Financial Security

For me being financially secure is on the very top of my list for career goals. I am sure that it is also on the top of many other people's list too. To me this seems like such an unreachable goal, one that will take me my whole life to complete. Is there another way? The answer is yes. In class yesterday we have a guest speaker come and share his insights about how he has become financially secure. He said that the only way to do this is to make the money work for you and not you working for money.

That is achieved by thinking like an investor. It's not just about saving the money that you make, but investing it so that you get a return on the money you have. He recommended a few books to read to start the process of thinking like an investor. Here are a few that I am going to start reading: Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki; The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson; and The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason.

How will you measure your life?

That is the great question of life...how will we measure our success, our happiness, our impact in this world? Do we use a measuring tape? A scale? How? The answers can only come from deep inside each one of us. We must recognize what we want most in this life and them create a vision that we can work towards every day. A wise entrepreneur and professor named Clayton Christiansen always taught his students to ask themselves three questions: How can I be sure I'll be happy in my career? How can I be sure how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? How can I be sure I will stay out of jail?

Those seem quite simple, but Dr. Christiansen expounds upon them in an address recorded in the Harvard Business Review. I believe that if we have a vision, attainable long and short term goals, and set standards that we will never deviate from we will find value in life. We will at the end of our lives know exactly what that value is. We will know how to measure our life. A very successful entrepreneur named Corey Bell, President of Trifusion, said that "the richest place in the world is the grave yard, because it is full of people who die with dreams not fulfilled, businesses not build, and love not found." That made me realize that the only person that will be disappointed that any of those dreams were not met will be the individual. The only one holding us back from making them reality is ourselves. This section in class really made me dig deep inside myself and confront what is was that was holding me back from making my dreams come true.