Letters to My Kids

It would be pretty bold to claim to give you the single secret to success in one step.  There are a lot of factors that lead to success, but there is a single step that will determine whether or not you succeed.

Know what success means.

Before you roll your eyes, think for a minute.  Why do so many celebrities with every hallmark of success take their own lives or succumb to substance abuse or some other self abuse born of depression?  Undeniably they made some material gains.  They may have achieved notoriety.  They may have gained power and influence.  But their gains didn’t satisfy them.  They didn’t achieve happiness.  They didn’t succeed.

And you don’t have to be a big splash to illustrate this, either.  Browse through the bookstores at any point and you’ll find stories of people who made drastic career changes in mid life because they didn’t find their old profession rewarding.  The high salaries, fringe benefits, fame and fortune looked good back at the bottom of the ladder, but once they had laid hold on it, it didn’t fulfill them like they anticipated.

You can likely see it in your peers as well.  Everyone knows at least a couple of people with intelligence, drive and means who are simply going nowhere.  They career hop, live for the weekend and never seem to really be satisfied with their lot.

You can’t travel without a destination.  You can move around and maybe even have a great time, but you won’t get anywhere.  And you’ll never really know when you’ve arrived.

Success works the same way.  You can put your full efforts into your career, relationships and pastimes, but if you don’t know what you want to achieve, you’re spinning your wheels.

When you don’t have a good picture of your goals, your focus is on activity.  Activity is good, but it can be wasteful and even counterproductive to a desired end result.  To move up, you need to focus on improvement, not activity.

I’d like to challenge you right now to evaluate your life goals and understand where you want to be.  Include career, finances, relationships, commitments.  Flesh it out as fully as you can.  Write them down and keep them in front of you and revisit them often.

Then, when you have a decision to make, you have a clear understanding of what outcome you desire.

It’s the first step, and really the most important.

When you finally get out on your own and find yourself somewhat established, the temptation to acquire starts to set in.  It happens to the best of us – you look around with a sudden increase in income and things just start calling you.  All the little luxuries you couldn’t afford are laid out before you and you’re caught by the desire to have them all. Clothes, cars, homes.   A poshy club membership.  All the toys and gizmos you lusted over around every holiday.

I can admit to those weaknesses.  Right now I’m looking over a spread of about 15 guitars, when I only play 3 or 4 regularly.  I have a couple of crates of action figures I haven’t had the heart to get rid of yet.  And in times past, I had an extensive baseball card collection, Album/8-Track/Cassette/CD collection – even a decently sized computer collection at one time.

What you don’t realize when you dive into these extravagances:

• They don’t create happiness. When the novelty wears off, you’ll be looking for a new thrill.
• They only impress a small percentage of people, and those are generally the people whose opinion means little to you.
• More times than not, they just create more work.  Organizing, cleaning, storing, valuing, insuring, maintaining and displaying.
• When you buy into a material culture, you develop a sort of snobbishness that often causes you to devalue people who have something good to contribute to your life.
• When you  buy things you can’t pay for, you put yourself in a spiral that’s really difficult to come out from under.  Debt compounds, and so do your problems.

One idea that was firmly ingrained in my head by my parents was not to spend beyond what you have.  And although I can readily admit I’ve wasted quite a bit of the funds that came my way, I never overspent my means.  I never went into credit card debt. I never kept an outstanding loan outside of a mortgage loan that wasn’t running interest free.  And I saw to it that my long term debts were never beyond my means to pay them back in a reasonable timeframe without creating a lot of strain on my finances.

I want to encourage you to accept the same limits in your own life.  Enjoy the power of what you earn, but see to it that you’re not spending more than you’re making and you’re putting a reasonable amount of money away into savings or retirement accounts – 20% is a decent figure.

Live below your means.

You will find in life that you often need to bring people around to your way of thinking.  Sitting in a job interview, asking someone on a date, a “heart to heart” conversation.  One of the easiest tricks to building rapport with someone is via a technique called mirroring.

If you ever notice a conversation between two people that are really connected with each other, you’ll notice how similar are their postures, movements, tone of voice  – even breathing pattern.  It’s because human beings that think similarly tend to act similarly. And when you detect someone is similar to you, it creates a feeling of ease and comfort. People feel understood and safe.

If you can create these similarities between yourself and another person, you create rapport and ease them into a position where they’re willing to listen to what you have to say.

