In the next part, I want to share with you my quest for money and how it turned from being a rodent on a hamster wheel to a joyful pursuit.
Back in 2011 a friend recommended the book called the 4-hour workweek. It opened my eyes to a new world of less work and more money. I had a full-time job as a scientist, but job security was not a given and I wanted to take responsibility for my financial destiny and learn how to make money instead of being the slave to a monthly salary. There is something about being in control of your destiny that is so attractive. Freedom from having to work and the choice of when and where you do work, I think is one of the highest goals to achieve in life.
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So, I set to work on a number of side hustles; Google Adsense websites which generated pennies per day, affiliate marketing, and product creation. It was a low point in my life, I was working more not less, and for little financial gain.
And to be honest, I struggled.
You see a personality trait of mine, is I want to win and succeed, not being satisfied until I do.
Often at the cost of the three most precious things in life;
Health, wealth, and your relationships.
I have read many self-help books and one comment I read, sticks in my mind from Jim Rohn “be careful about setting some goals because you never know how much effort it may take to achieve”.
Little did I know that this was going to be very true for me.
My main goal at the time was to be a millionaire.
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I had been fully focused on a monetary goal and not really on something that gives me joy. I was willing to sacrifice everything to succeed.
But you see; life and success is a delicate balancing act.
Between being grateful for what you have, desiring what you want, and what you have to do to get it.
So you have to be constantly balancing these to be happy, which is not easy.
I wish I would have committed to creating a business and quit my job to fully focus on this goal, but to be honest, I was not brave enough to do it.
Looking back, I wasted so much time and resources, and if I had just focused on investing and getting aboard the compound interest train, I would have been much closer to my goal.
But regrets and things we perceive to be mistakes are useless, there are only life lessons to be had.
Now, I am now one fifth the way to my goal of achieving millionaire status. It’s taken 10 years to get to this point. I still have the badge in my sights. However, the way I view that badge is very different now.
And that is where we must start our investing and making money enterprise.
Not from the goal we want to achieve, but from the life we want to create.
One of the hardest beliefs, I have had to struggle with is the pursuit of money for happiness.
If I had more money I would be happy.
And to a degree on paper its looks true; money can give the side benefits of what contributes to happiness. Freedom, options, security, material things, giving, etc…
But it does not work that way. Money is neutral, it’s only our thoughts about money that make it into something it is not.
If my story is anything to learn from it is this, when your building something, start from the ground up. Where you are coming from really determines the level of success you can achieve and the ease in which you get it.
My goal was money and at the beginning that did not get me very far. With some realizations about why I wanted more money and through many years of persistence, I found a way.
That's the power of compounding, in the start, it looks like no progress is being made, but once you start the exponential acceleration upwards it takes no time at all.
And that applies to life experience as well as investments!
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In the next part of my story, desperate in 2013, after much wasted time and money, I was searching for an affiliate marketing coach and found an Australian guy from a forum for a skype chat.
It was a strangely philosophical conversation and “He mentioned pursuit of money should never be a goal. But if you do just want money, just trade Forex.”
So that’s what I did next…..
Click here for Part 3
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