“I had achieved my goal, so I had to find a new mountain to climb.” ~Arnold Schwarzenegger

Years ago, I read a book called Seven Years to Seven Figures. The book was mostly fluff about copywriters and guys who had happened to purchase real estate during the boom and sold at the right time. However, there was one section that was extremely helpful to me in formulating my long-term goals.

In it, the author lays out exactly what your life would look like if you had $1 million, then $2.5 million, then $5 million, then $10+ million. It gave examples of how hard you would work, how much in taxes you would pay, how much you would travel or not travel, what kind of car you would drive, what your house would look like, how your eating out and vacations would look, and other aspects at each of those four lifestyle levels.

His point was to make you choose a specific lifestyle as a goal, stick with it, and don’t change your mind even after you hit it.

Most men who achieve a certain level of success in life suddenly feel like it isn’t enough, and keep working hard to achieve more, even if what they have makes them perfectly happy. Professional speakers in the business world know that if you ask a room full of millionaires if they’re rich, they will usually answer no. If you ask them how much money they need to be rich, they will usually give a number that is double whatever their current net worth is. The guy worth $2 million will say “rich” is $4 million. The guy worth $50 million will say “rich” is $100 million. Neither of these guys will feel successful.

So these guys keep pushing themselves to make more money… for no reason.

I’ve seen this in the dating/PUA world as well. A former beta, who is either a virgin or close to it, will work hard get good at dating women, and have sex with 20 or 30 women pretty fast. He will then start to think that he’s a pussy, because he’s “only” had sex with 30 women, when so-and-so on the PUA forum he reads has had sex with 130 (or whatever).

So this guy keeps pushing himself to bang more chicks and have more one night stands… for no reason.

I’ve been aware of this tendency with high-achieving men for quite a while, and I’ve tried very hard to make sure I don’t fall into this trap. I’m a motivated person, and I’m not always 100% successful, but I’m pretty good as compared to most.

With women, I never had any goal that specified a number of women I had to have sex with in order to be successful. Frankly, I think setting a goal to have sex with X number of women is silly. Instead, my goal was more specific to my own long-term happiness: to have sex easily, whenever I want, with attractive women, without having to spend money, without lying, and without having to promise monogamy to anyone. I hit this goal many years ago (around 2009) via a lifestyle of FB’s, MLTR’s, and the occasional pair-bonded OLTR, and I’ve simply stuck with maintaining it. It makes me happy, so there is no need to go have sex with more women. (If anything, my problem historically is that there were too many. Quality problems, I know.)

With money, since I knew I had to pick some baseline goals and not change them, I’ve had pretty much the same income and net worth goal for the past 17 years or so. I hit the income goal quite a while ago, and have no desire to change it, even though I now make more money than my original income goals ever called for. I still have a little ways to go on the net worth goal, and I’m going to try my best to not set another, higher net worth goal once I hit it (which I will soon).

Instead, I will set new goals in completely different areas of my life that have nothing to do with money when I hit that last financial goal… hopefully, that is. The siren song of “more” is ever loud in our years. It’s our job to ignore it once we achieve long-term happiness, and focus instead on new mountains to climb, instead of making our current mountain taller so we climb it forever.

Want over 35 hours of how-to podcasts on how to improve your woman life and financial life? Want to be able to coach with me twice a month? Want access to hours of technique-based video and audio? The SMIC Program is a monthly podcast and coaching program where you get access to massive amounts of exclusive, members-only Alpha 2.0 content as soon as you sign up, and you can cancel whenever you want. Click here for the details.

Leave your comment below, but be sure to follow the Five Simple Rules.