Mind Your Money

CHAPTER-1: Know Thyself

“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” – Socrates

What exactly does it mean? Is it just another fancy quote for your WhatsApp status? Let’s find out.

Once upon a time, in a vast savannah, a lioness was hunting a flock of sheep. She was pregnant, and just when she was about to pounce on the flock, she gave birth to a lion cub. Unfortunately, she died of exhaustion soon after. The newborn lion cub, not knowing what to do, started mingling with the herd of sheep. The mother sheep saw the cub and decided to raise him as her own. The cub grew up bleating like a sheep, eating grass, and playing with the flock. Over the years, he grew into an enormous lion but still mistook itself for a sheep.

However, he started noticing something. Firstly, he always felt that there was something missing. And secondly, the other sheep would constantly ridicule him for being so different. The lion would just stand there and take in all these remarks feeling extremely sad. He felt that he had let down the sheep community by being so different and that he was a disgrace.

One day, an older lion from a far-off jungle saw the herd of sheep and decided to attack it. While attacking, he saw the young lion running along with the other sheep. Curious as to what was happening, the older lion decided to stop chasing the sheep and pursued the young lion instead. He pounced on the young lion and growled, asking him why he was running with the sheep.

The young lion shook in fear and said, “Please don’t eat me. I am just a young sheep. Please let me go!”

Upon hearing this, the older lion growled, “What nonsense! You are not a sheep. You are a lion, just like me!”

He dragged the young lion to a river nearby and asked him to look at his reflection. Upon looking at the reflection, the young lion, much to his own astonishment, realized who he really was; he was not a sheep, he was a mighty lion!

The young lion was so thrilled that he let out a mighty roar. The roar echoed from all corners of the jungle and frightened the living daylights out of all the sheep that were hiding behind the bushes to see what was happening. They all fled away. No longer would the sheep be able to make fun of the lion or even stand close to it for the lion had found its true nature.

When the young lion became self-aware of his limiting beliefs through his reflection, he realized his true nature. He was no longer influenced by his surroundings and developed a bigger vision in alignment with his nature.

Just like the young lion in this story, you might have been brought up in surroundings that were negative, and hence, you accumulated many negative beliefs about yourself and have a substantial need for self-awareness.

To know thyself means to know yourself and to be self-aware. It might sound simple but has a very deep significance. It is your capacity for introspection and the ability to recognize yourself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals.

We usually see ourselves through a mirror. None of us have a perfect awareness of ourselves. It is something that must be intentionally improved upon. It is so much easier to blame other people, but truly great people are those who take sole responsibility and extreme ownership of their life.

Now, you might wonder what the big deal is, and who doesn’t know themselves. But, what if I tell you that according to research conducted on thousands of people over several years by self-awareness researcher and expert Dr. Tasha Eurich, 95% of people think that they are self-aware, but only 10-15% of the people in the whole world really are self-aware.

If your first reaction is that “I must be in the 10-15% category,” that’s normal. However, if like most thoughtful people, your second thought is that “Hmm… Maybe I’m in the 85-90% category of people who are not as self-aware as they think they are,” then also there is nothing to worry about since you are at the right place right now. Becoming self-aware is the first step in having control over your present and your future experiences with anything including your money. It is the starting point on a route to greater happiness and fulfillment.

I will be very clear here to say that even though it is the first step to escaping a life of mediocrity and moving towards prosperity, by no chance it is as simple as it may seem. In fact, it’s the most difficult step like any other first step in a journey of 1000 miles.

“The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.” – Thales.

If you know yourself, you will come to realize that everything that you need is within you. All the power in the world lies within each and every one of us. It is deep within, waiting to be unleashed. We don’t meet or get to know ourselves just by being born. Birth is something that is gifted, a gift that is unknown to us. Being alive, and being an accomplice to what is called life, is incomplete if you never find the reason why you were born in the first place.

People often look for signs from the universe to get their answers. But, what if I tell you that we don’t need the universe to tell us what we really want? Maybe we already know that, deep down. Nothing outside of yourself has any dictation on who you are and how you go about your life. When you know yourself, you will realize that life is so simple and that you control your own destiny. Knowing yourself is the greatest weapon that you can have in your arsenal. Its power lies in your strength when you truly know yourself.

