The Scott On Fire Philosophy

Over the last few months, I’ve been collecting my thoughts on the philosophy of my life. This philosophy – dubbed the Scott On Fire Philosophy1 for now – is what led me to start writing about money and meaning in the first place.

This is the philosophy I use to navigate the world and improve my health and wealth. I define the concepts of this philosophy under three pillars: Saving, Investing, and Choosing Work You Love.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how Saving, Investing, and Choosing Work You Love intersect everything we do in life. These concepts underpin my philosophy for building an ideal life, and will be the focus of this blog over the next few months.

The philosophy of Financial Independence Retire Early has heavily influenced my life. And my philosophy is similar to that of Slow Financial Independence, coined by The Fioneers. I also credit Early Retirement Extreme, by Jacob Lund Fisker, as inspiration for many of the concepts I have built into my personal philosophy.

I have used these principles to build enough financial security to quit my job, build a business, and begin writing online.

Now I write about how you can use those same principles to create a life you love.

The Scott On Fire Philosophy

The Scott On Fire Philosophy encompasses earning potential, meeting your needs, making investments, and discovering your true calling.

The philosophy has a strong focus on finances, as I believe that financial expertise is necessary to thrive in modern society. Money is essential for survival (via food and shelter), self-expression (via consumption), and freedom (from trading your time for money).

Without freedom, you are forced to engage in activity that you aren’t fully invested in doing. In my eyes, working a job you don’t want to do for fear of homelessness and starvation is a modern form of slavery.2

Money is required to attain freedom. Therefore, a primary focus of anyone seeking to achieve freedom should be a focus on earning, saving, and investing as much money as possible. This must be done in a manner that does not destroy your mind, body, or spirit.

Achieving freedom (in whole or part) offers you the ability to focus on what truly matters to you. Freedom allows you to Choose Work You Love. The nature of the work doesn’t matter – as long as you are intentional about how you spend your time.

You must build the habits of Saving, Investing, and Choosing Work You Love into your life, in order to attain freedom and live how you desire.

The Concepts of the Scott On Fire Philosophy

I have mapped out the concepts of the Scott On Fire Philosophy under three pillars. These pillars each have 3 sub-groups. These pillars begin with Saving, then Investing, and finishing with Choosing Work You Love.

These three pillars are the foundation of this philosophy and the way in which I plan to live my life.

The three pillars each have their own groups of principles:

  • The first group focuses on what you need to do in order to achieve the outcome.
  • The second group outlines what problems you solve by achieving the outcome.
  • The third group contains challenges that will impede you when attempting to achieve the outcome.

I plan to write about each principle in detail over the next few months. The end goal is to articulate the framework for how I intend on living my life. When you read this post, you’ll see that some link you to a piece I’ve written on that topic.

Eventually, every concept will be written about in detail on this site, providing a complete layout of my personal philosophy.

Saving

Saving is the first pillar in the list for good reason. It’s difficult if not impossible to invest your money if your basic needs aren’t met. And without having enough financial security to save money, being selective about the work you do is a suboptimal strategy.

Therefore, focusing on saving until you reach a stable position is optimal.

The point of Saving is to free yourself from the shackles that trap you in modern life. Debt, advertisements, subscriptions, and almost every aspect of consumerism want to separate you from your money. Society wants you to be poor.

In order to build a foundation of saving and put money towards your future, these truths must be acknowledged. Separating yourself from consumerism is essential to thrive in the modern age. In addition, you must take the aspects of society that attempt to destroy you and harness them for your own benefit.

You Save by:

You Save in order to:

To Save, you must overcome:

Everyone has their own challenges to overcome when trying to get on top of their finances. Your journey will look considerably different to mine, and I have been lucky in many ways. But living an intentional life of spending less than you make is essential to build security into your life.

Once you achieve enough security through saving, you can turn your focus to investing your money.

Investing

Investing is all-encompassing and affects everything we do. While it’s easy to think of investing as purely financial, everything we do is an investment in something.

