Month: January 2022

I’m a mentor on the Millionaire Money Mentor's forum and we were discussing a post by adimesaved that had some very interesting takes on millionaires. In fact there were 16 of them and four in particular caught my eye.  These are all characteristics that Chris Hogan, formerly of the Ramsey clan, and Tom Corely, the uber famous author had identified:

1. Millionaires Seek Feedback and Have Mentors

2. Millionaires Persevere 

3. Millionaires are Consistent

4. Millionaires are Conscientious

And while these all sound good on the surface there is something wrong with the list, at least when it comes to my own millionaire journey.  Because they don’t describe me very well at all. 

I agree that most millionaires I know, including the handful of nine figure and ten figure ones do share the first characteristic.  They seek honest feedback and advice. They look for quality mentors because they realize they are not the smartest person in the room on every conceivable topic.  

It is hard to argue with Number 4, because you cannot succeed unless you are conscientious about your work product.  You have to have a high standard for quality in what you do  and have to have pride in what you create. At least in the creations that matter the most.

Those two I agree with, I cannot think of any self made millionaires that cannot check the boxes on them.  But it is Numbers 2 and 3 that give me pause.  Millionaires persevere, or do they?  It may be more semantics than reality but when I think back on my career, especially the early days when I was in head to head competition with many other engineers, the thing that separated me from my competition was not perseverance.  It was my ability to leverage my natural lazy streak to find new solutions to old problems. I worked in a small engineering group alongside similarly trained engineers who were all about having a strong work ethic.  They would pound away at problems with brute force.  I didn’t.  My intuition told  me that the best path to resolve a problem was the easiest path. So instead of fixing the impossible I would back way up and find a solution that did not fix the problem but instead rendered it irrelevant. 

My example is a little arcane, the world of chemical engineering doesn’t translate very well into other career domains, but let me try.  Often the chemical processes we utilized at our oil and chemical complex couldn’t perform at peak efficiency because of contaminants in the feedstocks we were processing.  Typically we, as troubleshooters and process optimizers, would be tasked with figuring out how to get the most product produced in spite of the contaminants.  That was a losing game, the problem isn’t figuring out how to minimize the contaminants impact, it is too late to solve that.  The real answer, the easy path is to back up and figure out how to eliminate the contaminants from the feedstocks so the process doesn’t have to deal with them at all. 

And that is what I did.  I found enough surplus process equipment sitting around unused, to cobble together a process that would remove all the contaminants from the feedstocks.  With cleaner and purer feed stocks the process started making more premium products.  That was thirty years ago and that process is still saving my former employer  millions of dollars a year.  It sounds like something Captain Obvious would point out,  but it wasn’t at all clear to my co-workers.  They were told to find a way to tolerate the contamination.  So that is exactly what they did.  They did what they were told.  And it was a hard path because it had very limited potential upside.  But they were persistent at doing what they were told, they persevered.  However, they could not back up and look at the real problem with no restrictions.  They could not conceive of a world where their bosses did not understand the problem.  So no, persevering is the worst thing in the world if you are trying to solve the wrong problem.

I did not share the illusion that my bosses knew best.  I knew that often the higher ups would poorly define the problem and I felt that where I could get the most recognition and provide the most value was by changing my job assignments to better ones. I did not persevere on the wrong path, I got off of the assigned arduous path and got on Easy Street where the real money was. And it did not take a great work ethic to produce when you are aiming at the right target.   The less successful engineers had a Don Quixote mindset, and their solution to tilting at windmills was to find a bigger horse and to keep charging.  Persevering, in my opinion, loses out to talent every time.  The original post used the tortoise and the hare fable as support for perseverance, but really, has a turtle ever outrun a rabbit?  Never going to happen.

The other characteristic I don’t relate to well was Number 3, millionaires are consistent.  I am not so sure about that.  You have to be conscientious, your important work product has to be consistently excellent, but you do not have to have consistent effort, in my opinion.  I tended to work in flurries of accomplishment followed by periods where I did not get much done. And guess what?  Nobody cared about my mundane daily activities, or at least they did not penalize me for mailing it in on unimportant work.  That stuff did not matter to the bosses, they cared about those grand slam home runs that made big money for the shareholders.

In any organization a lot of what passes as work: meetings, reports, budgets, etc. does not really make the company any money. At a facility like ours what made money was anything that either cut costs or increased throughput or product quality.  So if my idea of getting the contaminants out of the feedstocks without spending a lot of money worked, which it did, then my boss looked like a superstar because he got at least half the credit for it. And his boss looked like a champ because his facility was now the profit leader of the corporation.  That one big hit of an idea, and the follow through to get it into production, was worth ten years of grinding away at budgets and reports. 

