I Visualized My Adult Life: 5 Major Insights I Discovered

It’s funny how sometimes things come full circle. As I was creating this website, I realized that I’d need to have a logo/icon so that people could identify it both here and on social media. I thought for a moment and whipped up something quick that had a bunch of line segments and added it everywhere I could:

A couple of days after creating that logo, I sat down to work on what would become this post, and I realized that in order to best represent and study my life quickly, I needed to visualize it. The logo I had randomly created ended up being the inspiration for the visualization below (best viewed on a bigger screen):

Essentially, I decided to break my life down into the four key components I care about–Relationships, Health & Lifestyle, Professional, and Financial–and then highlight the pieces of each that I thought were most important. Before going into the five insights I discovered, I think an interesting meta-analysis is that it took very little time for me to identify the big groups I care about, as well as what’s important to me within each of those groups. That makes me happy, as I know what my priorities are.

With that, here are the five things I learned.

1. I’ve been dating or happily married to my wife for all but 2 years of my adult life!

Strictly speaking, I know how long my wife and I have been together, though, admittedly, it still surprises both of us every year. You can see from the visual that we met while in Upstate New York during undergrad (tl;dr: she went to a school with a much higher ratio of women, and I went to one with a much higher ratio of men; the rest is history), and we’ve been through numerous moves and challenges together since. We celebrated our 9th wedding anniversary last month and our 14th anniversary of dating (dativersary?) in March, and she’s still my best friend and the love of my life! 

2. It took us 6 years to get out of debt, and 8 more years to reach $1M net worth.

I actually hadn’t thought about this one before visualizing it. Both my wife and I have undergraduate degrees, shouldered most of the student loan debt ourselves, and came from lower-income families, so we were north of 6 figures in debt at our (negative) peak. Climbing out of that while paying for a wedding was definitely a challenge, and–as the main controller of our financial situation–I can still remember all of the mental gymnastics I would go through to make sure we would be able to enjoy our lives while also building a solid future together.

Once we had made it back to $0, it took another 8 years to get to $1M. There were quite a few factors that helped us get there (a generally strong stock market, increasing salaries, etc...), but the absolute most important one was that we kept our expenses far below our earnings. For quite some time we were maxing out one 401k, we still drive just one car, and we actually lived with roommates for our year in the San Francisco Bay Area–all to make sure that we would be exceptionally set up for success. Once we settled in a more sane cost of living locale, we further compounded our net worth building by buying rental properties for their cash flow (though the cash flow has had mixed results–a topic for a future post).

3. Our net worth has been carried by momentum since early 2021.

Up through the time that I’m writing this, I’ve made very little money since I chose to leave my job at Startup A back in March of 2021. The companies I’ve founded after leaving have not been a financial success (side note: I’ll likely dig into this in a future post), so we’ve mostly been coasting along on my wife’s much lower earnings, a bit of rental property cash flow, and a mix of savings and long-term capital gains. You can actually see that we’re still reasonably at the whims of the stock market when it comes to our net worth (though not as much as someone who is only invested in the market):

4. Fitness is my stress reliever

Having worked at a startup for over five years–and having been part of the executive meetings for the last two of those five–I learned quite a bit about the inner workings of a high-tech startup. However, one of the biggest things I didn’t learn was how incredibly stressful it is to run a (bootstrapped) startup on your own! While I wasn’t worried about being able to pay my employees (since at both startups I was the only full-time employee), the stress of figuring out where to efficiently spend your time (across technical breakthroughs, feature development, marketing, early- and late-stage sales calls, cold-calling, design, partner development, and so on) is soul-crushing. I remember many days where I absolutely wanted to throw in the towel.

Fortunately, I have physical fitness as a place where I can blow off most of that steam. In fact, had it not been for the extra 2,000+ miles I rode while bicycle commuting to and from work in 2016, this period would have far and away been the highest and most consistent 3-year mileage total across my adult life:

5. Only once in 11 years of post-education have I done just 1 thing for more than a year.

If you ask anyone who knows me well, they’ll agree that I have a lot of interests and ideas. Creativity is one of my main advantages in life, and I’m constantly thinking about how to optimize this or revolutionize that. It’s a bit exhausting, but I would never trade it for an idle, complacent life.

That said, when I visualized my adult life, I was somewhat surprised to see that I’ve almost always (and always, since mid 2017) had at least two major professional things going on at the same time. I definitely recall the time where I was consulting for my old company, preparing for and lecturing students at the local university, running my nascent startup, and focusing on getting multiple rental houses stabilized with my property manager. And don't forget, my wife and I share a car!

Wrapping it up:

While I’ve been in the habit of creating annual “thermometers” to gauge desired vs. actual achievement in various aspects of my life for the better part of a decade, that practice often only yielded intra-year insights and lost sight of the bigger picture.

Doing this full visualization made me realize how a bunch of different parts of my life interact with each other, and it also made me realize that it might be useful to create a similar but more comprehensive and interactive visualization (capturing external factors like the stock market, major non-spousal family and friend events, and so on) to fully grok the arc of my life and how different events affected me. I’d be curious to know what readers think as they see this post and perhaps think about their own visualized lives.