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Are you REALLY doing the things that will actually drive you forward? (this tutorial is a GAME CHANGER so pay close attention!)
The Metaphor:
“So there you are: Captain of the Ship of your Dreams, traveling across the High Seas of Fortune, aiming for the Island of Paradise…
The ship isn’t perfect – hey that’s life – in fact it is something of a leaky one – and you must row it with oars.
If you are really well organized, you can keep most of your crew rowing and making actual progress towards the island, while the rest of the crew provides support to the oarsmen and keeps the leaks down to a minimum.
If you are not very well organized, or get distracted from rowing by the many sights along the way, the ship starts to fill with water. And the more water it takes on, the heavier it gets – meaning that the water comes in even faster. This can lead you into a situation where some or even all of your oarsmen have to down oars in order to help bail the water out of the ship.
Even if you manage to avoid sinking the ship…. all the time you spend bailing, or sightseeing, you are not rowing.”
What Are You Doing?
The above story is a simple metaphor I created for life and progress towards financial independence. It is about FOCUS – and its triplet of deadly enemies, Distraction, Drama and Disorganization.
First of all, the island will not come to you of its own accord. You have to make the journey to the “paradise island” of financial independence. It requires consistent, focused action in order to get the job done. If you want to get rich, you need to keep on making actual progress towards the island.
You may get distracted by pretty things along the way. Tempting sirens lure you away from the oars. Today’s such a nice day for a picnic. For some Youtube videos. Let’s go shopping / drinking / eating / dancing / cruising / checking out girls/boys / sunbathing / relaxing / watching sports / watching movies……
Then there is drama. Some people seem to thrive on it – they love to focus on worry, gossip and other soap operas, real or imaginary. But they aren’t really thriving. They are going sideways.
Let’s remember Winston Churchill’s famous quote:
“You will never get where you are going if you stop to throw a stone at every dog that barks.”
All the while you stop and picnic, daydream or fret, trickles of water (expenses) run into the ship.
Such is life and the story of your finances (including both the finances you have and the ones you don’t have because you wasted half your time!)
You can’t just stop rowing the boat, because if you do, overhead – the costs of living and working – will gradually weigh you down and sink you.
What do you ACTUALLY do with your day?
How many hours per day do you spend actually moving forward?
How many hours do you spend getting distracted by the sirens and “chilling”?
How many hours per day do you spend telling yourself you are being productive when all you are actually doing is “being busy”.
If you get into debt or difficult circumstances, it can eat into the amount of time you actually spend working productively, and cause you to run around doing all this other stuff to keep the ship from sinking. You end up in the land of crazy stress, bailing like mad just to keep your ship afloat.
All the while you are bailing, you are not actually moving forward.
And all the while you are relaxing, the ship is gaining water.
Is your day like this?
How many hours of your day do you actually spend working? And how many of those work hours are actual actions that make money?
Here’s How To Fight Back And Get Control: The “Time Diary” Exercise
“It’s not that the method doesn’t work. YOU don’t work!” – Dan Pena (shouting at his students at the top of his voice!)
There’s a fantastic educational exercise taught by high-level wealth coaches on this topic: Make a log of how every moment of an entire week is actually spent.
Dan Pena instructs his students to make an inventory of how EACH MINUTE is spent, for a week.
He then of course roasts them mercilessly over the multiple hours they spent each day just farting around.
Do this exercise. You will be horrified when you truly see how many of the 168 hours of a week you waste! It’s a tragedy, honestly. It often comes as an incredible surprise, especially to the self-employed, just how few hours are spent actually “rowing the boat” – until one really seizes the reins and gets control of how one’s time is used.
It takes pure self-discipline; nothing more, nothing less.
The ones who are able to control their day and spend their hours actually performing the actions that are going to lead to success, are the ones who will succeed.
But if you act as though you have forever, and you will never get there. You can see these people all around you. Bumbling along at snail’s pace. Don’t be one of them!
Then there are those whose lives are essentially a slow-motion train wreck. Everything is chaos. One cluster-fuck after another. It’s one of the sad facts of the modern world that many people’s lives are a whirl of bailing. If you are financially close to the edge, or in debt, you can find yourself in a scenario where much of your energy is expended just keeping afloat.
It’s as if the expenses of life keep you locked in an endless cycle. I know from experience what it feels like to use virtually all your energy just to stay afloat and to feel as though you are not moving forward at all.
However, everyone who becomes rich of their own accord has to rise above circumstances no matter what these are – and so there’s little use wondering why the world is unfair or turning circumstances into an excuse. You simply have to be a fighter, and a champion – and the same goes for every winner, ultimately.
So in addition to self-discipline, one of the major keys is organization. In life, you are like the captain of this ship. You oversee the entire structure. You decide how much energy to delegate to various aspects of your career and your world. A good captain is able to create structure and organization, and keep things running smoothly so that forward momentum is maintained. Being highly organized and efficient makes an enormous difference. It is one of the great secret formulas of the rich.
Maintaining forward motion in real life is often complex. The health of the “oarsmen” must be maintained. The machinery must be kept in good order. The ever-present expenses must be kept to a minimum. There are an endless whirl of things other than rowing vying for your attention – both necessary things and unnecessary things. Especially nowadays, in this era of too much information…
Put too much attention on any one of these things and the ship slows down. Put too little attention on any one of the other necessary things and the ship might start to take on water.
And do you really have time for gossip, politics, news (things that are happening to other people a very long way away) or opinions? You certainly don’t! Leave the monkey squabble to the monkeys.
An Entrepreneur has better things to be doing. Get on with it.
