The following is an excerpt from Mark Matson’s new book, Experiencing the American Dream: How to Invest Your Time, Energy, and Money to Create an Extraordinary Life.
The world is an amazing place, and if you help other people, you are rewarded for the value you create. That’s been my father’s attitude ever since he was a kid.
At 10 years old, my dad would get up early in the morning, pick up a stack of newspapers, and sell them on the streets of Charleston, West Virginia. When he ran out of papers to sell, he’d get out his shine box to shine shoes for money. Always on the lookout for the next opportunity, he read in a comic book about how Cloverine Salve can be used to help soothe cracked and dry skin. So, he went into business selling it to coal miners to protect their hands. He made sure to track down the miners on Fridays, right after they got their checks, and before they had a chance to spend it all at the bar. Before my father was a teenager, he was an entrepreneur three times over. That attitude and work ethic followed him into adulthood when starting his own financial advisory business.
Because my father developed a passion for the American Dream, serving others, and helping them invest and plan for their future, it was natural for me to follow in his footsteps. While other kids my age were reading comic books, I read books like Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. I was 12 years old when my father handed that book to me, and said, “Mark, you can learn anything you want to know by reading a book. Find someone who already has the results in life that you want to achieve and study their mindsets and behaviors. As you read, eliminate your own excuses and judgments about the strategies in the book. Do what it says to do, because take it from me – most people won’t. It is all too easy for your inner voice to tell you it will never work or that it worked for them but can’t work for you. You live in a great country, one that gives you the opportunity to build whatever you want in life if you’re willing to work hard enough and create value for others.”
He told me to reread that book every year if I wanted to fulfill my dreams. That’s precisely what I did. I also made sure to put in the work. Every summer, I would push my lawnmower down the street. If I saw that someone’s lawn was overgrown, I’d go knock on their door and offer to mow it. When it snowed in the winter and all of the other kids grabbed their sleds, I grabbed my shovel and went knocking on doors. Sometimes I’d get paid. Other times I’d work for hot chocolate and cookies. Forget the money, it was that feeling of pride and confidence that came from a job well done that was most rewarding.
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My parents helped me understand that hard work is a virtue with tremendous payoffs. That’s what the American Dream is all about. You can’t experience the “fulfillment” in freedom, fulfilment, and love if you don’t ever experience the benefits of hard work. And if you can improve the lives of others and help them succeed through your hard work, it’s exponentially more fulfilling. That’s what those who have the screen of victimhood will never understand.
Ideas are powerful, and I am so grateful my father instilled in me the screen of the American Dream at a very young age. “America is not perfect,” he would tell me. “But it’s the best country on the face of the earth.” If I hadn’t had that screen at a young age and didn’t believe that America was a great country where I could create anything I wanted, a book like Think and Grow Rich would not have resonated with me. If I thought like my grandfather, I would have believed that book was garbage. Instead, I read it and was blown away. It helped shape my vision of creating freedom and prosperity for myself and others.
That screen of the American Dream laid the groundwork for the actions I would take later in life – actions that others who didn’t have that screen were unwilling to take because they didn’t believe in the ideals and principles of the American Dream. It’s why my obsession with learning continued as I grew older. By the time I got to college I devoured every economics, accounting, and finance book I could get my hands on. I crammed my class schedule with business courses. Even then, I sensed that to be successful and to live a powerful and extraordinary life, it would take more than an understanding of finance. It would mean studying human nature and how the mind works. The world seemed to be full of people with a massive amount of knowledge and intellect that were not generating the type of success I sought. There was more to achieving an extraordinary life than having an analytical view of business and I was determined to find out exactly what that involved.
So, every summer during college, I went to work for my father. From the beginning, he made it clear that he wasn’t going to hand me anything, and a full-time position with him was not guaranteed. He said, “If you work hard, go to college, and get a degree, you can come work at my office. If you do a good job, I’ll keep you on. If not, I’ll fire you immediately.” There were no free rides, but that is also part of the American Dream. You need to take responsibility for your success. You need to earn it.
There was no better person to learn from than my father. A technically gifted guy, my dad spent a ton of time educating himself about financial planning. That’s what made him such a phenomenal teacher. And I was a sponge, absorbing every word of instruction. I learned about financial planning, insurance, real estate deals, partnerships, mutual funds, annuities, and all the financial products at our disposal in the 1980s. I learned how to acquire, market, and sell to clients. By the time I graduated with a degree in accounting and finance in 1986, I already had my life and health insurance license, my fire and casualty license, and my stockbroker’s license.
While my father gravitated more toward estate planning and the tax side of the business, I was fascinated by the investing side, which quickly became my focus. I realized that I wanted to become an entrepreneur, not just someone with a high-paying job I couldn’t escape. I wanted to create a business that would grow and thrive, even in my absence, like Walt Disney, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison before me. I believed I could do that as a financial planner by helping people invest their money and maximize their returns. Helping others achieve financial freedom, so they could live an extraordinary life became my American Dream.
Excerpted with permission by the publisher, Wiley, from Experiencing the American Dream: How to Invest Your Time, Energy, and Money to Create an Extraordinary Life by Mark Matson. Copyright © 2024 Matson Money, Inc. All rights reserved.
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