You Need a Mission in Life

Taking notes on the UBS 2020 Family Office Report, was describing why generational wealth building was the mission I needed to replace overseas work. Decided to break it out separately and go deeper because it is important.

Nothing changed my life as much as having a mission.

But what is a mission in life?

What do you do every day, constantly strive to get better at, that improves not just your life, but the lives of others? What is that one thing that you are building above all else, trading your time - no, decades of your life - in exchange to will into existence that is good and beautiful in this world?

That is a mission, and everyone needs one.

I promise, once you have one, you never want to go back to living without one.

The very world itself feels different without one, like losing all the vibrant colors and being left only in a haze of grey.

How do you know you have a mission?

Do you want to do it more than you want to keep breathing?

Are you that dedicated to it, that you value it more than the thought of continuing to live without it?

If the answer is no, then you don’t have a mission, you have a hobby.

So if you’re looking for a mission, here is why generational wealth building has been the best mission I’ve ever had and a few things to expect along the way.

Generational Wealth Building as the Mission in Life

You may be thinking, how do you go from drinking tea with village elders, dodging riots and burning tires in Africa, to now adopting generational wealth building as the mission in life?

They are the same way of living to me - the very pinnacle life has to offer.

When you find your mission, the one that you can’t imagine life without, it becomes the most precious thing you own.

Material possessions pale to insignificance, you realize the possessions you have don’t really make you happy in the way you have always wanted to measure yourself.

Have I ever truly made a difference to others?

Do others enjoy being around me in tough times because I maintain composure and am good humored?

Do I inspire the men I lead and have I earned their loyalty?

Compared to being able to answer those questions about yourself, a new fancy car, house, a watch, likes on instagram are nothing more than circus trinkets left on the ground after the show of life is over, to be swept up with the elephant shit before they turn the lights off.

None of those things which people are told to chase as a mark of success in the first world are worthy of comparison to the feeling of meeting a friend after the fighting is over, standing in the smoking rubble, and clasping forearms with him, seeing his smile in the dark.

Two bearded dudes standing strong, dead enemy laying on the ground, with 3”x5” red, white, and blue IR American flags on the front of their plates laughing in the middle of destruction.

Living the absolute pinnacle life can offer.

Once you experience this in some form, a person really doesn’t need much in life to be happy, and you slowly realize what an illusion most of what is constantly sold in the first world as being needed to lead a good life really is - little more than trinkets sold as external solutions to fill the void of internal doubt.

This is what lead to an interest in generational wealth building as a new mission in life, because it requires the same mindset in having a mission that is about building something which outlasts me, and not about what I can buy if I do something really well, that doesn’t motivate me at all.

But what if I don’t know anything about this stuff?

You’re talking to a dude who grew up lower middle class, didn’t even know what a Family Office was until my mid 30’s and decided to take this on after a traumatic brain injury (TBI) from a Taliban attack.

Lol who cares?

Every family of immense wealth started with the first generation at some point with someone who had never done this before and decided to just start building.

So why not us?

Don’t be afraid of failure, just keep moving forward on mission.

If you can do that, you have 99% of the world beat.

How do I know? Because only 0.9% of the world are millionaires.

I will say the great things about overseas work is it takes the fear of trying something new away.

You don’t have to go get blown up or shot at regularly to replicate this ability. Just pick something which scares you of physical harm and go do it.

If you’ve never been punched in the face, go take some boxing classes.

You will find out it really isn’t that bad, and dudes will think you are crazy when you show up talking about needing to get punched in the face to form positive reinforcement patterns for your brain to work through fear and not be afraid of failure.

When you continue to do this over time, you realize a few things.

You stop putting so much weight in what other people’s opinions are who aren’t there going through what you are.

You realize a lot of people truly have no earthly idea what they are talking about, since people are scared to do things because no one wants to fail and half the time they are just repeating something they heard to feel included in a conversation.

When in reality, there can be no success without the pain of failure first.

If you just try, stay disciplined through the failures, and constantly try to learn from those who did what you want to do ahead of you, you’ll get better at it, and eventually succeed.

