PILLAR 12

Becoming a Friend to Your Future Self—Mentally and Physically

Now, we all know at this point that there are friends and foes of your goals all around you, but it’s also important to remember that you have to be a friend to your future self if you want to succeed. Being your goal’s own friend comes right back to participating in your own rescue. You can eliminate people, behaviors, and mentalities out of your life all you want, but all that work you’ve done to better yourself doesn’t mean anything if you throw it all away in an instant. If you lose your temper once you have made it big, you could lose a company, a house, a fortune, and even a family. I know so many people who have worked their entire lives to build something only to watch it disappear due to a heated exchange in a meeting, a rash response to a troublesome customer, or the fact that they let their emotions get the best of them in a business setting.

In this pillar, I want you to start looking ahead. What will your life look like once you reach your goals? What will you have? And more importantly, what will you have to lose? From this moment forward, I want you to protect that future self of yours by choosing your actions carefully.

I want you to picture yourself in the house you want, driving the car you want, being able to give your children what they need when they need it. You may not have these things now, but I want you to comport yourself as if you do. Only then will you be able to be a friend to your future self.

Starting this very instant, I want you to go through life reacting to things not as if you have nothing to lose but as if you have everything to lose—because you do! I want you to internalize the fact that the actions you take now will affect your future self. Do you want to help that future version of you, or do you want to sabotage him or her? What happens to you in the future depends solely on how you act in your present.

As confident and mentally stable and strong as I would love to believe I am if you came up to me and suddenly slapped me across the face, at this point in my life I am about 99.9 percent sure I will probably slap you back. I am just not at a place in my life where I can simply turn the other cheek and wait for another slap. But here’s the thing: the minute I slap you back, I need to take responsibility for my reaction.

If I were a whiner, I’d say something along the lines of, “He hit me first! He started it!” Which sounds exactly like what a child would say, right? Well, I can say that all I want; the courts don’t care. I am working on turning that cheek because as I become more and more successful, I have more and more to lose. Because I have more to lose, I have to be laser focused on the environments into which I walk. I can’t start a fight with everyone who upsets me. I can’t throw a tantrum if a waiter brings me the wrong type of soda. I can’t bang my fists on the boardroom table if a deal is not going my way. I have to respond; I can’t just react.

In 2018, I had the honor of being in a leadership class taught by Bishop T. D. Jakes. He taught from a very familiar passage in the Bible that I have heard quoted hundreds, if not thousands, of times. The way Bishop T. D. Jakes dissected this passage rocked the very foundation of my soul—I mean in a way that I walked out of that session a different person. His reference came from Corinthians I, Chapter 13, Verse 11, written by the apostle Paul: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I understood as a child, I thought like a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things.” Please understand that this is a scripture that I have been able to quote since I was a teenager so nothing about this scripture was new to me—at least that’s what I thought.

If you notice above, I emphasized the words “I put away.” In this particular leadership session, that’s what he focused on, those three words, and those three simple words would ultimately change my outlook on my complete journey in life. There have been many times in my life when I have felt like people were honoring who I am now without honoring who I was before I got here, and I’ve never been OK with that. There are things that the old Johnny did that I massively regret today, but the truth is, I love that Johnny just as much as I love today’s Johnny, if not more. And I had always thought that this particular scripture was saying I needed to kill the old Johnny, but Bishop T. D. Jakes released me from ever thinking or feeling that way again. How? Because he said that when you put something away, that’s acknowledging you still know where it is and how to access it at any moment that you may need to.

The apostle in this scripture never said he destroyed the thinking of a child. Instead, he said he put his childish ways away. I cannot explain to you how much I needed that lesson. You see, I was never taught self-control as a child. I was taught fear and consequences, but not the benefits of self-control. Whenever I lost self-control as an adult, I felt the old Johnny surfacing. Feeling him again made me feel like I was not exactly where I thought I should be when it came to personal maturity. Now I know that is not the case. Instead, it just means that I have accessed something from my past that I put away, but I have the power to put it back where I found it—and by “it” I mean reacting instead of being responsible. I am sharing this with you because this is a personal place of struggle for me even to this day.

Life will throw you lots of curve balls, no matter how successful you are. I want you to practice swinging at them. I want you to know exactly how you are going to act. It’s not the curve ball itself but how you respond to the curve ball that comes your way.

