General

May 9 2021

A Letter to My Wife on Mother’s Day

Today is Mother’s Day, so I want to take a break from the usual Financial/Life topics and use this as a chance to write a letter to my wife. I almost didn’t post this here but decided to anyways because she is a big part of the reason I am doing all of this in the first place.

Don’t worry Glincoln, I haven’t forgot about your request (coming soon)

To My Wife,

You know how much I hate spending money on cards and flowers that will get lost and die in a couple of days. So, no card this year (#savedatmoney) … and the best part is I also get to embarrass you (really myself) on the web!

Happy Mother’s Day! It has been 11 years of marriage and another 5 years of dating before that. We have had a lot of ups and downs but we have always come out stronger.

We have now spent essentially half our lives together which is unreal.

Since our wedding day, we have moved 5 times and had 4 children in 3 different states. I think that trend has leveled out on all fronts…

We paid off our student loans, car loans and now almost done with Mortgage. This has positioned us in life so much different now than when we started out.

Throughout the years, you have taken care of me:

I remember going on a bouldering trip when you were out of town (back in college days). I forgot to call you and let you know I made it back safely. Unfortunately, my phone had also died so you ended up calling the police to see if they could make sure I was ok…

We have also had some pretty Serious things:

Our first baby spent 3 months in the NICU and the other 3 came with all of the fun of high risk pregnancies and many, many Dr visits, but they all came out healthy.

We got robbed during our first weekend married at college and you had me change out all of the locks and add chain guards and swing guards to our apartment just so you could sleep at night.

Another time, I remember you waking me up because you could hear “sloshing” under the laminate floor one night when you walked across it (at our first house). This was followed by us finding out we had a busted pipe in the slab and a night of pulling up the flooring with my dad and brother.

It’s All been Worth It:

There have been many fun memories and trips over the years and hopefully many more in the future.

Thank you for all you have done, especially the first couple of years where I made you move to the middle of nowhere for my first job 😉 Those years were important and helped us really ground ourselves.

Things have not always been perfect, but they have always been worth it.

Here’s to many More!

Until Next time, continue to Choose Beta

– Chris

November 14 2020

What the Heck Does “Choose Beta” Mean

Choose Beta General 0

Alright, time slipped up on me since the last post, but something cool has happened since then.

You can actually find this website on Google now…Cool! This is the first website that I have ever made, and it is awesome to be able to pull out a phone and search it. This is also kind of a drag though, because only a couple people know who I am so I can’t really go showing it around.

I hope all is well in your world, and thanks for coming back:

The Meaning of Choose Beta:

I hinted about it a little bit in the last post, but I wanted to put out a short summary of why Choose Beta.

My all-time favorite activity is rock climbing.

I love the technical aspects of working a route
I love the fact that you must have full control of your body and mind
But most of all, I love the comradery and bonds it creates

There are no better bonds you can find in a sport than when you become confident in literally entrusting your life into someone else’s hands. This is precisely what you are doing when you climb with a partner belaying you. You must fully trust each other.

The second point, is working through project routes together. You will try and fail together until you develop the correct sequence of moves to successfully work through the problem. Many times you can even find someone who already knows the critical steps and can use them as a resource to help guide you through the route.

This step by step sequence of moves is called the “Beta”. So, if I was working on a difficult part in a route (called the crux) and not able to get past it, I could ask another climber if they could “give me the Beta”. They would then help talk me through the correct moves or at least the sequence that they would try to use.

I read somewhere, can’t remember where, that the word Beta came from a climber who would record himself climbing on Betamax tapes so that he could show his buddies and say “You want to see the Beta? Max”. Whether or not that is the true origin I am not sure. Could be fake news.

Either way, Beta has been indoctrinated into the community and is essentially the cheat sheet of the climbing world. Sometimes there is only one logical sequence and other times there can be multiple ways to top out the route. There are many factors that can affect what the most efficient Beta for a specific climber is: including how tall, strong, and flexible they are. I have seen many routes where I will approach it in a very differently than the people I am with.

Life is exactly the same way.

