How to Live a Life That Matters

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. What does it take to truly live a life that matters? What does it actually mean to live a life that matters? Well, it's one of the conversations that I get a chance to have with audiences all around the world as I go around and speak. Because as much as I speak about money, about wealth, about business, about achievement, it really isn't about the achievement. It isn't about the money. It isn't about the wealth. It's about living life fully, to live it richly, to live it in a meaningful, impactful way, to live it your way. And I had an opportunity recently to do a keynote presentation around this whole idea and the framework it takes to live the life that matters. And in this episode, I thought I would share that training, that specific keynote with you on this episode of the Affluent Entrepreneur show. So welcome to this episode of the Affluent Entrepreneur Show. This one's going to be a good one. Let's talk about how do you live a life that matters? 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 athlete. Entrepreneur.

This is so good. Here's the thing. I'm going to kind of carry on from where Brendan went. Now, I've got a framework for you, which, you know, if it's training with Mel, there's a framework involved. And I'm gonna give you some things to do on the money side of the world, too, of your world. But here's what I. What I realized is that I think that the important thing for us to understand is as I started to think about this idea of Living a life that matters. I realized that too often we start to look outside to figure out if we matter. And as you all know, in 2019, I was diagnosed with bladder cancer. They found a. What turned out to be a 7 1/2 centimeter tumor in, in my bladder. And. And what people don't know is that what I started to do every Single day at 5pm I live on the beach. I would walk down on the beach.

And I would take a walk on the beach and I had my phone with me and I would record a video. What I was feeling, what I was thinking, what was going on in my head. Then I would put the phone down, I'd get in the water for 20 minutes and then I get up on the rocks and I'd visualize for 20 minutes, come back up and do that. Now I've. I've got a. All these videos from back in 2019 every day on my phone. And I was talking with a dear friend of mine on a couple weeks ago, and he happened to. I happened to bring it up. He says, have you ever done anything with the videos? I said, I haven't even looked at them.

And he says, would you be willing to release one? I go, I don't. I don't know. They were just a personal thing to me. That's like releasing the journal. And he said, send me a few.

And in the process, I started to go back through these things. Now, I'm not going to say that it was easy to go back through and listen. And I actually released it. 60 seconds of the very first one I did. It was a week after I got diagnosed, before my surgery, before we knew how bad it was, before we went through any treatments or anything. But the theme of all of them.

Was to examine my life. And I think that there's this saying Socrates had. And that is a saying of an unexamined life is not worth living. And I'm gonna. I want you to think about it in a little different way, and that is this.

But an unlived life is not worth examining. That's me with my Uncle Yoda. And here's why I think this is important, is that if we don't value ourselves first, we can't place value in the world.

So in a sense, I believe that we need to be selfish so we can be selfless.

It's not all about me, but I got to get me right. Yeah. I remember telling the kids at the karate school, I said two things you got to get clear in your mind, what are you going to stand for. How are you going to show up? And this has nothing to do with what you do for a living, has nothing to do with what you do in your daily life. It actually has to do with who you are. The be. It's not your title, it's not your job description, it's not your cv, it's not your resume. And so what I want to walk through is this. As I reflected back on what I did with post cancer and up to the cancer, what were the things, the questions I asked to allow me to examine my life so I could show up. Because people have heard me talk about this whole idea of legacy. And I met my wife, 12, going on 13 years now, and she would hear me talk about legacy. Now, she came from Philly, so she thought legacy meant that I wanted some statue or on some steps, like a rocky statue. And I go, no, no, no, no, no. See, we think that legacy.

Is something that happens when we leave this earthly place.

But I don't believe legacy is that. I believe that legacy is created each and every moment. Our interaction right now, Brendan's interaction right now, that is legacy. Legacy is created in the moment. And if we realize that we have the opportunity with a handshake, with a smile, with a wink, with, I'm proud of you, to create legacy, to change a moment, to do something.

You find that life matters in the moment. And when we look at life through that way, we start to look at things differently. So I want to walk you through this framework that's going to ask a couple questions for you. And I think that this is the thing that we start to look at in doing what we do. And the first thing is this. We have to examine your person.

This is answering the question of who I am. Who am I? It's too often we get into, you know, what social media expects of us or for or what our parents expect of us or society expects of us or people expect of us. But who am I? Who am I defining me to be? You get to live this existence, not someone else. And so there's a couple things. There's five things I want to walk you through here, just as ideas of how you can examine this. And the first thing is this. You gotta see it in you.

Too often we look at our imperfections, which to me is the gold. But we have to see it in ourselves, the possibility. We have to see the gifts we bring. We have to see that, but not just see it. We have to be willing to accept it.

To be willing to accept it as Our being.

