Learn to Set 2 Kinds of Goals. From $350 a Month as a Teacher to Saving $900k in 2019

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weidell, and let's get started. Mary, I really enjoyed the first time we talked, and so welcome back.

Thank you.

And I hope I didn't wear you out. I hope you have a few more ideas for us.

I'm ready.

You know, why don't we do this? Why don't you. I'm going to put you in the spot and let's, let's see if there's anything behind this idea that, you know, Randall Walker, your husband, he was. How long were y' all married before he passed away?

We got married in 70.

He got married in 70 and he passed away.

Yeah. So what is that? It would be. It would have been 50 years now.

Yeah. So you married over 30 years and 35. How long?

30, 35.

And then Randall was not just some goofus. I mean, he's a big, tall guy, played basketball at Auburn University, and, you know, he was an all star, outstanding athlete. And when you're an athlete, you know, you get winning built into you. And he brought that kind of preparation, discipline, mindset, thinking into his marriage and into the business. What are some things why don't we give people, get Randall in back in people's minds? And what made Randall great and what things, things did he, or what kind of ideas did he organize his life around that made him so successful outside of the athletic arena? You know, a lot of people are successful because of their athletic ability, but, you know, he was probably even more successful outside of that. So what, what led to that? What do you remember that was instrumental in, in your success?

Well, you know, I think that one of the things with Randall and me in the very beginning in this business was just being part of a team again. You know, when we started our lives together, we both were ex team players. I was a basketball player. We won my state championship in that. You know, he and I both played on college teams. He was at Auburn, I was at West Georgia, and, and I played volleyball. And then when we finished with that, we missed being part of teams. So we played in every sort of team there was. And you know, your local recreation department, our church league, co ed teams, we were participating, all of that. And we really were so happy when we found something that we could be a part of as a team. And I think that's what excited Randall the most. He said over and over the reason he did the business that he got into was because that we got into was because he didn't want a job, he wanted a Chance just to have a great coach and to be a player coach and to be part of a team again. And that's what really fired him up. And then another thing was a chance to build a business where we could help other people become successful. And Randall always said the way he judged whether or not he was successful and how successful he was wasn't by the money that he put in his own pocket, but it was the number of people that we produced through our business that became successful on their own and made money and changed their lives with that. And so that was a big deal. And we, we've always felt that way. We always pushed for promotions. We always tried to elevate people in their own thinking of what they were able to do, how to get there. That was a big deal to Randall to make. Every person he talked to, from a brand new person looking at our business to somebody who had been in here for a long time, to let them know how great they could be and the potential he saw in them, because again, that was just in his head and in his heart that the more successful people we could produce, he could help mentor and move on up in their earnings and in their business building, then the more successful we would be. And I think that that's been proven to be true. I believe that he had. He was also a good person, you know, and Larry, a lot of people don't, don't think about that. But whenever I have to tell anybody what I think they've got to do to build a big business, one of the things on my short list is you got to be a dadgum good person. And I told some people that once, I said, you might say you don't like me, you might say you don't like Randall, you might not like the way we talk or the things we say, but you can never say that we're not a good person. We're going to be good the best we can. We will never put ourselves first. And that was a big deal with Randall. He never made a decision based on the money it was going to make him or not make him or, you know, whether it was going to mean loss of any bonus or something. He was going to do whatever it took to help people move up because we really believed in the old Art Williams book and theory of pushing up people, you know, in our business. But that was a big thing. I think team being part of a team and getting a chance to be on a team, have that coach, player, coach mentality. And again, just being a dadgum good person so you really wanted the best for other people. I believe that was so important and helping people dream. You know, Randall always talked about that, man, he was a big dreamer, Larry. And I don't know that I dream as big as Randall. I sort of wish I dream.

Talk about that, I mean, because that's just words to most people like, you know, dream and vision and things like that. And so how did that play out? What did that actually mean, you know, to rather.

