I “suffer” from a form of privilege that I’m hardly ashamed of. Somehow success, wealth, and happiness have become the modern day equivalents of the plague. To flaunt your successes is bigotry, but to parade your failures, trials and tribulations wins the adulation of everyone.
Does this make sense? I don’t think so.
There is no secret recipe to becoming rich and successful
I’m not here to sell you a crazy dream about how you can just pack up, quit, and live like a king. We all know that dream is as much a lie as the “American dream,” which tells you to get a job, work for 20 years and (hopefully) retire and live out your remaining days in mediocrity.
There must be some middle ground. And I think I’ve found it!
This post will talk about some of the things I’ve learned in my last 12 years of employment. It’s going to set the foundation for the steps I took to get myself from there, to here, to retirement. And not just retirement: independence!
Success is NOT supposed to be easy!
If I can make my dreams come true, you can too. Here’s the catch — and this is the big difference between my site and every other Quit-Yer-Day-Job site out there — it’s not supposed to be easy!
Still with me? Willing to work at it? Then join me in my pursuits and apply what you find relevant. I’ll tell you about my successes and failures so you can capitalize on the successes, and avoid the pitfalls.
Your success nourishes my success. Don’t let me starve.
Why do I do this? Is it because I’m a good person who just wants everyone to be happy?
I think I’m a good person, but that’s not why I bring you this information. I do it because I want to capitalize on your success as much as you want to capitalize on mine. I’m a selfish person. But I’m successful because I’m selfish. I think everyone committed to success must also be committed to being selfish… and accepting it as NOT A BAD THING!
So let’s get to it, shall we?
Being successful means different things to different people
We’ve got to agree on a generally acceptable definition of success if we want to actively pursue it as a goal. Unless we define it, we’ll never know when we get there.
First things first, make S.M.A.R.T. goals.
SPECIFIC – Make your goals specific
Vague goals become open to interpretation and what I call “goal/mission creep.” You’re more likely to alter your goals to fit your end state, which can dilute your progress.
MEASURABLE – Allows you to create goals that let you know how close you are to achieving them
You have some kind of benchmark or rubric to go off of. This can be a monetary amount, like $500,000, or it can be somewhat of an intangible, like “Go on vacation to Hawaii.” Binary measurements are great (YES/NO), but as long as it’s quantifiable you’re golden.
ATTAINABLE – This means it’s something you can actually achieve
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Henry Ford didn’t start out with the Model T. But what is attainable, after all? Shouldn’t we set our goals high?
Of course we should! But you should break them down into pieces that you can achieve in steps. If your goal is $500,000, you’ll spend every moment from $1 to $499,999 with a sense of shortcoming and failure. How about $10,000 to start? Much more attainable.
One of my favorite financial gurus, Dave Ramsey, writes about the debt snowball as a means of paying off debt by targeting the smaller debts first. This provides a built-in reward that will encourage you to pay off more and more greater debts. The same should apply to your goals for success.
RELEVANCE – Don’t build a boat when you want a house
Without relevance your goals will never yield your end result. If your definition of success is complete financial independence, but your immediate goal toward achieving it doesn’t directly contribute towards that success, get rid of that goal!
One of the ideas of Lean Manufacturing suggests that any form of production, process, or maintenance that does not directly contribute, or add value to the process (or improve the final product), is considered waste. This is an important idea to remember. All of your processes and goals should be in the interest of achieving your end state.
TIME – Investors’ greatest friend, life’s greatest foe
Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. — Albert Einstein
If speaking strictly about financial gain, Einstein may have been on to something. In other posts we’ll talk about what happens when we watch our money compound. One thing we may not have a lot of, depending on our circumstances, is time. Compounding requires time, typically.
Set your goals so that they are time sensitive and time-bound. Open-ended goals allow you to put things off. This is one of the harshest products of the Great American Lie.
Go to school so you can get a job. Get a job so you can get more money. Get promoted to make more money. Keep working. Enjoy a few days off here and there. Push your dreams aside so you can keep working for someone else’s dream. Retire when you’re too old to enjoy your money, and maybe pass some of your savings on to your kids or grandkids.
You’ve got some goals, now go and grab them
As you’ve been reading this post, you’ve probably been thinking in the abstract. Stop! Grab a piece of paper or a pad of sticky notes right now and start writing. Write down as many goals as you can. Don’t worry about making them SMART goals just yet. Get as many as your brain and come up with.
Want a yacht? Want to live in Costa Rica? Want to sit on your front porch and drink beer for the rest of your days? No goals are too ridiculous at this point. This is just a brainstorming session.
Got ’em written down?
Time to categorize them. Are any of them SMART goals in and of themselves? Put them to the side. Are any of them goals that lead to your SMART goals? Group them together.
Your mission for these first crucial moments is to define what your idea of success is. If all of your sticky notes point toward financial gain, then go with it. There’s no universally right answer, but there is a right answer for you.
With some work you’ll come up with your mission. Once you have a mission, you’ll spend your remaining time in relentless pursuit of it.
Here is the mission I started with in 2006, just to give you an idea:
Accumulate $500,000 in measurable assets, and a passive monthly income of $3,400 by the age of 40 in order to not have to work and stay at home to raise my children.
Glamorous, right?
Here’s the great thing. Your SMART goals don’t have to stop once you’ve achieved them. Like the debt snowball, every milestone should be a step towards the next one.
If I could make that $500,000 into $1 million in another 3 years, why not? And guess what? I can!
Since 2006 I have amassed $433,000. I’m now 32 years old. I have a home on both coasts. Two vehicles paid in full. Over $250,000 in assets earmarked for retirement, and over $100,000 in cash assets.
I did this while working a “normal” job, using some of the methods I’ll write about on this site.
These are real numbers, and I don’t use them to brag. There are lots of so-called online gurus who claim they’ve made millions without lifting a finger. They’ll also charge you a ton of money for their secret formula. What they won’t admit is that people paying for their “formula” is what actually made them their money… and trust me… it wasn’t millions.
Your success depends on you and you alone
If you want a passive income, you will have to work to make it happen. I learned this early on, after spending a lot of money on experts online to tell me their secrets. I refuse to be like them. I’ll be honest with you.
I want you to use my methods because I’m not promising you a damn thing. What I offer is what has worked for me and nothing more. I implore you to try it out, and I hope it works. I don’t think everyone should be successful; if everyone had the same success, the idea of success would become meaningless. There have to be tiers for society to work… we just want to be on the top tier!
Use your SMART goals as your foundation
You’ve got some goals now. You can whittle them down until you find what you want to pursue.
Don’t go quitting your job just yet. Despite the title, that’s not what this post is about.
My aim is for you to be realistic about your goals. You absolutely can quit your day job and live a life of luxury. I don’t mean relative luxury. I mean lavish. I mean yachts, days at the beach, and nice cars. I also mean emotional success; a family that is taken care of, a healthy respect for life and perspective.
If you’ve made it this far, you might feel like you still don’t know where to go from here. That’s good. If you had it all figured out already, most likely your goals wouldn’t be “SMART” ones.
Stick with me, and I’ll tell you in other posts about some of the specific methods I’ve used to gain my moderate wealth. I’ll also share some of my plans for the future. Some stuff I won’t share, because like I said before: I’m selfish.
I hope you’ve found this post insightful, if not useful in some way. It is not meant as a guide, and it’s certainly not a promise. It’s just about an idea that setting SMART goals is the first step toward your personal and financial freedom.
It’s your first step to telling your boss to Take This Job and Shove It!
Thanks for reading.
-Eric