042 The Biggest Lessons from 2021

Hey there, real quick, before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training. Hey there. Welcome to this episode of the affluent entrepreneur show. This one, this one's one of my favorite episodes because it's the 10 lessons that I learned in the last 12 months. So as I come to the end of every year, I start to look back on what happened. What happened over the 12 months? What did I learn? What are the things that went well? What are the things that didn't go so well? What were the lessons that came out of that? I don't know. Maybe you do some of the same things, and if you don't, I would invite you to do that. I'm going to invite you to do that with me in this episode. But some of the cool things that came out I think can transform your next 12 months. So let's get into the episode. All right, see you in the episode.

This is the affluent entrepreneur show for entrepreneurs that want to operate at a high level and achieve financial liberation. I'm your host, Mel Abraham, and I'll be sharing with you what it takes to create success beyond wealth so you can have a richer, more fulfilling lifestyle. In this show, you'll learn how business and money intersect so you can scale your business, scale your money, and scale your life while creating a deeper impact and living with complete freedom, because that's what it really means to be an affluent entrepreneur.

Hey there. All right, let's get this thing rocking and rolling. This is a special episode that I do every year at the beginning or the end of the year. And so this is the 10 lessons that I learned last 12 months. And these are in no particular order, but I can assure you that if you can take on any of these lessons, any one of them or all 10 of them, they're going to make a difference in your life. They're going to make a difference in how. How things feel, how things are, and you'll start to choose things differently. So here's the thing. I'm going to go through these, give you my perspective, give you some of the things that happened to me that brought these lessons up, that highlighted these. And if you want to figure out your 10 lessons, here's what I'd invite you to do, is just get out a journal, find a quiet place. Maybe you do it quietly somewhere, or you turn around and you turn on some music, or you put headphones on or whatever makes you feel comfortable where you can reflect and take the time to understand. What Was the last 12 months about? What was the theme? What were the things that came out of it? The lessons? Because, look, things happen. We've had so many ups and downs in our life in the last 18 months, between the pandemic and economics and the elections and all the stuff, you know, clearly there's things that have gone on, and we ought to take the time to slow down and reflect on those things, to say, what do they mean to me? Maybe they don't mean anything. Maybe they mean something. But to take the time to ask yourself, what do I think about those things? Not necessarily what media thinks, social media, what your neighbor thinks, what your parents think, what your brothers or sisters think, it doesn't matter. But to exercise our own thinking skills, to exercise our own reflection, to exercise our ability to interpret and say, how do I take this on? Because I think when we start to do that, things start to allow things shift in a way that allows us to start to live the life that we want to live, because we're thinking through it each and every step of the way. So these are the 10 things, like I said, in no particular order, that have come out from the last year, the last 12 months or so of my life as I sat down and journaled and wrote and thought and reflected and asked myself some questions. And so the first one, I'm going to jump to the iPad so you guys can see this. Those of you that are on YouTube and everything, you'll be able to see this. And those of you that are not, that's fine, you can listen to it. But get a journal out. Let's walk through this. And so the first one is progress over achievement. Progress over achievement. And this is really about. We get so caught up. And this includes me. I am not exempt from. I mean, these are my lessons. So we get so caught up in achieving, accomplishing, acquiring, and the destination.

