All Is Possible - The Map to Having Your Best Year Ever

Most people spend their entire life stressed without ever giving a single thought as to what it is they really want or what's important to them. See, I'm here to cut through all that noise, connecting you to yourself and the life that you were meant to live. I used to slave away at a corporate job that I hated, but I broke through the social norms and pursued my passion. As a result, I own my own coffee company. I'm espresso sommelier, and I get to travel the world. You too can live a life that you love, but it starts with getting clear about what you want. It starts with a new decision. I'm your host, Donnie Rouse, and you are listening to the podcast One Life. What's going on, guys? Donnie Rouse here. Happy New Year. We have entered into 2025. How do you feel about it? Are you excited about the new year? Are you excited about all the possibilities that it offers up? If you are not excited about 2025, then there is a very good chance that the reason that you're not excited about it is that you just lack a little bit of clarity. And that is something that we could fix very easily. So what if I had a magic wand here? Imagine if you're watching me on video, you see me holding up this, my hand with absolutely nothing in it. But that's because you're not looking at it hard enough. It's a magic wand. And with the wave of this magic wand, I can grant you any wish, any design for your life. But the caveat is that design starts from where you are in your life, working with what you have. So with this magic wand, what is it that you want for the new year and for your life? It's super important to start the planning process from the big picture because it's the big picture that is going to inform all of the decisions that you will make from this day forward. I had just in a process in that I do every single year. But one of the things I did differently this year was I started with what I call my one life, one pager. And this one pager is like a jumpstart for my year. Because what I do is I have all of the categories of my life that require my time, tension and focus. And in these areas, I literally create a vision. I create the come up with reasons why as well as strategy, the belief system and where I am currently starting. So this way I know what gap I have to close. Now, I'd be lying. This is what I teach. But I'd be lying to say if this Process was something that comes easy to me, right? And I think I speak for a lot of people when they say, when it comes time to do the things that you need to do, sometimes you're like, oh, my God, it takes so much time, right? The time it takes to plan. I could just do the damn thing. But that is not the right way to think. Because by doing that, what you're doing is you're just repeating this vicious loop of always running, running, running, but never feeling like you're getting anywhere, never feeling like you're catching up. So by starting with the vision, by starting with the grand vision of what you want your life to look like and then allow it to inform all the different actions for all the different areas of your life is the only way that you are going to build life in harmony. And I want to say, like, if you're still fighting this, I want to tell you that you are not. There's no way you can get it wrong. Having a plan for your life is. Is better than not having a plan, because what it is, is it sets the guardrails for your life. This way, you can kind of bump up. But as you move, as you progress, you will start to get more and more informed, the vision will get more and more clear, and you will start to take better actions. It also informs you when you are completely out of sync and you need to realign or reconnect. So it is so important to have a vision, because without a vision, you're literally shooting aimlessly. You don't even know if you were on the right road, you know. So what I want you to tell, to tell you is just start by coming up with a big grand vision for what you want your life to look like. And it doesn't have to be in exact detail at this moment, but as you reflect over, as you read it, slowly, things are going to start popping in and you'd be like, oh, wow, it would be cool if I added this. And you're going to start to update and it's going to get more exciting. You're going to get a lot more clarity, and you're going to build a lot more emotion to get more momentum in those areas. So I'm going to give you a little bit of story from my own life rather than going on about this. As you can tell, this was. I had taken a little bit of a time off from doing the recordings, from doing the live posts and podcast, but this year I decided to come back and to do it a little bit more systematically with More purpose with more structure. So this way I don't get burnt out. So I was doing this one page, and I was going through all the different life areas, and I was fighting it the entire time. I was like, oh, my God, I don't want to do this. Because I could sit and look at a category in my life, try to draft the vision, the, you know, the strategy where I am now and all that, do all those. Those components, and it could take me an hour to do one. But it did something differently this time. I set a timer on my watch. I said, you know what? I am giving myself two minutes for each category. And then I'm just this way. I just capture something on paper, and I'm not spending too much time spinning my wheels. So I set my timer, went to work. Two minutes would be up. I'm like, ah, but I'm not done with it. And then I would give myself an extra minute. And then with that extra minute, I would tie up everything else and then move on to the next category. I have this list now, and it looks kind of like jumble, right? Because I'm scribbling. Because I only have two minutes. I was scribbling all the different visions for my life where I am now, the strategies I feel will get me there. And they weren't exact strategies. There's no way they could be. I mean, I'm building off of visions that I've had in the past, but those strategies still aren't foolproof. It will require more clarity. But there are some strategies there that at the very least will start moving me in the right direction. So I went through this entire process, and I was like, okay, done and wanting to work out. I read my vision statement for my body in my health, and I was like, I am going to the gym. I went to the gym. I had a great workout, and I even went running this morning when I woke up, all because I