#133 Roadmap To Your IDEAL Life

Welcome to the Passive Income MD Podcast, where we talk about creating your ideal life through multiple streams of income. I'm your host, Peter Kim. If you enjoy hearing about this stuff, make sure to hit subscribe so I can bring it to you every week. Now, let's get on with the show. Hey, everyone out there watching this, I hope you're having an amazing week. This week, we're going to be talking about a topic that's near and dear to me. This is a roadmap, a system that I've learned over time that really helped me achieve my ideal life. Now, the ideal life might be different for you, might be different for me. Now, only you know what that is. But what if there was a system, a way that you could actually think about how to make that happen and put it in a nice and easy framework for you to figure out how to. Okay, what step do I need to do now? What's the next step do I need to take to make it all happen? Now, over time, I've kind of worked on this again and again, and I think I've come up with something that works well for me, and I hope it works for you as well. This is what I call the ideal roadmap to success, or the ideal roadmap to your ideal life. Now, when I mean ideal, I mean actually the letters, the I, D, E, A, L, they all stand for things in an acronym. I'll go over what they are really quick. I, I stands for identify, D stands for determine, E stands for execute, A stands for assess and adjust, and L stands for leverage. So we'll go over these one by one. We'll do this in a systematic order, and hopefully this will help you as well. I'm wondering how many of you have actually figured out what your ideal life should look like. Maybe when you went to med school or when you were in college, you were thinking, I want to be a doctor, I want to be in medicine, whatever it might be. And so you had a pretty clear idea of where you wanted to be, where that next level was. But then once you went through medical school, you went through residency, you went through fellowship, and you became an attending, you finished all of that. A lot of us tend to stop dreaming. We tend to stop looking at what our ideal life is, where we actually want to be, and then we just let life take us down the river, what it might be. So when's the last time you actually thought about what your ideal life would look like? What I mean by that, what I mean by ideal is how much Time you want to be spent doing something, what do you want to be doing exactly? You know, how much time do you want to spend on something? What exactly do you want to be doing? Do you want to spend more time with family, friends? Do you want to start a business? Do you want to have investments? What is this ideal life in terms of the 24 hours of your day, for how many years you might have left? What does that look like? And how are you spending your time, energy and money? So when you want to identify your ideal life, these are the things you want to think about. You want to set overall goals, you want to create the right mindset. You want to figure out what success means for you. You want to think about what's important in your life and ultimately what is your. Why? Why are you doing all of this? So. So the first thing you want to do is set some goals. Like what do you want to achieve in life? How much money do you want to make? How do you want to be spending that money? What do you want to be doing with your time? And the way to do this is to put it in a framework that I've used over time. It's called the Smart Goals. S, M, A, R, T. I know there's a lot of acronyms here, but hopefully you'll find this useful. S stands for specific. When you set a goal, you want to know exactly what you're talking about. When I talk about people's passive income goals, a lot of times they just say, I want to have enough or I want to have more. Well, that's not enough. I mean, if you're trying to get healthier, for example, it really helps for you to have absolutely clear goals. Maybe it's a certain weight that you want to achieve or a certain time that you want to make in terms of your mile and how much you want to be able to run without losing, you know, without stopping or losing your breath. It helps to exactly be specific. So when it comes to passive income goals, when it comes to other income goals, it's nice to put a number to it. So I recommend people figure out exactly how much passive income you need to create the ideal life that you want. And M is measurable. Now, you want a goal that's measurable. So it really helps when you use actual numbers. Again, you don't want a goal that is just vague out there, so you don't know how to measure whether you're getting closer to that goal or not. A stands for achievable, meaning that you can actually achieve this. Now we want to set outrageous goals. I'm the biggest fan of setting huge goals out there. But what you don't want to do is say, I want to make $100,000 a month in six months. Now, it's possible, but I would actually think about what is outrageous. Maybe that's something that's like a 10x goal, but something that's actually quite achievable as well. That way you can make sure that you're hitting landmarks, hitting milestones on the way to getting there. R is realistic. And that kind of goes along with the A achievable and realistic. You know exactly what that is. Now, how do I find out what's realistic? I like talking to as many people as I can. I like talking to people who are at a level that I'm not at and figure out what they've achieved. Now I know that if it's possible for someone else, it's possible for me as well too. And the last part of the SMART acronym is the time. So you want to set a timeline for when you want to achieve these goals. Now, it's important to say, hey, I want $20,000 a month in passive income, but it's nice to put a timeline to that. I want to achieve that in five years, 10 years, whatever it is, so that again, you can have these milestones along the way. So you actually know how to reverse engineer your goals to help you get where you want to be. The other part of this is to make sure you have the right mindset to make all of this happen. They say that success in business and investing, we all think