Every time I find myself reacting with emotion, I simply know that the old Johnny has slipped off the shelf, and if I want to truly continue to master the art of the millionaire mindset, it is my responsibility to clean up any mess and put him back on the shelf as fast as possible. Responsibility simply means the ability to respond. The hidden word is able, which means it’s possible for all of us to respond instead of reacting. Reactions are the ways of a fool. Responsibilities are the ways of the wise. Wisdom is the application of knowledge. The opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which means you have knowledge but refuse to apply it. Prisons are full of people who reacted instead of responding. The more you have to lose, the less you can react.

When you find yourself at the start of a confrontation, remember these three things:

1.   Ask yourself the question, “What do I gain by being right?” If the answer only feeds your ego, just walk away. It is more self-empowering to exercise the ability to experience a victory that only you realize than it is to publicly prove you are right. This is a mental muscle that is so rewarding once you give it a shot.

2.   Ask yourself the question, “What does this person have to gain, and what do I have to lose?” If your loss potential is greater than his or her gain potential, that is evidence that you are in a no-win situation. Never argue with anyone who has nothing to lose. The loss exposure should be equal or greater for the opposing party.

3.   Ask yourself the question, “Am I strong enough to take control of my reactions?” The answer is always yes. Remember, arguing with a fool in public will only force the public to determine who the fool is. Staying in a position of self-control will lead other powerful leaders to invite you into their circles.

Take a deep breath, and let those three items run through your mind, even if you have to step back and take a minute. It will be worth it in the long run. Your future self will thank you for not getting into this particular fight. It may be hard in the moment, but your thoughtfulness and poise will pay off in the long run.

Now, when you are actually in the middle of a heated confrontation, I want you to pause and do the following:

4.   Ask yourself, “What will being right profit me in this situation?” What does their being right profit them? If they are in a position to gain more by proving you are wrong than you will profit for proving you are right, remove yourself from this risk exposure immediately.

5.   Ask yourself, “Am I the one who has the most to risk?” If the answer is yes, leave immediately. Never stick around to feed your ego. Feeding your ego publicly is reserved for those on the path to nowhere.

6.   Ask yourself, “What is the absolute best end result that can come from this?” If the best result is showing your ability to walk away, then exercise that option. The weak-minded naysayers don’t matter, but the few in power that may witness your strength could open future doors of possibilities down the road. No one in power wants to partner with or give control to someone who lacks self-control.

The following two principles have probably saved me from losing millions:

1.   Never argue with the fool in public because the public will never know which one is the fool.

2.   The fools will always expose themselves so never interrupt them.

Whenever I think of responding versus reacting, I think of my 25-year-old self, driving down the street in my BMW convertible. I had just listened to a Tony Robbins audio recording about staying in control when—and you can’t make this stuff up—someone in the next lane over flipped me off, cut me off, and drove off. In that moment, I realized that by doing this to me, he was elevating my importance in his life. He was making me number one. When he did that to me, I didn’t do anything. I let him drive off and went about my day. I was being responsive and not reactive. If I had reacted and raced after him, I would have been telling him that he was number one in my life. I would have been elevating him. And no matter what I did that day, I would have been responsible for my actions.

Remember, it’s not what happens to us. It’s what happens in us when something happens to us. It’s how we interpret what happens to us and how we allow ourselves to react. When adversity comes our way, do we inspect what we expect? Are we a friend or foe to our future selves? Are we participating in our own rescues? Are we thinking about the consequences of reacting over responding? No matter what you do, you either have to be responsible, or you react and then take responsibility for your actions. You might as well be responsible from the get-go. Learn how to be responsible now so you don’t have to face the consequences of your actions when you have everything on the line.

“This is all well and good, Johnny,” you may say, “but what does this have to do with becoming a millionaire?” It doesn’t have anything to do with it. But it has everything to do with staying a millionaire. I don’t want you to just be successful. I want you to maintain that success for decades to come. I want you to be able to pass it along to your children. If you work your tail off, get the business, earn the money, and achieve the success just to lose it all because of a reaction to adversity, all that work will have been for nothing. I want you to know how to respond to a problem before you ever even face it. I want you to act like everything is on the line because one day it very well could be, and the last thing you and I both want is for you to lose everything because you didn’t prepare yourself to respond. You need to exercise this mental muscle now so it is ready for you to use down the road.

