In this week’s episode, Crys and JP talk about their short-term gains and long-term goals. They discuss how they balance the two to keep themselves healthy and financially stable.
Show Notes
Comments: https://writeawaypodcast.com/episode-30-how-do-i-balance-short-term-gains-with-long-term-goals/
Substack: https://writeaway.substack.com
Transcript
JP: Hello, friends. This is episode 30 of the Write Away Podcast, and it is the 11th of February, 2021 as we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch with my co-host…
Crys: Crys Cain.
JP: Hello. How has your writing week been?
Crys: I have not written at all or worked much.
And I actually mean that this time, literally. Not like my brain thinks I haven’t worked, but I haven’t worked. And that’s okay. This is a difficult month for me. This is one year of being separated. And so I’ve got a lot of things happening inside and I have let myself do whatever it is I needed to do, which is a lot of napping.
JP: 10 hour sleeps, naps.
Crys: The 10 hour sleep is because I didn’t sleep the night before. Thanks nightmares.
JP: No, but that’s good. Self-care is important, right?
Crys: A hundred percent. How was your writing week?
JP: Okay, so opposite of you. My writing week has been fantastic. So I would say that the last couple of weeks have been iffy, but this week it’s just been really good. My biggest problem is anything to do with social media. Someone else in a different podcast this week, and I don’t remember which one, mentioned that they don’t initiate loops in the morning, and that has been looping in my head. And what that means is staying away from social media, because you will get looped in and you will keep looping through, and it’s a never-ending cycle.
And so I just stopped doing that. And my biggest problem with social media of any sorts is I get sucked into it. And then I lose all my writing time. So I put a hard set in the morning, I’m just going to not look at my phone as much as I can, and I’ve been getting started writing even earlier than I scheduled to and I just keep going. So it’s been good.
And also, side note, I think this is now the second week that we have kept up with our Substack newsletter.
Crys: Which is all thanks to JP, because if it’s something that’s only on my calendar once a week that doesn’t physically require me to meet with somebody, it never sticks in my brain.
And it’s not that I can’t do it or don’t want to do it, it’s that I forget. And so JP is like, “Hey, are you going to do the thing?” I’m like, “Yeah, I meant to do the thing.” And then I do 99% of the thing. And he’s like, “Hey, did you finish the thing?” And I’m like, “Damn it. Yes, I did. Send it.”
JP: It’s just a new habit, right?
I think definitely having a co-host and a co-writer for a newsletter definitely makes me want to get it done because I have this fear that I’m going to be the one that’s holding up.
Crys: Just let me be the slacker. That’s fine. No, those have been fun. It’s another helpful way for me to reflect on what I’ve done that weekend, not in just a writing sense. We talk about what we’ve been watching or reading, thoughts we’ve had on the previous episode, and just kind of what we’re planning on going forward.
And so it has a different kind of spin on what we share here, and I just like sharing more. I’m not an extrovert, but I really like connecting with people on very limited timeframes.
JP: Right? And so the newsletter is free for anyone who wants to join Substack, but then we also have a special series, a tarot series, where we pull cards for the 12 months and then the year. Our first episode is free, but then the rest is for a paid subscription.
Crys: We also release these episodes two days early. So if you are a news junkie slash podcast junkie and want all the things early, that is part of our paid membership, but head out to https://writeaway.substack.com. The link will be in the show notes.
Now for this week’s question, we had several that are high on our list of things we want to talk about, so I made JP choose this week. And I was like, “Which one would be more helpful for you to talk through and to think through?”
And what he said is, “How do you choose between short-term gains and long-term goals, or short-term goals and long-term goals.” So what are the short term versus long-term that you’re currently struggling with, JP?
JP: I have a lot of fun things going on. I have some shorter-term projects that basically have a closed loop at the end of it.
It’s more or less like technical writers for a different author and different little projects that are still within the writing world that gain a certain sum of income. But then it kind of ends there. Those sorts of projects I’m now starting to ramp up, I’m still building what that platform looks like, but I have some early kind of grabs in on it.
So I would consider each of those projects as short-term goals, short-term profits, whatever you want to call them. And then the long-term stuff is my series with my co-writer and then the series that I’m starting this year for TASM, that I’m kind of working on that novel project.
So yeah, I’m curious about your takes on short-term, long-term goals, and profits, and etc.
Crys: Yeah. I have been chasing the right-now profits for four years. I wrap up my year four in April, and it’s been really frustrating to me because there’s a lot of stuff that I want to do that I know will take longer to bring in money.
And so I have had to focus on the right-now money to pay my bills. That’s been so frustrating for me. Right now, I feel like I’m in a really good place because I can see the end of the line, but it’s been a source of angst for years. And I’m a huge proponent of focusing on satisfying your needs immediately, whatever those are.
