A while back, I watched part of the Jack Nicholson/Morgan Freeman movie The Bucket List. In it (if you didn’t already know), the two main characters, older gentlemen, come up with a list of things they want to do before they “kick the bucket” – and proceed to do most of them, even though many of them really push their physical and mental limits.

It was a cute movie with a pretty thoughtful premise – the idea of the “bucket list” itself. Like a million other viewers of the movie, I was anxious to make my own “bucket list” – and so I did. Here it is, for all of you to read.

Spend more than a week in a rural part of France.
Spend more than a week in a rural part of Italy.
Drink a bottle of 1982 Latour, Pauillac wine with my wife and some friends.
Run for a significant political office.
Write the novel I have inside me – and get it published.
Visit Petra.
Run a marathon.
Do a three week gastronomic tour of America, a la Feasting on Asphalt.
Dance with my wife and with my daughter on a special evening.

Those were the nine I wrote down, anyway. Some may seem silly to you, but those are all things I want to do before I pass away.

We all have “bucket lists” of some sort, but for most of us, these things remain just a list of dreams, likely to be unfulfilled. It’s fun to think about them and make lists of these things, but for many of us, such things often lay in the realm of dreams. Take my list, for example. Does it seem sensible or frugal to drink a $2,200 bottle of wine (yes, the 1982 Latour, Pauillac goes for that much)? Do such things really matter in the greater context of our lives?

Experiences are something that’s easy to overlook in the cut and dried world of personal finance. Tight budgets and careful saving rarely leave room for powerful and life-altering experiences, so we tend to tuck them away, intending to do them someday.

When we look back on our lives, however, it is the experiences that we remember. We don’t think fondly about that iPod we bought in 2003; we think about the night we danced in the backyard with our spouse under the moonlight. We don’t recall all of the things we fritter our money away on, but we remember the big moments, those experiences that changed our lives.

In the end, a “bucket list” is merely a list of experiences we wish to have, and just like any other dream for the future, there’s no reason to not start planning now for your own bucket list – experiences that cap your own fulfilling life. Here are six steps that will take you from where you are now to grabbing ahold of your bucket list.

Give some consideration to your “bucket list” – the list of great experiences you’d like to have before you die.
This is actually quite fun. While I constructed mine, I just kept a few pages in my pocket notebook devoted to it. I’d add ideas as they came to me and scribble off other ones after some reflection, and after some time with some very nice daydreams, I came to the list above.

The process itself was very valuable. It provided a big prod for me to spend some time thinking about the experiences I dream of having in my life. Along the way, I brainstormed a lot of things, spent some time deeply reflecting on dreams I once had (and maybe don’t have any more), and realized that most of the things on my bucket list are things I want to share with my wife and my children. Great reflections, indeed.

Identify one (or perhaps two) items from that list that seem the most reachable.
Obviously, your “bucket list” is not something you’re going to be able to just start running through, like a checklist (that’s the humorous part of the movie, actually – they run through many of those items like a person might run through a grocery list). Instead, just pick out one or perhaps two of the items to focus on right now – leave the rest for a later time.

For me, I decided to focus on writing the novel and going on a gastronomic tour of America. Both of these seem possible in the next few years. The wine one was also tempting, but honestly, I’d like to do something with that with my children and their spouses in about twenty five years. I might consider saving up and purchasing the bottle at some point, but I’ll hold it for the right moment.

Flesh them out into full-fledged long term goals.
So, now we have two items off our “bucket list” that we’re intending to do. Now what? The next step is to flesh those goals out into something tangible and specific. Specify exactly what that bucket list item is and figure out when your target for getting it done is.

I’ll take my goal of writing the novel as an example. I’d like to be able to accomplish that in five years and I think it’s a reasonable timeframe. So I’ll spell it out clearly – I want to write and publish a strong novel in five years’ time. That’s a very clear goal now, not just something vague on my bucket list.

Start developing short term goals and microgoals that build a road to that item.
Now that it’s a clear long-term goal, I need to figure out the little steps to get there. The first step is to get my fiction writing chops in gear, and that simply means writing more fiction. To get in gear, I’ve decided to commit to writing a short story a week, polishing up another one each week, and then sharing them with my wife, who is my best critic for writing, and others, too.

These little baby steps are just the push I need to start moving forward with this. They not only will tangibly improve my skill at writing fiction, but it will also force me to expose my fiction writing to others, which is actually the hardest part for me. Eventually, when I start writing fiction that clicks, I’ll start by entering some short story competitions, but for now, my microgoals are mainly there to keep me writing fiction.

Make those little steps a priority.
Now we have these little goals in mind, but it’s easy to just leave them on the table and forget about them. There’s a lot of other things going on in my life – why not just leave that little goal on the table this week and forget about it? Why not do something really fun instead, or do something that will eventually earn me some income in other areas?

The real trick here is to keep how much you want that big dream in your mind. By sitting down and working on a short story or editing one, I’m taking a little step towards that big dream in my mind. Simply setting aside an hour or two a week to focus on this – and maybe a few lazy hours in the evening when everyone else is asleep – will make that goal come ever closer to reality.

