What would you do? What would you do? If you knew that you couldn’t fail? What would you do? If you knew that you couldn’t fail? I’ve always been interested in that one. Because it doesn’t really resonate with me. And now that I’m thinking about that, I just wonder, is it that I’m not worried about failing. And therefore, fear of failure is not stopping me or holding me back from pursuing or doing the things that I’m interested in doing. And perhaps, that most people or other people are, in fact, mortified of failure, really nervous about it, and they’re not interested in experiencing it. Therefore, it keeps them from taking that first step, or from exploring or taking action or whatever it might be. That’s interesting. You know, failure is that is a feature of, of life. And it’s a feature of life in every aspect of life. It’s life is full of failure, life is full of of setbacks, and pain and suffering. It is what the idea or the practice of Buddhism is based on is the cessation of suffering in life. Certainly, in athletics, if you have an athletic background, you probably didn’t win every, every game, or every point, or whatever it is, whatever small increment within the larger game that you’re playing, I’m sure that you didn’t win that in relationships. You certainly didn’t get a yes, every time you asked somebody out for a date, or maybe you did, and business and everything, in different conversations, every interaction with human beings, we have the opportunity to screw things up and to put our foot in our mouth and say the wrong thing. So what is it about about failure that we’re so worried about, it just causes us to do nothing and take no action, which really locks in failure that locks in the status quo, or it locks in? Just keep getting what you don’t necessarily want. Which that’s been very much on my mind as of late. Now, the reality that if I’m not able to do it exactly the way I want it to, I’m just not going to do at all. And people, we do have a tendency to throw the baby out the bathwater, when things don’t go totally our way to stops us from doing it. So what would you do if you knew that you couldn’t fail if it was going to work out perfectly? And maybe it’s just not a fear of failure? Maybe it’s just I don’t want to waste my time if I know it’s not going to work out. I’m sure that everybody’s got a little bit of a different answer that but I’d be really fascinated to hear what you think about that. What do you think about failure? Do you fear it? Worried about it? There’s a cross your mind? How do you deal with it? All that kind of stuff? So I am not a fortune teller. I cannot communicate with spirits in the afterlife. I have no connection to the metaverse or any multiverses. I know versus two songs. There’s a dad joke for you. But definitely can’t see the future. Or can I can I see the future? A lot of ways I think that I can actually see the future. Even though I don’t have a crystal ball. I do not have any psychic or spiritual abilities separate or different than yours. But I make goals. I’ve made plans and service of those goals. And I’ve taken action to realize those goals. And in so doing every time I do that, I am looking into the future, specifically, my family’s future my future. While it’s true that I’m never going to know the total situation, the whole story in advance as I am making my plans. That’s that’s not possible. But wouldn’t it be cool? If you could know some of it? You could know some of what was going to happen the future? What parts of your life do you think are knowable? Are there any parts of your life that are knowable? If there were, would you want to know if you could know everything? If you could know how it was all going to play out? Would you want that if we were in fact if we didn’t have freewill if it was just a deterministic life that we’re living. We’re living in some kind of a simulation. Do you want to know how it’s going to end? So I don’t know. I think I definitely would not. I think that as much of a cliche as it is like is a journey not a destination. So I’m not interested in going through the motions, I’m more of a choose your own adventure kind of a person. I’m interested in choosing and making choices when I do come to forks in the road, or Option A, B, or C, which 1am I going to choose and trying to make good decisions based on my long term needs and my short term needs and my breadth of my needs, and all those kinds of things. So if you could know, how much would you want? Well, in terms of money and personal finances, that’s one where I think I’d like to know about as much as I possibly can. I don’t think that most people are as attuned or that’s the wrong word. They don’t spend as much time thinking about money as I do, which I think is a good thing. Maybe you do, maybe you work in money. And it’s it is your vocation or your career. But I think that most people don’t. That being said, I do not want a lot of mystery around my finances, I’m interested in knowing as close as I can, how it’s all going to work out. And that helps me to control the controllables I prefer a little less mystery and more certainty, certainty over mystery is an attractive thing. But what are those controllables when it comes to our money? Well, how much you earn, that’s within your control how much money you spent, how much you save, how much you invest, how much you give, the kinds of things that you buy. So the price of things that you are buying, or renting and the kind of car that you’re buying, kind of house you live in, in where you’re going on vacations, that kind of restaurants, you’re going to all these things are within your control, what’s out of your control, certainly getting sick, getting in some kind of accident dying before you’re supposed to the stock market, these things are out of your control. The actions of the companies that we invest in, most of those are out of our control. But for a lot of it much of life on a money stuff, we have influence over it. And there’s certainly causal causal relationships at play, I know if I do this is the result that I’m going to get. If I defer 15% of my income into my 401k and get a rate of return of x, I’ll likely have Y accumulated at time of retirement age. Okay, good enough. On the other hand, if I defer 3%, all of a heck of a lot less. So this is a way to see into the future, for sure. And you think about if you feel like you’re stressed out, feel like you’re suffering from anxiety, as I know a lot of people are. Now what is stress, it is feeling anxious over things that you have no control over. So if you don’t have a plan for your finances, and you find yourself feeling kind of anxious, I don’t think you need to look a lot further and think you solved the mystery that you got your finger right on it, you just are flying completely blind, you have no idea what you’re doing financially, you have no idea where you’re going to end up. So terms of retirement, it’s also true for saving for the down payment on a house saving for your children’s education. While I certainly have no idea what that’s going to look like, when my kids are ready to go to secondary education, they’ll at least have some money saved up for it. Now, when it costs $10 million a year, they’re probably in trouble. Hopefully, they’ll have some kind of scholarship of some kind. God knows what that’ll be, too. You get the idea. So there’s a lot of things that we can see into the future on or put some control over. So why not do it? Or not make plans for thanks. The benefit is less worry, more certainty, resulting in a sense of just right, which I think is kind of a feeling of contentment. And that is a good thing. There’s lots of ways to be exciting and have excitement in your life. Why are we making money that way? So why not do it? Why not make plans? Why not try and live the life that you are that you want? As you know, I’m fond of saying that the only way to live how you want is to know how you want to live. And that’s because most of us have no keen idea. No idea. Sure. Got passing ideas I want I’d like to be doing here in the next couple of hours, or next week or you know, next quarter. But too few of us have actually sat down thought about it and put pen to paper. Like it’s like 3% of Americans have written down goals. So that’s not very many fewer still have have taken action on that vision that they want have made plans and begin to execute on those plans. You literally see human superpower can imagine any future you want, then get to work on bringing that desired future into your current reality. Too easy to do. It’s too easy.

