The Facts of Life – Mathematically Speaking

Recently, my morning walk plus several hours of chasing after five grandkids plus an evening trip to the grocery store added up to 13,000 steps according to my fitness tracker! It was shocking to me, but a wonderful reminder of this important life lesson: A little bit + a little bit = a whole lot. This math-fact-of-life is nifty because it applies to every area of life not just fitness. It applies to finance, friendship, and more. Let me shares some examples to illustrate my point and to promote this mindset. It’s a pathway to a rich life!

Finance:

A calculator on the Illinois.edu website shows that if a young person saved as little as $20 per week and invested it at 10% – which would mean placing it in a mutual fund with a proven track record of at least 10% over ten years – the investment would be worth $506,326.00 after forty years. That’s more than half a million dollars all attributed to the fact that a little bit + a little bit = a whole lot.

Friendship:

If you are on the outs with a friend or family member, it’s never too late to fix things. A book about divorce will help. The book is The Good Divorce by the late Constance Ahrons, PhD. Ahrons identified five kinds of divorced couples and placed them on a continuum: Dissolved Duos, Fiery Foes, Angry Associates, Cooperative Colleagues, and Perfect Pals. She then instructed that if there were one hundred steps from one of these relationships to the next, we should take just one step in the more positive direction. And then of course, another step after that. If we keep going, perhaps Perfect Pal-ship can be ours. All of this is made possible by the fact that a little bit + a little bit = a whole lot.

Writing a book:

If you have ever thought of writing a book but find the task to be daunting, follow the lead of Mike Kahn, a guy in my high school graduating class. Mike is a husband, father of five, trial attorney, and also the author of many novels, among them eleven mysteries featuring detective Rachel Gold. Rumor has it that after work and after the kids went to bed, he wrote one page a night. This means that in a year’s time, he could turn out 365 pages. Guess what? The average length of a novel is 300-400 pages. Ta-da! Mike just proved that a little bit + a little bit = a whole lot.

Becoming a successful salesman:

To build a career in sales you make a lot of cold calls until eventually you make a sale. Then you make more cold calls boasting of your one sale until you make another sale. Then you make more cold calls boasting of your two sales until you make your third, and on you go. Months and years later your résumé will show the dozens and dozens of happy customers you have accrued all because of the fact that a little bit + a little bit = a whole lot.

By the way, don’t forget to go back to those happy customers to sell them a second time! And don’t forget to ask them for letters of recommendation and referrals. Your next cold call will go a lot more smoothly when you tell them John Jones told you to call. Oh, and by the way, if you tell a potential client that you will call them Tuesday at 2 o’clock, it’s a really good idea to call them Tuesday at 2 o’clock. Being a person of your word does a lot to get those referrals and letters of recommendation.

I know firsthand about this method to build a career in sales because I used it successfully to sell myself as a motivational speaker. Over a ten-year period of time, I spoke to over 250 groups in 11 states.

In summary:

The used-to-be 20-year-old guy who’s now a half-millionaire? The person with the renewed friendship? The trial lawyer by day and writer by night? The gal with 250 speaking gigs on her resume? None of these people got lucky. Instead, they got proficient at using this math-fact-of-life.

The really good news is that anyone can use it.

Want to learn to play the piano, guitar, or violin? Practice 15 minutes a day each and every day. Be sure to record yourself stumbling through your piece on day one, so that when you listen to it on day ten you can be motivated by how much you have improved. Then watch as the mastered sheet music grows into quite a pile over time.

Want to have a collection of china tea pots? Buy one right now and repeat monthly. You’ll have twelve teapots in the first year alone because things add up quickly! Soon you will also be collecting shelving units to house your burgeoning teapot collection.

The only hard part in all of this is getting started! So, remember this, if you start today, you will be one step further along than if you start tomorrow.

A rich life can be yours! On your mark, get set, go!

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A Postscript:

The impetus for this story is the shocking fact that this is my 100^th blog! I launched my website September, 2017 with the goal of publishing two blogs or newsletters per month. In these many months, I have written 100 blogs, 19 newsletters, 110 book reviews, and 8 special newsletters for book lovers. I also wrote a total of 47 stories for two other online sources, Worthy.com and Medium.com. It’s mind boggling to look back on, but it was easy to achieve. I did it one story at a time. Congratulations to me!

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Here’s my M.O.: I tell the stories of my life hoping others can find life lessons in them. AND I function as a cheerleader with the core message: Life can be difficult but you can handle it. Like these topics? Then try my blog and/or my new book, Love, Loss, and Moving On. And tell a friend!