The Relationship of Luck and Control – Episode 557

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers, on this episode, we’re going to be talking about luck. Kim, are you lucky? Yes, and it’s not one of my favorite words. Oh, why is it not one of your favorite words? I know language is important to you. Oh, I know. I just think it implies that the good in my life was happenstance and that while I have good in my life and the things that are important are amazing right now that somehow it didn’t take work to get there and that the luck can be taken away because I kind of believe if you can have good luck, then you can have bad luck and I’m just basically not interested in the word at all. Okay. If I take your word and your language and deconstruct it, you tie the word luck to

[00:52] work. Do you believe those two are connected? Absolutely, because I believe that we were put on earth to serve and working is the way that we serve. It’s the way that we put our value out in the marketplace and working is an absolutely necessary thing to do from really as early as humanly possible until the day that we die. Then we should have joy in our work and be servant oriented in our work and know that work is not a negative four letter word. It’s a four letter word, so we’re going to make it a positive four letter word and it enables so many things, including the worker to feel a sense of purpose. Okay, so but how does luck and work? How are they tied together in your head? Those two, when you work, you get lucky.

[01:50] When you are ready, when you are prepared, when you are out in the marketplace doing your good work, when you’re out in the marketplace serving, when you’re out in the marketplace being, then luck occurs. And so then you could say, well, then it wasn’t luck. It was preparation. Great. I’m all in. So however the terminology wants to play itself out, it’s, I think, imperative that people realize that there is opportunity out there every single day. And there’s opportunity in here every single day, right? In my mind, in my heart, to be able to put forth the effort that creates the lock and being ready and willing and open and open minded and willing to serve and willing to work. Those are all the things that if you want to use the word luck, get to go together

[02:52] because I just do not believe that either good luck or bad luck is so far out of the realm of our our abilities, our connection that we like have absolutely no control over it. I just not OK with that thinking. I’m not OK with them either. And, you know, I was observing a lot of Eastern thinking, and it was something from a recent travel that I would see that and it depends on the religion, Buddhism or whatever it may be. They would be throwing coins or they would, in fact, in Vietnam. Get this for luck, they have their money. It’s fake money and they burn it. They believe that burning their money will give them more luck. I don’t know if that’s a part of the Las Vegas marketing convention that

[03:52] promoted. I don’t know what it is, but again, I’m in the same route as you. I don’t play lottery. I don’t believe in luck of that nature. And they said to me, well, why don’t you decide to even participate? And I said, well, it can go either way. I don’t believe I’m going to be unlucky or lucky. I just I choose to work. I choose to participate. So let’s take luck. Let’s move that away. Let’s talk about creating what you would do. We’ve had episodes on visioneering. We’ve had episodes on creating abundance. We’re going to remove the luck piece. And let’s talk about what that looks like in your world using your language. Sure. Well, back to our prosperity ladder, which is something that we have in our very first book, Busting the Financial Planning Lies.

[04:41] The way to get up the ladder is to work, then to save and then to own. And so, as I was saying, I mean, early, early on, like my sister had her children washing their own clothes at five and six years old. That’s a decision that she made. You can judge it not like it, not like it doesn’t really matter. The example is what’s important. And the example is that for her kids, one of them cared about their clothes a lot, and so the only way that she could get his actions to go along with his mindset was to put the two and two together, which is if you care about your clothes, then you’ve got to wash them and get them out of the dryer so they’re not wrinkled. And so what was interesting is the other one didn’t care about the

[05:33] clothes as much. And so he had a completely different approach, which meant maybe I wear pajamas to school, so be it. And so she was able to just set that in their control. And so it’s actually just kind of dawning on me right now. Like work, save, own, that puts you in control. The more you work, the more that you can save. And I do mean that literally. And then the more that you own, you can own your time. You can own a business and then you are more in control and the more savings people have, the more control they are. So all of this comes together to me in a way that’s so much more beneficial and life-affirming because when we can control our actions, which starts with our controlling our thinking first, and then we can do the thing

[06:26] that our mind and brain and heart desire, then that puts us in so much better of a position that we control. Now, you know, you can say, Oh my gosh, well, you don’t control everything. You know, like what if an accident happens, you control how you react to it and you can react to it very differently. If you’re in a work, save, own control environment in your mind and with your money and with the various other things that you have in place, like insurances so that that apparently freak accidental thing that occurs doesn’t have to have that big of an impact on you. And this is a much better way to live life. This is a way to be much more impactful in your world. And this is a way to, I believe have a lot more harmony.

