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Mindset & Money | Hope Deferred Makes the Heart Sick

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Hosted by
Mike Ayala

On this episode of Investing For Freedom, Mike talks about a scripture that has been on his mind recently. The scripture reads “hope deferred makes the heart sick”. Mike acknowledges inequalities which some people may suffer and discusses how a change of mindset could be enough to break through your individual barriers.

“So, if you find yourself in a spot where you’re frustrated, the best thing you could do is stop grinding, stop working, take a morning, take a day, take two days, five days, whatever it is to yourself, and really just think through what it is you really want and why you want it. ”

HIGHLIGHTS:

0:00 – Intro
0:45 – Mike’s discusses the health issues his son had in the womb and feelings of hopelessness
3:26 – There’s nothing you can do when it comes to your children’s health
4:22 – There is a state of inequality. Some people have more challenges than others, but we chose the state of mind to remain in
6:24 – Mike believes that the inequality of today will only get worse
6:58 – You need to find a way to bring some hope into your life
8:29 – Don’t find yourself in the middle of the pack
9:20 – What do you want? Why do you want it? What are you gonna do to get it?
10:53 – We’re taught not to dream and we’re slaves to our jobs
11:35 – If you have $100,000, what would you do today?
15:54 – There’s going to be a big crash
16:21 – The people who escape the inequality gap are the ones who change their mindset
18:02 – $1,000,000 invested 25 years ago in treasuries would get a return of $70,000 a year, to get that same return today you would need to invest $10,000,000
19:07 – It’s never too late
20:20 – If you find yourself in a state of hopelessness, pause for a few days and think what is it you really want and why do you want it

FULL TRANSCRIPTION:

Thank you for joining me on the investing for freedom podcast. Today, I’m going to talk to you about a scripture that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately out of the Bible, and it says “hope deferred makes the heart sick.” And I’ve really been thinking about the state of our world and everything that’s going on. You know, and it reminds me of a time you may have heard this story before, but when Cara was pregnant with our first child Dylan, in the womb, he had some health issues and the doctor, fortunately, found it in the first ultrasound and then send us over to a specialist. And we ended up having to see a specialist in Salt Lake, which was three and a half hours away from where we lived. And, you know, throughout the course of the pregnancy as it got closer, we were going over there every four weeks. And then when it was nearing time for delivery, it went to every two weeks and long-story-short, there was a growth inside of his chest and they didn’t know exactly what it was. They said it could be a tumor. It could have been a bunch of different things, but the reality was that until he was born, they didn’t know exactly what they were going to do with it. And their concern was that it was in his chest cavity. So, they were afraid that when he started breathing maybe his lungs wouldn’t be able to inflate completely. And they didn’t want him born in Elko, Nevada where we lived at that point in time, because it was a small hospital and they didn’t have the trauma units and the NICU and all that stuff that they would need to be able to deal with an issue like that.

And so long-story-short if she went into labor and we weren’t in Salt Lake, they were going to Life Flight her. And then they want her to induce her early so that they could make sure that the teams were on standby in Salt Lake. So fast forward he’s born in Salt Lake City at the University of Utah and primary children’s is right there across the way. And so, there’s like 25 people in the delivery room. It’s this big ordeal. And when he’s born, he breathes like takes his breath. And that was like the first big win, right? Because the concern at that point in time was that he wasn’t going to be able to breathe. So he’s screaming and, you know, hearing my kids scream for the first time, not knowing if he was going to be able to breathe is just an amazing situation super happy, but then you fast forward two months later and they decide that two months old, you know, they were going to let him grow and get a little healthy. And they were going to do surgery. So, ended up having a six- or seven-hour surgery, it was scheduled for 16. Everything turned out fine. It was a growth. His body had basically tried to create a second esophagus. It wasn’t cancerous, it was benign, no cancer, any of that kind of stuff. And, you know, he’s a young, healthy 20-year-old today. He’s actually a professional wake surfer for those of you that don’t know, we are super proud of him. He’s already gone on to do amazing things in life. Here’s the point. Hope deferred makes the heart sick. I will never forget feeling so hopeless and helpless. You know, there’s a lot of in life that we can control. I do believe we can control our mindset. We can control our health to a certain degree. There are things that are obviously beyond control, but the majority of things we can control in our health. We can control our attitudes. We can control how much money we make. And a lot of people would argue with me about some of this stuff, and I’m going to get into that. But when it comes to like your children and their health and this situation, there was nothing I could do about that. And I’ll never forget handing the doctor this little, this little two-month-old baby and, you know, crying Cara and I are crying and you’re just feeling so hopeless. You’re waiting in the waiting room just trusting in the doctor. And we had one of the best pediatric surgeons in the country. I think she was rated in the top 10. But that feeling of hopelessness I felt so helpless. There was just literally nothing I could do but pray and hope. That’s not us when it comes to our mindset, the way we react to things being, you know, stuck in our jobs, any of that stuff.

