MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (36 page)

Second, you have to review what steps you took to turn that dream into your reality. Take a moment right now. Select one of the things you have achieved. What were some of the first actions you took? Jot them down now.

I’ve interviewed literally tens of thousands of people about how they’ve taken something that seemed impossible and woven it into their life. How did they create it? How did you? There’s a process we all go through. It’s a matter of three steps.

Step 1: Unleash Your Hunger and Desire, and Awaken Laser-like Focus.
Something happens within you: either you become inspired by something that excites you so much that your desire is completely unleashed—you become completely obsessed with it—and you focus on the object of your desire with laser-like intensity! Your imagination is ignited. Or you hit a wall, a threshold, a place inside yourself, and affirm that you will no longer settle for life as it has been. You make a decision never to go back, and you become ferociously focused on the new life or object you desire. It could be a job change, a relationship change, a lifestyle change. You unleash your hunger for it—and wherever focus goes, energy flows.

Have you ever experienced this? You bought an outfit, or you bought a car, and suddenly you saw that car or outfit everywhere? How did that happen? Because part of your subconscious mind, called the reticular activating system, knows this is important now, so it notices anything that relates to it. Those cars and outfits were always around you, but now you’re noticing them because your subconscious makes you aware of the very things you were not seeing before.

That’s what’s going to happen as you’re reading this book. You’re going to start noticing the fees charged by mutual funds and hearing about asset allocation. You’re going to start hearing things you’ve never heard before—
high-frequency trading! dollar-cost-averaging!
—and they are going to come to life for you because now your brain knows they’re important. Anything that’s important, anything that’s focused on, energy flows into it. And when you have that level of hunger, desire, and focus, step 2 starts to happen.

Step 2: You Take Massive and Effective Action.
If your desire is truly unleashed and you are obsessively focused on what you want, you will be called to do whatever it takes to make your dream a reality. There are no limits to the energy and flexibility you’ll have in the pursuit of what you want. In your heart, you know massive action is the cure-all. If you’re willing to put in the effort, you’ll get there. You’ve done it before, right? Maybe there was a time when you just had to see the girl you loved, so you borrowed a car and drove all night through a snowstorm to visit her at college. Maybe you moved heaven and earth to get your child into the best school to suit her needs. If it’s a “must” and not just a “should,” you’ll find a way.

But there’s one caveat, of course: you need to put effective execution behind all that effort, right? What if you drove through that snowstorm without a map and ended up in the wrong city? You can throw all your effort into saving for the future, but put your money in a 401(k) loaded with high fees and poorly performing mutual funds, and you’ll get nowhere. Or you can invest everything in one company and watch the stock drop 40% in a day. So if you’re willing to do whatever it takes, you still have to execute your plan carefully, and keep adapting your approach. Because effort with effective execution creates magic. This book is your map, your blueprint to take you from where you are today to where you want to be financially. By consistently taking massive and effective action, and adapting your approach whenever it doesn’t work and trying something new, you will move toward your dream, but there’s one final, extraordinary element that plays an important role in whether your dream becomes a reality or not.

Step 3: Grace!
Some call it luck, coincidence, fate, or God’s hand. I call it grace: the acknowledgment that there’s more in this world than just ourselves, and that perhaps a higher power gives us both the privilege of this life as well as the gifts of insight and guidance when we’re open to them. It’s amazing how, when you take care of the first two steps, God or the universe or grace—whatever you like to call it—tends to step in and support what you’re doing. Things flow to you when you do your part first. We’ve all experienced the phenomenon of serendipity. Something happens that defies explanation, so we call it a coincidence. We miss a train and meet the person we end up marrying. We fill in for a friend, and it leads us to the job of our
dreams. We didn’t figure it out in advance, didn’t earn it—it just happened. To me, that’s grace. And the more you acknowledge and appreciate the grace that’s already in your life, the more you experience the gifts that are beyond what you’ve created. I’ve had it happen many times in my life, and I know it’s real. I also know that gratitude connects you to grace, and when you’re grateful, there is no anger. When you are grateful, there is no fear.

So, are you ready to become the creator of your life, not just the manager of your circumstances? Do you know what you’re really investing for? An income for life! Are your dreams becoming a part of you, a “must” that your unconscious mind focuses on night and day? Are you willing to do what it takes to make them a reality? Then it’s time to turn the page and do what so many others fail to do.

It’s time to make a plan. . . .

CHAPTER 3.2

WHAT’S
YOUR
PLAN?

If you don’t know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.

—HENRY KISSINGER

Congratulations, you’ve come a long way! You’ve taken three huge steps toward Financial Freedom. You’ve made the most important financial decision of your life. You’ve become an investor by committing or expanding the percentage of your income that automatically goes into your Freedom Fund, and you’ve begun to build your money machine that will set you free. You’ve also learned how to protect yourself from the biggest lies designed to separate you from your money. Finally, you have put a price on your dreams: you know how much income it will take to be financially secure and independent. Now we’re going to take what you’ve learned about the power of compounding and put those
Money Power Principles to work. We’re going to work together to create a plan for you and your family that is absolutely attainable and within reach, no matter what level of financial dream you’re shooting for: security, vitality, or independence.

There’s one more thing before we start. If you’re like most people, you hate talking about money. But hey, it’s just us, anyway. No one else will see these numbers unless you decide to share them. What’s most important is that you be honest with yourself. No rounding up here. No bending the truth. No looking at your “numbers” with a rosy lens and making your finances look a little better than they are. And by the same token, don’t sandbag yourself either by making the plan so conservative that you feel like it’s impossible to achieve. Just level with yourself and commit to taking a candid picture of where you are now. That’s how to make this plan
really
work.

