Garbage In, Garbage Out: What you put into something, matters a lot

You’ve probably heard this ad nauseum if you went to a business school. They tend to say very cliche-y, inspirational and/or made-up business terms to students without realizing it.

My favourite of all: “KSFs” referring to “Key Success Factors”. If I had a $0.01 for every time I heard this during business school, read it in a report, or encountered it in any shape or form, I’d wouldn’t just be rich, I’d be filthy rich.

Anyway, one of the more useful and relevant business terms that has stuck with me through it all is:

“Garbage In, Garbage Out”

Simple, to the point and pretty self-explanatory.

This applies to anything and everything you can think of.

I can think of plenty of instances in my life when this happened.

Give it a go, yourself: Think about your education, job, and/or any times you’ve failed at something, either lightly or miserably. It’s probably because you put in a half-assed effort and got a bad result.

In terms of personal finance, if you put in GARBAGE efforts (read: crappy), you will get crappy results.

Garbage efforts can be characterized as the following:

• Staying deep in debt and doing nothing about it except burying your head into the sand
• Knowing that you overspend each month but are in denial
• Refusing to start with the money basics like creating a budget and tracking your expenses
• Not making enough money but thinking your budget will still magically balance every month
• Thinking you deserve fancy things like splashy vacations when you’re deep in debt
• Assuming there will be some big pot of gold with your name on it by the time you retire at 65

I could go on, but you’re probably getting bored at this point.

If you don’t put in the work, you won’t get the results.

If you don’t put in the time, you won’t get the results.

If you don’t even try, you DEFINITELY won’t get the results.