Think of your future self. How will you handle a day of disappointing meetings if you cannot handle someone cutting in line at Starbucks? Every day, I seek out small instances of adversity so that I can work my response muscles for when I see a real, consequential curve ball coming my way. If I stamp my feet and yell when someone is rude in the grocery store, how will I possibly be able to stop myself from doing that in the boardroom? I have trained (and continue to train) myself to act as if I have everything to lose all the time. Before you can achieve the massive successes you desire, you have to internalize the idea of responsibility and manage how you react to the world around you. Reactions are emotions; responsibility is power.

When someone writes a bad review or starts bad mouthing you to clients and business partners, I want you to respond as if you had dozens of employees who depended on you for a paycheck. How would you respond to disgruntled customers? I want you to take a measured approach and figure out why they are saying what they are saying. Don’t just lash back at them. That may feel good now, but it will definitely not help you down the line. When someone trashes you or your business on social media, I want you to respond as if you already had achieved all the success you set out to achieve. I want you to stand firm, master self-control, and choose your fights wisely.

When my friend Holton Buggs first started making it big, he also started getting a lot of negative reactions on social media. His first reaction was to fight back online, to stand his ground. But as he kept doing this, he realized that the old Holton was calling the shots, not the new businessman he knew that he had to be. He stopped in his tracks and made a decision then and there: that he would never react from a place of anger. By changing how he reacted, he began practicing using those mental muscles, so the next times it happened, not only did he know exactly what he needed to do but it also got easier and easier for him to do it.

If people do bring you negative confrontation, I want you to be seen as the authority in control because that is how millionaires with much to lose act. They know how to pick their fights and walk away a winner every time. Learning how to pick my fights was something Les Brown taught me firsthand.

Years ago, a young lady in my field was approved to coauthor a book with me. She went through the process, and I invested in her chapter. We even printed the books. But then she pulled out of the deal at the last minute and wanted her money back. Well, I wasn’t going to make any money on the book, but I wasn’t ready to lose money, so I told her no. I had no problem doing this because I knew I was in the right. She had backed out. There was no way my stance was going to backfire on me. Not when I was this right about something. Well, she called her lawyers, and I called my mentor Les Brown.

It was in my nature to seek wisdom from my mentors, but in this case, I almost didn’t because I was so sure that I was in the right. I didn’t feel like I needed any advice. Boy, was I wrong.

“Johnny, you have to give her her money back” was the first thing Les said to me after I explained what happened.

“No way. I am not wrong here! She is!”

“It doesn’t matter if you are wrong. If you fight her on this publicly, everyone will think that you need her money. That will be the perception. No matter what she says you did or didn’t do or said or didn’t say, you will be left defending yourself. That defense will take energy away from something good, something productive, something that could help you.”

I knew in that moment that I needed to end this no matter the cost. I got her on the phone, and Les put it on speakerphone: “You are talking to Les Brown. Go ahead, Miss.” As he was being nice to her and praising her speaking, my collar was getting hotter and hotter. How dare he be nice to her? How dare he give her things! But when it was all said and done, he said, “OK, we are going to give you your money back.” And just like that, it went from me against her to us against her. Les used his credibility as currency because he was in the position to do so. After we hung up the phone, he told me, “It doesn’t matter if you did it or not. If you can get rid of something based on your value, do it. Pick your fight.” I was so focused on being right that I wasn’t focused on the energy I would have spent fighting with her for that $2,500. Over the 10 years that followed, picking my fights saved me millions. When things go wrong, don’t go with them. Take the higher road.

From this moment forward, I want you to operate in as-if mode. I want you to walk around, conduct business, and live your life as if you already had a global business that was worth millions. As if you had already reached your goals. As if you were already successful. Then, when you finally have success, you will already be a master at responding, not reacting. You will have the power and the ability to control your emotions and your behavior, allowing you to be a friend to your goals. When you react, you risk losing everything. You cannot respond until you have faith in yourself and your ability to succeed. Success should be a foregone conclusion. Be faithful to your future self in your actions today.

Before reading on, I want you to take a pause and do something for me. I want you to think about a time when you absolutely lost it—possibly in a very regrettable moment in your life. Write it down. Relive the emotion. Don’t hold back. Now that you’ve done that, I want you to write about a moment when you stayed in control. Maybe your kids were around. Maybe your boss was around. Regardless of the situation, I bet you kept your cool because you had something to lose, whether it was the respect of your children or your job or whatever else you valued at the time.

