Design Your Dream Life Before You Build Your Business

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We've got a really good topic today because we're going to talk about how to build your dream life. And I don't mean like in a fluffy way, I mean like this big shift that's happening out there among my friends, your friends, what people are talking about, about what's the sweet spot, how do you identify the sweet spot, like how do you know and how do you land in and stay in the sweet spot? Because you can undershoot it and have a, you know, a struggling life, and you can overshoot it and create new types of struggles because you worked too hard for too much. And so how do you dial it in? But before that, we want to make an awesome announcement. If you've wanted to get into our Mentor Collective Mastermind and it's always been like on your bucket list, but it's been a bit of a budget constraint or you're intimidated by it, we have been working for the past couple of months with our team to create MCM Essentials. It is like just the greatest hits pulled out of the whole program that you can have access to. Hence the term Essentials. And it's going to be released to a limited number of people. So this is like the more budget-friendly, get the best parts of MCM, but we can't release it to everybody. So if you want to learn about it and see if it's a fit for you, Right now, hit pause and go to loriharder.com/mentor and put yourself on the waitlist. Seriously, go to loriharder.com/mentor and learn how you can be a part of our MCM Mastermind, the community, the accountability, uh, emails every single week with your one-on-one accountability coach, all the lessons, all the recordings, you name it, the essentials for such a bargain. Seriously, hit pause, go to LoriHarder.com/mentor.

This is definitely for people who are beginning entrepreneurs or have been around for a couple of years, and they're definitely looking for clarity on their offers, clarity on what they should be focusing on. I was literally just talking to my brand coordinator today about, you know, who this particular product is for. I mean, we're talking about when you're in business for the first couple years, even sometimes up to year 5, like you literally don't know what you should be doing at all from day to day. You kind of literally wing it. And the thing that's so cool about MCM is you just get so much feedback and there's so much information in there about exactly what you should be doing next, what you should be focusing on, and how. So it is clarity to the extreme, especially having access to the community.

Yeah, I'm so excited and we wanna make it accessible. Like, listen, I get it, building business stuff and money's tight out there for a lot of people right now. So this is like a way to get into the community, get all the support that you want, but on a budget and it's freaking awesome. But we can't do it for everyone. So seriously, hit pause, go over to loriharder.com/mentor, put yourself on a waitlist. You'll be the first to hear. It's freaking awesome and it's coming this week. Okay, let's talk about a dream life and I wanna kind of frame this for you. And we'll frame it a few different ways. So some of you have heard in the past, you've been listening for a long time, I do something called the Dream Life Budget Exercise, and it's this very strategic way of figuring out the exact dollar amount that you need to earn to live your dream life. Not less, not more, your exact dream life. And then we back into what does your business have to earn in order to be able to pay yourself to support that exact dream life. And it's wild because when I do this exercise, people come in and they start by saying, well, you know, I think I need to make blank. I think I need to make $1 million a year. I think I need to make $5 million. I think I need to make $10 million a year. And then we do the exercise. And more often than not, people need to make less than they thought they had to make in their business to be able to live their actual dream life. Now, if you ask me to put a number on it, I'd say for every 5 that I do, 3 of them are surprised to learn that they actually have to make less, you know, and they get their exact number. For the year and the month. And then 2 out of 5 learn, oh, I need to make more, or I knew, I knew it, I needed to make, but now at least I have a target, a real exact number, super duper dialed in. So you're no longer waking up saying, I wanna make $1 million just because Instagram told you you have to, which by the way is a very empty fuel. What do I mean by empty fuel? Just having an arbitrary goal but not any meaning or data behind it is an empty fuel, right? It's kind of there, but doesn't run very well. So you're waking up and saying, hey, I just wanna make a million dollars 'cause that's the next step that my coach told me or that the internet told me or that chat told me. You know, that's a very empty fuel. But knowing, okay, I've gotta make $447,812, which is approximately, you know, $37,200 a month that I need to generate. And here's how I'm gonna gen— like that is a powerful fuel 'cause now you know why you're waking up and hustling and that if you hit it, is going to result in your exact dream life. Now, what's happening— and help me to dominate this, so sorry, I'll let you jump in here in a minute—

you to teach everybody this.