My ideal life is not going to perfectly match yours. We all have different things that bring us happiness and fulfillment. If we can figure out the sequence of steps from people who are farther down the path, then we can use their Beta to expedite our achievement of those same goals.

This is the key to Choose Beta.

Time is finite but there are an infinite number of possibilities on how to live your life. If you understand what you want to achieve in your life, why would you waste it wandering around trying to find your way when you have people around you that can share their Beta???

There isn’t always one right answer, and some moves will feel more natural to you than others, but the key is to build a network of trusted peers and resources so that you can use their Beta and share yours… or at least that is my approach…

You want the Beta on how to Live Better

What can I say? I love climbing

November 3 2020

The Road Begins

Choose Beta General 1

Who Should Read this?

If you acknowledge that time is the most precious resource that you have, and you don’t want to end up realizing that you wasted countless years with no life progress…
If you are trying to become a better person everyday, and are looking for a support structure to lean on while on your life journey…
If you disagree with the “work until you die” mindset that plagues the work force and want to pursue freedom…
If you realize that life is short and you want to take action and choose to live a better life…

If these thoughts race through you mind, you are not alone. I have spent the last few years in the same place and decided I needed an outlet to discuss these ideas in random detail. I have been inspired by many people: Dave Ramsey, Seth Godin, Malcom Gladwell, more recently ChooseFI, the Mad Fientist, and Vicki Robins just to name a few. I have drawn inspiration from all of the above and want to continue down the path of living a better life.

This blog will be a conduit for exploring many ideas and seeking feedback, sharing your thoughts, and challenging the status quo. Together we will track our journey along the way.

I invite you to join the ride so that we can learn from each other.

So what the Hell does “Choose Beta” mean?

For now, lets just pretend Choose Beta is a play on Choose better as in Choose to Live a Better Life… I will get more detailed in the next post. Essentially, I want to use this platform to explore how to utilize the most precious resource that we have, our time, in order to live the most fulfilling life that we possibly can.

Currently, I see most topics falling into one of the following categories but who knows what we will learn and add in the future:

Financial Independence (Freedom)
Life Hacks (Optimization)
Family Life Balance (Prioritization)
Personal Growth (Development)

Who am I?

Let’s start with a name. Full disclosure, I want to remain anonymous at this point so I am going to go by Chris. Why?

There is more opportunity to dig deep into topics such as my personal financial situation if I stay anonymous…
There will be topics we will get into (such as retiring early) that I want to be able to discuss openly without potentially holding me back in my career… Assuming I choose to stay in it

In any event, the more honest I can keep this process the more We can grow together. So for now, “Chris”.

Am I qualified to do this?

Not Really.

I have no experience as a blogger, nor do I have any real writing background. I am simply passionate about living the best life possible. In the past, I have focused on new years resolutions and daily life improvements and have had some success… It is time to take it to the next level!

The best way to sustain motivation and continued learning is to utilize trusted peer groups and accountability partners. In that environment, ideas can be discussed and debated through honest feedback. We need each other. It is hard to find people who are passionate in some of the topics we will discuss, so hopefully we can feed off each other’s thoughts.

Should you “waste” your time reading these posts?

Good question.

There are already a lot of blogs out there and I have been through the rabbit hole myself. I would consider myself a “late adopter”. I generally look for blogs, podcasts, books etc by people that have been around a while. Why? Because time is finite, and I don’t want to waste it on things that may not hold up years down the road. I try to find the people that have built their reputation and grown their work to the point that most of the flaws have been checked out already.

I can; however, say this about myself:

As of this posting, I have already written enough posts to get me through the first few months. I opened a Microsoft Word document in July and started writing. I did this to prove to myself that I could get the words out and in a format that I thought would be helpful.

I have already invested a few months of my time into this and haven’t run out of things to discuss yet.

Aside from that, I can only say give it a chance and I need your input.

What is the posting strategy?

I plan on doing a post every week or two for as long as I can generate good discussion points (I have a family and a full time job so I am still trying to find the correct balance).

I do not want this to become something that is forced. If I cannot think of something worth writing about, I am not going to post just for the sake of posting. That would be a waste of both of our time.

If you made it this far, may as well hang out for one or two more.