Your state of mind can make all the difference in the world. If you want to find out how to feel wealthy, feel rich, feel lucky, and be successful you need to think wealthy, lucky, and successful thoughts.
“People don’t need enormous cars, they need respect. They don’t need closets full of clothes, they need to feel attractive and they need excitement and variety and beauty.” - Donella Meadows, ‘Beyond the Limits’.
Here’s an interesting fact: Studies have proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt: money and happiness have NO link. Really!
A recent study confirms that, once over the $25,000-income line, increases in pay produce no appreciable rise in joy, happiness, or life satisfaction.
In other words, once you’re earning enough to meet the bare minimums of existence - some sort of shelter, food, and basic clothing - extra money doesn’t actually make people ANY happier.
People earning $25,000 a year scored as well as, if not better than, those earning six- and seven-figure salaries.
Even the guys at the very top of the money heap – Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg, mega-investor Warren Buffet, and Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates – know it’s true.
In fact, all three of these guys have signed a charter pledging they’ll give away half or more of their fortunes by their death.
Here’s what that says to me: Money isn’t enough.
1. To Feel Wealthy And Rich Meaningful Life is Important (it's NOT always about money).
Even to the guys who are indisputably ‘in a position to know’ – is meaning, respect, fulfilment, and ‘making a difference’.
‘Leading a life of meaning’ would also suffice. Granted, nobody’s claiming that money is ‘unnecessary’. And it’s true that a certain amount of money is necessary for happiness … indeed, for survival.
But it’s not sufficient all on its own – it’s merely a piece of the pie, not the whole cake.
And if a money-hungry bully like Mark Zuckerberg (someone who allegedly stabbed his own friends in the back to claim ownership of Facebook) can decide that ‘money isn’t everything’ then trust me, money isn’t everything to feel wealthy and rich.
Another real-life example: Did you know that Lottery winners often suffer a profound depression in the first four to six weeks after raking in that huge pile of cash?
Why do you think THAT could be? I’ll tell you: it’s because they’ve had their illusions shattered.
They’ve been afforded a peek behind the velvet curtain and they can see, finally, that life as a rich person is just the same as life as an average person only a bit more convenient, in some ways.
And that’s why it can be so horribly depressing. Many people spend entire chunks of their life yearning, ACHING to become rich. And once they do it’s a tremendous anticlimax.
2. Money Feels Horrible If Your Life Has No Meaning.
If your life has no meaning after wasting your precious time, struggling to attain something that, once achieved, every thing feels meaningless.
Look: I’m not trying to convince you that money is horrible. Quite the contrary - money is wonderful, and we should all have as much as we need in order to enjoy life as much as it deserves to be enjoyed.
But to believe that money will make you happy - satisfied, safe, secure, and content with life through and through - is to court unhappiness in the extreme, because it ain’t gonna happen.
As long as you have enough to keep the wolf from the door and to sleep easy at night, YOU’VE GOT ENOUGH.
Of course, it’s one thing to read this in an article, and quite another to actually feel wealthy and feel rich this way deep down.
So let me kick-start your self-realization with a simple fact: You can’t have it all. You can either work very, VERY hard and eventually become affluent (maybe) or you can prioritize time over money, decide you don’t care about getting rich, and enjoy life now, with less money – but more life.
And you’ll be a lot happier – and enjoy your life a lot more, starting right now – if you stop expecting your OWN life to be the exception to the rule also.
It’s like the authors of He’s Just Not That Into You claim: you’re the rule, not the exception to the rule.
So you need to make a choice: do you want time-scarcity and (possible, eventual) money abundance?
Or do you want less money, but more LIFE? A quick fact to sway your decision-making process: by age 40, actuarial tables state that you have just 349,763 hours of life left.
And while you can sometimes find a $40 bill lying on the street, nobody’s ever going to found an extra ten hours of LIFE just lying in the gutter.
3. Time is More Valuable Than Money If You Really Want to Feel Wealthy And Feel Rich.
Yes, it’s true: I am one of the increasing number of people who believe that, once your basic needs are met, time is more valuable than money. I’m in good company by adhering to this value (a poll conducted by the Center for a New American Dream discovered that over half of all Americans would be willing to sacrifice a day’s pay for an extra day of free time.)