To accept I'm a good dad, I'm a good wife, I'm a good, you know, whatever.

And that's not enough. And what I want you to do is phrase these in questions as you start to examine your life. Am I seeing it? Am I accepting it?

Am I nurturing it?

We've all been given a unique set of gifts, Some that we have to continually develop, some that were innate. Are you nurturing it? Are you respecting and giving the reverence to the gifts that you have to be here right now?

Which leads me to this. Are you willing to receive it? I can tell you that it was hard for me early on. It still is. To receive compliments, to receive accolades, to receive, hey, you've got this. And so what we are pushing away is the very gifts that other people are acknowledging. So we have to see it, we have to accept it, we need to nurture it, but we need to be willing to receive it so we can do the last thing.

And that is to give it.

You weren't given the gifts of your life.

To hoard it. Yes, you need to be selfish to develop it, but you need to be selfless to give it. And so we need to look at it through those eyes. And so when I look at who I am, I start to ask those questions, those questions. Am I seeing it? Am I accepting it, nurturing it, receiving it, and I giving it.

That leads me to the second piece of this framework. And the second piece is if I examine the person, I have to now examine the potential.

If the person is who I am.

The potential is who I can be.

Now, there's three things here I want you to look through. To acknowledge the question of what is possible. What's possible in this life, what is possible in this moment? To not look through the eyes of problem, but look through the eyes of solution. Everything around us was simply a thought. Everything around us was simply a possibility. Everything around us.

Was a dream.

But is now a reality. What is possible for you?

When I had the martial arts studio, the black belt test was a four hour test. They went through their forms, they went through their techniques, they sparred every black belt. And the last person they sparred was me.

They had three minutes with me, 180 seconds. But by the time they got to me, they were absolutely destroyed. Exhausted, they had nothing left. And my black belts knew to get them on the edge of collapse.

And I got in there with them and I said, you have 180 seconds. That's it, stay with me. 180 seconds. It's not about winning, it's about moving through it. And they would get through it. And they looked at me and when we were giving them the belts at the end of the ceremony, you know, parents are thinking, I'm abusive, all this stuff. But I looked at him, I said, tough exam. And said, yeah. I said, four hours, right? And they looked at me and said, yeah. I said, the exam was 180 seconds. It took me four hours. To get you to the point, to give you the test. The test that there is more inside of you than you believe, the test that there is more possibility than you see that this becomes the first reference point for you in many cases, that when you think you can't go any further, whether it's work, whether it's health, whether it's relationships, whether it's school, whatever it is, let this be the point for you to see possibility beyond what you think. And I think that that's the thing we need to look at. Then we got to examine for our potential to what we believe. Believe.

What we believe becomes so important because if we don't believe it, we won't take the actions to do it. We will tiptoe through it. We have to believe in it. And then ask this last question.

What are you willing to do?

When I had two surgeries, I had a bunch of treatments. This was first surgery in July, second surgery in August. I had the treatments in December. They cleared me. They said, you're good with cancer. We're clear. We don't have anything. I went back in, in April of 2020 for another scope. And I'm laying there as my surgeon is going through the scope, and I hear him say, oh, that's something. He found another tumor. I thought it was out of the woods. I started to spiral into darkness, into resentment, into. Into fear, into all those things. Until someone asked me.

If you knew the outcome, how would you show up from here on out? If you knew at the end of this.

What the outcome was, what would you do each day? What are you willing to do each day? I said, I know the outcome. I'm going to beat this thing. I'm going to get. I'm going to get through it. He says, then the rest just needs to be written. Just like life, we know the outcome we want for our life. We just don't know what the journey looks like. Now. We start to look at it and say, what am I willing to do to make the possibility and the potential the reality? And if we understand that now we've examined our person. We've examined our potential. We now get a chance to examine our path.

And when we examine our path, it's about where I decide to go. This is driven by, I think, three things also. The first is, what is that internal calling? You all have a yearning inside of you. You all have something inside of you that's pulling you along, that's getting you in a place where you're sitting back. There's this aching of what I want to do, an aching of the kind of father I want to be, the mother I want to be the wife, the husband, the leader, the spokesperson, whatever it is. What's that internal calling? Too often, we suppress it because of judgment. We suppress it because of what society. We suppress it because of fear, because of imposter syndrome. I'm telling you that you cannot suppress it. You've got to let it fly. The world deserves it. The word needs it. It's the reason it was given to you.

Then in that path, if I now start to define that internal calling is to start to look at and say, well, what is the external impact that I want to have?

See, I realized really quickly, someone said to me, oh, you got. I bet you got your life's priorities and in order when you found this whole thing out, I said, yeah. I realized that there is no priority list. There is a single thing. And it's just life. It's just life. Go live it.

