Not living your life until you reach a goal.....

If you want to make a lot of money your going to have to work quite a bit. Very few people built successful companies without putting in very long hours and working hard.

But thats hardly a reason why you can't enjoy life. You can't let work takeover your life, even though you work alot you need to have family/you time.

Besides building your business shouldn't feel like work. I enjoy what I do, I have no problem going in on a Sunday morning and digging a foundation or doing something else. But on the flip side if their is something I want to go to on say a Wednesday I do.

Jon,
My question here is, had you not put in the hard years, would you have the finanicial rewards you have today? As an entrepreneurial shut in, did you learn so much in that condensed period of your life that you now can use that knowledge to make your life easier?

id say his response will be yes. I do things but, id rather be focusing on reaching something i think about 24,7 not hanging around with people watching tv. This attitude has had me for about 4 years, i have still had plenty of good times, but for the last 4 years even being out day to day you start realizing things you did not before. When you are reading about businesses, you take it out and apply to situations all day and evaluate how it would work out.

When you drive by an empty lot for $400,000 and you were reading last week about that carwash business and you say to yourself.
400,000 + 250k= 650k
monthly bills = X
this area contains Y amount of people
Z of them have $35,000 cars and up
The other carwash said they were doing 40 cars a day at avr. $20 bucks= 800 day
blah blah blah

I have had alot of this going on for a while now, everything im doing i apply a strategy to it, its prob not normal but i feel it helps ALOT. You want to rent a spot to open a burger place..im going to know more about how much PSF the rent it then the guy who will actually do it. You want to buy property to build homes... I know better than them what the avr price is of the property...and how much the homes will cost, etc, etc.
This may not help tomorrow, but because of this i will never get a bad deal in my life..i will never get ripped off in life.. and i will never make a business decision without comparing it to many many other models/businesses. This is huge to me.

Figure if you do these things the numbers you apply have to be real so eventually you are just a business machine.
I can look at alot of businesses, and get pretty close just by looking and give you a close overhead, gross, and net....this does not go for internet ...hahaha way beyond me.

Well, there is some truth to that. It's going to be tough to build passive income or wealth without taking action.

But, the time it takes to reach a goal is often determined by how much time is available. If I had a more balanced approach to life, I may have achieved the same results by working fewer hours each day, just by being more efficient in my thinking.

If I had to name the factors that have held me back the most they would be:

1.) being smart - most of the time it results in trying to impress rather than being profitable.

2.) being willing to work really hard - if you are lazy, you'll invent more efficient ways to get the same things accomplished.

3.) being a perfectionist - this is the biggest, it is simply fear of criticism, all successful people must be able to face criticism and naysayers.

4.) limited thinking - not realizing that you can have anything you want in life if you set your mind and purpose to it.

In summary, we set our own rules. If you believe you need to work 16 hours a day to be successful, then you will. If you believe that you can have all the money you need to have great life and golf all day, while working a few hours a week... well that is certainly possible too.

As my grandpa used to always say, "if a bullfrog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass so much".

I agree, that I now see many, many things in my life that could have been done better, smarter, and more efficiently. But we also need to realize those experiences are what made us into who we are today and will continue to drive us into the future. There are lots of if-thens in life, but fretting over them is pointless.

I BET THAT THIS IS BECAUSE OF THE FORMER YEARS OF THAT HARD WORK!

"...did you learn so much in that condensed period of your life that you now can use that knowledge to make your life easier?"

That is a fundamental (if not THE fundamental) point of human existence.

Thanx a mil for this link. It was very interesting to read both opinions, guy's and wife's!

Here is my 2 cents worth.

It sounds like you're stuck in a rut. You should consider changing your entire outlook/mindset about work and living your life. To forgo any happiness or personal time just so you can eek out that extra 2 hours of work is ultimately going to 1: burn you out; 2: frustrate you to the point that you want to quit because you're not meeting your unrealistic timeline; and burn up any personal relationships (friends and family)due to not maintaining a healthy work/life balance.

You can have a blend of both. Try this for awhile and tell me what you think. Treat each day as if it's Saturday (my favorite day of the week). Envision each day as if it's Saturday, typically a day for recreation and life pursuits. Once you have that in your mind, envision incorporating work in between your personal time. In order to have balance you have to set time frames like from this time to that time, I'm going to work. Then set time aside EVERY DAY to do something you like. Pretend it's Saturday every week. The trick here though is that you may decrease your overall work hours and that's good because now you focus QUALITY not QUANTITY. The hours you do work are going to make you focus more so can you can accomplish what you would spend an entire day doing in a matter of hours.

You will also get to maintain your sanity. Working all the time leads to burnout. I don't care what anyone says, that's a fact. At that point you are just simply wasting time (and your life). Some of my best business ideas come during times when I'm not working. I simply jot them down and then when I am working, I implement those ideas.

So to recap, the key is mindset and some time management. Acting as if you've already arrived aligns yourself to have your goals and dreams to come true. Envision what you truly want to have as a life and then start doing that, albeit on a smaller scale in the beginning.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.