Do I have a hum dinger for you today? So I was talking with a client who admittedly had gotten really comfortable, and this is something that happens in life and this happens also. If you look at any wirehouse, you walk into any financial advisory firm, I don’t want to mention any names, I really don’t. I’m not picking on anybody, but this is what happens. There’s growth in the first anywhere, 2, 3, 4, 5 years, and then they plateau out and they kind of service their book and there’s not a lot of growth and they get comfortable. They can pay their bills, they can raise their family, they can do that, but they don’t. They’ll take referrals, they’ll be attrition. Some will die, some will move. Maybe it’ll be because of bad service. It oftentimes isn’t because of bad results. It’s oftentimes because of bad service or double talk.
I know that community pretty well, but it’s gotten so bad that even if they’re going to the office, if you walk in the office and kind of take a stroll around just to get a tour, you’re going to see most folks sitting around watching tv. There are times of course, when they’re on the phone servicing their clients asking this and that, doing paperwork, but they farm that out. And so the decision makers are kind of coasting, and that’s a tough spot to be because you can’t really make any growth if you’re not doing the work. Now you can take that. This particular client is at a big hedge fund and they’re making good money. They have a big line of credit. They made a few good trades, actually a handful of trades that made 95% of the money, which is kind of how it works.
But with that, you can get used to making a certain amount of money and then being super comfortable because face it, I mean after you have one or two cars, a couple of houses, after a while you’re just kind of collecting toys. So then the question is, what’s the motivation? Well, I can’t really divulge into that here because I think I’d be betraying the trust. But the point is that it’s all relative. Whether you’re upper middle class, whether you’re upper class, whether you’re 1%, whether you’re the top one, 10th of 1%, you always need to have a goal. Once you start to what I have written down here, when you get comfortable doing nothing, taking action can invoke fear of failure. And if you’re making big money, seven, eight figures a year, what’s there to complain about? Life is good. So you just have to keep doing more of the same. The problem though, just like any endeavor, sooner or later, the style of clothes that you wear, your haircut, the shoes that you wear, the car that you drive, they’ll all go out of style. So you need to constantly evolve. Doesn’t mean you have to turn your trading rules upside down overnight, but you do have to maybe give the quality of money that you have in your world a different meaning. For
Me, when I started making money, it became important for me to want to give some away and help some of the things and the causes that mean a lot to me. So that was a big motivator to help me earn more because then I could give away more and have a bigger impact on the people that I cared for. And the things like I said that are important to me in my life, it also allowed me to peel off some time and work more efficiently in a Pareto efficiency kind of manner where I could get the same results for putting in less time. So anyway, be careful about plateauing and then standing still a lot of life to live. Even if you’ve made it and you’re making big money, you can still dream big dreams, dream bigger dreams. How do you get it so that maybe your name is on the front door?
How do you get it? What happened at Commodities Corporation? A lot of those guys broke off and started their own company. Bruce, I mean, Bruce Covner, one started Caxton I think in 83, and I’m almost certain he was Grubs staked to a degree from Commodities Corporation. He built his own company and then he evolved and he did a lot of things with the American Enterprise Institute. He may have been involved or at least aware of what’s going on at reason. I know Bill Dunn was big at reason. He played a big role at Julliard and in Lincoln Center as well, and he acquired very valuable artifacts in and around music and this and that. And then I’m pretty sure donated them or put them up somewhere. So you can continue to push into new strata, if you will, without being egomaniacal or greedy and serve the greater good you see.
And that will kind of propel you forward and keep you growing. It’ll also help ensure that you don’t let the world kind of catch up to where you are because it’s all about the pace of the race, right? The race is a marathon, but there’s also a pace to it. And what you don’t want to do is get used to coasting when someone’s behind you, when you have a two minute, if you run a 26 mile marathon and you have a two minute, three minute lead, there’s someone in the back who might want it more than you. So you don’t want to get lazy and start to procrastinate or get comfortable or too satiated with your reflection in the mirror and keep moving forward. Have a goal. It could be personal goal, could be a business goal. You can always evolve your goals to the next step. Paul Tudor Jones and Peter Boris founded Robinhood Foundation, which has given away over 2 billion over the course of its existence. And that’s quite something. And they show no signs of stopping their annual events and their programs are getting bigger and better every year. So you can just keep dreaming
Bigger dreams if you’re creative. If not, give me a call. I’ll help you process your feelings around that. But at the end of the day, remember that if you start to stagnate, the rest of the world’s going to catch up to the market is going to change. It will evolve. There’s no way around it. If you would’ve told me when I started where we were making so much money in commission dollars that one day commissions wouldn’t even exist like in the world we are now, for the most part, I would never have believed it. I didn’t have a vision for it. Luckily for everybody that evolved. So for the very, very active traders, that is no longer an issue. But don’t be afraid to dream big dreams because once you start to apply yourself, you never really know until you try. And the response from this person was, well, who the heck am I to even think about something like that? And I said, well, who the heck are you to not?
Where’s the judgment in there? Okay, to use your judgment, I think. But you can oftentimes hurt yourself if you try to be a judge. So you have to study in your life. Where do you see the difference between being a judge and using one’s judgment? Because you can carry limiting beliefs no matter what of the strata that you exist in. There’s always some other person who might be doing better or has a bigger name or has a bigger mouthpiece, but that doesn’t mean anything. It has nothing to do with you because you don’t have to compare yourself. You can just be the best version of yourself and dream the biggest dream. Carve it out. Maybe start a family office. Maybe start an art collection. There’s a whole bunch of stuff you can do. You can endow a school. You can look at estate planning using insurance to leave big gifts upon your death. That can put a lot of wind in the sails of smaller operations that could use a lot of help. There’s a million things that you can do. And along the lines of think and grow Rich, the more you give, the more you get. So think about it. If you need any help, reach out. I don’t kiss and tell. And other than that, I appreciate you all being here. Please like and subscribe and I’ll be here tomorrow with Ganja. Take care.
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