Knowing the next 10 steps in your financial journey is a game-changer.
For example, if you were to climb a colossal mountain like Mount Everest, when would you want to know how you were getting down from the mountain? Is it just when you reach the top of the mountain? Or would you rather know your full plan from start to finish before you even begin? Imagine reaching the top and realizing you don’t have the correct resources and supplies. Maybe you don’t have the right gear or enough oxygen. When it comes to climbing Mount Everest, these decisions quite literally can be the difference between life and death. When it comes to business and finance, these decisions are still extremely important, critical to determining your success or failure.
In addition to strategizing ahead, another key benefit of forward-planning is that it grants you the ability to recognize when you are drifting off course and gives you the opportunity to get back on track swiftly. If you have an annual goal, you want to realize at the end of January you are off course, not in October. If you have a 10-year goal, you want to recognize changes need to be made at the end of year 1, not at the end of year 5.
In aviation, even the smallest deviation can lead to a massive error over long times and distances. Take the airplane gyroscope — an instrument pilots rely on to maintain the aircraft’s orientation. If the gyroscope is just a few degrees off at the start of a long flight, the airplane could end up hundreds of miles away from its intended destination. That minor deviation seems insignificant at first, but over hours of flying, the error compounds, pulling the plane further and further off course. This is something we must recognize for ourselves in business and finance.
There are no reset buttons in this line of work. When climbing a mountain, you can always get a quarter of the way up, decide it was a bad idea, turn around and go home. In business and finance, you have to live with the choices you make. You wake up the next day and your reality continues. Did you make the best decisions for yourself, your business, and your family, or did you make decisions that are going to put you behind the eightball? Did you create an environment where you are set up for success, or did you create an environment where you are going to be treading water?
Often, I write more technical articles about business, retention planning, exit strategies, tax implications, and finance. Today, I wanted to take the time to encourage everyone to focus on creating the space and capacity for future planning. It is so easy to push these items down the road. Planning is often a disruption in our lives. However, planning will also allow us to achieve our goals. One of my partners, Zack Pumerantz, wrote an article explaining this interesting phenomenon of cognitive dissonance revolving around our financial behavior.
Taking action in our own lives can bear even further similarities to how airplanes function. Hear me out: Did you ever realize that airplanes use significantly more fuel during takeoff than when they are cruising in the air? Takeoff requires a large amount of thrust to overcome gravity and lift the aircraft off the ground. The engines are working at full power to generate the necessary speed and altitude to successfully accomplish this. The process of getting the plane airborne involves fighting against air resistance and gravity, which results in higher fuel consumption. These factors have significantly less impact once the airplane reaches cruising altitudes.
The same can be said for people. It takes significantly more time, energy, focus, determination, and discipline to get started than it does once you form new habits and start seeing results. Whether it is building your business with the end in mind, understanding your exit 10 years early, focusing on your retirement in the present rather than once you are ready to arrive, there is value in understanding how these narratives end, and then reverse engineering them to the point of knowing what actions need to be taken on a monthly or even weekly basis.
Comparatively speaking, the person focusing on their future today, rather than waiting until they arrive, will almost always be the more successful of the two.
Which person do you want to be?
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