Building Your Rich Life

I’m in the process of designing “my rich life”, as Ramit Sethi describes it. Hoping to attain financial freedom through starting my own business and earning passive income. A rich life doesn’t necessarily mean driving the newest sports car, owning a sprawling villa in five countries, and only buying luxury clothes.

A rich life is whatever you want it to be and whatever suits your dreams. This could be having location freedom and travelling wherever in the world you want in the drop of a hat. Being able to order whatever you want on a restaurant menu, donating to your favourite charity, even being able to be a stay at home parent to raise your children.

Step one is figuring out what this means to you. Where do you want to be? What do you want to do and with who? How much money do you want to make? Where do you want to live? Be specific. Get into the details. Paint the picture in your mind, write it down. Even better, create a vision board - Canva is a good resource. Once you’ve figured this out, you’ll have the motivation to pursue these dreams.

It’s a Mental Game

Through my preliminary research in finding out how to start my own business. It turns out that this is not only a physical, but also a mental game. The roadblocks of: “how do I know if I’ve got the right idea?”, “where do I start?”, “what if I fail?”, and the worst of all “I don’t think I can do it” will all take you down if you’re not proactively working against them.

The mental game is one I’ve fallen prey to on more than one occasion. The traits that can act as a good counterattack against these is building consistency and just implementing. Without these skills, even the best idea will only ever see the light of day by being jotted on your phone or scribbled on a notepad.

Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither was any other great company. It takes a considerable amount of effort to be the next Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, or even that entrepreneur friend or family member who’s raking in the cash.

James Clear discusses how being just 1% better every day can help you get to that magic 37% better by the end of the year. So start here - read a book on how to build a business, listen to podcasts on the same, join a network of like-minded people. Just start.

The Crossroad Between Business and Investing

I’ve been reading Invested by Danielle Town, and it seems that investing in the stock market can also teach you a good deal about business. Now I’m no investing guru, but the S&P 500 offers on average 7% a year, beating yearly inflation by about 4%, decent enough.

This doesn’t take much work to understand why investing in 500 of the biggest American Companies and spreading your risk across different industries is a good idea in the long-term. Automating your weekly or monthly investments directly to this index fund makes life even easier. But when deciding to invest in individual stocks, the level of research, dedication, and industry knowledge increases tenfold.

Knowing which industries I should even start investing in boiled down to also knowing which industries I could start my business. This is what I’ve come across.

Exercise

Draw a four circle Venn diagram and ask yourself these questions:

1. What am I good at (talent)?

2. What am I enthusiastic about (passions)?

3. Where do I make money (job)?

4. What do I know that people will pay me for (skills)?

See Figure 1 for mine.

Next, determine how many times the topics repeat:

1: Psychology/coaching, nutrition, meditation, skin care, investing, athleticism, self-awareness;

2: Personal development, travel, food;

3: Waste management;

4: None.

Results

Realistically, having earned my Masters in Environmental Engineering and having 2+ years in Waste Management, a sector I actually love, would make the most sense for me to start a business in. I could always find ways to utilise my passion for personal development, travel, and food in some way. But it would take a lot more effort and starting from scratch to attain the same level of where I’m at in Waste Management.

Incidentally, remove the fourth circle “What do I know that people will pay me for (skills)?” and the remaining three circles will give you an idea about what industries to start researching to invest in. Nifty, right?

If you want to start over for whatever reason - you hate your job, you want to earn more money, build new skills, whatever it is. This is a starting point to at least give some insight into the next step.