Deanna asks …
Deanna asks …
When you started your journey, did you deal with feelings of fear? – I know that I am committed to doing this (or at least doing SOMETHING) but I have seen people taking risks and failing in such a way that their families are impacted dramatically – and that scares me. My dad had an entrepreneurial spirit – and granted, I know he also suffered from materialism, living beyond his means, and keeping up with the Jone’s – but I still remember the opulent lifestyle he led when I was growing up (I didn’t live with him, I lived with my impoverished mother) and I remember him losing everything as well…and he wound up living in his sister’s basement for years and years while he tried to recover financially. So I know, somewhat first hand, there are no guarantees, and unless I want things to continue on as they have been, I will have to make changes and take risks, but how did you deal with that? With the possibility of failure? Did you make any measures to ensure that the risks you took were ones that wouldn’t impact you more than you were comfortable with? What do you advise me to do about my conflicting values of taking risks in order to reap the rewards and my values regarding safety for my family?
Am I making sense? 🙂 Probably not, but that’s what I’ve been wrestling with lately – we’re safe right now. We can pay the bills, have a few extras – but we’re SO unhappy with just getting by and we’re so frustrated with seeing our children grow up while we are working…a lot. SO I am ready to make changes, but I don’t want to screw up the small sense of safety we currently experience, you know?
Deanna is expressing what I think we all feel: the fear of making the leap and not reaching the other side …
… yet, if we have a lion chasing behind us we simply must make the leap.
For without the lion, it makes no sense to make the leap … at least not to those of us driven by fear (of what is behind us) rather than greed (for what might lie on the other side).
So, we will make that leap if the fear of not achieving our Life’s Purpose is real. Now, do you understand why what we have been doing is so damn critical?
Without the ‘big dream’, Deanna’s fears will simply prove too large to overcome.
Now for the practical:
1. Put the Making Money 101 safety net behind you – or as much of it as you can safely string up without wasting precious time in the race towards your Number / Date
2. Do NOT increase your lifestyle along with your income … keep putting that additional money into passive investments (towards your Number), then it automatically also builds your buffer.
Your dad suffered financially – as did mine – but, perhaps more so because it is always much harder backing off your lifestyle than it is to delay jacking it up in the first place.
When my businesses generated more than $20k per month ($250k+ per year) my salary was still $50k and my wife and I agreed that she still had to work.
Some would call that overly harsh … others would say that we had a clear idea of the end goal and could suffer a little delay in gratification to safely achieve it.
