Do you hate the thought of working past 55 or 60? Do you hate not being able to live the life you deserve today? Do you hate not knowing what your financial future looks like? It's time to stop doing what you hate, here's your host, Mr. Harold Green.
(00:20): Oh, Hey everybody. This is Harold Green of Brightree financial group. And I'm back. How's everybody doing today? I'm doing fantastic. It is a wonderful new year. And, uh, once again, I'm excited to be sitting here in the chair. Ready to share. Ready? Rock. Ready, roll. Ready? Get it in 2022. How about you? I hope you are. I hope you had a fantastic new year and, uh, you know, have had an opportunity to rest, to reflect and to get ready to accomplish all the things that you set off to accomplish in the new year. And with that being said, I want to talk to you guys about today's show. I don't think I really have a title for it. Other than find your ambition, find your ambition, find your ambition, find your ambition. I think that is gonna be the key to getting us through the next two to three to four years, with everything that's going on in, in the world.
(01:23): I feel that as a, you know, a country as a whole, our ambition has changed. A lot of people, no longer have ambition. I think ambition is being taught out of our kids. Ambition is being discouraged. Ambition is being looked down upon. And I just think it's a horrible, horrible thing. And I've talked to a lot of people. I've talked to a lot of parents, I've talked to a lot of kids. And one of the things they tell me is, you know, Harold, you know, my kids don't have any motivation. My kids don't have any, they don't have any ambition. They don't have any, they don't have any drive. They don't have any get up and go. And that's not all kids, but it's, it's a large portion of kids who have bought into to the myth of who do you think you are? We're all equal equality.
(02:09): I'm telling you that crap will ruin your mind. No, we are not equal at all. We are all different. You may be better than me at some things. I may be better than you at some things. Now at this doesn't mean as a human being, I'm better than you as a human being. No, that's not what we're talking about here, because I believe that we were all created equal by our, and that's my belief. What you do with the creation is totally up to you. You can build up on that creation, or you can just sit there and let that creation go about doing what it does every single day and just living life. And then just, you know, being whatever you want to be and doing whatever you want to do. But I wanna talk about this thing called ambition. And I wanna talk to you about a very ambitious person, and I'm gonna give you this thing with a warning because ambition is a double edged sword, right?
(03:03): It's a double edged sword. It cuts both ways for the good, and it can cut for the bad, but I wanna start off by giving you the definition of ambition. It's a strong desire to do or to achieve something typically requiring termination and hard work, right? And doing some more research here, people ask what exactly is ambition that says a desire for success honor, or power. I mean, eh, yes and no something a person hopes to do or achieve my ambition is to be become a jet pilot, three, the drive, to do things and become active and goes on and says, I'm tired and have no ambition. But I tell you, ambition is a very serious thing when we gotta have it, we gotta find it. And we gotta figure out how to, you know, how to grow it in space, because it's gonna be very, very important.
(03:56): I wanna talk to you about a person that really ends inspired me. Um, and my wife kind of told me about this story some years back, and I never really figured out what it was until I did my own research on it. And it's about a man named Dr. William S. Clark. And this is back in the, in the 18 hundreds. And he, he fought in the civil war. He was a Colonel. He had a PhD in Kim and street. He founded UMass Amherst and, um, which was a, you know, it was known as the Massachusetts agricultural college Mac. And now it's UMass Amherst. And basically he was criticized by a lot of people for doing what he was doing in the, in the United States back in the early days, very, very, very criticized. And so the people of Japan found out who this man was, and they requested him to come to Japan because they realized that agriculture was the foundation and the better rock of any society and the better that, you know, they were at it, the, the more successful their nation would become.
(04:58): And so Dr. Clark went to Japan and he, he founded the, uh, Hakaido university, which is a very, very famous university up there in Hakaido. And people look up to Dr. Clark for a lot of different reasons. And one of the reasons why they look up to him is because he changed the cultural system in Japan of the, the funeral Lord type of thing, where let's say you were born with, uh, you know, it's three of you, you, your brother and your youngest brother, and let's say you were the middle kid. Right? And so in Japan, the oldest kid got everything. And so the second kid and the third kid got absolutely nothing. They were kind of, you know, kicked out to go and, and figure out life, you know, for themselves. But the dad passed everything down to the oldest son, even the, my I've got nothing.
(05:43): And so it was the oldest son's job to take care of the mom. And so you had a bunch of people, a bunch of men of Japan that were, that were demoralized and that were just kind of thrown out in society. And so Dr. Clark began to change that. And he, he told these guys, he said, look, you can do anything with your life that you want to do. You can become anything that you want to become. And this was kind of Hery back then, because you didn't talk like that. And he really motivated these guys and, and it just sparked a revolution in Japan. And this man was so successful, but he was looked down upon in his own country. And he, he pivoted and went to where he was wanted and went to where his ambition would take him. I mean, to the moon and that's what he did.