Sometimes we fail to recognize how far we've come. We fail to celebrate the little successes that have happened. I sat down with my. My surgeon, this, just a few weeks ago. When this comes out, it'll be a. It'll be a few weeks ago. And this was a scope and a scan that was a follow up for the cancer to just check on things. And he literally sat down with me after the scope and scan and everything was clear, which is great because that's now we just crossed a year and a half mark, which is a big milestone. And he looked at me and he said, you need to understand how far you've come because it's easy to not realize how far you've come. And he said, when we first saw a 7 1/2 centimeter tumor in your bladder, I never thought we'd be having this conversation where everything is good, everything is clear, everything looks good, and we're going to keep it that way. And too often we don't think about those little steps and how far we've come. You know, it's an interesting thing. In the martial arts historically, there was no colored belts. The colored belt system was a product of western civilization. It was a product of us deciding that we need to remind people or reward people for accomplishing things. So we got really caught up in achievement. But the reality of the belt system was really about marking progress. And this became really blatantly clear to me. You know, when I had the, when I had the school, I had a martial arts studio for 11 years and we put in a program for three to five year olds. Now granted, you're teaching three to five year olds, we're not teaching them to fight, we're teaching them balance, we're teaching coordination, we're teaching them speed, agility, we're using the martial arts to do that and everything. But unlike the traditional classes, the children, the three to five year olds, they would wear a, it was called the little dragons program. They would wear a T shirt and they would wear bottoms of what we call GI bottoms, the bottoms of a martial arts uniform. So that they had the bottoms, they had the T shirts, but they wouldn't get belts, we didn't reward belts, they didn't do testing, they didn't do any of that. And we would teach the little dragons in six week increments. So they would come in and one six week cycle we would have a theme. It would be balance and then it would be coordination or speed. And so every six weeks it was a new thing. And what we noticed is after about two to three cycles of six weeks, we would get a drop off. And so I was sitting with my instructors and I said, we need to change that, we need to fix that. And so we came up with an idea. Just like the scouts do of merit badges. So every six weeks we would put a. We would give. They would get a graduation ceremony and they get a merit badge. And so what we would do is they would. They would then sew it or attach it to the side leg of their pants and it would create this little ladder of merit badges. And what it was meant to do is one, to remind not really the kid, because the kid's so young, but the parent how far their child has come and to see and celebrate their progress, to look at what we call micro successes. And you know that our retention in the Little Dragons program doubled. It doubled after we did that. And so here's the reality is that are you celebrating your micro successes? Are we recognizing how far we've come instead of focusing on the end goal, the destination, but relishing the journey along the way? So that's lesson number one. The second lesson that comes about is the future is where your why is. See, this is that whole thing. I'll find your why. And I get it, and I believe in that and, and everything. But sometimes we try to look at things and ask ourselves, why did this happen to me? What we're doing is we're searching in the past. We're looking for a reason. We're looking for something or someone that's responsible, some act, something that we can remove ourselves from it. This happened to me with a cancer. Okay, When I was diagnosed with cancer, I, you know, I was sitting there. No one in my family had cancer, ever. I lived a healthy life for the most part, other than a sweet tooth. I didn't smoke, I didn't drink, I was exercising all the time, I was eating well. How did I end up with this? And, you know, I started to spiral. I started to. To fall into resentment because I couldn't find a reason. You know, sitting back saying, well, you know, was it the. That day that I was working on a car and the gas tank started to leak and I was laying in the gasoline, did that give me cancer? I don't know. But what I knew is that over time I wasn't going to find the solution. And if I stayed in looking for the why, the reason behind me, I wanted to get out of it. And it wasn't until I asked myself the question. I said, well, what if the why for the cancer is in front of me? What if the reason that I ended up with the cancer is so I could do something different, so I could be someone different, so I could bring some lessons to the world? And that's really what Started to fuel this show, the affluent entrepreneur show. That's what really started to fuel the affluence blueprint and all the work that I'm doing to help people find financial independence. Because as many of you know, if you've listened for any length of time, yeah, I fought the cancer. Fought the cancer physically, emotionally, medically, psychologically, energetically. But I didn't have to fight it financially. And so many people were fighting things financially. And the only reason they were, and the only reason that maybe you are.

Is because you don't have the principles that you need. You haven't learned them, no one taught them to you. It's not your fault. And so I said, oh, that's why I got the cancer. My why is in front of me to serve, to help, to, to change. What happens if you look to your future and say, what's the why in my future? Because here's the cool thing about it. When you do that, you get to define it the way you want to define it. I remember having a, a conversation with a dear friend, David Bach, who's another financial guy and a best selling author. I think he's got 11, 11 or 12 New York Times bestsellers. And we were having a conversation about my, you know, upcoming book, the Affluent the Avalon Solution, and, and why I'm doing what I'm doing. He says, mel, you don't have to work. Why are you going through this effort? And I looked at him and I said, dude, I go, it's the only way I can make the cancer make sense. So is there something in your life that you want to make sense out of? And I think that we ought to look to the future and say, what is that for? What is my future for? That's the why. It's not in the past. So that was lesson number two. Lesson number three.