Rinse and repeat.
Once you’ve got the basic steps down, it’s a matter of doing it over and over again – making those little steps a natural part of your routine. Maybe it’s setting $20 a week aside for some sort of big, momentous goal. Maybe it’s a little task you need to accomplish. Whatever it is, make a steady effort to do it over and over again until it becomes completely natural.

Before you know it, you’ll be happily marking something off your bucket list – and you’ll have a life-altering experience to savor for the rest of your years.

About two weeks ago, a friend observed that since I started The Simple Dollar, I seem to have become really goal-oriented. Then he asked two big questions that really made me think:

Will you ever reach your goals? And what will you do when you get there?

I’m a goal-oriented person. I find it much easier to accomplish the things I want to do in life if I set clear milestones and aim straight for them. One big aspect of my personal finance success is that I began to set goals that focused on getting my money straight – before my turnaround, I used to focus on other things.

I have small goals, like my list of 101 goals in 1001 days. I have big goals, like complete debt freedom, financial independence, and raising emotionally and intellectually centered children.

These goals drive me on a daily basis. Each day, I get up intending to push myself towards one or more of these goals, and every once in a while, I feel the relief of accomplishing one or more of them.

What happens, then, when I reach my goals? Where will I be at if my children grow up and have healthy and normal lives, I’ve achieved financial independence, and I’m completely free from debt?

I move on to new goals, ones that I’m not able to reach for right now because I haven’t achieved enough in life yet.

I would love to spend a few years doing volunteer work in a poverty-stricken nation, where people don’t have access to the basic food and water they need. I would love to be able to work for a foundation that pushes for basic personal finance education in all schools. I would love to be able to just drop everything and write the novel I know I have inside of me. I would love to be able to start a granting agency to financially support and promote people who go beyond the call of duty in their lives for social work – something of a MacArthur Genius Grant for social work.

But I’m not there yet.

These dreams are the really big ones, the ones I won’t be able to reach for for twenty or thirty years. These are the dreams I have that might just help change the world. But they require me to have a platform of support that I can leap from.

To a degree, I’m working towards one of them now. My dream about pushing for basic financial education in schools is coming true in part because of The Simple Dollar, and I’m going to do a few things over the next year or two to push that idea even further.

What do these things have in common? They all seek to uplift as many people as possible through communication. It’s a common thread through almost every big life-altering dream I have.

Some people refer to this general idea as a vocation, that your career is just one element of your true role. I look at it this way: what is the purpose of your life? It’s a difficult question for many people to answer, and I’ll confess that sometimes, when I’m troubled, I wonder what my purpose is, too.

So, will I ever reach my goals? Probably not, because each goal I have is just another step in a life’s journey. I’m just thankful that I have at least some semblance of an idea where I’m going and why.

Just sit down for a minute and think about it. What do you want to do with your life? Do you have an answer? Mull it over in your head for a few days, and realize that you have many, many years ahead of you to make it happen. If something begins to take shape in your mind, think about what you can do to get there. It starts with a goal for tomorrow, a goal for next month, and a goal for the next decade.

Your money and your career are just small parts of that bigger picture. Good luck in finding it.

Whenever I read personal finance books and articles, I often see the term “financial independence” bandied about. To some, it merely means not relying on a parent or other loved one to help pay the bills. For others, it means freedom from all debt. For yet others, it means freedom from having to work for income.

These are all apt definitions of financial independence, perfectly applicable to different points in life and each useful as a goal for some people. Let’s take a look.

Freedom from financial reliance on loved ones
This is a freedom that many young people earn in their late teens to mid twenties, as they get through college, earn a degree, find a job, and separate themselves from their parents. For many people, this is financial independence. They strive to be their own person, independent of the people around them, capable of standing on their own two feet.

I achieved this goal at age twenty-three, after graduating college and moving on to a well-paying job. I partially achieved it at age eighteen after departing from college – other than holiday trips and one very long summer when an internship fell through, I didn’t live at home after that, I had steady work that provided income, and scholarships and loans took care of the college bill, though my parents did assist with little things fairly regularly during my college years.

Setting it as your goal If you can survive for a significant period of time (multiple months) without going rapidly into debt or without a steady cash infusion from your family, then you’ve achieved this goal. Generally, it requires a decent job, a commitment to keeping that job, and a desire to actually move on from a state of dependence.

Freedom from financial reliance on creditors
This freedom occurs when you are completely free of debt. No mortgage, no student loans, no car payments, no anything. Aside from taxes, you’re free to do what you want with all of your income. This is often used as the definition of financial independence by writers advocating a strong anti-debt position.

I haven’t achieved this goal as of yet. I am rapidly moving towards it, however. Since mid-2006, I’ve eliminated $17,000 in credit card debt, $6,000 worth of auto loans, and $19,000 worth of student loans, fueled by both personal frugality and earnings from The Simple Dollar. Currently, we have about $24,000 in student loan debt to tackle, then our mortgage (at about $170,000, all told). We’re attacking that debt as vigorously as we can, with large advance payments on the student loan debt going out every month. When we get down to just the mortgage, we’re going to start investing as a method to pay it off, as we believe we can earn more by investing our money than by making early payments against a rather low interest rate.

