It Took Me 47 Years to Realize What I'll Tell You in 18 Mins
In this 18‑minute YouTube talk, Mel Abraham argues that most people build a financial "money machine" without first defining the life it should fund, creating a perpetual sequencing problem. He illustrates this with three personal wake‑up moments: his son Jeremy’s drawing that revealed his work‑centric priorities, a 2009 bike accident that prompted a friend to ask, “How much is enough?”, and his mother’s regret after his father’s death, showing the cost of living for others’ expectations. Abraham proposes a reverse‑order approach: first craft a detailed, honest vision of the desired life across all domains (health, relationships, work, finances, etc.), then calculate the true lifestyle cost using a free calculator (melabraham.com/lifestyle). He offers a concrete framework—three probing questions per domain—to build that vision, stresses the importance of aligning with a partner, and reframes money as a paintbrush that only works when the picture (the life) is already defined. The talk ends with calls to action: use the calculator, comment, subscribe, and commit to living a life defined by personal “enough” rather than external benchmarks.
Chapters
You've been working hard, building the portfolio, growing the income, hitting the milestones that you actually set for yourself years ago. And underneath all of it, there's this quiet assumption: get the number big enough and the rest figures itself out. Here's the problem with that. Most people spend their entire lives building a machine and never stop to define what it's supposed to fund. The number grows, but the life waits. And the gap between them never closes on its own. See, that's a sequencing problem. And it has a fix. This. This is Building Your Money Machine, where we help you master your money, eliminate financial stress so you can live a life of choice. And I'm your host, Mel Abraham. And in this episode, we're gonna fix the sequence. Let's do this. I want to start with a question. When did your life actually begin? Not the day you were born, not graduation, not the first job, the business launch. I mean, the day you stopped performing someone else's version of success and started designing your own. See, for most people, if you're honest, that day hasn't come yet. And here's the uncomfortable part. Most of us get warnings along the way, moments that try to shake us awake. We hear them sort of, kind of. We make maybe a small adjustment, we give ourselves credit, and we go right back to running. I got one of those warning signs when Jeremy, my son, was 6 years old. He came in one day and he said, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, I drew a picture of you at school today. And in Jeremy's picture, as I knelt down thinking I was going to see us playing, us having fun. Nope. It was me standing in front of two computer screens, a phone in each ear and the other one on the desk ringing. Jeremy wasn't even in the picture. This picture was a mirror into my soul. And what I saw, I didn't love. Now, I made changes, real ones, like I blocked time for Jeremy. So I was there with him. I was at his games and all the things that he was doing, his practices, the stuff that I thought mattered. And I stopped letting work bleed into the time that belonged to him. And I'm genuinely proud of that because it was the right thing to do. But here's what I didn't change, though. I left the math running on autopilot. The achieving, the acquiring, the accumulating. The number kept growing. The number had no relationship to a life that I had actually sat down and designed. It was just bigger is better, more is more, build it, it'll all work out someday. Turns out someday's not actually on a calendar. Here's why this matters though, and I want you to hear this really carefully. Being half intentional is more dangerous than being fully asleep. And when you're fully asleep, at least you know you haven't done the work. But when you fix one part of your life, and leave the rest running on comparison and expectation, you think you've done the work. You give yourself credit and you move on and the clock keeps ticking. See, I fixed the relationship column, but I left the financial column pointing at a number that belonged to someone else's definition of success. And I wouldn't fully understand that until another 13 years later. And I'd be surprised if you can't name your own version of that picture. Maybe it wasn't your kid who drew it, Maybe it was a conversation that stopped you cold, a health scare, a birthday that hit harder than you expected, something that told you that the score was off and you felt it. See, you made a small adjustment, you gave yourself credit for the adjustment, and then you just moved on. See, that's the warning. Most of us get it. The question is whether we hear the whole thing or just enough to feel like we did. So the warning came at 6 years old from Jeremy, and I heard part of it and made part of the change and then left the rest running. And let me tell you what it took to hear the whole thing. See, I was riding my mountain bike— this was in 2009— down to the gym one morning. I was distracted, I was frustrated, I was angry about something that genuinely I can't even remember now. I mean, it was a conversation I had with an ex-girlfriend but it tells you everything about how important it actually was. I don't remember what it was, but my shoelace, not paying attention to details, got caught in the chain as I was coming down the hill and I clipped the brake. The bike flipped and I came down on my head. All right. And what ends up happening is I wake up with a grade 4 concussion, not feeling anything on my right side, and I could barely speak. A few days in the hospital, home in a neck brace. And the doctor told me, hey, I was alive because of the helmet and because of the shape I was in. Now I'll take it. But a few days later, after I got released from the hospital, my dear friend— he's someone I call a brother. He had retired at 37 years old. He comes out and he says, I'm taking you