Following the principles in the Saving pillar ensures that your basic needs are met and you create stability in your life. As your wealth grows, the options for how to use your money also grow. Knowledge of Investing allows you to use that money for the most benefit.

We invest in order to triumph over entropy and inflation. The focus is therefore on ensuring that we can continue to build wealth, health, and happiness at a greater rate than entropy and inflation undoes those efforts.

As you begin to increase your wealth, threats to that wealth also increase. Scams, bad advice, and changes in your relationships with friends and family can all unravel the hard work you have put into improving your circumstances.

You Invest by:

You Invest in order to:

To Invest, you must overcome:

Understanding these concepts and overcoming them is mandatory if you want the rewards of your investments. Your portfolio, as well as the interests and people you invest your time and effort into, rely on you to be invested in their growth and success.

Choosing Work You Love

The benefit of building a life of intentional saving and careful investing is that the ability to choose the work you want to do becomes natural. As your wealth increases in monetary terms, so too does your ability to leverage that wealth for your freedom. You can use this time to invest in your skill set, start a side project, or live a simpler life.

I define work as “challenges you overcome in your life”. A life without overcoming challenges is a life without progress. Saving and investing your way to freedom does not and should not eliminate your need to continue to learn and improve your circumstances.

The purpose of this step is to separate the concepts of work and money. It’s to reframe the focus towards work and meaning. Money is a side effect of doing good work. It is the method by which you are rewarded by the market for your efforts.

At this stage, money should no longer be the driving force behind your decisions. You have built security and future-proofing into your life. Your reward for doing so is building the life you love, right now.

However you approach this step, the focus is on being selective about how you include work in your lifestyle. If you continue your regular job regardless of your level of Financial Independence, this step forces you to become intentional about how you build a life you love from that.

My Work vs FIRE Philosophy

I don’t anticipate intentionally stopping work. Whether I am writing, working in my community, or anything else, I plan to work forever. I find the value of the work I am doing on this site is in the work itself. Investing time and effort into writing my thoughts down is a form of work.

Writing may provide an income to me in the future. But I don’t write with that goal in mind. The joy is in the work and building a portfolio of information that I can use to improve my life and stay on track.

I’ve applied the steps below to create a harmonious relationship with work in my own life.

You Choose Work You Love by:

You Choose Work You Love in order to:

To Choose Work You Love, you must overcome:

I don’t believe that people who intentionally save their income, invest in their financial future, and plan to retire early are the types to do nothing once they retire. The skills you build along the way to Financial Independence allow you to earn an income in whatever capacity you choose. Building financial security allows you to try new things without fear of total failure. This allows you to learn and grow, becoming more powerful in the process and making all other areas of your life better.

You could attempt to Choose Work You Love much earlier than when you plan to retire. By doing so, you may discover that you didn’t really want to retire at all.

Closing

Thank you for reading about my personal philosophy. If you’ve read my other articles, you may notice that they form part of this philosophy and have already been linked above. If you haven’t read them yet, I encourage you to do so.

The topics going forward will all be related to my underlying philosophy, and I can’t wait to write more.

I plan on maintaining my current posting schedule, especially now that I have a public roadmap on what you can expect to see on the site. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

If you liked this piece, consider sharing it with a friend or a group you think will enjoy it. This helps me grow my audience, and is the best way for you to support my writing.

If you’d like to read more, check out previous posts on the blog, and follow me on X @ScottOnFire, on my Facebook page Scott On Fire, and on my YouTube channel. You can also sign up to my newsletter below to get even more content, delivered straight to your inbox.

  1. It’s a working title. ↩︎
  2. The conditions we live under are much better than those endured by those in slavery. The quality of life we live is vastly different to slaves of the past. However, many people in society are still trapped by job/ salary/ debt beyond their control. While conditions are not like for like, is that not a modern form of slavery? ↩︎

Scott

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