Slow and boring, but very profitable

 Hey everybody, welcome to our weekly broadcast of Business, Money, and Christianity. We’re a financial podcast, but we’re dealing from a faith perspective—a Christian faith perspective. So, we want to welcome you every week.

Every week, we come along here for less than fifteen minutes to try to give you a tidbit to help you make your business, your life, and your money work a little bit better.

Today, I want to talk about something that’s hard to fight. A lot of people fall into this—I’m guilty of it—it’s easy to get bored doing things. And when we get bored doing things, we look for something new to do.

Well, actually, there are some boring principles in business that are profitable—doing the same thing over and over again. And we have to fight the inclination to change our strategy while being bored.

I like to trade the stock markets. I actively watch the stock market throughout the day. I trade both stocks and options. For a long time, my account would just kind of, you know, go up and then come down—it would go up and it would come down. I’d make money; I mean, I would stay afloat and everything like that. But my trading was driven by, or was a result of, boredom.

I wanted to get in, make some money, and get out. My goal was not really how much money I could make, but I just enjoyed the process of buying and selling and doing these different things. So, you know, I was bouncing up and down. Then I thought, you know what? I’m getting older. I need to grow my money.

So, I went to a boring strategy, and in the boring strategy, I started seeing my account go up—far greater than it was when I was getting in and out of the market and doing different things. But guess what? It was boring.

And so, I started looking for ways—okay, how can I keep that boring element but put a little bit of excitement into it? There are things that… you know, wealth doesn’t come through chasing shiny objects—trying to capture the next big thing or whatever. Now, some people have captured it; they just got into something at the right time, and it was really profitable. But the general population chasing shiny things doesn’t create wealth.

Slow and boring creates wealth.

And so, it comes by allowing the process to work. Now, what happens in the boring is that when we find ourselves getting bored, we get distracted very easily. I know this from personal experience. We’ve got to not allow ourselves to get distracted in the process of growing.

If you’ve ever looked at a chart where compound interest is shown—and you can Google it and look up compound interest charts—you’ll see that if you allow your money to grow over time, the chart will be going up. But then there comes a time, usually between twelve to fifteen years, when it starts going like this—steeper. That’s because the growth has built up to a point where it’s now growing at a faster pace.

Now, I hope you caught one of the words I said—around twelve to fifteen years. Do you know how boring it is for twelve to fifteen years of just putting your money into something, allowing dividends or whatever it is to come back in and compound, and start earning dividends or interest or cash flow off of the money that was put there?

We want it now. That’s why lotteries are so popular. People want to spend five dollars and make a million dollars. And yes, people do win lotteries—but most people don’t.

And so, we’ve got to pay attention to the strategy of what we’re doing. Wealth doesn’t come by chasing shiny things, nor does it come by waiting for it.

The other side of the equation—I’ve often said that there are ditches on both sides of every road. So, the road to wealth is a slow, boring road, but there’s a ditch on both sides. One ditch is getting distracted, trying to capture some big move that we’re just going to profit off of really fast. The other ditch is being complacent and just sitting and waiting for something to come.

I know a lot of people who have been sitting and waiting, believing that things were going to change—but they’re not doing anything to facilitate that change. And so, we have to watch both ditches to make sure that we stay on the road—the road of compounding, the road of growth—so that the things we’re doing produce.

Now, going back to my trading experience—I think I’ve mentioned it before in our broadcast—I’ll buy shares of stock, and then I’ll sell options against them. Sometimes it works against me, because all of a sudden, the stock will hit a big uptrend, but I’ve got a call option against it, and somebody takes my stock. But every week I sell an option, and I put money in my account. I make sure it’s a minimum of a 15% annual return. And so, I’m slowly building the account because I constantly put it in.

When I am called out, then I sell what’s called put options, and I usually exceed the 15% on the put option—I might get 20–25% on that. Eventually, I’ll get my stock back, and I try to pick up the dividends and so on and so forth.

It’s a methodical method that, when you get good at it, you can consistently make money. And so, this comes down to mastering the boring—mastering becoming good at something that continually pays.

It doesn’t matter what goes on in the world. When you’re selling calls or selling put options, you sell them, you get money for them—it doesn’t change. The dynamics of the market may change, but as long as you’re selling them, you’re pulling in cash flow.

Now, I’m not advocating going into the market, nor am I advocating doing anything that you don’t know how to do. What I’m talking about is mastering something that’s boring.

