CHAPTER 1

You Must AlwaysAcknowledge Your Reality

If you think that you can't have what you want out of lifebecause you lack a fancy diploma or something else is missing, youare wrong! I never believed that I couldn't have success, and youshouldn't believe that either. If you're reading this book, that's proof ofyour desire to improve your life, and that's everything you need. If youdon't succeed, it's your own fault.

I want to start this chapter by telling you that, while this chapter isabout your metal state, it's not about holding crystals to your foreheadand burning incense. Don't fight the concepts that I'm going toexplain—it will make sense.

As a newly married young adult, I felt that I was experiencing fartoo many disappointments, misunderstandings, and frustrations in mylife. With very few exceptions, every one of those struggles came as atotally unanticipated surprise. Regardless of the nature of my struggles,I thought I had too many of them to deal with. Yes, the definitionof "too many" is different for everyone, but for me, each of thosefrustrating situations was unpleasant, and dealing with them weekly oreven monthly was far too often.

My wife and I hated those setbacks and difficult situations becausethey were unpleasant and often resulted in bickering and blaming.Bickering and blaming does little to solve problems, and doesn't preventthe problems from happening again. Mostly, we both disliked arguingwith anyone—regardless of who eventually won the argument. Wepreferred calm, pleasant, and productive relationships with each otherand with other people. We also had too many financial struggles.We really wanted to be able to pay all of our bills on time and havelots of money left to do whatever we wanted to do. I became verymotivated to figure out how we could permanently eliminate most ofthese frustrating situations that caused life to be so difficult. Even tome, those goals sounded like they were very difficult to reach. But I wasdetermined to get as close to it as possible because struggling, arguing,being disappointed, and going without sucked. I knew that I didn't wantto live my whole life like that.

I figured it out and I achieved my goals, and looking back, it nowall makes sense, and that's why I decided to write it out for my familyand friends.

Understand Your Problems

When people are faced with seemingly insurmountable problems,it's common for them to blame other people that are involved in theproblems and then part ways. That happens with friends, employmentsituations, business associations, and all other types of relationships.Regardless of the relationship, separation without resolution usuallymeans that the people either continue to struggle with life alone orfind someone new with whom they'll share their struggles. They don'tbother to understand the causes of the problems, so they eventuallyencounter most of the same problems again. Thankfully, my wife andI acknowledged that, except for a few rare situations, divorce doesn'tresolve most of the problems. Divorce just gives people separate addressesand more expenses while they continue to fight about the same money,the same children, and all of the other unresolved problems they stillhave. My wife and I knew that our marriage was not the cause of ourproblems, so common sense told us that ending our marriage wouldn'tsolve our problems. There had to be a real solution.

Eventually, I figured out the first step: Don't try to deal with yourproblems. It's stupid and futile and doesn't improve your life.

Don't try to deal with your problems? Well, I don't mean that youshould ignore your problems. I mean that spending your entire lifetrying to deal with problems is like signing up for a lifetime of playingWhac-a-Mole. No thanks! Don't stand there beating the moles as fastas you can for your entire life. The easiest way to end that struggle isto reach behind the machine and unplug it. The cord is the source ofthe problem, and that mallet is a crappy solution. The first step youmust take to improve your life is to stop dealing with the same typesof problems over and over. Dealing with problems is reactionary—that'snot what you want to do.

Reactive solutions to an existing problem are only slightly helpful;they don't change what happened or explain why things aren't alreadyhow you want them to be.

The first step to developing a viable and permanent method tosolving your problems is to first figure out why the undesirable situationsexist and why better situations don't. A reactive solution is like moppingup a puddle of water that keeps appearing on the floor in front of thesink. Wiping up the water every once in a while does deal with theproblem of water on the floor, but you're going to keep wiping uppuddles until you find out where the water is coming from and fix that.Obviously, that's a situation that we'd normally handle properly, but youneed to understand that successful people don't deal with problems—theyidentify the sources of their problems and then eliminate thosesources. You need to, find the causes of the problems, and deal withthose causes to prevent the problems.

