A key theme in just about every self-help or self-improvement book is goal setting, and it’s easy to understand why. If you don’t know where you want to go, how can you expect to find your way, or indeed, know when you’ve arrived? But it’s a more complex process than you might think, and an over-emphasis on the achievement of goals is something of a red herring that can lead you along the wrong psychological track.
Your life is made up of a series of journeys. Sometimes you embark on them one after the other, and at other times they’re concurrent. Each journey usually has a goal or target attached. It could be the attainment of a qualification, a promotion, a new job, buying a house or other asset, perfecting a skill or ability, building a saleable business, achieving recognition in your field, progressing a relationship to the next level, achieving financial security, or something else. It’s perfectly natural to become focused on the destination but a big mistake to neglect the journey.
The nature of worthwhile goals is that they are rarely achieved quickly. The journey to each is what life is all about, but many people miss out on much of what it has to offer – because their focus is on where they want to go. The irony is that reaching the destination is almost inevitably an anti-climax. There is invariably an: “Is that it?”moment when you realise you’ve reached your goal and it doesn’t feel how you expected it to.
Few achievements can match the expectation and anticipation, and this feeling of slight deflation is then replaced with a realisation that this isn’t the end of the journey at all; it’s a brief stop-off before embarking on the next leg. Once you’ve arrived at one destination, it’s vital that you immediately embark on another journey. There’s no ultimate destination– not in this life at least. The journey is the thing.
All of this may sound negative, but it isn’t. It’s merely to alert you to the fact that the journey is what really matters. Destinations are merely brief stops on a longer route and it’s only by going on the journey and experiencing the highs, lows, successes and failures along the way, that you can really appreciate the destination. So take the time to enjoy and appreciate the journeys you embark upon.
By all means, garner all your efforts to reach your destination quickly and smoothly, but not at the expense of looking out of the window every now and again and stopping off to enjoy all the fascinating stuff along the route. When you look back on any achievement or goal you have reached it will be the journey you’ll remember, not the ultimate destination. If you start out with the right attitude, it’s within your power to make those memories great ones.
Kind Regards
John Harrison
PUBLISHERS NOTICE
Dear Streetwise Customer,
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If your great-great-grandparents were resurrected tomorrow, they’d be stunned…
We travel where and when we choose at astonishing speed and at very little cost. Goods and services are in almost limitless supply and everything there is to see and know is practically there at the click of a computer mouse or via a smartphone screen.
Go back just four generations, and the poor were undernourished and thin. No longer. How would you explain to your great great grandfather that the ‘poor’ of today are usually the people who eat way too much?
Take any wealth and well-being measurement you like… per capita income, car ownership, real spending power, health, home ownership and size… and the trend is always upward and always improving. Our wealth and prosperity, and the factors connected with them, just get better and better.
Forget nostalgia about the good old days… if there’s ever been a Golden Age, one where economic prosperity has created freedom, opportunity and the good things in life, it is right here and now. It’s never been any better than this.
But if that’s the case, let me ask you this – are you any happier than your parents were at your age… or your grandparents? You have good ‘stuff’ in your life, ‘stuff’ they could have never dreamed of. But unless you’re very unusual, the answer will be “no” – you are not happier than the preceding generation.
Throughout the Western world something strange is happening. As prosperity grows, so does the incidence of depression. Experts calculate that depression is 10 times more prevalent than it was 50 years ago.
Psychologist after psychologist has come up with the same conclusion – people are less satisfied and less happy than at any time in recent history. And yet by any measure, they’re more prosperous. Real happiness and fulfilment clearly can’t be bought. And if you want confirmation of that, you need look no further than the average lottery winner.
Most people buy a lottery ticket with the expectation that if they ‘win the big one’, it will transform their life for the better… for all time. And yet research by Dr Nick Baylis of Cambridge University suggests that the average lottery winner’s happiness quotient returns to its pre-win level within one year of the win.
Acquisition of goods and services bring them no long-term improvement in happiness – just a short-term ‘buzz’, followed by a storage and ‘looking after’ headache! The new possessions give no pleasure – just hassle and worry. And then pain if they’re taken away.
But I think it goes further than that, because many winners end up less happy than they were before. The money has robbed them of something very important… the belief that there is a simple solution to their personal happiness problem – a great pile of cash! Once they realise that the money has failed to do the ‘trick’ they feel lost. All hope of a simple solution easily purchased in the shape of a lottery ticket, is gone.
Now they’re going to have to find the real key to happiness, but they haven’t got a clue where to look. Maybe they should try the Jacuzzi.
Some time ago I was talking to a friend at my local health club in the Jacuzzi. He’d just sold his business and was thinking about what to do next. Paul had enough money to retire on, but after a few weeks of inactivity, he was starting to get restless. Brendan, who quickly caught up with the conversation, joined us.
