I fully expected my posts to be about the experience of being a student again, and what that means to you as you pursue your Rich and Happy adventures.  As it turns out, today’s post has nothing to do with studying Spanish.

It has to do with surfing.  See, when I’m not in class, I have a lot of time on my hands.  And since the school is literally right on the beach, and since the waves are great, and since I’ve always wanted to surf, I decided to try surfing.

Wouldn’t you know it, within my experience was a great microcosmic example of many parts of the Rich and Happy formula.

For starters, this is not the first time I’ve tried to surf.  A number of years ago when I was backpacking around the world I was staying at a place in South Africa that is known for surfing.  Being an athlete, and a pretty adventurous guy, I went out and rented a board for a couple of hours.

After all, the people out there doing it made it look so easy.  After about thirty minutes of getting beaten to a pulp with the waves, I promptly returned the board and took two ibuprofen.

To say that my efforts were disastrous would be a major understatement.  I’m lucky I didn’t kill myself.

A few other surfing endeavors over the years were not as painful, either in their results, or impact on my body, but they too were far from successful.

So this time I decided to put the Rich and Happy formula into play.  The first thing I did was ask around for WHO of my classmates  had been out surfing.  Then I asked them what they did.  There was a common thread to their answers.

They had almost all been out surfing.  None of them knew how to surf before arriving in Costa Rica.  They had all taken LESSONS from one of the local surf schools.  Every single one of them could get up on the board and ride waves, and they had been able to do that during and ever since their first lesson.

Sounded good to me.  So instead of suffering from Mad How disease, as I had clearly done in my other surfing attempts, this time I imitated my Who’s, and went to one of the surf schools for a lesson.

The lesson was one hour and it cost $25 dollars.  Within the first ten minutes of instruction I learned two very important things I had been doing wrong.  That was before we even got off the sand and into the water.

Within another ten minutes, this time in the water, I had learned three more important things, including how to make sure I didn’t get killed when big waves were breaking in front of me, behind me, and on top of me if I got thrown off the board.

And then, on my very first attempt to catch a wave, stand up, and ride it, I promptly got chucked off the board and thrown into the surf.  And unlike with all the other attempts, it didn’t bother me in the least, because I now knew what to do when that happened.

On my next attempt I was up on the board, and from that point on I was consistently catching and riding the waves.  And I have to say, if you have never surfed before, it is AWESOME.

So here are the big takeaways.

#1. Rich and Happy moments are a lot easier to come by when you get the help you need instead of always trying to figure everything out on your own.

If you have a Rich and Happy dream or interest, ask someone who has done, seen, or experienced it.  No need to be the martyr who did it all on their own.  That is a slow, slow path filled with lots of pain.  Find a WHO.

#2. Don’t be cheap when it comes to your training.

I think part of the reason I never took lessons in the past is because I thought $25-$50 was sort of a waste for a lesson or two.  I kept thinking I should be able to figure it out on my own.  The truth is totally different.  What I remembered through this experience was that I wasn’t paying for an hour lesson.

I was paying to learn the way to surf, which I could then use FOREVER.  In the past I had been making the classic mistake of looking at the immediate cost of the lesson, and not the lifetime value of the information or skills I would learn because of the lesson.

Thanks to my training, I now know how to surf, and how to not get killed while I’m surfing.   I probably logged ten more hours of surfing just the week I took my lesson.  Extrapolate that over my life, and that was a seriously cheap lesson for learning the way to do something that will log me lots of Rich and Happy minutes.

#3. Sometimes knowing what to do in the face of adversity is every bit as important as knowing what to do to enjoy an experience.

Our fears can be very effective barriers to keeping us from being Rich and Happy.  However, once you understand that fear, and the way to avoid what you are fearful of, the barrier goes away.

In surfing there is a fantastically intoxicating, and mildly terrorizing moment when you are facing forward, paddling to catch the wave coming behind you, and you feel the wave start to pick you up and throw you forward.

If you keep paddling, you catch just the right momentum and you can jump up on the board and away you go.  A great ride.

If the fear gets you though, inevitably, you stop one or two paddles short, and the wave slides right underneath you.  You missed it, and now you’re out of position to get all the other waves in the series.