(06:24): And so he was successful in Japan and he came back to the United States and he, he started a business, a mining company with a business partner who was a crook, I guess he didn't know it guy was a crook, a crook. He was corrupt and the company went downhill fast. It, it took Dr. Clark's money. It took a lot of his friends and his family's money. It ruined his health. And he, and he died of heart disease in 1886. This man started at the bottom. He fought in the Eric civil war. He was a leader. He was a leader, became well known. And then his life got ruined by a crook, a business partner. This man had some serious ambition. It took him up, but because he trusted the wrong person, it also took him down. And so you're gonna really have to be careful with your ambition because I'm telling you that same thing happened to me where I started a business.
(07:27): I became successful. You know, I had business partners, which I should not have had. I, I didn't do my due diligence at the time. This was many, many years ago. And my company folded and I almost lost everything I had because I didn't put my ambition where it was really supposed to be. I didn't check my ambition. And basically I was foolish because I really didn't have a plan to go along with that ambition. And that's why one of the things I talk to my clients about is making sure you have a well thought out financial plan, a step by step to get you from where or you are today to where you really want to be, because your ambition will drive that plan. Your ambition will drive anything. You put it in. It's kind of like that stuff. I don't know if you guys watched the Ironman, but he had this suit and he put this like this nuclear reactor thing in this suit, and it propelled the suit.
(08:15): And I'm telling you, ambition is your nuclear power that will propel any thing that you put it in. And that's why ambition can be good. It, it can be bad. It can be, uh, used for good or evil. You've seen evil people and ambition, and they've destroyed countries. They've destroyed people's lives. They destroyed everything that they say at their hands to, because that's what ambition will do if it's not put in check. And so that was part of my story. And you know, the other part of my ambition was my wife and I wanted to, to have our own house one day, our own condo or whatever it was. And I was working for this company. I was making like $30,000 a year. And, you know, we went and, um, we, we wanted to buy this place and I quickly realized that making $30,000 a year, we would pretty much have to give up everything we had just to buy it.
(09:03): We would've been house rich and you know, money poor. And at that time I said, honey, no, I think, no, this is not gonna work because if I'm gonna have something, if we're gonna own something, we have to make sure that it is not taking every penny. We have every single month just to keep the roof over our head. So we said, no. And then I sat out to own my own business. That was my ambition, driving me to own my own business, to start my own company. But the, the downside of my ambition was I wasn't checking who I was rolling with. I wasn't looking at them in the proper light because my ambition was blinding me. It was fueling me to just go, go, go, do, do, do, and not check and not check and not check. And that almost destroyed me. And so I believe that I have my ambition and check.
(09:50): I have to constantly check my ambition to make sure the things that I'm getting myself up involved in is not just foolish or just fool hearty. Yes, I can be successful. Yes. I can go tackle the world. Yes. I can do all these things, but without a plan to do any of that stuff, I'm just an idiot. That's why I think a lot of people get ambitious to quit their jobs and they go out there and they destroy themselves doing something foolish. And that's why basically 50% of all businesses fail in the first five years or the first year or something like that. Because the people don't have a well thought out plan to take that ambition and put it in. And the other thing I find is that people use their ambition to chase up the foolish things with no plan, right? And it's sad to watch that, you know, you want people to be success.
(10:36): You want people to grow. You want people to do great things, but at the same time, man, that ambition gotta be put in check. And one of the things I wanna talk about is have we become a nation of zombies with either the wrong ambition or no ambition at all? And if we, if we become a nation of zombies where we're just, you know, I see people like this all the time, they're walking around with their heads down and you know what their heads are down for. It's down in their phone, people's phones drive their lives. And so therefore I feel like when you do stuff like that, your ambition is stifle. Things like video games. You know, when people, the kids play a lot of games all the time, basically, I believe, and this is just me. And you can go talk to some psychiatrists.
(11:27): They will tell you that, that stuff in innate amounts, like just like large amounts of it. Sorry, but large amounts of it will basically destroy your kids. Right? They won't have ambition to do anything with their life. I talk to a lot of kids that like that all the time the parents ask them, I said, what do you guys wanna do? They said, well, you know, uncle, we, I don't know. I don't know what I wanna do with my life. And the parents say the reason why they don't know, cuz they don't really take the time to explore and to research because they're sitting there trying to get to the next level on their video games. And that's why as a parent, we limited the amount of time that our kids watch TV. We limited the amount of time that they play video games because we knew that getting outside and playing, exploring, learning new things, talking to new people, not just the people in your friend, you know, your chat, Snapchat based, chat, whatever that stuff ain't gonna cut it.
