Why It’s Ok To Make Financial Mistakes
In society we are taught that making financial mistakes is stupid and if you make financial mistakes you must be dumb, but this is completely untrue. It’s ok to make financial mistakes and financial mistakes are some of the best ways to learn and grow your wealth.
0:00 – Introduction
0:22 – Robert Kiyosaki lost $100,000 of his dad’s money
2:31 – We are taught that finances are logical
3:23 – We aren’t taught about money in school
4:30 – We shy away from talking about our financial mistakes, but they can be our best opportunities for learning
5:50 – It’s ok to make financial mistakes
6:40 – Don’t make yourself feel stupid for your financial mistakes
8:00 – If you’re not making mistakes are you pushing yourself hard enough?
8:30 – One of my biggest financial mistakes and what I learned
10:36 – The emotions of mistakes accelerate our learning
12:20 – Realise mistakes WILL happen, it doesn’t make you stupid
in society were taught that making financial mistakes is stupid and if you make financial mistakes well you must be done but that is completely untrue in this episode I want to talk about why it’s okay to make financial mistakes and why financial mistakes can be a big part of your learning journey towards growing your wealth I’ve recently been reading the book fake by Robert Kiyosaki and in that book he shares something that he hasn’t shared in any of his other books and I’ve read almost every single Robert Kiyosaki book that has been published and he talks about back in the day when he started his nylon velcro wallet business he was having a lot of trouble with that business basically he was going out of business and he went to his rich dad to ask for money his rich dad wouldn’t give him the money so he went to his poor dad and his poor dad loaned him a hundred thousand dollars he then took that hundred thousand dollars to his CFO or chief financial officer at the company and said will this money fix our problem and the chief financial officer said yes it will and Robert then goes on to say that I think it was a week later the chief financial officer left the company and took the hundred thousand with him so the hundred thousand was used to pay back the debt that the financial officer had put into the company and then Robert was left a hundred thousand dollars in debt to his father and was in a situation where he didn’t want to declare bankruptcy because that was a loan against his father’s house so if he was to declare bankruptcy then his father would lose the house and it took him ten years he said to pay off that hundred thousand dollars so Robert Kiyosaki author of Rich Dad Poor Dad has made some significant mistakes in his life significant financial mistakes and he goes on to say that that was not the biggest financial mistake that he has made either and that financial mistakes are a massive part of learning I’ve just come back from the Sunshine Coast filming a lot of educational content up there with Ben Everingham from pumped on property staff looking at property stuff talking about the hard stuff that’s going on in our lives as well as some more personal videos that I did by myself talking about my financial mistakes talking about the advice that I didn’t take and the mistakes that I made and I’ve come to realize that we are taught in society that if you make these mistakes you must be stupid because obviously finances are so simple and so logical if that was actually true everybody would be rich it was actually true that it was really easy finances were really easy then everyone would be rich maybe this has come about in society because we often just look at finances as something that is purely logical and we as humans are emotional creatures and we act emotionally and so I guess maybe it’s perceived that if you’ve made financial mistakes you haven’t adhered to obvious logic and you’ve acted emotionally and done something emotionally that wasn’t in your best interest long-term and sure I guess that can be part of it and some financial mistakes definitely come out of emotion but there’s also financial mistakes that come out of just a lack of knowledge of how finances work and how things work we’re not taught about money in school your teachers don’t teach you about money the lessons that you get about money tend to come from your family and whether or not you’re family a good money managers and live at the wealth level that you want to live that you don’t get to choose that you don’t get to choose the family that you are born into and you don’t get to choose the money lessons that you get from them so from life for me and myself and the financial mistakes that I’ve made there’s definitely an element of emotion attached to that and emotional immaturity I guess in terms of managing my money so not being able to delay gratification enough in some areas you know kind of being in denial and putting your head in the sand because it’s too emotional for you so there’s definitely elements of that in some of the financial mistakes that I’ve made but there’s also definitely elements of just being uneducated and just not understanding how you’re meant to do things and how to properly manage finances as an often it takes going through hardship it takes going through mistakes to learn and we shy away from talking about our financial mistakes and talking about the things that we’ve done and the mistakes that we’ve made because you just get labeled as stupid you just get labeled as someone who can’t control themselves or doesn’t know what they’re doing but sometimes we end up in bad situations and sometimes we make mistakes but those can be our best opportunities for learning if we take those opportunities so in school we’re taught that if you make mistakes that’s bad however in real life that’s not the case mistakes are one of our biggest opportunities for learning when you’re riding a bike you’ll often fall off your bike in the beginning it’s part of how you learn when kids are learning to walk they’re going to fall over all the time before they can work but those mistakes in falling over is a part of learning my kids are currently going to the skate park a lot and learning how to skate go down ramps and stuff like that falling off making mistakes is part of that I’ve been going off the Rams trying to come up in the air and land and every time I miss it and I can’t do it but every time I make that mistake it’s part of learning and you learn and you adjust and it’s the same with finances every time you make a mistake that is an opportunity for learning so I’ve got a bunch of episodes coming out where I’m going to get a bit more raw about some of the mistakes that I make I’m going to be open with you because I don’t want this to be a channel where it just looks like everything’s going well all the time and that we don’t make mistakes I want this to be a channel and this to be a community where you feel like it’s okay to make mistakes and looking at Robert Kiyosaki making $100,000 mistake and taking ten years in order to pay his dad back and now he’s an extremely wealthy person making multiple millions of dollars every single year doing some massive real estate deals but he had to go through that in order to learn and we’d go through mistakes and I guess as you progress in your wealth the mistakes that you make get more and more expensive as you go down so I want to employee don’t look at your own life and the mistakes that you make don’t make yourself feel stupid as a result the same if other people make financial mistakes it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re