I remember the moment clear as if it were yesterday. My wife and I going over our financial picture, looking at the gap in our ages (8 years BTW), and another newborn in the house. We certainly were not getting ahead financially, and with retirement looming in the far distance, the ‘math’ just wasn’t adding up. We both grew up ‘poor’, not destitute, but certainly not what we would consider to be ‘well off’. Were we starving? Oh hell no! But we knew who amongst our friends who had money, and what friends led a ‘comfortable’ lifestyle. Money was important. We needed to do something now if we both going to not only climb out of the current situation, but also retire at relatively the same time.
We bantered about the idea of second jobs, but with two people already climbing the corporate ladder, and two kids in the house, that seemed like a waste of the only precious resource we had, time. As well, climbing the corporate ladder as a Gen X was like trying to pierce the ‘Maginot Line’ riding a bicycle; you run smack into Baby Boomers who held the positions you wanted, refuse to retire, and quite honestly you can’t stand, ( it was the arrogance if you must know Boomers, but I must admit, the experience you imparted was invaluable).
That’s when I read a book by Felix Dennis entitled, ‘How To Get Rich’. This book literally changed my life, not so much as a motivating tool, but rather from a value perspective. The Entrepreneur was always there, even as a child with my first ‘Kool-Aid’ stand. What Felix’s book did, was chip away the marble to discover the Statute of David lying beneath. It was the hammer. It expressed the values which I subscribed to; it aligned my stars. The light bulb would never be turned to ‘off’ again. But as Jim Carrey famously said, ‘you can’t just want to do more and then go eat a sandwich’, (I paraphrase). But where to go from there?