There'S always lessons and room for growth. This one's a hard one because, look, not everything goes the way we want it. And sometimes, well, not everything goes the way we want it, but it goes the way it needs to be, I believe, to serve us at the highest level. Now, that may not feel good in the moment when things aren't going the way you want, but we have to look at things and start to ask ourselves, what did I learn? Look, the Ponzi scheme wiped out one third of my net worth. Okay, it's not what I wanted, but the result of it, once I was willing to accept responsibility for my involvement in it, for my choices that got me into it, allowed me to create the very rules, the very principles that I teach, that I follow, that my son follows, that my clients follow, to keep them out of the problem, to keep them from ever getting into a situation like that, to keep them from getting damaged or hurt like I was hurt. So one of the questions we got to ask ourselves when we reflect back and say, these things happened not to me, but for me, and in order for it to be for me, the first thing we got to do is accept responsibility, number one, and then ask ourselves, what did I learn? What did I learn to make sure that it doesn't happen again? And that comes through awareness and acceptance. Right? That's number three. Number four. Number four. This is wealth should be measured in time. This one's a big one. One of the key things that I realized with. Yeah, look, we get. We all get told that we have a finite amount of time here. But I think a lot of us, including me, take it for granted. We take it for granted how much time we have. We take it for granted that even time is.

Limited. But you know what? It's the most limited commodity we have. It's the most limited element that we have. We cannot buy additional years on our life other than staying healthy and that type of thing. But time is time. We can make more money, we can build more houses. We can do all those things. But once I use up the time, the moments that I'm using now to record this, I can never get that time back. And so one of the things that we work on in the affluence group and one of the key elements is this idea. One of the critical outcomes is a richer lifestyle. Well, richer lifestyle comes from you being able to control your time. Complete freedom is one of the other critical elements. Time freedom is one of the elements of complete freedom. Here's the thing. It doesn't matter to me whether you have $100 million, a hundred dollars, or thousands of dollars. It doesn't matter.

If you don't control your time. I believe that's a poor life. I believe that we need to look at things from that perspective to start to ask ourselves, how much of my time do I control? Do I get to dictate where I spend it, how I spend it? A lot of the things that I do today are driven and measured in time, not dollars. How much time away from my family? How much time away from the things that I love? How much time am I going to be spending doing things that maybe I don't want to do now? Sometimes we have to do them, but we should be looking at our time as a more valued commodity than our dollars. And I know that's hard for some people when they're trying to pay bills, but it's how we spend our time that matters. Okay? So I would look at it and start asking ourselves, how do you measure time? Because it's the stacking of the moments that create the richness in our lives. You know, as a brand new granddad and I'm a puppy dad, a husband, a son, a father, it's looking at how am I spending those moments and how do I stack them together to create the richness in life. So that's number four. Number five is true fulfillment can only be found in your lane. Oh, man, is this a big one. So this is what I mean by this. I want success my way. I was having a conversation with one of my members of the affluence blueprint, and we were having a conversation and he was talking about how people in his family never did this entrepreneur game, never did money right. And they're looking at him with crossed eyes going, when you're going to do what we had this conversation about, is this what you feel called to do? And he said, absolutely, but I'm shrinking down because of everyone around me. If you think about, if you've watched anything that I've done with the money identity cascade, at the environmental level, when we are swimming in a pool where people are not supporting, not necessarily supporting, but they're critical of what we do, and we take that on ourselves, we tend to limit, we tend to change. We tend to think that we need to live life based on their rules. Well, that's not success. I mean, you live life on our rules. As long as it's legal, as long as it's moral, as long as it isn't hurting anyone, let's get on with it. And so, you know, him and I had this conversation around, around building wealth and building richness in life and finding fulfillment. And so it isn't about what your neighbor's doing. It isn't about what they say on social media. It isn't about what media is. It's not about this whole idea of keeping up with the Joneses. There was a comic strip in the early 1900s, 1930s, called keeping up with Joneses, where they were literally this. This idea of this family, the Joneses were trying to keep up with the neighbors that are buying stuff and acquiring stuff, and they're dressing a certain way and they're doing. Here's the challenge. The Joneses are broke because all they're doing is trying to live a facade. So let's not keep up with them. Look in your lane. Your definition of success may be a tent in Montana. It may be a yacht in Monaco or somewhere in between, but it's your life. It's your definition. And true fulfillment will only be found in your lane. So put the blinders on. Define success on. On your terms. That's what I'm doing. That's what Stephanie's doing. That's what my sons are. That's what our students are doing, is to sit back and say, this is how I want success to be. I don't care what other people want. Let them to live their success. But you want your fulfillment. What? We don't want to live someone else's life and get to the last days of our life. Bronnie Ware had had a book called the Seven Regrets of Dying. One of them was not living the life that you were meant to live. So I invite you this next 12 months to sit back and say, let me stay in my lane. Let the other people buy the expensive cars if that's what they want. Let them go into debt and live a certain way. I'm going to live the affluence way. So I look at it and I say, I define my own fulfillment. I define what success looks like. My family, my wife and I do it. It's in our lane, not someone else's. All right, number six. Let's look at number six. Number six.

