CFD 553 – Patrick Donohoe on Rethinking Retirement, Success, and the Meaning of Life

September 20th, 2019

Patrick Donohoe is the author of the bestselling book Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: A Financial Strategy to Reignite the American Dream. He is also the Founder and CEO of Paradigm Life, one of the largest private and independent financial planning and advising firms in the country. Patrick and his team teach thousands how to build wealth, create lifetime cash flow, and leave a meaningful legacy. 

Patrick Donohoe was recently honored by Investopedia as one of the Nation’s Top 100 Most Influential Financial Advisors. He is a highly sought after presenter and speaker at financial-based events around the country and is the host of The Wealth Standard podcast. 

Podcast Highlights

  • Who is Patrick Donohoe? 

Patrick has always been driven to succeed, which has given him a lot of the things he has achieved in life but also made him extremely unhappy. He has a hunger to understand the way things are and no matter what the achievement or result he was looking towards, he knew that he could have it.

The way in which we look at the world today is shaped by our experiences when we’re younger. We link the things we all end up wanting with certain emotions, and for some people that can mean believing they are not worthy of their goals, or if they do achieve them they’re unhappy anyway.

  • What are the top seven things that your formal education never taught you on the way to seven figures?

Understand that you are your best asset. You have infinite potential. You have uniqueness that you need to discover and then invest in it and magnify it, that will allow you to apply it to the marketplace and add value to the world.

The school system and the workforce were originally created to train workers and the military, but that paradigm is being turned on its head. Just because you don’t do well in school, that doesn’t mean you’re not smart. You’ll make way more money if you focus on yourself instead of something external.

Nobody likes to be managed, everybody likes to be lead. Leadership is one of the hardest things to do but it’s one of the most fulfilling things you can do. Everybody has in them the ability to lead and if you adopt that in yourself it can be very powerful.

The deeper the emotional level your pain and sadness goes, the more you’re capable of experiencing the positive. You don’t know the light if you don’t know the dark. People’s tendencies to avoid fear and pain means that they restrict themselves from many of the possible positive experiences and lessons in life. The wider the spectrum of experiences you have had, the more meaning life will hold for you.

School is very focused on the individual and assumes you should have all the skills you need to succeed, but that’s not the way life works. You have to understand the value of teams and what can be accomplished. The things you are not good at are things you should hire other people to do for you, so you can focus on the things that you are good at. Teams with a good culture will look at unforeseen events and see them as opportunities instead of potential threats.

All investment is business, and all business is people. One of Patrick’s biggest failures in business is in not understanding other people and how they work together.

  • Patrick’s Mission

Our society has been programmed with what a successful career means, and what success in school means, and it’s completely unprincipled. Retirement is one of the worst ideas introduced into society. Retirement is anti-life and it kills people. The world needs people with experience and wisdom to keep adding their value, not to disappear at their prime. We want freedom and independence, not retirement.

There are three steps to achieving financial independence. The first step is establishing a foundation of certainty where you have enough money available that if you stopped working, you would have enough time to figure out what you wanted to do. The second is to educate yourself on the investments that you’re making and focus on one or two asset classes. The third is to invest in yourself first in order to find a career and calling that you can pursue for the rest of your life.

The sooner you realize that what you want to achieve is not retirement but freedom, the sooner you can reposition your assets and get started on the path.

The first step is a fundamental pillar of certainty which is why Patrick set up a specifically designed insurance policy to establish that foundation. 

Reference: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: A Financial Strategy to Reignite the American Dream, Patrick Donohoe

  • Patrick’s Takeaway

Most people have too much information in their mind and if they want to learn something new they need to purge something else. The path that leads to a fulfilling life has examples everywhere if you know where to look. In order to capitalize on the time we have and spend time with the people we love, doing the things we love, we need to open our minds about what is possible.

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