to lunch. And we go to this little pastrami place that we loved and walk in and I'm in the neck brace. We order our sandwiches, we sit down, and I'm still trying to get the feeling back on my right side. I'm still trying to speak. I'm stuttering. And he looks me dead in the eye and he says, "How much is enough?" I'm looking at him, I go, "Dude, I just got outta the hospital from a bike accident that nearly killed me, and you wanna ask me philosophical questions right now?" He didn't blink. He looked at me again. He says, "How much is enough? Do you even know where your finish line is? Because here's what happened. You got on that bike distracted, angry, frustrated." Running a race without knowing where it ends. The finish line literally could be behind you right now, but you could be standing on it, but you'd never know. You'll heal from this bike accident. I know you will, but you're gonna get back on that bike. You're still gonna be distracted. You're gonna still be frustrated, and you're gonna still be running a race that you don't know where the finish line is. And one of these times you won't get back up. Ouch. See, that hit me. Because he was right. I had spent decades building, acquiring, and achieving. The number kept growing, but the life I was building it for, I hadn't designed it. Not in full, not across every domain, not with any real honesty about what I wanted versus what I thought I was supposed to want. And here's the realization that came to me in those weeks as I'm trying to recover, is that I have no choice but to slow down and recover. We didn't need more money. What we needed was more clarity. And we have to get that clarity in the right order. And most people do it backwards. They, they set a financial goal and they chase a number and they figure that they'll sort it out when they get there and it'll all fall in place. But you can't build a machine for a life that hasn't been designed. And if the number you're chasing came from comparison or expectations or watching someone else's highlight reel or your parents or your degree, it was never really yours to begin with. See, the money is just the mechanism. It's the paintbrush to paint the life. Life is the driver. And until you define the life, any number you chase belongs to someone else. So let me ask you what my friend asked me. How much is enough for you? Not a ballpark, not a more than I have right now, but could you actually answer that question in detail if I asked you right now? And if the answer is no, or if the number that comes to mind came from a salary benchmark or a peer's lifestyle or a figure you had heard someone throw out at a dinner party, then you're running the same race I was running, and the finish line is moving every single time you get close. Now, one of the first things we need to work on and work through here is really starting to understand what that life costs when you define it, not just the bills, but genuinely what does the life cost? And to help you with that, I've got a lifestyle cost calculator that'll walk you through step by step to do it. It's totally free and you can go to melabraham.com/lifestyle. We'll give it to you right here. All right. Now, Let's talk about the third warning I got when it came through it. See, my dad passed away in 2010. He and my mom had been married for decades, and when we lost him, I watched something happen to her that I didn't fully expect. See, she started to talk about him differently. Not just grief, something underneath the grief. She talked about what a good man he was, and he was. The life he had given her, how hard he had worked, and, and there was a sadness in her voice, a weight. In her face. And it didn't come from missing him alone. And then one day she literally said it directly. She said, "You know, I didn't appreciate the things he did while I had them." See, she spent the rest of her life, and she was into her 90s before she passed, and she passed 2 years ago, but she spent those next 15 years trying to make up for it, telling people what they meant to her, expressing the appreciation that she had held back. Trying to return what she hadn't given in the moment. She got some of it back, but not all of it. And there were things that she couldn't fix. She couldn't go back. And that sadness, that quiet as it was, it stayed with her all the way to the end. And what I understood watching her is this: it wasn't that she had wasted her life. She had a full life. It's that she had spent so much of it looking towards the next thing. Measuring herself against the neighbor, comparing or striving, or never quite landing it in the present long enough to appreciate what's already right in front of her. Here's the thing, my friend Patrick Ben-David, we grew up in the same, same area, and he made this observation. I remember him saying this once. He says, it stayed with me. He says, when we grew up, our comparison set as a kid was the kid down the street that got a new Schwinn bicycle. That was the competition. But today, the comparison set is the Kardashians who just got a new jet. Think about what that does to you psychologically. When your comparison set is infinite, contentment becomes mathematically impossible. And there's always someone with more, always a bigger number, always a better version of the life that you're not living. And when you let the outside world define success for you, You're gonna spend the entire life chasing a finish line that keeps moving. That's what I was doing. You'll look back the way my mom did and wonder where the life went. Think about people in your life right now, the ones who matter most. Are you present enough to appreciate what they already have? Are you living somewhere in the future instead, waiting for the version of life that you haven't built yet? Because the regret my mom carried, Wasn't about the things she didn't do. It was about the things she didn't appreciate while she had them. That's a different kind of loss. And it's a quieter one. It doesn't announce itself until it's too late to do much about it. And the only antidote