Your pursuit of financial freedom requires more bullets now than ca...

Baku is a young man whose family and village lost everything because of the attack by bandits who burned down everything they had and almost everyone they knew. His family survived, his mum and sister because he hid them somewhere but his mum went blind as a result. It was on his way to making sure his family escaped death that he got captured by the leader of the group. He spent the rest of his adult days with them, learning to be an insurgent.

Once in a while, the leader allows him to visit his blind mother and helpless sister, a privilege no one else in the group had. He visited them whenever he wanted, until the last time, he did, he discovered that the government, through the service of the Air Force, helped his fellow villagers, most importantly, the medical team they provided gave his mom sight, and she was able to see again.

He was very happy and would have loved to stay with his family, but he still owed his life to the leader of the bandits, so he had to return to them, plus, he needed to be there so his family will be safe from harm.

But on this last day, something changed, unlike the rest of the days he often visited. I didn't know something had changed until a pilot's plane crashed in one of the villages that were already living in the fear of the bandit's visit. The bandit heard of it because the plane crashed on their territory, the enemy's territory, they called it, but the pilot, knew this, and utilize a strategy to move in the opposite direction to the enemy's territory. A tactic that kept him safe and helped him find the village.

As much as the rest of the Air Force team put up a rescue mission to find him and return him to base, his family, and his country, the bandit wanted him too so he can use him as ransom to get whatever he wanted from the government.

It was on one of those days of trying to find the pilot that Baku met him and didn't bring him to his boss because he saw the Air Force batch his mom had shown him in the picture the last day he visited her.

Now, Baku knew who his enemy was, it wasn't the Air Force, the government, or the pilot. It was the man who took everything from him, his home, his school, his health care facility, almost took his family, and his life. So, Baku allowed the pilot to escape while he went ahead to tell his boss, they were walking into a trap so they must run.

This one step saved everyone's lives from the bandit, this is a movie I saw yesterday, and I'll tell you why I am sharing a few scenes with you.

Source
Yesterday, I finished chapter four (4) of Good to Great, and in this Chapter, Jim Collins was leading us on the title, " Fire Bullets, then Cannonballs". What he tried to do was tell me about different companies who had the opportunity to strike but didn't, instead, they worked around the 20 Mile March and kept their pace. They kept putting up new ideas and testing them in the market, bit by bit until they found the one that worked, and they put every resource into it.

This is to say, they fired bullets, kept firing bullets, and when an idea that changed everything came, they stopped firing bullets, and fired cannonballs instead. And then the world heard of them. And other companies who fired cannonballs the moment they set foot in the market received the shock of their lives. They burn resources, time, energy, and funds on cannonballs when they should have fired bullets first, no matter how many times, until it got to the right time.

It's almost like when my favorite author said, we shouldn't try to be in a hurry, we should try to take it one step at a time, but when an opportunity shows up that we need to act fast, we should dump the slow motion, and act.

For Baku, he kept firing bullets, every time he visited his mum, and until his cannonball was ready which was when his mum received sight. It was at this point that he not only knew his enemy, he also had the opportunity to save his hometown from the brutality of the bandits. If he had acted earlier, he would probably have died along with the people he was trying to save. But he bided his time, firing bullets, until it was the perfect time to act.

Different companies followed this procedure, including Microsoft, Apple, certain Airlines, Pharmaceuticals, etc. Some died even before they arrived because they set out to fire cannonballs first instead of bullets.

Firing bullets in your pursuit of financial freedom is okay because it's a low cost, less risk, and low distraction test or experiment, Collins pointed out. So, the successful companies he was analyzing fired lots of bullets, that barely hit anything, but they kept firing because they didn't know which would be successful.

He went further to explain that calibrated and uncalibrated cannonball exists and that the former are those with whom an empirical validation has been done and the success rate is high, while the latter leads to calamity because you will be placing a bet without validations.

What we all need in our journey to financial independence is to know when to fire our cannonballs. And it will take relentless discipline and creativity to do so. Baku if he did not have the discipline to wait would have met with calamity; if on one of those days his bandit boss angered him, he had pointed a gun at him, everything he had worked for would have been in vain. But he had the self-control to wait until the perfect timing showed up.

You could be firing bullets as we speak, investing in this and that, or trying to come up with contents every day, firing them into the air, until one day, one of those methods will yield good results, and at this point you throw everything and your entire being into it, working, nailing, and digging your new-found gold mine.

But you'll need the discipline to stick around when the going is tough. Discipline to not fire uncalibrated cannonballs first when it's not the right time to do fire cannonballs.