Is the past. The past is in the past. Let's not keep reliving it. Past can't be changed, okay? The past is an anchor. And the truth be told, someone asked me, with the things that have gone on, would I change any of it? And truth be told, I wouldn't change a thing. I am who I am today. I am where I am today because of the accumulated past experiences, the stacked past experiences that I've had. I'm a different person because of it. I hope I'm a better person because of it. I hope I'm a better father, grandfather, husband, brother, sun. But the past isn't the anchor that holds us back. Think about it this way. You're on a boat, okay? And behind the boat is the wake. The wake is the past. The wake is where the boat came from. And it shows the path of where it came from, but it doesn't define the direction it's going. Your past simply allows you to understand where you came from. And when you go back to one of the first lessons and you start to learn the lessons, the awareness, and it helps you grow. The past is a good thing. It's not an anchor to hold you back. It's the stepping stones to move you forward. And so I think it's important for us to start to look at things from that perspective. The past was necessary for me to be here having this conversation with you. Now, I don't know what your necessary was, but I would examine the past and then say I needed this as the threshold, the stepping stone to move me forward. Now I'm going to move forward from the past. I'm going to leave the past in the past. I don't need to drag all that baggage with me. Okay, so that leads me to number seven. Number seven. Okay. Number seven is it's never too late to start. Especially when this is, this is a money one. And it's never too late to start because too often I was having a conversation with someone that said to me, well, I'm 55 years old, so I don't know if I, you know, it's too late. Wait a second. Just because maybe you haven't started investing, just because you haven't started to build wealth, just because you're at 55 or 60 or 50 and you didn't do things that maybe you wish you would have done at 30 or 40, does that mean you give up? Does that mean you stop? Of course not. Here's the thing. No matter your age or stage, especially when it comes to wealth building, you gotta get in the game. There's no possibility of building wealth if you're not in the game. If you're not in the process of building wealth, let's assume for a moment that you didn't save anything. Whatever age you're at, 20, 30, 40, 50, I don't. It doesn't matter if you start, just start. You'll have more than what you would have done if you said, ah, it's too late and you don't try. I mean, what's your alternative? The alternative is that you get older and you have nothing and you become dependent either on the state, the government, family, a burden to your family. And then. And I, it doesn't need to be that way. And there are a lot of people that made their wealth in their later years. Now, is it more difficult than when you start early? Sure it is, but it's not impossible. If we think about this, the sooner we can get you in the game, the better off you are. And this goes on the other side of it is that some People will say, oh, I got plenty of time. No, why not use the biggest lever you have in wealth building to give you the financial freedom and independence you deserve? Time. If we start at age 25, it only takes $158 a month to build a million dollars. By the time you retire. 158 bucks a month, that's not much. Now you might say, well, wait a second, way past 25. Okay, 35. Yeah, it goes up 500 bucks. A little over $500 a month. A little less than. It's $546 a month. We'll get you to a million dollars. At 45, it's harder. It's just shy of $1,700 a month. And at 55, it's going to cost you about $5,800 a month to get you to a million dollars by age 65. But the point is not the number, the point is, is that we gotta start somewhere and we gotta get in the game. So I don't. Doesn't matter where you are at this moment in time. If you have not started investing, if you have not started on your wealth creation path, make today the day that you decide that you get in the game. I'm here to help. We will continue to put the content out, we will continue to help you on this path. But I can assure you that if we don't do something, then we'll still end up with nothing or worse later on. But let's do something. Even if we don't get to the million dollars or the 2 million or the 5 million you want, if we got a percentage of the way there, we're better off. So really it's never too late to start and we need to get in the game and it's never too early to start. So for those youngsters that are listening, I know youngsters, that makes me sound old. But for those young folks that are listening, get in the game early. Think about my son, Jeremy and Cammie. They're 31 and 28 years old as of the recording of this. Three homes and a multi million dollar net worth because they started early. Now they're by the time they get 35, 38, as things grow, they won't have to worry about it. They're set for life. Why not start early and then take that off your plate and say I'm good instead of waiting? All right, that leads me to number eight. This is one that I think is really important for us to think about. And it's something that I started to really focus on and that is this. Go from lifestyle to income and not the other way around. Here's what I mean by this. Too often we start to do what we call income planning, income based planning. So we look at, I'm making $60,000 a year, I need to replace that income. So when I decide to retire, how do I make $60,000? How do I take $60,000 a year so I can continue my lifestyle? And I think that's the wrong way to look at it. The question really we should be asking is what's the lifestyle I want? Okay, what's the lifestyle I want.