Yeah, well, I'm telling you, you got to decide what you want. But just the thought that you can have things beyond what you have right now, that's when I tell people to dream. They say, what do you mean? I'm like, I can't tell you what your dream is, you know, All I can do is tell you what mine is and tell you, you got to have some dreams. Stop having those blinders on you that make you just see what, what you can see here, expand your vision, you know, And Randall was always doing that. Even in the very, very early years when we first got out of college and just got started in our business, you know, we, we did everything in the world to make extra money to allow us to stay in this business. At one time, we ran four different paper routes. I taught school. We did everything just to make some extra, extra bucks. But we were on every weekend, man, we would jump in the car and drive around to every car dealership. You know, we drove all of the real estate people crazy because we went and viewed every house that we could see. Not that we thought we could buy them ever. The same thing with the cars, you know, but it was a dream seller to us to think, somebody's doing this, somebody's buying this house, somebody's buying these cars, somebody's doing this. We looked at travel magazines. We dreamed all of this stuff. Of course, when you're running four paper routes and there's seven days a week, 365 days a year, you really can't take many trips. But it didn't stop us from dreaming. And we were always thinking about the next thing. Matter of fact, right now, still got the last motorhome, which is a prevost coach like the country music folks have. But we started out with a little pop up camper. But our dream was going to all of those shows and seeing what was bigger and better and just thinking, man, if we work hard, we can move up to the, the next level, we can do some more things. And then we started thinking about, man, we want to take some trips and take Some of our people with us, we were always dreaming. He was a big dreamer, thinking always on what we could do for us and for our family and also what we could do for our team. And that was a big deal. He also was a big dreamer about what he could have in savings. You know, when we saw that very first hypothetical anybody ever shows you about how to start investing just a little bit a dollar a, he started dreaming about, man, what if we could invest twice that amount? What if we could invest 500, you know, or a thousand a day? And because of that dream, you know, I bought into that, too. That was unbelievable what the rule of 72 could do for you. And I told somebody, I said, you know, it's amazing. I went from Randall and I investing a dollar a day to last year I invested over 900,000, which blows my mind, you know, but those are the kind of things that are so important that you think about. And I think a lot of people have that ability to dream just because life kind of knocked them up the side of the head a time or two. They started thinking and accepting what life's gonna give them. They let somebody else tell them what they're worth and made them start thinking, this is all you're gonna get. Just put your head down and work your job till you get to retirement and then sit on the front porch and hope you've got enough with Social Security to live on. The fact is, and we want everybody to know that just no matter what your profession is, dream bigger. You don't have to accept that. You do not have to accept that you can change your life if you want to.

Yeah. And when you talk about. Did you say 900,000 in savings last year?

Yes.

Yeah. How did that feel?

Really good.

That was equal to your first X number of years in business, total income. Right.

My first teaching job, I brought home $357 a month. Yeah.

Wow.

That's amazing. It's amazing. So you know what you can do. And anybody, you know, I don't know that everybody's gonna be successful to the same degree that we have been, but I know a lot of people who, you know, have surpassed what we've done. But, you know, you just got to have a dream out there. You've got to. To know there's more out there than what an employer is going to offer to you. You got to decide you want to go for it, and you got to think outside the box, and you got to think bigger and you got to dream bigger and you got to want More for your family. I think that's a secret to it. That doesn't mean you're a greedy person. That just means you understand there's more out there. I look around and I see people that have the good life, and it's great. And I think I'd like to have that too. I deserve that as much as somebody else does. So that's why it's real important to me to make sure people understand it's there for them too. No matter who it is out there, if they just want to dream bigger and put some elbow grease to it, then they got a chance to do that too.

Yeah, and the thing is that I had a guy, you know, I had a guy come up and we had a training program that I'd used for starting up new people, like a four point game plan. And it made all of the good things happen that you wanted to have happen with a new person. And so we had the four point game plan and weeks. It was really titled the four point game plan to explode your income. But so many people understood it just a four point game plan. They didn't really know what it was for. It's just like, it's four points. I've got to learn the game plan. And I actually. So I remember going into Denver one time, we spent a whole big three days on it. And then about a couple of months later, I got a call from one of the bigger guys at the meeting. And he said, larry, how do you stay focused? You know, he said, now I learned the game plan. We're running the game plan. But he said, how do you stay focused? He said, because we, you know, how do you keep yourself running the game plan? And I, you know, it just totally blew my mind. It wasn't anything I could relate to. And I said, finally it dawned on me. I said, wait a minute, Alan, why are you running the game plan? What's your income goal? Because when I got that goal and I got that plan and kind of refinesed it from somebody else is because that guy had used it to go from basically, you know, a few thousand dollars income in a month to a million dollar a year, you know, to over $80,000 a month inside 12 months. And I said, I wouldn't have, you know, I was so far down. The one thing about not making money is you, you get behind in your bills. And I was so far down, I needed to explode myself out of my debt hole that I had dug for myself. You know, little, little small dollar a month plans weren't Going to solve my problem, you know, so that's why I've always been interested in exploding the business, you know, explode, explode. Exponential growth, geometric progression. Now you got my attention because of how far behind the eight ball I was. And I said, what are you going for? What's your income goal? And, you know, that was so foreign to him. He never could sort it out. Some people just can't make a decision about where they want to live, you know, what they want to do. But you ought to be able to get clear on what's a reasonable amount of money to target your efforts towards. Everybody doesn't have to make a million dollars. Not everybody can make it. But you can, you can sure head towards something that's a whole lot more exciting on income than what you've got right now and get in a position where, you know, that can happen to you. And, you know, he totally could not connect the dots between working an income and working hard and focused and getting a dream life, you know, where it would actually be such a result that it would literally change his life. But when you know that's. You got the potential of that happening because you've seen other people do it, you've seen where they live, the cars they drive, the vacations they take. You saw the path they took to get there. Unless you just really got something missing inside your, your, your soul, you're going to say, I'm going for that. You know, you put that in front of any kid, a kid's going to go for it. You know, the kid, you put the shiny truck in front of the kid, he's going to throw his old truck in the trash and he's, he's going to go after that shiny truck. And you don't have to be real sophisticated on your motivation and your vision, but you got to have something big enough that it gets you excited. And Mary, what was the most specific things that you got really excited about that you realized that could actually happen to us, other than just in general being a part of a team and this, that and the other, you know, something specific that, that just wound your clock.

