Those of you that are soccer fans will get the pun.
As a young lad in high school, I was a mediocre student for reasons that I won’t get into, but could be a whole other discussion. When I got to college it was a different story. What changed? Goals. For some odd reason I got it in my head that I wanted to graduate with highest honors and once I made that commitment, everything changed. All my behaviors became about the goal. I made it to every lecture and sat in the front row of every classroom so I could be closer to the action. Sure, there was the occasional party till 3AM and then being in a lecture hall on campus for a 7AM class, but I never missed one. The point of this piece isn’t to toot my own horn, although yes, I did indeed graduate with highest honors :).
When I was a high school administrator (ironic huh?) I would preach this to students who were having behavior issues in class. Do you want to correct your behavior? Set a goal. If your goal is to get A’s, then all of a sudden the guy sitting next to you trying to chat during the lesson becomes a nuisance getting in the way of your goal – your enemy.
At One Wealth Advisors we also preach about goal setting. Because we realize that unless you have a goal, you’re basically meandering. So the first thing we do when tasked with building a financial plan is ask, what are your goals? Financial Independence? A second home? A first home? A 3-month backpacking tour of Eastern Europe? The specifics are unimportant. What is important is that once we know where we are going, we may then build a roadmap to get there. Once that is in place, then every financial behavior – how much we save, how we invest, how we spend – are now and should forever be looked at through the lens of goal achievement. This, we have found time and time again, to be the recipe for success not just in finance, but in life.