Brendan has sadly passed away now. He was quite well known locally. He was boxing trainer who had successfully trained several British European and World champions, including Prince Naseem and Johnny Nelson. He also did an enormous amount of work with the area’s under-privileged kids, for which he received an MBE. Brendan listened to what Paul was saying and then said: “You can’t just do nothing… you need a purpose!”
And the more I thought about it, the more I realised how true this was. The acquisition of money, wealth or ‘stuff’, which is unrelated to activity or effort, is rarely, if ever, satisfying. Lottery winners become unhappy, not because they now have money, but because they have lost their previous purpose… achieving financial security and working to buy ‘goodies’… and have failed to replace it with a new one. And maybe large sections of the wider population are similarly afflicted, albeit less acutely.
Just a generation or two ago, they were too tied up with their primary purpose of feeding, clothing and sheltering their family, to need other ‘purposes’ in their life. Today, in this country at least, that purpose has been broadly taken care of. And many people now see acquisition per se, as a purpose, and expect it to bring them happiness and fulfilment.
They acquire some ‘stuff’, but it doesn’t make them happy. But rather than conclude that ‘more stuff’ doesn’t make you happy, they conclude that they’re not happy because they simply don’t have enough ‘stuff’ yet! But no amount of ‘stuff’ will ever be enough.
Now I know what Brendan meant by purpose. He spent a lot of his life helping young kids who might otherwise go ‘the wrong way’, find their own purpose in life. So his purpose was helping others find a purpose. But I have a broader definition, which encompasses what most of us should be looking for…
To Create, Make Or Do Something Better.
The ‘something’ you create or make or do better, could be a business, a job, a house, a product, a book, a charity, a club, a society, a plan, a person’s life… whatever. Note that I said: ‘create or make better’ not ‘buy’. Buying doesn’t work. Money offers a convenient measure of how well your creation has done but, in isolation, offers little in the way of satisfaction or happiness.
So am I saying that making money is pointless? Not at all, but it has to be used in the right way if it’s to have any impact on your level of happiness. I’ll say it again: buying ‘stuff’ won’t do it.
Money, once earned, opens up ‘purpose opportunities’ that aren’t available to people without it. That might involve buying time to pursue a personal project, buying instruction to further your goals in a project or hobby, or directly investing in people or projects where money can be used to create something… or make something better.
This is the real way you can use money to create personal happiness… not through the vacuous purchase of yet more gadgets and gizmos that clutter up your life and render no long-term benefit. You ‘re-invest’ the money in a purpose that has meaning to you and that will bring long-term satisfaction and happiness.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting you have to give the money away, work for charity or help the disadvantaged. That might not be your thing. It might not be a purpose that is going to make you happy.
Your purpose could be a totally selfish one… to work towards a personal challenge like climbing a mountain or sailing around the world for example… but there has to be something – a plan followed by action to create something – or make or do something better.
It’s all about seeing something you care about transferred from an idea, to a plan, to action, through to an end result with a positive outcome. It’s about having an impact on something.
What that thing is will be very personal to you… it may or may not require large sums of money to bring about. Only you will know. But the more money you have, the wider the choice of ‘purposes’ you will have.
The happiness-creating potential of money is not in what it can buy, but rather in the access to new purposes that it can bring.
You can’t use money to buy happiness directly, but you can use it as an ‘entry ticket’ to the next level, and the best tickets – the expensive ones – offer limitless choice.
Look, I’m not totally stupid, I know that if you’re struggling to make ends meet, you probably think the preceding 500 or so words is pure baloney.
“Just give me the cash,” you may say, “and I’ll show you whether it will make me happy. Purpose my arse!”
Nothing I can say will convince you that having a million or two to spend as you please won’t make you happier than you are right now, or that if you were in that position, you couldn’t happily sit on a beach for the rest of your days and conspicuously consume. Nothing will convince you of that other than experience.
As the great Spike Milligan once said: “All I ask is the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.” That’s why so many of our publications are devoted to the task of helping you become financially strong and secure. The things I’ll do to prove a point!
Kind Regards
John Harrison
PUBLISHERS NOTICE
Please Don’t Forget…This Works!
Dear Streetwise Customer,
Just imagine this for a moment…
Every morning before you go out to work or whatever else you’re doing that day, you switch on your laptop or PC and click, ‘Go’.
A few hours later you come back home and yet another £59 has been added to your account…Simply, Easily, Automatically…without you lifting a finger.
That’s what I’m writing to you about today. I want to send you everything you need to get this up and running and working for you in less than half an hour…and I want to send it For Free!