What's happening is a lot of my friends, it's like something has shifted in the ether, are now talking about building their dream life from a place of this exact sweet spot instead of building a dream life with all the houses and cars and Lamborghinis and planes and helicopters and all this other stuff that people used to talk about. It's almost like the pendulum shifted so far from, you know, in the past where it was work for somebody and build their dream to work for yourself and build your dream. But then the dream got too big and then it wasn't working out for a lot of people. And they said, wait a minute, this isn't what I wanted either. So I don't want to work for somebody else, build their dream. That's not making me happy. I don't want to overwork and build too big of a dream. That's not making me happy. Damn it, what am I supposed to be doing? And that's where this was born from. And so anyhow, I've been talking to friends. I'll give you one specific conversation. I've had a friend, he's mega successful, and I'm gonna be very vague here. He has several, several properties and they're beautiful. And you know, he drives on a daily basis, uh, a super exotic sports car and an incredibly nice SUV. Those are his two daily drivers, and he's got some other stuff too. And recently he came to me and he said, I put the properties up for sale and I traded in all these cars and I'm just driving this one. Now listen, it's super nice. It's a, it's a Rolls-Royce, but this one particular car only from here on out. I want a simpler life and I've been working too hard for too much. And I overshot my dream life. I said, bro, I'm right there too. Like Lori and I have absolutely overshot what we thought was required for our dream life on many occasions. And then we catch it by doing, you know, an exercise and rolling it back and getting dialed back into, oh, we bought too many things. Oh, we got too many distractions. Oh, we got too much this or too much that. And we are able to bring ourselves back into, no, here's the sweet spot.. And so then when I'm talking to my friend about doing this, I'm like, oh my God, crazy, we're doing the same thing. And then he's like, bro, all of my friends— so he's got a set of friends that I don't know— it's like they're all doing it right now. They're looking for the sweet spot and they're dialing in the sweet spot. It's no longer bigger is better. It's no longer more is better. You can see this literally trending on social media about finding the sweet spot. Well, I've been helping people find the sweet spot all the way back from when I helped our buddy Rob do it. And that's how they ended up living in Italy. You know, he thought he had to make $1 million. I'm allowed to be public about these numbers because he tells story all the time. He thought he had to be making $1 million. And I said, man, why $1 million? He's like, it was the next step and to live the life I want, it's what I need. I said, are you sure? Have you sat down and done a real budget? He's like, no, I don't really do budgets and I don't really know what things cost. I just think I need $1 million. I said, okay. We're gonna do this. We sat down, this is where the Dream Life Budget was born out of. I said, what do you drive right now? How would you wanna change it? Where do you live right now? How would you wanna change it? What's your budget for shopping right now? How would you wanna change it? What's your grocery bill like? How would you wanna change it? We went line item by line item. Some things he's like, well, I'd wanna get rid of this. Other things he's like, well, I'd wanna add this. And when we sat down, his number was just a little bit over $600,000. That he needed to live his absolute dream life. Not a million, just over $600,000. Now, why is this important? I will tell you, the amount of life that you will exchange going from $600,000 and change to a million is not a little bit, it's a ton. It's a lot. It's a ton. That means less dinners out with people you care about, less time with the kids, more stress, more meetings, more phone calls. You're literally overshooting the thing, the goal that would have made you perfectly happy, aka the sweet spot. And so that's why it's so important to have these conversations with your significant other, or have these conversations with someone who can coach you through it, or have these conversations with your mentors or your peers. Like, hey man, what's your actual dream life? Have you ever sat down and scripted that out? Have you ever sat down and penciled that out? Or are you just chasing more for the sake of more because you think you need more to pay for what you would want in your dream life.

Okay, so when you do it, are you asking people like to go all in on exactly what they want, or are you like coaching them to be a little more—

it's very, very strategic. So you're asking when I do it, what does it look like? Um, it's very strategic. So we start by saying, come to this meeting with an understanding of your current budget. What are you spending right now on your housing, your cars, your retirement, you know, whatever it might be. Totally non-judgmental wide open, I've seen everything kind of meeting, right? So they bring their budget, quote unquote, and we go through all these columns filling it in. What do you spend on housing? What do you spend on transportation? What do you spend on vacation or travel? What do you spend on groceries? What do you spend on the kids? All this stuff line by line. Then we go back to the top and we say, okay, housing, would you want to change it? And if so, how? Sometimes it's upsizing, sometimes it's downsizing. All right, your cars. Do you wanna change your transportation? If so, more or less, how do you wanna change it? Okay. Your kids, the school they go to, all this stuff. And we dial in exactly what the dream life is. And like I said, sometimes it's eliminating things, sometimes it's adding things. You know, they want a bigger house or a second house or a different kind of car, or who knows, or they wanna add a boat.

Mm-hmm.