Setting it as your goal Setting this type of independence as your goal takes a strong commitment to the “spend less than you earn” philosophy. You need to be willing to directly put some of your income straight into large debt payments in order to get rid of that debt. This requires enough income to cover your basic expenses and more, a good grasp on how to control your spending, and a debt repayment plan that you’re committed to executing. If you’re willing to take on all of this, then you’re probably ready to take on this goal.

Freedom from financial reliance on employment
Many financially stable people view this as true financial independence: an end to the financial reliance on employment. It doesn’t mean you have to stop working, it just means that income from your work is no longer a requirement. It appears under many names: retirement and “walk away from it all” money are two of the most common ones.

I haven’t achieved this goal yet, either. My wife and I have a lifetime financial plan that involves debt freedom, building the house in the country that we’ve both dreamed of since we were young, and then heading towards this type of financial freedom (hmm… this plan alone might make for an interesting article).

Setting it as your goal Many of the same principles for debt reduction apply here. Spend less than you earn and invest the rest of it for the long term. Work on maximizing your income and minimizing your spending and sock away that difference. This means not only maximizing your career, but maximizing your frugality, too – know the real value of your time and do things with that time that produce value.

Financial independence is a great goal, but as with any goal, you have to define exactly what it means for you and then define a plan to meet that exact goal. Without that exact definition, you’re just whistling in the dark.

When I first started The Simple Dollar, I mostly intended it as a place to log my own personal financial progress and also note any interesting thoughts or findings I discovered related to personal finance and other related topics. My primary goal was to make myself write every day and also to motivate myself to keep going forward with my financial turnaround – and maybe tease out some of the root causes of it.

While it’s grown beyond that original plan, it certainly has fulfilled the motivational part of the goal. I’m motivated every day to keep my finances in line, to the point that it’s become an integrated part of my life. It may have happened without The Simple Dollar, but the motivational factor of putting my situation out so publicly was an enormous motivator.

The best part is such public motivation can be done by anyone and can be applied to any goal. Here’s how.

Define Your Goal
The first step in achieving something is to clearly state what you’re trying to achieve. What are you aiming for?

Figure out what you want to change. Most of us already have this part figured out. We know what we want – we want better health, a better figure, a greater financial life, a better job, a business of our own. The problem is that goals are often nebulous and thus are easy to pass through – just like a cloud. So, once you know the change you want to implement…

Define exactly what it means to achieve that change. If you want to lose weight, figure out your target weight. If you want to improve your financial state, figure out a target debt level or target net worth. Want a better job? Define exactly what that job is. Know exactly what your goal is and exactly how you can determine if you’ve made it.

Devise a plan to take you to that exact goal. Now that you have a specific goal, what steps do you need to take to get there? Let’s say your goal is a specific net worth. That means you need to reduce spending, increase your income, or both. What’s your plan of attack? What about a target weight or BMI? That will likely involve dietary changes and an exercise regimen. What’s your plan of attack?

Define Daily (or Near-Daily) Metrics for that Goal
Once you’ve got your goal specified and have a plan in place to reach that goal, you also need to define very specific microgoals along the way. Losing fifty pounds is not something you can grab ahold of today, but losing one pound is. Exercising for thirty minutes every day isn’t something you can grab ahold of, but exercising just today for thirty minutes is something you can do.

Look at your specific goal and your plan to get there. What sort of regular, repetitive steps will you have to take to get there? If you need to eat better, your regular, repetitive step comes with each meal. If you need to exercise, your regular, repetitive step is a daily (or near-daily) exercise session. If you need to start saving, a spending log is perfect. If you need to start building up your resume or just learn something new, learning something each day and documenting it is a great way to go. A musical instrument? Daily practice is perfect.

The point is to define those tiny steps you need to take each day. Make them small enough so that you actually can take those steps each day and you’ll find yourself walking right toward your goal.

Announce Your Progress with those Metrics to the World
One big problem, though, is motivation. How can you keep motivated to take those small steps? Some people have that internal motivation, but others are often driven to be motivated by others, and that’s when online tools can help.

Twitter is a great way to publicly log your progress. Twitter lets you publicly post quick reports that are 140 characters in length – perfectly long to note spending, eating, a daily weight check, learning, your daily practice, and so on. If you’d like to write longer entries, starting a free blog like the one at Wordpress is a great way to go. Putting it out there publicly means that some strangers might visit, but you can cover that up by being fairly anonymous – using just your first name, for example. Even better, strangers often provide great motivation in the little comments that they make.

This daily logging routine is a way to provide a check against yourself. Did you do what you were supposed to do today? Did you take that little step towards your big goal?

