WARNING: Overused-clichè alert.
When someone says that to me as a response to something I’ve said, I inwardly cringe.
I’m thinking about a specific example. It was about 10 years ago, and I was talking to my then-financial advisor.
One of the kind of advisors that makes his living selling mutual funds, and keeping over 1% of your balance as a fee.
Not the gain he earns you. Just the principal of the entire investment.
Plus convinces you to accept an equal or greater fee from the fund itself as well.
It’s a great gig if you can get it, but between then and a couple of years ago I got my grubby little inquisitive paws on the book “Money Master the Game,” and learned more than I wanted to know about these guys.
I like numbers. Let’s make that perfectly clear, if it wasn’t already.
I look at one of these statements, and see my meager 2% to 3% gains being eaten up by fees and I ask the obvious (to me, anyway) question.
Why?
Imagine if you were invested in $100,000 in mutuals right now, and getting your ass handed to you with this current Ukraine War-inflationary schizophrenic market and STILL having to pay these fees.
That would suck, right?
In fact, it’s possible you’re feeling the suckage as we speak.
I brought up my weak returns to Mr. Financial Expert back in the early 10’s, and he uttered the dreaded phrase to me:
“It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.”
He said this out of a decidedly fleshy face and head, perched atop a corpulent well-fed torso.
Get it? Not morbidly obese, but certainly a middle-aged fat boy.
And spewing running similes at me.
(shudder)
I found myself mentally picturing him trying to run after his dog, and getting winded by the end of the driveway.
Am I being a bit of a running elitist snob? Perhaps, but it just rubbed me all wrong and funny.
Waddayou know about marathons, tubby?
I fired him within the next couple of weeks, by the way.
When your advisor is making more off your money that you are, you are not being well served.
I’m going to come to a Grand Point here in a second, but first I want to fill in the blanks about what I do about investments now.
Index funds.
If you have enough patience to fill out a couple of forms and bank online you can manage your investments the same damned way Mr. Big Shot does, with a 60/40 or 50/50 or whatever stocks/bonds split you can tolerate, for a fraction of a percent.
A small fraction, at that.
I do not give this advice professionally because I’m a profitability and tax accountant, and I don’t want the witch doctors shrinking my head, but I’m telling you innocently enough that I do this for myself, and you can too.
Okay, so! Let’s talk about the cliché now, shall we?
Maybe you’ve heard this, and have even been brought to believe in it a little bit as a new entrepreneur.
You’re not going to just burst out onto the scene and start raking in the cash instantly, right?
You have to spend some money getting supplies, and possibly advanced training.
Also, you have to get the word out.
Let people know you have the Thing that fixes their Problem.
In 2019 I joined a coaching program entitled Six Weeks to Six Figures.
It was six weeks long, and at the end of it I was not making six figures.
The monthly equivalent of that by the way is just $8,334 a month. Sounds easier in smaller chunks, right?
I did reach six figures using the principles and teachings – it just took longer.
In fact it was quite honestly a little over a year.
But it’s not an effing damned marathon, for the love of a graceful God!
Want to know why?
Because when you get to the end of your 26 miles 385 yards you’re done with the race.
If that isn’t enough for you, then let’s milk the metaphor a bit.
I have run marathons. Eight of them, including Boston, and I can tell you that you don’t haul ass off of the starting line. That much is true.
You get yourself into a pace that ensures you’ve got something in the tank after mile 20, which is about the furthest you ever run during your training for race day.
Believe it or not that first 20 is easy if you trained well and your mind is in a Zen place.
See why using this as an allegory for business and/or general wealth creation is bogus?
Starting a business is like Jim Collin’s proverbial flywheel, from his excellently-researched book “Good to Great.”
A series of little pushes moves it ever-so-slightly. It gets moving.
More pushes pick up the pace. The wheel rotates gradually faster.
Those who figured out how to provide the good or service for the right value find the flywheel rotating right along almost effortlessly once they have done the hard foundational work of building the business.
The long-distance race metaphor breaks down.
I reached that 2019 goal at the end of 2020, and I can say without hesitation it was glorious, but it was NOT the end. And I don’t see an end in sight any time soon, either.
I guess I get to call myself a runner. After having spent several decadent years trying to destroy my body with hard partying and bad food in my early 20’s I joined the Army in 1984 at the age of 25, and found that I could still run the required fitness-tested 2 miles faster than all but a few of my platoon-mates.
Many years later, I got dared to run a half-marathon by my adult daughter in 2013, and the bug bit.
I run for fun, but also because it’s my reading time, and I’m literally learning on my feet.
I haven’t read a fiction novel for pleasure in 4 years, and that’s one of my little pushes on the flywheel.
It’s not a marathon, people, so stop saying that.
I think of it as a time-money continuum, if I think of it in philosophical ways at all.
But really, it’s life.
If you’re one of the entrepreneurs, the risk takers, you are my brother or sister, and my hero.
I will never make the mistake of labeling you as a racer.
Because, final thought:
The only person you should ever be in competition with is the person that stared back out at you from your mirror last night.
Be Your Best You, Now!
If you want to learn more about how we help people like you make more money with the business you’re already doing then message me or go to our website and choose Work With Me.
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