At the end of my last post on Comparative Advantage I wrote briefly about high leverage skills.
The idea is to optimally develop a specialty in order to earn FU$ as efficiently as makes sense and then pursue 'simple high leverage skills' to reduce your cost of living. This two pronged approach increases your freedom (from having to work a lot).
What do I mean by simple high leverage skills? Skills that are the most efficient at reducing your overall cost of living. I'm defining simple leverage here as the amount of work it takes to decrease your cost of living. There are more variables to consider when it comes to mature postconsumer lifestyle design, but for now we're just looking at buying personal freedom via CoL reduction as efficiently as possible.
Skill Leverage = CoL reduction / hrs spent on the skill.
To deploy a skill you have to spend two kinds of time:
Invest time in acquiring the skill up front, and then
Spend time to deploy the skill.
Learning to make your own clothes from scratch is a low leverage skill because it would take a ton of work to learn, a lot of time to make each garment, and clothes are cheap. The CoL reduction is low (or even zero) and the time requirement is very high. (I'm not arguing that you shouldn't learn to make your own clothes if you want to! I am pointing out that it is a low leverage skill in terms of CoL reduction. If you want to make your own clothes, your desire to do so is justification enough. It is not necessary to make up a story for why you're doing it.)
Learning to cook simple tasty food is a very high leverage skill. Note that when most people think of learning to cook they think they have to learn French cooking or something fancy. No. Simple meals are a thing. There is a whole genre of three ingredient or five ingredient cooking, instapot cooking, batch cooking, and other approaches to cooking that are designed to reduce the amount of time you have to spend in meal prep and also reduce the chances of you screwing the whole thing up.
You can save hundreds of dollars a month for a few hours of skill investment and then *minutes* per day of operational time for meal prep. In fact, you can spend way less time doing meal prep than you have to spend getting to and from restaurants.
Learning to cook is the ideal poster child of high leverage skills because it applies to basically everyone. Other skills can be more circumstantial.
Learning to work out without a gym membership or expensive equipment. This requires an investment of maybe a dozen hours if you want to really nerd out about it, and the operational time investment is on par with whatever you were doing in the gym except you don't have to spend time getting there. The CoL reduction is $50 to $150 a month.
Learning to ride and maintain a bike to get around your city instead of daily driving a car. Investment of a handful of hours, potential CoL reduction of $100's of dollars a month, and another reason to cancel your gym membership (who needs to 'go do cardio' when you pedal ten miles a day?).
Learning how to organize low and no cost social gatherings within your social group. Lots of people hang out at bars and restaurants just because it's easy. It takes a handful of hours to plan and execute a picnic in the park, a group hike, a rooftop hangout to watch the sun go down, a potluck dinner party. This practice can reduce CoL by hundreds of dollars a month (and it connects the skill of cooking/meal prep with social skills).
Learning DIY/Handyman skills is very circumstantial. If you rent, it's easy to just call the landlord and have them deal with it. But if you own, or vanlife or ecovillage or workaway, then DIY skills can be high leverage even though it generally takes more hours to learn these from scratch.
But learning to clear a pipe mechanically, rewire an outlet, renovate a bathroom, build simple furniture, do concrete work, et cetera can save you hundreds and thousands of dollars a year. (It also might turn into a skillset that you can potentially get paid for, which increases your income robustness, a concept I wrote about in Polymathic Skill Acquisition).
Pre-Autonomy Skill Development
I also think about high leverage skills as existing in two phases, or contexts. One context is you don't have much autonomy yet. You've still got a full time job, or multiple part time jobs, or your freelance gig consumes most of your time. In this context it's all about what can you do to reduce your CoL that requires the least amount of effort. These are almost always the big three, housing, transportation, and food.
For me, my skills and activities here were to build Serenity and then my studio, so I completely own my shelter and am not paying rent or a mortgage. I also had to learn to design and build offgrid PV systems, how to boondock, how to tow a trailer safely, how to set up a truck to tow, tiny house construction, and seismic retrofitting.
Part of the skill of living with no rent cost is the skill of living with my parents on the family land. I don't mean to make it sound super hard (my parents are wonderful) but I wasn't brought up in a culture where multigenerational occupancy is normalized and so it is a bit of a learning curve, there's social and emotional skill and competence involved in it.
Post-Autonomy Skill Development
The other context or phase is when you do have a lot of autonomy. The imperative to seek only slam dunk high leverage skills decreases because you have more time and attention to work with.
Likely by this point you've already taken care of the obvious low hanging fruit and so you're looking for subtler approaches that take more time up front to get going, but return profound benefits down the line.
If you employed the Crowbar Method of buying freedom for yourself, some of this skill development might look like developing the skills to keep your CoL down but increase your quality of life.
For example in your pre-autonomy phase maybe you decreased your food expenses by learning to cook oatmeal, fry eggs, and make beans and rice with sauted vegetables and hot sauce. Now that you've got more autonomy, you'd like to learn to cook more than just those things and introduce a little variety into your diet. Your CoL might not change at all, but your quality of life increases.
In my pre-autonomy phase my CoL dropped like a stone for about two years. Then I got more autonomy and the rate of CoL reduction began to level off. In the beginning it was easy to find actions to do (or not do) that would reduce my cost of living by hundreds of dollars a month. Now that my CoL is in the $400-$800/mo range, there are no more three-figure-reduction actions to take.
In the immediate post-autonomy phase I think the focus on skill development begins to shift from being money-centric ("How much can I reduce my CoL by? How much freedom can I buy with this skill?") to vocational and stoke-centric ("How can I develop and mature my ability to show up in and engage with the world, help people, creatively self-express, produce value, find meaning and fulfillment, explore, discover, etc?").
At a certain point money is largely irrelevant to the skills you choose to pursue. Your cost of living is optimized for your lifestyle and you maintain a high level of robust autonomy. Money is more or less solved and you don't need to think about it too much, so you don't.
My thesis here is that *autonomy is the foundation*. There is a lot more to skill development (and life in general!) than just CoL reduction, but CoL reduction is the fastest no-brainer slam-dunk method to increase your autonomy and so it makes sense to pursue it aggressively in the early phases.
One of the reasons I'm not a naturally frugal person is because I don't like thinking about money. It's boring and I used to have psychological baggage around it. I'd much rather spend my attention on just about anything else. Before I began developing postconsumer skills this attitude caused me to trap myself. I *had* to work a lot and earn because I spent all of my money because I didn't pay any attention to it.
Now that I've spent a couple years paying very close attention indeed to money... I'm entering a phase where I can go back to not thinking about money very much at all, but since I've internalized high leverage skills and arranged a postconsumer lifestyle, my autonomy is going to continue to increase. I put in a burst of intense focus on money, and the payoff is that I'm not going to have to think about it much in the future.
One of my favorite books is The Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin. He describes how beginning chess players learn a points system that assigns values to the pieces, so you can calculate if using a rook to take a knight that will then be taken by a pawn is a good move or not. So beginner chess players are "running the numbers", they're doing all these calculations in their heads while playing chess games.
But this is a phase. Grand Masters don't run the numbers. They internalized the numbers and don't have to think about it, and their attention is elevated to a much higher-level perspective on the game. But just because Grand Masters don't run the numbers doesn't mean that it's a waste of time to go through a phase of running the numbers. Waitzkin writes that you have to run the numbers in order to forget the numbers.
That's what I'm talking about here with postconsumer praxis. You have to think about money in order to not have to think about money.