Growing up, I was never great at math.
I was never pulled aside by teachers and anointed “gifted” in this area.
The only thing I was “gifted” at was talking – and too much.
I struggled with math until I didn’t.
I vividly remember the third-floor, east-facing classroom of my college Sophomore Calculus class – how the light poured through the windows, my professor’s denim uniform, his sweeping grayish-blonde hair, and the green chalkboard.
It’s a vivid memory because this is where I understood math for the first time.
It was like a lightbulb went off in my head – I was shocked.
And the outcome 13 years later is even more shocking.
Understanding math and how to use it radically changed my abilities to generate money as an investor, advisor, and entrepreneur.
This week, I will share how you can do this in your own life.
Throw your “I was never good at math” to the curb, and let’s dive in.
But before we get into the how, I want to explain what happens when math is absent from your financial life.
- Someone else will do it for you.
- It will work in their favor, not yours.
You’ll end up late to the party (retirement) with an empty wallet (not enough money).
Not good.
The world is savage—it’s a commercialized place where people who get math have almost unlimited access to people through an internet connection and the 7 billion smartphones on planet Earth.
Here’s how this works.
“If I {company who gets math } show this person {you/me} an ad 20 times on Instagram, they’ll buy my $70 shorts, and I’ll make $20.”
“If I get 99 other people to buy, I’ll make $2,000.
Do that for a year; I’ll make $730,000.”
Now, this isn’t bad per se, but we live in the mess of other people’s math equations, and trying to invest and build a high-performing financial life for ourselves gets – difficult.
Let’s cut through the noise.
Enter 6th-grade math and your ability to think.
Building a high-performing financial life isn’t that hard. Spend less than you make and invest the difference.
But life and many things outside your control make that simple sentence above complex.
This leads to bad outcomes.
- Too much debt
- Slow growing Net Worth
- Cash that needs to be invested
- Bad investments
- Spending too much
Stuff you want to avoid.
But the more you understand your math, the better financial decisions you make.
It’s as simple as that.
It’ll be easier to budget, invest, and make hard decisions.
For years, I’ve incorporated key math into every major financial decision, and it’s changed my world.
If any financial problem arises, I always look for the equation.
This has allowed me to build better investment models, understand economies, become a better entrepreneur, solve complex problems, and help clients align their goals, money, and math.
So, here are the four steps to thinking in math.
- Math is the foundation of your financial life— every decision you make with money solves a problem – you buy groceries to eat, pay your mortgage to live in your home, and exchange time for money at work. Every dollar you spend is a dollar that cannot be invested. Every investment has a corresponding assumption of growth mixed with some measure of risk. At every step, it’s a decision to spend or invest. Love it or hate it is what it is – money is math.
- Know your most important numbers—math is not everything, but numbers don’t lie, which is why this is so practical. The key is to find your most important numbers; this could be your net worth, passive income, bonus compensation, student loan payoff schedule, or the value of your RSUs. Once you understand those fundamental numbers, you reach point #3.
- Grow them— as I said above, this isn’t all about numbers, but numbers don’t lie, and if you don’t want to work when you are 85, you need to grow money. If you need $8k a month in retirement and that means you need an extra $500k in assets to get there – work towards that goal. If you don’t know these numbers, it’s hard to get there. Write the essential numbers from point #2 and grow them.
- Practice makes perfect—my journey with math as an adult has been one of consistent application. Though I could not walk back into my Calculus class and solve a complex derivative problem, I make it a point to understand the math in every critical financial decision I make as an entrepreneur and investor.
The more you do this, the better you get.
People like to distill things down to simple numbers because they can easily keep score of things.
Football games are settled by math, not poetry.
The markets are measured in numbers, not adverbs
Paychecks are numbers, not books.
There are seven days in a week, 12 months in a year.
Money is math.
When you start thinking in math – you invest better.
The better you invest – the better off you’ll be.
How do I know this?
It’s just math.
