Investment Systems vs. Investment Products

The initial thing that brought me to Paradigm Life was reiterated in one of our recent trainings on many of the truths that are hidden from many financial vehicles. I realized that I didn’t have a full, complete understanding of what I had going on or, at least, what I thought I perceived I had going on. I had investment products, but no investment systems in place. So, when I came on here as a client of Paradigm Life, my eyes were opened up as how to look at money and how it works and how it can serve me just from a different light.

I just saw from a different perspective. When I began to make the shift in my financial strategy, I realized how many people don’t know the truths that we should know.

I decided to share with anybody and everybody that I possibly could; talk everybody’s ear off here and there. That was my driving factor. I was in mortgages at the time and during the experiences with the crashes in the market at that time, I began to realize many important things were being hidden in the mortgage industry from the people, and even some of the lenders were not lending what I would say–ethically.

There were a lot of hiccups coming up there for me, and I started to realize that maybe–maybe, this wasn’t somewhere I wanted to be. A lotta times when I would actually tell the truth to my clients, that wasn’t seen as such a good thing in the mortgage industry.

Before that point, my strategy was that I had my financial system bucket, and I was just filling it with as many system tools that my friends said I ought to have. It was “Here, you gotta have this, you gotta have this and you gotta do this and this has worked.”

But I was more focused on trying to make the products fit my system. It was kinda backwards in the way that I was attempting to make all that work. I would just add more and more and more financial products and they might be all neat and sparkly and have all these cool features. But at the end of the day if I didn’t know how to use it and I didn’t have a clear picture on how it was going to serve me, all it was doing was consuming space in my financial system and in my bucket.

Yesterday, in one of our team meetings that we had here we were talking about this “product versus strategy” idea and we used a great analogy. When you go and watch a great golfer–let’s take Tiger Woods, for example. If I were to say “you are now going to become the master golfer, but there’s one of two things that you can have: either you can have Tiger Woods’s golf clubs or you can have the skills that Tiger Woods’ has. Which one would you take?”

When you think about it, the answer would clearly be Tiger Woods’ skills.

We can have Tiger Woods and a pair of clubs from the local sports store but he is still going to out-golf every one of us. The skills he has learned and the systems he has put into place and learned in order to be a pro golfer is worth a lot more than the stick he is using.

That’s what we’re referring to here. The product does a good thing, but the system outweighs it. The system has to be the primary focus and, then, adding tools to make that system work the most efficiently.

That’s what Paradigm Life is trying to do. We are working hard to teach as many people as possible about investment systems and strategies that work, and then helping people find the tools and vehicles to support that strategy. One way we do this is with our free eLearning course, Infinite 101, which you can access here.

This blog was created based on our podcast with Justin Martin and Jennie Steed. Click here to listen to it now!