Choice plays a very important role at different phases of life to set our destiny. It depends on us whether we need to improve our financial life or continue the current struggling life.
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Symptom or Cause?
If poorness were an illness, take a guess as to its cause. Of course, lack of money. But is that a cause or a symptom of the underlying problem? Lack of education? Lack of opportunity, positive role models, or determination? Those are all symptoms. If you retrace poverty’s footprints you will find that poorness starts at the exact same place: choice. The leading cause of poorness is poor choices.
If your car’s fuel tank had a small leak, how would you fix it? The symptomatic solver would increase his trips to the gas station to ensure a steady inflow of fuel. The problematic solver plugs up the hole. One addresses the symptom (the gas tank leaks), while the other addresses the problem (there’s a hole in the gas tank). While adding fuel addresses the symptom, it doesn’t solve the problem.
How does this relate to success and choices?
Simple: If you aren’t where you want to be, the problem is your choices.
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It’s Not About One Choice
Your circumstances are the symptoms of those choices. For example, everyone loves success quotes. Here are two:
‘The will to persevere is often the difference between failure and success.’
‘Success means having the courage, the determination, and the will to become the person you believe you were meant to be.’
The problem with these quotes is they’re ambiguous to the real issue.
The first quote deals with perseverance. How do you persevere? You react from conscious choice. Not just one choice but hundreds, perhaps thousands. You cannot choose to persevere with one choice. You cannot wake up one day and say, “Oh, today I will choose to persevere.” It must happen every day, not just once! Perseverance is woven by many choices that fabricate lifestyle. If you quit after two tries, have you persevered? Can you claim perseverance after one failure?
Likewise, the second quote suffers from the same problem. Determination is not a solitary choice but thousands of them. You cannot decide to be determined; it must occur repeatedly and with commitment.
It isn’t one choice but hundreds. And when you line a string of choices together, they create your process, and your process will create your lifestyle. Lifestyle choices will make you a millionaire.
Choice and You
There’s a big chasm between thinking wealth and choosing wealth. You can choose to align your life with greater purpose or choose to let life live you. You can choose to believe these theories or choose not to. The common denominator is CHOICE and YOU.
Your steering wheel (choice) is the most powerful control you have in your life. People don’t choose to be poor. They make poor decisions that slowly assemble into a poorness puzzle. Retrace the footprints to poverty and it happens slowly, systematically, and methodically, under a steady diet of poor choices.
- The choice to cheat on your exams or study.
- The choice to lie or to be honest.
- The choice to drive without insurance.
- The choice to befriend bad people over good people.
- The choice to watch TV or read a book.
- The choice to drive 105 mph in a 55 mph zone.
- The choice to overindulge in food or liquor.
- The choice to believe in people with no track record.
- The choice to buy on credit.
- The choice to hire a contractor without a background check.
- The choice to play video games 30 hours a week.
- The choice to go into business with incompetent partners.
A Fastlane millionaire by age 28, Andre has everything: money, a beautiful wife, a healthy baby, and seven restaurants scattered across the Five Boroughs. Andre is on top of the world and feels invincible. One Friday night after a few drinks to celebrate his night manager’s birthday, Andre drives home sloppy drunk. He chooses to think, “I’m OK.” On his way home he gets into an accident and kills a family of four. Andre is arrested for drunk driving and charged with manslaughter. After his conviction, he spends the next 11 years of his life in prison. He loses his business and his family.
Andre’s life forever changed because of multiple treasonous choices. The choice to drink. The choice to drive. The choice to think, “I’m OK.” The series of choices are plentiful, his exit strategy is clear. He doesn’t choose wisely.
Your life’s steering wheel is a dangerous weapon. Three inches is all it takes. Jerk your life’s wheel three tiny inches while speeding and you can steer your life onto a path of no return, or worse, smack into a concrete wall. Like an automobile’s steering wheel, your choices are super-sensitive. Unfortunately, treasonous roads always have a green light. People drown in the misery of their own choices while neglecting to acknowledge they are the cause.
The Butterfly Effect
Can you make a choice this instant that can forever alter the trajectory of your future? You can, and it can be the difference between poverty and wealth.
When you make minor permutations (choices) that deviate from your initial conditions, profound effects transpire over time.
Think of it like a golf club striking a golf ball.
When the clubface hits the ball square, the ball goes straight and heads toward the hole. But when the clubface has rotated a fraction of one degree, the ball’s trajectory lands far off course. At impact, the divergence is minor, but as the ball travels further it widens and widens until the gap is so large that getting back on track is nearly impossible. A bad choice can set your trajectory off by only one degree today, but over years the error is magnified.
Choices have this type of divergence over time and it’s called “impact differential.” When your choices are extrapolated throughout the years, the divergence widens. The divergence can be either positive or negative.
Recognize that every day you make decisions that will ripple through the years. Question is, will your choice ripple to happiness and wealth? Or depression and poverty?
Way Ahead
So make a better choice to improve your financial life. Once you decide to improve with deep faith, your mind is there to guide you, just listen to it. But be sure that you are not having contradictory thoughts about money, otherwise, you will be at the same place, where you are right now.
When your health is not well, then what do you do? You simply visit a doctor (expert), take medicine, and then get fit.
But when your financial condition is not well, then what do you do? Many a time not much? Even you avoid discussion on this topic among others and you keep on struggling. You think that you are the expert in managing money, but you are not.
Earning money & managing it well is also a skill and each skill can be mastered by increasing the domain knowledge of that.
e.g. if your investments are not giving good returns, go into the detail, find out the cause & then take actions to improve the situation. If you go into the detail, definitely you will find the causes to correct and then make a better choice. Being rich a right!
(Excerpts are inspired from one of my favorite books, The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco)
“Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.” – Zig Ziglar
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