Latest / Built by Margin with Laurie Chen / Risk Worthy: Defining Your Best Possible Future as a Founder with Laurie Chen, CPA, MBA
Transcript
- 0:04Welcome to Built by Margin, the podcast where strategy meets the spreadsheet. I'm your host, Laurie Chen, fractional CFO and tax strategist, here to help you make smarter financial decisions, build a profitable business, and keep more of what you earn. Let's dive into the numbers that actually move the needle. Hey friends, it's Laurie, and I'm super excited to share that I just signed my publishing contract. Welcome to Built by Margin, episode 16. Today, I'm pulling back the curtain on my upcoming book, Riskworthy, a field guide for founders who want to grow with grit, not guesswork. In this episode, I'm sharing three bite-sized ideas straight from the manuscript. Best possible future defined, dive with zero applied, and making the best possible future inevitable. If you're a founder who keeps asking, how do I make the best possible future inevitable?
- 0:57This one's for you. Stick around to the end. I've got a tiny homework prompt to help you make one risk-worthy move this week, plus a way to get on the early reader list. All right, contract signed, pen uncapped. Let's build with intention. This is Built by Margin. Let's dive in.
- 1:15Best Possible Future Defined. Your best possible future is closely related to your best self. Unlike the best self, it is a concept from positive psychology where you imagine your future self living the most fulfilling and successful version of your life possible. It's not enough to think about the best version of yourself. You must also consider how your decision affects your best possible future. When viewing risk and uncertainty through the lens of your best possible future, the main question to answer is, does the outcome, despite the risks, move you closer to your long-term goal and vision for your future? Your best possible future is your ideal future, or what your life would look like if you are thriving. Your best possible self is about the thoughts, energy, and character that define who you are, while your best possible future is about the outcomes that define your life. Think of your best possible future as your life vision board fulfilled. Even if you're not there today, which you most likely are not, your vision of your best possible future will help you make the decisions that are risk worthy. After I made the big decision to move to Seattle and had lived there for several years, I knew that my life wasn't thriving in all the areas that I wanted to be thriving in.
- 2:30When I mapped out what my best possible future looked like, I made the decisions that would get me there. Just knowing that I had a best possible future and that I was working towards it with intention made all the difference in the world and giving me hope in an extended period of uncertainty in my life. A unique characteristic of human beings is the inclination to act based on the vision of the future. Human beings don't tend to make decisions based on the past. Human beings make decisions to either create a good outcome or avoid a bad outcome. Instead of living in the past, Benjamin Hardy suggests that the research shows that human beings are, quote unquote, pulled forward by the future we're most committed to. The Law of Attraction essentially tells us to create the best possible future by attracting more of what you want in your life. Like Neville Goddard's Law of Assumption, the Law of Attraction is about pulling forward a future that you know is ideal for you. Whether pulling the future forward through attracting or assuming, human beings make decisions based on the vision of the future, not the past. And the more we decipher the end from the beginning, the more we take the risks and make the decisions that increase the quality of the future. There's a lot of science and thought leadership that goes behind financial retirement planning, precisely because it is about planning for the best possible future financially. Nobody wants to read old age and not have any assets and not have a family to be supported by. Today, government sponsored plans like social security, employer 401ks, and personal savings form the financial safety net for old age. Now, if the average person starts working at 22 years old and retires at 65 years old, that's 43 years of saving money in an account that is compounding interest so that as much money is available in the senior years of life where the ability to work diminishes. Conventional retirement planning tells us that our best possible future has a maximum amount of financial assets saved in a tax deferred retirement account that is accessible without penalties around age 65. In the book Die With Zero, Bill Perkins writes about minimizing regret in life by focusing on acquiring memorable experiences rather than focusing on maximizing the retirement savings account. Even though life expectancy can be somewhat predicted, it can't be known with greater than a certain confidence level because many external life risks such as natural disasters, freak accidents, and murders can tragically cut life short. Even though death itself is certain for everyone, the exact timing and age of death is the most uncertain risk in all of life.
- 5:16Perkins says that if we follow conventional retirement planning, then we may actually be working for free. Because if we die with a large surplus in our retirement account, then we won't be able to actually enjoy it ourselves. Therefore, his solution is to aim to die with zero, maximize life experiences and invest early in those life experiences. The die with zero theory illustrates how accumulating the most money in retirement or getting the best quantitative return on investment is not the most important result in life simply because the timing of individual death is the most uncertain factor of all. Considering this, investing in memories and experiences is what Perkins argues strongly for. And this concept supports the pursuit of qualitative returns on investment, especially investments into the best version of yourself and your best possible future. So how can you make the best possible future inevitable? Making hard decisions such as whether to build a life-changing product, invest$100,000 of your own money into your startup, or form a business partnership with a specific person still comes down to whether the qualitative return on investment is worthwhile. if it is aligned with your best self and your best possible future. If you make decisions that have big consequences, predominantly from a qualitative point of view, then you can trust that the quantitative numbers and logistics will work out in the long-term horizon, maybe even decades. Because when you want something, the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it. Because we live in a world of cause and effect, every decision we make will impact another person, another event, or another outcome.
- 7:01So when you are committed to your best possible future, infinite possibilities and opportunities were open to you both in your personal life and in your business life that weren't there before you took any big bets or made any consequential decisions. That's a wrap for Built By Margin episode 16. Quick recap. We talked about the best possible future, your life vision board fulfilled. We talked about Bill Perkins' book, Die With Zero, illustrating how accumulating the most money in retirement or getting the best quantitative return on investment is not the most important result in life. And then we talked about making the best possible future inevitable. If you make big decisions that have big consequences predominantly from a qualitative point of view, then you can trust that the quantitative numbers and logistics will work out in the long-term horizon.
- 7:57Your action step, pick one decision that you've been parking.
- 8:01Define the smallest 72-hour bet, put it on your calendar, and tell one person who'll hold you to it. If you want early chapters, tools, and launch updates, hop on my early reader list by going to www.riskworthy.co. And if today helped, follow, subscribe, drop a quick review, and share this with a founder who's on the edge of a big bet. I'm Laurie. With publishing contracts signed, thanks for building with intention today. This is Built by Margin. See you next time.
- 8:36Thanks for tuning in to Built by Margin. If you're ready to turn insights into income, subscribe and join me each week as we break down the numbers behind smart business growth. I'm