Now? Maybe you're living it already, which in that case, cool, you now know the numbers, but maybe you're not there already. Maybe you need, you want a bigger lifestyle, maybe you want a more substantial lifestyle than what you have today. See, what we really should be doing is defining the lifestyle we want, the, the one that we're going after and let that tell us how much income we need to make it a reality. So one of the things that we do in the affluence blueprint is we use a process that I call the affluence visioning process. We literally build out your lifestyle. Build it out, put a timeline in place. We know what that number is, we know what lifestyle you're trying to create. And from that we then define the income. It doesn't matter what your income is today.

If it's not going to fund our lifestyle, then, then we need the lifestyle we want. We need to, to change it now. If it funds our life, so then great. But we don't know that. If we're doing income based planning, I want you to look and look at your lifestyle and say, what is the life that I want?

Get that vivid vision and then figure out what's the price tag for that life that I want.

And now you have the fuel to figure out.

What the income is. You need to create it over time. So lifestyle to the income versus income to the lifestyle. Okay, leads me to number nine. Here's the deal. Change is scary, but staying the same is even scarier. Okay? We are, change is the norm. And, and in today's environment.

Change is faster than, than we can imagine. It's, it keeps coming faster and faster and faster. I mean, think about the technological changes that we've had in the last five years compared to the last 20 years. Huge. So if we allow change to unsettle us, we're going to live a very stressed out life. But if we embrace change and we're willing to accept it, then we will grow with it. When we choose to push against change, change is coming, and it doesn't care whether you like it or not. But when we can embrace change, then change can lead to progress. And remember, the first.