I do not want to give the impression that one good idea made my career successful, I had dozens of similar ones over a long career, some even more profitable.  So why did the other engineers so often miss the low hanging fruit I consistently found?    They were intelligent, they were diligent, they persevered and they were consistent.  They just were not as talented at reframing the project assignments.  They had too much faith in their superiors’ abilities. And they liked the comfort that comes from doing exactly what they were told to do.  I knew I was better at my job than anyone else in the company so I felt authorized by my own talent to change my job assignments at will.  I will make one caveat.  While it is imperative to alter a bad project assignment to a better one, you also have to do the original assignment.  What I mean is I not only solved the contaminant problem by thinking out of the box, but I also presented a report that detailed how to minimize the effects of the contaminants, I fulfilled the original assignment as well as rendering it moot by solving the root problem.

That is critical because your bosses have egos too, and if you dismiss their instructions out of hand they are going to take that as an attack on their competency. I saw that first hand one time when my boss, myself and one of my engineers were on the company plane.  My subordinate, a very bright and intuitive engineer, had realized my boss had passed down a flawed project assignment.  He immediately reframed it into a better project and did an amazing job of coming up with a better outcome.  But he completely neglected the original assignment, which he could have completed in a day or two.   When he presented his bright new idea to my boss and brushed off the original assignment as being unnecessary, my boss blew a fuse.  When he calmed down he looked at me and said that I would have never done that.  I would have done the assigned work in addition to freelancing a plan B.  It was a big life lesson and my former protege was better for it. In fact he is a senior VP now at a large corporation.

You are supposed to be better at solving problems than your boss because they have too many other things to do besides micromanaging you.  But you have to have some tact about it.  If you present the answer to the original assignment first you are showing respect and honoring their position in in the company.  Then you can show them this other thing you came up with and ask what they think about it.  If you have a good boss they’ll see it as a win-win solution that will make you both look good.  That will make you indispensable to your boss and will motivate them to keep you happy. Rinse and repeat and you’ll be running the whole company in time. 

So are millionaires mostly people who have mentors, persevere no matter what, consistently produce and are conscientious?  Or can enough talent and creativity make up for lacking two out of four of those? 

Can being an extremely fast and extremely lazy rabbit beat the consistent and persevering turtle? I don’t even think its a contest, personally. 

Do you see yourself as mostly checking the boxes on millionaire characteristics or are there a few that do not fit at all, but have not seemed to slow you down? 

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For my entire adult life I never saw the value in having a vacation getaway house on the lake or a cabin in the woods.  It seemed impractical to maintain two places and would tie you down to just mostly going there when we like going everywhere.  Some of my friends have multiple homes or apartments and while they can easily afford them it still seemed like a strange way to live.  However I now find myself joining the two house crowd, or at least taking the first steps toward that lifestyle.  

My wife likes projects, remodels, yard improvements, building furniture and redecorating.  And she was intrigued by the possibility of getting some land up in the remote wilderness area of Arkansas that is very popular among hikers and river floaters.  We spend a lot of time in the woods, bushwhacking to water falls and hiking on the hundreds of miles of Arkansas wilderness trails, so we are in that area often.  She recently brought up the idea of buying land and a cabin, and for the first time it started to make sense to me.  What I had not considered was that it isn’t just a luxury expense, like a tricked out Mercedes Benz, its a luxury expense that might not actually cost us anything. 

I know it will cost several hundred thousand so I’m not in denial about that, but it still could make us some money.  This land has gone up in price steadily as it is a reasonable drive from the only two metro areas in Arkansas.  As we began looking around we were surprised at how many cabins, homes and vacation compounds have already been built there.  It is extremely difficult to find private land for sale that has utilities accessible and does not require some sort of easement to get to it. A large amount of the land in this area is government land and part of either the national forest or the Buffalo River National Park.   The Buffalo was the first National River in the US and all the land the river runs through is part of the park, and is not for sale.  So land that is very close to these protected wilderness  areas is becoming highly prized. 

We found an area that was being developed  with very large lots.  The last two lots totaled 25 acres, completely wooded and quite steeply sloped except for a very small yard around the cabin site.  The views are spectacular. This part of Arkansas is as remote and beautiful as many Western mountain states, without the feet of snow each winter, although we usually get a few inches.  We decided to buy both lots and leave one empty as a buffer so that the closest cabin to ours will not be visible.  If we later change our minds we could sell the empty lot or sell both lots and the cabin.  In any case the total cost isn’t enough money to impact our retirement finances.  We will probably VRBO it just to make sure it is occupied and not just sitting empty when we are not there and the income will help offset utilities and taxes if we decide to do that. I think that will be another adventure in itself.

I’ve long known we do not spend enough, we just are not spendy people.  But this kind of spending on an appreciating asset, that feels fine to me.  And the whole thing will be a multi-year project for my wife.  I have a lot of projects with my college and charity foundation boards I chair.  Plus other volunteer activities  keep me challenged.  But this is right in her wheelhouse and that alone makes it worthwhile.  If it pays for itself, fine, if it doesn’t, still fine.  In the big scheme of things is it small money.  Plus, maybe it will give the kids something to fight over when we are gone?  And it surely will give me some blog fodder.  I’ve only owned one house in my life and I know nothing about the process of getting one built, so we will learn a lot and make more than a few mistakes. 

