Debt Is 90% Mental

When I was growing up, my dad used to coach my Little League baseball team. I enjoyed having my dad as a coach instead of a complete stranger, but it also meant that the coaching didn’t stop when we got home. While it might have been a little annoying at the time, I guess it worked because I still remember one of his lessons to this day. His favorite lesson was that baseball is 90% mental and 10% physical.

While I probably didn’t fully understand what that meant as a 9-year old, it stuck with me, and over the years, it has started making more and more sense. I’ve come to realize that this lesson can be applied to many areas of life. In fact, if you’ve played any competitive sport, you’ve probably heard the saying, “Winning is 90% mental and 10% physical.” There’s even a famous book called The Inner Game of Tennis that focuses entirely on the mental aspect of achieving your peak performance.

What does any of this have to do with debt?

Fundamentals are the most important part of the physical aspect of any sport. You’ll never be good at baseball if you don’t know how to throw one. Improving your fundamentals takes a lot of hard work. This is where you put in the blood, sweat, and tears. It requires countless hours of drills and training to refine and develop your physical skills.

Similarly, it requires innumerable amounts of training and work to generate a source of income in the money game. Whether it’s working a job or running a business, you have to put in a lot of effort to develop the skills just to be able to play the game. But this is only a small part of the game, and almost everyone can master the physical aspect of the game.

If anyone can master the physical part of the game, then what separates average players from elite players? Knowing how to throw a baseball does no good in an actual game unless you know when and where to throw it. This is where the mental side of the game comes in. A lot of people may know how to throw a baseball, but not everybody knows when and where they should throw it in a particular situation.

The same concept can be applied to the money game. A lot of people know how to earn money, but not everybody knows when and where to use the money. People have the physical skills to play the game, but they haven’t developed the mental smarts to utilize their skills effectively. This is what makes the money game so challenging.

I think a lot of people make enough money to get out of debt, but that’s only 10% of the game. It’s the other 90% that most people struggle to overcome — the mental side of the game. I know a lot of people who know what they need to do, but they have trouble convincing themselves to actually do it. There’s a huge difference between thinking about an action and actually doing it. It’s what separates the thinkers from the doers.

In the game of money, are you a thinker or a doer?

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