Acknowledge the fact that some people have never met themselves.

Some people will never get to know themselves because their egos won’t let them. The ego is the main threat to self-awareness. So, it’s very simple; if you really want to move ahead in this journey of attracting wealth and success, you must keep your ego aside even before you take your first step.

You must have heard about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs by Abraham Maslow, which puts forward that people are motivated by five basic categories of needs: physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization. This hierarchy ranges from more concrete needs such as food and water to abstract concepts such as self-fulfillment. According to Maslow, when a lower need is met, the next need on the hierarchy becomes our focus of attention. The topmost level is self-actualization, which is the realization that you are doing the right thing. It’s about fulfillment by doing the thing that you were put on the planet to do. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, and a poet must write if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This can only be achieved by knowing yourself and utilizing your own true potential.

But unfortunately, most people never reach this stage and fail to understand its importance, as they spend all their lives fulfilling the needs that are lower in order. Money plays a critical role in determining one’s level in the hierarchy. However, people nowadays are so involved in making money that they ignore the fact that their own behavior and beliefs about money prove to be the biggest roadblock in their journey to financial success.

As an adult, it is quite easy to lose yourself in negative thoughts and to start feeling like a victim by blaming the past. But, that will only keep you stuck in the current reality. To change your reality and find your tribe, you need to start working on your inner self and focus all your energy on becoming self-aware. The older lion in the story was not an external entity, but it lives right inside you. It is your true self, your self-awareness. Allow your awareness to shine light onto all your limiting beliefs and find who you truly are. Those who look outside, dream. And, those who look inside, wake up, and take action to make that dream come true. No matter what you have done and where you have been, the right time is now.

CHAPTER-2: Welcome to the Real World

“Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world, there are only individuals.” – Oscar Wilde

People often tend to forget that life is unpredictable, and nothing on this planet can be taken for granted. There are always going to be ups and downs. And, that is why it is called life. It exists in the form of a sine wave and not a straight line, which symbolizes death.

When we say the real world, we think about practicality and the already occurring things, in contrast to our own ideas, which may seem unrealistic because of certain aspects of our wild fancy imagination.

The real world is reality, rather than an idea, fantasy, or dream. If your dad tells you, “You need to live in the real world,” he probably means that you should be more practical and face your responsibilities.

Since you have already discovered your inner-self and have got an idea of where you stand in the hierarchy of needs, now it’s time to jump onto the next step and enter into the outer world, which is beautiful and real but sometimes a bit cruel. It plays a significant part in everyone’s life since it has got emotions, ecstasy, and enlightenment. It explores the divine feelings of love, trust, and joy but also one can’t set aside the need to handle the feelings of anger, jealousy, and hatred.

Human beings are complicated. Not all are the same, and everyone has their own choices. People with different beliefs follow different lifestyles. But, when a group of people with common beliefs or motives comes together, they form a society.

We all are a part of some or the other society, regardless of whether we have joined of our own will. It is good to be social and respectful and to live in harmony.

But, at the same time, it is also important that the beliefs followed by a group or society are not forcefully imposed on you. And, to ascertain this, you must ask a few questions to challenge your inner beliefs:

Are those beliefs your own or imposed on you through society?

Do they make sense or followed blindly through the generations?

Are these people guiding you in the right direction or are they misled themselves?

You need to understand that being good and being successful are two different aspects of life. Not every successful person is good and not every good person becomes successful. Even your well-wishers, your family, and friends, who must be really good people, may also deny you of your success, not because they have such intention in mind but because they themselves don’t know the path to success.

Being social is the best way to connect with more people and grow your network, but also remember that your network is your net worth.

“You are the average of five people you spend the most time with.” – Jim Rohn

A non-smoker person who mingles around with people who smoke, naturally starts smoking after a few weeks or months. Similarly, if you are friends with growth mindset people who are ambitious can certainly help you grow in life. Ultimately, it’s just a matter of choice. Those five people must be always your choice, and nobody else has got the right to make that choice once you are grown up. Since you are reading this book, you definitely want to become rich and successful, but are you hanging around with already successful people? If not yet, then you must not delay and start to find such people and connect with them.

