If you’re  not sure of what you like about money other than pleasure and avoidance  of pain, look at what you’re willing to do for the money — as in, the  work itself. That is what you really value.

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If the work you’re willing to do is sleep around until you nail a wealthy spouse, you’re in the world’s oldest profession.

If  you’re willing to study to get multiple school degrees for the money,  you’re a professional student or scholar. You value ideas over  execution.

If  you’re willing to withstand failure and humiliation over and over again  while trying to create a product or service, you’re an entrepreneur.

If  you’re willing to practice your instrument every day for hours on end  and face the possibility of rejection during a performance, you’re a  musician.

You are what you’re willing to do for your money.
The money will never change that."

https://medium.com/personal-growth/the-hidden-sign-that-you-have-a-poor-persons-mindset-13203d676a4c

 

You May Have A Poor Person’s Mindset And Not Know It

" Have you  ever noticed that the poorest, most miserable people you know tend to be  buyers of lottery tickets? C’mon lucky numbers 3, 10, 16, 22, 4, 50.I’m  sure there’s a smart-sounding statistic somewhere lodged in a research  report by some well-meaning PhD student who had to get funding from the  So-And-So Foundation to prove his or her point, but I digress.The correlation is common enough that I’ll assume you know what I mean.Big dreamers tend to be the ones who never seem to be able to get their dreams off the ground.People who view themselves as great lovers tend to be the ones left at the altars.And the most educated people in the world tend to be the dumbest ones in the room. Not always, but way often.“But  Ms. Hwangbo, whatever your last name is, what on God’s green earth does  this have to do with money?” you may be asking. It would be a fair  question.After all, you are  reading this article because you’re pissed that someone may be raining  on your grand financial plans, right? I applaud you for seeking the  truth, despite this fact. It’s a great quality. In fact, valuing truth  no matter what may be one of life’s most useful qualities ever.The big problem is this. We try too hard with our money.We  overcompensate for everything with money. We can’t stand that we’re  insecure about ourselves. We feel like we can never do as well as the  latest who’s-it on Instagram, which leads us to make a series of small  financial mistakes that snowball over time.Back  in your parents’ day, the people to beat were on TV instead of on  social media, or they were your next door neighbors, the Joneses. The  underlying problem was the same. The negative comparison bias caused  people to take out mortgages they couldn’t afford, play in the stock  market when they couldn’t take the losses, and run up their credit  cards.Instead  of just being okay with feeling inferior, we do all the wrong things  with our money in order to convince ourselves that we’re better than  okay. And when our insecurity comes calling again which it always does,  we do whatever we’re doing that’s taking us the wrong direction and do  it more.In  the case of people who buy lottery tickets every week, instead of  changing how they think about money and using it in more productive  ways, they buy more tickets. Every purchase feels like a last ditch  effort, which fuels more last ditch financial efforts because by  definition last ditch efforts rarely work. This inevitably creates a  financially desperate situation, and kaboom. It’s sad. Lots of lives go  up in smoke this way. Not by buying lottery tickets per se, but by  taking on more student loans, leasing expensive cars, and buying big  houses.Maybe  this is starting to sound a bit too existential. Isn’t life though?  Since we developed this newer part of our brain, we can overthink  ourselves right out of relevance, which may be why our average brain  size is now shrinking, but again, I digress.

