Joshes and Joshettes, let me ask you a question. Have you arrived? No, this isn't some random question, this is today's topic. It's okay to still be a bit confused because it's a vague question. But by the end of this post, you'll understand the topic and even know if you've arrived or not. Let's get started.

Today's topic is a mash-up of many different saying, but it's a powerful teaching. The exact topic is "How can you know if you've arrived if you don't know what you're after." I can hear some of you groaning because this sounds like another goal-setting post, and it kind of is but at the same time it isn't. Let's take my normal job as an example, I am commission-based and if I don't hit my metrics then I don't get paid. How do I know what metrics I need to hit and where my strength and weaknesses are? Only by knowing what my quota is and gauging to see where I am daily. Whenever I clock in, I load up the same webpages and one of those pages is the ranking report and on it, I see my current ranking and numbers. It's one thing to see where I stand but it's another thing to see how I'm doing for the day, but don't worry I track each transaction I do in an excel sheet. This excel sheet allows me to keep a history of each day and gives me my metrics for each day. Since my commission is based on how I rank against my peers, I need to know how everyone is doing. I asked my supervisor to copy me on an hourly email update so that I could see how I'm doing against my peers. This is one of the reasons why I rank in the top forty percent at work out of nearly two hundred reps. Now let's take a look at where that pay goes.

I can tell you without looking at my accounts that I have not arrived at my financial goals. One of the reasons why I haven't arrived is because I honestly don't what I want financially. In episode 64 of The Books By Josh Audio Immersion I go into detail about this but here's the gist; I don't know how I want my money to make me money. I've already gotten myself out of debt, have a fully-funded emergency fund, and am saving for retirement. But where do I go from there, which vehicle is right for me? Until I can find the answer, I'll be losing money because the interest rate on my bank account is only 1%.

I've already talked about this topic in regards to my job and my finances, this post should be done right? Wrong, let's talk about how this topic relates to my life. Have I arrived in life? Nope, I'm still a long way out from where I want to be. It might be hard to believe but I do have a goal that incorporates the previous two examples. My goal is to be able to sustain myself off of what I make from my various endeavors so that I work full time for myself. My number isn't even that high I just need to make three thousand a month and I can go full time. I know I've been talking about this for a while and when I've been out because of injury or COVID, I haven't fully been focused. Honestly, I haven't been fully productive since before my accident, actually sitting down to work when you don't have to is hard. The days just pass you by and without realizing it a week or two have passed and all you have to show for it is a beard. So what is it that I'm personally after? Even though I have a goal, I don't know what I want out of life. Life has hit me with so many curveballs that I honestly don't know anymore. A prime example of this is when I was looking for a new job while working at my last one. Everything was fine and then boom, I got hit by a washing machine. Just like with my financial goals, I need to find out what I'm after if not I will never arrive.

When I first started writing this topic I was going to go in a different direction but I said f it. Everyone should learn from my mistakes rather than their own. As Mark Cuban often says, you just need to be right one time. Honestly, if I follow the financial advice of Dave Ramsey and Chris Hogan, I will retire with over a million in assets. It's a long game but that's why I constantly invest in my 401k and my Roth IRA. I know I'm going to hit that because there was a proven plan written for me. But the other aspects of my life don't have a written proven plan for me to follow, so it's trial and error. If you want one golden nugget of information from this post here it is: Read biographies of people who have obtained success and write down how they did it and try to emulate them. Don't just read this post go take some sort of action and report back here letting me know how it went.