Sacrifice is defined as something given up or lost. What sacrifices have you made as a mother, father, brother, sister, son, or daughter to provide for yourself and your family? What did these sacrifices cost you? Do you feel fulfilled on a day to day basis whenever you find time to reflect on your progress? Or your family’s progress? A large part of the day for most of the lower and middle class is spent working 8-10 hours a day for 5+ days a week. The common dream is to make ends meet, saving up the spare change in hopes of taking a dream vacation one day or have enough to retire by 65 years old. We often come home at the end of the workday exhausted, too tired to spend time with our children (who are spending time at school learning from teachers/kids we don’t know or fully trust) and too occupied with tomorrow’s workday to focus on the happenings of our spouse’s day (who may be dying to talk to you about hopes, expectations, stresses, and dreams). We are exchanging our precious time with our loved ones for dollars. This time is stolen from the people we should invest time, wisdom, and love into most. We are sacrificing an investment into our own legacy because we are investing in the dirty work of others, no matter how nice your nice cubicle or office space is. We trust a market that does not guarantee you a safe job if you are not compliant. We trust a system that does not play by the rules or fight for us. We trust an environment that thrives on our complacency and displaced energy. Our most valuable, finite resource is being spent working for someone else’s dream, accomplishing something that is not fulfilling God’s purpose for us and our family.
How do we stop sacrificing our own fulfillment for a paycheck?
It all depends on how you choose to spend your time. Start by making a conscious choice to strive for your dreams: To spend more time raising your kids; To explore the world with the love of your life; To pursue the fullness of what life, and ultimately what God, has purposed for you? It starts with your mind and how you think about life itself.
Compliance and complacency are two things that are common through all nations under a government that intends to establish order. We strive for comfort, so we listen to what people agree is safe based on the perceived parameters, boundaries, limits, and conditions established by our society. We get a college degree for the purpose of being an employee, diversify our stock portfolio, and stockpile our cash into a savings account and wait. We wait for the time when we don’t have to work anymore when we can sit back and enjoy the things we love to do. I challenge any and everybody to stop waiting. Don’t try to make a living. Make life worth living. Make your life self-sustaining with less hard work, more smart thinking, and abundant fun/fulfillment.
This is a Call to Action: Stop hitting the snooze button dreading the day and sleep well at night. Stop complaining and cherish what you are grateful for every day. Remove anxiety about what people think/expect of you and start staying true to yourself. Create more than you consume.
How?
Commit to navigating throughout life according to your values. Commit to lifelong learning. Commit to constant exploration, discovery, and creation with your family.
The system is forcing us into compliance and complacency through fear of failure. It’s up to us to make an effort to break the cycle by daring to take a chance on what we value. We must trust and believe in our own abilities, skills, and talents (gifts) to serve others. It’s not bad to develop transferable skills in college and in your occupation, but oftentimes people don’t leverage their gifts with an entrepreneurial mindset to develop a big business off of their valuable know-how and network.
People say that it takes money to make money. There’s an additional step that is often forgotten. It takes money to make money make money. Oftentimes people will spend their childhood and young adult lives as a career student. Our taxes pay for students to go through K-12 while administrators & teachers struggle to do what’s best for the student due to making compromises to receive and keep funding. We are then told to figure out what we want to do for the rest of our lives as a career and go to college to end up in debt. Once we finally take a few senior years to fail and get a degree, we stress about getting out of debt and we hamster wheel our way in our careers until we finally pay off SallieMae by the time we’re 40+. We manage our other debts (mortgage, car loans, small business loans, etc.) and liabilities (homes, cars, not-so flourishing small business, etc.) and maybe, just maybe, we can retire 2-3 years earlier than we expected. We expect to survive in an economy that is unpredictably predictable, putting us at risk to an imminent great recession that forces us back to stuffing money into our mattress. There is no cash flow in liquidated assets, especially when they’re exposed to the very real dangers of the natural environment. Make your money LifeProof through intangible assets.
If a great life is highlighted by the healthy relationships that we have, why not develop the relationships that matter most. Everything is relative. However, the people we relate to most are those who share our DNA, blood, our laughs, our family. It only makes sense to invest in your family’s wealth by developing and utilizing our skills and network to attain wealth. When one of us succeeds we all succeed, so why leave our family members to their own devices to figure it all out throughout life. Time well-spent is cherished moments and memories. Time wasted is Time lost to stuffing other’s fat purses. So many of us have so much experience, insight, and wisdom that has yet to be imparted on the people who need it most. When you begin to compound all of that experience, relationships, and intelligence, our family could become an unstoppable force.