[07:20] Absolutely. So you’re looking at it differently. And I love the correlation right here of taking the laundry, for example, and having them tied to understanding that they’re responsible for it. And you’ve made this connection between the work and this connection between the ownership and the control. And recently I’ve, I’ve adjusted the language in my head of one piece, which is I’ve often told people that I optimize for freedom. And that’s what I’ve, I’ve wanted for a long time. Now I’ve changed that. I now say that I actually, I optimize for independence. It’s different than freedom. And the reason why is because independence means that I’m more self-sustaining and so in your example of control, uh, we can look

[08:13] at the work that you’re doing and especially the work work as in like the work of this conversation and the labor work you’re doing is being able to provide more control to families. And I believe it’s also to provide more independence. Yes, there’s freedom, there’s independence. So my goal of this episode is to help listeners figure out where is it that they can create their, I’m using the word luck, but where they can have more control, more freedom, more independence in their lives. And there must be a few things that you see bubble up every time as you meet with people and light bulb moments. So share a couple of those with us. Well, without a doubt, it’s the arena of government sponsored plans.

[09:09] So whether it’s a five 29 plan, whether it’s a 401k plan, a four or three B plan, all of these government sponsored plans remove control from whoever is involved. The owner of the business that puts out the plan, the employee of the business that puts money in the plan. The control is gone. And I used to just let people contribute. You know, we’ve talked up to the match level and made TCH, but not M A X, but holy cow, for a young person starting out, putting money that they really still need to maintain control of in one of those plans, whether it’s 401k for themselves or five 29 for their children, honestly can be one of the most detrimental things as it independence or freedom, because it’s categorically opposite of either one

[10:08] of them, the government controls, what you can invest in the government controls, when, who, where, what, why, I mean, all of the aspects of it are government controlled. And so it’s become more and more clear to me. In fact, I was just reading Tom Willwright’s third edition of his tax-free wealth book just came out mid February. Let’s say it is indicative of this same type of thinking. Now this is from a CPA and most CPAs. That’s the first thing they’re going to turn to. Oh, you want to reduce your taxes. Let’s get you a solo 401k or, you know, an IRA contribution or whatever it is, but even the Roth IRA, which doesn’t get the current year contribution, still a government controlled environment.

[10:51] And I just see the detriment that it does to people because they cannot pivot with that money. They must maintain the course to either age 59 and a half or age 18 for their children. And then even then there’s a whole bunch of rules. It’s just not a space to be overtly focused on. This is very true. I think the reason why we see people do it and not the, but we’ll say a reason why we see people do it is because it’s easy. And we no longer have the ability to do what’s easy in our country and in our world. And that comes back to the beginning of this episode because there’s so many things that are changing and so much uncertainty that we have to cling on to the things that are certain. And you made one comment in our little thread of conversation that

[11:50] is so critical to the way you think, which is you can control how you react, and that is where a lot of people are going sideways. And so again, we control how we react. We also can control the environment and setting yourself up and something that you can’t control, doesn’t matter how you react, it can only go in certain directions. So Kim, the last thing that I want to touch on, which is an often used acronym, the L U C. You want to break that down for us and pull that in, in our final thread? Sure. So inside our community of advisors of whole life friendly life insurance agents that are focused on the human life value aspect of term insurance plus whole life insurance. There is some time and an acronym used that is L U C and it stands

[12:50] for liquidity, use and control. So looking at the words, I love the control word. I love the liquidity word. I love the use word. As we know, I have a similar acronym. It’s C L U E. So I’ve added the fourth E, which is equity, meaning you can borrow against it and it will keep on growing. Here’s my challenge with the L U C acronym. And that is that it spells luck and whole life insurance doesn’t have anything to do with the word luck, which implies as we’ve stated here, that you’re not in control. It implies that there could be bad luck if there is good luck. And that is about the most opposite message that I can think of as it relates to the whole life product that people are purchasing to enable

[13:47] them to prepare since I don’t like the word plan, but whole life is about guarantees and preparation. And neither of those have anything to do with the word luck, no matter how you spell it. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast to take control of your money and have it work for you. Visit ProsperityThinkers.com.