MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (32 page)

Remember: we all get what we tolerate. So stop tolerating excuses within yourself, limiting beliefs of the past, or half-assed or fearful states. Use your body as a tool to snap yourself into a place of sheer will, determination, and commitment. Face your challenges head on with the core belief that problems are just speed bumps on the road to your dreams. And from that place, when you take massive action—with an effective and proven strategy—you will rewrite your history.

It’s time to no longer be one of the many but to become one of the few. One of the few who step up, own your true capability financially and in every area of your life. Most people start out with high aspirations but settle for a life and lifestyle far beneath their true capabilities. They let disappointments destroy them. Disappointment is inevitable when you are attempting to do anything of great scale.
Instead, let your disappointments drive you to find new answers; discipline your disappointments.
Learn from every failure, act on those learnings, and success becomes inevitable.

So next time you come up with a reason why you can’t do something, when you know in your heart that your spirit is unlimited, call bullshit on yourself. Change your state. Change your focus. Come back to the truth. Adjust your approach and go after what you really want.

Okay, deep breath. Or loud scream. Get up and shake and move. With these 9 Myths—these past limitations—now out of our way, it’s time to move on to Step 3 on our 7-Step path to Financial Freedom. We’re going to make the game winnable by coming up with a specific number—a number that reflects your
exact financial dreams realized.
Then we’ll create a plan, improve that plan, and find ways to speed it up so you can achieve your financial dreams sooner than you may have ever imagined.

SECTION 3

WHAT’S THE PRICE OF YOUR DREAMS? MAKE THE GAME WINNABLE

CHAPTER 3.1

WHAT’S THE PRICE OF YOUR DREAMS? MAKE THE GAME WINNABLE

All men dream, but not equally.

—T. E. LAWRENCE

I usually kick off my financial seminars with a question: “What’s the price of your dreams?” Then I invite people to stand up and tell me what it’s going to take for them to be financially secure, independent, or free. Most of them don’t have a clue. There’s a lot of shuffling and squirming in the room, and then maybe a few hands shoot up. In hundreds of seminars with hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life, I’ve heard just about every number imaginable.

So let me ask you personally now: How much money will
you
need to be financially secure, independent, or free? Just take a guess. You don’t have to be right—or even logical. Is it $1 million? $5 million? $500 million? Take a second right now, go with your gut, and write down the number, either in the margin of this book, in a notebook app, or just on a scrap of paper. It’s important to write it down, because writing it anchors it and makes it real.

Did you get it done? Soon you’ll see why this step is an important first action.

Now, my experience tells me that if you’re like most people, that number probably feels a bit large to you right now, doesn’t it? Well, keep reading, because we’re going to do a few easy exercises to help you tame that number. And I’ll bet you’ll find out that it can be made much smaller than you ever imagined.
In fact, you’re going to learn there’s not just one “magic number,” because there are five different
levels
of financial dreams that will set you free.
And no matter if you’re just starting out or getting
ready to retire, no matter how solid or shaky your balance sheet is right now, I guarantee you
that at least one or two of those dreams will be within your reach. How? It starts with understanding what you truly need.

Recently, at one of my high-end programs, a young man in the back of the room stood up to name the price of his dreams. He threw back his shoulders and announced, “A billion dollars.”

There were a lot of
ooohs
and
aaahs
from the crowd. This person was in his 20s, one of the younger participants at the conference, and he probably hadn’t earned his first million yet. So I asked him to consider what that number really meant.

Remember in chapter 1.4, “Money Mastery: It’s Time to Break Through,” when we talked about how everything people do, they do for a reason? Just as a reminder, there are 6 Basic Human Needs: Certainty, Uncertainty/Variety, Significance, Connection/Love, Growth, and Contribution. So why did this young man want a billion dollars? Which of these needs was he trying to meet? Certainty? You can get Certainty in your life for a lot less than a billion dollars! How about Variety? You can get plenty of Variety with a million dollars, or much less, right? Connection and Love? Hardly. If he gets a billion dollars, there will be a lot of people who want to be in his life, just like lottery winners who suddenly discover dozens of relatives and “friends” they never knew they had. With that kind of money, he’ll get connection, all right, but not the connections he wants and needs! Growth and Contribution? By his demeanor, I doubt these were at the top of this young man’s list when he named his number.

So when you look at the human needs, which one do you think drives him the most? Clearly, it’s Significance. As he said, with a billion dollars, people would take him seriously; he would
matter.
This might be true. But the problem is when he gets a billion, it still won’t be enough—because
when you seek Significance, you’re always comparing yourself with someone else.
And there’s always someone bigger, taller, stronger, faster, richer, funnier, younger, more handsome, more beautiful, with a bigger yacht, a nicer car, a nicer home. So while
there’s nothing wrong with significance, if you make it your number one need, you’ll never be fulfilled.

But rather than lecture him, I decided to show him he could feel
significant with a lot less money
—which would make his life a lot easier. After all, he was just picking his number out of the sky. Saying he needed $1 billion
made him feel like he was going after an important goal. But the problem is, when you have this huge goal in your head—if in your gut you don’t believe it’s going to happen—your brain rejects it. It’s like living a lie. Have you ever done this? Come up with some ginormous goal, and then a voice in your head pops up to say, “Who are you kidding?” The truth is, you’ll never make it happen until it sinks deep into your subconscious—the part of your mind so powerful that it makes your heart beat 100,000 times a day without your ever having to think about it.