YOU CAN PLAY ONLY YOUR OWN HAND

A good friend of mine recently had a reunion with a group of his boyhood pals near my home in Palm Beach. They all gathered to celebrate their 50th birthdays. They had gone to nursery school together and lived down the street from one another throughout high school in a Levitt community of tract homes on Long Island, New York. Their fathers were all professionals, or owned their own businesses, their mothers were all housewives; and their household income levels tracked together closely. What struck me most about these lifelong friendships were the demographics. During their formative years, the lives of these friends were in synch, but once they went away to college, the young men splintered in different directions:

One went to work for a leading financial institution on Wall Street.

One became a photographer, opening a frame shop in Manhattan.

One built homes across the mid-Atlantic states.

One started a business as an importer of fine wines and craft beers.

One trained as an engineer and worked on a civil servant’s salary in South Florida.

When they got together, these lifelong friends compared notes. Despite the gap in income levels and bank accounts, they were all happy—not happy in precisely the same ways, of course, but happy. Their needs were met. Many of their hopes and dreams as well.

My friend shared the concepts from an early manuscript of this book with his buddies. After a few beers, the conversation turned to money, and they asked one another the same question you answered in the last chapter: How much money would it take to reach financial security or fund their retirements? The Wall Streeter thought he had to save at least $20 million to maintain his present lifestyle without having to work. The Manhattan photographer thought $10 million would do the trick. The real estate developer thought he could manage on $5 million, especially now that his kids were out of college. The wine merchant had recently remarried. In spite of welcoming a new baby, he was counting on a nest egg of $2 million. And the civil servant, the one who’d been conditioned to live within his means and to look ahead to a steady pension for the rest of his life, thought he could
live worry free once his pension kicked in and he started collecting Social Security benefits.

Which one of these friends was closest to achieving his goal? Who had the right number and the right plan in place to help him get there? It’s a trick question, of course. The answer isn’t driven by money. You don’t “win” the race of life by amassing the biggest pile of cash or accumulating the most things. And you don’t win by grabbing a quick lead and coasting to the finish line.

How do you win? You win by living on your own terms—as well and as fully as you can, for as long as you can.

You create a plan that meets your needs, that works for you, and you stick to it. That’s success, plain and simple. If you’re scrambling, constantly competing with others’ views of success or financial independence and trying to achieve an elusive goal, you’re going to fall behind and become frustrated. If you’re chasing someone else’s goal, you also lose. It doesn’t matter how much your neighbor has, what kind of car he or she drives, or the vacation he or she takes. This plan is about you, only you, and no one else.

The day you stop racing is the day you win the race.

—BOB MARLEY

THE ILLUSION OF ADVANTAGE

Ever watch track-and-field events in the Olympics? It’s easy to stare at the track just before the starting gun fires and wonder how the runner positioned all the way out in front in the outer lane of the track doesn’t have a
huge
advantage. Intellectually, we know that all the runners must run the same distance, but visually our eyes seem to deceive us. That so-called lead is called a stagger, and it’s meant to even the distance on an oval track. In a 400-meter race, there’s a gap of about six meters separating each runner.

But, of course, everyone knows that there’s no advantage, physically, to being all the way out in front on the outside of the track, or all the way in the back on the inside.
You have to run the same distance either way. Yet the
appearance
of advantage can be a powerful psychological edge. Does the guy out in front think he’s got the lead? Does that give him a boost of
confidence, or perhaps take away the tiniest fraction of his drive? Does the guy all the way “in back” feel like the underdog—and then run just a little bit faster to compensate?

Let’s go back to our five friends, from the outside-looking-in perspective. It might
feel
like the civil servant is all the way in the back, lagging behind the field, and it might
seem
like the Wall Street executive has set himself up for a strong finish, but that’s the illusion, not the reality. No one is ahead.

There’s no
first place
or
last place
here. Life is not a competition. Often people use money and the acquisition of
things
to measure where they stand: who’s got the nicer house, the fancier car, the summer home in the Hamptons. But the truth is, we can’t predict how long we’ll live or the state of our health as we age. The reality is,
it doesn’t matter where we start. It’s how we finish that counts.
Here it seemed that all of these lifelong friends were headed in the right direction—
each on his own terms, in his own time. That’s one of the reasons they felt so happy with their lives.
With a little discipline and foresight, they all had a shot at winning the race they’d started together, all the way back in nursery school.

The same can happen for you. It doesn’t matter where you stand in relation to your friends, your family, your colleagues, or clients. All that matters is your personal journey. It’s tempting to look at others as a yardstick and convince yourself that you’re all the way out in front, with the appearance of a lead, or resign yourself to the back of the pack. But that’s not the point. The
race of life is a marathon, not a sprint.
The only thing to do is focus on the path in front of you. Look ahead. Establish your own pace. Keep moving forward. And then create that plan.

The only person you should try to be better than is the person you were yesterday.

—ANONYMOUS

YOUR PLAN

Now that you know that your only competition is yourself, it’s time to come up with a plan and create a financial blueprint. The good news is, all you
have to do is answer six questions in the It’s Your Money app. Using this wealth calculator, you’ll have a first version of your plan within seconds. If you haven’t already downloaded the app, here’s the link:
www.tonyrobbins.com/masterthegame
.