The real motivator, though, is letting your friends and family see it. When you start, send out that URL to supportive family and friends and ask them to take a look and keep tabs on it. Almost any caring family member or friend will happily do so and probably send you supportive notes along the way. It takes some personal courage to share things in this fashion, but the rewards are great – you’ll find yourself with a support network that’s intimately familiar with your progress, knows what your goal is, and best of all knows you well and cares about you. These people can be the best motivators of all.

How I’m Doing It
I’m actually using Twitter myself for this very thing. Recently, my wife and I made a strong commitment to get into better shape, and I elected to track my progress publicly on Twitter. I set up a fresh new Twitter account and am posting brief updates each day on how I’m doing. To up the pressure on myself, I shared the link with friends.

And now I’m going to up the pressure even higher.

http://twitter.com/trenthealth

That’s my health log in Twitter form. That’s right, I’m revealing my daily BMI, diet, and exercise progress to 50,000 readers. If you’re interested in following along, bookmark it. I estimate it’ll have 5-10 quick blips a day.

My goal with it is to use Wii Fit, the lifetime fitness ladder, and a better diet (basically following Michael Pollan’s guidance from In Defense of Food) to push myself to two goals: a BMI of 22 (which my doctor recommended as a good long-term target for my body build – I’m 6′6″ and have the shoulder width of an NFL linebacker) and to consider riding a leg of RAGBRAI next year. I anticipate both goals taking a year or more, actually.

We’ll see where I get, but I can certainly say this: the idea that there are many friends and readers watching is both an exhilarating rush and also makes me a bit nervous. Having that many eyeballs on my progress is one big motivator.

When I think back over my life, I’ve found that time and time again, the hard choices I’ve made were the ones that provided lasting positive change in my life. When I took the easy road, it didn’t have any impact – it was only the hard choices that really brought about change.

When I was young, I made the hard choice to reject the culture of most of the adult males in my life and instead devote my time to reading and self-education. That resulted in the opportunity to go to college, educate myself, and chase dreams that would have been far out of my reach otherwise.

When I was in college, I made a difficult decision to walk away from my entire social circle – people who were bending me down with negativity. Without that choice, I would have never cultivated the relationship with the wonderful woman who would become my wife.

When I was near my financial meltdown, I made the hard choice to reject a heavily consumerist lifestyle and start saving money. That resulted in me getting rid of debts, finding some financial freedom, and being able to sleep at night.

When my writing career began to launch, I made the hard choice to quit my real job and let that rocket lead me wherever it might go as well as free me to spend a lot more time with my family. This has given me a level of day to day freedom as an adult that I could have scarcely imagined a few years ago.

Recently, I made another very hard choice – one that I’ll talk about again in a few months once the ramifications of it start to become clear.

Every single one of these choices was hard. I didn’t want to make them – in fact, in each case, I avoided actually making the decision for far longer than I should have. In each case, though, once I finally made that hard choice and committed to sticking to it, my life made a big turn for the better.

On the other hand, when I look back at my life and think of the big choices where I made the easy choice, they didn’t turn out so well.

I made the easy choice when it came to my college major. Instead of seeking topics I was passionate about, I stayed in my early major choice for far too long – I found it interesting and sometimes exciting, but I never bothered to find my burning passion.

I made the easy choice (through most of my life) when it came to my spiritual beliefs. Early in life, I bobbed along to my parents’ mix of agnosticism and lapsed Catholicism. Later on, I followed people through various churches and religious groups. It took a lot of introspection to go beyond being a follower and figure out what I actually believed – and realizing what that meant in terms of organized religion.

I made the easy choice when it came to friends. For much of my life, I just settled for whatever people were convenient instead of trying to find people I genuinely connected with. The end result was only a few people I can genuinely call lifelong friends.

The easy choice is just that, easy. But you have to live with the consequences of it.

Some inspiration:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference
- Robert Frost, Road Less Traveled

Tactics for Making the Hard Choice
Here are some things that helped me make all of these hard choices in my life.

Imagine your future self if nothing changes. When I was a teenager, I often visualized my future if I didn’t make a concerted effort to focus on my education. I imagined a future where I stayed in my small town and worked at a factory job, probably coming home each night and drinking to excess, something I witnessed over and over again. It was a future I didn’t want – a future that really frightened me. I used that picture in my mind for motivation over and over again.

Imagine your future self if you do make the change in the best case. Before quitting, I imagined my life if my writing career took off like a rocket ship – and it was a good picture. The house in the country my wife and I had always dreamed of, the ability to usher my kids off to school each morning and be there for them when they get home, and lots of other little details. It made me feel genuinely happy inside.

Imagine your future self if you do make that choice in the worst case. In that same scenario, I imagined myself having to go back to a nine to five job in a couple of years. But, even then, I got to spend a lot of time with my children during their formative years and I have the good feeling that I got to chase my dream and I wouldn’t have to live with the regret of having not given it a shot.

Compare that worst case to not making the choice at all. Ask yourself genuinely if the worst case is really worse than not doing anything at all. If it’s not, then you should make the leap immediately. If it is, that’s the time to do some serious soul searching and evaluation, but don’t walk away from the choice – great reward does not come without some risk.