I don’t really like the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory. It doesn’t necessarily fit with the way I view my world a hundred percent, but I do like looking at what is your personal hierarchy of needs. So what are the things that I absolutely need in my life? Food, shelter, healthcare. What gives me those things? No matter what, those are the things that I need to do first, and then you can start to look at all of the other levels of things. I think, for you, that’s what’s keeping you in your particular day job right now. It’s that it satisfies all of the needs.
JP: Yeah, I would say so. So I think a funny attribute about myself that I’ve learned is that I am a weird financial hoarder, if you can put it that way. I’m very much into building money I can’t touch. And unfortunately If I keep doing that, I’m going to continue with the day job for a very long time.
I think part of it is welcoming in these shorter-term goals, these shorter-term profits, to help be that bridge in between these long-term projects that will hopefully build upon themselves and grow stronger. So yeah, that’s where I’m at.
Crys: Just wondering, so your long-term goals, you don’t necessarily want to leave a day job 100%, correct? There is a possible path that you would really enjoy where you go into more research jobs, that’s more of a joy job than a paid job.
JP: Exactly. It’s funny. So when I was over in Europe a few years ago, there was just a totally different aspect that people had towards their positions they were in, regardless of if they worked at a restaurant or in an industry. Where yes, of course they were getting paid to survive, but it was almost like they were getting enough to not just survive, but almost thrive. And the fact that you could work in the industry that you’d so chose, and just the mindset there was so much happier.
You had people who worked in the restaurant business at the same restaurant as a waiter for 40 years, and they’re just loving what they’re doing. And I would love to be in a place where it’s not that I am dependent on the job to give me the things I need to survive, but I’m doing the job because I enjoy it.
And it’s not to say that I don’t enjoy what I currently do, but there is that – I think it’s an American mentality – that you just have to work because you have to get paid to do this and X, Y, and Z. I don’t like that. It’s not healthy, to say the least.
Crys: Do you have in your head, a vision of the path that gets you to where you want to be working for joy, whether that’s full-time on books or books on the side and researching?
JP: Yeah. Part of the whole long-term goals is I scurry away money. I’m nowhere near people who do like fire.
I wish I were, but as is life, I’m not. However I think that for my age range, I’m pretty higher up than the median average. And so that’s my mentality is that for long-term stuff, there will be a point in time in which I can say, “Okay, I now have a livable income that I can then do the things that I so choose to enjoy.”
And that’s kind of where those long-term project goals come into mind. The series with my co-writer, the series that I’m working on, I want those to become their own brand that kind of functions together, so that they build upon themselves. Then that way that can feed into that point in time. And I guess what I view that point in time is it just keeps moving closer as I age. And then there’ll be this kind of point in time where they meet and then I can feel comfortable taking that leap.
Crys: Do you worry that point will never come where that comfort arrives?
JP: Obviously. What do you think, I’m some crazy robot? 100%, all the time worried. And that’s why I’m like, the biggest thing I love to do is figure out other people’s processes because I just want to see what I am missing. I don’t feel like I’m missing a lot, but I feel like If I’m missing something, I need to know what it is.
Crys: Yeah. I’m definitely different as far as how I plan ahead.
Number one, I started without planning, clearly. No money, broke, living with my mother and father. So how do I process this?
With the short-term stuff that I needed to do, when I get really frustrated at it and really annoyed with it, I found ways to make it joyful again for me.
With writing romance, that has been to focus on bringing in neurodivergent characters, differently abled characters, focus on the learning that I can create when I’m writing. For me with romance, more than most genres, really care about the emotional experience of the reader. Romance more so than others, because that is the thing that readers go to those books for. I think it is one of the things that most readers go to books for. Hard sci-fi is one of the few exceptions there.
And I focus on how do I learn and grow my ability to create emotion in my readers? How do I become more manipulative? So my short-term profit seeking activities, when they’re really frustrating for me, I try to create joy in them so that I’m not resentful. But I also know that my personality is the kind that if I get to a point – maybe it’s because I know that I’m this personality that I try and make it so that I don’t get that resentful – if I get to a point where it is no longer palatable for me to continue doing the thing, I stop. It doesn’t matter how financially dangerous that is for me, I will be done. I will wrap it up nicely, as well as I can, but I will be done. And I know that there’s a trigger point for me on everything in life that is that point. And I know that I’m approaching it when I start to get resentful. And when that resentful hangs on for a very long time or a very intense amount of resent over a fairly moderate period of time.
One of my examples of this is 2018. We’d been in New York for a year after we’d moved in with my parents and my ex at the time had been like, “We should go back to Costa Rica. We’re making enough to make it work. We should go.”
