You Are Your Only Hope
There are only four things that matter when it comes to building a better financial future.
1. Your current situation
Good. Bad. Decent. Somewhere in between. It doesn’t matter.
Wherever you are right now and however you got here, it is what it is.
2. Where you want to be
Your goals. Your dreams. Your aspirations. The life you want to live.
This is what you’re working towards.
3. The opportunities available to you
There may be many. There may be few. They may or may not be ideal, or enough to get you all the way to your goals.
But there are always opportunities to make things better than they are right now.
4. What you do next
Your mission is to use the opportunities available to you to the best of your ability in order to get from where you are now to where you want to be.
And here’s the thing:
You are the only one who can do it.
You can get help along the way. You can ask for advice. You can learn from others.
I would encourage you to do all of that. You are not alone in this.
But in the end, you are the only one who’s responsible for improving your situation.
You can only build a better financial future if you’re willing to take the next difficult step forward. And the next one. And the one after that.
For as long as it takes.
So, what’s your next move?
All about taking that first step. It can be scary, but I found to keep reminding myself of the end goal, being debt free, reducing stress, communicating better with my wife. Those things where so motivating they got me past the first month or two and my initial fears.
Great point about staying focused on what you’re working towards. Everything else gets a lot easier when you have a clear mission.
Hey Matt, I love the simplicity of your points. #2 and #4 are most crucial to my wife and me. What comes next is what we focus on day to day but at least once a week we talk about our bucket-list goals and where we strive to be. That keeps us focused for the long term.
That’s awesome that you have such a consistent routine for talking about this stuff. I always find that the more my wife and I talk about these things, the more progress we’re able to make.
Hi Matt. Your post (positively delightful in its brevity BTW) made me think of the idea of not resisting your situation. Many of us can keep ourselves stuck by obsessing about what’s wrong in life and it keeps us from identifying and pursuing opportunities that present themselves. By lifting the dark clouds overhead that we might have identified in #1, we can think more clearly and identify a greater number for #3 and successfully act on #4.
Obsessing over and resisting the negative aspect of our current reality is energy-sapping and prevents us from looking at the big picture. It’s wasted time and effort that could be put to better use. The sooner we can help ourselves move on, the more success can come our way.
I totally agree! I get stuck feeling sorry for myself plenty and it never gets me anywhere. The only thing you can really do is accept your situation and figure what to do next to make it better.
And the thing about opportunities is that we can always create more! Adding education or training, volunteering or otherwise getting acquainted with a new group of people, relocating–all these and many more can lead to exciting new opportunity. We can wait for a knock on the door, or we can shake things up by gently kicking in a few doors!
Such a great point! Sometimes all that’s really needed is stepping outside your normal routine. The more you expose yourself to, the more opportunities will be available to you.
That about sums it up in a nice neat way! Too bad our “human-ness” often gets in the way of all that. 🙂
Very true. It’s pretty easy to make things a whole lot more complicated than this.
Do it! I’m a firm believer that the opportunities available to us as often way more plentiful than they seem to the naked eye. You aren’t going to find them until you step out though.
Once you do the beauty of human-kind will blossom like a flower and you will find yourself drawn in by the dazzling beauty of opportunities you never could’ve imagined.
Well that’s certainly way more poetic than I could have said it. Thanks!