We are creatures of habits that over time get automated in our body’s operating system. That is why you drive a car without thinking, ride a bicycle with no mental effort or do the same things before you sleep or immediately after you wake up in the morning.
Once these habits get automated into your subconscious mind, they become second to nature in how you do them or operate in them. Similar habits can be created around any of your human endeavours. That is why I have insisted on setting financial habits or if you may call them rituals around your earning or income cycles until they become automated into your operating system.
This is the only true path to financial freedom and the realization of wealth beyond your wildest dreams. While I have never been wasteful with money at any point in my life, it took me a long while before I made a deliberate effort to set up specific habits around my finances. I have had a straight run on these habits for almost a decade now. Here is what I have learned:
- The most difficult part is making the decision – looking back, I realize the many years and earning opportunities I lost during the era that I handled my finances in a mechanical way. Had I set up my current habits early enough, I estimate my net worth could be at least more than twice where it currently is;
- Starting looks easy until you plunge into the deep waters – most people make great resolutions each beginning of the year and at many points in between the years. Many more get started but lose track and momentum at the first sight of opposition or setbacks. Habits get formed and automated into your system if and only if you make it past these early challenges;
- Seek opinion if need be, listen when necessary, but set your sails based on your own convictions – the will to stay on course comes from within you not from without. Do not attempt to start depending on the goodwill and support of other people around you, no matter how close you may think they are to you;
- Take small steps at a time – for instance, it does not matter how much you save at a time as long as you stick to your saving commitments. If the habit is formed, the will is immortalized in your system and everything else becomes as simple as abcd;
- The momentum you build becomes your greatest motivator -achieving small milestones is a sure guarantee of staying power. Today, I never realize the things I do so naturally that it takes no thinking -it is as natural all attending to biological calls of nature;
- Trust the power of compounding – numbers never lie. We all have to start somewhere, but over time the things we choose to do on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis set us worlds apart in a decade’s time.
- Choose your sails wisely – whether you take action towards immortalizing good financial habits or not, time will pass anyway. Unfortunately, majority of the people only notice the difference when it is too late, and after wasting the greatest advantage anyone can have, that is, the benefit of time.
Note: while any time is a good time to begin, wasted years in bad financial habits can never be recovered in your lifetime. The clock will never ever rewind or wait for you to sort your mess. A day gone is gone forever.