Wrestling with Wealth: Limitations and Grit

Carpe Diem. A short phrase dripping with implication and almost second nature to most Westerners. Yet, its first use was by the Roman lyric poet Horace, where more accurate English translations reveal it’s more like “plucking the day” than seizing.

I’ll admit, plucking feels inferior to seizing. Who doesn’t want to win the day? But let’s think about where plucking the day might get us. I think it emphasizes two things often overlooked, luck and opportunity.

Over morning coffee with a best friend, I was reminded of what plucking looked like in the first person. Here’s a real story about a young man plucking away at life’s opportunities.

Sammy the?Stallion

Sammy is the second of four in a family ripe with athletic talent. On the surface, he has the physical structure of an Olympian. But that’s not all. Watching him grow up I saw that he possessed a personal calmness and radical acceptance of life. Even more interesting, there were some physical challenges. Nothing majorly debilitating, but a few setbacks that prevented him from doing everything he wanted. Withstanding these limitations, he is next-level intelligent. Like many boys his age there was an affinity for sports, where he was average in football, but excelled at wrestling. This combination of calmness, intelligence, and humility makes him fierce on the mat. The word quit doesn’t exist in his vocabulary. And with several victories on the national stage, he possesses an urge to compete at the collegiate level.

I’m not sure how Sammy’s story ends. He’s navigating the complexities of a high school senior. But I will say this: he is plucking every opportunity at his disposal to materialize his goal, which is a full athletic scholarship to a university with a top-ranked engineering department. I wish him the best, but truth be told, he already understands the magic formula:

Goals fueled by passion plus awareness of limitations equal grit.

Rolling with the?Punches

Sammy reminds me that, despite the odds, we should accept our odds with grace. Sammy’s sights are set high, but the expectations remain on himself, and he understands that he may not get exactly what he wants because nobody does. But, he will work like the only thing standing in his way is himself. He is a perfect example of what it means to pluck away at the day.

Also, Sammy’s journey and our experience with writing a money story are the same. Mainly, intentions and limitations find a way of intersecting. We try to push through our limitations because that’s what successful people do. However, an honest inventory of proven success demonstrates that acceptance of limitations is critical, if not mandatory or even transformational. And everyone wants to have more money. But aligning reality with a disciplined plan moves the needle by inches, and inches become yards eventually.

I like what Brian Portnoy says about adaptive simplicity:

A mindset that accepts that change and complexity are unavoidable features of daily life, but then responds by embracing the frequent challenge of rolling with the punches and cutting through the noise. This is the engine that moves us along the path toward funded contentment.

With any success, we will pluck the opportunities available to us. Plucking requires an almost conscious effort to know that we may not get what we want, but we have to try because anything less is not plucking, but expecting.