What do you mirror?

• Posture – how is the other person sitting/standing?  Relaxed, tense, tired, energetic?  Posing? Stretching?
• Motions – what kind of gestures do they make with their hands?  Do they tilt or toss their head at some point?  Are the movements smooth and graceful, or energetic and pointed?
• Voice – how loud are they speaking?  What kind of tone of voice is being used? Are there long pauses in the conversation, or do they fill every gap? Does the pitch of their voice go up or down at the end of a sentence?

Obviously, you don’t want to mirror them exactly – that becomes obvious and comical.  But if you can do so subtly and slowly, it’s possible to mimic them exactly without arousing suspicion.   Maybe you start off by matching their voice patterns and moving into a similar posture.  Later in the conversation, you can use some of their hand gestures after they’ve shown them to you. Little by little, you can move into the same motions they use without notice.  Move slowly and pay attention to any signs of tension or confusion, and pace yourself.

Believe it or not, you can tell when you have a rapport built by taking the lead instead of following.  Yawn or cough, and watch them do the same thing.  Use a gesture and watch them repeat it.

When you have this kind of rapport built, you’re ready to move.  When they’re comfortable, open and feel they have something in common with you, it’s the best possible time to present your case to them.

Anyone who’s regularly involved with weightlifting will easily tell you it’s made a major difference in their lives.  I’d like to encourage you to consider weightlifting regularly, especially as a younger person.

Aside from having a better physique, weightlifting builds you up in a number of ways:

•  By lifting and gradually increasing resistance, you gain the confidence that come from knowing you’re accomplishing goals and getting stronger. That’s a fantastic ego boost.
• By lifting, you learn how to concentrate on a goal. When you’re trying to complete a set of reps, you’re completely focused on that effort.  Nothing else is in your mind.  You’re fatigued, your muscles are burning, you’re ready to quit and just when you think you’re going to fail – BOOM – you make it.  Regular mastery makes it easier to concentrate on goals outside the gym in exactly the same manner.
• When you lift and regularly fatigue yourself, you get the greatest sleep in the world.  You can cure insomnia overnight with a solid exercise routine.
• Weightlifting builds testosterone, which boosts your drive, confidence and aggression.
• Lifting boosts your energy levels to their peak – energy to accomplish your goals, enjoy your life and make the most of the day.
• Hard exercise combats depression.  A thorough endorphin boost will bring you out of a funk in no time.

Whether you want the bulked up body is beside the fact.  You can spend your time in greater weights for size or greater reps for tone.  Either will benefit you endlessly.

I want you to be rich.  Rich beyond your wildest dreams.  Because when you are rich, you will be happy.

And this wealth has absolutely no dependency on your bank account, investment portfolio or retirement plan.

We live in a materialistic society.  You are bombarded daily by messages from TV, movies, magazines, peers… most every source available with the idea that material gains bring happiness. And that’s easy to buy into when you’re young.  You think “if I could just have that car, or those clothes – I’d be happy”.  As you get a bit older, maybe it’s even more abstract.  “If I just had x amount of money, I’d be happy”.

You can validate this in your own life.  Think of the last thing you absolutely had to have in order to be happy.  Maybe it’s a piece of clothing, or a car.  It’s great when you first get it, but very soon the luster wears off.  Soon, it’s an everyday object and you’re looking lustfully at the next thrill.

That cycle doesn’t end.  As long as you convince yourself that material wealth is your key to happiness, you’ll keep looking for the next stage up.

But there are a lot of other ways to be rich.  Ways that are much more valuable than having a particular bank balance.

•  You can be rich in relationships.  A person who cultivates friendships and is great to be around can have many good friends.  Many people with lots of money often find themselves very lonely from the process of focusing on wealth and alienating people in order to get ahead.
• You can be rich in health.  A person who takes care of himself by eating right, exercising and keeping himself strong can have a wealth that the migraine-plagued, stress ridden, overweight executive would kill for.
• You  can be rich in family.  Devoting your time to spouse and children and building a healthy history together can enjoy those bonds to their dying day.
• You can be rich in knowledge. Devoting your time to reading, studying, practicing skills and growing as a person finds that the pursuit never gets old to them.
• You can be rich in character.  A person who is honest, truthful, loyal and shows integrity can build a reputation that people respect, trust and value

The funny thing about these kinds of investments are that most often, they lead to material wealth as a side effect.  When you are vital, knowledgeable, stable and well-liked, the doors are going to open for you to pursue whatever you want.