Maybe that’s that? Maybe this is just too easy. And we need to make things a little harder on us. Or it could be you know what if this just doesn’t work Whenever it doesn’t work, I was talking about the beginning. Who, what if I fail? On if I come up short? What if I fail catastrophically? What will people say about me? What will they think about me? I think now we’re getting a little warmer. But let’s go ahead and start just moving into it trying to project into the future. No, you don’t, you don’t want to do that. It’s bad advice. So what if it doesn’t work? I think that I know. I know that life is not a game of perfect. And it ought not be treated as a game of perfect. Just life is what it is. It’s never going to go exactly the way that you want it to. That conversation you’re going to have with so and so later, it’s not going to go exactly the way you want. business deal, your workout session, your game of pickleball, it’s not going to go exactly the way you want, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. In fact, that’s how you do everything is just a little bit at a time. But I can’t go all in. I can’t spend all my time on this thing. I’m just not going to do it. Okay. All right, well, you’re selling yourself short, we do little things. And we do things, we can do things at the same time, it’s possible to, to be doing multiple things at the same time, you’re probably doing that now. Why not be pursuing the things you really want a little bit at a time, even if you can’t dedicate 100% of your attention, or time or energy or money, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be doing 10% of it. So there was this article in the Wall Street Journal, talking about preparing for retirement. And the idea was that it was a husband and a wife and the person was an editor at The Wall Street Journal for many years now. He’s been retired, they’ve been retired for some years. And it was kind of a cool piece. Talking about what has gone right, what they thought they were going into with retirement. And so some of the highlights kind of give you the highlights were that we got these things we got right, which were working and preparing decades in advance from a saving and investing standpoint. So that’s an obvious one. But not enough of us to doing that. Even if it’s just a little book get started. They felt like they were successful in working out their health insurance options, they were proactive in researching and understanding. And how is our current plan going to measure up or be the same or be totally different than when we have when we go into Medicare. So that was good. They were happy with where they stayed, they considered moving. But they decided to stay because they had community that was a winner. They felt like it was a winner a win to save up travel funds, knowing that that that was something that they really wanted to do was to be able to travel consistently. From a misstep standpoint that talked about how, from their perspective, it was a mistake not engage in a financial planner earlier that they did it within a year before they actually retired, they felt like they’re probably made some mistakes and left some things on the table, just you just don’t know what you don’t know. They talked about how they didn’t necessarily have a plan between trips. So these folks, travelers, they like to take month long trips that plan for it. But that they felt sort of out of sorts in the time in between going on their next trip. So I thought that that was a pretty interesting thing. And so that was kind of the bulk of it just got me thinking about a lot of these things got me thinking about planning ahead, the importance of that. And then one of the big things that is in the ether and making the rounds, Warren Buffett, at the I believe it was the annual meeting for Berkshire Hathaway. He those are famous. There, they’re well attended. And he always has something really, really wise to say. And I know that you can always glean something from Warren has to think or say so. But his advice was ask yourself who would who you’d want to spend the last day of your life with and then meet with them as often as you can. So there you go. It’s kind of like the idea of you can have any life you want. You’re worthy of it, you’re deserving of it, but you’re not entitled to it. This stuff takes work. It takes planning to think that it’s just going to work out the way that you want it to is a losing plan. It’s a losing proposition. Because what’s going to happen is you’re going to get to the place that you don’t want to be and then you’re going to talk yourself into it. You’re going to rationalize why it is you’re here, wherever here is and for you. It could be The place that you don’t want to be. And that’s not a situation that I want to find myself in. And it’s not a situation that I want you to find yourself in. We’re looking to the future. Warren Buffett is approaching 100 years old. We lost Charlie Munger a year or two ago, we lost Daniel Kahneman this year, you’re gonna die. Warren Buffett is just closer to that any of her husband is closer to it than I am probably closer to it than you are. But let’s take his advice. Let’s take the advice of those people from the Wall Street Journal article that was talking about what worked and what didn’t, now that they’re actually retired. Figure out what you want your life to look like, get to work on bringing to life, some of it just a little bit at a time. I know you can’t do all of it. It’s not going to work out exactly the way you want. Maybe you’re going to fail, maybe you’re going to fill up failed catastrophically. But it’s all about thinking about what you want making plans and executing on those plans, getting out there and making it happen. So think about I encourage you, I submit that it’s a good thing for you to think about what a perfect day looks like for you. Where are you? Who are you with? What are you doing? And work to bring that day to life however you can. And whenever you can. Even if it’s just a little bit at a time, a little bit on a weekend. Maybe you can work in a little bit every day. Think about that. Just because you can’t do it all the time doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try and do some of it all the time. The only way to live how you want us to know how you want to live. You’re perfectly capable of doing this. You probably have plenty of time to do it. We don’t have any time to waste. So we got to get to work. Finally friendly reminder. It’s never going to be anybody more interested in your financial success than you are. So act accordingly.