And one of the things that’s going on right now, I believe with all the turmoil and everything that’s happening in the world, a lot of this really comes down to equality. And I’m not saying there are not racism issues. I’m not saying any of that. But what I am saying is that I think there’s a true, genuine, not only feeling but the actual state of inequality and are certain people born with more challenges than others? Yes. I was born with an alcoholic father who disappeared a lot and you know, a lot of challenging times he was abusive and all this, I came from some challenges, but my mom was a bad-ass and still is a badass. And she pushed through that. And I didn’t decide to stay where I was. I didn’t decide to be angry. I didn’t. I decided to just forgive and to just be a happy person. We choose the state of mind that we remain in. My mom worked two jobs, you know, while we were growing up, she went to college, she became a nurse. She went on to be an executive at a hospital. Then went and started her own urgent care. She just started multiple businesses. My stepdad who came into my life when I was ten-ish became my dad, I call him my bonus dad. And really stepped up and was a dad to me and my brother. When, you know, he didn’t have to be, but he was and is a successful business owner today and real estate investor. And so, all of these things, you know, I didn’t come from a place of you know, with a golden spoon in my mouth. And so, I understand, you know, the people have it way harder than I did. But what I am saying is that the state of inequality that we find ourselves in, there is something that you can do about it. And it starts with a mindset change. It starts with the stories that we tell ourselves. I believe that the chaos and turmoil and uproar that’s going on in the world today is about inequality. Whether it’s about sex or color or financial inequality, this is going to get worse because there’s a widening financial gap in America. That’s getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And we’re in a period of time right now where this grand canyon is just going to open up. It’s been big and it’s been slowly growing for the last 120 years, but it’s going to, like the earth is going to open up and split right now. And so, the reason why I’m saying all this is not to discourage you but hope deferred makes the heart sick. And I want to say this to you right now that if you don’t find a way to bring some hope into your life, you’re going to find yourself in a really tough position. So, whatever you’re going through today, right now, financially, mentally, emotionally, whatever state you find yourself in, you can pick yourself up off the ground. You can find yourself a mentor and you can go out there and change that.

There’s an old saying that Robert Kiyosaki always talks about saying he who has the golden rules. So, there’s a golden rule, right? Do unto others, as you would have others do under you. But he says that the golden rule is actually he who has the gold rules. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of truth to that. And so, you know, we’ve got this crazy political environment, and everybody’s left, right, liberal, none of that matters. And none of that is really going to truly change the inequality and the lack of hope that we have in our lives. A lot of that is a long process do, you know, changing a president whether it was 4 years ago, 8 years ago, 20 years ago, 25. There’s such a widening gap there that one new president isn’t going to change anything. And this is a long, drawn-out process. You’ve got to start making some changes for yourself.