that I know is this. You have to define your life for yourself first, not a number. And I'm a numbers guy, but define a life. What does it look like? What does it feel like? Who's in it? What do you do in your mornings? What actually gives you meaning versus what just keeps you busy? And when you can answer those questions, the comparison has nowhere to go because you're no longer playing their game, you're playing yours. That's what it means to live fully expressed. Not the biggest number, not the most impressive title, but a life you designed on purpose that's entirely your own. So let's make this concrete because I don't want you to walk away with, from this and say, Great, but fuzzy because I don't know what to do. Here's the first thing I have people do is to stop before the spreadsheet, before the retirement calculator, before any of that, before we look at numbers, is to sit down and draft a vision for your life. Not some vision board that you hear about. I'm not talking about cutting out pictures from a magazine and calling it some sort of plan, but a real detailed, honest description of what you want to create in this lifetime. Across every domain. Your health, your relationships, your family, your work, your finances, all of it. Because here's what happens when you only define one domain. You end up like me after Jeremy's drawing. You fix the relationship column, you feel good about it, and the rest keeps running on autopilot. And a decade later, you're in a neck brace at a pastrami shop getting asked a question you should have asked yourself years ago. See, for each domain, Here's what I want you to do. I want you to ask 3 questions. One, what does the perfect scenario for this domain look like for you? Not someone else, not a watered-down version, the realistic version, the real one. Two, what does it mean to you and why does it matter? And why does it matter? And when you close your eyes and think about this area of your life fully alive, what words come to mind? Those 3 questions across every domain start to build that picture, and that picture that belongs to you, not some benchmark, not your neighbor, not the peers, not social media, not the media. Let me give you an example. If we're working through family and relationships, it sounds like this. What does the perfect scenario look like for each of the key relationships in your life? What does each of those relationships mean to you and why? And when you think about those relationships at their best, What words or phrases come up? Now, those aren't soft questions. They're hard ones because most of us have never actually answered them. And if you're in a committed relationship, mm-hmm, do this together side by side because you can't build a shared life from two separate defined visions. There needs to be a unified division, a unified vision that brings it together. And at some point you'll all arrive somewhere and realize that you're not in the same place if you don't do this together. It's why we grow apart. My wife and I I literally sit down every single year and take a look at our vision. What do we want? This is where the vision earns its keep. Every day, the decisions, the opportunities that come at you are filtered through that vision. See, most people will evaluate them emotionally in the moment based on urgency, excitement, fear, whatever it is. And when you have a defined life vision though, the question changes completely. It's no longer, should I do this? It becomes, Does this move me closer to the life I designed or further away? See, design from the life out, not from the money in. The money is just a paintbrush. You have to know what you're painting before you pick it up. And until you define the life, you don't even know how big of a machine you actually need. And the number has to come from the life, not the other way around. See, this isn't just a Mel exercise. This is your exercise. The only reason it worked for me is because I finally stopped letting the number be the answer and started letting my life be the question. My mom got 15 years of trying to return the appreciation she held back. She got some of it right. She told people what they meant. She showed up differently in the time she had left, but she also carried a weight that she couldn't fix. The moments were already gone. The things she couldn't take back. I don't want that for you. I don't want you to build a machine that runs perfectly and funds a life that you never designed and leaves you someday wondering what you were actually running towards. See, you have one life and it deserves to be defined by you, for you, on your terms. Not when the work slows down. Not when the kids leave. Not when you hit some number that belongs to someone else's story. See, because people who live richly are not the ones who earn the most. They're not the ones that accumulated the most. They're the ones who decided what enough looked like and built towards that with everything they had and knew that it might change along the way. And that's okay. And they refused to let someone else's definition replace their own. That is what it means to be fully expressed. Not perfectly successful by the world's standards. But fully alive by yours. Because earning more doesn't make you free. A money machine does, but only when you design the life it's meant to fund. All right, I hope that this helps. I hope that this makes sense and that you find value and you start to look at things differently. I get it, we talk about money, we talk about wealth, we talk about finances, but we can't talk about it separate and apart from the life that you want to design. All right, let me hear from you. Send me a comment, send me a DM. Let me know what hit here. And while you're here, do me a favor, hit that subscribe button and give me a thumbs up. It helps the algorithm, but it also warms my heart. Until I get a chance to see you in the next one, or on your path to financial freedom, living the life that you've designed, always, always strive to live a life that outlives you. See you in the next one. Cheers for now.
