01 | February | 2011 | wealthymatters

Self-Defeating Beliefs About Wealth

February 1, 2011 4 Comments

If a person says he/she would like to be wealthy but you find them struggling,you will find them having one or more of the following self-defeating beliefs about wealth.These beliefs sap energy and kill initiative.

Belief No. 1: How much you earn depends on how hard/long you work or how highly skilled you are

Such a person becomes a workaholic and often believes in driving other people to work.A person like this might have a professional degree and quite often believes in chasing professional qualifications.He/she believes that a professional qualification often entitles them to more money.With these people the focus is on the work and its length, hardness, unpleasantness and/or skill.They believe in their own merit and get upset when they feel the world does not reward them justly.These people focus on the process and not the results.Their focus is not on wealth generation, which should be their goal if they want to be wealthy, but on part of the process, i.e. the nature of the work they engage in to make money, which they believe will make them wealthy.

Belief No. 2: Work is not meant to be enjoyable.

Such people often unconsciously believe that the more they suffer at work,the more meritorious they are and the more deserving they are of wealth.As they believe in the virtues of suffering,these people often maximize their own suffering and those of others around them.They are resistant to the thought that pain might be an indicator that they are going about things the wrong way or the hard way that there might be better,easier and less painful ways of going about things.

As a contrast consider these words of Warren Buffet “I get to do what I like to do every single day of the year.I tap dance to work, and when I get there, I think I’m supposed to lie on my back and paint the ceiling. It’s tremendous fun.”

Obviously the more fun you find work the less you have to force yourself to do it.Your body and mind instead of rebelling and sabotaging your efforts are actually engaged in harmony to produce your best work. Read more of this post

Filed under Theory, Tidbits, Tool Kit Tagged with Age and Wealth, Education and Wealth, Enjoy Work, Enjoyable Work, How much you earn, Money as a Constraint, RandomBlog2011, Researching Business Plan, Self Defeating Beliefs, Self Defeating Beliefs about Wealth, struggling, Wealth from Unglamourous Businesses

Wealth

February 1, 2011 3 Comments

“Wealth is having all that you want and need.

There are two ways to achieve this:

1) Work to aquire all that you want and need.

2) Reduce your wants and needs to less than what you have.

Both methods are difficult.

In practice, a mixture of both will be employed to gain wealth but option 2 will always be available where option 1 may not always be.”

This is something I came across while surfing the net yesterday.The original is here. http://sleepythinking.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/wealth/

I think it’s a nice and clear way of putting things.Wants are infinite.Our definition of needs are often extended to include everything we can have.Living below our current means is a sure shot way of accumulating a corpus.The corpus , in time , could be put to work to increase our means and so reduce you direct labour to have the things we want and need.In the mean time , work , both hard and smart , is a given.