In today's world of inter-connectivity, constant media, and smart phones, we can be up-to-the-minute informed as often as we want to be. There is a great satisfaction in having access to more information. With Social Media we can keep up easily with friends we knew from long ago, and stay in contact with family. However, all of this information can be overwhelming as well.
If the stock market is down, there is a barrage of pundits on one side claiming the end of the world. On the other side pundits claim this is a great time to buy as the market is about to turn around for the better. News stations are filled with negative media reports that often have very little to do with everyday life. Social media allows us to only view what others want to share about their lives (mostly the best parts) and that can leave one dissatisfied with their own life.
Information overload can lead to information overwhelm, and the main symptom of this is distraction. If you do not have a vision and a strategy for your life, your peace can easily be disrupted by information overload.
It is easy to get distracted. Since the smartphone hit the market, the human attention span has dropped to that of a goldfish. Our technological and media infrastructure is designed to distract us easily, and for the most part, they do a pretty good job.
In a distracted age, it is wise to heed the words of business leader and author Stephen Covey. “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”
The best way to do that is the have a vision for your life, based upon your values, with a strategy to achieve that.
Like a good map, a strategy is a guide through the various market cycles, interest rate cycles, tax changes, etc. A strategy can also act as a guiding vision to make sure that, no matter what, you have a vision that matters to you and makes sense of your financial life. A strategy should be based around your values and your lifestyle, and therefore filter out distractions and missteps.
Once you have a personalized strategy in place, it is easy to either make sense of the “noise” or to tune it out completely.
If you do not have such a strategy in place for yourself, or if you know of someone who would benefit from a strategy like this, give our office a call. This is what we do. We are wealth strategists who believe that your wealth deserves a strategy. We can also help keep you committed to your strategy so that the age of distraction does not affect your financial life. We agree with Covey that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing, no matter what.