Found the more I repeat this process, the more self-confidence develops because you realize it is never as bad as you make it out to be in your mind, so as you keep solving the problem in front of you and unlocking new levels with new problems, you adapt and discover a decision-making and risk management strategy that works for you.

This process becomes so engrained in you, it just is you after a while, and pretty soon you are applying it to anything in life and get better over time in general.

Overseas I had a mission and people that mattered to me, the price of failure was measured in lives, the highs of success made you feel like a Titan walking the earth, and unlike the first world, decisions had consequences because there was no safety net to save you besides our own actions.

Very similar to generational wealth and family offices.

When you’re in charge of your own money and looking 100 years into the future, your decisions have consequences for everyone and there is no safety net. You either keep growing wealth, or are the generation that loses it all.

This is why generational wealth building is the best mission, there is no end to it, can never be taken away, provides freedom for you and your family, and you succeed or fail by what you do, no one else.

No More Smiley Faces for $200 million than $2 million

Whether I end up at the $2 million or $200 million mark is completely irrelevant to my approach on building generational wealth.

I’m not going to be materially happier at the $200 million mark than I am making $200k a year.

Sure, there will be some things which are nicer, but it doesn’t move the needle on the 1-10 smiley face happiness scale on a daily basis.

Having the mission in life is what moves the needle and lets you consistently circle 8s on the smiley face scale because you are about your work.

After all, how do you improve on being healthy and enjoying a crisp fall morning, kneeling down watching animals cross in front of you while you are stalking big game on a 20 mile hunt?

Is the wine going to taste any better or laughter be any more sweeter sharing a dinner party with friends because the net worth has more zeroes?

Will I be able to be any stronger in the gym, a more steadfast friend, or a more honorable man?

No, of course not. In every way I consider important in measuring myself as a man, it makes zero difference if it is two or two hundred million, what made the difference was I had the mission in the first place.

The dollar figure is only useful as a measuring tool for determining progress and wise stewardship on a year by year basis as I progress on mission to ensure the freedom of my family and move the ball down the field for the next generation to pick up and crash forward to continue to build wealth as a byproduct of having a mission and being steadfast and honorable people.

Pick Up The Hammer And Strike the First Blow, Michelangelo

The key to finding the right mission is finding something that is hard, like genuinely hard, because learning to love the struggle and the person it chisels you into is part of the magic that happens over time.

You aren’t adding to yourself, you are letting the mission chisel away all the nonessential nonsense that the modern world has coated you in which is weighing you down and completely unnecessary.

Like Michelangelo carving David, you have a mission that is inside you, your job is to discover it and get rid of the excess in life as it reveals itself.

Some will say a mission isn’t necessary to a good life, but they are weak, scared, and secretly hoping you never pick up the chisel and strike the first blow on the marble so they don’t feel bad about themselves always shying away from their own block of marble sitting ignored in their lives.

After having had a great mission, and going to living a life without one after being blown up for a bit, I can tell you living without a mission is no life at all.

The long-lasting satisfaction that comes from the discipline, building, and improvement as you progress in your mission is the happiness our souls truly seek which the first world tells us can be found in an Amazon basket.

It can’t.

Your soul doesn’t crave a new espresso machine, it craves being at work in accomplishing the mission of your life, one where there it only ends when dancing pallbearers take you to your final resting place in a large above ground family crypt with plenty of sunlight streaming in so strangers walking through the cemetery know years later we didn’t live the same lives of their ancestors.

We’re above ground, nice and dry, having left a legacy for our family, and all their ancestors have marking their walk on the earth is a small piece of granite that gets mowed over because they ignored their mission and selfishly spent every dollar they could from their IRA to retire and play shuffleboard in Florida.

On Mission In The Matrix

I can only imagine what Astronauts feel like walking the earth knowing they’ll never again ride a rocket or glimpse the earth and moon from the blackness of space.

How do you live on the earth to never walk amongst the stars with the memory?

Once you know what having a mission that matters does to shape you, you will no longer see the land of Netflix and UberEats the same.

You will see it like being awake in the Matrix, a first world kept just safe enough, with problems artificially manufactured to entertain, filled with grey and plain boring rules.

Be very careful who you share that you have a mission with. Most won’t understand and it will scare them.