Now take it a step further. Write down two more instances of when you reacted to something and two more instances of when you responded to something.

I want you to feel the reward of responsibility. I want you to exercise those mental muscles before the deals, money, and success start rolling in. Now is the time to position yourself for the future, when you will have everything to lose.

Don’t read any more until you have done this. Your experience will be so much richer if you take the time to think about these two types of instances carefully and why you reacted the way you did.

My good friend and international motivational speaker Gary Eby always said, “Change is a door that can be opened only from the inside.” People who react are trying to change other people through their actions. Do you think telling off the woman who doesn’t pick up after her dog will make her change her actions? Probably not. You don’t have that power. 147You have power over only your own actions.

In order to drive the idea home, I want you to think about an athlete on the field. A 300-pound American football player. A huge guy, full of contained power, ready to give his all. At the sound of a whistle—at the command of a “hike”—he will slam into the opposing team with every ounce of energy in his body. He is close enough to his opponent that they can spit on each other, close enough to insult family members and loved ones. He is doing everything he can to get into the heads of his opponents. His goal is to get the other team so riled up that they step out of line and get a penalty or are thrown out of the game. And they are doing the same thing to him.

The only thing that prevents him, his teammates, and the other team from completely losing control—the only thing that causes them to walk away in a split second—is a whistle. At the sound of the whistle, everyone steps back, self-control intact. Is it the power of the whistle? Is it the power of the referee who blows it? Or is it the power of the penalty?

The penalty is the only reason the player has the maturity and discipline to get up and walk away. If he doesn’t keep his temper, energy, and anger under control, he is putting himself in jeopardy, and he is putting his team in jeopardy. How does the sound of the whistle keep him in check on the field? After years of conditioning, he knows that when he hears that whistle, he has to walk away from whatever insults are being thrown his way and get back into formation, or he will pay the price.

Now, that exact same player could be on the elevator with his girlfriend, lose control, and knock her out. That exact same player could feel someone step on his shoes in the club, lose his temper, and pull out a gun. It’s the whistle that creates discipline. Without that whistle, he has a much harder time keeping that energy in check.

Football players have coaches on the field to help them control themselves, but very few have those same types of coaches in everyday life. A coach is meant to protect their players, even from themselves. You can’t tell me these guys don’t have discipline. They do. They just don’t always know how to transfer that discipline to their everyday lives. Let me ask you: What are you allowing to condition you in your game of life? Can you condition yourself to live by the whistle and walk away from a situation that could cause you to be thrown out of the game, or do you start the brawl, take the bait, and be the one to get your whole team disqualified?

Every first-generation millionaire needs to prioritize learning to live by the whistle in every aspect of their lives. Remember, as Les Brown always says: “It is always better to be prepared and not called than it is to be called and not prepared.” Success requires preparation with the hope of never having to exercise this extreme discipline, which in turn prevents extreme losses through penalties, whatever they may be.

I knew that I had to be ready when it was my time to face adversity. One of my biggest challenges came to me when I least expected it. It was not when I was in the boardroom or onstage or in the middle of negotiating a new partnership. It was when I was out for dinner with my wife.

My wife and I had just participated in an event in Plano, Texas, for the show Black Love, which was about successful couples in the African-American community. It had been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). We had been personally invited to attend the event by the multi-platinum-earning, Grammy-winning artist Kirk Franklin and his wife, Tammy. After the event, we happened to be across the street from Sambuca 360, a restaurant that Crystal and I both like and where I had hosted a few large events over the past several years. It occasionally had live jazz music, and since we both love jazz, we went in to see who was performing that night. When we walked in, we saw that all the best seats around the stage were reserved. I had started looking in the back when my wife called me over. She had found a high-top that was right in the action and didn’t have a “reserved” sign on it. We sat down, ordered drinks from the waitress, and watched the musicians get ready for their set. After about 20 minutes, we were ready to order our second round of drinks and started looking at the menu.

Before we could even order our food, however, a man walked over. He explained that no one should have seated us there, that it was reserved for someone else, and that he would be happy to move us to another table. I listened to him calmly and then told him that we were good where we were. Neither of us wanted to give up our great seats, and we had already gotten our drinks. As soon as he heard my polite reply, he started getting agitated, so my wife pulled out her cell phone and start recording. (This was only a few weeks after the infamous Starbucks incident in Philadelphia in the spring of 2018.) He stormed over to another man, started talking excitedly and gesturing over to us so I started to record on my phone because his body language and gesturing was very bizarre, and I knew it would be my word against his. Then he came back in a huff.