And too often we're waiting for permission. Too often we're waiting for a sign. Here's your sign. You're alive, you're breathing, you're seeing, you're hearing. That's your sign. The world needs your impact.

And then rely on this. It's not the great thing.

That we're trying to accomplish. It's not the statue. It's creating and stacking the moments of legacy that I'm going to show up each and every moment with the reverence that it deserves, to know that I can change a life, to know that my smile, my thank you, my how are you today? Is enough to shift. And then when I stack enough of those moments together, I shift things. I change the legacy.

That leads me to the fourth piece of this. And the fourth piece is, this is your progress. This is how I grow.

The things that I want you to be here. And the first one, you're going to go, what is he talking about? I said, I want you to be greedy. I want you to be greedy for growth. I want you to be hungry for development. I want you to want to be more, not because of lack of contentment, lack of happiness, but because in the process of growing is the contentment because I'm in the game. I'm alive when I'm growing. So I want you to be greedy for growth. I want you to be curious about life.

I want you to be committed to this life that matters, to create an examined life that I know if I am matter to myself, I will matter to others.

I want you to be true to your word.

First the word to yourself, then the word to others.

To be truthful, to be honest, to be committed. And then it allows you to ultimately be generous. Give it all away. Give it all away. You know, it's leaving it on the field, it's leaving it on the stage. Just give it all away. Because that is what's going to create a life that matters. Now, how does this translate? Because I think that we get a chance to have choice each and every moment, each and every day, how we show up, how we do things, how we play with things. Now, I want to give you a couple things that relate to money, because that's what I do to how to make your money matter in this construct. So there's just a couple things that I want you to think about, and that is this, is this idea of first, know your why. Why do you want the money? It has nothing to do with the money. There's something bigger to it. It's freedom, it's impact. It's something bigger. Now I get it. Some people might say, I'm just trying to pay bills. That's why I need money. I get it. But beyond that, there's something greater.

Then create a vision for your life. What does that look like? What? What do you want it to look like? What do you want trying to accomplish?

Be specific. Make it holistic. It's not about the money. It's about the lifestyle. It's about everything you do. Then you get a chance to create the plan. So we've got the why, we've got the what, we've got the how. What's the plan? To make it real.

And from there, define your legacy. That's what happens if you show up the way we did and then build on that. The rhythm of your habits, the rhythm of your money habits, where you're sitting back and saying, great, I have my why, I have my vision for it. I have the plan to make it happen. Now I need to define what my rhythm is to look at and say, how often am I going to look at my numbers? How often am I going to look at my vision. I want you to look at your vision at least once a year. I want you to look at your numbers at least once a month, because that's what's going to get us moving forward. I want you to look at how you create things in a way that start to allow you to transfer skill sets and assets, to give you the freedom to do the things that you're meant to do. The causes, the movements, and the way we do that is to have the vision and the plan and. And the action steps with a rhythm to create money habits that matter. Because when we start to do this, you can ask this question at the end of the day, every single day. Ask this question at the end of the day that says this. Did my choices, did my decisions or my behaviors move me closer to my financial and impact goals today or not? Here's what I know.

The choices you make with your money today should be in service of the future you're trying to create tomorrow. Let me repeat that. The choices that you make with your money today should be in service.

Of the future you want to create tomorrow. And when we start to come from that perspective, what you'll find is all the complexity of money goes away. Because I am making choices that we know will feed the future. It is the same as sitting back and saying, I want to lose weight. And here you are buying a bag of, you know, Baby Ruth bars and M&M's. Okay, but if the choices that you're making today are. Are meant to serve the future you want tomorrow, and we get that to our soul, to our core, we start to make the right choices that start to move us in a way that change the game for us. And so I look at this in this way, is that if we truly want to live a life that matters, then we have to matter to ourselves first. We have to be willing to examine what we do, how we show up, the choices we make, the way we interrelate whether it's a conversation and be willing to have the hard conversations with ourselves saying, listen, I wasn't my best there.

Trust me, I've had plenty of those conversations, not only with myself, but those that I've wronged. I learned it a lot since I got married, trust me. But the fact is this is that when you examine your life, when you turn around and examine your life and show up knowing that the moments matter, that the stacking of the moments is what creates a life that matters. It's not some statue. It's not some name on a building. It's the way you connect in a moment, first with yourself and then with others. And I hope you take that spirit as you start to move through the season that we're in now and into the next stages of your life. Because I promise you, when you start to look at it through those eyes and be willing to examine the things in your life, things will shift not just for you, but those around you, because it's contagious. I hope this serves you. Thank you so much.

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.

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 Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate and review 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.