Lower Your Potential for Things to Go Wrong, Raise Your Happiness

There has never been a better time to simplify

New Year’s Eve 2016 remains the most stressful day of my working life. At the time, I was working in a 300-seat Asian fusion restaurant in Melbourne, during my Australian working holiday. On any given day, the potential for things to go wrong in this restaurant was enormous. It was shared-style dining, gourmet order-as-you-go with food as pretty as it was delicious.

As a server, instead of putting in one big order per table, I would often send 8–10 smaller orders as people chose small bites on their schedule, then chase down said orders in the kitchen. The kitchen was always overloaded with meal tickets because the meals weren’t scheduled. Nobody could keep up on a good night.

We operated at the edge of possibility at all times, unless tables opted for the pre-planned $100+ seven-course degustation menu. This menu rotated every night based on food availability and the whimsy of our nutcase head chef.

Memorizing this menu was part of our “pre-shift” memorization talks every day. It made things easier because it was scheduled and pre-coursed, but we still had to remember to course it out properly, sending seven individual tickets to the kitchen at separate times, often not knowing how long each course was going to take to make because the seven courses changed every day.

Following me so far? Awesome. Now, this 7-course menu worked on a normal work night because not everyone was opting for the seven-course degustation menu.

Here’s where the horror story begins. On the fateful night of December 31st, 2015, all of this chaos was ramped up by 1000%. The restaurant was in a perfect position to view the Melbourne fireworks. Because we were a corporate restaurant, and not locally owned, we were at the mercy of the fates (by the fates I mean the businesspeople, who had never waited on a table or worked in a restaurant).

About two and a half months away from New Year’s, the big-wigs told the marketing department to start blasting out ads for New Year’s Eve reservations. “The night of your dreams! seven courses of delicious Asian fusion for everyone!” (They had offered four courses the year before).

People got excited. With a full month left before New year’s Eve, we were booked out. Our managers were ecstatic, and when the fateful night finally arrived, we were operating full-staff with our best servers and bartenders on the floor.

People started trickling in at 8:00–9:00, and before the shift, we were briefed that we needed our tables to have dessert finished, with the check and complimentary champagne ready on the table at 11:30, so that everyone would be able to leisurely meander out to watch the fireworks.

If you’ve had the great fortune of working in restaurants as I have, you might have seen where this story is going.

It was an unmitigated disaster.

11:30 rolled around, and less than half of the tables in the restaurant had received even half of their seven courses. The kitchen had been overloaded all night, so they had been flinging orders at the servers to give to tables out of sequence, even though everyone had been promised a coursed-out menu in the perfect order for flavor and digestion.

The manager started uncorking champagne and handing it to us, telling us that the one-glass limit was null and void and that we needed to start pouring to anyone who wanted it, as much as they wanted.

My favorite part of the story is that everyone who reserved had prepaid to reserve this horrendous experience, so they couldn’t refuse to pay. They had to wait in line to demand their money back at the end of the night.

All of my tables walked out at midnight to watch the fireworks, without having received most of their food or settling their alcohol tabs. Some of them never came back.

I walked out with them, figuring that since I didn’t have tables to wait on, I could watch the fireworks too. I remember sitting on the curb outside watching the fireworks, thinking about not going back in. I had already put my two weeks in, it wouldn’t matter if I just slipped away like some of my customers, right?

Don’t worry, I did the right thing. I went back at the end of the night to partake in the negative atmosphere that followed as the managers shook their heads wondering what went wrong.

The truth is that it went wrong because it was destined to go wrong. It was far too complicated of a system. The managers, who were feeling pressure from their managers, who were feeling pressure from the marketing people, who were pressured by the business people, asked the head chef (who was at a point in his career where he was more decorative than functional) if his kitchen could produce seven-course meals on a mass scale.

“Of course!” He exclaimed, without bothering to run this idea by the people who made the food and didn’t just flounce around tasting things and having whimsical yet innovative culinary ideas.

The system was destined to fail because it was too complicated. Everyone was used to overpromising, and nobody knew what anyone else’s job entailed.

I’m sharing this story because I know several people who live their lives like that restaurant. Things are so tightly wound that they’re stressed on a good day. They over-promise, operating right at their limit. It’s all okay until something goes a little bit differently than they are expecting and wham! The whole operation is derailed.

Their hours are reduced, or they get hurt, and they are sent into a panic because they have nothing saved to fall back on.

They won’t be able to make the car payment (that they shouldn’t have had to begin with).

They can’t pay rent because they went out every weekend and overspent, trying to exchange their hard-earned dollar for perceived status. They bought a new mountain bike and are still paying off the credit card debt.

These are all situations I’ve encountered in my peer group, and they amount to the same thing:

The rich world wants you to turn your life into a tremendously complicated machine, spending your money the second it comes in, dialing your life for maximum consumption, and living on the edge of what you can afford because “you deserve nice things” or “you just want the same standard of living as your parents.”

If this is familiar to you, I’m sorry. As someone who’s lived on both sides, it’s not the way it has to be. Imagine the tremendous power of knowing that a setback at work would be a blip on the radar, not a completely life-destroying event. This is the power of a contentment-optimized life of simplicity. You haven’t overspent, so you have money for a rainy day.

You bought a used mountain bike, and the rest of the money is working for you, chugging away at making future freedom easier than you thought. This takes time, but there is one major thing you can do today if you’re ready to step towards a better life:

Get rid of anything financed.

Have a new car and the monthly car payment that goes with it? Sell it, and use the proceeds to buy a solid mid-2000’s foreign-made hatchback. If there’s money left over, get a used bike and start replacing driving with riding (I recently acquired a hatchback and an awesome used bike on Facebook Marketplace).

Insurance is much cheaper on the hatchback. Any money that you were putting towards more expensive insurance and a car payment can now be saved and invested.

Now start using your bike for transportation. The more you bike, the less you spend on gas. You’re getting stronger in the process. Congratulations!

If it’s not a car that you have financed, do you have anything financed? (Not counting a house, which can be leveraged positively).

Get rid of it. Find a cheaper version.

A lot of people confuse this with frugality, because of the way that we have been raised and conditioned to be consumers at all times. I am not advocating for frugality. The way I have designed my life, I barely try to save money. It just happens.

This is what I’m advocating for: a life of simplicity, living within your limits, simultaneously experiencing abundance.

To do this, you have to start somewhere that terrifies most people I know. You have to look at your spending, and be honest with yourself.

Look over your bank statement every week. Sign up for Personal Capital. Pay your credit card bill weekly. Be obsessive about it at the beginning. Where are you being an idiot? Where are you punching your wallet?

The first step in this process is much like the first step in meditation. You need to realize that your spending, and the way your mind perceives spending are totally out of control. This is not your fault. You’ve been conditioned from a very young age by malicious advertising.

This is not going to be easy. Your whole society is against you. But stick at it, and you can be a revolutionary. Self-honesty is the hardest type of honesty to start, but once you make it a habit, the possibilities are endless. Small changes really do snowball.

Let’s build a bright future together!