If you want to be successful in life then there is one principle you must learn first: Learn principles. What makes a chef great? They know the principles of cooking and flavors and how they balance and then they can take unlikely ingredients and mesh them together into a signature dish. What makes an engineer great? They learn principles and then take those principles and apply them systematically to their work. What makes money managers great? They learn principles, apply them and keep their finances in order and grow their net worth.

Elementary school and primary school, and unfortunately some college classes tend to be about rote memorization. The best teachers I ever had were the ones who took the principles behind the things I was memorizing and taught me those instead of merely cramming data into my head. As a web developer/programmer I have memorized a lot of coding things, but I didn’t begin to think as a programmer until I learned the principles behind smart programming (sometimes called ‘patterns’). My finances were a mess even though I had heard good personal finance bits and pieces, but it wasn’t until I learned the principles behind sound personal finance (influenced by blogs like the Simple Dollar, NCN, and Dave Ramsey’s “The Total Money Makeover“).

Smart, successful people will be able to think with abstraction. They’ll be able to identify the principles that make up great process and then merge those principles, where they apply, to their different areas of expertise. Recently I read a book called, “Critical Chain” and it had lots of good principles in it. It is how I run my budget (which I posted a bit about before, but I’m going to write a further detailed article later), but it wasn’t how I ran my budget before reading it because I hadn’t clearly seen the principle. Once I learned it, I was able to see how it could apply to other areas in my life.

Learn principles, learn how they can be applied across broad scopes of your life, and then forget about rote memorization. It could save you thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, your life, or a few minutes time here and there, but get past the short term rules and start thinking bigger.

I realized that I was a bit of a junky when I was at the Denver International Airport and I saw a guy sitting, waiting in a seat for a plane… and I thought it was Dave Ramsey.  It wasn’t, but I had to take a double take.

How do you know you’re a junky?

Last night, and the night before, and the night before that I was up until past midnight.  Working.  You see I’m attempting to wrap up two side-jobs in an attempt to pay off debt faster.  Faster than I would be able to pay them off if I was just working for my normal big client.  It eats into family time.  It eats into time to do things like blog on the many blogs I have (I’m rather embarrassed to say I have five), it eats into time that I have committed to doing other things like Sunday School preparation.  But I’m focused on doing it because I’ve got to get it done.

Dave Ramsey calls it Gazelle-like intensity, I call it focus, and the reality of things is that if you don’t have the drive to get out of debt, you’ll simply be in it for a lot, lot longer than you would otherwise.  Possibly thousands down the tube in interest payments and weird fees.  My buddy worked 90 hours a week for about six weeks to get the major thrust of his debt paid off.  I can’t manage that due to various limitations on my body, but it was the very same drive to have the debt behind me that pushes me to work extra side-jobs.  There’s no reason not to just dive in and get it done.  Yes, it will cost you time and friend and family time in the short term, but it may gain you that back afterwards and if you add financial liberty to free time… you’ve got something.