Recently, I came across a beautiful definition of Life by a French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, which goes “Life is a journey between points B and D, where B stands for Birth and D stands for Death. Between B and D exists C, which is Choice.” The most important thing that determines your success in life is the choices that you make. Your choices determine your environment, which is not just about the people but also the vibes that they create.

“The richest one percent of people grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population,” reveals a new Oxfam report.

People call the rich greedy and always expect them to donate to a cause but fail to realize that they themselves are more selfish by just thinking about their own needs and their own family’s desires without ever doing anything good for others. There is no doubt that to escape a mediocre life, create wealth, and achieve financial success, building the right mindset plays a huge role. You must understand what you have learned about money from society and how it has affected your belief system.

Some common prevailing money beliefs are:

1. Money does not grow on trees.

2. Getting a decent job is enough for leading a happy life.

3. Doing work that you don’t like is okay and totally acceptable.

4. People who get rich are the lucky ones.

5. Extreme wealth changes people and makes them bad.

6. You must play safe and avoid taking risks.

7. Saving is the best way to create wealth.

I am sure that there are plenty more, but these are the very common ones that you, too, must have come across at some point in life. These are embedded in our minds from the very childhood, which seems to be realistic over a period of time. But, are they real in their true sense?

Have you ever found out if the people who preached these so-called life principles and facts are themselves very rich and successful in life?

Most likely not.

Mediocrity kills more dreams than Cancer or Covid.

Mediocrity is a disease more dangerous than deadly diseases like Covid and Cancer. People suffering from serious illnesses and various health issues can be treated and recovered, but people having a mediocre mindset rarely get treated or recover for a better life.

People get so used to living mediocre life that they are unable to realize that it is eating away their dreams. For some, it has affected them to such a deeper level that they are scared to dream. But, unfortunately, they have no idea about what they are going through.

For example, a person can work for 40 hours a week for 40 long years and retire happily with a fixed amount of pension, which can surely give him a sense of security, but it won’t necessarily fulfill his dreams. He might have spent a major part of his life climbing up the corporate ladder to reach a certain respectable position, just because his mind was already tuned for it in advance. And, by no chance, a conditioning of several years can be changed in a few mind-blowing moments. Though it can surely start to…

You would have surely met people who use their life situations as excuses for not being successful. But, in the real world, it’s not that they did not get the opportunity to do something; it’s their attitude of blaming others or the circumstances for their failure. It is obviously the easiest way to justify to others and, at the same time, not to feel bad about themselves.

Do you know what’s the real reason?

It is because of the lack of 2 things:

1. Burning desire to accomplish something remarkable.

2. Courage to take massive actions.

Almost everyone makes an effort, and there is hardly anyone on this planet who doesn’t want a good life, but when they don’t get the expected results after a few attempts, they give up. And, giving up too early can only happen because there was a lack of burning desire to achieve it in the very first place.

Your burning desire is your “why” that pushes you to do something, and when it is not clear, you end up quitting. A dream must be your need, not a wish. And, when you need something so desperately, you can’t afford to live without getting it so easily.

For most people, it is the above-mentioned reason, but by any chance, if you are one of those few who are very clear about your “why” both in your brain and your heart, then it is your stomach, which lacks strength. Yes, you read it right. Your gut lies in your stomach. And, it is no wonder that courage comes from the gut. Anything can be dreamt and learned but can’t be turned into reality without taking the requisite action. The probability of achieving your goals is directly proportional to the level of action you take. Smaller goals need small actions and bigger goals or your life dreams demand from you a massive action.

Often taking massive action is not that easy because it usually involves other people, not just you. In order to not be judged, people get scared to take that massive action. Trusting your gut can be scary. It involves being against the cultural norms such as needing proof, reason, and validation. Developing courage can take time, practice, and learning from experience. Start with smaller low-risk decisions and over a period of time, you can surely work up to taking bigger decisions. Success demands sacrifice and for that, one must be bold enough to come out of their comfort zone.