Have you ever set a goal and not hit it? Have you ever missed it so bad that you weren’t even close? Do you ever set the same goal year after year but end up back where you started? Does that make you feel like a failure?
Don’t feel bad, you are in good company. I’ve done the same thing too many times to count. I can remember being 22 years old making less than $500 a week telling a fairly large group of people that I was going to own a million dollar house in Ponte Vedra Beach in five years. Five years later I’m living in 2000 sf house on the westside of Jacksonville. In fact I completely forgot I had ever set that goal. What’s funny about the fact that I forgot it was not that I didn’t want it any more it was that I just got tired of putting it on my list of goals and not getting it. Skip forward 10 years we built our dream home in Ponte Vedra Beach and yes, the price tag was over a million dollars. I’m not bragging, I sold the house a 7 years later because I was tired of the five thousand a month payment and the twenty five thousand a year in property tax.
A million dollar or ten million dollar house is not an unreasonable goal, nor is a Ferrari, or a Rolex watch or anything like it. In fact, no goal is unreasonable. Many times when people set goals then they try to justify why they want that goal. I used to be the king of justification when it came to goal setting. Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach says to set goals and never justify them. If you want something you don’t need a reason to want that. Dan says, It’s ok to want something just because you want it. I can honestly tell you I have goals on my list right now that would not make sense and have zero possibilities of being justified and so should you.
Now before my Christian friends get all in an uproar, I’m not talking about making things your god and I am certainly not recommending you finance anything. Just the opposite. But there is nothing wrong with having nice things, going to nice places and there is certainly nothing wrong with making lots of money. I have had boatloads of money and I’ve been so broke that if it took a nickel to crap, I’d have to puke. I can tell you it’s better and easier when you have money. Especially money that comes in on autopilot and you don’t owe anyone any money for your stuff.
Too many people spend their entire lives earning a paycheck, whether they work for someone else or they work for themselves. They take that paycheck and survive off of it, spending hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars on interest and never reach a point where their money earns them more money than their paycheck.
I said it earlier, there is nothing wrong with buying nice things. There is absolutely something wrong if you finance them. Other than your home I don’t believe it’s wise to borrow money for anything unless that is the only way for you to earn money. Americans are over 13 trillion dollars in debt and we have a national debt that exceeds 22 trillion dollars at the time of this writing. We’ve got to stop this nonsense. Who owns who? This is modern day slavery and we are all slaves to the banks and our government. Unfortunately, I don’t see that our government is going to stop asking for money any time soon so the only option you and I have is to make the banks go away.
Listen, I understand the desire for nice things. Set your goals big but wait until you have the money to purchase them or else they will have you. Delayed gratification is not waiting until you have the money to buy something its waiting to buy something even when you have the money to buy it.
If more of us adopted this practice, more of us would have the nice things we have always dreamed of.
To your lifelong prosperity,
David Mulvaney