Quality Living is in the Moment

With age, and the experience of achieving great success, it has become glaringly clear that wealth, power, status, fame, possessions, etc. do not, by themselves, add anything significant to the actual quality of our lives. Yes, I find having wealth is nice and allows me to do many wonderful things like travel a great deal. I do thoroughly enjoy many of my physical possessions, like my house and all the bits and pieces my wife has brought in to make it a home. These things, however, are not how I measure how well I live.

Most of what makes a life worth living cannot be bought or collected. They can only be found in the experiences you have, what you give to others, what you accept, and how you choose to look at the world. It’s those many small steps that make up the journey that determine the true importance of the destination, not the destination itself.

If your ‘destination’ is great wealth, gaining that wealth will only be important if you’ve lived well, struggled often, and celebrated your small successes along the way. This is why lottery winners almost always end up unhappy. There is no journey, no sense of success, and no memories that make up the path to their wealth. The money just becomes a condition of their life, not something that engages their sense of personal achievement.

This idea brings together much of what I’ve been talking about these past few weeks — that your quality of life is made up of what you experience in the great right now. You want to live in the moment and choose to be happy or your life will be made of many disappointing moments, making the whole of your life disappointing as well.

Also, don’t forget to look for joy in the wonderful act of giving to others. Generous, kind acts will infuse your life with the kind of treasures that you could never buy or fabricate — they can only be given. When you give, you’ll often find that even more is given back to you.

Go ahead. Go for the wealth and the status and whatever else you dream of. Just remember to live a quality life along the way, and keep up your passion for living, not just for the future life you’re after.

Be One of the Smart Ones

 

So, in last week’s post I told you a bit about the lady in Paris that suddenly found out one of the paintings in her house, one that she thought was just an average painting (the one you see above), was extremely valuable and it went on to sell for $26 million dollars!  Wow, what a shock that must have been for her! But have you read that many people who all of a sudden win the lottery or suddenly come into a huge fortune blow the money in short order or are scammed out of it? The problem is that most of the time, people who haven’t earned the money over time are clueless and just don’t know how to handle it. Most of these people start spending it like crazy and or they are taken to the cleaners by scam artist.

Compare that overnight super-rich person to a person who has worked for years and saved every extra dollar they could. The smart ones don’t go out and buy a brand-new car that will immediately drop in value. The smart ones buy a used car and put whatever extra money they have into savings. Then they slowly build up enough money to buy an asset that goes up in value and, if they’re really smart, when they sell that asset at a profit, they reinvest that profit in another appreciating asset. Over the years, those small savings and investments can grow into a fortune.  And if you have made your money that way, then you most likely won’t be like those who suddenly came into big money and spent it all or got scammed out of it.

It will be very interesting to try to follow the Paris lady and see if she goes crazy with her money, following the typical lottery winners. Please, Paris lady, be cautious and wise with that $26 million. Don’t put your money with someone else who makes promises of huge returns.

Years ago, I met a guy who told me that he could give me a 10% return, per month, on my money, guaranteed! Remember the old saying, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” I had a friend who had invested about $300,000 dollars with this guy who said it was going to get a great return and guaranteed it. I was pretty darn sure it would not be even close to that. And yes, my friend lost his entire investment, and the bad guy in now serving time in prison. Not that him being in prison gives my friend any of his money back.

So, I sure hope you see the huge benefit of saving all the dollars you can and investing them wisely. Do the research carefully. It’s my advice and experience that you should invest your savings in income producing real estate. It almost always goes up in value and even if the appreciation is very slow, if you have purchased wisely, you will have tenants paying off the mortgage. That’s what the smart ones do!

 

Our Changes in Fortune

Wow and double wow! I never expected the huge and heartfelt response I received after my closing comment on my last week’s blog, asking people to send their best wishes and love to little 2-year-old Kate who had just been diagnosed with leukemia. So, at minimum I want to take time right now to give a HUGE THANKS to all you beautiful, wonderful people who cared enough to take time to send your heartfelt wishes to little Kate and her family. That means so much to me, her parents, the rest of the family, and to little Kate and her twin sister Ellie. I’m thinking that Kate and her twin sister could feel the love and the caring that was sent to them. I sure could!

We all know that life has its big bumps, surprises, and setbacks. And, yes, it also has many wonderful, fun, exciting, and pleasurable moments as well. It behooves all of us to constantly remember to live in the great “right now” moment. I’ve written a lot about this previously and most people know they should try to live more in the “now moments” and not spend too much time worrying about the future or beating themselves up for the past mistakes and or bad decisions. But, if you are like me, you have to keep reminding yourself to think more in the “now”. That kind of thinking can be very critical for our mental and emotional health and our great enjoyment of life. Meditation can help with this. Meditation works because, if you do it right, you truly are living in the moment!

Knowing all this and preaching it to others, I still wake up worrying about what I need to get done in the immediate or not too distant future as well as fretting a bit over what I missed out on doing yesterday. I have noticed, however, if I take time to write down my next day’s plans and actions the night before I go to sleep, I usually wake up much more likely to just get out of bed and get going on my to do list. My mind seems to be so much clearer and my thoughts are much more positive in the “now moment”.  Of course, we all need to think about the future and make plans, much of which is very fun and exciting like when planning a trip to Disneyland with the kids, or a vacation to Europe, etc. It’s the same with the past – we enjoy taking time (but not too often) to relive our great experiences and the really memorable moments in our life.

Talking about great moments in time… did you read about the older lady in Paris that recently discovered that one of the paintings she had hanging on her walls — one that she wasn’t even particularly wild about — was very, very rare? She sold it for a shocking $26 million dollars. I sure hope she’s not like so many jackpot and lottery winners that have never had a ton of money. So many of them have lost everything years later, making the news again because, not knowing how to handle tons of money, they spent it all and/or were scammed out of it. Whether fortune smiles on us or we have a ton of bad luck thrown at us, we need to learn how to handle our changes in fortune. I want to talk a bit next week about the smarter ways to handle money when good fortune comes your way.