The EPIC LIFE Calculator [Must Do Personal Finance Task for any Entrepreneurs]
Remove Risks Through Planning Upside & Downsides
This concept from an unknown book written by someone in my old industry
The book is called Zero Excuses.
It’s a really short read, and very easy to understand.
I read this book 7 years ago according to my Amazon orders.
The book is not going to win any literacy awards, but one of the concepts really stood out to me, I’m sure Gabriel saw this concept somewhere else first, but to be fair I haven’t seen it explained this way since.
He’s coined it “the epic life task” and it’s something I think everyone starting a business needs to do.
The Epic Life Task
The epic life task involves building a spreadsheet/doc of 5 versions of your life;
Survival Life
Basic Life
Good Life
Great Life
Epic Life
Obviously, the epic life is the ultimate goal. It is the type of life where you wake up in the morning and scream “holy shit, my life is amazing”
Gabriel goes on to list his examples and breakdowns, at the time his survival/basic life still had quite a few costs, he has kids/family to take care of so that survival life still involved a lot of responsibility.
If you’re below 22 or 23 though, you likely have little to no responsibility.
Why this task is also important is it frees you up to take big risks, knowing that if you fully fail, your survival life isn’t actually that bad and you can re-build and take another swing at the epic life.
It took me around 5 years to build up to the epic life and even when I reached this, because of how things change, half the stuff on the list isn’t really that important to me anymore.
So when you build your version out, remember to do it for you specifically. If you want a yacht then your epic life funds need to reflect that.
You can then reverse engineer your business or edge to build for that epic life structure.
My 2017 Version
So as you can see, the survival and basic life options are very low, but they also aren’t horrible. They are a lot lower than most people’s would be able to, simply because I didn’t have any outgoings then, nor accountability.
You aren’t living on the street and to make £1,200/month is pretty easy.
Although this was back in 2017 so with some 30% inflation you might want to increase this to £1,500 for the basic life, but its all dependent on your current situation.
What’s interesting is that during this 2017 time I was able to get between the good and great life in profits (I’ve tracked profits since day 1 of starting a business).
Getting to £50k/year and securing the good-life was a really promising development at the time and something that solidified this epic-life approach.
A pro-hack to this approach is to live your “type of life” (epic/good/basic etc) 1 year AFTER you earned it.
So if you have a great life of £8k/month (about 100k/year), live this the year after you earned this amount.
This way even if you experience a downswing, you won’t have to drop back a life quality instantly.
The Great & Epic Lives Change
For me, in my 20’s I wanted to prove things a bit too much.
I’ve never really been materialistic but I think like most early 20’s, just wanted people to know a bit too much.
So spending £1,500 on “Tech/Clothes/Luxury Items” - seemed like a good idea.
In reality I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than £1.5k a year on these things. It’s not the game I’m trying to play…
After selling a company last year I considered buying a really nice watch as a self-present, I’ve always thought a clean, not over the top Rolex is really nice. In reality though, the money that this costs (about £7k), could go towards paying for parents/friends holidays that will have far better memories than some £7k watch.
But, if you are a watch guy then 100% do this.
Or if you are a car guy, buy the car….
Just don’t become the person who reaches epic life levels and becomes attached to your cr*p and not what actually matters.
Oh and remember tax.
So this £15k/month figure is AFTER TAX.
So depending where you are, aim for £20k+/month at least.
Cheers.
Thomas.