And I’m like, “No, it’s smarter to stay here and save money because we’re not paying rent and save up and then go back.” And then February came around, and I make very intense decisions in Februarys. And it’s miserable in New York. There is no sun, I have seasonal depression even with taking vitamin D, and I hit a point now I just said, “Fuck it. We are leaving in two weeks.” I bought the tickets and we went. So I know I have that point on everything, and I have to manage myself to make sure that the smart decision also matches the healthy decision for me.
And if I can make them match up for long enough to get to the safety point, the comfort point, then it will be the smart, healthy decision going forward. Because I will always choose health over quote unquote smart. So I am just now, because I have worked so hard to make my smart and healthy decisions comfortable with each other for the time being, I now see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I did some financial projections, and I decided last year to write a solo series in my co-written series. That is one of the books that I had on deadline last month. That’s the one that I went crazy over because I procrastinated. And I’m going to write a series of six books. My original plan was to finish those up by June and that’s clearly not happening. So my plan is to finish them all up by the end of the year. And my co-writer and I are finishing up another series by the end of the year.
I did these financial projections, and I didn’t do the super conservative financial projections, but I also didn’t do my super pie in the sky projections. I did a fairly medium level of projections, and I’m gonna do numbers here because I feel really weird without talking about the numbers because that’s how I think.
So my median projection is if I make $7,000 a month and I continue paying myself what I pay myself every month, which is $4,000 a month, and I continue putting into savings the amount that I put into savings out of my personal income, and I piece out what I expect for expenses, I will have enough at the end of the year to supplement me for an entire year. That’s assuming that money still comes in from the romance as it has proven it has when I haven’t had releases, that some money still comes in from the romance over the year. Then I’ll be able to supplement myself for an entire year and just hard stop writing romance. And knowing that is entirely possible does give me fuel and also mitigates that resentment.
All of us have a really hard time stopping the sure thing. I was with my day job for seven years. And even though it drained the life out of me, it was miserable, it was such a sure thing, until it wasn’t of course. But this company was notorious for not firing people when they ought to. They would create elaborate situations or wait for an elaborate situation to justify them firing someone who should have been fired a year ago.
And I was a good employee, didn’t get in trouble, there was no way I was getting fired. The only reason I even lost my job was because I was remote. They cut all their remote workers. So that was their justification, no more remote workers. So I have a really hard time working on my long-term stuff because my short-term stuff takes up most of my mental energy.
So I’m one of those people who cannot work parallel things. You’re working parallel things and I admire that a lot about you. You’re working on your writing, and you’re working in your day job. And not only are you working on your writing and your day job, but you’re also working on long-term writing and you’re working on short-term writing. You seem to be able to hold a lot of parallel steps or projects better than I do, sir.
JP: Fair. I think maybe that’s an aspect I still want to look into, because I get what you’re saying and I guess I’ve never considered it, but I think part of it is just wanting to kind of have that variety.
It’s funny when you were explaining what kind of person you were because I was like, I’m the 100% the opposite. I need things to be as sure as they most feasibly can before I commit to anything. It’s insane the amount of weird hesitancy I have, and it’s fine because then I make financially stable decisions more or less most of the time. It’s not fine when you have a fiancé for 10 years because you want to make a really nice financial wedding choice, and you just don’t.
Crys: That’s your nice financial wedding choice, elope.
JP: Realistically, I would love to just go to city hall, but for some reason I grew up with a lot of really nice weddings, so I have this thing in my head as to a number, and we’re not there yet. But yet again, to me it’s just a piece of paper. The fact that we’ve been together for 12 years matters way more. And so I guess it’s just funny hearing the difference and maybe writing down the things that I do would help. And I think that part of it is just it’s so early on all the other projects that there is minimal income in especially the long-term stuff because that’s just stuff that takes time for it to come out and all that fun jazz.
Crys: When we talk about decision-making, I think one of the very important things to remember about me is that I moved to a country that I had never been to before, three months after making the decision that it was going to do that. So that is something important to remember.
JP: That’s like a dream life of mine, but yet I’m a person that grew up, went to college, worked at, and now live within 30 miles of everything. My hometown is 30 miles away.
Crys: I went to college ten or eight hours away from my family and knew no one there, none of my friends ended up going there. So I went by myself, 10 hours away.
When I was 16, I went to Jamaica for two and a half months to stay with people I didn’t actually know, they were friends of my aunt. So personality is very important with this kind of stuff. And for me, that’s part of the reason that with my particular short-term gains now with the romance, one of the reasons that I work so hard to make myself happy with it, is because it provides me the freedom to make a lot of those snap decisions in other areas of my life.