Lesson was about progress versus achievements. I got news for you. If there wasn't a lesson that came out of the pandemic that was bigger than this, I don't know which one was. But the fact of the matter is that the way things were before the pandemic are not coming back. It's just not now. That's neither bad nor good. It's just different. And the sooner that we accept, embrace, and move with it, we can then progress. We can then grow. So I get it. Change is scary. I don't like change. Most people don't like change. But the risk of being left behind, the risk of not knowing, the risk of not growing, is far scarier in the long term than the scary part of embracing change. So I think we need to just embrace the change and say, how does this apply to me? How am I going to take it forward? What am I going to do differently? And that leads me to number 10. Okay? Number 10, which really connects with number eight about lifestyle versus income. And that is this. The amount is not as important as the habit. Okay? Most of you that have been with me know that I say that money issues are not money issues. Money issues are symptoms of other issues, symptoms of behaviors. Your wealth, your wealth creation, your financial independence is a behavioral issue and not a mathematical issue. And so if we look at wealth creation as a muscle that needs to be developed, a muscle that we need to use, a muscle that has to create muscle memory, so we do it on a regular basis, then it's important. Now you'll see how some of these start to fit together that we need to get in the wealth creation game. In other words, it's never too late and it's never too early to start. Okay? Because the sooner we start to develop the muscle, the sooner we just start to develop the habits, the sooner we start to develop the behaviors of a wealthy person, someone living a rich life, an affluent person, the sooner it becomes embedded in our soul, into our core and our identity, and we show up that way every day. We can't expect to live a rich and wealthy life, an affluent life, if we don't do the things that affluent people do. So what I mean by this, the amount isn't as important as the habit, is that you may be in a place where you sit back and say, I don't have a whole lot of excess cash mail, so I don't know how I'm going to be able to save and it's not going to make a big difference. I got news for you. $5, financially a week may not make a big difference in the bank account, in your wealth creation for that week, that four weeks, that 10 weeks, that 12 weeks, that 50 weeks, whatever it is. But the fact that you are exercising the muscle, that you're creating the habit with, that $5 over the long term will make a difference because that $5 will turn into 10, it will turn into 20, 40, 80, 160, and on and on and on because you develop the muscle versus sitting back and say, I'll wait till I make more money, then I'll start doing investing and savings and wealth creation. No, it's a habit, it's a behavior. Get in the game as low as you possibly can, but get in the game, start exercising the muscle. This is no different than when you first decide, I'm going to go to the gym. Right around now, this time of year, a lot of people are jumping at the gym and they're gone in a few weeks. But here's one of the things that you do when you go in the gym. You don't go there and go, oh, I'm going to throw two 45 pound plates on a 45 pound bar. I'm going to try and bench press it in. If you've never been in the gym, you never worked out and you tried doing that, you're going to crush your chest. We don't do that. We start with a small weight, we build the muscle and then we go to bigger weights. It's the same thing with wealth creation. So it's not about the amount, it's about you creating a habit. So these are my 10 lessons that I came up with from the last 12 months. And I hope they serve you. I hope you go back and you listen, I hope you took notes and I hope you get a chance to start reflecting on what are the lessons that came out from you. Take some of these, put them in your life. I know what they've done for me and I know what they can do for you. Because I've seen these same things do some amazing things for my students and the people I get to serve. I want 2022 to be a breakthrough year for you, your family, your legacy, your children, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren, wherever you are. And I get it. The last couple of months, the Last year or so. It's been a tough time. But let's take a step out, let's get on with it. Know that you're not alone. Know that I'm here to support, the community's here to support. Let's make a conscious effort to bring 2022 home in a whole different way. And that we find ourselves and you find yourself on a path to financial independence, to living a richer lifestyle, to having a deeper impact, to living with complete freedom, the affluence way.

And I will be with you every step of the way. I hope that this serves you. I hope that you found this of value and I can't wait to hear from you. If by chance you found this helpful, valuable and it hit a note with you, do me a favor, let me know. Take a screenshot, post it on Instagram or any of the socials and tag me in it. Let me know. And if you haven't done so already, do me a favor. Send a review. Write a review. The reviews are coming in. I'm reading them live on the air and when I do that, the person that I read their review, they get a one on one strategy session with me. So you could get a chance to have you and I working on your finances, your business, your world. Just leave a review. Be honest. Hopefully it's five stars, but be honest. Okay? And until we get a chance to see each other or talk in an upcoming episode of the Affluent Entrepreneur show, always, always strive to live a life that outlives you. Cheers. Thank you for listening to the Affluent Entrepreneur show with me, your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financial liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join me in the Affluent Entrepreneur Facebook group now by going to melabraham.com group and I'll see you there. Foreign.

And that's it for this episode of Building your money Machine where we help you learn how to master your money, eliminate financial stress, and live a life of choice. If you found this valuable or helpful to you, here's what I'd love for you to do. If you do me a favor, go to Apple, Apple Podcast or wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate and root view the show. It helps us tremendously to keep us at the top of the list so we can continue to get this information and this message out to people. Because I truly believe that financial freedom is your birthright and I want to help each and every one of you claim it. Thanks so much.