There’s probably something in your life that, every time you do it, it creates cash flow—but it’s boring. It’s not exciting. It’s not the shiny thing. But if you keep your mind straight on your goal—to build wealth—and you continually do the things that build wealth, it is going to pay off in the long run.

So, finding a simple system, finding a simple process, and then doing it over and over and over again.

I coach—I’m a business coach for a lady who has a business. Every time she needs more clients (now, she can only take so many clients at a time because she’s basically a one-person business and can only handle so much), when she comes to a point where she can take on one, two, or three more clients, there’s one element in this particular type of ad she runs where she can pick up clients easily. There are other ways of picking up clients, but they don’t produce as consistently as this one type of ad that she runs.

So, you know what she does every time she needs clients? She just runs the ad. It’s boring—it’s the same ad, it’s the same thing—but every time she does it, she gains one, two, or three clients and fills the spots she has open.

Now, as we said before, Business, Money, and Christianity—what I talk about comes from principles in the Word of God. And in the Word of God, the Bible talks a lot, especially in the Book of Proverbs, about the diligent.

When we’re diligent—diligent almost denotes slow and boring—we continually do the things that work. We continually do the things that produce. And we continually watch our lives grow because we’re consistent at it. We’re not jumping from here to there and just trying different things.

We keep plowing the field. You know, the farmer goes out every year—he does the exact same thing. He plows the field, he plants seed, he waters it, he gets rid of the weeds, and then comes the harvest. He harvests it, turns it over, and goes through the same process next year—slow and boring—but every year he gets a harvest.

Now, sometimes the harvest is bigger, sometimes smaller—depending on weather, rain, and other factors that affect agriculture—but he does the same thing over and over again, producing and producing and producing.

We’ve got to learn that in our lives: slow and boring is actually very profitable.

Another thing that the Bible talks about a lot—especially in Proverbs and in various places in the New Testament—is stewardship: being faithful with what you have.

Let me go back to my farmer illustration. If he’s a farmer who farms corn, and he has his corn seed, but he cooks it up every night for dinner and says, “Man, isn’t this corn great? Let’s put a bunch of butter on it and eat it!”—by the time planting season comes, he’s not going to have any seed.

So, stewardship means we manage what we have very wisely. We don’t eat our investment to make things bigger. We don’t live on and spend everything that we get.

I was in a conversation just two days before this recording, and I was speaking about a person I knew who made a lot of money. But when they got to their older years, they had nothing—because they always spent everything they had. Their older years were a very sad condition because they couldn’t do anything. They couldn’t go anyplace. They couldn’t live their life the way they wanted to. Why? Because they ate their seed as they were producing a lot of money.

So, we have to watch this—don’t get excited when we get some extra money and just go out and spend it. We must be good stewards over everything.

Yes, we enjoy our money. Yes, we enjoy our wealth.

In fact, there was a real-life story—a person I know, very affluent, has a lot of money. He’s old—about ninety years old—and he was trying to move a water heater down some stairs. He fell, ripped up his arm, and got hurt pretty severely. The sad thing was, he had the money to hire someone to come over and do it—it wouldn’t have made any difference.

Yes, we need to enjoy our wealth. Yes, we need to not do foolish things to try to save a little bit of money. Enjoy it, make your life easier—but be a good steward over it.

This particular gentleman was a poor steward because he made a decision to save some money, which he had plenty of, and it injured him when he could have easily had someone else do it. Yes, it might have cost him a few dollars, but he had the dollars.

So, being a good steward means paying attention to all areas of our life—the money that comes in, handling it properly, and even paying somebody else to do something that maybe we’re not at the right age or stage to do.

I want to encourage you about slow and boring. The bad thing about it is—it’s boring. Get over that part.

What we’re wanting to do in life is have enough that we can live off of it.

I have a rental property. I have a person living in it—they’ve been there for about ten years. Once a month I interact with them: they give me the rent check, I go on my way, and I don’t have to be concerned about it. Nothing has broken down in it for a long time because, when they moved in, it was totally rebuilt.

So right now, I can say—it’s boring. But you know what? It’s boring with a positive cash flow. And I rejoice in that.

I want you to build some cash flow that flows in a boring method—something you just continue to allow to work, and it continues producing for you.

Thank you for stopping by. Like, subscribe, make a comment, or ask a question—we’ll respond to you so that the algorithms work properly in our favor. I look forward to seeing you next week. Have a great weekend.