Use the “first thing in the morning” test. What are the first things you think about in the morning when you wake up? My first thought when I wake up is usually about my wife and children – often, my son is jumping around on the bed and my daughter is laying there yelling “DA DA DA DA!” (her favorite exclamation at the moment). Once I’ve wished them both a good morning, done a diaper check, and have some idea of their clothes for the day, my next thought usually revolves around writing. The same was true well before my career choice. In a nutshell, the first tasks you think about during the day that don’t fill you with dread are the tasks you should be focusing your life energy on – and if it requires making a difficult choice to get there, it’s a difficult choice you should be making.

Ask for help from your inner circle. The people around you can be incredibly helpful if you’re trying to make a difficult change in your life. Ask them for help and support when you make a challenging choice. My parents were extremely supportive with my educational choices. My wife was incredibly supportive and cooperative when I wanted us to make some financial changes and when I made a career change. The people around you are your support staff – let them support you when you need it.

Good luck in whatever you choose.

Prior to our financial meltdown, my wife and I simply never sat down and talked about our finances. Right after our meltdown, we talked about things almost every day, but through our recovery, our discussions have slowly reduced themselves to the point where we’re effectively already having monthly family financial meetings.

And these meetings have become a big part of the financial glue of our marriage.

These conversations keep us on the same financial page and ensure that we both are open and clear about our goals, our dreams, our mistakes, our challenges, and our shared path in life. They let us constantly be a check against one another, making sure we both stick to our better behaviors and use each other as an inspiration for making good choices. If you’re in a long-term relationship with someone, I can’t possibly recommend a monthly financial meeting more highly.

What Our Meetings Look Like

Our meetings are really pretty simple. We go through any credit card statements and bill statements that we have, talk about any changes we should make, plan for anything that’s coming up, and set some goals for the next month, mostly along the lines of limiting unnecessary spending and deciding where our budget leftovers will go for the next month.

For the most part, we don’t need any sort of specific agenda or meeting time – we just do it every once in a while on roughly a monthly schedule. Some keys:

Everything is an open book. There should be absolutely no secrets in such a meeting. If your spouse wants to know about a specific spending choice, be completely open about it, not defensive. If you’re getting defensive, that means you have something to hide – and that means there’s a problem that needs to be addressed together.

Make goals a big part of the meeting. Not only big, long-term goals, but the shorter goals over the next month that will help you get there. Set goals together, even if the goals are very individual in nature. Then, throughout the month, offer each other encouragement. It’s hard to break a bad spending habit or to make new financial choices – use the motivation of goals and the constant encouragement of a loving partner to make the changes easier.

This is a great time to work on a simple budget together. Sit down and talk in detail about your spending plan for the coming month – and also where your challenges and successes were over the last month. This discussion can provide a lot of insight into where you’re going – and where you’ve been – and that information together can help you to make better financial choices.

Love and respect each other, even if you have differences of opinion. Money brings about strong feelings – don’t let these strong feelings overshadow the more important things in life. One good way to do this is to hold your partner’s hand during the meeting.

Involving the Kids

I am a big advocate of involving children in these meetings as early as possible, by age seven at the latest. Allow them to bring their own financial picture to the table – pay them an allowance, have them budget the money, and have them talk about their own successes. Here are some thoughts on how to incorporate kids into this picture.

Keep the open book philosophy. Everything should still be wide open so that your kids can see the financial reality of being adults. They need to know how much you’re spending each month to keep the roof over their head and the food on the table – as well as giving an idea of all of the little expenses that eat away at the big pile of money.

What about privacy? Many parents like to hide behind a veil of privacy, saying that it’s none of their children’s business how they spend their money. My argument against that is twofold: first, it makes a great educational opportunity for your kids impossible and second, it says that there’s something in your spending that you’re ashamed of. If there’s shame, that means that there’s something you personally need to improve in your life.

Naturally, I see no problem eliminating a few items with black highlighter in order to hide an upcoming gift or something, but if you’re sealing away most of your spending from your children, they’re missing out on a big learning opportunity.

Let them offer input towards goals – and have them set their own. When you’re making large financial choices, let them have a voice in the decision, but don’t let them run the show, either. Where you should allow them a lot of control is in setting their own goals, both over the long term and over the next month. Help them identify good things to save for and encourage them to work towards those goals. This goes hand in hand with the idea of splitting an allowance into pieces for spending now, sharing with others, and saving for later – in effect, budgeting for kids.

Make some of the economic choices you have available to them. This is a concept heavily advocated by David Owen’s excellent book The First National Bank of Dad. In it, Owen advocates that you should create a “virtual” bank for your kids with a very high interest rate – say, 5% a month – to teach them the value of saving very early. In other words, let’s say they have $20. They have the choice of putting that $20 in the “First National Bank of Dad” where it will earn $1 in interest every month, or they can spend it immediately. All they have to do to earn that $1 each month is simply not spend it. It’s a real choice for a young child and it introduces them to the dilemma of saving versus spending – and offers plenty of encouragement to make the “good” choice.