And with good cause: because unlike other consumer resources, time is irreplaceable.
The moments you have on this earth are all you will ever have. You can always get more money – more is minted every day – but you have a finite number of precious hours above ground in this world.
And I happen to believe that such a resource is more valuable than anything else there is. So here’s a radical suggestion: maybe there’s more to happiness than just money.
And not just in some airy-fairy ‘let’s paint peace signs on our foreheads and stop shaving our legs’ kind of way but in a very real, visceral, IMMEDIATE sense: your life could be vastly improved with the advent of more time (even at the expense of extra money.)
Let me be more specific. Money is a tool that is best used to fulfil basic needs, and then put aside in favour of pastimes that enrich the life, create meaning, and add value on a spiritual level.
In a more pragmatic sense, here’s what that might look like in real life: Let’s say you earn $3,000 a month working a 40-hour week.
And let’s say your ‘needs’ (rent, utilities, groceries, insurance, transport, debt, and savings) come to $2,000 a month.
That’s $1,000 a month that you are spending valuable time to earn, when you don’t really need it.
If you earn $25 an hour, that’s forty whole hours a month that you could have to do other things – time away from your job, away from the Monday to Friday grind, away from the ‘Life In Hell’ (as cartoonist Matt Groening puts it).
Imagine if you had forty extra hours a month to spend on anything you wanted? Would you rather have $1,000 cash? Or forty beautiful, unmarked, un-refundable hours of your life to spend how you see fit?
4. If You Want to Feel Wealthy And feel Rich Know That The Most Important Thing in Your Life is Your Life.
The most important thing in your life is your life. Each hour of your life is a precious, valuable, irreplaceable commodity.
And most of us are spending so much time working – in jobs that leave us feeling trapped, stressed, unappreciated, and increasingly exhausted – that any surplus of money we DO earn is used to ‘make ourselves feel better’.
We spend the extra money that we’ve exhausted ourselves from earning on nothing more than cheering ourselves up for working so hard in the first place.
It’s a totally nonsensical gerbil wheel of earn-spend-earn-spend … and none of it is actually improving our lives or truly making us feel richer, better, happier, or more valued.
Studs Terkel, author of the book Working, begins his book this way:
‘This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence – to the spirit as well as the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us …’
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5. Why Do We Work So Much?
Why do we continue to spend so many hours at work – earning money to live, but also earning money to spend on video games, unnecessary pairs of pants, candy bars, slot machines, bigger cars, more expensive vacations, flashier Christmas presents, and mindless purchases from eBay?
Modern history and primitive cultures alike place the adequate minimum of working hours for adults to be approximately 3 hours per day.
In hunter-gatherer times, the fruit and vegetables yielded by 1 days’ foraging would last for approximately 3 days. 2 and a half days of hunting would yield enough meat to last for one week.
And the rest of the time would be spent relaxing, playing, visiting, story-telling, sleeping, and taking part in the community.
A couple days’ work, followed by a couple days of R & R. Now compare that to 40 near-continuous hours of work – often in jobs that are less than meaningful, for more than half the population – followed by two short days of shopping, boozing, eating, and hyper-stimulation designed to make up for the lack of interest in the preceding 5 days.
Since the Industrial Revolution (and especially since the Great Depression), our society is increasingly focused on working more, in order to earn more, in order to spend more (often to console ourselves for working so much.)
Leisure time has become about buying instead of being. And what’s almost worse is that the acceptance of a 40-hour week as ‘normal’ is so widespread that anyone working less is labelled ‘lazy’.
I don’t know about you, but as I grow older, I increasingly value my time more than my money.
Granted, I’m fortunate enough to earn an amount sufficient to pay my overheads (including savings) with some to spare and in fact, it’s that ‘some to spare’ that got me to thinking in the first place.
Because I wasn’t spending that ‘spare’ on stuff that would really improve my life in the long run.
I was spending it on new pants, designer Jackets, and watches.
Granted, this is all very fun. It’s a rush to be able to fling money around a little bit.
And it’s certainly wonderful to have ‘more than enough’. But none of that stuff is really improving my life.
