The 4 Pillars of Financial Mastery: Part 3 of 4

Financial mastery will require a fair amount of deferred gratification and self-discipline. It is not easy, but you know it is fully worth it. The journey can be lonely unless you surround yourself with a community that motivates you and keeps you focused.

I paid for most of my undergraduate education. I was 17 when I started. I got a job on campus – first on the cleaning team, and then as tech support. My cleaning job paid $6.50 or so an hour but then I hustled and landed the most coveted job on campus, earning $11.11 an hour. I really should tell you how I hustled that job, but let’s save it for a future column. For now, you need to know that I made about $3,000 every semester. After taxes, the actual money that came into my account was about $2500. But at the end of every semester, $2100 to $2400 of that money was used to cover my school fees and tuition.

None of my friends at the time knew that I was paying for school myself. Many of them had heard about my amazing on-campus job. They had heard of the posting, but hadn’t hustled the hustle I hustled to land the job. The pay was clearly advertised, so they also knew the sort of paycheck I was making. Many of these friends also worked on-campus as well as received stipends from their parents. I did not. As is normal for young people at that age, my friends and I wanted to enjoy life. They regularly organized trips to the movies, road trips to nearby cities, and nights at the club.

Because of my goal to pay my way through school, I regularly needed to turn down their invitations to hang out on the town. One day, my then closest friend turned to me and said, “You’re a miser.”

This was a guy who regularly boasted about the fact that a rich friend of his father’s was paying his tuition, leaving his dad free to send him over to the US with loads of pocket money.

As you can imagine, that friendship did not last long. It took about a year to fully extricate myself from that friendship, but I quietly switched groups and became friends with a different group of guys whose goals were very similar to mine. They sought scholarships to help with tuition, they discussed ways to earn money during holidays, they were my tribe. In fact, I was just on a Zoom call last Saturday with all eight of them. Over a decade later, we are still friends.

This story shows the active and passive ways your group of friends can help you on track. Some of those active ways include:

Shared goals: Your group of friends regularly discusses and is aware of the fact that you are all pursuing similar life destinations.
Shared activities: As a group, you spend your time doing things in service of that shared destination.
Motivating conversations: Hearing others talking about their goals motivates you to take yours even more seriously.
Healthy competition: Because you see your peers figuring this out, you realize that you don’t want to be left out. As Nigerians say, “I cannot come and carry last!”

But sometimes, the passive motivation is even more powerful. For instance in my group:

Positive peer pressure: There was an unspoken expectation that all of us would be frugal with our money. Splurging simply wasn’t and still isn’t the group’s culture.
Infectious motivation: When I might have been tempted to abandon my goals, I was motivated to keep going because I was surrounded by others who were holding themselves to high standards.
Self actualization: And finally, each time I hit my goal, I felt great about myself. I was that much stronger when dealing with the next financial goal. My confidence grew unshakeable.

So, how do you build this community? If you’re in your 20s and 30s, it is very likely that you have a core set of friends, people that are closest to you. Take a look at the list above. Does your current group of friends help you in those ways? If the answer is no, you need new friends. Or, you may need to pull closer to the right friends already in your circle and put some distance between you and those that are not helping you be great.