Welcome to Under 2, an email series delivering short insights to empower your money life – in 2 minutes or less.
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My parents recently visited and experienced a complete debacle in their timeline flying home. First, a half hour delay on their return flight, then another half hour, then the flight was simply canceled until the next morning, all while they’re sitting on the plane with bags already stowed below.
Next morning comes (after a night without luggage) and the fully boarded plane sits again for another hour and a half past its designated departure time.
There’s nothing like airline travel to occasionally remind us how much we don’t control. And timelines of when things happen are often exactly that – out of our control.
The same is often true of our goals, especially the financial ones. When those goals (just like flight destinations) aren’t reached as planned, it generates stress, anxiety, and usually a lot of effort trying to get things back under control.
But how much of that effort is wasted in unproductive struggle?
The reality is that we can’t control the interest rate on our savings, the annual return on our retirement investment accounts, or even how fast our new business grows.
What we do control are the inputs – how much money we put in savings or investments each month, the effort and strategy we put into a new career or business venture. But we can’t control all the other variables that affect the ultimate long-term compounding of those efforts.
The key is to understand this truth so that you can convert any tendency for unproductive struggle trying to control what can’t be controlled and, instead, put that effort into the inputs that have the most strategic leverage for your big picture outcome.
For example, cutting coupons won’t make up for low stock returns, but keeping your insurance coverage updated to prevent catastrophic loss just might.
Also, when we acknowledge our lack of control over the timelines for our goals, we’re then free to keep trying, keep working, keep retooling. In other words, doing the work, instead of feeling like we’ve failed and simply quitting.
And you know which of those choices—quitting versus continuing—makes all the difference in the long run.
We can influence a lot about our outcomes. But we most certainly lack full control over any of it.
Target your efforts where they count, and then be willing to let the rest go while freeing yourself to keep at it.
Is it a little discouraging that we never seem to “arrive”? That our standards rise just out of reach of our abilities? Absolutely not! We move the goalposts so the game doesn’t get boring and, more importantly, so it never ends.
Ryan Holiday in Discipline is Destiny
I hope you enjoyed this edition of Under 2, an email series designed to share quick bites of wisdom to empower your financial journey (while keeping it short). Be sure to sign-up below to get these messages in your inbox.
All for now,
Lindsey