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Some people might think it’s hard to spend time in Quadrant II on money matters doing things such as creating shared vision, having weekly meetings, or increasing your financial intelligence. But the reality is, if you don’t spend it in Quadrant II now, you’ll definitely spend it in other quadrants later—working longer hours, paying more bills, and handling financial crises.

As you make and live with your money decisions day by day— particularly if you’re having your weekly meetings—you’re learning and becoming more effective as you go. You’re discovering principles that empower you to make effective decisions with both your money and your time—principles such as:

• Importance

• Investment

• Margin

• Alignment

• Leverage

• Choice

• Trust

• Deferred gratification

• Integrity

• Discipline

• Synchronization

• Accountability

• Simplicity

As you interact with these principles and consciously use them to calibrate your navigational intelligence, you become better at dealing with money matters. You also discover that as much as deciding what’s most important, successful navigation is remembering what’s most important. And the optimizers we examined earlier can help.

As you track your spending, create and regularly review a vision of your goals, and plan and evaluate weekly, you develop the navigational intelligence to avoid major money traps such as reacting unwisely to the “urgency” pressure of advertising, or becoming impatient to get what you want now. You create context for your decisions.You develop character to defer gratification and to act with integrity in decision moments. The strength of what you are doing overpowers what you should not be doing and creates that deeper “Yes!” that empowers you to say “No!” to the less important.

Also, as you develop the Quadrant II paradigm and habits of managing money, it actually strengthens your ability to handle your time. Once you catch the vision of Quadrant II, you realize that each decision you make to invest instead of consume in one area strengthens your ability to do so in both.

Best of all, investing in Quadrant II enables you to create a legacy of importance and investment that will bless your children’s lives for generations. Can you honestly imagine a greater inheritance you could give your posterity than a 24/7 example of a lifestyle based on the principles and values that lead to balance and peace?