Life à la carte

Even within a set menu, you have a bit of choice. (California Historical Society)

Listening to Dave Ramsey’s radio show, I got to the point that I could recite by heart all of his “baby steps” for getting out of debt and building wealth.

I could answer listener questions right along with him, and I rolled my eyes impatiently when someone talked about how they wanted to continue to use credit cards due to the points.

I wholeheartedly believed Dave’s message. I understood that if I followed his instructions exactly, I could get the promised results.

Though I learned a lot from Dave Ramsey, I no longer subscribe to all of his methods. I am grateful for the airline miles I get from my credit cards as well as the cushion against disaster that they offer (albeit at a high APR).

Admittedly, it can be a bit arrogant to say, “This is the way that works for me,” instead of following expert advice. But I’ve found that questioning assumptions, unbundling stuff that supposedly goes together, and taking a more à la carte approach to life can help us to get what we want.

There are all kinds of decisions that don’t have to go with other decisions, even if they traditionally do.

We can pick and choose what we like even when someone advises against it. We just have to be willing to accept the consequences of not buying into the whole package.

I recently purchased business Internet service from one of the big providers. Naturally, they bundled a bunch of other things into my package, including a hot spot for my nonexistent customers and a dedicated phone line. I do not want these things, but it was cheaper to include them. However, once the installer got everything set up, we dismantled all of the equipment I wasn’t going to need and put it in a cabinet.

This is a metaphor for so much that we encounter. So much information on the Internet these days is padded with all of this extra stuff to make it longer and presumably more SEO-friendly. Books are longer than they need to be so that they take up more space on the shelf. We can ignore everything except what we came for — and if it’s too hard to find what we came for, we can go somewhere else.

Advice is this way, too. Whether advice makes sense to follow is often predicated on sharing values with the person giving it. When you realize that those shared values don’t exist, you might want to reject the advice; on the other hand, understanding someone’s context can help you decide whether some of what is being shared could be useful.

At the meetings of twelve-step programs, they say, “Take what you like and leave the rest.” That means that whatever you hear in a given meeting is just someone’s own experience and ideas, and if they’re not helpful to you, you can reject them. They are not necessarily representative of the program itself.

For anything you might want to do, someone’s come up with a formula. But chances are, that formula can be remixed, rearranged, or otherwise tinkered with. You can change it to suit your purposes, or even reject the whole thing. There is always another way.

I taught piano lessons for a long time using the Piano Adventures series from Faber & Faber. These books taught no only my students, but me — I would have had very little to offer without those books.

However, as I grew more confident as a piano teacher, I developed my own sequence and methodology. These books no longer worked. Now, I use my own, and rely on Faber & Faber at just a few points in the sequence.

Most formulas don’t come from on high. They’re just something that somebody made up. You don’t have to celebrate Christmas with a Christmas tree. You aren’t obligated to put cream in your coffee or cream cheese on your bagel. You can skip all the cardio and weight machines at the gym and just go swimming.

Some traditions, you might find affirming and soothing. Some formulas, you might adhere to religiously. Some advice, you might follow to the letter.

But to make sense of these things, you might need to dismantle them. To find out why something works, you might need to see what happens when it doesn’t. To do your own learning, you might need to do your own questioning.

To find your own way, you might need to let go of the established way. Then, you can go back and gather what you find truly useful.

Formulas and packages and methodologies offer valuable shortcuts — someone else has done the work. But you can still do the work to figure out what will help you get to where you want to be. And letting go of this or that piece can lighten your load and make the journey easier.