How do you find the causes for all of your problems? Sometimes it'seasy to find the cause of a problem and sometimes it takes some effort. Themost important thing is for you to believe is that the only way to improveyour life is to understand that you need to stop dealing with repeatingproblems, and to do that you must look at the problems honestly so thatyou can identify their causes. Remember; blaming other people doesn'tprevent the problem from returning—and neither does ignoring problems.We all know that if we ignore problems, they rarely solve themselves; theyusually get worse, and we see them continually until we do somethingdifferently. Sometimes, problems can't be anticipated—they come intopeople's lives and all we can do is deal with the consequences. My wifeand I were no different. We found no obvious or easy way to deal withthose situations either, but we knew that we were going to experience thesame problems until we did something different. In those situations, allwe can do is make sure we prepare for the unexpected. That might meanhaving some money in reserve, or buying better insurance instead of abetter vacation. It's amazing how much smaller big problems are when wehave the resources to deal with the problem. Big problems and unexpectedproblems are usually only problems for us when we're unprepared andhave no resources or ideas how to resolve them.

Still, most problems that we deal with are avoidable and can beavoided if we identify the cause and only solve the problems once—correctly.In order to identify what was really causing me and my wifeto repeatedly experience unpleasant situations, I had to start payingattention to my reality, and that required that I be honest with myself.That wasn't always pleasant or fun but neither was being unhappybecause I was not getting what I wanted out of life.

I have to pause here and tell you that I was born with an overlypragmatic brain. I'm not sure if that's a legitimate medical condition (Isuspect it's not), but that's always been a challenge for me to handle.One of the symptoms of being overly pragmatic is that I can't be satisfiedwith impulsive explanations that allow me to dismiss a problem. Forexample, when I find myself in a disagreement with someone, I can'ttake the easy option of blaming that person for the misunderstandingbecause I know that option won't prevent similar misunderstandingsfrom occurring again in the future.

Even with my total commitment to my goal, it took years toincrementally figure out why unpleasant things really happened inmy life. If you sincerely want to improve your life, look at eachunpleasant situation and really examine the conditions that cause itto exist. More often than not, you need to look back further thanthe most obvious cause. I often considered what had caused me to beinvolved with certain people or to be in a certain situation that thencaused me to make what turned out to be bad decisions. As the oldsaying goes, "Peel the onion all the way, even when it makes you veryuncomfortable."

As I uncovered the true causes for my disappointments and struggles,I discovered some good news. I found that although I had a lot ofdifferent struggles and disappointments, there weren't as many separatecauses that I'd have to work on. There were actually fewer than a dozenthings that I was consistently failing to deal with properly. Those thingswere all part of the ever-present reality that was the major part of mylife to which I didn't give near enough attention. As I learned how todeal with my reality, there were fewer disappointments, arguments, andregrets in my life. That was great, but here's the best part: as I correctlydealt with my reality more and more, my financial situation improvedwithout my even working on it.

Let's look at why that happened without me working on that.

Despite the financial obstacles we all face, it's actually very easyto improve your financial situation at least a little bit. When you dosomething a little bit over and over, you end up with a lot.

So how does that work? No, I'm not talking about setting up a budgetand tracking how you spend your money! Here's the simple explanation;people argue about all kinds of things, but most serious disagreementsare directly or indirectly related to financial issues. Financial problemscause stress, and stress causes people to look for quick relief, whichfrequently results in blaming somebody. Blaming someone else doesn'tactually bring relief, and it doesn't solve problems, so people continueto live with the same money problems and the same frustration andstress. If people can't meet their obligations or the expectations theyhave for their own lives, they're unhappy, even if they pretend they'reokay. Again, early on, my wife and I were just like everyone else; weexperienced the same stress and frustration. I don't criticize my wifeor myself for failing to remain cheerful when we couldn't meet ourcommitments to our creditors, our children, or each other.

When my wife and I struggled with financial problems, the stressoften caused more problems. Early on, our tendency to blame each otherand justify our own faults would exacerbate the financial problems atleast a tiny bit more. Once we agreed to work together to acknowledgeour reality rather than blame each other, we started figuring out whatreally caused the problems and doing that stopped us from relivingthe same struggles over and over. That caused our financial situationto permanently improve a little bit, which automatically improved ourmarriage a little more. As our relationship improved, we worked bettertogether and made better decisions. This cycle of improvements inour finances and our relationship continued, and with a consciouscommitment to not let setbacks break the cycle, it eventually led usaway from financial struggles permanently. It doesn't happen instantly,but a little improvement over and over adds up to a lot.

