Stop Waiting for Someday to Live Your Life

Let me ask you something. What is sitting on your someday list right now? The trip. The passion project. The thing you keep telling yourself you will get to once the business is a little bigger, once the kids are a little older, once you finally hit that number. Most of us have a list like that. And most of us are not getting to it.

That is the conversation I had with returning guest Ohan Kayikchyan, Ph.D., founder of Alohana Financial and one of my favorite people to think out loud with. You can hear the full conversation in the full episode. Ohan has spent nearly two decades helping people stop treating money as the destination and start using it as the tool it actually is. And some of what he said in this one hit me in a way I did not expect.

The ratio that changes everything

Ohan opened with a frame that I think applies way beyond personal finance. He said that managing your money is roughly 80% behavior and psychology and only 20% actual math and optimization. He even pointed out that AI can already do the math better than any human. The hard part is not the numbers. The hard part is the human part, the beliefs, the fears, the stories you have been telling yourself about money and about what your life is supposed to look like.

So if you are an entrepreneur sitting here thinking this episode is not really for you because you have an accountant, stay with me. Because almost everything in your business follows that same ratio. The strategy and the tactics are the 20%. The behavior, the self-awareness, the psychology driving your decisions every single day, that is the 80%. And most of us spend all of our energy on the 20% while completely ignoring the thing that actually determines the outcome.

Want versus need: the distinction that buys you freedom

Ohan came to the United States from a post-Soviet country through the Diversity Visa Lottery at 27, started over as a bank teller, and worked his way through every layer of the financial system. When he was learning English, he admitted he used two words interchangeably because he did not yet understand how different they were: want and need. And when he got into financial planning, he realized that confusion is the root of most financial stress he sees, even in people who have been speaking English their whole lives.

A need is the shelter over your head, food on the table, the bottom of the hierarchy. A want is the type of car, the size of the house, the version of something you could genuinely live without. And the want is the part you actually control.

Half of financial stress is not caused by not having enough. It is caused by confusing what you want with what you need, and then feeling like you are failing when you cannot afford your wants.

This goes straight into your business too. How many things are you treating as needs, the new software, the fancy branding, the next certification, that are honestly just wants dressed up as necessities? When you can clearly separate the two, your stress goes down and your decisions get sharper. Clarity on want versus need is one of the most freeing things you can build, in your money and in your business. That is intentionality at its most practical.

The lifestyle creep trap

Ohan talked about a certain type of client, the high earner who somehow never actually builds wealth. Every time the income goes up, the lifestyle goes up right alongside it. Bigger house, nicer car, more expensive everything. They look wealthy. But they are on a treadmill, earning a lot, spending a lot, and never widening the gap between the two.

This is so important for entrepreneurs specifically, because we tend to think the answer to every financial problem is to make more money. But if your spending scales every time your income does, you can grow your revenue significantly and still feel exactly as trapped, exactly as stressed, exactly as far from free as you were before. The number changes. The feeling never does.

The antidote is not deprivation. Ohan is not telling anyone to live like a monk. The antidote is deciding in advance what actually matters to you, funding that fully, and not letting the mindless upgrades eat the gap. One approach builds a life. The other builds a cage with really nice furniture.

Be the space, not the hero

This is the part of the conversation that hit me hardest as a coach. Ohan said that when he first became a Certified Financial Planner, he thought he had figured it all out and could just go tell everyone exactly what to do. And people did not take his advice. Because he was handing them his answers.

Then he trained as a life planner and it changed everything. He realized his job in the first meeting is not to talk. It is to listen, to create a space that is judgment-free and guilt-free so the client can bring out the dreams they have been protecting deep in their heart. He described couples who had been together for decades learning things about each other for the very first time, simply because someone finally created a space where they could speak without being steered or judged.

"Advice you hand someone is worth a fraction of the insight they discover for themselves."

He even has a name for the discipline it takes: let your thoughts go, let your feelings be. Which means when a client mentions a dream, you do not hijack it with your own story. You hold the space and let them bring out everything that dream means to them. This is leadership. This is coaching. This is being a good partner. The most powerful thing you can do for another person usually is not handing them your brilliant answer. It is creating a space so safe they finally say out loud the thing they have been protecting their whole life.

The story I had to share

Ohan talked about something called the honeymoon effect in retirement. The first few years are exciting, but the average retirement age in America is 67, and no matter how healthy you are, your body at 67 is not your body at 40. He pointed out that if you want to take your dream trip to Italy, maybe do not wait, because those streets were not built with escalators in mind.

So he is a big believer in mini-retirements, taking a planned period earlier in life to actually do the things you have been saving for someday. Not the reckless version. The intentional version, where the numbers get checked and you give yourself permission to go live a little before you are 67.

And that is where I had to get personal.

My dad used to talk about how he could not wait to retire. He worked incredibly hard, crazy hours, for years, a lot of it for my sister and me. He kept telling himself he could put in a couple more years. And then he got pancreatic cancer. He had filed all of his retirement paperwork, everything was ready. But because he passed before that very first retirement check arrived, he technically died on the job. And my sister and I were not able to receive the pension he had spent his life earning.

He worked, and worked, and worked, preparing for a someday that never came.

That is why I do not wait. That is why I decided I am going to live the life I want now, do the things that matter now, and build around them instead of postponing everything to a finish line that is not promised to anyone. Ohan said it simply: we are not guaranteed our next breath. Every moment is a blessing. And our whole culture is built around this idea that you grind until some far-off age and then you are allowed to live. That is a myth. And it costs people the only thing they can never get back.

You can choose the awakening now

Ohan shared a reframe at the end that I cannot stop thinking about. A friend of his in the industry does not call it a midlife crisis. He calls it a midlife awakening. A crisis is something that happens to you, something to survive. An awakening is something that happens for you, an invitation to finally start living on purpose.

You do not have to hit a crisis to wake up. You can choose the awakening right now.

So here is your one concrete step this week. Pull one thing off your someday list, just one, and take a single real action toward doing it now. Not at 67. Not once the business is bigger. Now. Book the thing. Make the call. Start the project.

Because money is a tool. The goal was always the life. And the whole point of building the business, making the money, and doing the work was to go live that life, not to keep deferring it.

If you want to dig into where you are getting stuck in your own business and life right now, start with the free 6-Principle assessment at /assess. It takes just a few minutes and gives you a real picture of where your momentum is and where it is not.