Afterword: Making the All-Star Team

Congratulations on finishing The Wealth Creator’s Playbook! You now have a game plan for your journey to Living Fully, and the knowledge and framework to invest your life for maximum returns.

Making the All-Star team in Little League is the coolest thing for a 10- or 11-year-old. Coaching one of those teams is an experience I’ll never forget. Our team of 10-year-olds fought their way through the losers bracket to reach the finals, needing to win twice to advance to the state tournament. We won the first and lost the second game by only one run in a heartbreaker. It was as exciting and dramatic an experience as any professional game I’ve seen. I will never forget the pure joy in the eyes of those boys proudly running onto the diamond in their new blue-and-red uniforms, with pennant flags flying, umpires in their blues, and fans surrounding the field. They were walking on water.

I challenge you to be an All-Star investor in life and money by putting the information that you’ve gained from this book into action—evaluate your Life Portfolio and look for opportunities to improve your return. As a wealth creator, you have advantages that others can only dream of, and you have a responsibility to steward those resources well. There are no do-overs in baseball or in life, so start making the most of the time and opportunities that you’ve been granted. Don’t accept a backup role, standing on the sidelines doing nothing, placing this book on your actual or virtual bookshelf as a trophy of your latest reading conquest. There are no practice games in life, only the regular season. My hope is that the pages of this Playbook are dog-eared and highlighted, with notes scribbled in the margins, and your soul wants to experience change, possibly even transformation.

I’ve learned through facilitating change workshops for many years that one of the biggest impediments in taking action toward any kind of change is usually ourselves. If it were easy to change, we would have done it by now, and we can often trick ourselves into believing that change will happen if we just give it enough time. Often, we devise a defense that requires no real commitment or responsibility on our part. In fact, many times we don’t want to experience a better return on life because we just plain don’t want to put in the work. If that is you, I can’t help you. This game favors anyone who has the drive to be a starter on the team: When you are ready to take on that challenge, I’m here to coach you.

Sometimes our life circumstances can feel overwhelming, and we can get stuck, scared, and unsure about where to start. By breaking big issues into small and digestible action steps, it’s easier to get started, see positive movement forward, and not get frustrated by lack of progress. Start with one or two areas in your Life Portfolio that you want to focus on, or simply commit to working through the Research step in the Investing Your Life process. Whatever you choose to do, the step should be realistic and have a level of difficulty that introduces a sense of challenge or risk to the equation; otherwise, you may not achieve a meaningful return.

When I ask the groups I facilitate through this process to decide on an action step that moves them toward their desired outcomes, I often get watered-down responses that might sound like movement but are just trivial attempts. When I challenge them to take on something more, the response is often, “Oh, no, that would be risky” or “It would scare the heck out of me if I did that!” That’s when I know we’re in the ballpark of real change.

The other reason why progress stalls is lack of intentional support and accountability. Most of us don’t have a community where we can be heard and validated, be encouraged to keep going, be held accountable to our objectives, learn from others, and be inspired to target a grander vision and outcome for our lives. Often, the people I talk to say that they don’t have relationships where they can be honest and vulnerable about their life, sharing struggles and dreams, worries and joys. Because money is such a taboo subject in our culture and has an isolating influence, it can be difficult to talk openly with anyone about your money history, money EQ, and how money is affecting your ideal outcomes. For this reason, I’ve created a virtual community for current and aspiring wealth creators to find inspiration, tools, resources, and an engaged group of like-minded people who are serious about financial returns but, more important, are seeking a truly wealthy life. To find out more about the Living Fully Community and the resources available to you, please visit my website at www.jcchristianson.com.

I believe it’s possible for you to have it all, and I hope that now you can see it, too. Go make it happen, because I can’t imagine an objective more important than what we were created for: life fully lived!

Living Fully,
John