'Cause they've always wanted to take the kids on a boat, or they want their kids to go to private school and they're in public right now. We add these in line item and exactly what it's gonna cost. And because I say this tongue-in-cheek, but also it's true and not necessarily a good thing. Because I've bought almost everything under the sun, from flying in private jets to motorhomes to all the cars to all the homes to all the things, uh, and because I understand finance real well, I'm able to help guide people through, well, here's what that would cost, here's what that would cost, here's what that would cost. So they're not just kind of guessing. So we dial in exactly what they have to pay themselves on a monthly and annual basis to live their dream life, so they have something to start shooting from. But then we go through their business. Okay, what are you spending on this? What are you spending on this? What are you spending on this to earn the revenue? And what are your profit margins, right? How much you pay yourself out of your business so that you can figure out, okay, I need to— a $440,000 business to be able to pay myself $210,000 a year to live my dream life. And that's the output. So now you know what you're waking up and chasing every single day.

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That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code EYH. I think people are starting to realize what actually makes them happy too. And I think that that's a huge, um, it's just a huge moment to go, okay, do I want to be constantly working, constantly hustling, constantly launching? What does this look like to have to hit those numbers? And I think, you know, you and I have gotten to experience all of it, literally all of it, which has been so cool and also such a realization.

And I, I know it wasn't a dream life.

I know that people can't fully tangibly grasp it if you haven't lived it, but I hope that you can borrow the fact that Chris and I still— some of our favorite things that we do, don't get me wrong, I love going out to dinner, I love being able to get a new outfit. I love those things. It's so incredible to be able to travel. But I will tell you, the simple things— Chris and I literally are like, I just want to feel peace at this point in, in our life. I want to have a home that's comfortable with a grill. I want to, um, live in a place that I love, like in an area that I love with great community. And I want to be able to just take walks every single day. I don't want to be so insanely busy that I am so stressed out that you miss your workouts, you're not feeling healthy anymore, you don't have any friends, you're hardly close with your family anymore because you're working so insanely hard. You're sacrificing whether you're gonna have a family or not. You're sacrificing friendships, you're sacrificing so many things. And don't get me wrong, I am totally the person who's gonna tell you to go for it and that there is hustle times, that there is hustle moments, that there is those rocket ship moments that you need. But with a dream life budget, you guys, you can actually have a general idea of what you're shooting for, where you should hustle, how much you should hustle, when you could be taking off, how you can build in a life that still actually works. Because I believe that you can prevent burnout for the most part. And let me tell you, coming back from burnout is tough, guys. It's a rough one. I have been there. Chris has been there. And so I think this is a great practice in like, no, we still want you to go for the dreams. Like, we really want you to have everything that you want, but let's really look at it and look at the reasoning behind it and look at how you're going to get there.

Well, that's why it's so important to have a data-backed roadmap to your dream life, because it's not about go bigger, and it's also not about go smaller. It's about go elegantly, go intentionally, go dialed in towards the exact target that'll actually make you happy. And you have to have peers or friends or coaches or somebody who knows how to guide you through that because you're in it. So you can't zoom out far enough and you can't be objective enough and you don't have the data of what things cost in many cases to be able to actually do this. So you just keep on saying, well, more must be better. Well, more must be better. Oh, kids need private school. Well, more must be better. Oh, we want this house, or the Joneses just got this house, more must be better. Until somebody sits and really walks you through envisioning what is this dream life, you know, item by item. And it's trending. When I say my most successful friends that were the biggest thinkers I've ever known in my life are now saying, yeah, there's too many things, too many houses, too many cars, too many this, too many that, too many distractions, too many problems. I mean, that's how I felt when we had the lake house and the Arizona home. And the California home and all of the cars— is an absurd number— and a motorhome and everything. It was like everything was managing stuff that was broken. Everything was managing storage. Everything was managing this, managing that. It was not the dream life that you thought it was. And what happens is your 40-some-year-old self wakes up and says, oh, I don't think I like the life that my 20-some or 30-some-year-old self thought I would like, and you have to recalibrate. Or your 30-some-year-old self wakes up and says, wait, I don't think I like the life that my 20-some-year-old self designed for me, and you have to recalibrate. Or your 50-year-old self says, yeah, I don't think I like the life that my 30 and 40-year-old self designed for me, and you have to recalibrate. And that's what this is about. It's about awareness. Of what will truly make you happy. Listen, if you wanna have one of these conversations, it's real simple. I'm gonna do 'em real inexpensively because I really care about people being happy and healthy. I mean, look at what our mantra is every day. I'm happier, healthier, wealthier, and more fit than I was yesterday. Those things are important and you gotta get 'em dialed in. So if you wanna have one of these conversations, go ahead, DM me @chrisharder on Instagram. I'm happy to do a couple of these a week. I won't do a ton of them, right, because it doesn't fit my earnings per hour that I model and all this other stuff. So it's more like this is fun for me and I feel like I'm paying it forward, but I'll do a couple a week. So if you want to have one of these conversations, just DM me @chriswharder on Instagram.

All right, you guys, we will talk to you next week.