I was at Powerbooks yesterday. I arrived early for a commitment and so I decided to pass the time inside the bookstore.

One of the books that caught my attention was The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell.

Are you familiar with this book?

The Tipping Point is basically about change and social epidemics. It tries to gives us a “new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does“. It likewise presents thoughts and ideas that show how big things can come from small and unnoticeable causes. The book is quite interesting, I must say.

Anyway, as I was browsing through the pages of the book, I can’t help but think about the phrase tipping point. My engineering background gave me a vision of a cylinder laid down on a horizontal plank and a force is slowly raising one end of the board. This continues until the maximum angle for impending motion is reached and gravity takes over and causes the cylinder to roll.

Can you think of other ways to physically describe a tipping point?

However you describe it and whatever you might call it – moment of critical mass, threshold value, the boiling point, etc. It is essential that we grasp not only the concept of tipping points but we should also learn how this idea applies to our life.

Not so long ago, I was your typical corporate slave. I was a young urban professional walking the streets of Ortigas everyday and working hard for the money. Back then, I believed that the only way for me to become rich and financially secure is to constantly get promoted at work and get paid higher and higher salaries.

For several years, my life was a routine – sleep, eat, work on weekdays and party hard until the next morning on weekends. I thought I was living “the life”, but I guess I was wrong because more often than not, I felt empty and without direction.

I asked myself, “What’s wrong?”

The question lingered inside my head but I was too busy “living my life” to really think about the answer.

Unexpectedly, the answer to my question came one afternoon through a simple conversation with a friend. It was a moment I would always remember because it was when I was pushed over my financial tipping point.

I was hanging out and having coffee with a friend when I mentioned to him that I wanted to quit my job and work for another company. I told him that my prospective position pays better than my current one.

Surprisingly, he showed little enthusiasm towards my plan and instead told me something that changed my life forever. In the next few minutes, he talked to me about investing and the concept of passive income.

I went home that day thinking about everything my friend said. I assessed my own life and realized that it’s been lacking a concrete financial plan. I can hop from one company to another and get better and bigger salaries, but in the end, nothing will really change. I’m still a corporate slave daydreaming of the things he wants inside his cubicle.

That night, before I went to sleep, I resolved to learn more and do more for my finances. And since that day until now, I never stopped.

What about you? Did you experience such financial tipping points? Can you recall an exact moment in your life when you realized that you seriously need to start paying attention and planning your financial future?

One of the things I’d like to do is to show people how to start “positive” epidemics of their own. The virtue of an epidemic, after all, is that just a little input is enough to get it started, and it can spread very, very quickly. That makes it something of obvious and enormous interest to everyone from educators trying to reach students, to businesses trying to spread the word about their product, or for that matter to anyone who’s trying to create a change with limited resources… The point is that by the end of the book I think the reader will have a clear idea of what starting an epidemic actually takes. This is not an abstract, academic book. It’s very practical. And it’s very hopeful.

Did you like this short story on how I started my journey towards financial freedom? Then you might want to read a little more about it here. Also, if you want to receive more articles about life and personal finance, then please subscribe to Ready To Be Rich.

Works Cited:
gladwell dot com. “The Tipping Point“.

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Photo courtesy of jgarber