was looking at my map of for my life. And here is something really cool that happened as I was looking, reading over my health. Let me pull this over here. As I was reading of it, you know, I read, strong, lean, ripped, flexible mind has clarity. You see, I'm speaking in broken English here because that is what I wrote. I just wanted words that captured the gist of what I wanted for this area of my life. Feel great energy, right? And then I started scribbling in other things for like, my personal health, my personal growth, feeling empowered. What I want you to take away from this is that as I started to read over These categories that I wrote down and I read over the vision statement, new words were popping in. And as a result of that, I was able to update it and make that vision more enticing, more powerful. And I'll touch upon this one here. Like, personal growth is about thinking logically about my life and noticing where there are pain points. So this way I could alleviate those pain points and grow. As I was doing this and reading over that, all of a sudden it put me in the driver's seat of my life. Rather than just act, act, act, act, act. Now all of a sudden I was like, no, no, what is. I would think about the result up front, and I would. Instead of starting something and then dropping and going on to the next thing, something that I had the habit of doing just because my mind wasn't disciplined, I realized that how it was throwing me off because I wrote it down in how I wanted to, in my vision statement, how I wanted to show up in the new year and for the rest of my life. And as a result, now all of a sudden, I started getting all these different ideas to create a strategy not just for my life, but also for my business. So I feel like I'm going off on a little bit of a tangent. So I'm going to go into an area of finances just to give you example as to how having clarity will give you tremendous, tremendous power over every year of your life. So looking at the area of my finance, if you were to ask me, where are you in the area of your finances? I would have given you the number two. Like, it was one of my lowest performing categories, and there was good reason for it. I lacked a lot of clarity. If you told me, well, how much money do you need? I would throw out some arbitrary number that had no background to it. One of the areas I wanted to, because it was one of the lowest areas in my life, I wanted to transform this area. And by putting energy there, that area, by lifting that one area, it would literally lift every other area of my life as a result. Like the rising tide lifts all areas of your life. And one of the keys was getting clear as to what exactly is I need for this area. So in order to understand this, I mean, I did a few things, and they weren't to show you that sometimes the strategy isn't straightforward. I started to learn about investing, like, where should I be putting my money? One of the begging questions that I had for a while was, I have this. I have money that I put aside for retirement. What do I do with it like I was afraid to enter the market because I'm like, well, what if the market dips? You know, like then, then I could buy in. Then what if it. But then if it goes higher, then I'm buying in at a higher point. So I attended a seminar and I was working, talking with a financial advisor. And he wasn't an advisor, I'm just calling him advisor because he was advising me in this workshop. And he said, listen, you gotta have your money in the market because if your money's just sitting on the side, you're missing out. And he says, here's an example of why you must do it right now. Because over any eight year period, I believe it's eight years, the mark has always turned positive return. I think it was like 8%. So by having the money on the side and not doing anything, what you're missing, you're missing out on the compound, you're missing out on the reinvestment of those dividends. And then all of a sudden it just made sense to me. That gave me a nice jump up in terms of future, feeling confident about what I should be doing with the money right now. So I'm almost completely invested right now. And then I started to get clarity. Well, what do you need in order to live your life? And if you would ask me that, I would throw in at like some arbitrary number, right? And that number wasn't so far off from what I thought I needed. And the intention is to create a cash reserve, what you call your cash machine. And that cash machine is what will give you the interest from that is what is going to fund your life, Right. If you don't, if this doesn't make sense, just go with me. It'll make sense at the end, I promise. So I knew roughly what I wanted to have annually as in terms of revenues coming in so that I could live the life I want. That arbitrary number was $120,000, right? $120,000 a year. Knowing that it's going to come in with complete certainty would allow me to travel, would allow me to have the home I want. That was the number I had assigned. That wasn't powerful enough because I didn't. I was lacking the clarity as I started to look at these numbers. Okay, well, what are my expenses now? All right, listing all the expenses down. Okay. What are they likely going to be in the future? Do things get more expensive as time goes forward or do they get less expensive? All you have to do is ask your parents about the price of a piece of Bubble gum. And you'll know that they get more expensive. So taking into account inflation and then also looking at the different inputs, right, like medical costs, are they going to increase or decrease as I get old? They're going to increase mortgage payments, right. If I'm buying a house, are they going to get increase or decrease as time goes by? Commodity. Real estate is commodity. They'll probably go up and looking at all these things as well as the cost of travel. I mean, like the way I travel right now, not going to be traveling that forever. Like I like to say, at youth hostels and jump around, meet people as I get older. I am probably not going to do that. I will attempt, but I probably won't. And so now all of a sudden, it makes me look, it gives me a much crisper picture as to what I am going to need to live and travel the way that I want to in the future and for the rest of my life, past retirement. So as I was creating this picture, I started freaking out. I'm like, holy crap, I am behind. I am so behind. And it was making me nervous. And while that sounds like a bad thing, right? Like, well, that sucks. Like, I don't want to do this in order to be anxious, but as a result of getting that plan, all of a sudden I felt like I was in gear because I had clarity. Now I'm like, all right, well, now I know exactly what I need to do. It allowed me to create a map, a blueprint, so that I can start to have the money coming in to feed this cash machine, which is just another way of saying you're building something that you were just living off of the interest, right? So if you get a return on your investment and you were just living off that return without touching the, the principal or all the money that you've saved up. To give you an example, it's like saying if you save a million dollars, that might give you something along the lines of like 6, maybe $60,000 a year. And so my, my number was like 2.5 million. 