Have you ever been driving your car and gotten lost in thought and then suddenly looked up and realized, “Holy sh*t, who’s been driving my car for the last five minutes?!” Thankfully, it was the amazing protector of life, your subconscious mind.

To get an idea of how this process works, take a look at the image below. Imagine your brain divided into an upper half and a lower half; the upper half is the conscious mind, while the lower half is your subconscious.

Ideas keep trying to lodge in your head, such as “I’m going to make ten million dollars!” or “I’m going to be financially free by the time I’m forty!” But your upper, conscious brain goes, “Screw you! There’s no way in hell that will happen!” It quickly rejects the big idea and bounces it back out into space like a tennis ball. But if you resolve within yourself the sense of absolute certainty that “I’m going to do this!” and then
you start to build a plan
—something extraordinary happens. You begin to develop the certainty you can actually achieve it. And with newfound confidence, you suddenly see there is a way to get it done. You’ll find a role model who’s already achieving what you’re after, and you’ll take massive action.
The goal seeps down into your subconscious, and it goes to work to make your dream a reality. That’s when the magic happens!

Now, I doubt that you think you need $1 billion to fulfill your financial dreams. But I’d be willing to bet that the number you chose to feel financially secure or independent is pretty intimidating. Almost everybody makes that number bigger than it needs to be, because he or she doesn’t take the time to calculate what it really costs to live at different lifestyle levels. And that’s why so many never begin to work toward it. They talk a good game, get excited about it, they tell people their big dream, but they never act on it. Why? Because psychologically they don’t have
Certainty
that they can do
it. And Certainty is the first human need that influences our behavior or actions. Fact. If you’ve failed to act in your financial world, it’s partly because you’re uncertain, you’re unsure as to what is right or wrong and which approach will succeed or fail. Or you’re feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of the system that no one has taken the time to walk you through with clarity. With uncertainty, we default to doing nothing or at least procrastinating. We put off until tomorrow what we need to do today.

To help my would-be billionaire friend identify the real price of his dreams, so that they could lodge in his unconscious and become real, I asked him some questions. They’re the same kinds of questions I’ll be asking you in a moment to guide you on your path.

I started by asking my young friend what his lifestyle would be like if he had a billion dollars. He thought for a moment and then said, “I’d have my own Gulfstream!”

“Your own jet!” I said. “Where will you fly to?”

He said, “Well, I live in New York. I’d probably fly down to the Bahamas. And I’d probably fly to LA for some meetings.”

I had him write down how many times he’d fly in a year, and he figured it was probably a maximum of 12 flights. And how much would a jet cost him? We looked it up, and a long-distance Gulfstream G650 would cost him about $65 million; a slightly used Gulfstream IV would only set him back about $10 million. Not including fuel, maintenance, and crew. Then we looked up the cost of chartering a private jet instead of owning one: a midsize jet was all he really needed for himself and three family members to fly, and that’s around $2,500 an hour. He would be flying for maybe 100 hours a year for a grand total of $250,000 per year, or around $5,000 per hour; or $500,000 if he wanted to fly by Gulfstream on every flight—still far less than the annual price of maintenance on many jets, and at a cost that would be less than 1% of the cost of buying that Gulfstream. Even from the stage, I could see his eyes lighting up and his mind working.

“So what else would you buy with your billion dollars?” I asked.

“A private island!”

That was something I could relate to. I own a small island paradise in the country of Fiji. It was a wild dream I had early in my life to find an escape someday where I could take my family and friends and live. In my early 20s,
I traveled to islands all over the world searching for my Shangri-La. When I arrived in Fiji, I found it. A place with not only magnificent beauty but beautiful souls as well. I couldn’t afford it at the time, but I bought a piece of a little backpacker resort with 125 acres on the island. I really didn’t have the money, and it probably wasn’t the best investment at first. But it was part of what I call my Dream Bucket—something you’ll learn about later in this book. Still, I made it happen, and I’m proud to say that over the years, I’ve purchased and converted it into a protected ecological preserve with over 500 acres of land and nearly three miles of ocean frontage. I’ve turned Namale Resort and Spa into the number one resort in Fiji for the last decade, and it’s consistently rated among the top ten resorts in the South Pacific. But how often do I visit this paradise? With my crazy schedule, maybe four to six weeks a year. So my dream has come true: everybody else has a great time there!

I told my young friend, “If you want to enjoy your own island, you might not want to be in the hotel business. And trust me, you’re only going to be there a few weeks a year at the most.” We looked up the costs and found out he could buy an island in the Bahamas for $10 or so—and then he would have to spend $30 million to $40 million to build a small resort! Or he could rent my friend Richard Branson’s Necker Island resort for a week and bring all his friends and family for less than $350,000, with a staff of 50 people to take care of them all. If he did that every year for a decade, it would only cost $3.5 million versus $30 million to $40 million, with no work to maintain the property.

We worked through his list, and guess how much it would take to have the lifestyle he wants for the rest of his life? When we added up the real cost of even his wildest dreams, not just his needs, it came to a grand total of not $1 billion, not $500 million, not $100 million, not $50 million, but
$10 million
to have
everything
he dreamed of having in his lifestyle and never have to work to pay for it—and his dreams were gigantic! The difference between $10 million and $1 billion is astronomical. These numbers exist in different universes.