This morning, I found myself captured by the idea of progress. How physical progress: the weight you push and sustain can be related to financial progress: the dollars you make and retain. Progress is similar for most things it seems.
Let’s try looking at physical fitness. Each time you visit, you are meeting or improving from the previous times. Some days you maximize your growth, so your recovery may last longer, but future maxes will be higher and your baseline will increase. Overall, the basic process being that you work out to grow sustainably. Growth that is sustainable is slow. Radical change is more difficult to incorporate and takes considerable will.
That is not to say sustained growth is easy, because it’s not. Some days you may be more tired than others. You might excuses in your head like do I need to be doing this? Or I had a late night last night I’ll skip today. Discipline yourself to avoid these situations, and dismiss negativity around the progress you are making?
How can we do this? We can start by avoiding situations where we might hesitate to stay committed. When someone asks you to go out, consider what is more important to you. Which is not to say you should ignore social invitations, but instead to better prioritize your life to make room for your personal growth.
Your friends will appreciate the example, and if they don’t, which is to say they are more interested with their ability to have a good time, than they are interested in your well-being, then those people are not your friends and you are being used.
So assuming you have good friends, which I hope you do, this change will improve your life, and, therefore, the lives of the people around you. Contribute your growth, your success, and your time for the people who you love, and who love you.
Back to the original point, physical growth is similar to financial growth or any kind of growth, it is a baseline. Financial growth can be described as sustained capital increase over time. You put in work, maybe a lot one day, which is like maxing out, which may be tiring and require a period of restorative time for your energy levels to rebound. For that work, you see the result in capital. These work-your-heart-out-for-a-day-or-week data points will register in your skill set, and therefore your potential. Your potential being correlated to the dollars that you make. Although capitalism is not perfect, it gets us closer to achieving for the value we provide our environment. So in this model, we have to provide sustainable value to have a sustainable income, but the really cool thing about the financial game that is different from the physical game is that we do not have to work to earn. Passive income is financial freedom, which real freedom. The ability to do what you want with the time that you have is the greatest life achievement. So, start with physical growth, it will clear the mind and teach the basic principles of discipline which will translate to other areas of life.