stupid I think what we need to start doing is to admit that if we want to get wealthy and if we want to move towards financial freedom and kind of step up in our consciousness of how we see wealth and step up to that higher income level then changing that mindset and moving from one level to another there’s going to come a lot of mistakes with that and a lot of errors that you have and so understanding that that is a part of the journey I think we all want the journey to be the slow upward trend where you just incrementally maybe buy investment properties or build investment skill and it kind of just goes up like this but I think for a lot of us it’s going to go okay we make good decisions and then we make mistakes and then we make better decisions and then we make mistakes and then we make even better decisions and so life kind of moves up on that trajectory and some of the worst financial mistakes in your life can be some of the best learning experiences that are going to set you up for financial success in the future so financial mistakes are okay it’s okay to make financial mistakes and in fact financial mistakes are one of your biggest learning tools that if you’re not actually making mistakes are you really pushing yourself hard enough are you trying to learn enough and sure some of you out there might be perfect and might be able to learn things and be super risk-averse and just make all of the right decisions and never make mistakes but in a lot of cases we just don’t know what we don’t know and as we’re trying to step up into these higher levels of wealth we’re stepping into areas that we don’t know and that we don’t understand and we’re taking real soon when making mistakes one of my big mistakes was losing money in cryptocurrency and investing in cryptocurrency after a peaked when it was on the way down I learned so much about market cycles I lost thousands investing in cryptocurrency and then had to sell out because of the life situation that changed I needed to liquidate that money and I actually needed that cash to fund a lifestyle sort of stuff like to find moving and so it was a long-term investment but life got in the way and those finances would need it so funnily is that if I hadn’t kept the money in crypto if I hadn’t have needed it then six months later the price was actually up higher than what I paid for it so it was just that little lull in the period where I had lost money and if I hadn’t been able to hold it I would have actually ended up making money so I learned so much through that experience that cost me thousands of dollars but I probably learnt more through that experience than I would go into some sort of financial seminar I learned so much about market cycles I learned so much about risk and managing your risk as well and just looking at cycles and looking at where the risk is I learned so much about FOMO and fear of missing out and the fact that okay if there’s a run up and you’re scared of missing out there’s going to be a correction there’s going to be another market cycle whether it be in this asset class or another asset class I’ll learn about that I also learned so much about life risks and how sometimes you can have good long-term investment strategies but sometimes life gets in the way that doesn’t allow you to achieve those so for me with the cryptocurrency it was a long-term strategy for me and looking at it now it was playing out fine but at the time life got in the way and I needed that money and so I’ve learned that okay life risks come where you need money and so it’s like okay I need to prepare my investments in the future that when life risks happen when things happen in life that I don’t need to liquidate those assets in order to fund life so get myself in a better position there so there is so much learning in there that I got from making those mistakes that if I didn’t make those mistakes I wouldn’t have learned that you don’t learn that when you don’t invest your money when you don’t emotionally invest into it and put your attention into it you don’t learn as much in emotions and while they can cause us to make bad financial decisions emotions can also help us and learn lessons so much quicker than if we just try and use logic I think it’s silly to try and pretend to be a completely logical creature because we’re not our emotions are super powerful in how we process things and in how we learn and in how we live and emotions actually really good and help us make really good decisions as well and so part of making the mistakes part of feeling the emotions and often they’re quite difficult emotions to feel can actually lead to rapid learning and rapid growth which is going to improve your investments moving forward how good is it to learn to lose a few thousand dollars on cryptocurrency rather than you know investing in something that was way more money and losing tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in that so I yeah I lost thousands of dollars but the learning experience that I gained from that was amazing do I wish I lost thousands you know was it worth it like I wouldn’t say go back and repeat the exact same thing again by the learnings that I got out of it were intense and we’re amazing and are going to you know really direct my life and direct my finances moving forward and so I think it’s important to recognize that a lot of that learning won’t happen if you don’t make mistakes so go into this realize that mistakes will happen and that it’s not bad it doesn’t make you a stupid human or a dumb person to make financial mistakes admit your mistakes say look I didn’t know what I didn’t know I didn’t have the emotional maturity that I needed sometimes I’d say I look at past Ryan I look at Ryan in the past younger Ryan and I’m like he made some dumb choices but then I also look at past Ryan or younger Ryan’s emotional maturity and where his headspace was at and be like okay he wasn’t really in the right headspace to make the same decisions that present-day Ryan would make and I’ve had to go through that to learn that and so part of accepting our mistakes is accepting who we were as people when we made those mistakes and then working to become better people so I’m excited to share and more openly talk about financial mistakes and to make this more part of the conversation when it comes to investing when it comes to our personal finances when comes with property investing the mistakes are a part of the journey and mistakes are okay and it’s okay if you make mistakes and mistakes can be one of your best learning experiences so get ready start changing your mindset around mistakes start not necessarily enjoying them look they’re not enjoyable but accepting accepting them as part of a wealth journey and if you’re gonna try and grow from where you are now to where you want to be which I’m guessing is a big jump in terms of wealth there’s gonna be trip ups and there’s going to be mistakes along the way you’re going to have to change as a person to get from where you are now to where you want to be so there’s going to be a lot of character development a lot of change and mistakes are going to be a part of that journey so I wish you the absolute best of luck in your property investment journey or in your financial freedom journey or investment journey or whatever it may be I hope that you can accept yourself accept mistakes and we can start to change this conversation and change this mindset around if you make mistakes you’re stupid and see mistakes as the opportunity that they are thanks so much for tuning in today and until next time stay positive