What amazed me is how lightly I was holding on to the “I’ll never have two houses” mantra.  Now it doesn’t bother me at all that we are about to do just that. I wonder how many of my other principles are not as fixed in concrete as I think they are?  Maybe next time I buy a car I won’t buy a used one? I’m on the crazy train now!

What about you, have you ever completely changed your mind on something you were certain about?

Would you ever consider a second place on the beach, or in the mountains or at the lake?

Work is funny.  Not fun, but odd and weird and strange. This epiphany came to me just minutes ago after I got off of a phone conversation with an urban planner at an engineering company.  But first let me place this in context.  I stopped working a meaningful number of hours a week nearly six years ago when I turned sixty and retired.  I did still keep earning money doing light consulting but it only took about eight hours a week of my time.  I think eight hours a week qualifies as being fully retired in spite of being highly overpaid for it.  I quit most of that consulting last year, and maybe work an hour a month now. I only do that for friends when they need an inexpensive expert witness or lobbyist.  My rates make me the Costco of the consulting business.

The reason I quit my original retired consulting gigs last year was because I did not enjoy the deadlines and rigid schedules it placed on me.  Eight hours isn’t much time in a work week but it wasn’t evenly or regularly distributed.  One week I might work forty-five hours and then not work at all for the next six weeks.  And I had no control over when I worked and when I didn’t since that was set by hearing dates and docket schedules.  It was kind of a grind having arbitrary deadlines pop up and mess with the time freedom I wanted in retirement. It was fun at times, and it kept me relevant with business and industry leaders and government officials.  But it just wasn’t fun enough to make up for the constraints it placed on my life. 

I thought I had finally escaped most of that by no longer working any paid jobs.  But not so.  I still have lots of arbitrary deadlines and meeting dates I cannot escape that come with my volunteer work.  Chairing a college board and a charitable foundation board, both with multimillion dollar budgets places the obligation on me to attend every committee meeting either board schedules as well as leading the board meetings for both groups.  I still have to do annual performance reviews and salary recommendations for the president/CEO of each organization.  I have to get continuing education credits and have to attend multiple commencements and grants award luncheons each year.  I even have to get finger printed and sign affidavits and financial disclosures as part of the deal.   I need to attend some of the college basketball, baseball and softball games as well as college foundation fund raising events. And in a similar fashion I have church commitments and student mentoring commitments with my former university engineering department.  Finally, my billionaire friend has me running a local team to recruit some industrial jobs to our area.

That last one, the industry recruitment gig, that’s the one that led to my epiphany, the “work is funny” one.  Because that project ground to a halt during the holidays.  It is mostly a matter of outreach to economic development experts and you cannot reach out to anybody reliably during the three weeks that encompass the Christmas and New Year holidays.  That part was good, I had a complete break from just about everything, and I enjoyed it.  But part of me was dreading going back to my volunteer responsibilies, just like working people often spend Sunday evenings dreading Monday morning. And today was the day I decided to get back on the industry recruitment horse.  Truthfully it was kind of painful to have to do that. Yet as soon as I had made my last call of the day and was back to “my time” that feeling went away and I got a little dopamine rush from having made some progress I could report back to my team next week.  And that’s the odd, weird and strange thing about all my volunteer work now.  I kind of dread it a little, just like I always have some misgivings before getting behind a podium to give a speech.  But when it is over, I always feel great about having done it.  I like the things that accompany the completion of these tasks, but at the time I’m not particularly thrilled about having to do them.

My nine to five was different.  I enjoyed both the details of the work, the tasks involved and the thrill of completing them successfully. It is why I kept at it so long.  But it did stop being fun at the end and what I do now is much better.  However, I have come to believe I need the deadlines and the small amount of anxiety that my volunteer commitments create to make the leisure time and the hobby time more meaningful.  I don’t really understand why that is the case, but I think my life would be less than it is without those commitments.  It would be nice if they were as exciting and as much fun as work was back in the day, but I’m not sure that is possible.  I’m fine with how things are now, but still, it is a little weird that some of  the things I do to increase my overall joy are not that much fun in themselves.  

What about you, if you are retired do you feel that you need some deadlines and required tasks that resemble work to add to your overall happiness, even if those very things create some stress?

If you are nearing retirement, early or conventional, have you decided how you will spend your time each day? 

Some people see retirement as endless golf or fishing or pickleball.  I do all of those (except substitute tennis for golf) but without the volunteer duties or some kind of part time work I do not think I would be happy.  Do you think you will need something similar in your life or is endless leisure a sustainable lifestyle?

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