“You’ve got to leave.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t like you.”

“Because you don’t like me?”

I was being as cool as possible on the outside, but I was boiling inside. He told us we were trespassing, and I held up my drink as proof that we were paying customers. He told us we couldn’t sit there because it was someone else’s table, and I replied that it wasn’t reserved. That’s when he pulled out his phone—and called the police. He told them he had an “irate black guy” who was “refusing to pay his bill” and “refusing to leave.” His last comment to the dispatcher chilled me to the bone: “And we don’t know if he has a gun or not.”

The old me would have lost my cool. I would have been yelling. I would have caused a scene. I would have likely caught the attention of the police. But I knew what I had on the line. My family. My reputation. My standing in the community. My business. Even my freedom. I had too much to lose to act a fool. Was I being discriminated against? Of course I was. But I couldn’t let that injustice cloud my judgment in the moment.

We paid our bill and were walking outside when the cops arrived. They stormed past us and looked for the “irate” black guy who may or may not have had a gun. They didn’t even give me a second look because I didn’t fit the description of the picture that the manager had painted to get the Plano Police Department to storm in as if a robbery were taking place. I kept calm and rose above. A few days later, after the video went viral and was picked up by the news, the restaurant issued an apology to me. I didn’t lose a thing.

Sambuca 360 went from having a four-star online rating to less than two stars. The video has over 1 million views on social media. Virtually every news outlet across the country—and many international markets—picked up the story. My staying in control created global visibility for me and my brand. The man’s behavior cost the restaurant dearly.

Being reactive to every little (and big) thing is what whiners do. Being responsible for their own actions is what winners do. I want you in the winner’s circle all the time.

The second part of this chapter will address how you must take care of your body. I want you to start respecting your body—thinking about what you eat, focusing on what you do to stay active, and considering what vices you indulge in. If you make bad health choices now, you are going to suffer the consequences later. I don’t want that for you. I want you to live a long, healthy life, so that you can see all this hard work support your children and their children after them.

Being a friend to your future self doesn’t just mean learning and practicing how to deal with adversity and saving yourself trouble down the line. It also means taking care of your body so that you are around to see your children and your children’s children reap the benefits of your hard work.

Let me give you an example from my own life. Not about my business, but about my health.

When I was 21, my uncle—my namesake Johnny Dale Wimbrey, Sr.—died from a heart disease–related incident. My family members were shocked. In our minds, he was incredibly successful and incredibly healthy. Just a year before he died, in 1996, he had actually carried the Olympic torch through Fort Worth, Texas, on its way to Atlanta, Georgia, where Mohamed Ali would ultimately light the flame for the official Olympic Games. It just didn’t make any sense to any of us. Within a year and a half of his passing, two more of my uncles died from heart disease. My father had his first stroke that same year. My father would ultimately have over two dozen more strokes and lose many physical capabilities including his ability to drive and walk. With all of this information, it’s clear that heart disease used to run in my family. I say “used to” because I made sure that the streak of Wimbrey men dying at a young age from heart disease would end with me. I broke that chain. I broke that generational curse. I was a friend to my future self.

When I was 35, I took out a life insurance policy. Part of the process was a lengthy medical workup. The doctor at the agency called me the week after my checkup and told me that the company had to increase my rate because my cholesterol was too high. It was a sobering phone call because I saw firsthand what that could mean. I did not want to end up like many of the Wimbreys I had seen perish during my lifetime thus far. Those men had died suddenly before they were ready. I knew something needed to change.

I told the doctor that I exercised but that maybe I wasn’t watching what I ate as closely as I should. He gave me two options: cholesterol-lowering drugs or a 90-day health challenge. I was at a crossroad. I could live as I had been living, take the drugs, and end it there. Or I could take the necessary steps to make a substantial change and be a friend to my future self. I chose the latter. I chose to destroy the high cholesterol. Not only did I exercise every day but I also cut out all meat from my diet for three years. As Les Brown says: “Nothing tastes as good as living.” I made that my motto. I took control of my health, my future, and the future of my family. I had the choice to be a friend or foe to my own life. It was my responsibility to participate in my own rescue.

