The Success Architect
Success doesn’t happen by accident — it’s designed, built, and reinforced brick-by-brick. On The Success Architect, builder and business strategist, Jake Lewendal brings a craftsman’s mindset to personal growth, wealth, and high-performance leadership.
With raw honesty and practical frameworks, Jake breaks down the systems, habits, and decision-making principles that separate the overwhelmed from the unstoppable. From building multi-million-dollar companies to coaching ambitious people, Jake’s philosophy is simple: success is a structure, and every person can learn to build it.
Each episode blends actionable strategy with real-world conversations featuring high-impact, career-driven entrepreneurs and operators who are building lives of purpose, discipline, and momentum.
This is for the ones who build. The ones who take responsibility. The ones who know they’re meant for more — and are ready to architect a life of depth, strength, and true success.
The Success Architect
Building a Financial Philosophy You Actually Choose
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In the final episode of this series, Jake Lewendal helps listeners turn everything they've uncovered into something concrete: a short, written financial philosophy they actually own. After tracing where their money beliefs came from, learning to shift between scarcity and abundance on purpose, and reconnecting money to values instead of identity, Jake makes the case that a philosophy nobody writes down isn't really a philosophy — it's just a mood that shifts with stress.
He walks through four questions that define a real financial philosophy: what money is actually for, what risk posture fits your own season of life or business, what you protect no matter what, and what you're willing to be uncomfortable for. From there, Jake pushes listeners to write it down — and keep it short. A real philosophy fits on an index card, not a manifesto, and he offers a simple fill-in-the-blank structure to get started.
The episode closes by showing how to make that philosophy load-bearing: running real decisions — hires, purchases, investments, price increases — through it before acting, so it speeds up decision-making and cuts through inherited noise instead of sitting as inspirational wall art. For builders and business owners, Jake connects this directly to margin decisions, hiring timing, and scaling without breaking.
Jake leaves listeners with a challenge: write one paragraph this week, then test it on the next decision that comes up. As he puts it, the goal was never to hand anyone a philosophy — it was to make sure the one they're living by is actually theirs.
Welcome to the Success Architect, where we don't just build homes, we build legacies. I'm your host, Jake Lewendahl, custom home builder and coach. Each week, I sit down with builders and entrepreneurs who are ready to 10x their business, their health, and their mindset. This is where blueprints become breakthroughs. Let's get to work. Alright, what's up, guys? Jake Lewendahl here on the Success Architect. Super happy to be coming to you with episode four of our financial series, talking about financial philosophy and actually helping you as a listener create your own philosophy that you can live by. Now, the way we're going to do this today is I'm going to ask you some questions after we kind of recap what we've talked about. And then what's kind of fun is I have not sat here and thought about these questions. I'm going to answer these off the cuff. I'm going to be honest about these questions, but I'm going to do it 100% off the cuff in order to help you see what it looks like. And then I'd like you, as the listener, to do the same in order to create your own financial philosophy that you want to live by, not one that anybody else created for you. So let's recap what we've talked about over the last couple weeks. First, we found out where beliefs come from. We all have money beliefs, whether we like it or not. They were created early on in our life, whether through decisions from our parents, things that family members or friends said, traumatic things that happened, positive things that happened. Maybe our parents had a windfall of cash come from a big business exit and they never had to work again. And you have three generations worth of money taken care of for you. There's there's positives and negatives about where these beliefs came from. Next, we learned about scarcity and abundance, how to toggle the two, and how to live in an abundance mindset while doing it in a very positive and pro-growth manner that does not include just spending freely for no reason. Next, we reconnected money to values instead of identity. We found out that money is a magnifier for who we already are. We went through our own values and we discussed how do we change our money decisions, our business decisions, and our life decisions in order to fulfill our values and use money as a tool in fulfilling those values to their fullest. Today, I want to take all of that and help you build your own financial philosophy, your very own, not anyone, not one that anyone told you. Like I said, I'm gonna answer all of these questions for you to help give you an example. But the idea is that you create your own financial philosophy that you can live by and you use this financial philosophy to make every single decision going forward, whether it's in your personal or your business life. So let's jump in. We're gonna start with four questions. First, I'm gonna state them and then I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna answer them off the cuff and we'll see what comes out. So, first, what is money for in my life? Now, this is a values-driven question. Okay, so it's driven on purpose and values. Number two, what is my risk posture? And does it match my actual season of life in business and personal, not my father's, my competitors, not anybody else's. Does it match mine? Number three, what do I protect no matter what? Number four, what am I willing to be uncomfortable for? Now this is a growth abundance mindset question. Remember that. This is your growth edge, and the idea is where discomfort is the price of the upside. So I'm gonna go through number one, what is money for in my life? As I explained to you, my core belief is that money is a magnifier of who we already are. So money is meant to increase my ability to live my values. Now, we don't have time to go through all of my values, but I have a lot of different ideas about how money are tools. And though from the outside, I like nice houses, I like cars, I like boats, those are all things that take a lot of money and use up a lot of money. And besides maybe a house, those are not investments. But a lot of my value is in being happy and living a joyful life, and some of that is having those things. Now, those things also, the house, the cars, the boat specifically. The boat is probably the greatest example of this. Is my value in life is creating memories with my family. And what I do is use money as