In The End…
At its core, the idea of a monthly money meeting is really all about communication. The more we talk about money with our family and the more we encourage each other to make good choices, the more likely we are to make good choices over the long haul. Even better, it’s a splendid opportunity to use ourselves as examples for our children, teaching them how to be financially responsible adults.

One of my most loyal readers, a person named Brad who first emailed me about The Simple Dollar about a week after it launched, sent me an email this week that really struck a chord with me. Here’s the key part.

Ever since I was a little kid, all I’ve wanted to do was play professional golf. I can’t dream of a better life than playing golf for a living, or even working in some way professionally in a way connected to golf.

Right now I work in an office and the closest I get to this is playing a couple of rounds each weekend. During the week, I’m too busy to hit the greens.

This makes me depressed. I hear you talking about reaching your dreams and I’m happy for you, but then I look around my office and I see mine slipping away and I get sad.

All right, a confession.

I fail at writing. A lot.

I’ve been writing in my personal journal every single day since 1991. When I started digging into my writing passion (writing in a little leatherbound journal my grandmother got me for Christmas 1990 when I was only twelve years old), I read that one should write at least 1,000 words each day. So I have. Since January 1991. Every. Single. Day. At this point, I’ve been writing 1,000 or more words a day for the majority of my life – and it’s usually more words. Way more.

In high school, I entered essay competitions and other contests and did middling at best. I probably would have given up then, feeling much the same way our friend here feels like giving up, if it hadn’t been for the constant and often subtle encouragement by my high school English teacher. Randy, if you’re out there reading this, I wouldn’t be writing for a living right now if it wasn’t for you.

I kept it up in college and in my early professional life. I wrote two full novels and a pile of short stories. I had a few glimmers of success with it, even going so far as to get what I considered to be a very strong bite from a publisher in 2003, but most of it was a pile of rejection letters. Failure, over and over again.

I kept writing. Why? I loved it. I still love it with every ounce of my being. I love writing short stories. I love writing essays. I love making words flow together. I love how they transfer meaning to someone else, to people I’ve never met and will likely never meet.

Finally, after seventeen years of this, I’m finally seeing a little bit of success with writing. Why is this happening? There are a lot of reasons: I intentionally write very conversationally, which works well on the internet; I’m writing about a topic that’s near to people’s hearts; and I have a lot of great readers who help me out and inspire me over and over again.

There’s another piece, too. I practice. I’ve written and edited so many things over the years that now the actual art of taking an idea and turning it into a written piece fits on me like a familiar glove. It’s only because of that familiarity that I’m able to write so much for The Simple Dollar – two original columns a day – plus freelance stuff elsewhere. Because of that practice, I am now pretty fast at brainstorming, separating the bad ideas from the good, organizing a good idea into a series of logical points, and fleshing out those points into a written piece.

Great. But that doesn’t help me with my dream.
But it does! There are a ton of lessons in that story that can help anyone with any dream that they want to achieve. Let’s walk through them and see how they fit into my story, into Brad’s story … and into your story as well.

Passion.
Every single morning, when I wake up and lift my feet out of bed, two things cross my mind. The first one usually is a thought related to my wife and my kids – my immediate focus is on getting everyone up, getting them dressed, making sure they’ve eaten something nutritious, and getting them started on their day.

The second thought, though, always revolves around writing. I think about crafting sentences and pulling together ideas. I think about the written word in all of its varieties.

I yearn to write. There are times when I am almost magnetically pulled to a keyboard or to a pad of paper – there’s an idea floating in my head and I have to start recording it.

That’s what passion is. It’s the things in your life that you’re drawn to over and over again. It’s the things that you can scarcely go a day without doing – or at least wanting to.

Brad’s golfing is a perfect example. Every day when he goes home, he yearns to golf and it tears him up not to be able to act on that passion. He has that first piece in hand – he knows dead-on what he’s passionate about.

I have another friend who is incredibly passionate about chess. His home is littered with chess boards, magazines, and books. I finally saw how deep his passion went when I discovered a chess set in his bathroom so he could work through problems while doing his business.

What if you don’t know what you’re passionate about. Not long ago, I listed in great detail seven steps to finding what you’re truly passionate about. Here they are in a nutshell (but that whole article is well worth reading):

1. Maximize your health
2. Ask questions
3. Ignore what’s “cool”
4. Dabble in everything
5. When something piques your interest, try it again – and again
6. Associate with people who share this burgeoning interest of yours
7. Don’t keep pushing it if the passion dries up quickly

Keep doing those steps and you’ll find your passion – or it will find you.

Practice.
I like watching basketball players practice. I’ve watched bad coaches lead practices, mediocre coaches lead practices, and good coaches lead practice.

At first, I thought that basketball practice was about intense scrimmages. I thought that the best way to coach would be to have your team run complete plays over and over again with the coach pointing out flaws and correcting them. In essence, I thought practice would be much like a game with the coach shouting instructions.

