We all make mistakes but living The Fantastic Life is all about living YOUR life. It’s not about keeping up with the Joneses or trying to live life the way others want you to. It’s all about finding your path and walking it.
Here are three ways to do this:
- Stop wasting money! Don’t buy that new TV/Car/Clothes. Instead save and acquire intelligent assets so you can buy experiences.
- Work hard towards winning your freedom. Getting out of the rat race requires YEARS of discipline and careful preparation.
- Work for yourself. “You work 8 hours a day for someone else and 8 for yourself. Then, on the weekends, you can work 32 hours for yourself.” I wrote this at 5:30 am on Sunday morning. Yes, I practice what I preach.
Rule #2 from my book The Fantastic Life: Be Crystal Clear on What You Want
What does YOUR Fantastic Life look like? Is it financial freedom? Having the ability to travel or pursue your passions? If you don’t know exactly what YOU want, then the only life you’ll have is one picked out by someone else.
Most People Don’t Even Realize They’re Making This One Huge Life Mistake
Your personal freedom comes at a steep price.
By: Quora
By far the most common way I see people ruin their lives is by not planning ahead to get off the treadmill one day.
Adult life starts when we get on the treadmill. We show up somewhere and do something for which we receive compensation–money. Money! What are we going to do with it?
And that’s the fork in the road where most people take a wrong direction. It’s easy to project “I keep showing up at work, and they keep giving me money. Heck, I’ll be getting raises!”
I’m not saying that jobs can’t be fun and rewarding, but there always comes a day when you are ready for a break or, worse, the break is forced on you. What then?
Few people understand basic personal finance: Classified Balance Sheet. “I’m money ahead! I can get a boat!” That boat is fun and increases your popularity, but unless you are using it to run hot commodities from clandestine ports, it is a liability (and smuggling is its own non-financial liability). You now get to pay docking fees, buy fuel and insurance and cover maintenance now and then. You’ve just upped your outgo and committed yourself more to the treadmill.
The smart fork in the road is to tighten your belt and acquire assets, things that up your income. In 1963, my dad let drop that he made $11,000 a year. Doesn’t sound like much, but $11k then equates to roughly $100k now. We lived in a rural town, and that was double and more what my friends’ dads made. However, we lived much poorer. My friends all had souped-up cars that their parents bought in their name. I got to borrow the family Ford Custom. They had afternoons and weekends free. I had to clear the lots and tear down the houses on the distressed properties my dad bought.
Freedom, your personal freedom, comes at a steep price. As my dad would say, “You work 8 hours a day for someone else and 8 for yourself. Then, on the weekends, you can work 32 hours for yourself.” Not only did he mean that he lived it. Before long, he no longer had a job. And, a decade or so after that, he could see to his affairs as necessary and take off as desired.
That’s the fork in the road to take. Work hard when you are young and build toward your freedom, because, believe me, one day you are going to ache to be off that treadmill and won’t begin to see a way to manage that.