You Don’t Want The Right Thing

Minimalism’s  pretty hot right now. The coolest people you know are subscribing to a  financially minimalist lifestyle, which I would applaud if it weren’t  another form of trying too hard.Minimalism unfortunately feels like a way of fitting in. Another mantra to live up to.People  say they want a financially successful life, but what they really mean  is that they want the pleasure and ease of having it without the pain of  creating it. It’s the most common goal ever.Their  highest value when it comes to money is therefore pleasure. Pleasure,  unfortunately for everyone pursuing money for this reason, is a pretty  low quality human value. Even if you attain it, your happy feelings come  and go and never really accumulate.Apes  and cats value pleasure too. Pursuing pleasure rarely makes  higher-functioning human beings happy. You can try to use your money to  become a happy person this way, but it probably won’t work. You have  this newer part of your brain as I mentioned before, that needs  something deeper to be satisfied.Fear  is the killer of all pleasure, so in order to reach and sustain as much  pleasure from money as possible, you have to do dick moves like not  paying the doorman a tip or demanding that the world give you everything  for free even though it really chaps your hide that you yourself don’t  make enough money from other people to make a decent living.Welcome  to the millennial economic paradigm where it sucks for everyone just a  little bit more. Sorry to those millennials who do the opposite. You  guys are my heroes.Remember that old saying? Nothing in life is free? Well, you’re in denial of it. It’s what you’re not  willing to pay for that makes wealth elusive to you. Either with time  (sustained, difficult effort) or with more money (what those Wall Street  bastards call “investment”). Bad long-term plan.You  want the life of the rich before becoming the kind of person who  becomes rich. By rich, I also mean being compassionate and hard-working,  commensurate with the dollars earned.Nope,  the real problem isn’t your lack of money. Your problem is that you’re  in the market for a hack. You want the outcome of financial success  without the process. You want the yacht, the Ferrari, the fabulous  Instagram life, but no thank you to the work and the boring minute  stuff. You’ve got a poor person’s mindset.Pleasure  is never long-lasting and pain is inevitable, so if you think about it  that way, you’re sort of screwed. You want the wrong things out of your  money. You want it to relieve your pain, instead of providing the means  to some other value.

The Only Way To Become Rich And Happy

You  have to figure out what you value more highly than seeking pleasure and  ease when it comes to your money. You have to value something better.  What might that be?Ever get the feeling when you read stories about mega-successful and financially wealthy people that:a) They never did anything for the money, andb)  They would have done whatever they did that made them successful  anyway, even if they had never seen the kind of success they did?The  difference between them and people with a poor person’s mindset is  exactly that. Successful people value the process and the work itself  over the outcome, the party, the accolades, and the money. In some way, they value the pain.  It’s a better pain to build a business out of their art than say, the  pain one gets from passing a kidney stone. The pain from doing their  work and failing over and over again is meaningful pain, and always  worth going through.They  don’t try to avoid discomfort and uncertainty because frankly, avoiding  these things is not what makes a great freakin’ wealthy life.There  are things in your own life, whether you’ve identified them or not,  that are worth the pain, that you’d be willing to go through a ton of  suffering for, and still come out the other side with a vaguely goofy  smile on your face. If you don’t know what these things are, hoping that  money will solve your “purpose” problem is pretty darned unlikely to  succeed.You’ll never have enough money.

Value What You’re Willing To Do For The Money, Not The Money Itself

Let  me repeat that. If you’re not sure of what you like about money other  than pleasure and avoidance of pain, look at what you’re willing to do  for the money — as in, the work itself. That is what you really value.If the work you’re willing to do is sleep around until you nail a wealthy spouse, you’re in the world’s oldest profession.If  you’re willing to study to get multiple school degrees for the money,  you’re a professional student or scholar. You value ideas over  execution.If  you’re willing to withstand failure and humiliation over and over again  while trying to create a product or service, you’re an entrepreneur.If  you’re willing to practice your instrument every day for hours on end  and face the possibility of rejection during a performance, you’re a  musician.You are what you’re willing to do for your money. The money will never change that.Now  don’t get me wrong. Not all values are equal. Some values are healthier  for reinforcing self-worth and confidence than others and therefore  better values. Your job is to pick the ones that reinforce the quality  of life you’re trying to build, and pick them well.But  please, stop going around thinking that what you want is the money.  You’ll only attract people whose highest value is to take it from you.

Try this 10 minute exercise

Sit down with a pen and piece of paper tonight, and think about what you might be willing to take some major pain for.It  doesn’t have to be what you do for a living, or even anything you  believe you do well yet. It doesn’t even have to be one thing. It could  be multiple things.Ask  yourself what you do already or have done in the past that you’re  pretty sure no amount of suffering could keep you from doing if you gave  yourself permission. Improvement in doing would be enough to keep doing  it.Keep the money ‘what-ifs’ out of your mental equation. Baby steps. "

Stay Tuned, for MORE - @gloryb