Tag Archives: you

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You Need To Know…Talent vs. Practice

Listen to Tim deliver this YNTK!  Click below:

You Need To Know – TalPract

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YOU NEED TO KNOW… some good news and bad news about your retirement—and life–plans.

You want the bad news first, don’t you?  Your retirement plan goals aren’t likely to be realized overnight.  Worse yet, most of your big plans in life also aren’t going to materialize in a flash moment of brilliance.  We know this, don’t we?  But our actions don’t always show it.  We agree that our goals aren’t likely to be met in an instant, but then we act as though the retirement or other life goal lottery is going to strike…. by over-weighting hot stocks picks or volatile mutual funds in our portfolios…  Or maybe we work day-in-and-day-out expecting someone to change our life and move us to the penthouse corner office, or hand us that big break.  So the bad news is that hope, desire – even talent – alone will not really get us anywhere in our long term planning.  As Anders Ericsson, the world renowned expert on high performance in work, sports and life puts it “I have yet to find a talented person who didn’t earn their talent through hard work and thousands of hours of practice.” 

So what’s the good news?  Ericsson dubbed the term “deliberate practice” in describing the one key factor that virtually all successful plans have in common.  That’s the reason that your buddy, who doesn’t have a lick of athletic ability, has a golf handicap in the single digits.  That’s the reason that monthly investment plans virtually always end up positively surprising folks years down the road.  But, when it comes to engaging in “deliberate practice” to better your retirement or financial independence plan, it requires that you HAVE a plan… then you have something to practice.

Talent, hope, passion and vision are all great things, but without employing them in habitual pursuits, they will accomplish very little.  Conversely, you will surprise yourself in your retirement and other life plans if you simply dedicate yourself to a deliberate practice of your objectives… and that is something that YOU NEED TO KNOW.

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You Need To Know…A Dead Pig In The Sunshine Is Quite Happy

Listen to Tim deliver this YNTK!  Click below:

You Need To Know – Dead Pig

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YOU NEED TO KNOW… that a “dead pig in the sunshine” is actually quite happy.

I’m sure you’re quite convinced at this moment that I’ve finally lost whatever marbles I previously possessed, but if you’re from the south, you might know EXACTLY what I’m talking about.  I was on the phone recently with a great client who lives in another state that is decidedly below the Mason-Dixon line, and at one point, he mentioned that he was, “Happier than a dead pig in the sunshine.”  Since I’m a big fan of the use of uncommon metaphors, I asked him how that could possibly be… he didn’t know, so I looked it up on Google.  And believe it or not, even Google was not able to tell me why a pig that was dead could be happy regardless of where he lies.

Do you ever feel this way when people in the financial world start talking?  These days, everybody is throwing around a good bit of gross domestic product, core inflation, and if you’re lucky, maybe you can have some credit crunch… (is that an ice cream topping?)  At tax time, you’re sure to hear about adjusted gross income, maybe modified adjusted gross income, and the rightly scorned alternative minimum tax.  In estate planning, you have a federal estate tax exclusion which may or may not be impacted by your annual gift exclusion or your lifetime gift exclusion.  But, if you’re looking for the most common “dead pig in the sunshine” style rule that could never be explained, why is it that the two primary ages for IRA distributions are stipulated in half years (59 ½ and 70 ½)??

Do you ever think that the phrases that are thrown around in the financial realm are actually used to make you think that you don’t know enough and thereby need to buy something from the person who’s doing the phrase dropping?  Next time, just tell them that “you’re happier than a dead pig in sunshine”… they’ll understand… and that is something YOU NEED TO KNOW.