(12:15): Right. Very few people know how to bridle that stuff and still do what they need to do to become, you know, to be successful in life. They are well balanced. It's not too many people that are well balanced anymore. Right. And I think that's how we got here as a nation. And I think that's how people get to where they are in a bad situation with their finances, because they're not well balanced. They become zombies doing what they're told to do, following the hottest person on the Instagram or on, on TV talking about the market or on YouTube. And yeah, some of that's stuff is good, man, but it ain't gonna get you where you really need to be. And that's what we talk about in our program and the things that people need to do. There is some serious ambition in the rapid retired program, getting yourself in position to walk away from your job.
(13:08): Five to 10 years sooner is a very ambitious thing. Some people are like, man, I just, I, you know, I, I don't know if I can do that said, it's not about, you don't know if you can do it or not. It's do you want to do it? Do you want to accomplish these things? And if so, we can put together a plan and then we can put our ambition in that plan and we can drive that plan wherever we want it to go. But in Dr. Clarks final words to his students in Edo, his parting words were boys. Be ambitious, boys, be ambitious. And I can change that and say, ladies and gentlemen, be ambitious. You have to ambitious. I don't care if it's a little ambition, a big ambition, and this is gonna be part of a series that I'm gonna do on ambition.
(14:07): There's other things that are gonna be in this series that we're gonna talk about. And I'll just kinda give you guys a heads up. We're gonna talk about the courage to succeed. We're gonna talk about big things. We're gonna talk about choosing to be different. We're gonna talk about it's your season. It's your time. We're gonna talk about the land of opportunity. And I do believe that we live in one of the greatest countries in the world. Believe it or not, anybody can do anything they set their mind to, and they build a plan to accomplish their goals and it's gonna be fueled by their ambition. And the last thing I'm gonna say about ambition is we want that ambition to be for works of good, not for the production of things that are, that are for vain or detrimental use, but things that are gonna make a big difference in society and to help society and to propel society and to drive society forward.
(15:05): I pivoted into in the investment world for one reason. And one, I think it's one and reason only my business was predicated on helping people figure out how to get their kids to and through college, without going broken, spending down their entire life savings. And I was spending lots and lots of money sending out hundreds of thousands of flyers or whatever it was inviting people to my workshops. I would do a workshop on Tuesday would do a workshop on Thursday. I would do a workshop on Saturday and I would be standing there speaking for hours, talking to people about how important it was to put themselves in position to get their kids through college in four years. But the more and more I did it, the less and less, I guess, famous it became. And people for whatever reason, decided that, Hey, there's a lot of information on the internet.
(15:53): We don't need to go see anybody talk about this stuff. We can try to figure this stuff out on our own. And I was like, okay, that's fine. And Andy, and there were so many people that I came across that were like, eh, and my kids are just gonna get scholarships, eh, and they'll figure it out. And I said, you know, why am I gonna waste my time? Trying to get convince people of doing what they should be doing the right thing to do, positioning themselves. Why am I wasting my time doing this? And as a business model, it didn't make any sense because I was paying for dinners and I was doing all this stuff. And I was paying for the marketing, paying all my employees and paying all of that. And then the fees that I was collecting from the, the families, wasn't a, an exorbitant amount of money.
(16:37): It was almost like a public service kind of thing where I was funding it like a 5 0 1 [inaudible] [inaudible]. So I said, you know what, instead, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna work with my current clients. We're gonna switch the game up. I created the rapid retire program because quite frankly, that's what a lot of people were talking about. Yeah. College is great. But yeah, I wanna retire. Yeah. College is great. But yeah, I need to figure out how to get my 401k working better. I heard of that a lot. So I pivoted and I begin to work and build and grow. And now the thought process is not, how do we get financial aid to pay for college? It's how do we outrun the cost of college? It's a different, and the people that I take on as clients now, they it's a different mindset.
(17:18): How do we grow our network? How do we grow our money to, to tackle any obstacle, any challenge we face versus how do we position ourselves and make ourselves look poor? So somebody will give us something that was the wrong mindset. And I had to flip the script and moving forward. That's what want to help. A lot of people do our mission is to help eradicate bad financial planning, one client at a time, but you're gonna have to have ambition. You're gonna have to want this. I can't spoon feed it to you. You're gonna have to make this vision and this mission, your own. And I'm excited to be a part of your team. If you want me to be on your team. And if I am on your team, let's get it done. And so thank you very much for tuning in looking forward to sharing the next show. Don't know which one it's gonna be yet, but I'm really liking the choose to be different topic for the next part of this series, because that's what it's gonna take. You're gonna have to be different and you're gonna have to be ambitious. And so until the next time, everybody 1, 2, 3, be ambitious and let's get it.
(18:31): This is the podcast factory.com.
