If you’re already fat or if you’ve already lost your money, then there’s nothing here for you today.
Just move along, fat, money-losing people: there’s nothing to see here (overly harsh?). Today, I’m writing to those who haven’t yet made the big mistakes. I’m talking about the things I’ve learned from making them myself.
I’ve been fat, and I’ve lost money. I know of what I speak.
There are two rules I’ve learned the hard way. For some reason, they provide some sense of clarity for me. Maybe they’ll be helpful to you (doubtful, I know, but you’ve read this far anyway, so…).
The Rules
- Don’t get fat.
- Don’t lose money.
Once you’re fat, it’s incredibly hard to lose the weight.
Once you’ve lost money, it’s incredibly hard to get it back.
Two Stories
1. I went on my honeymoon back in 1990. We went to Mosquito Island, which is tucked in right next to Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands. The resort had 10 rooms on a private island. The food was amazing. I gained seven pounds in about a week. I’m not even sure how that’s possible.
2. I did a huge amount of advertising for my practice in a single year back in the late 1990s. In one six-month period, I lost $200,000. I don’t mean the business lost money. I mean I started the year with $200,000 more in my pocket than I had six months later. The money was gone.
I gained the weight in about seven days. I lost the money in about six months.
How long did it take to lose the weight? How long did it take to save back the money lost?
It takes way, way, way longer to lose the weight than to gain the weight. It takes way, way, way longer to save the money than to spend it.
Why? I don’t know. I’m not good at math, and this whole area is logically troubling for me. It seems like you should be able to lose weight as fast as you gain it. It seems like you should be able to save money as fast as you spend it.
But the world doesn’t work like it should. It simply takes much longer to lose weight than to gain it and longer still to save back the money you’ve lost. It’s some kind of larger, cosmic force we can’t control.
Bottom line: you can gain weight instantly and spend months trying to lose it. You can lose money instantly and take years to earn it back.
So What Do You Do?
What’s the actionable takeaway for today?
I refer you back to the rules. Follow rule number one and rule number two, and you won’t have to lose weight or have to save extra money.
I can hear you now: “Thanks, Rosen, for that stupid as crap advice,” or, “Good stuff, Mr. Obvious.” Hey, no one forced you to read this far, right? Seriously, though, you’re put in situations each day where you face the prospect of getting fat or losing money (or saying the wrong thing, taking the wrong path, or doing a long list of other things that take forever to repair).
Preventing the problem is dramatically easier than solving the problem after it occurs.
Making the right choices now gives you the freedom to make additional right choices later. Making the wrong choices puts you in a place where you’ve got to spend all your time and energy repairing, redoing, and correcting. Little progress comes when you’re expending most of your energy recovering from your prior bad decisions. Each little bad choice you make adds up—big time—and takes exponentially more energy to fix than it took to inflict the damage.
Follow the rules. That’s the best course of action. That is all.
