MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (30 page)

I’ve always believed the best way to get a result, the fastest way, is to find someone who has already accomplished what you’re after, and model his or her behavior. If you know someone who used to be overweight but has kept himself fit and healthy for a decade, model that person! You have a friend who used to be miserable in her relationship and now is passionate and in love for ten years going? Model her. You meet someone who started with nothing and has developed wealth and sustained it through time? Learn from those strategies! These people aren’t lucky. They’re simply doing something different than you are in this area of life.

I’ve spent my entire life as a hunter of human excellence.
So to find a strategy that works, you go to the best; those who have proven results for the long term.
And if you follow their strategies—if you sow the same seeds, then you’ll reap the same rewards. This is the essence of what I mean when I say, “
Success leaves clues
.” And this book is filled with strategies modeled from the very best.

The other thing the right strategy can do is save you the most valuable resource of all: time. If you start with
a proven plan, the right strategy,
you can literally convert decades of struggle into days of achievement. You can avoid the inevitable frustration that comes with learning something for the first time by trial and error. Instead, you can get results in days, instead of years, by learning from people who have achieved success already. Why reinvent the wheel?

So now there’s the question about the power of strategy. And if you read this book, you’ll have the best financial strategies that exist in the world
today. I promise you that: because they’re not my strategies, they’re the strategies of the most successful investors in history. But as obsessed as I am with strategy, I know that strategy alone isn’t enough.

Why not? There are two key challenges to thinking that strategy alone can change your life. First, too often people have the
wrong
strategy, which inevitably ends in disappointment. You’re trying to lose weight by eating 500 calories a day—which, of course, isn’t sustainable. Or you’re sure you’re going to get rich off one hot stock—highly unlikely.

Where do most people go to learn strategy? Where do we look for advice and guidance? Too often from someone who isn’t successful in the very area we want to improve! How often do people get relationship advice from friends who are in lousy relationships themselves? Or fitness advice from a friend who struggles with his weight, too? How many people hear the message reinforced that they can’t change their body? Why that message? Because they’re surrounded by friends or family who aren’t fit. The same is true for financial advice. Looking to someone who has not developed real wealth is a recipe for disaster. It simply reinforces the belief that nothing will work. It’s not that nothing will work—it’s that
these
strategies won’t work.

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL

THE POWER OF STORY

Let’s go back to our biggest challenges: our relationships, our bodies, and our finances. In each of these areas, we get stuck for one of three reasons. First, as we showed above, we lack the right strategy. We all know a couple where the guy doesn’t communicate or the woman never stops talking. Neither of them understands the needs of his or her partner, much less meets those needs. And what about the friend who goes on fad diets constantly or is always looking out for a magical way to make a million bucks—telling himself that without it he’ll never be financially free. Without the right strategy, you will fail. And when you fail, you develop a lousy story: “
My wife will never be satisfied.” “I’ll never lose the weight.” “The only people who make money are the ones who already have money.”
Those limiting stories keep us from finding the right strategies, or, even if we have the right strategies, from executing them.

Do you know anyone like that? You put the answer right in front of their very eyes, and they still say, “No, that will never work because . . .” They’ll tell you a million reasons why it won’t work—they’ve got every excuse in the book. So if the right strategies are there in front of us, why aren’t people using them? Why are they still not achieving their goals? Why is it so hard to maintain a passionate relationship or lose the weight once and for all? Are 70% of Americans overweight because the strategy for becoming thin, fit, and healthy is really so complex? Is the information hidden and only available to the 1%, or incredibly expensive? Hell, no. The answers are available everywhere: There’s a gym with someone who can instruct you within a short drive. (God forbid we were to walk there.) There are trainers all over the world, some of which will coach you online, wherever you are! The web is filled with free advice, and, of course, there are thousands of books on fitness and weight loss available for you to download right now to your iPad or smartphone. You have to work to avoid finding the strategies for becoming fit, strong, and healthy.

So what’s the real problem? The answer is: we have to bring in the human factor.
I always say that 80% of success in life is psychology and 20% is mechanics.
How else do you explain how someone can know what he needs to do, wants to do it, has the right strategy to get it done, and still not take action? To solve this riddle we have to delve into the psychology of individuals: the values, beliefs, and emotions that drive us.

When someone has the right strategy in front of her, and she still doesn’t succeed, it’s because she’s missing the second key to a breakthrough: the power of story.
If you’re not taking action and the answer is sitting there in front of you, there’s only one reason: you’ve created a set of beliefs that you’ve tied into a story—a story about why it won’t work, why it can’t work, why it only works for other people.
It’s only for the rich, the thin, the lucky, the happy in relationships.
It’s easy to come up with a limiting story.

So why bother to take action on a strategy that you “know” will fail? Well, strategy here isn’t the problem. Your story is. A half-hearted approach that says, “
It might work, or it might not . . .
”—of course it won’t! That belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
With a disempowering story, failure is nothing less than guaranteed.
Which, of course, only reinforces your belief that nothing will work. And so the cycle continues.

But the people who make change happen, who get stuff done, who accomplish, who shift, who grow, who learn, they take their strategy and attach a new story to it: a story of empowerment, a story of “I can and I will” instead of “I can’t and I won’t.”
It goes from being a story of limitation to a story of empowerment: “I will not be one of the many who can’t, I will be one of the few who do.”