Wrong.

The best basketball team I’ve ever seen would have two and a half hour practices – and only scrimmage for ten minutes or so at the very end. Most of the practice was filled with very repetitive drills. They’d sprint from one end of the court to the other to do a layup. They’d run the same exact screen a hundred times. They’d all shoot fifty free throws. They’d do endurance sprints. In other words, the intense part of their practices were nothing like playing a game of basketball – they were instead a bunch of focused little pieces on specific attributes of playing basketball.

I got the opportunity to ask the coach why this was and he made it very simple: these kids would play basketball for fun all the time anyway, so scrimmages were kind of a waste of time. Instead, it was much more important to work on very specific fundamentals.

In other words, practice isn’t just about doing something over and over again. It’s about focusing in on very specific elements and techniques, hammering them in over and over again, and then seeking out feedback on that technique.

Not long ago on the New York Times Freakonomics blog, Stephen Dubner wrote about the value of using deliberate practice to make oneself very good at a particular skill. He broke such practice down into three pieces:

1. Focus on technique as opposed to outcome.
2. Set specific goals.
3. Get good, prompt feedback, and use it.

When writing, I do this by writing on a bunch of different topics. I write articles and guest postings on all sorts of topics. I write short stories. I try mixing up what I do and taking on new things. In order to get feedback on this stuff, I post it online in various places – sometimes as guest posts on blogs, sometimes on community sites where I’ll get comments. This lets me know pretty quickly whether I’m writing well – or I need to work on something.

Alternately, I’ll just take one little piece of a post for The Simple Dollar and polish it, honing a truly great paragraph. This moves me from working on just content creation into working on editing, another piece of the writer’s toolkit.

With my golfing friend, instead of going home each night and lamenting that he doesn’t have the time or cash to go golfing, he should go to a park or a field somewhere where there is a lot of open grass and practice specific shots. Lay a hula hoop on the ground, then back away fifty yards and practice hitting chip shots into that hula hoop for an hour nonstop. Do that every night and your chip shots will get better and better.

The key here is to not “practice” the whole of what you’re doing. The key is to practice specific elements. Focus wholly on the areas where you’re weakest and drill in on them. Do some intense work on just one specific element of what you’re trying to accomplish.

After that, have fun and notice how that practice helped you become more complete in the area you’re passionate about.

Persistence.
Many people know what their passion is and how to practice to get better, but they are content with merely doing so every once in a while. They sit back and get complacent with what they know, only practicing every once in a while for a specific purpose.

For some, that’s enough. My mother-in-law is a very good piano player who can play stunningly well by ear; she also knows quite well how to practice to go from being very good to great. But the persistence isn’t there – she doesn’t sit down at the piano and practice chords over and over again or try banging through highly complex pieces or try mastering some of the more common techniques through repetition.

Persistence is the repetition of practice, and if anything, it’s the most important P. The gap that separates the very good from the great is the repetition of deliberate practice and the ability to keep at it no matter what.

It’s easy to echo countless stories and anecdotes about this. I like the story about Abraham Lincoln – during his adult life he was fired from his job, failed as an independent businessman, had a nervous breakdown, lost elections to the state legislature, state Speaker of the House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Senate again, and the Vice Presidency before finally becoming President. There were countless times he should have or could have quit, but he didn’t, and by persisting, he made an indelible mark on history.

I write thirteen articles for The Simple Dollar every single week. I’ve written at least 1,000 words every day for seventeen years. Sometimes, I won’t write anything at all that sets anyone on fire. At other times, I’ll write so much good stuff that it’s running out of my ears. But I don’t give up on those bad weeks – I keep at it because I know that when I stop being persistent about it, that’s when things will start to fall apart.

In Brad’s situation, he needs to stop by the park and practice some aspect of his game every single night. By making it an essential part of his day, something he must do without fail, he will put in the huge number of hours he needs to get better.

You know what your passion is. You know what you need to do to get better. Set aside some time right now to get better, every single day. It’s a tough choice, but it’s the one you need to make to pull your dreams closer one baby step at a time.

Patience.
About once a week, I’ll get an email from a disheartened writer. They read The Simple Dollar, thought that they could do the same, then sat down to crank out their own blog. The desire to write burned inside of them, they knew exactly what needed to be done to develop and produce good articles, and they understood the need to write every single day.

What they found out is that after two or three months, their site still only received a handful of visitors. They’d write to me wondering what was wrong, expressing some serious disillusionment. Usually, it didn’t matter what I wrote back to them – they’d usually abandon blogging, often with the sense that it was a scam or something or that the system was rigged against them.

There is no scam. They lacked patience.

Take Brad’s golfing passion, for example. Let’s imagine Brad gets the memo and starts practicing every day at the park for an hour. He practices his chip shots, his putts, and even his iron play from the rough. He hits the same shots over and over again and begins to get a real feel for his game.

Then he goes out on the course and hits an 88. He’s devastated. That was the same score he shot before he even started practicing! He tosses this stupid practice thing in the dumpster and gives up.

