Get Smart!: How to Think and Act Like the Most Successful and Highest-Paid People in Every Field
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- The Retirement Crisis
| Determine Your Future Intent In 1994, Gary Hamel and CK. Prahalad wrote a breakthrough book on business strategy titled Competing for the Future. In this book, they popularized the concept of future intent. They wrote that the greater clarity you have regarding where you want to be in the future, the easier it is for you to make correct decisions in the present. One of their most popular ideas was that if your goal is to be a leader in your industry, you must project forward five years and ask yourself, What skills, abilities, and competences must we have five years from now in order to be one of the top companies?” When you have clear future intent, future orientation, it becomes much easier for you to think with greater clarity, to make those decisions today that will enable you to achieve your long-term goals. The critical word in long-term perspective is “sacrifice.” Successful people are willing to sacrifice, to delay immediate gratification in the present, in the short term, to enjoy greater rewards in the future—in the long term. Without the willpower and discipline to engage in “short-term pain for long-term gain little success is possible. The Retirement Crisis Today in America, and in other countries, we have what economists calla looming retirement crisis Ten thousand members of the baby boomer generation are reaching retirement age in the United States alone each day. According to the New York Times, the average savings of a married couple reaching retirement is only This amount has to last for fifteen to twenty years in retirement. At a withdrawal rate of 4 percent (recommended, the average retired couple can draw down $4,160 per year, $346 per month, for the rest of their lives, plus Social Security. And $104,000 is the median size of accumulated savings. Fifty percent of retirees are above that number, and 50 percent are below. Some retirees have no money at all saved up. How could this happen in the most affluent country in all of human history? The answer is clear—lack of time perspective. Millions of people got into the habit early of spending everything they earned and often more throughout their lives. Today, fully 70 percent of adults live from paycheck to paycheck. They have nothing leftover. They complain that they have “too much month at the end of the money.” They were and are lulled into believing that their spendthrift habits would never catch up with them. Download 0.86 Mb. Share with your friends:
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