It’s amazing, it’s brand new and it works
Why would I send you the means to make over £300 a week for doing (or risking) nothing? Because I want to introduce something which makes that kind of money look like chickenfeed.
Food waste is big news at the moment. The amount of food going to landfill has been estimated to be as high as 40% and there’s general consensus that something needs to be done. Much of the waste seems to be down to over-zealous ‘sell-by’ dates, and one US grocery store and restaurant has been set up to tackle the problem.
The Daily Table offers grocery shopping and dining. Goods are kept on sale in the store for way beyond the usual sell-by dates and then used in the restaurant when it becomes clear that they are about to pass their best. The owners of the business believe that by using older stocks of fruit and vegetables which would otherwise be thrown away, they are able to provide healthy meals at prices which compete with the fast food chains.
This is an admirable idea. It provides low prices and environmental brownie points to its customers. Will it be a success? I don’t know, but it certainly hits the zeitgeist of the times, Perhaps a trend to keep an eye on and food for thought – how else might you profitably tackle the issue of food waste?
Quote Of The Day
“Happiness depends upon ourselves.”
Aristotle
Alternative Quote Of The Day
“My wife said: Can my mother come down for the weekend? So I said: Why? and she said: ‘Well, she’s been up on the roof two weeks already’.”
Bob Monkhouse
It’s Been A Good Month For…
Metal Detectorists – as one enthusiast has discovered a rare hoard of Bronze Age artefacts, which experts describe as “nationally significant”, in the Scottish Borders. Mariusz Stepien was searching a field near Peebles with friends when he found a bronze object buried half a metre (1ft 8in) underground.
Archaeologists spent 22 days investigating, building a shelter to protect the find from the elements. Mr Stepien and his friends camped out there. They uncovered a complete horse harness, preserved by the soil, and a sword dated to 1,000 to 900 BC. The Bronze Age in Britain ran from about 2,000BC to about 650BC.
IT’S BEEN A BAD MONTH FOR …
City Centres- Almost half a trillion pounds could be wiped off the UK economy over the next four years if workers fail to return to offices. Flexible working plans that would see most staff never return to the office full-time.
Thousands of small businesses – from sandwich bars such as Pret a Manger, which is shedding 2,890 jobs, to pubs, newsagents, and dry cleaners – rely on urban centres being full of employees and professionals accustomed to spending freely during lunch breaks, on their journeys to and from work, and in the evening.
Today’s National Day
NATIONAL COMIC BOOK DAY!
PUBLISHERS NOTICE
Please Don’t Forget..This Works!
Dear Streetwise Customer,
Just imagine this for a moment…
Every morning before you go out to work or whatever else you’re doing that day, you switch on your laptop or PC and click, ‘Go’.
A few hours later you come back home and yet another £59 has been added to your account…Simply, Easily, Automatically…without you lifting a finger.
That’s what I’m writing to you about today. I want to send you everything you need to get this up and running and working for you in less than half an hour…and I want to send it For Free!
It’s amazing, it’s brand new and it works!
Why would I send you the means to make over £300 a week for doing (or risking) nothing? Because I want to introduce something which makes that kind of money look like chickenfeed.
When sustainable alternatives are widespread, affordable and just as good or better than the legacy option, then eco-consumption becomes less about the status of opting in and more about the shame of opting out. That’s why in 2020, millions of consumers will seek out products, services and experiences that help them alleviate rising eco-shame. It’s the evolution of eco-consumption as a status play.
Just take a look at three iconic eco-consumption moments. Way back in 2008 Tesla launched the Roadster, a $100,000 supercar. In 2016 Adidas partnered with Parlay for Oceans to produce a limited-edition line of sneakers made from recycled ocean plastic; only 50 pairs were made.
Also in 2016, NYC’s Momofuku Nishi becomes the first restaurant in the world to offer the Impossible Burger, which looks, cooks, smells, sizzles, and tastes like conventional ground beef but is made entirely from plants.
But what has been the story since then? Fast-forward to 2019, and Tesla’s Model 3 is a play for the mainstream driver, and now the third best-selling car in the UK. Adidas made 11 million pairs of ocean plastic sneakers in 2019. And Impossible Burger is available at over 7,000 Burger King outlets cross the US.
Quote Of The Day
“If you plan on being anything less than capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.”
Abraham Maslow
Alternative Quote Of The Day
“I’m normally not a praying man, but if you’re up there, please save me Superman.”
Homer Simpson
From high-end and rare to affordable and widespread: that’s the eco-consumption journey across the last few years. And when eco-alternatives go mainstream in this way, they’re no longer an exciting status currency.
The key implication? A shift in the moral calculus for consumers. Because when eco-alternatives are as available, affordable and effective as the legacy option, there’s no reason not to choose them.
