Too Busy Earning a Living to Make Your Fortune?

By Larry Waldman

Your Keys To Personal And Financial Success:
Study, learn, and put into practice the psychology revealed by Dr. Waldman and you will be equipped to achieve your life goals. The knowledge to do this is within these pages. But it is up to you to put that knowledge to work.
Are you up to it?

In this, Dr. Larry Waldman’s fifth book, he tells step-by-step how to achieve life goals by using accepted tenets of the four schools of psychology:

Biological, Behavioral, Cognitive and Analytic.

He uses the same easy-to-read style he established with his acclaimed child-raising classic Who’s Raising Whom? A Parent’s Guide to Effective Child Discipline. Like that book, in this one he gives many anecdotes from actual case histories to illustrate his points.
Those who study, learn and put into practice the psychology revealed by Dr. Waldman will be equipped to achieve their life goals. The knowledge to do this is within the pages of this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UCS PRESS
• Release date: Apr 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9780943247649

Larry Waldman

Dr. Waldman has lived in the Valley of the Sun (Phoenix/Scottsdale, Arizona) for nearly 40 years with his wife, Nan, who recently retired after 30 years of teaching fourth grade in the public schools. They have two sons, Josh, an attorney in southern California, and Chad, who is completing his training in school psychology in Portland, Oregon.He started his private practice in 1979 after working for seven years as a school psychologist for Scottsdale Public Schools. Over the next 31 years he developed his private practice into one of the most successful practices in Arizona.In addition to his clinical practice he does forensic work, consults to Social Security and to a private school, teaches for Northern Arizona University, sells his books, and speaks professionally.He’s written four books:Who’s Raising Whom?: A Parent’s Guide to Effective Child Discipline, published in 1987, is aimed at helping parents learn why their children misbehave then how to correct that misbehavior with techniques that work.Coping With Your Adolescent, published in 1994, is designed to help parents appropriately cope and shape their adolescent’s behavior.How come I love him but can’t live with him? published in 2004, teaches couples, using a behavioral model, to better understand their relationship and to behave toward each other in a more mutually-rewarding fashion.The Graduate Course You Never Had was published in 2010. It's focus is on helping professional counselors learn how to better manage the business aspect of their practice.Over 24,000 copies of the print edition of Who’s Raising Whom? are in circulation.Dr. Waldman speaks professionally to the community, to educators, and to other mental health professionals. Topics include:parenting and managing children’s behavior; dealing with teens, marriage, stress management, understanding and treating ADHD; dealing with the difficult child in the classroom, solution-focused treatment; and private practice management and marketing.Print editions of Dr. Waldman’s books may be purchased at http://www.the-relationship-doctor.com and at http://www.marjimbooks.com.Look for e-book editions of all of his books at Smashwords.To arrange for Dr. Waldman to speak, please contact publisher @ marjimbooks.com. Remember to delete the spaces around @ so that your e-mail goes through.

Book preview

WARNING

This is not another get-rich-quick book. Nor will it give you the winning numbers to the next lottery ticket you buy.

HOWEVER . . .

If you sincerely want to learn how to program yourself to achieve your life goals, this book is for you.

If you want to be the best person you can be.

The best dad or mom you can be.

The best achiever you can be.

The best investor you can be.

The best business-person you can be.

Then this book is for you.

Study, learn, and put into practice the psychology revealed by Dr. Waldman and you will be equipped to achieve your life goals. The knowledge to do this is within these pages. But it is up to you to put that knowledge to work.

Are you up to it?

Too Busy Earning a Living to Make Your Fortune?

Discover the Psychology of Achieving Your Life Goals

By Larry F. Waldman, Ph.D., ABPP

Clinical Psychologist

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 by Larry Waldman

Cover design by Marty Dobkins

Cover photo by Brandon W. Mosley

ISBN: 978-0-943247-64-9

UCS PRESS

P.O. Box 12797

Prescott, AZ 86304-2797

UCS PRESS is an imprint of MarJim Books.

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the authors.

The names of Dr. Waldman’s clients cited in this book have been changed to protect their privacy.