Be sensible.  We are all bitten by the materialism bug from time to time.  And it’s OK to indulge it occasionally.  It’s good to want a healthy financial future and to have the freedom to do what you want.  But if that’s your focus, you’re going to miss out on the wealth that life can really offer you.

Be rich.

Life goes by quickly.  As you will age, the reality of this statement will strike you harder and harder.  The older you get, the more responsibilities you gain and the more experiences you have, the more it will ring true.

It’s hard to see that as a young person.  You feel invincible – like your whole life is ahead of you there on the horizon.  You revel in the strength and enthusiasm of youth.  And as a result, you often take risks with that life.  It’s so abundant and strong, you don’t really see the value of managing it properly.

Imagine with me for a moment.  Imagine that I set you down one day and tell  you that because of an unexpected windfall, I have opened a bank account in your name and deposited ten million dollars.  This is my gift to you, my legacy.  This will be enough money to sustain you the rest of your life.  At your age, when you earn maybe $5000 a year, this supply seems endless.  Even living on $100,000 a year would support you for your natural life and even past it.

You begin to live on the money and even spend a bit in extravagance.  Every day you draw out funds for your immediate desires, but it never seems like a lot is gone.  Even the purchase of a house doesn’t really put much of a dent in it. At this point, if a friend came up to you and asked to borrow $100, you’d probably agree easily.  After all, ten million dollars is going to be plenty of money for you.  You’d probably indulge yourself a bit with expensive cars, gifts for friends, the best clothes, the best restaurants – whatever your heart desires.

As time passes by, you notice the account is down to five million, then two, then one.  At age 50, the money is down to a few thousand, then nothing.  You’re over the hill with no job experience and no further savings to support you.

At this point, your perspective on that money changes.  You wish you still had the $100 you loaned to your friend.  Those expensive luxuries seem very foolish – you’d do anything to have that money at this point. You begin to look back in your life and wish.  “I didn’t realize the money would go so fast”.  “I wish I had saved”. “I wish I had invested”.  But the time’s past now, and you can’t have the opportunity back again.

That’s a lot like your life.  When you’re young, you don’t think a lot about the harm you do to your body, because it’s so strong. You can’t realistically picture it being weak and sickly.   You don’t think about the waste of your time because it’s so plentiful.  You don’t really think about preparing for the future because it’s so far away.

So you harm yourself.  Maybe you get involved with smoking, drinking or drugs, or you eat a diet full of fatty, caloric, sugar-filled junk food and soda.  You spend endless hours watching mindless TV or playing video games.  You spend the money as soon as you earn it on whatever happens to be in the front of your mind at the time. You risk life and health by driving poorly, doing reckless stunts or pushing the envelope in some way.

Those things can seem fun and harmless in your younger years.  But what you don’t understand is the toll they are taking on your body.  You don’t realize how unhealthy consumption habits are draining the vitality out of your immune system and building a body you will curse in your adult years and regularly trust to the care of a doctor.  You don’t realize how much you will kick yourself for wasting the energetic and optimistic heyday of your existence by wasting its efforts on trivia. You don’t realize that the expensive designer shirt you spent your money on today could probably purchase a car for you down the road, if you’d taken the money and invested it wisely.

You will realize it, of course – when you’re older.  And you will wish for the chance to go back and do things the right way. I can think of lots of things I would change if I could go back to those years again:

• I would have built a habit of a healthy diet so that I wouldn’t be fighting so hard at age 39 to get rid of excess weight and to reprogram myself away from gluttony.
• I would have kept physically fit and strong so I could enjoy playing the sports I enjoyed so much as a younger man.
• I would have saved and invested so that my first years out of college weren’t so hand to mouth.
• I would have spent less time being so cynical and noncommittal and taken  advantage of some fantastic opportunities I had to learn and grow.
• I wouldn’t have been as snobbish and spent some time getting to know some really remarkable people.
• I would have spent less time in front of the TV and more time in front of people.
• I wouldn’t have taken on some of the risky things I was involved in when I realize how closely I escaped death so many times.

I don’t expect you to read this advice and embrace it wholeheartedly – you honestly will not understand the value of life until you have less of it. But I do hope you can see some of the forethought in it and think about building a solid foundation to live on.