Family can equal business. Actually, business is built on the family model. That’s why there are family businesses. I can understand people’s well-founded resistance to this concept due to bad blood. A team of people that gain money through buying and selling goods or services is a business. A family that attains wealth through investing in one another through bridge building, knowledge sharing, and profit-sharing to benefit us all is much more than a business. It has the capacity/potential to become big business. Remove the fear of trust by encouraging responsibility in those you love. Empower your loved ones to grow holistically. If one of us learns how to create something innovative, why not share in the wealth of knowledge. Build each other up instead of build on your own. Expand your interactions beyond a Christmas dinner or a Family Reunion. How about we regularly Unite with Consistency and Intentionality, and profit from it.
We are still on the very brink of the Information Age. In the days of the Digital Era, we can make a smart passive income through online businesses. These businesses do not have to be extensively complicated, but they must be intentionally well-thought-out and calculated for success. This is going to take hard work, but once the content is developed, refined, strategically designed for scalability, the hard work is done. You just need a 1000 true fans that will buy whatever great content you put out next. If your family are the first 10+ true fans, that invest and reinvest in you and your endeavors, it becomes a lot easier to bounce back from any failures that will undoubtedly occur as you learn the ropes.
All it takes for us is to develop a Family Entrepreneurial Network through Design, Engineering, and Strategic Implementation. This Network would capitalize on wealth attainment through financial investment and knowledge-sharing for the sole benefit of each family becoming self-sustaining. Think of each house family as an entity inside of the familial conglomerate. We share and develop skills for market-research, content co-creation, advertisement, and online business creation, and automation. We don’t quit our day jobs, but we start building intangible assets that provide a supplemental income. The more assets (online businesses) you have that serve as passive income, the less you have to worry about your active income (paychecks) paying for the necessities. Then you use your active income to reinvest in your businesses to bolster down your products and increase consumer base. Automate your services so that you’re not spending too much time trying to handle the growth. Let your money work for you and outsource the easy work such as customer service with virtual assistants. Over time, you no longer need an occupation because the conglomerate is making enough passive income. Then we start focusing on things we enjoy and we use our entrepreneurial skills, experiences, and ideas to spread the wealth to our communities. We all have a natural stake in our family. Why not invest and reinvest in the people you love and want to see do their best in life so that we all can win.
Key Terms
Family: Family is what you make it.
Business: Business is the activity of making one’s living or making money by producing or buying and selling goods or services. Simply put, it is any activity or enterprise entered into for profit.
Network: a group or system of interconnected people or things.
Purpose of Education: to develop learners and leaders who will create a better present and future.
Purpose of Life: Exploring, Discovering, and Developing Your Gifts to Create Innovative Ways to Serve Others.
Financial Literacy: Financial literacy is the ability to use knowledge and skills to manage one’s financial resources effectively for lifetime financial security.
Financial Freedom: Financial independence means you have enough wealth to live on without working. Financially independent people have assets that generate income (cash flow) that is at least equal to their expenses. The income you earn without having to work a job is commonly referred to as “passive income”.
Concept of Wealth: Wealth is not the same thing as money. Wealth is not measured by the size of income. Wealth is measured in time. Wealth is the ability to survive so many numbers of days forward. Ask yourself, “If I stop working today, how long could I survive financially?” Your
answer is equal to your wealth at this moment. Wealth is measured by the richness of your life experience today plus the number of days into the future that you have the capacity to continue living at that level of experience. One reason the rich get richer is that the rich work for a different kind of money. They don’t work to generate income—they work to build wealth.
Net worth: net worth refers to the value of assets owned minus the value of liabilities owed at a point in time.
Assets: Anything tangible or intangible that can be owned or controlled to produce value and that is held by a company to produce positive economic value is an asset. Simply stated, assets represent the value of ownership that can be converted into cash (although cash itself is also considered an asset). One can classify assets into two major asset classes: tangible assets and intangible assets.
Liabilities: Any type of borrowing from persons or banks for improving a business or personal income that is payable during a short or long time;
A duty or responsibility to others that entails settlement by future transfer or use of assets, provision of services, or other transaction yielding an economic benefit, at a specified or determinable date, on the occurrence of a specified event, or on-demand;
A duty or responsibility that obligates the entity to another, leaving it little or no discretion to avoid settlement;
A transaction or event obligating the entity that has already occurred.