Dedication

To the hundreds of clients I have seen in my 33 years of private practice as a clinical psychologist. I appreciate the faith and trust they placed in me. While I always attempted to educate them, many of my clients have enlightened me, as well.

Acknowledgments

Special gratitude to Jeff Fagin, MBA, CPA, my good friend and hiking buddy, who inspired me with his drive, innovation, and entrepreneurship. He helped me to realize that most of the concepts concerning achieving financial freedom also apply to attaining life goals—and all stem from basic psychological theories.

Also to my friends Larry Beer, Esq. who guided me in staying on track and correctly advised me to stick with what I know best; and Cary Silverstein, business professor and consultant, for his thorough review of the manuscript with excellent recommend-ations

And to my dearest friend Harris Golden for his careful reading of the manuscript and his insightful recommendations.

Finally, I express major gratitude to the love of my life; my wife of over 41 years, Nan. Nan has always provided me with support and encouragement—in good times and in not so good times. Sometimes it amazes me how far we’ve come. It has been a fun run—and I hope it continues for a long while more.

Foreword

I am an expert in how people can change their thinking and their behavior, but I am not a financial expert. Therefore, in this book I am not going to provide financial advice, such as recommend specific areas in which to invest. Instead, this book is about helping people change so that they can overcome their psychological obstacles to finally achieve their life-long ambitions.

If I am not going to dispense specific financial advice, you might ask why I chose the title Too Busy Earning a Living to Make Your Fortune? I did so for three reasons:

First, like my four previous books, the title came from a client during a session and I liked the irony of the statement.

Second, I have become convinced that achieving financial freedom is more about personal psychology than understanding the stock market or earning an MBA.

Finally, the title conveys the frustration many people have. They would like to move forward but they can’t, won’t, or don’t.

Many very intelligent people are eager to tell you how to get rich and become successful. Some of these wonderful experts have amazing insights and terrific ideas. I have learned much from many of them. The reason, then, I decided to write my book is that after reviewing quite a number of these books written by these experts, I have become convinced that nearly all of these experts do not possess a consistent, theoretical, philosophical framework.

As an adjunct professor of classes for graduate students who intend to become counselors and clinicians, I constantly remind my students that they must develop a solid theoretical perspective. When they are working with a client they must have an established theoretical reason to support what they are doing with and saying to a particular client at that particular time. Of course, therapists are free to choose the form of treatment they believe is optimal for a client, but once the treatment begins the therapist must be able to support what they are doing with that client according to a specific theoretical frame of reference. Therapists should be consistent and theoretically integrated, or the patient could become confused.

As I read many of the experts as they write about how to achieve personal and financial goals, they often are not theoretically consistent. While many of their ideas are great, theoretically they are, frankly, a bit scattered.

My good friend Jeff inspired me to write this book. Jeff and I often hike together on Sunday morning. He is so enthusiastic about the ideas he has learned concerning business and marketing, and always is eager to share them with me.

Jeff is a businessman and an entrepreneur. He has a business degree but he is not a trained psychologist. Interestingly, though, many of Jeff’s ideas are psychological in nature. While hiking I would listen intently to Jeff’s ideas and then I would reframe those concepts in their proper psychological perspective. In this manner we both have benefitted greatly from our hikes—physically and mentally.

My goal with this book is to educate you, the reader, using solid, accepted theories and principles of psychology, to help you understand why you are where you are, and help you learn to get where you want to be. Not only should you learn some helpful ideas to move you forward, you should also be able to understand from which psychological perspective these concepts originate.

Enjoy the journey.

Larry F. Waldman, Ph.D., ABPP

Clinical Psychologist

About Larry Waldman

I was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; the only son and oldest of four children. Although my father was a certified public accountant, money was always an issue; there was never enough. It was like the proverbial cobbler whose kids had no shoes. He worked very long hours in the effort to develop his private accounting business. Like the many mental health clinicians I now speak to, I have come to recognize that while my dad knew much about accounting, he unfortunately knew little about how to conduct an accounting business.

Looking back, I realize I was jealous of my first sister who was just two years younger than me and I resented that my father was gone so much. Desiring attention, I became the class clown in elementary school. I never really understood—then—the difference between people laughing with you and laughing at you.

