How To Retire Well And Sooner Than You Thought Possible — The Flywheel Principle
Posted @ 9:12 am - Filed under Purposeful Planning, Real Estate Investing, Retirement
I’m often asked what is it I actually do. I’ve worked on my answer to that question for quite awhile.
What I do is show regular folks how to retire very well — and sooner than they thought possible.
The next question, as you might have already guessed, is usually, “How do you do that?”
It’s simple, and it’s not. But there are some common denominators that will always be present. Ask anyone who has retired with impressive income, and at a relatively early age how they did it. If you listen, you’ll hear the same principles being repeated every time.
Before I continue, you can listen to a Purposeful Planning podcast on this site. (There are actually two of them.) But the principles spoken of in those interviews, though they form the foundation and steel girders of what I do, also entail other principles left unspoken.
One of the bedrock principles with which we help people advance toward their retirement the way my son does a carne asada burrito, is known as the Flywheel Principle. I wish I’d thought up the name for it, as I’ve been employing the principle for decades now. I not only employ it for my clients’ benefit, but for Brown & Brown too. I just always thought it made sense, though I didn’t have a name for it. Grandma taught it to me.
The Chinese have used this principle for countless centuries. It’s actually become part of their culture’s DNA.
There was a book published about six years ago, Good To Great that talks about and explains this principle magnificently. Here’s how it works. I very much like how the book explained it, so I’ll loosely paraphrase that version and apply it to what I do — the Purposeful Plan.
Imagine a solid steel wheel 30 feet in diameter, about six inches thick, and in a horizontal position. It’s massive, and you can only guess at how many tons it weighs. Now picture yourself (and your better half if you’re married) trying to get this thing turning. By turning this wheel you generate power — energy. Your only allowed to get it going by your own efforts — pushing with your shoulder(s) to the wheel. Since this giant, heavy flywheel is perfectly balanced it can be turned, but only with determined, and consistent effort.
The Flywheel Principle: Once you know, in any endeavor, what behavior is required to accomplish your mission statement, you focus only on those behaviors. You keep focusing on them, no matter what. Even though it may take years, and at times you don’t seem to be advancing by any measure — you keep doing what you KNOW will take you to the mission statement’s promised land. You do this until, almost like magic, you realize you’ve broken through to the other side.
The first day of pushing this monster flywheel for all you have, results in almost a whole revolution. Of course in your Purposeful Plan, this ‘first day’ is really your first year or two. You’re not discouraged though, because you know what’s possible. You understand that the faster you get this dang thing turning, it will reach the point at which its weight will cease being your foe, and turn into your friend. We call this inertia. More on that later.
So you’re sweating blood with your partner pushing this monster wheel, and you begin to notice the RPM’s increasing — as long as you keep paying attention to the force you’re applying. Translation: You’ve got a Purposeful Plan (represented by this flywheel) and you’re doing everything you possibly can to keep it turning. As time passes you’re becoming encouraged and excited by how you’ve managed to get the wheel spinning almost like a top. What you’re also noticing is that even though the RPM’s are increasing at an impressive rate, you’re also not having to expend so much of your own energy towards that result.
This is creating the inertia, mentioned earlier, that keeps it moving in the right direction with less and less effort.
Now you begin to smile. It’s been 5-10 years and your flywheel is now spinning like something you vaguely remember from Star Wars. Your effort has now been reduced to ensuring you don’t do anything to alter the wheel’s direction. You’re really liking these two trends.
This is usually the time you begin to notice something. The flywheel is now spinning so fast and creating so much energy, you can’t believe it. You’ve experienced The Breakthrough. It’s that moment in time when you realize you’re worth more than you’ve ever imagined. It’s not like you weren’t paying attention — you’ve been paying very focused attention.
And there it is. There wasn’t a specific day you woke up and said, “We’ve broken through Honey!” That’s just not the way it works. There is a moment though when you realize what you’ve accomplished. And it happened because of the Flywheel Principle.
At this point it makes sense to point you to a very recent post in which the flywheel principle was illustrated without naming it. The Purposeful Plan and the consistent ‘pushing’ made the results shown in that post possible — over a 20 year period.
You created a Purposeful Plan — your own personal flywheel. And since you realized that Plan, like the wheel, wasn’t going to accomplish anything by it’s mere existence, you began ‘pushing’ for all you were worth. And now that Plan is generating the huge smile on your face as you can now easily visualize your retirement dreams — as reality.
My favorite client meetings are those in which I get to show them they’ve reached breakthrough status. There are two such meetings. One is when I can inform them they’re now easily worth seven figures — exclusive of their own home. My favorite though, is when I get to tell them their Purposeful Plan has now made it possible to quit their jobs any time from that day on. Their ‘wheel’ has created enough energy (Read: Retirement Income) to last them a lifetime.
Those who choose to ignore this principle are doomed to experience mediocre to good results. If you insist on great results, the Flywheel Principle is a must. There are no exceptions.
Often, we are a product of the questions we continually ask ourselves. Try this one on yourself.
Given the choice, do you want to live an average to good retirement — or a great retirement?
That’s a great question, isn’t it?
What’s your great answer?
This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 9:12 am and is filed under Purposeful Planning, Real Estate Investing, Retirement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