it's strategy, but actually only 20% of it is strategy and 80% of it is mindset. Now, how many of us know people who have had ideas before or who have thought about making an investment but weren't really confident, weren't able to make that leap when they needed to make the leap. Those people don't achieve the success that they could be achieving because some sort of mindset, some sort of limiting belief holds them back. That's why I talk about mindset so much, whether it's in our podcast, in our channels, in our blogs. I think that's an absolutely important part. And many of us underestimate how important that is in identifying these goals. It's really also important to figure out what success means to you. Does success just mean making a lot of money? Does it mean having a thriving family life? Does it mean growing constantly? Does it mean contributing to others? These are all things that you need to think about what does success mean to you? And ultimately that will help shape what your goals might be. And lastly, it's important to know why you're doing all of this. Who are you doing it all for? Is it for yourself? Because many of us know if it's just for ourselves, sometimes there's a limit to how much we feel like we can put in in terms of time and effort before we get tired or we burn out or whatever it might. But when it's for other people that are important to us in our lives, whether it's your family or your friends, many of us will put in effort that we wouldn't put in for our very selves to make these things happen. So it's again, important for you to identify who and what are you doing all of this for? And all of that is wrapped up in that I of the ideal life. Now let's get to D determine. It's important for you to know not only where you want to be, but it's important for you to know where you're starting at. It's like, you know, trying to get to a certain destination using Google Maps or whatever it might be. Uh, you need to know where you want to be in terms of the address, but you also need to know where you start. That way you can actually figure out what the roadmap is to get there. So here's some questions that you need to be asking yourself. Are you currently living the ideal life? What is your current situation? Are you happy with your income? Do you feel fulfilled? Do you feel in control of your time? Are you happy with the trajectory you're on? So take inventory right now. How much are you working? What does your income look like currently? What are the different sources of income that you have? Whether it's just your day job, do you have investment sources out there? Do you have investments creating passive income for you? How much time are you spending with your family? Are you in a good place overall financially? Are you happy where you're at in the sense that could you be in the same place in five years and 10 years and be okay with that? So at this point, when I talk about things financially, I just have them go into the numbers. Look at your past 12 month of expenses, look at your net worth, look at your assets, your liabilities, what properties, what investments you might have. Put all of that stuff together because it's going to help you to figure out what, what you have in your assets, what you have at your disposal to help you get where you want to be. And it will help you ultimately bridge the gap between the two. Knowing all of this will help you come up with a strategy that makes sense for you, considering your goals, considering where you're starting. And again, what will bridge that gap. And I know many of us learn to educate ourselves. That's part of the E. Actually, it should be educate and execute, meaning that you educate yourself. There's so many resources out there available today. Now, if you're on, we all know that you can just. We know that you can just about Google anything. But the problem is that we have so much information that I think we're drowning in information. And some people say that we're starving for wisdom. So there are ways to get educated by putting yourself in community of people who know and are doing things the way you want to do it. There are courses, there are conferences. There are people who are curating these things to bring that information to you in a way that makes sense for you. And that actually, that you can execute on that is the other part of the. You got to execute. I mean, that. How many of us have actually just thought about doing something, but we've actually never taken action? You'd be surprised how many people actually will sit there in what's called analysis paralysis. They'll think about what they need to get done. You don't know if it's a good decision or not. Next thing you know, six months will pass, a year will pass, five years will pass, and nothing will have happened. I know somebody exactly like that. He called me and he wanted to change how much time he was working in the hospital. And he said, I cannot do this any longer. And we talked about what different plans might be. And he said, look, I need to start investing in real estate. I said, fantastic. You know, you know how to educate yourself. There are some resources here. Now go ahead and make it happen. Now, I didn't hear anything from him, and I talked to him about five years later, and he was still waiting to make his first investment. Things had not happened for him. In fact, things had gotten worse at the hospital. His job situation had actually gotten worse, and he felt like he was even further behind than he was before. So it's so important for us to actually take action. And that's what sets apart people who ultimately are successful versus people who end up staying in the same place where they're at. In fact, they might end up in a worse place, especially when it comes to medicine. So you got to learn to take quick action. Now. You want to take that action without Knowing how to do the proper due diligence or making smart decisions. But that's where the education comes in. Find where to get educated, find the right people, and then figure out a way to take action towards your goals. Once you execute, you're able to move to the next step, which is the A step, which is to assess and then