Continuing from last post about settling for less I started to get into mentorship and the contrast I saw in my life compared to the people I wanted to be more like. For the longest time I thought if it was meant to be it would happen. But what would happen? The world was just going to decide one day that I was a nice guy and I deserved more resources to manage? The late Charlie Munger (God rest his soul) has a great quote for this attitude. “To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. The world is not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of undeserving people.” I don’t know why I thought I knew better than he did. The arrogance and ignorance of younger me, I shake my head now just thinking about it.
I didn’t educate myself in the proper ways of deserving the rewards I wanted. I thought that the world would just hand them out like a winning lottery ticket. Speaking of lottery tickets, the greater majority of lottery winners are bankrupt. The stat says that greater than 70% of them are bankrupt within a FEW YEARS! Money will solve your problem, right? NOPE! If you didn’t know how to earn/manage money before you got a bunch of it, what makes you think that it comes with an instruction manual? Most people have ZERO idea how to manage money or grow wealth.
I said before I didn’t educate myself, well that was until about a year ago. I signed up for a course after seeing it advertised on a podcast I enjoy. I saw the person who mentors our group speaking to the audience in a way that I had never really seen before. The more time I spent listening to and being around this mentor, the more I knew I had to learn from him. So how do you go from not knowing anything about finances or how to act as a confident adult to being a confident individual with the privilege of solving complex problems for people of value? Take the first step! After taking that first step you will already be further along than I was for the first 39 years of my life. Get around better people, take ACTION, and NEVER stop LEARNING! In closing, remember, you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with. If you want to be a bum, keep hanging around bums. If you want to be poor, hang around with poor people. If you want to be an investor, hang around SUCCESSFUL investors. If you want to be better at anything, spend time with the people who do it SUCCESSFULLY already!