I was bright—too bright for my own good, I now like to say. I was so intelligent that I got decent grades with little or no studying—which became my curse. I graduated from a demanding high school in the middle of the class with a non-impressive grade point average (GPA) because I continued to slide by on my basic intellect without expending much effort. I spent most of my time in high school working long hours—like my Dad—outside of school, to have my own car and fancy clothes that my parents could not afford to provide me. If I wasn’t working, I was with my girlfriend. I remember my parents asking:

"Where are your books? (in my school locker)

When do you study? (never)

My father used to say, It seems like school is getting in the way of your education. (He was right.)

Since I graduated high school with mediocre grades, I had nowhere else to go for college but to stay in Milwaukee, live at home, and attend school at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). Back in the mid-60’s it seemed to me that UWM was a small commuter school trying to find itself. You could not live on campus then. I was unhappy there, as most of my friends had gone out-of-state to school or had gone to Madison, to the University of Wisconsin. At least, I had my girlfriend who was a senior in high school.

Living what I had learned, I continued to work nearly full-time during my freshman year of college and, as usual, viewed school essentially as an afterthought. This was especially foolish, I realize now, as I was taking five-credit lab science classes, thinking I was going to become a psychiatrist. My first year of college I garnered an uninspiring GPA of about a 2.4, with 15 credits of C in science. I wasn’t willing to admit it, but I had already closed the door on my dream of becoming a physician, as there was no way I could ever get accepted into medical school with those unimpressive grades.

By working hard (at my job) and saving money I made it to Madison (to the University) my sophomore year. I continued my pattern of working nearly full-time while attending school.

During the second semester of my sophomore year at the University I took advantage of an opportunity to serve as a research assistant for a young professor in the psychology department who was interested in the topic of learning. He shared his manuscript with me on how to study effectively—and it changed my world. From that point forward, through the remainder of my undergraduate and graduate education, I never earned anything less than an A.

As I approached my senior year I realized that with a Bachelor’s degree in psychology and a dime, I could purchase a half-a-cup of coffee, as my Dad used to say. I decided then to change my major to education—to teach high school psychology and maybe coach some football—so that when I graduated college I could get a JOB.

Since my psychology courses substituted for many educational classes, changing majors so late in the game only cost me an additional semester. That additional semester was my student teaching in Edgerton, Wisconsin, a small town about 45 miles southwest of Madison near the Illinois-Wisconsin border.

For most of that semester every workday I awoke at 4:30 am, drove to Edgerton, and taught four classes of high school psychology. At 2:45 pm I went to the gym, changed clothes, and coached the freshman football team from 3:15 to 4:45. (We had our eight games on Fridays.) At the end of practice (or the end of the game) I would shower and change back into my street clothes and drive back to Madison—at around 6 to 7 pm I would enter Ella’s Delicatessen, on State Street, and work as the evening manager, closing at 1 am. (When things got slow late in the evening at the Deli I would prepare my lesson plan for the next day.) After closing, I would get to my tiny apartment by 1:30 am, fall immediately asleep, awaken at 4:30 am, and do it all again. Working hard was something I’d become quite familiar with.

Following graduation I had numerous offers to coach high school football all over the country, but I wanted to teach psychology or, at least, do something psychological in nature. I ended up teaching delinquent boys in the morning and pregnant girls in the afternoon in what then was the beginning of special education in Racine, Wisconsin, a small town off the interstate between Milwaukee and Chicago.

That summer of 1970 I essentially traveled around the world. I traveled on less than four hundred dollars for about ten weeks. It was a blast. I sowed my wild oats, as they say, and I forever became bitten by the travel bug.

Near the end of that summer I re-met Nan. Nan and I had gone to the same high school and to the University of Wisconsin; we often said hello to each other but never dated. We saw each other daily for the remainder of that summer and I helped her move to St. Paul, Minnesota where she was going to teach fourth grade. I went back to teaching emotionally handicapped/pregnant teens in Racine. (I guess the District thought that pregnancy was contagious, back then.) That school year I tore up the highway