Don't worry about how to identify the causes of your problems orhow to find the solutions and implement the changes—you will not beleft on your own to do that. The purpose of this book is to help youwith all of that.

However, just to be perfectly clear, I never had wealth like DonaldTrump or other super-wealthy people. Honestly, I never really wantedto reach that rare level of wealth that some people attain. We'll addressthat subject in Chapter 10. Still, I did reach a point at which I didn'tneed to worry about how I'd pay my bills, and we did get those thingsthat made us happy. If you need more details than that before youdecide if this book can make a difference in your life, well, I'll tell youthis:

• My wife and I bought a modest house. It was small but adequate,and over the years, we put every luxury item that we wanted intoit and made it our home.

• I paid all of my bills as soon as they arrived, set the thermostatto whatever temperature made us comfortable, and watered mylawn as much as was needed to keep it very green (yes, I know;some people think I need to apologize to some polar bears).

• We bought any furniture, appliances, jewelry, clothing, shoes,and so on that we wanted.

• We ate in any restaurant that we wanted to, and we would leavegenerous tips for exceptional service.

• We started giving nice gifts for Christmas, birthdays, andspecial occasions, and each year, we gave away more money tofamily, friends, and charities than a lot of people earn.

• We took three or four nice vacations each year.

• We paid off the mortgage on our house and bought each otherluxury automobiles.

• We had years of income saved in investment accounts.

• And, yes, we paid our state and federal taxes in full every year.

Most important, we didn't have to pick a few of these things. Wewere able to enjoy all of them at the same time, year after year! Mywife and I used our understanding of reality to make consistently gooddecisions for our employers—and our employers compensated us wellfor many years for those decisions.

Oh, one last thing—I didn't write this book to make more money.I already live as comfortably as I want. Please believe me when I tell youthat I wrote this book for you, not for me. Quite honestly, I'm not richby the conventional American definition, and giving out that personalfinancial information isn't a poorly veiled method for bragging. I'drather not provide my personal information because doing so is morelikely to cause problems for me than benefit me. I told you about mypersonal finances because I want to help you envision what's possible foryou. If you faithfully implement the principles in this book into yourown life, your life will be infinitely better, too.

My wife and I were able to thoroughly enjoy life and each other.Then, in June 2006, she was diagnosed with a rare and terminalneurological disease. For the first two or three years, it was mostly aninconvenience. The following two years were very hard for her, but shepersevered by maintaining as many purposes as possible and fightingthrough the difficulties. Despite her efforts, by late 2009, her ability totake care of herself was gone. Thankfully, we had enough money savedto allow me to stop working and give her full-time, personal attention.Being able to spend that time with her was more important than I canexplain. I can't even imagine how horrible it would have been for herif I had needed to leave her with someone every day and go to work sothat I could pay the bills.

By early 2010, her ability to understand what was going on wasseriously diminished, and her ability to travel would soon be gone.So we spent that summer traveling, and our son, Mike, took care ofeverything at home while we were gone. We went everywhere—fromSan Diego to northern Maine, from Key West, Florida, to Bellingham,Washington. God bless Ed and Debbie Brinson for having us as guestsin their home in Bellingham! Being able to spend that time togetherand having the money to travel together was such a blessing. The factthat we had previously worked to understand what had caused ourproblems and had learned to acknowledge and deal with our realitymade it possible for us to spend that time together. We had figured outwhat we needed to do to end our financial struggles and enjoy our timetogether. If it were not for the horrible medical condition, we would stillbe enjoying our lives together.

Defining Your Reality

Dealing with reality may sound unappealing because you thinkit will be difficult or because it will make life far less spontaneousand enjoyable, but that isn't true. Learning to deal with reality is likelearning to read. Learning to read required effort and discipline, butonce you learned how, you never considered going back to not being ableto read. Learning to read didn't make life more difficult—it made yourlife better. After your life improves as a result of dealing with reality fora while, I guarantee that you'll refuse to go back to the attitudes and thethinking that you're now so reluctant to change. Believe me—once youdo it for a while, you'll think that not dealing with reality is incrediblystupid and it will make you uncomfortable when you think that youused to live that way.

You might believe that you already deal with your reality, and youprobably do to some degree. However, most people deal with reality inreactionary ways. If you acknowledged and dealt with your reality asoften as you should and in the way that you should, you wouldn't needto read this book. When you deal with your reality properly, you'll avoidproblems, not call those problems your reality.