You are now out of time with this world, living by the old ways where honor, respect, and trust are sought out, difficulty and challenges recognized as opportunities disguised as hardship, gratification is delayed, with wisdom and knowledge sought by reading the words of other Patriarchs long dead who successfully navigated this world and built wealth till they sailed to the land beyond the sun.

We walk amongst those who just want to be normal, seek instant gratification, stare in their phones at fake outrage, have no standards, are inwardly ugly and outwardly miserable, forgetting what they were meant to do on this earth.

We are not the same as them.

Our world is one of strength, freedom, responsibility, and building beauty with vibrant colors.

Theirs is a grey haze, because without standards there is no beauty, everything is the same, no one is responsible, only decay, negativity, and ugliness in the form of a full Amazon basket of things they don’t need, tacos from UberEats, and wearing their fat sweatpants while watching Netflix for 6 hours a night.

It is the siren song of self-destruction.

Remember the strong never explain to the weak.

This is a path that everyone must find and start to walk on their own, and like the merchants of old traveling the Gobi desert with silk, you find like-minded people where others don’t dare travel, who like you, left the walled safety of Xinjiang behind, wrapped their shamag around their face, and setting out into the blowing sand said I may die, but I won’t quit.

If you try to explain what this is to someone who has no desire to leave the city walls and adopt a mission in life, they will attack you because they would never survive outside the safety of their artificial first world.

Don’t just ignore these people, cut them out from your life completely.

No team worth being on ever had a 100% acceptance rate.

Instead, focus on finding your mission, embrace it, put in the work, nurture it and enjoy the process.

Remember, if you won’t quit, then the worst thing that happens is you die, so you can now enjoy the process of being on mission, all the highs and lows as they were meant to be experienced - at the pinnacle of life.

If you quit, you will be like a mariner cutting away his sails, losing direction, starting to drift in the storm of life, towards the rocks and the siren song of self-destruction, becoming a danger not just to yourself but to everyone who counts on you to get them safely through this life.

This is what the first world wants, they want us weak, they are afraid of the strong.

Remember, we’re told freedom is now a board of bankers printing trillions, giving us nearly no interest on assets while credit cards charge poor people trying to live 21%.

They tell us now is a great time to shackle ourselves in debt and economic slavery by buying a $700k house that looks like the rest of houses in the neighborhood with an hour long commute to work.

At the end of this commute you get a meaningless apology from the same girl every day who hates her life because she’s serving coffee with a degree and $60k in student debt since no one ever did her the favor to tell her following her passion in college only made colleges money.

So every morning she misspells Radigan on a coffee cup on purpose as her way of rebelling against a system that lied to her before she goes home and strips for strangers on OnlyFans and hates herself a little bit more each day.

But it’s fine, you still have to sit in another meaningless meeting led by people who can’t do 10 pullups, who hate confrontation, and somehow think they have power over people.

Does that sound like freedom to anyone? That’s the other option if you don’t embrace the mission of building wealth.

Now imagine all of this, but instead you wear an amused smile throughout it all because instead of the $700k house you live in an apartment that is a five minute walk and invest half your income every month so none of this nonsense makes a dent because you are on mission every day.

In the haze grey of the first world, building generational wealth and having a mission stands like a light house on a dark rocky shore, the world batters at it but it is still there, standing strong, lighting the way to the good life.

Building generational wealth, like fighting and adventure, is one of those core missions which has always stood out as high value.

Our ancestors didn’t cross the land bridge tracking mammoths, set sail off the maps of the known world, or set out across the Gobi on caravans carrying silk from Xinjiang just so we could sit and watch Netflix, eat UberEats and make Jeff Bezos richer.

We aren’t here to get up and drive another hour to work and make a mortgage payment on a 3,500 sq ft home filled with stuff we don’t even like or need to make bankers who can’t do 10 pullups and sit behind a curtain pretending to be all powerful wizards richer as they sell all of us into economic slavery.

Find your mission, fully embrace it, unfurl the sails and point to the horizon. May it bring you much happiness, adventure, and success for the rest of your life through discipline, overcoming doubt, the pain of failure, the humility of learning, and the highest highs of success as you live at the pinnacle of life.

See you out there, Radigan