Delightful Post-Olympics Hangover

I enjoyed the Winter Olympics more than I have in what feels like decades. When the games wrapped with both women and men's hockey teams winning gold medals, by the same score (2-1), over the same opponent (Canada) in overtime, well...it was a blast!

The Wall Street Journal ran this headline:

Perhaps someday...you never know!

Wisdom for Money & Life

The men's gold medal victory was the first since the 1980 miracle on ice team coached by Herb Brooks.

When the United States beat the Russians — the greatest hockey team in the world in 1980 — they had to nurse a 1 goal lead (4-3) for 10 painstaking minutes to secure the victory. Herb Brooks' mantra to his team for the whole 10 minutes? Play your game...Play your game. Their "game" had been drilled into the team over the course of 60 games and 8 months of training.

It got me to thinking...how do we play "our" game, to win our game, and what's our game anyway?

It comes down to discipline and investing. Discipline for money, and investing with objective to get a return on life (ROL).

Our disciplines are captured in the 4 H's from Ron Blue. It begins with our heart...

We need to approach our finances as a steward and apply wisdom to our decisions.

Next is health. There are only 5 things you can do with money. Live, give, owe (taxes + debt), or grow it. It looks like this:

If the heart is calibrated right, it'll increase the odds of healthy deployment of money and assets.

Habits are the repetitive acts that secure the desired health. They look like this:

To the extent each of these areas are aligned, then there ought to be margin — which contributes to a sense of hope that looks like this:

What Then?

Then we're ready to invest.

In traditional investing, we are interested in return on investment. In a similar way, investing in your life can also bring about gain. But it's different! In this type of investing, we're seeking a return on life.

So, what's our game? Your life!

Investing in your life has four aspects. Invest in:

•  Your relationships

•  Your health

•  Your capacity (to better fulfill all of the key roles in your life)

•  Your spirituality

Along with the 4 H's above, investing in these four areas is a potentially winning formula to win our game! The game of life!

Thanks for reading,
Tim O'Connor