a tool in order to buy the things that help me create those memories. So that could be a boat and being out on the lake with my family on a day and creating amazing memories during that day. That could be a rather expensive vacation that we create the absolute best memories with our family. All of these things lead money, lead back to money being the tool in order to promote the fact that I want to create amazing memories with and for my family. Now, what is my risk posture? And does it match my actual season of life? So this one is well, hopefully not everyone's answer, but I am overly risky for the season of life that I'm in. I'm 37 years old. I think the season to be very, very risky is in your 20s. So I think you should be overly risky and shoot for the moon. I think once you get to the 30s, I have two kids, a wife. We've been married for 13 years, we have a life built up, and I am probably riskier than I should be in this season of life. But that is also my personality, and it's just me because my father is not as risky as I was, and I don't really give two shits about my competitors. I just care about the adrenaline rush and looking for the win that means a lot to me. Does it mean it's right? Probably not, but that's just how I live life. And it is something that in making decisions and in this financial philosophy and answering this question is something that I will dive deeper into and possibly change my financial philosophy a little bit to alleviate some of that risk because it has gotten me into trouble before. Now, number three, what do I protect no matter what? So reserves and having six months to a year worth of reserves for my business and my personal family is something that is non-negotiable. Now, have I have I basically outdone or canceled my non-negotiable before? Yes, unfortunately. I have blasted through those reserves not on stupid purchases, but on mistakes. And that's a story for another day. But that is something that I have recently decided is not something that I'm willing to do. And building back those reserves is something that's very hard, and I'm in the middle of doing at the moment. Family time is something that I want to protect no matter what. Am I good at it? No, but I am working on it, which is why this is a new philosophy that I'm gonna work on. Another one is integrity in how the business makes money. We have integrity in the product we provide, the way that we deal with clients, and the honesty that we provide in our business. And I am not willing to go against that. Even if it loses us jobs, if it loses us projects, if it loses us relationships, we will tell the truth and have integrity in how we go about our business and we will be transparent. Number four, what am I willing to be uncomfortable for? So I'm willing to be extremely uncomfortable, and that ties back to the risk question from number two. And I'm willing to be so uncomfortable in my basically discomfort for the upside that I have to manage that in order to say no and look out for what I need to protect. So when it comes to reserves, when it comes to family time, I have to be very careful in order to keep those sacred while living on my growth edge, which means my growth edge is probably gonna come down a little bit in order to protect those other things. That's why these questions go hand in hand. So there's my answers. And actually, what I just found from these answers that I didn't know before is that my money philosophy is a little different than I thought it was gonna be, and that I have a lot of work to do on my money philosophy and my decision making going forward, because I would say the last two years of decisions did not match this philosophy. And I am going to modify my decisions going forward. I hope that in answering these questions for yourself, we will get to the question of, you know, evaluating past financial decisions. But this is the whole idea is create a philosophy using these questions and then go back and see how it has worked in the past years and what you want to change going forward. So, section two here is basically just writing these down. The whole idea is to write these down. Do not create a novel. This is not to be a manifesto. This is to be essentially an index card, a quick paragraph answering these questions and making sure to cross-reference these questions, like I did with question number four, three, and two, in regards to risk, willingness to be uncomfortable, and what is a non-negotiable to protect. Put those three together and make sure that they all align. So once you have this philosophy, the idea is that you can use this philosophy for every single big decision you make, whether it's personal, whether it's business, a big hire, hiring an employee who's gonna cost the company a lot of money, but could bring a windfall of cash, a windfall of sales, good revenue, good efficiency, whatever that is, using this philosophy and a personal investment you want to make, a business investment you want to make. Use the philosophy in order to make the decision. And that whole idea here is checking your values. Make sure that the money is the tool that is going to get you the gain you're looking for. This will help you make decisions faster. It's going to remove the emotional piece of it because you will have solid answers on your values and the fact that you're using this decision to get to your values. Final challenge here is take what we just went through, write it out onto an index card, one paragraph, like I said, four questions. Then I want you to go test it on your next financial decision and see how it works. I'm super excited. I know that my answers actually did not align with where I thought my financial philosophy was going to end up. And this has actually gotten me a lot to think about with uh discussing, you know, the dichotomy between risk and discomfort, but also protecting the non-negotiables that I have in my life, essentially those values that we talked about last week. So I'm really excited. I hope this was productive for you guys. And if you have any questions about financials, abundance, you know, we are gonna keep talking about abundance mindset, operating systems, how to get rid of the old shitty operating systems and mindsets and install new ones. This all is intertwined with this money game and this philosophy of how you are going to make money, how you are gonna use that money for your values, and how you are gonna go impact and change the world for the better in your own way. Thank you so much for listening. That closes out this series, and I look forward to talking to you guys here next week. I will see you on the next one. Thanks, guys. Thanks for tuning in to the Success Architect. If today's episode helped you lay a stronger foundation for your business or your life, subscribe and share it with someone ready to do the same with theirs. You can follow me, Jake Lewendah, on social for daily tips on health, wealth, and building success that lasts. Until next time, keep designing, keep building, and keep leveling up.