And so it’s very hard for me to just let that go. And that’s another interesting factor, when my different short-term goals might clash, there’s a lot of things reinforcing that I stay in the romance end, beyond just putting a roof over my head and all that. And that’s if I want to pick up and go, outside of COVID times, to Mexico tomorrow, I want that option, and the romance is making enough money to allow me to do that. I know that when I do let the romance go, that I have to let some of those other short-term decisions not be options anymore because I’ll have to be more fiscally conservative, but it will be working towards those long-term goals.
I always see it as a negotiation of choices. One of the things that drives me nuts about most people is they do not recognize the plethora of choices that they have. They either choose a path and say, that is what I want. They pick their long-term thing and they’re like, everything has to go towards that. I can’t do anything else. And they don’t realize that they are continually choosing to do that thing. They think that everything they do is not a choice, it’s what they have to do. And that’s so against how I view the world.
JP: I totally agree. Even with my day job stuff, I think when I left college, I originally was like, Oh, I’ll just do manufacturing work for a year, and then I’ll go back to college for XYZ. And then I just ended up continuously moving down this chain of events that just made more sense to me. And I would hop different industries because I would reach a plateau and there was no other options. There’s five of us competing for a position that a person has had for 30 years and they’re not retiring anytime soon. So it’s okay, I’m leaving now because I have no other choice here. I guess for a really long time, I thought it’s the choice I made, I’m going to be a scientist for the rest of my life. But I kept having this nagging thing in the back of my head saying this isn’t what you want to do for the 100% thing you want to do for your whole life.
And so that’s when I really started to consider the fact that we make all these choices that we want to make and there is room for more as long as you’re able to balance things. So I guess that’s where that whole split always goals thing I have comes from.
Crys: One of my frameworks for deciding big thing is, if I don’t have a concrete reason to continue doing something — I guess this is kind of a whole another question, like when do you stopped doing something — but if I don’t have a reason to keep on doing a specific thing, to keep on living a specific place, if I don’t have a concrete reason, that I can say, “Oh, this is why I’m doing that,” then I force myself to default to change.
So for example, I love the town I live in. It is wonderful. I hear the ocean. I can walk to the beach. I’ve got my monkeys, my toucans. It’s warm most of the time, probably too warm for most people. But it’s changing. And I know that I want to travel, and there’s part of me that doesn’t want to leave because this literally is a magical town.
I cannot explain it to people who’ve never been here. It is one of those places where you either connect with it or you don’t. There’s nowhere else like it on earth, as far as I know. I’ve talked to so many people about it who’ve traveled all over the world and we all say there’s nowhere like here.
So why the fuck do I want to leave? And part of it is, one, it’s changing. It’s not going to be the magical place that it’s been in for so long, but also I know that I want to see more things. And my brain is doing these comparisons, like what are my long-term goals? My long-term goals are to travel and to see more of the world.
There’s part of me that wants to stay. I want roots. I want that continual community. But I’ve decided to default to change because I don’t have a very clear, specific reason that I am staying here because of X. I’m like, okay, so then we default to change, we’re going to move at the end of the year.
JP: We really are opposites because I’ve been living here forever, and I’m always like, I just need to move. I need to go somewhere. I have all this desire, but at the same aspect, it’s the, I want a community, which I don’t really have here. But it’s that fear that what if that place is worse or different?
So it’s just really funny that we have those different aspects, but even then, where you say, the place you live at everyone else considers it magical. Now you’ve lived in this magical place. You’ve experienced it. You even claim that it’s magical. It doesn’t mean that by you leaving, it’s less magical.
Crys: And I can come back anytime. If I hate where I go, I can come back. So it’s that default for me. I have a default to change if I don’t have a specific reason to keep on doing it. I keep on writing because that is what I’ve wanted since I was a child and I know that I love it. And I still question that even. Am I getting tired of this? Am I getting bored of this? Should I default to change to something else? And so far it’s been like, no, this is still the identity I want. And that still makes me happy to be able to do this. But I question everything.
JP: I’m literally going to be the hermit that lives at my house. There’s an interstate surrounding my house because I’m the only home that did not move. That’s going to be my life. I’m aware of it. I don’t want it to be that way, but I think it’s going to be. Telling the cars to get off my lawn.
Crys: I would move. What is our question for our readers, because we’ve kind of danced around a lot of things here with our initial question.
JP: I guess I’m just curious, how do you balance your short-term goals versus long-term goals or short-term profits versus long-term profits or gains?
Crys: Excellent. We’re going to have a link in the show notes for where you can leave a comment at www.writeawaypodcast.com. And if you would like to get the newsletter that JP and I will send out tomorrow, it will have some more of our thoughts as we’ve had a week to sit with this episode because we record these a week before releasing them.
We add any thoughts that we felt we missed out on the previous topic, as well as what we’re reading, and what our plans are going forward in the week for our writing business. I hope to see you next week.
JP: Alrighty. See ya.
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