I am simply consuming more resources as a way to alleviate my stress over not having enough time to do what would be truly meaningful to me – which is to spend time with my family, and my friends.
And I can’t buy any of that with money. Only with time.
That's how I
6. Here's What s Paramahansa Yogananda Said in His Biography.
As Paramahansa Yogananda says, with less money but more time, I could ‘live in the luxury of literary wealth and have time to do what is meaningful (to me)’.
So 2 years ago I made a decision: I chose time over money. And later I decided to take every Friday to do what is meaningful to me – essentially, to work a 4-day week in order to feel wealthy and feel rich.
And if all goes well, perhaps in the future I’ll cut it down still further to a 3-day week. Yes, I will have less money. But I will have more life.
And who knows what will happen with such a glorious superfluity of time? When you have true leisure time – not just ‘shopping time’ or ‘consuming time’ but true leisure – you have time to think. Your mind and your spirit grow.
You conceive of new ways to improve your self and your life. Your relationships flourish.
(Indeed, this last one is a particularly big deal – it’s been said that modern workers actually have three jobs: paid employment, home life, and repairing the damage caused to their relationships by lack of time.)
Of course, the idea of ‘working less and living more’ isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time. Some people are so throttled by debt or paid so poorly or living so far beyond their means that they need every penny of their 40-hour wages just to keep their head above water.
For such people, deciding to work a 4-day week may not be an option (at least, not yet.)
But everyone – regardless of how much or little they earn - can benefit from taking a look at how they spend their money. There’s a saying that goes,
‘If you want to see what someone’s values are, look at how they spend their time.’ But I say, ‘If you want to see what someone’s values are, look at how they spend their money.’
After all, money is nothing more than an expression of our time (a concept originally pioneered in the bestselling Your Money or Your Life, by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez.)
We spend hours of our life in exchange for dollars. Therefore, each dollar we spend represents a unit of our life.
If you get paid $20 an hour, and you spend $15 on a bottle of wine, you’ve exchanged 45 minutes of your life for that item.
(In fact, it’s more like an hour, because the income tax you pay means you get much less than $20!)
So how you spend your money is how you spend your time – and therefore is a highly reliable indicator of what our priorities are in life.
7. If You Want to Feel Wealthy And Feel Rich Look at Your Spending to See How You Are Spending Your Life.
WARNING: this can come as a nasty shock. Many people honestly believe that they prioritize ‘family and friends’ (or health and fitness, or the pursuit of learning, etc) more than anything.
But if you look at how they spend their dollars – and thus, their lives – an entirely different picture is painted: one of a life being spent in exchange for new clothes, socializing at the bar, makeup, and credit-card repayments for junk never used in the first place.
If you were to pare away everything that you spend money (and your life) on that you don’t really need how much time would you have saved – time that you could spend on what’s truly important to you? Add it up.
Look at your receipts. Look at your bank statements. You know how much you’re paid per hour: how much of your life are you spending on consumables (perhaps simply to console yourself for your lack of true leisure time)?
So here’s what I’m suggesting: do the math. Figure out how much of your LIFE, not just your paycheck, you’re spending on junk you don’t need and then figure out how much of your time – your irreplaceable time – that figure corresponds to.
And then weigh it up. What could be possible if you had more time to spend?
How might your mood, your outlook, your energy and vibration levels, your family, your belief levels, your life change?
If you have the option to take more time for your self now i.e. if your income exceeds your needs then I recommend that you strongly consider exchanging a little (or a lot) of that disposable income for time spent actively participating in your own life.
And if that’s not an option for you yet – but you’d like it to be – then here’s what you can do: whatever you can to make that day come sooner.
This is what that means in real-life terms:
If you are in debt, get out of it. Debt means lack of choice. It means working because you have to.
Once you’re out of debt, start saving. Savings mean choice. Savings mean time. Savings mean options.
You will get out of debt faster and save better if you spend less on stuff. Stop shopping recreationally.
Buy less of what you don’t need. (In fact, here’s an idea: buy nothing that you don’t need.)
Don’t replace stuff unless it’s worn out. (When was the last time you used something until it literally wore out?)
Take better care of what you already own, so it lasts longer.
Take good care of yourself, so you spend less on healthcare.
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