Speaking of participating in my own rescue, a lot of people look at me as if I am crazy when I tell them how much I spend on my own personal development. Seminars, books, and conferences add up. But to me, they are worth every penny. I have spent over $100,000 to spend time with industry leaders, giving myself the chance to learn and apply what I’ve learned to my own efforts.

Think about how much you have spent on movies, concerts, dinners out, and vacations. How easy it is for you to justify buying that third pair of sneakers or the sunglasses you have been eyeing. How many hours have you spent gossiping with your friends or scrolling around on the internet, especially social media platforms? How many hours have you spent learning sports statistics and watching college basketball?

Now, if your job is making or reviewing movies or concerts or sneakers or sunglasses, or if you are a gossip columnist or an NBA recruiter, then this is how you are productive. More power to you. But let’s be real: most of us do not fall into those categories. If you are wasting your time, resources, and money on things that do not directly affect your success, then you are allowing those things to pull you away from your destiny. Don’t give into the now. Invest in your future. Your future self won’t remember what movie you saw on a Wednesday night, but she will thank you for saving up for that course, for studying for that test, for taking the time to make those few extra connections.

Never cease to invest in your internal and external personal development. The consistent development of your mind will become the universal key to unlock any door that you desire to walk through. The consistent upkeep and development of your body will be the deciding factor of whether you can run through that door or barely walk.

When I was a child, we watched Saturday morning cartoons. I remember very vividly one of the commercials that would come on multiple times during the morning. It was a commercial that promoted eating healthy. I am literally laughing right now because I can still hear it in my mind at the age of 45. This unidentifiable character would say these words to music: “You are what you eat from your head down to your feet.” So simple and yet such a perfect example of common sense that is very uncommonly practiced. Who you are today is directly related to what you physically, mentally, and emotionally consume. You are what you eat, so what will it be? Will you fritter away your present and sacrifice your future, or will you invest in your future self now and reap the rewards down the road?

Prove to yourself that you value your future, and commit to seeing that feeling of value come to fruition. Not everyone can do this. It is so easy to bargain your future away, bit by bit. If you aren’t willing to make the commitment to your future self, you will never become a first-generation millionaire. Remember, the millionaire mindset begins within. When I made the sacrifice to stop eating meat for three years, that strength came from within, and ultimately the benefits were both internal and external.

Once you truly obtain the millionaire mindset, sacrificing temporary desires becomes a daily practice, and anything that is a daily practice will ultimately become a simple lifestyle. Ancient writings of scripture asked the question, “What does it prosper a man to gain the whole world yet lose his soul?” Likewise, I ask you, “How would any people prosper by gaining massive external success while ignoring and allowing the destruction of their body that is their temple?” When I committed to becoming a first-generation millionaire, I also made a personal commitment to be young and healthy enough to experience the benefits long before I passed my wealth onto my legacy and the generations beyond my earthly existence.

Holton told me to think about it a certain way, and his words really stuck with me. If you hurt a friend’s feelings by saying something nasty or thoughtless, you can look him or her in the eye and sincerely apologize. That friend can forgive you, and you can go back to where you were before your comment. But if you smoke three packs a day for 20 years, you can’t just apologize to your lungs and magically clean them up. You can’t eat fried foods all your life and then apologize to your arteries and magically unclog them. That’s not how this works. You have to do the work now to take care of your future self. It is the same for your education, in how you treat your mind, and how you treat the world around you. The ability to adjust, adapt, and sacrifice for the best interest of your future self is a major step toward mastering the mindset of a first-generation millionaire.

ACTION STEP

Look back at your goal from Pillar 4. Look back at your supersized goal from Pillar 8. Now, make a list of things you need to do and make a list of things you need to not do because they will interfere in your reaching your goal. For example, if your goal is to have more money in your account at the end of the month, you need to make a list of things you need to do to reach that goal and a list of things you must stop doing because they are in the way of your reaching that goal. Dinner out three nights a week needs to go, but putting extra cash into a savings account at the end of the week needs to be on the to-do list.

You won’t be successful if you don’t adjust your spending. You have to do the work. For my health challenge, it was a “do” to eat at least five servings of greens and a “do not” to skip a day of exercise. It worked for me, and it will work for you. Be serious about the list. Following the steps you outline for yourself is an integral part of being a friend to your goals and your future self.

PILLAR 12