by: Cameron MacKenzie
By the end of the summer here, I’ve got a few extra pounds to lose. In truth I’ve always had a few extra pounds to lose. I try to stay in shape and try to eat right but I gotta be honest--I love IPAs. The real big ones with the ridiculous alcohol percentages. I don’t need more than two but two go a long way, and then you have the beers and so you want the fries and etc. etc. In essence, no matter how much effort I put in otherwise, I’ve always had, let’s say, about 10-15 pounds I could stand to drop. I move within that weight range, and have moved in it for over a decade, never really cracking the top of it but never really breaking through the floor either. And so, despite what I may tell myself and my friends and my family and my wife, I’ve got an equilibrium that I’m not really willing to disrupt. Because it can be disrupted, for sure, I’m just not willing to do it, because that would take a lifestyle change.
I’ve got a friend who recently lost fifty pounds. FIFTY. And he looks great. Like a whole different person. His face is different, his walk is different, his outlook on life is different. He is, and I think he’d agree with this assessment, a better person without those fifty pounds. Now, he had fifty to lose, no question, but he had, like me, been in the same rut since about college. What’s different is that my friend did something I’m not willing to do. He got religious about his workouts, and he completely changed the way he ate. He’s not monitoring the brewery message boards anymore, he’s trying to figure out the best way to cook quinoa. I’ve had his quinoa, and it’s pretty good. For quinoa. But watching him change his life has made me slowly (very slowly), start to rethink some things.
It’s so easy to underestimate what’s normal. Normal is what we’ve always done, or what our friends do, what our family does--what the people on TV do or hosts of our favorite podcasts do. And I’m not here to knock normal--sometimes it’s very sensible--but what I am trying to call attention to are the ruts we fall into when we’re not even looking.
Are you really where you want to be? Are you really on target to get the things that you want? Are you really comfortable with what you’re achieving, or is there a persistent discrepancy between what you want, and what you get? When you look at your income, your savings, your investments, your debt: are you hitting your targets, or do you keep coming up just a little bit short again and again?
If you’re like me with those 10 or 15 pounds, you’re thinking you don’t need to do anything radical or painful or significantly different, you just need a little tweak here and there--a nice easy little life hack--and you’ll be on the road to unmitigated success.
But how many years are going to go by before you look back and say if I’d only really taken the time, and the effort, to get where I think I should be, I’d be in a much better position today? Are you comfortable saying that at 65? At 70? If not, and you shouldn’t be, what steps do you need to take now?
The steps, in all honesty, are simple. There’s no big secrets. All you need is to do is start to think a little differently. It sounds easy, but in truth it’s remarkably difficult. It’s difficult to cut back on credit, on spending, and put actual effort toward saving, investing, and making sure the money goes in the right places. IPAs are tastier than quinoa, for sure, but I’ve had a lot of IPAs, and I’ve started to ask myself how many more I really need.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of SagePoint Financial, Inc.