324 | Rewind: The Value of the Journey

If you’re like many lawyers, you want to rush to achieve your financial goals as quickly as possible.

You’d probably skip straight to the end goal if you could. But in focusing so much on the goal, you miss the most valuable part—the journey.

In this episode, let’s talk about the value of the journey and why it’s more important than the goal itself.

• • thinking life will be better when you reach your goal

  • how your journey impacts the habits you need to sustain your goal

  • why you don’t want to get straight to your goal and what you want to do instead

  • why the journey is bigger than achieving your ultimate goal

  • how the journey changes you

  • the importance of celebrating along the way

Episode 26: Why You Won’t Be Happier When You Make Partner or Reach Financial Independence

You’re listening to Personal Finance for Lawyers. I’m Rho Thomas, and as a busy wife, mom, and former Biglaw associate, I know all too well the tension between the culture of the legal profession and pretty much everything else you want to do in life. That’s why each week, I’m bringing you the information and tools you need to improve your money mindset and manage your money to create true wealth. Because ultimately, it’s not about the money. It’s about the freedom and flexibility the money affords.

Hey friend. Welcome back, and happy summer. I am doing something I have not done in the six years I’ve recorded this podcast, and that is taking the summer off.

In place of recording new episodes, I’m sharing webinars I’ve done, trainings from private programs, and past episodes. So, please enjoy today’s episode, and I hope you’re having a great summer.

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Today we are talking about the value of your financial journey. Often we think that when we get to some point in the future, when I’ve paid off my debt or I’ve saved X or I make Y or reach this net worth, then life will be better.

We want to skip ahead to the part where we’ve already achieved the goal because we believe it’s gonna make us happier. It will make us feel better. The thought that this future point is going to be better and make you happy is a mistaken belief. It’s called the arrival fallacy, and we talked about it back in Episode 26, so go check that out.

But while we’re focused on the future, we’re not focused on the things that we’re doing now and the importance of the journey along the way. So that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. That middle part between where you are now and the money goals that you want to achieve—or any goal really.

You can’t skip that middle part. You don’t wanna miss the journey. The journey you take to get to your ultimate destination is very important. It’s helping you build your capacity to have the ultimate goal that you’re striving for. It’s where you develop the habits that allow you to sustain the goals you’re trying to achieve.

So as you keep going along, doing these things that lead to you achieving the goal, those habits become ingrained. They just become a part of who you are and how you manage your money.

Even though you think you just wanna get straight to the goal, you really don’t because if you were able to go straight to the goal from where you are now, you probably wouldn’t appreciate it as much and you likely wouldn’t be able to stay there.

Think, for example, about lottery winners or pro athletes. About 70% of lottery winners lose all the money within five years of winning. For pro athletes, the stats vary by different sports, but anywhere from 60 to 78% of athletes go broke within two to five years of retiring.

In both instances, these are people who get multiple millions of dollars in a very short timeframe. They go straight from being a regular person to having millions of dollars, but they never grow the capacity to have the millions.

They never learned to manage the money they had to begin with, so they’re bringing that same mindset, that same way of thinking, that same way of managing their money to the new finances, and then, they end up in the exact same place they started when the money stops flowing.

That’s why you don’t want a crash diet approach to your finances. Instead, you want to change your lifestyle. You want to change the way you think about your finances. You want to change the way you manage your money. You want to change the way you see yourself.

Start believing that you know what you’re doing and are capable of handling your finances. You want to find those things that you can continue to do for life because if it’s something you can’t see yourself doing five or ten years from now, it’s not something that you need to be doing now.

Like I say all the time, if it feels like deprivation, you’re not gonna do it. You’re not gonna keep up with it. But all of that happens during the journey. And as all of those things change then your finances will inevitably change, too.

I read once that if a butterfly is released from its chrysalis before its time, it will inevitably die. The struggle to break out of the chrysalis is a part of the process, right? It’s part of the butterfly’s journey. It helps the butterfly to strengthen its wings and to be able to fly the way it needs to to survive.

In the same way, every step of our journey prepares us for the next thing. It’s all part of process and when we try to shortcut that process and get straight to the end goal, we end up missing key things we need to learn to be able to sustain the goal.

Each step builds on the last one. Everything you’re going through right now is preparing you for the next stage in your journey. Everything you learned along the way is a gift, and it’s so much more than achieving your goal of paying off your debt or building to this net worth or whatever the goal is for you.

The journey itself is growth. It’s a growth opportunity for you. You learn so much about yourself, about your finances, about your ability to manage money in the process of your journey. You continue to tweak and improve day after day, week after week, month after month.

And as you move further along in the journey, not only do you get closer to the goal you set, but you also start to see more clearly other, bigger things that are also possible because you set goals from the perspective of where you are now, but that perspective changes as you move further along in your journey.

Even if your journey isn’t the quickest, even if it’s not the fastest way to get to your goal, the journey that you are on is personal to you. It’s what you need to learn to manage your finances in a way that feels good to you, but also leads to you achieving your goals. The journey makes you into the person who has the results you want, so you ultimately become a different person in the process.

You become the person who has no debt, who has an emergency fund, who has that net worth, who has the ability to manage their money in the way that best suits them in service of their goals. You think like that person. You do the things that person does. And as you grow into that person, you also grow your capacity to maintain those results.

We’ve talked before about the importance of celebrating yourself. Remember, it’s not just achieving the end goal that’s worthy of celebration. Every step you take, every milestone you hit along the journey to that ultimate destination is worthy of celebration, too.

The key takeaway here is: commit to the journey. Don’t fight or resist it because there’s so much value in the journey itself. And as you relax into the journey and enjoy it, you’ll inevitably achieve the goals you’ve set and so much more.

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Alright, I hope you enjoyed today’s episode and got a lot out of it. If you have not done so already. Please subscribe to the show, leave a review, and/or share this episode with a friend or two who you think could use this information. All of that is how we get this podcast in the hands of more lawyers, and as always, I appreciate your support.

As we close out, friend, I pray that you take the information you learn here, apply it in your life, and open up to the realization that wealth is available to you. As you do that consistently, week after week, you’ll continue to take steps to take back control of your time, build wealth, and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve. Talk to you later.