Patience, Brad. Look at Tiger Woods. He’s the best golfer in the world and can hit below 70 with stunning regularity, but even he hits a 74 every once in a while. The last time you shot an 88, it was on a day where you were naturally playing a bit above average. Now, when you shoot an 88, it’s an average day. All of that practice managed to shave a consistent stroke or two off of your score, but you’re judging that progress based on one round – and that’s not nearly enough.

In my own life, I went through periods where I was ready to give up the writing dream. I’d write every day, but I’d feel like I was, if anything, getting worse as a writer. I’d see no success in getting anything published – all I’d see were rejections. It often took everything I had to keep going, but I knew that if I stopped, the dream I had of being a writer would never happen. So I kept plugging away.

A while back, I noted nine techniques for developing patience:

Figure out what your actual destination is.
Make a “Plan B,” too.
Take the other side’s perspective.
Break down big goals into tiny ones.
Wait. Just a little.
Recognize that there are some things that you simply can’t control.
Think about the things that make you react on impulse.
Recognize when you do act on impulse.
Forget the results, enjoy the process.

Whenever you feel like you’re about to give up on your dreams even after investing a lot of passion and effort into them, look at these techniques. After all, all you need is just a little patience.

Participation.
Passion, practice, persistence, and patience will make you very, very good at something, but true greatness requires even more. It requires learning from others and also sharing what you know.

Every truly great person got there by participating in a wider community. They either brought something to the table that hadn’t existed before or helped someone else stand on the shoulders of giants. They changed the game, not just for themselves, but for others as well.

For me, this means interacting with other writers. It means participating in interviews. It means mentoring new bloggers. It means sharing what I know freely and also learning what others can teach me along the way.

For Brad, the possibilities of participation are nearly endless. He can teach others how to play golf. He can participate in community events, like organizing charity tournaments at the local public golf course. He can get kids interested in the game he cares so much about. He can use his passion and practice and persistence and patience as tools to not only make himself better, but bring something of value into the lives of others as well.

Don’t know where to start? You can begin by participating in general community events and meeting as many people as you can. You’d be shocked how many opportunities there are to share your passions with others, and from there the word can only spread outward.

It is only through that kind of participation that doors will open and you’ll be able to truly live your dream. Your passion, your improved skills, and your desire to share what you have with the world will make you stand out, and when things fall into place and the right opportunity comes around, you’ll be ready and waiting.

Starting on a Big Dream Right Now
Those five elements are all you need to start in on your dream right now.

Passion. Find it and know it.
Practice. Break your passion down into pieces and deliberately work on the elements.
Persistence. Practice as much as you can on an extremely regular basis, like clockwork.
Patience. Don’t expect to be great in a day, a month, or even a year.
Participation. Find new ways to get involved and share what you know.

Today, my friend, is a great day to get started.

Many thanks to Images of American Political History for helping me find public domain images for this post. For those curious, Passion was represented by Thomas Paine, Practice was represented by Benjamin Franklin, Persistence was represented by Douglas MacArthur, Patience was represented by Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Participation was represented by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The life stories of all of these people taught me valuable lessons about achieving my dreams.

When I was young, I dreamed about a lot of things. I wanted to be a writer, writing things that genuinely changed people’s lives. I wanted to have children and be a father to them like Ted Arroway without the collapse. I wanted to visit lots of different parts of the world and see how people actually lived, beyond the tourist areas.

When I got a little older, I had to make some choices. I could be “financially responsible” and start preparing for some big dreams … or I could take the easy path and bust out the credit cards. I looked down both paths… and then I started buying stuff. I filled my home with DVDs and books and electronic equipment and other stuff I didn’t really need – and that I already scarcely remember.

I started feeling the regrets before I was even twenty eight years old. I had a pile of debts that pretty much locked me into my current career path. I had almost no time to become a writer. I had a child, but I wasn’t spending the time with him that I wanted because the need for more money fueled my activities. I obsessed over work (even to the point of interrupting planned family events) and when work was done, I played hard, too.

Soon, I began to realize I was trading my dreams for a pile of stuff. I was swapping all of the things I truly wanted to do for some minor experiences that didn’t really stick with me. I was broke every week, but the reason I was broke wasn’t because I was chasing my dreams – it was because I was buying a mountain of scarcely-played DVDs and video games and spending my spare time dumping my money into sports cards and other ludicrously expensive “hobbies” such as stocking my home with the latest electronic goodies.

I gave these things up. I made some changes in my life. I stopped spending on the silly things and started “spending” on the big dreams. I spent my spare time practicing my writing and spending time with my children, and “spent” my money socking it away in savings so that it could help me during the lean times of chasing my dreams.

When I’m an old man, I won’t regret not buying that flat panel television or that Lexus. What I might regret is the thought that I spent my money on stuff instead of on opportunities – opportunities to follow my creative dreams, opportunities to spend time with my children when they’re young, and opportunities to stop and smell the roses instead of running forever and ever on a treadmill without end.

For me, it was really a simple choice.

No regrets.

What’s your choice?