Your fear not only costs you a great ride, you end up having to work hard to get out past the break again.

For me, the fear of not knowing what to do if I got thrown off the board was always a huge barrier to having the confidence to allow the wave to start driving me forward.  After my lesson though, the fear went away.  I had learned what to do if things went wrong, and it was EASY and IT WORKED.

I know, because in addition to catching a lot of waves, there were more than a few that gave me a big heave into the ocean.

So there you have it.  After almost twenty years of research into the Rich and Happy formula I finally was smart enough to apply parts of it to learning to surf.  And because it worked, I can now log lots of Rich and Happy minutes on surfboards all over the planet as I travel around.

As they say here in Costa Rica.  Pura Vida.

John

There are two dealerships in your local town, one is a couple of minutes down the road and the other is a 30 minute each way cross town drive. Both dealerships have the particular model you want in stock, but the prices are slightly different.

Your local dealer wants $60k on the nose for you to drive the car off his forecourt, whereas the other guy wants $59,750, a saving of $250.

What do you do?

Is a $250 saving really worth the hassle of driving across town for when you are spending 60 grand?

Let’s change the scenario somewhat and suppose you want to buy a new iPod. Your local Best Buy has the one you want available and it’s $250 and you pass the store more or less everyday.

However, you then get a letter in the mail telling you, that you have won an iPod in a competition you entered last week. Woo-hoo! How cool is that?

The only catch is you have to make  the 30 minute cross town drive to collect is as it cannot be shipped.

What do you do?

If you said you wouldn’t drive across town to save $250 on your new car, then logic suggests you wont want to drive there to fetch an iPod either. After all it’s the same amount of money and you either want to save it, or you don’t.

On the other hand, if you did drive across town to save money on your car, then you’ll do so again for the iPod without really thinking about it.

Tests similar to the above have been conducted many times by social psychologists and the results are always the same. People on the whole don’t care about the $250 when it is part of a much larger purchase, but want it when it sits in isolation.

That doesn’t make much sense, or maybe on occasions it does?

In this post on happiness I talked about gambling and the approach some people take in casinos when they’re winning. They have a much higher tendency to make rash or large bets using the rationale that they have nothing to lose.

It’s called playing with the houses money, but it’s a ridiculous way to look at it when you think about it. It’s not the houses money once you have won it, it’s yours. and is just as valuable as any other money you have.

Although we go to great pains to stress How To Be Rich and Happy isn’t about wealth creation per se, it is about understanding basic concepts regrading money. Concepts that Rich and Happy people adopt on a daily basis.

For instance, if you are a senior executive in a blue chip organization earning $250k per annum, then there would be a case to be made for buying the local Mercedes. Not because you can afford the extra $250, but because if you sat down and worked out your hourly rate, it would cost you more in time and fuel to fetch the car than you would save.

That may seem a somewhat extreme example, but there are other reasons why the trip may not be worthwhile.

Let’s suppose you have a well paid job and money isn’t a huge issue for you. The only time you can go and get the car would be the time you usually spend playing with your kids. Is that time with your kids worth $250 to you?

Or maybe you want to build up a relationship with the more local dealer for servicing and the money you’ll save on not driving so far each time your car needs a service will more than make up for the initial saving.

Rich and Happy people are experts at looking at such examples and quickly deciding which option is best for them. They understand the difference between cost and worth and they know how important their own time is to them.

I’ve always had a very laissez faire attitude toward money, which is probably why I never have any. But in working with John on How To Be Rich and Happy I can see I haven’t done myself any favors.

I’m not going to beat myself up over it as I reframe the last 47 years as a learning curve and start to implement changes!

However, from here on in I am going to really work hard at getting fluent on this and making sure I’m living as many Rich and Happy minutes as possible. Until very recently I'd never stopped to ask myself what money was worth to me. I've been too locked in on the cost of things rather than their value. The book has helped me see the fallacy of that and I hope it can help you think more deeply about the value of money to you.

I wrote a post some while ago called 'How To Avoid Getting Ripped Off'. It goes into some detail about the techniques marketers use to help people part with their cash. I'm not saying Rich and Happy people never get caught out with these methods, but it happens a lot less often.