And a couple of podcasts ago, I was talking about the gazelles and I wrote about this in my blog, but you know, there’s the front of the pack that can see what’s going on, there’s the back of the pack. But then there are the ones in the middle that are just kind of going where everybody else goes. Don’t find yourself in the middle of the pack. You need to start asking the questions, what’s wrong in the market. What’s wrong in the world. Like what’s really happening. What doesn’t make sense? You know what doesn’t make sense? The fact that the unemployment’s at a record high, the governments print money left and right. The stock market’s at an all-time high. That doesn’t make sense. What’s going on and I’m not even going to dig into that right now, but you’ve got to start asking questions. Like, what doesn’t make sense in the world? What the heck’s really going on out there. And how do I control what’s in my life? So, hope deferred makes the heart sick. How are you going to change that?

If you’re feeling hopeless, because you’re not making enough money to cover your bills or to achieve your dreams, or you don’t, maybe you’re covering your bills, but you just feel like you’re never really doing anything for yourself. You’ve got to step back and say, ask the question that I’m always asking, you know, what do you really want? Why do you want it? What are you going to do to get it? Measure results and adjust. If really here’s, here’s the thing you can’t dream from where from a state of hopelessness. Hope deferred makes the heart sick. You can’t dream from that state. You can’t dream from where you currently sit. You know, if you’re sitting in the middle of a pile of dog crap, sorry for the, you know, horrible analogy. But if you’re sitting in the middle of a pile of dog crap and it stinks, you’re going to have a really hard time visioning yourself anywhere else. And so, if you’re struggling right now, I would encourage you to get yourself into a place. In my last episode, I talked about the road less stupid by Keith Cunningham. And he talks about thinking time. And I challenged you in the last episode that I did on my own to just really take a notebook and just take 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and just think around the question, like whatever it is that you want, like how could I afford the vacation that I’ve always wanted. I want to go to Cabo San Lucas. I want to go to California, whatever it is. Just journal. Like, what could I do today? What could I do this next week to find myself in that dream position? It’s thinking time.

So, you can’t dream, you can’t vision from a state of where you’re currently at. Benjamin Hardy at willpower doesn’t work talks a lot about environment and how important the environment is. Get yourself out of your current environment and start dreaming. So, you’ve got to come from a state of vision. And again, I talked about this in the last podcast, but the world that we live in, we’re kind of beat down, we’re taught not to dream. We’re taught not to collaborate. We’re taught not to work together. We’ve been programmed to be employees and there’s nothing wrong with being an employee, but at the same time, even if you’re an employee, you should be dreaming about your own life. And when that job you’ve heard me say this before, but if your current job or business isn’t helping you achieve your personal goals, then you’re just a slave to that job. You’ve got to move past that.

So, hope deferred makes the heart sick. So how do we start dreaming again? I think it’s thinking time around, you know, what do I really want? What am I going to do to get it? And why do I want it? But here’s the question that I would encourage you to sit down with when, during your thinking time and your visioning. So, if you had a hundred thousand dollars, what would you do with it today? It’s completely different than if I asked the question, what would you do with $10,000? Because a lot of people with $10,000 would say they would look at, what’s always causing them stress. They would do one of two things. I can almost guarantee it. They would pay off debt, or they would take a vacation. And I’m not going to tell you which one’s right or wrong, but I can almost guarantee you based on experience with Cara and I, that if you took a vacation and you were intentional about thinking time, visioning, dreaming, you would figure out a way, you would get yourself in a place that you were so inspired that you would come back and you would be able to go figure out how to make 10 grand, that could pay off the debt anyway. And so, I’ve often asked myself the question, can I afford to do this? Well, the question that I would ask you is, can you afford not to? So, you got to get yourself into a place of dreaming and visioning. And so, if I asked you the question, what would you do with 10 K? We discussed that. If I asked you the question, what would you do with a 100K? Now we start getting into a different realm of thinking. That might seem too big for some of us, but the reality, if you had a 100K you’d probably say some of the same things to me, I would take a 10 or 15 or $20,000 vacation. I would pay off $10,000 or $20,000 worth of debt. And then I would do X. And what I’m interested in is what is the X, because most of us want to pay off debt, take a vacation, pay off debt, take a vacation, but whatever the X is that you’re going to do with that extra 50, 60, $70,000, now we’re visioning. Now we’re dreaming. And I’m not just talking about a vision board. I have a vision board sitting right over there. But it’s really just getting yourself in a state where you can dream more.