adjust. Now, this is probably the most important step out of all of them. I'm again, every step is important. You got to take action and these kinds of things. But nothing will happen exactly according to plan. And it's really important for you to figure out, how can I course adjust, course correct, or whatever it might be to. To actually get where I want to be. The old story that people talk about is the story of a plane that takes off in one location in Los Angeles and lands in Hawaii. Even though we look at it on these little flight trackers, it looks like a straight line. In reality, it is a constant zigzag. According to winds or whatever it might be, the plane is constantly adjusting. But somehow it starts in Los Angeles and lands on a dime in Hawaii. How does it all happen? It happens because even though there are angle changes, there are location changes, direction changes, wind changes, the pilot will constantly course correct to make sure that you end up back on the right path. In fact, it might be a better path to help you get where you want to be. And I think that's how we should do things in life. We'll set our goals, we'll set our strategies, but just get started and we'll figure out whether these things are starting to work or not. Maybe you have to course correct. Maybe that didn't work. That wasn't something that you enjoyed doing. Maybe it didn't work in your situation. And so you got to find some other ways to go. You'll have milestones along the way to tell you whether you're getting closer, whether it's actually on a right trajectory, whether you get there as fast as you want to be. And these things will change in life as your life goes and as your goals ultimately slightly adjust to as well. So you should be constantly looking ahead and seeing whether you're on the right trajectory. So assess where you're at. So assess where you're at and adjust accordingly. Personally, every three months or so, I take a look at where I'm at and whether I'm moving in the right direction, meaning a holistic look at my portfolio. Look at my net worth, my assets, liabilities, my income. Make sure that things are moving in the right Direction. As we all know, the economy continues to change. And so if you're not adjusting according to it in some way, at least seeing what you're doing and trying things differently, then maybe you're going to fall behind as well. The other way to assess where you're at is to honestly celebrate. Celebrate those wins as you're moving in the right direction. Make sure that you recognize that, because that's going to keep you motivated. You can have some fun with it, and it's going to help you get where you want to be. Now the last step, L. That stands for leverage. Now, for those who don't know what the word means, you might have heard of it according to debt, or whether it means, like taking a loan. But what leverage really means is that you take an action here and then you get an outsized result over here. Think of a lever. A lot of times is what people think of. When you're able to move a boulder by just putting a lever there and maybe a plank or whatever it might be, that's something you probably could move on your own. But using leverage, you're able to achieve these outsize, amazing results. The question is, how do you do that to accelerate your results, to help you get where you want to be? And I think there are two things that you need to think about. Number one, it's the model someone, meaning that find someone who's already done it is doing something very similar to where you want to be. And use a shortcut. Find out what they did that worked out well, find out things that they did that didn't work out well, and try to avoid those. The best way to learn from mistakes is to not make them yourself and learn from other people's mistakes. When you find someone to model, find out what they're using in terms of resources, how they're spending their time, how they're spending their money, what kind of mindset that they have. Utilize all those things and that will help shortcut your trajectory to get where you want to be. The other thing, to really leverage and get where you want to be faster and better, with hopefully less pain, is to put yourself in a community of people, meaning that you put yourself in a community of people who are trying to achieve the same things that you're achieving. There's so much shared knowledge that happens when people get together to talk. I don't know if you've ever been in a situation where you know, you've had some people talking about, whether it's real estate investing or even how to cook something or how to go camping or whatever it might be, and everyone shares their knowledge and you're like, I never thought about that. I mean, that's what happens when you get in community with people that are like minded, that are intelligent and those type of people can help you get where you want to be. And you can help them as well. Use the wisdom of the crowd. They've said proximity is power. And I believe that absolutely is the case. You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. That, especially for physicians, spending time with the right people who are doing the right things and that are going to help you and you can help them get where they want to be. You're going to find yourself getting to your goals a lot faster than you would on your own. So in a nutshell, that's my roadmap, the ideal roadmap that I use to help get the results that I want. You can use that for finances, you can use that for your career. You can use that for a new side hustle, whatever it might be. I hope you find that roadmap helpful. Let me know what you think and how it works for you. Thanks so much. Enjoy the show. Let me know by dropping a review in the podcast app you're listening to us in. And if you haven't already, make sure to hit subscribe. Are you a part of our community yet? Join thousands of physicians who are also on this journey to creating their ideal lives through multiple streams of income. You can join us on our Facebook group Passive Income Docs, and you can always learn more at our website, passiveincomemd.com thanks again for allowing me to be a part of your journey. See you next time.