A New Decade-Start With the Basics
Issue #50 January 2, 2020
I hope you enjoyed the short hiatus from me filling your inbox so that you could properly give all the holiday promotion spam its just attention before hitting ‘delete’.
We have just officially entered what I wholeheartedly believe will be view as one of the most volatile, transcendent, important, and disruptive, (net positive) decades in the short 10,000-year history of humanity. That is not hyperbole.
We have never faced so many critical inflection points in any prior 100-year macrocycle transition from one set of institutions to the formation of the next world order that will emerge and rule through 2120 before it begins to decay. The last time we faced this repeating cycle we had 7 billion fewer people on the planet and only 5% lived in cities and economies were not linked with such interdependent complexity.
Today we live in highly populated density with double-digit growth in net migration to urban centers. Information (and misinformation) move at light speed on personalized devices that compound our bias at unprecedented rates and a perpetual state of quiet overwhelm baseline the majority of our decision-making days.
Yet in all this complexity, we remain positive and hopeful this time of year because we have one weapon we can still deploy that is certain to actively (not passively) increase our sanity and help drive meaningful returns to our portfolio. What is that weapon?
Our Will.
Of all our six intellectual faculties/mental muscles (i.e. Reason, Intuition, Perception, Will, Imagination, & Memory), the Will is our greatest asset when it comes to execution because it is where we choose how and where we direct our thought energy on a consistent and daily basis. It is where we cultivate new habits and reinforce old ones.
Goal setting is a common exercise this time of year with the famous New Year Resolutions and I don’t discourage this habit, but to ‘resolve’ oneself to a new set of activities, begins and ends with the Will.
Much like the strength of the biceps muscle in your body, your aggregate willpower stems from the daily and consistent effort to exercise your Will (the ability to focus and complete key activities that support your larger goal and ultimate form new habits). This is done best by getting back to basics and purposefully simplifying your year to the “must-haves” versus the “nice-to-have” achievements. Goal achieving (unlike goal setting) after all, is not an intellectual exercise, but a lawful one that is governed by universal laws like cause & effect, relativity, gestation, and the perpetual transmutation of energy.
The Will is your ultimate weapon once you have decided upon the 1-3 outcomes that matter most and must be improved by specific quantity off the starting baseline in a specific period of time.
So to kick your decade off right I suggest you use the simple personal balance sheet form from the Rich Dad CashFlow board game and get clear on your baseline net worth and cash flow statements as of today and then set your financial wealth targets for this year and list out the daily habits that will support you doing that and which habits don’t align with those outcomes and swap them out immediately. (Click to open and print one-off)
Secondly, I encourage you to list out all of the people you spend time with on a regular basis throughout your week/month by name on a sheet of paper. Once you have listed all the names out on a page go back to the top and next to their name place either a “+” or a “-” or an “N”.
“+” people are those who with each interaction you leave feeling better, more energized, smarter, more curious, healthier, etc.
“-” people are the toxic ones that with the majority of interactions of informal agreements you leave feeling anxious, uncertain, drained, etc.
“N” represents the people that net out to a neutral impact. You sometimes leave energized and sometimes leave drained, but they net out to a neutral impact on your mental and physical state.
Work this January to begin to remove the commitments or minimize the entanglements with all of the “-” ranked people. If they are family members, then reduce the interactions to what it takes to cordially meet the necessary obligations unless it is acceptable to cut them out as you would non-blood relationships. If they are a boss or business partner, seriously consider how you will make moves to find a way to move beyond the relationship through a new career path or business buyout.
For those who you ranked “N” get clear on how and where they can be supportive to your ultimate newly simplified financial and personal goals and limit your interactions to those activities that keep you on track but engaged in positive ways.
For those that you ranked “+” find ways to provide value and receive mutual directional value towards your new goals by increasing your interactions with them.
At the end of the day, life and wealth are all about relationships. You can make money doing any number of things with any number of people, but holding onto that money and feeling and living wealthy has a direct correlation to the people you allow in your inner circle. There is no point in living with a lot of cash and equivalent assets in storage while looking over your shoulder and feeling alone. The next 10 years will be a wild ride and you get to decide today who you want to take that ride alongside. I have to get my own personal balance sheet and friends list updated now and take a dose of my own prescription. So ‘til next issue, Happy New Year!
~Chris