We live in a world that is defined by dogmas and trends from people who aren’t as smart as we might be. As you may have noticed, this introduction is related to the famous commencement speech delivered by Steve Jobs at Stanford University in 2005. I just love this speech so much that it seems like everything in life can be related to it. Anyway, most of the time, those dogmas, that we are somehow required to use in our personal finance, are taught and dictated to us from school. However here is the trick, none of them focuses on things that really matter to us when it comes to “saving“.

Here is what nobody teaches us at school.

Sure we memorized all the continents, flags of countries, seas, forests and deserts. Somewhere at the other corner of the world, there are still folks learning about the part of an insect smh 

We learned imaginary numbers.

We learned all the parts of an atom.

We learned how to find the hypotenuse.

We learned how to say, “I would like a cheeseburger, please,” in French, Swahili, Spanish, Turkish, etc.

But nobody told us how to manage our money effectively. Nobody explained what a Roth IRA is. But most importantly, nobody taught us this vitally important lesson about money as Tony Robbins clearly said it :

Without a cushion, you will never (or very, very rarely) feel confident enough to take the leap and do whatever it is you really want to do.

Sure, we are encouraged to save, but for what?  For retirement? It’s hard enough as a 20-something figuring out where we want to be a year from now, let alone being able to warrant putting money away now for when we’re 65+.

As soon as I graduated college and landed my first job as an English teacher, the first thing I did was reach out an uncle of mine who had successfully navigated the finance world and asked him what I should do. Of course, I didn’t know the answer, but I knew what I didn’t know, and I didn’t know anything about managing money.

The overwhelming response was that I should immediately start saving for retirement, even if it was only a small percentage of each paycheck. So that’s what I did. I reached out a well reputed Turkish bank and opened a Roth IRA and started putting away 10% of every paycheck.

But then I started to question where my “active savings” would be.

What about the things I couldn’t buy now but wanted to buy later? At first, my mind ran to “materials” I wanted to buy or rent. A nicer apartment? A big screen TV? A new computer? A Tesla car (my dream car)? A 10 day vacation in Santorini? 

But as I started to save more “active” money, as in, money not tied up in my retirement account — I started to realize that money was actually something much, much more.

Money was a runway, and I was a startup.

Never before have there been so many talented young people out in the world all asking themselves the exact same question: “How do I do my own thing? How do I become my own boss? How do I take the leap into the unknown?” The answer is, yes, we need to have a sense of what it is we actually want to do (and how we’re going to do it), but we also need a runway. As the author of the famous “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” Robert Kiyosaki highlighted in one of his blog post:

You need to save money so that when you do take the leap, you have a little something to stand on while you find your way.

As a young person, this is the ultimate test of patience.

It is far easier to spend money as soon as we have it, and on completely worthless things, no less. More than 80 percent of whoever is reading right now will definitely agree with me.

I don’t think that opening a bar is a great investment. Not only that, buying a table at a club my goodness that is a horrific investment. A vacation or a trip abroad, as I always consider and plan way in advance in order to minimize the cost, well that’s a life experience and so it’s ok. But it really comes down to how badly we want to do our own thing. And if you want that more than anything else, we’ll start saving now to bring that vision to life.

How much we save and how quickly will determine the speed that we can ultimately move in the direction of our choosing.

It’s important for us to start seeing money as our runway, not as a big pile of cash for us to spend on things that seem important now but won’t actually move us to wherever it is that we want to be.

Do you think somebody needs to hear this? Share this article with them