From Mark Ford, founder, Palm Beach Research Group: There is a wonderful scene in Blow Up (a great movie) where the protagonist finds himself in a rock and roll nightclub fighting with fans for the possession of a guitar that one of the band has just thrown into the crowd.

He fights furiously to keep his grip on it, finally wrests it out of the hands of those others who want it, and runs out of the auditorium and out into the crepuscular evening where, alone on the sidewalk, he looks at his hard-won trophy, drops it on the ground, and walks off down the street.

The same story is repeated endlessly in the world of business. After working ferociously and sacrificing nearly everything, the once-ambitious young person has now, in his maturity, reached the pinnacle of his financial and career success. He retires to what he has always dreamed about—a life of comfort, security, and luxury—only to find that he’s bored to death.

I’ve seen this happen to dozens of successful entrepreneurs and executives, amazingly smart and ambitious businesspeople who spent their lives working furiously to rise to the top of their industries and retire. And I’ve talked to a few (and read about many) best-selling authors and politicians and movie stars and rock stars who experienced the same thing.

We were talking about this “problem” just the other day—the small group of people I’m currently coaching in an effort to improve my goal-setting/personal productivity program. We were talking about the first step of the journey: setting goals.

Goal Setting Begins With the End in Mind

I told them that the first time I seriously set a goal for myself, I set a single, solitary goal and I achieved it. I said that I believed making that goal my only goal was extremely helpful in achieving it. But when I achieved it, I didn’t feel all that great—either about my accomplishment (getting rich) or about myself.

As a reader of financial publications, you are no doubt interested in increasing your wealth. And I do believe that if you put into action the sort of advice you can get from Creating Wealth (or better yet, join the Wealth Builders Club and make it nearly automatic), you will accomplish that goal.

But if you have no goals other than becoming wealthy, your chances of success will be great—but the likelihood that you’ll be dissatisfied will be great, too. As I suggested earlier, there is no greater financial cliché… than the poor man who builds a fortune only to discover that he lost everything that was really important to him.

That doesn’t have to happen to you. You can grow your wealth considerably without giving up everything else, like I nearly did. You can become wealthy and wise and healthy… and happy, too!

You can accomplish that by making sure that your big goals are in sync with your core values. In other words, you have to create goals that mesh with the person you truly want to be.

Happily, I’ve discovered a trick to doing this that is quick and easy:

In Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, America’s two favorite juvenile delinquents disappear from their small town for a boyish adventure, and then return to find a funeral going on—for them. Hidden in the church’s balcony, Tom and Huck get to hear exactly what other people think of them. It is an eye-opening experience for the two young troublemakers—and imagining your own funeral can do the same thing for you.

So, imagine being at your funeral. You are hiding up in the balcony. You can see your coffin. Standing behind the coffin are four people:

  • Someone from your family or a close friend

  • Someone you work with

  • Someone whom you admire

  • Someone who didn’t know you

What do you hope each one of them would say about you? Go ahead. Write it down. Your wish list might include statements like these:

  • “He always made me feel important, even when I felt like I had nothing to give.”

  • “He was the best father I could have ever hoped for. He taught me to be strong and independent, and he showed me that I could be brave and loving at the same time.”

  • “He was a brilliant writer. For someone who spent so much of his life in the business world, I was astonished at how well-written his stories were.”

  • “I would still be working as a security guard if it were not for him. To think of what I’ve become. I know how much of that I owe to his help and care.”

These are what I mean by core values—the ideas about living that you value, in your heart of hearts, at the deepest level.

And that, incidentally, is why “becoming rich” is probably not likely to make you happy and proud when you’ve done it. Because I doubt that when you imagined your funeral, you imagined people saying, “Boy, (your name here) was really rich!”

Now, let’s apply what you just learned about yourself to your next task…

Translate Your Core Values Into Four Lifetime Goals

If you invited all the right people to your imaginary funeral, you can now figure out what your core values are in every important aspect of your life.

Your core values might look something like this:

  • “As a worker, I want to be considered creative and helpful.”

  • “As a parent, I want to be thought of as supportive and kind.”

  • “As an individual, I want to be thought of as smart and interesting.”

You are not going to publish this list. The point of making it is to help you know yourself in a way that matters. Which brings us to your next task: converting your core values to life goals. If you’ve done your work well so far—if you truly do know yourself—this will be surprisingly easy.

How many life goals should you have?

I recommend four:

  1. A financial (wealth-building) goal because we are all morally responsible for paying for what we consume.

  2. A social (social relationship) goal because we are all social creatures and live among people and recognize that a great deal of our ultimate happiness is partly derived from our relationships to those around us.

  3. A personal (personal development) goal because we are all also individual creatures and have individual values and ambitions and recognize that our ultimate happiness is partly derived from serving those ambitions and values.

  4. A health goal because we know that without good health, nothing else can be done well or enjoyed.

Do that now—convert your core values into four big, long-term goals. Do that in writing. Your list of four goals might look something like this:

  1. My wealth-building goal: To be financially secure and be able to take care of other people (family, friends, people in need) in some responsible way.

  2. My long-term health goal: To be able to work and play with vigor, to be pain-free, and mentally alert and energetic for as long as I live.

  3. My long-term social relationship goal: To be remembered as a great parent, a loving spouse, a loyal friend, and a charitable soul.

  4. My long-term personal development goal: To be a published author, a competent pianist, and a great conversationalist.

As I said in the beginning, having four main goals rather than one may decrease by some degree your chances of achieving all four. (My guess is that your chances of achieving all four will be 75% rather than 95% if you choose only one.) But the good news is that by having four goals that align with your core values, you will begin to have a rich and happy life immediately.

And when it comes time to retire, you will retire into an equally rich and happy life and not end up tossing your accomplishments away like an unwanted guitar.