2.5 million would give me roughly $120,000 per year, just in assuming a 4% rate of return, which is like a Treasury bill, back to where it was going. So while it freaked me out, it allowed me to get super clarity and to start to put in motion a plan to start to better my, my, that area of my finances for the time I retire. Because now it also shined a light in terms of what investments am I going to make that are going to give Me that return. Prior doing this, I had no consideration of investing in real estate. After doing this, I realized, you know what? Real estate might be a very viable investment vehicle because if I supply the down payment, I'm renting it out. I have money coming in after the mortgage is paid off. I have the, you know, I have the asset, the value of the asset, and I have money coming in to save $3,000, depending on where you are and where I invest in the country. And then looking at contrasting that by what it would take if I were just investing in the s and P500 and I was getting that compounded rate of return. If your head hurts right now, don't worry. That's normally where my head goes as well. But there is power and clarity. And as a result of going through this process, all of a sudden now where I was literally couldn't look at numbers, now all of a sudden I was interested because I realized how they were so important to my life and to my retirement. It's like everything when you give something purpose, when you know why you need to pay attention, why you want to do something, all of a sudden it reinvigorates you, it gives you energy, it allows you to move forward and put the time and energy into whatever it is that you're trying to do. The same is the area of my finances. So all of this I was trying to tell you was really. I could have just saved my breath and just told you. With creating this, you know, with creating visions and getting clear about what you want, it serves as a guide. And as you go through life, you will get more and more clear also that when you are clear, it is powerful because it'll help you move to action by giving you all the reasons, pain and pleasure. What happens if you don't take action? And all the pleasure you'll get by taking the action. You know, it's like the easy things that. It's the hard things that we need to do to make our life easy. When most people do the easy things, but putting off the more important things that make their life harder in the end, we don't want to do that. We want to do the things we must do up front so that we have an easier outcome and we build the momentum. So that is my long winded way of saying, know what you want this year. By knowing what you want, it is going to feed your passion, it's going to feed your purpose, it's going to help you follow through. Whereas maybe in the past you would have just kind of fallen off path and you would have gotten deteriored. And two months into the new year, you would have given it all up and said, oh, I guess I'll do it again in 2026. Don't do that this year. And I'm going to end it with this. I'd done live and I shared this in live. It's so easy to look at the year and all the shit you must do because you. The results you want to do. Forgetting about this present moment, the moment that we are in right now, I want you to come up with a ritual, something you are going to do daily, not planning into the future, but something you're going to do daily to give to yourself, something you're to do to enjoy more of life. Because we can make plans all we want. God has his own plans for us and we have no control over that. Said differently, every single moment is a blessing and should never be taken for granted. And with that, you want to just make sure that you are allowing yourself to feel the richness and fullness of life by giving yourself the things that make you feel good. So I am going to end it with that. That's going to be my challenge, right? Yes. Get the clarity. But let's make a commitment to ourselves this year to show up for ourselves, to give to ourselves. First, I want you to take a note or take a piece of paper and jot a note. If you don't have a piece of paper, then imagine yourself scribing this into your mind. What is the one thing that. That you are going to promise yourself to do to bring enjoyment to your day so that at the end of the day, even if you just did this one thing, it would still be a day well lived. And then I challenge you to just go out and start doing that every single day. As you give to yourself, as you allow yourself to experience more joy, you're going to find that it is going to spill over into every other area of your life. And it's kind of like the snowball that gets bigger and bigger. Once you allow it to get momentum, it's going to spill over and pretty soon it'll be easy to stay on target because now you're, you're. You're coming from a place of fullness. So that is it. That is my intention for you guys. Again, I apologize. This. I had a plan for where I wanted to go with this podcast, but I had several messages I want to come in and it's been a while since I've been on here, so I just wanted to come here and show up for you, so I hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please share this with someone whom you feel would benefit from it. Tag me in social media if there's a part, take a screenshot. Tag me in at D o n y r a u s.com Again if you have any questions or would like to leave a comment, you could do so@donnyrous.com d o n n y r a u s.com that is all I've got for you guys. So I hope you have an amazing start to your year. Remember, you only get one life. Live fully, live passionately, and most of all, live now. God bless you guys and I will see you again very soon.