Now I hesitate to go to $1 milllion because a lot of us would ask the question. You know, when we’re asked the question, what would we do with a million dollars? We get into some of the same things vacation, you know, I’d pay off my house, I’d pay off my car. Okay, great. We’re still not into that investing realm. We’re still not into growing that mindset realm. We’re still not into expanding our revenue. And that’s what I’m going to challenge you to think around. How can you invest in yourself, your mindset, whether it’s 1,000, 5,000, 10,000, and how could you begin investing in something that brings a return? The reason why we don’t do this by the way is because we’re not educated around it. Hope deferred makes the heart sick. And so, when I asked the question about a million dollars, most of us wouldn’t know exactly where we wanted to invest it because we just don’t know we’re not educated in that arena. And I’ll just tell you right off the bat buy an online business, there’s a website called Flippa where you can buy online businesses. And I’m not telling you to rush out and buy one, do your due diligence, but you could buy businesses there. You could go buy a laundromat for probably $400,000. That would make you a $100,000 to $120,000 a year. You could literally quit your job.

But most people, when they think about a million dollars, they might say, well, I would go see a financial advisor. I’m not, listen, I’ve got nothing against financial advisors. I’ve got a lot of friends that are financial advisors. And if you just want to show up to work every day, and you don’t want to think about your investment and you want to retire 40 or 50 years down the road and hope that it’s there, then great, you do that. But most of us, when we are confronted with the concept of having a million dollars, we don’t know where to put it. And so, I would challenge you and educate you, right now what you need to do is get educated. I am not going to challenge you and educate you. I’m going to challenge you to go get educated. I am going to challenge you to start thinking around, you know, if I had an extra $100,000, $200,000, $500,000, where would I invest it? You could buy a business. You could do what I’m doing. I’m launching a fund. I’m going to buy HVAC businesses. If you’re a good baker, you could start a bakery. You could invest passively. We’re launching a fund around buying HVAC businesses. If you were an accredited investor, which you would be at that point in time, because you have a million dollars, you could invest with us. You could put a hundred grand in a fund and just get returned. You could keep working your job and you could invest a million dollars or a hundred thousand dollars, and just keep working your job.

I’m saying all this to expand your thinking, because what we tend to do is hope deferred makes the heart sick. We think we’re never going to get out of this job. We don’t know how to invest. We just put it into the stock market. That’s the natural tendency. What I’m telling you right now, you need to be taking your money out of the stock market. Back to the gazelles episode, a few episodes back. That’s what the herds are doing right now. And there’s going to be a big crash. And I don’t know if it’s going to be next month or six months from now or two years from now, but I’m telling you when this balloon keeps getting blown up, it’s going to go pop. It’s going to happen. That’s coming. So, you need to start educating yourself. You need to start taking some vision time. The way we’re going to get past hope deferred makes the heart sick is to start dreaming big, visioning big and understanding that you’re no different than everybody else that’s out there that’s super successful. This inequality gap, it exists. And I understand that, but the people that get out of it, the people that escape from it, it’s because they changed their mindset. And they said, they woke up one day and they said, listen, I can do this. And I’m telling you right now, you can do this too, but it takes baby steps. It takes dreaming. You might just have to look at your goals for five minutes every single day, sit down and just write out in that thinking time. What would I do with $10,000? What would I do with a $100,000? What would I do with a million? And then get real clarity on that? What is it that you really want? Why do you want it? What are you going to do to get it measure results and adjust, and the measuring results and adjusting that comes later. Let’s just start with dreaming, envisioning what do I really want? And why do I want it? Then we can start talking about what are you going to do to get it?But the important part is spending a month or two months or six months just dreaming along the lines of we’re doers. Again, back to the employee piece. We want to show up to work and we’re getting measured by our output and our production. Just step back and spend some time dreaming. That’s what I really want to encourage you to do.