Throw in Extinction Rebellion, the global Strike for Climate movement, and Greta, and you have a tipping point in awareness also fueling this crucial shift. Increasingly widespread shame at air travel – or flygskam in the original Swedish – is now set to diffuse across every B2C industry. It’s a shift with profound implications for consumerism, business, everyone.
Today’s National Day
NATIONAL COFFEE DAY!
PUBLISHERS NOTICE
Your $400,000 training starts at 8pm
Dear Streetwise Customer,
We’ve just finished setting up behind the scenes for tonight’s exclusive live training with world-renown trader Guy Cohen.
If you’ve already reserved your spot, then you’re all set to discover the exact trading system our very own Streetwise Publications member, Roger, used to make $400,000.
But if you haven’t got your name down yet, time is seriously running out …
Here’s everything you need to know:
What: Live training with world-renown trader Guy Cohen, called “The Big Money Keys That Made Streetwise Roger $400,000”.
When:8pm tonight.
Why: You’ll learn how to implement the same 3-step trading system that made Streetwise member Roger $400,000. It takes less than 30 minutes per day and can be used by complete novices or advanced traders alike. You’ll also get to ask Guy questions during the live Q&A section.
I have spent some time during lockdown and its aftershock thinking about economic depressions, which we are once again feted to enter, just over ten years after the last Great Recession.
But there have been many myths around economic depressions. In fact, many simply signal a shift in economics.
The British depression of 1873-1896 caused real hardship. This was a result of the economic opening up of the prairies, the pampas and Australia to farming, combined with falling freight rates by land and sea, lowered the cost of food.
In 1870, Britain produced half the world’s coal. But by the mid-1920s, it produced barely a fifth as producers in both the New and Old worlds dug coal for a third of the British cost.
Distress among coal miners, agricultural workers and the landed gentry who had built their fortunes on coal and farming was palpable. Rural areas depopulated and emigration soared.
In the economy as a whole, however, nominal wages were at least stable and prices fell. And most of the economy in fact prospered.
Quote Of The Day
“You go through life wondering what is it all about but at the end of the day it’s all about family.”
Rod Stewart
Alternative Quote Of The Day
“My mother was a lolly-pop lady…and by that I mean she had a long body, and a big, fat head.”
Harry Hill
The 1920s were a difficult time for the UK, especially for traditional industries such as iron and steel, shipbuilding and coal mining, exacerbated by austerity and competition.
But in 1931, Britain enjoyed a boom, driven by new industries like cars and aircraft building. Yet the popular narrative is that this was a period of unemployment and deprivation. In a period of structural economic change, the losers were again more visible than the winners.
In the early 1980s. Unemployment rose to three million. But while traditional industrial output fell, new services — which are still with us — expanded and thrived. But when all the data came in, it became clear that the recession was much less severe than predicted.
Output fell by less than 3% in 1980-1981 and grew strongly thereafter. There is now much gloom about a post-Covid British economy. It sure looks bad: businesses shutter up and job losses increase daily.
But maybe a shake-out and a technological leap forward is just what the economy needs. As in any recession, companies have to cut costs, improve efficiency and change their business practices. This does not mean that the economy as a whole may not benefit.
Online shopping is soaring, and a shift from consumption to savings and investment may improve stability. Employers have found that working from home raises productivity and many new business opportunities have opened up.
For now, there should be no need to worry about markets, the global economy, inflation or the euro. We must not fall prey to the doom and gloom narrative of another depression or recession.
This is simply a time of recalibration, brought on quicker by Covid. But whether Britain will over-perform, as it has done in past periods of structural change, or underperform with dire consequences, is far from clear and rests with the government.
Today’s National Day
NATIONAL INNERGIZE DAY!
PUBLISHERS NOTICE
“I want to cancel all my subscriptions”
Dear Streetwise Customer,
Streetwise member Roger had been using Guy Cohen’s trading system for years …
But suddenly he wanted to cancel ALL of his subscriptions.
Why?
Well, take a look…
Yep, Roger had just made over £300,000 (c. $400,000 at the time) using Guy’s trading system …
SO MUCH money he simply wanted to stop trading and “enjoy a comfortable retirement.”
As Roger says in the email, “I am now approaching my mid 70s and the time has come to enjoy my money rather than spend time making more of it.”
I wholeheartedly agree with Roger … what’s the point in making money if you can’t enjoy it!
So, how about you? Have you made enough money to enjoy “a comfortable retirement” yet?
If not then I have good news for you …
I’ve persuaded Guy to hold an exclusive live training session for Streetwise members only.
During this short training he’ll walk you through the exact same 3-step system that made Roger $400,000 (by the way, he’s made even more since!).
And even show you how to automate it so you can profit in less than 30 minutes per day.
