Oh no, here we go again.
Another year is ending, which means we must all rush to assess the last 12 months of our lives, while planning for 12 better ones by some arbitrary deadline – 1/1. Here’s an easy template with 6 questions, go.
Does that sound fun to anyone, anywhere?
Tomorrow morning you will wake to 10,000 list of the 10 things to make you…better, richer, smarter, skinnier, or WHATEVER in 2018. These lists will come at you as blogs, NPR programs, New York Times articles and party conversations. Those smarmy resolutions will tug at your ego, smirk at your waistline, question your willpower and dare you to fail. Which you will, if you’re part of the 90% who fail by February 1st each year.
I suggest this year you stop all the scurrying about and think of your life for a moment. Not as a project or list or problem, but as a gift. Albert Einstein taught at Princeton in the 1940’s and 1950’s. There are stories of him, finding a conversation or idea particularly interesting, simply wandering off to a corner muttering “excuse me, I must for a moment think”. We don’t often do that anymore. Ideas, like the days in our lives, are gifts.
I challenge your need for a “how to DO” list this new year. What you really need is a “how to THINK” list. Change your investing paradigm. Acknowledge your shortcomings, biases and blind spots. Make happiness, personal happiness, your goal, rather than money or material things. Your wealthfulness is a palette of friends, family, health, happiness and, yes, money that you can use to paint your life’s portrait. This is my simple message; this is my book.