One final thing. Somebody I have got to know recently and who's read How To Be Rich and Happy has started a website documenting the experience. You can read about his exploits in moving toward a Rich and Happy life by checking out How To Find Happiness

This particular day happened to be the day after Thanksgiving, North America's busiest shopping day of the year. They don’t call it Black Friday for nothing and you can read more about my experience in more detail here.

I was in a sports store with my wife and she was trying on pairs of sneakers. As a nurse who spends a great deal of time on her feet it’s important that she wears something that will remain comfortable all day long.

I think she’d tried on somewhere in the region of two hundred pairs and I sensed she was literally within hours of making a final decision as she had narrowed it down to only two pairs.

I sat watching her go backwards and forwards between the shoes and I could almost hear her mind whirring. Finally, she pointed to the pair she was going to buy with all the enthusiasm of a chicken announcing to his family he’d just landed the job as night watchman at the alligator farm.

I questioned her on this and then the real reason came out for her decision. The pair she was choosing were cheaper. In fact they were over $40 cheaper and no way could she justify spending $90 on a pair of sneakers.

That’s weird I thought, she never has any problem justifying spending $250 on a pair of boots that she’ll wear a fraction of the time.

The shopping trip 2 years ago was a rare moment of clarity for me into a Rich and Happy formula that I never even knew existed, and one that it took me another 18 months to reacquaint myself with.

I pointed out to Helen that the shoes she was about to buy were about as important a purchase as she ever made. Having shoes that were cheap and didn’t feel great when she was going to be wearing them for upwards of 60 hours per week made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

In terms of a Rich and Happy return, having good shoes ranked up there with just about anything you can imagine and certainly well above Coach purses, Channel Perfume and DKNY jeans.

There are multiple sides to being rich and happy and the reason that most people don’t hit the state and stay there for any length of time is because they focus all their energy in one area.

Until very recently I was as guilty (if guilty is the right word) of this as anybody else by neglecting the financial side of my life and trusting that “things will turn out ok because they always do”.

Then about 6 months ago after a meeting with John about the book, I was sat at home staring at my bank statement online. It certainly didn’t look like I was particularly Rich and Happy. Ok, so maybe I was doing what I wanted when I wanted most of the time, but I also wanted to go back to the UK for Christmas and it was looking unlikely.

Trust me, the irony was not lost on me.

Something else that was not lost on me was the multitude of debits on my statement between $4 and $7. I decided to total them up and came up with the grand total I can still remember (for obvious reasons), of $76.66 for the month with a couple of days still to go.

That’s not a huge amount of money, until that is, you realize they were all paid to Starbucks for coffee and the occasional scone.

As I stared in disbelief at my calculator I realized it was actually significantly worse than that because sometimes I paid cash, and on other occasions I went to Panera Bread instead and I wasn’t even looking for those payments.

It became sickeningly apparent I was spending well in excess of $1,000 per year on coffee above and beyond what I drank at home (or in other words, more than the cost of a return flight to the UK). I suddenly remembered a client once telling me if you worked out the weight of coffee in a Starbucks latte, it's literally more than the cost of gold.

That thought didn’t make me feel as good as the 15 minute buzz the coffee gave me let me tell you.

However, fortunately for me, the wisdom of John Strelecky, combined with the cost of coffee has allowed me to become consciously aware of the money I’m spending and it’s real value.

So now I no longer buy coffee on auto-pilot just because I’m driving past Starbucks on the way to the dog park. Now I ask myself if I really want it and more often than not the answer comes back, “ no not really, and certainly not to the tune of $1,000 per year”.

A How To Be Rich and Happy Update.

We sent out an e-mail to all people that have bought the book announcing we will be undertaking some free teleseminars with myself and John starting next month. Primarily, this is for people that have the book and want help in certain areas.

However, assuming we have space on the call we’d also like to invite people that are toying with the idea of buying the book and putting it into practice. We know it’s an investment in money and also time and we want to make it as easy as possible. Please let us know any areas that you would like us to cover off because this is for you.

We have also doubled the size of the free download to give you a better taster of the what the book is all about. You don’t have to give any e-mail details to get the free sample. Simply click here and it will automatically download to your computer.

We have also started a Facebook fan page and would love to have you on board. Yoy can post questions to myself and John and generally talk about Rich and Happy stuff.