Strategies for planned retirement
How should anyone without a job start preparing for retirement right after reading this article –– one hour flat from now? Can’t be done, you say! You want to know my own opinion? “Yes, it can be done!” And, if you bear with me, I’ll show you how.
The first, small step towards achieving that goal is the easiest. It doesn’t require you raising a seed capital. It doesn’t demand that you write yet another I-beg-to-apply letter. Nor does it require that you even lift a finger.
All you have to do is have a change of mind. Yes, change your thinking and begin to see things differently. And what aspect of your mind do you have to change? Change the way you used to think!
One of the greatest challenges facing us as human beings is our uncontrolled negative ways of thinking. Our negative mindsets. Our wrong beliefs. Unknown to many, if we believe the wrong things, we get the wrong results. And if we think on the right things, we get the right results.
The reason this is so is because of what is known as The Law of Attraction. This law establishes the fact that we naturally attract to ourselves what we think about mostly. Unfortunately, very few people know the impact that their thoughts are having on their lives.
As far back as 1986, some two years after we started our sports publishing business, I suddenly realized, after reading some motivational books, which included Napoleon Hill’s Think And Grow Rich, that what I really needed to work on was what was going on in my mind; the dominant things I was thinking about; the dreams I was nursing and how diligent I was in clearing the cobwebs of negative thoughts that were fighting hard to take control of my mind.
Initially it was really tough for me. While I was struggling to keep my mind on the good things that I wanted to attract into my life, my mind was busy operating like a magnet programmed to attract only fearful and negative things.
This battle went on for several years. But I persisted in weeding out the things I didn’t want. Eventually, I began to notice changes. Now, I’m able to concentrate on my goals. And I find it easier to slam the brakes on negative thoughts before they ever take root in my mind and become difficult for me to dislodge.
Success –– or failure –– is an inside job. It all starts from the mind. Control your thoughts and you’ll control your future.
GOD’s Word even makes that truth abundantly clear in Proverbs 23:7a –– “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.”
The good thing about this simple, first step, apart from the fact that it doesn’t cost you a dime to implement, is that if it is firmly in place, it will make it easy for you to apply all the other principles that you need to achieve financial freedom and make retiring gloriously less challenging.
For example, as I stated in last week’s column, the only dignifying way a jobless person can scale over the immovable hurdle that makes achieving financial success a daunting task is to understand how to create a legitimate cash flow and sustain it.
Creating and sustaining a legitimate cash flow depends absolutely on one principle: provide a service or sell a product that adds value to the prospective buyer.
If a jobless person is still thinking in the old way, his reaction to this suggestion will be negative. He would say: “How can I create cash flow when I’m not earning any money? Will I use stone to create it? What I need is a job. When I get a job, then I’ll start to save money. After that, I can start a business and when I make enough money, I’ll start preparing for retirement.”
This thinking is wrong. It places the responsibility of getting a job on others. You must discard it today.
If you’re thinking right, your response to that revealing principle should go like this: “Okay, now I know what I’m up against. I must either provide a service or sell a product that adds value to prospective buyers.
“What do I know about providing a service? What about selling a product? Which of the two options can I handle well? Do I need to learn a new skill? If yes, where? What will it cost? How can I raise the money for the training?”
If you take time to analyze these questions, you’ll discover that all of them are directed at you. What you’re saying, by daring to ask yourself these questions, is that you’ve accepted the responsibility for making things happen positively in your life.
These powerful questions will propel you to take action. And action is the energy that drives accomplishments.
Previously, these same set of questions would’ve over-whelmed you. But not any more. You’re, literally speaking, up on your feet now, determined to find answers to the questions. So, let’s take the first question: What do I know about selling a product or providing a service?”
Unless you’ve experience in sales and marketing before, providing a service is the option you’re most likely going to settle for. And I can assure you that that is the best choice to make. Rendering a service is the cheapest way to start your wealth-building journey.
But what service can you render and another person will pay you for it?
Before you decided to change your thinking, this would’ve been a difficult question for you to answer. There are so many jobless people today who should be gainfully employed but who are sitting idle because they consider the services they can render and get paid for beneath their status or dignity.
Just so you understand what I’m saying, to render a service means employing your time, talent, energy or knowledge for another person so that instead of them doing that thing themselves, you do it for them and get paid for it.
And that includes anything from washing their cars, to shining their shoes, to ironing their clothes, to baby sitting for them, to keeping watch on their home, to driving their cars, to cooking their food, to going on errand for them, to cleaning their business or residential premises, to coaching them on how to speak in public, to keeping their books, to repairing their handsets, and on and on like that.
If you’re healthy, there is no limit to the services that you can choose from. The only thing that will stop you from picking one and doing it is your over-sized ego, which sees staying at home doing nothing as more dignifying than doing any of the hundreds of services that are available, some of which I listed above.
A multi-billionaire that you and I know, Cosmas Maduka, owner of the Coscharis conglomerate, told the story of how, on his way up, he was carrying scale for measuring weight on his head in the market and charging N10 per person for the service –– just so he can put food on his family dinner table.
Cosmas Maduka is a Nigerian not an American. And the market where he sold this service was a Nigerian market, right here in Lagos!
Stay with me as I’ll elaborate more on this topic in the next edition.
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