You know, we found out that early on we learned to set our goals that were reachable as well as some way far out goals that were maybe like pie in the sky by and by, but we still had those up there on our list. But we knew we had to take it a step at a time. And when you were talking just then, it hit me. There's so many people who really, because of life, because of what's happened since they were babies when everybody thought they could do everything. And then they start getting told no by parents and no by teachers. And by the time they're out of high school and go to college, they really have had it just knocked out of them basically, that they could achieve anything more than just that first job. And that's what they've been taught, that's what they've learned. So I think people have to be untaught that before they can start thinking like you're talking about and hitting those dreams to get the bigger things. You know, I'm always amazed, too, whenever people will have set a goal and maybe they're just barely getting by, and they skip all those intermediate goals and jump to something way, way high that, you know, you can't just. You can't just climb to the top of the mountain without going through all of the different levels you got to go through to get there. And so you got to have those intermediate goals. But one of the things for us, our first thing, of course, was to be able not to have any other jobs. That was our first thing, and we could see that. But up here, like I told you, we had our dreams. We're gonna have a dream motorhome that's gonna be a prevost like the country music folks have. You know, we had a dream that we're gonna have whatever car we wanted. We're gonna build a house on our big farm. You know, we're gonna do that now. And we built that in 1978. And I'm still living there. I have painted it a time or two since then, Larry. But, you know, my other goal, though, and Randall and I really talked about this, and it was our dadgum goal, and we achieved it, of course, before Randall died. But we said whenever we first got married, we went to a bank because we had a little well on our little acre plot with a trailer that we lived in. We got married and the well went dry. We went to the bank. We didn't owe anybody any money. We didn't have any credit cards, but we didn't have any bad debt. We just didn't have anything. And so we went to the bank, and it was going to cost $350 to have a new pump put in that well. And the banker who knew Randall and had known him his whole life, they had played golf over at the country club. It was like five bucks a month to join when that country club in Carrollton opened. And so he knew him and knew Randall's dad and he looked at Randall and now we're without water. He said, randall, money's just too tight right now. I can't do it. So we wound up going to Randall's dad and borrowing the money. But after that, man, our whole goal, our big goal that we really had placed way out there, but we weren't sure if we'd ever meet it, was to never need a bank, to not need a bank again, to make the banks need us. And we got to that point and we were so excited. That's a feeling you can't replace. I'm telling you, when, you know, I don't need you to look down your nose at me because I'm trying to get a mortgage. I don't need you to tell me I can't get some money for a well, you need me. You would like me to be the depositor at your dadgum bank, and I'm to that position, and, man, I'm telling you, it was the most exciting point to ever get to. You owe nobody anything, and the bank needs you. And I'm just telling you, I get chill bumps now just thinking about the fact we got there. You know, Randall got to see that before he died, and it just gets better and better. So that's. That was my top one. I don't know if that's.

Well, that's what the whole thing is. When you hear people say, get goals, get dreams, get a vision or something, get some. Get something you can get yourself excited about, you know, something. You know, think of the things that will give you goosebumps if you could pull that off. Something you think, you know, you think about late at night, early in the morning, things that really make you mad. You say, I got to do whatever it takes with that. That doesn't happen to me. You know, I had these kind of decisions with myself in high school, you know, working labor jobs, you know, I'm going to do whatever it takes where I can be on the top end of the totem pole, ran the bottom, you know, because you get treated like dirt and you get. You get no money, you get no respect, and, you know, whatever it takes, I'm gonna find my way up to the top of the ladder, you know, and, you know, things like that. I'm gonna be my own boss, you know, I'll fight you for that, you know, and I just don't want any. Any faceless person at, you know, it's kind of like why England did the Brexit, you know, they didn't want a bunch of faceless bureaucrats behind these buildings in Brussels with the EU deciding about what was going to happen in England, you know, it's just like, no, we want to be in charge of our own destiny, you know, and that's what I had, you know, I just, you know, live or die, good or bad, at least I can take responsibility for it and I can change it. I can be in charge and I don't have to be the victim of somebody else's decisions. I don't mind being the victim of my decisions because I'll learn from them, you know, I'll always learn. But I don't want somebody else because, you know, somebody else is in charge. They might not necessarily learn from the bad decisions they make for my life, you know, and so I, I'd rather be in charge. And so that's what it means to get your own vision, your own idea, your own dream. And you know, you got it. You, when it electrifies you inside, you know, your switch is turned on and you're going for something important to you. Mary, this has been great. Thanks so very much. I think we've knocked it out of the park on getting people to see what maybe they are missing that they could add in and, you know, find resources, energy, inspiration, abilities inside themselves they've never tapped into yet because they've never really gone for anything that caused them to be that fired up, you know. And so thanks so much, Mary. Appreciate all your input on these things.

Thank you for having me. Bye bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind with me, Larry Wydell. If I've helped you in any way, leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. For more information like this. Listen to our other Million Dollar Mastermind episodes and check out my Wydell Academy YouTube channel and visit us on widel on winning.com I'm the million Dollar Mastermind. And until next time, go go.