Alan Lakein Quotes

Did we ever plan on being billionaires? No, but we wanted to be millionaires.

Whatever your dream is, every extra penny you have needs to be going to that.

Five days a week, I read my goals before I go to sleep and when I wake up. There are 10 goals around health, family and business with expiration dates, and I update them every six months.

When families save, they can get through emergencies like a bad harvest or a medical emergency. But it's more than that. They can also plan for the future, gradually saving up for a small business or for their children's school tuition.

My giving is discretionary, but keeping the business going is not.

Without vision you don't see, and without practicality the bills don't get paid.

I'm an entrepreneur. This is my life. This my career. This the way I eat.

One thing I've tried to never do is make wish lists. I try to have a very steppingstone mentality about this whole thing, where as soon as you make one step you visualize the next step, not five steps ahead.

If we are to achieve long-range goals, we must learn to set up and accomplish short-range goals that will move us along the way. If we do not consciously select our goals, we may be controlled by goals not of our own choosing - goals imposed by outside pressures (such as the expectations of others) or by our habits (such as procrastination) or by our desire for the approval of the world.

Design your financial future in every respect, and then make a plan to achieve it.

You cannot create what you want by moving away from what you don't want.

I think short-term goals are important. Trying to set a missive for yourself for the entire year can be daunting, and it can feel too easy to fail or fall short of that.

Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.

The thing that I learned early on is you really need to set goals in your life, both short-term and long-term, just like you do in business. Having that long-term goal will enable you to have a plan on how to achieve it. We apply these skills in business, yet when it comes to ourselves, we rarely apply them.

You better make yourself acquainted to what the requirements are, what the value of money is all about and how you create a long-term survival, and in many cases it has to do with how you handle finances.

Aim low, reach your goals, and avoid disappointment.

I realized sometime in the early '80s that if I didn't do something - like planning for the future in a way, a kind of pension or something - that if I didn't do something there and then, I was going to be condemned to forever present my three years as a pop star, condensed, as a stage act for the rest of my life. Because that's normally what happens to people in the pop business.

I had a plan ever since I was nine years old, when I said "Mama, I'm a buy you a nice house and pretty dresses." That was the plan, that was my goal.

Two rules: 1. Preserve the principal 2. When in doubt, see Rule #1.

In the long run, it's not just how much money you make that will determine your future prosperity. It's how much of that money you put to work by saving it and investing it.

If we stop believing in a future, if we stop doing things for something else but start doing them for now, some fundamental things change. Retirement becomes less about how much money you can squirrel away now and much more a matter of participating and contributing to your own community now so that they want to take care of you. … We’re going to move into a world where your retirement will be more secure if you’ve made lots of friends with young people rather than collected lots of dollars.

Pick a goal, make a realistic plan to reach that goal, work through each step of the plan, and repeat.

The secret to success can be found in people's daily agendas. If they do something intentional to grow every day, they move closer to reaching their potential. If they don't, their potential slowly slips away over the course of their lifetime.

We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period.