Guest speaker

Tom McAuliffe

LPL Financial Services

By Alexandr Larionov

This month our guest speaker was Tom McAuliffe. He is a financial consultant from LPL Financial Services. I was surprised that he comes here every December, but in one hour, I understood why Tom keeps coming here every end of the year.

He started with three basic rules:

· Spend less money than you bring in to save it.

· Don’t spend your money on stupid things, instead invest it.

· Find and work with a partner who can support you.

He wrote a phrase on the board: “I am a creative genius.” He said that all of us are creative geniuses. Then Tom told a story on how to construct a house. It needs only three things: a plan, material and labor-effort. If we paraphrase it, we will see that the only thing we need to achieve success, is a goal in our mind.

To know exactly what our goal is and how to achieve it, we should identify it and make it concrete. Tom gave us pieces of paper where we could  write our goal, give a detailed description of the goal, and define a target and completion date. Also we needed a written affirmation and an image or diagram of the goal. Tom said that there are two kinds of people; those who succeed and those who do not. People who succeed in their goals are confident; they know what they are doing. They keep trying and moving step-by-step toward the goal every day. They know exactly what their goal is, and what to do to achieve it. For instance, Tom told us his mother’s saying, “Saints are the sinners that kept trying.”