So, I heard this guy the other day that I listen to a lot, and he was talking about his grandpa had told him that the investing is easy. You basically spend less than what you make and invest the difference somewhere else in something that produces a return. Here’s the challenging part that happened before our eyes and we didn’t even know it. A million dollars 25 years ago invested just in treasuries, which is the easiest place to invest anything. I don’t know if you remember, but I remember my grandma buying me a bond, a 10-year bond or a five-year bond. I think it was a 10-year bond and it basically doubled. So, she bought me a hundred dollars bond for 50 bucks that became a hundred dollars in 10 years. So I don’t know what that period of time was, but this guy was talking about how a million dollars 25 years ago invested just in treasuries, not the stock market or anything else just in treasuries would make you $70,000 a year.

So, you fast forward to today and to get that same return, $70,000 today, you would need $10 million in treasury bills. Part of that’s inflation part of that’s the value of the treasury bills. I’m not going to go into, you know, a financial argument today, but the point is 25 years ago, a million dollars would get you $70,000 a year that you could live on. And $70,000 a year 25 years ago was a lot of money. Today you would need 10 times the same amount of money, the same investment, 10 times, $10 million, instead of one, in order to get $70,000 a year and $70,000 today is going to get you a lot less than $70,000 did back then. And so, there’s this huge inequality gap in the financial arena. There’s and this is why people are so frustrated, the haves and the have-nots. But what I’m here to say is that regardless of where you came from, regardless of how old you are, I don’t care if you’re 50, 60, there’s plenty of stories of people that were 60 years old when they launched their business and went on to become worth a hundred million dollars and enjoyed, you know, the rest of their life and set up a legacy for their family, etc. So it’s never too late, but you’ve got to change the way you’re thinking, obviously, the stinking thinking that has got you to where you’re at today, isn’t going to get you to where you want to go. You can’t sit in that pile of dog crap and expect for your world to smell better. It’s just not going to happen.

So, this inequality gap that is true, it’s real, it exists. And you know, 85%, 90% of people are not going to pull themselves out of it, but nobody’s coming to save you. I’ve said this before. No one is coming to save you. You’re the only one that can make the difference. And it’s all about your thinking. So, I would just encourage you if you’re at this stage in the podcast, just go back to the beginning, listen to this again, dig into everything I told you to do. I’m going to leave you with this.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick. So, if you find yourself in a spot where you’re frustrated and we all get into stages, I still get frustrated. You know, I find myself in weeks where I just feel like I’m not really doing what, if you find yourself there in a place of hope deferred makes the heart sick. The best thing you could do, stop grinding, stop working, take a morning, take a day, take two days, five days, whatever it is to yourself. And really just think through what is it I really want and why do I want it. Forget about what you’re going to do to get it. I said this in the last podcast, and I’ve got to pull it up, so I don’t slaughter it. But when the what and why are clear, the how becomes obvious. We spend too much time thinking about the how and measuring results and keeping score. And that’s what has us frustrated, what we really need to focus on is what do we really want and why do we want it. And when that is figured out, the how is going to become obvious. So, when the, what we want and why we want it becomes clear, the, how becomes obvious, and that’s how we’re going to get out of that state of hopelessness.

And so, you know, I started off with talking about Dylan, our son. And again, you know, he’s just progressed to be such an amazing young man. I was in a state of hopelessness because there was nothing I could do about it, but believe that the universe had the best for me and put him in the hands of the doctors and God, really that’s true hopelessness. But even during that time, I had my faith. And so, you know, while I was frustrated and physically and mentally and emotionally, I was sick I hadn’t lost my faith and hope. And so hopefully you haven’t either. But the difference between the situation with my son is literally, all I could do is hand them to the doctor and God, but you and your financial future in this inequality gap and tightening that gap up that’s in your hands, but it takes stepping back, slowing down and getting into a zone of vision and start asking yourself the questions that you need to get answered.

If I can help you in any way, shoot me an email to team@investingforfreedom.co or reach out to me on Instagram @themikeayala. Hope that helps you.

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