There was a time when I was 38 pounds overweight, and my story was, “I’m big-boned.” Which I am. But I was also fat. Stories can be true, but if they don’t help us, if they’re stopping us from having the life we desire and deserve, we have to change them. We’ve all had lousy stories in our lives.

I don’t make enough.

I can’t save more.

I’ll never read. I’ve got dyslexia.

My friend Sir Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin empire, has dyslexia, but it certainly hasn’t limited his life in any way. Why? Because his belief or story about dyslexia was empowering, not limiting. His story wasn’t “I’ll never read,” it was “I have dyslexia, so I have to work harder to make everything happen—and I will.”
You can use your story, or your story can use you.
Everybody has got an empowering story if he or she wants to find it. What’s wrong with your life is just as easy to find as what’s right with your life, when your story changes. If your relationship isn’t working out, all the good guys are gone, or they’re gay and you’re not. Or you’re gay and they’re not. There’s always a story, right? Stories control our emotions, and emotions drive all of our behavior and actions.

Let me ask you a question: Do you worry about money? Does it keep you up at night, stress you out thinking about your next paycheck, your car payment, your kids’ college tuition, or whether or not you’ll ever have enough money to be able to retire? What’s your financial stress really like? According to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), 44% of Americans, nearly half of us, report “high levels” of financial stress. Have you ever thought to yourself, “All this stress just might kill me?”

Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University, warned about the dangers of stress for a full decade before she realized that maybe
it was her advice, rather than stress itself, that was sending people to their graves faster. “I’m converting a stimulus [stress] that could be strengthening people into a source of disease.” With a breakthrough in her thinking, and some powerful new research, McGonigal made a complete turnaround.

Turns out, stress might just be our friend. Just as you put stress on a muscle to make it stronger (by lifting weights or running), emotional stress can make us physically and psychologically stronger too. McGonigal now highlights new research showing that when you change your mind about stress, you can literally change your body’s physical reaction to it. In an eight-year study, adults who experienced a “lot of stress” and who believed stress was harmful to their health had a 43% increase in their risk of dying. (That sure stressed
me
out.)
However, people who experienced an equal amount of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die!
McGonigal says that physical signs of stress (a pounding heart, faster breathing, breaking out in a sweat) aren’t necessarily physical evidence of anxiety or signs that we aren’t coping well with pressure. Instead, we can interpret them as indications that our body is energized and preparing us to meet the next challenge.
The bottom line is, science has now proven that how you think about stress matters—the story you attach to stress. Telling yourself it’s good for you instead of harmful could mean the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at 50 or living well into your 90s.

Success is my only mofo option, failure’s not.

—“LOSE YOURSELF,” Eminem

So what story have you been telling yourself about money? What’s stopping you from achieving your financial dreams? Are you telling yourself that it’s too early to start saving? Or too late to start rebuilding your investments? You’re not making enough salary to put anything aside? Or the system is rigged against you, so why bother trying? Maybe your story is, “The government has saddled us with debt, the financial system is in shambles,” or “I’m just not good with numbers.” Great news: you don’t have to be! If you’ve got a phone and a calculator or can download our app on your phone, to answer six simple questions about where you are today, where you
want to go, and what you’re willing to do to get a financial plan that you’ll clearly understand about how to be financially free.

Maybe your story is “It takes money to make money.” One of the first people I shared an early version of this book with had a core belief of “I will never be financially free unless I have a way to make a lot of money. People who start with a lot of money can make millions, but not me.” After she read the chapter on building your own money machine with Theodore Johnson—who never made more than $14,000 a year yet turned it into $70 million over his lifetime—her story went out the window. Theodore wasn’t lucky. He used a simple system, the same one you’re about to learn.

Here’s her new story, and it could be yours: “If I just happen to use this simple system of compounding, I can make a lot of money, I can go wherever I want, I can live however I truly want, I can be financially free. There are no limits except the ones I impose on myself.”

One of my own financial breakthroughs happened with an important change in story. Growing up poor, I always associated a lack of money with pain for everyone in the family. I swore to myself early on I would never have a child until I was truly financially successful. I swore that someday I would be so successful financially that my family would
never ever
experience the humiliation, frustration, and pain of my childhood years of not being able to pay the bills or put food on the table.

And I made good on my promise. By the time I was 18 years old, I was earning as much as $10,000 a month, which at the time seemed like a huge amount of money. It still is. I was so excited, I ran back to my friends from my community, the guys I had grown up poor with, and said, “Let’s go have a blast: let’s fly to Egypt and race camels between the pyramids!” I had had this dream as a little boy. And I could now share this dream with my friends. But the response was hardly what I was expecting: “Easy for you, Mr. Rich Man.” The level of disdain I got from guys I considered to be friends shook me to my core. I wasn’t flaunting my money. I simply wanted to share my abundance with my friends and create an experience of real adventure. But I had to reevaluate. I created a new story: a belief that said you can do well but only
so
well, or else people will judge you. If you stand out and do too well financially, people won’t like you.

So for years, I did well in my life and businesses, but my income didn’t
grow significantly. Until I finally hit a tipping point, a stage in my life where I thought, “This is ridiculous. If I could expand my intelligence, should I?” My answer was, “Of course!” If I could experience and give more love, should I? Of course! If I could expand my ability to give, should I? Of course. If I could earn more and expand my financial wealth, should I? And the answer was, “Of course!” For the first time, I felt hesitancy. Why was it that in every other area of my life it seemed natural to expand and become more, but when the issue came to money, suddenly it was different? Why? It made no sense.