Time: Your Most Valuable Asset
The Roaring Twenties were a memorable time in the United States and in world history. In the United States, there was a desire for innovation, creation, and risk-taking. This decade brought America exponential economic growth, fostered revered art and artists, philosophers, and social movements, and was brimming with transformation that could be felt from coast to coast.
Like the period of the Roaring Twenties in American history, your early professional years (roughly ages twenty to forty) are the most vibrant in your life. You are encouraged to explore the country, the world around you, and every possibility. You will experience the extremes of good and bad, and are young and energetic enough to surge forward with hope into the future. At this stage, you are filling your wealth bucket drip by drip, and anything you can do to shore up your financial situation will lead to exponentially greater assets down the line.
When it comes to designing your wealth, young people have the ultimate advantage: time. The time value of money principle suggests that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow because of its appreciation potential and compounding of interest when invested. And the longer your money is put to work, the greater harvest you will reap. That is why time is the greatest asset you can possess. But it cannot be bought. You either have it or you don’t, and if you’re reading this book, you have it. Now here’s how to make it work for you.
Four Simple Steps
For years, we, the professionals of the financial services industry, have failed young people (and their more mature counterparts, for that matter). We’ve muddied the waters of fundamental investing with jargon and ego-boosting hypotheses on what the market will do next. We’ve focused on how much better we can sound than the next guy—instead of thinking about how much better we can serve our clients. Our most serious error is that we’ve complicated the process of designing your wealth.
It took over a thousand prospective client meetings for me to “get” all the things that we were doing wrong. People didn’t care about my smooth talk, all the fancy terminology I used, or even the tailored suits that I wore. What they cared about was creating money management plans that made sense for them now and that could grow with them and change with their circumstances, plans that would protect them from the blows life inevitably deals out and that would maximize their current and future fortunes. I realized that we had been wasting our time on the trivial things and not focusing on helping individuals really build out their unique visions of prosperity. And based on this realization, I developed a simple, four-step mastery approach to designing long-term wealth:
1. Master the Mindset.
2. Master the Plan.
3. Master Your Income.
4. Master Money Drains.
The Mastery Approach
Anyone can be a Master Wealth-Builder, but becoming one first starts with a decision, a decision to want to be better. Master Wealth-Builders are not born, they are made. They are you and me. They are our mothers and fathers. They are our grandparents, our teachers, physicians, law enforcement, entertainment professionals, politicians, athletes, and religious leaders. They are normal people who have committed to building upon whatever foundation they have inherited. They believe that they can take their thoughts and plans and manifest them into realities.
Today, we see Master Wealth-Builders on the grand stage of the media, idolized for their financial achievements. We see the spotlights, the big businesses, the assets, and all the things that we’re led to believe mark success. What we don’t see is the challenges they faced, the risks they took, and the mental fortitude they had to exhibit daily and relentlessly to get to that point.
When you’re young, mastering wealth is primarily about mastering time—making each day that you have (and that you won’t have tomorrow) work at maximum efficiency for you. Because mastery is built by repetition. You set up a plan, and then you work that plan to exhaustion until you’ve internalized your mission and every action you take is in service of it. You work diligently every single day to reach your ultimate goal. Mastery is synonymous with action, and action is the only thing that yields results. This is what it takes to build your wealth over the course of a lifetime (and beyond).
Being young is the ultimate advantage when it comes to mastering wealth, but this is not just a feel-good book about how you can leverage your youth to attain long-term financial success. It is an instruction guide to help you improve the everyday qualitative and quantitative metrics that will guide your wealth-generation journey beginning today and continuing on for the rest of your life.
But Wait, There’s One More Thing
Why should you listen to me? It’s not only because I run a growing wealth management firm and serve clients who have the same concerns as you. It is not only because I watched my parents master these four steps upon their arrival from war-torn Liberia to lay a foundation for my siblings and myself. It is certainly not the fact that I have failed repeatedly in my own attempts to build wealth (and picked myself back up every single time).
If there is one reason why you should take my advice, it is because I am right here on the journey with you. I am the living embodiment of this book, my own case study. And it is working for me.
So if you are ready to go on this journey with me, let’s begin. The road to wealth awaits us.