The Simple Dollar (23 page)

Kim Bentz, an administrator in Colorado Springs, Colorado, reflects on making a similar choice. “Up until the time I was about 26, I thought that you were as happy as the personality you were born with or that circumstances allowed you to be. Some people had won the lottery in both of those, having naturally sunny dispositions and having very little trouble in their lives, and some of us were naturally morose, and circumstances and tragedies conspired to keep us that way.

“Naturally I resented happy people, thinking that they had simply won life’s lottery and, but for a twist of fate, that could have been me. Once I was told it was a choice, I began to study happy people. What I found was truly eye-opening. Happy people have no fewer problems than I or anyone else, but they were making a conscious choice to be happy anyway. If they could choose, so could I. The
habit
of unhappiness was deeply ingrained, so it took years for me to really learn how to make that choice.”
⁴

All of us have barriers in our lives that keep us from accomplishing the things we want and keep us from making profound changes in our lives. Overcoming those barriers is often the real challenge in the process of turning our financial, personal, and professional state around. Here are five steps you can take toward identifying the barriers in your own life and devising solutions for them:

1. Use the “whys” game for every aspect of your life that makes you unhappy.
   Ignore the things you cannot control. Instead, keep asking “why” until you come up with something that you do have some control over—a personal choice or an ongoing state in your life.
   
2. Use simple passive barriers to your advantage.
   If you want to break the television habit, hide the remote. If you want to break the smoking habit, throw away all the cigarettes. Make it as difficult as possible for you to access the tools you need to continue to engage in the behavior you want to break.
   
3. Dwell on the positive aspects of your life, not the negative ones.
   The negative aspects of your life—the sense that you’re not pretty enough, not smart enough, and not happy enough—are the areas that marketers like to feed on to convince you to buy products you don’t need. Instead, look at the many things you
   do
   have in your life—the friendships, the hobbies, the fulfilling career, the family.
   
4. Stop making promises and focus on actions.
   Instead of making grand pronouncements about where you’re headed, focus on today’s behaviors. What can you do
   today
   to establish a better routine for yourself? Once you have that new behavior in place, use the chain technique to put together strings of consecutive days utilizing that new behavior. Eventually, the behavior will become the norm, and you’ll have achieved the goal without the bluster and hubris.
   
5. Declutter.
   Evaluate the possessions you have and determine which ones contribute real value to your life and which ones do not. Sell the items that don’t have value (netting you a minor windfall, perfect for pushing you into a better financial place) and focus on enjoying the things that do have value while decreasing your maintenance time and also making your home more inviting to others.
   

Most of this book has revolved around making changes in a life that you’re unhappy with. In fact, I assume that you picked up and read this book because you are in fact unhappy with your financial or professional position in life, and you’re seeking answers for a better life.

Most of us, however,
are
happy with much of what goes on in our lives. We have friends and family that we
love and care for and who love and care for us. We have a career that we enjoy. We have hobbies and activities that fill our remaining hours in interesting ways.

Yet something still made you pick up this book. Something is still not quite right in your life. Here are a few potential answers for your conundrum.

When I think back to the summer of 2004, I don’t remember the DVDs I bought or the video games I collected or the new furniture we picked up. Instead, the first thought that comes to mind is sitting on a low bridge with my sister-in-law Rachel. It was a hot summer day, and we had both pulled off our shoes to dangle them in the water—and the water was freezing cold.

When I reflect on the high points in my life, I don’t remember
things
. I remember experiences—the people I was with, the activity I was engaged in, and the place where I was doing it.

When I have conversations with my friends, we rarely talk about the things we have. Instead, we talk about our experiences—the things we’re doing in our lives. We don’t brag about the fact that we use the expensive laundry detergent; instead, we talk about the hike we went on last weekend or the ultimate Frisbee game earlier in the week.

Experiences always trump things. Experiences do not require maintenance. They do not take up space in your home. They stay with you in your heart.

Fill your life with experiences. Chase the things you’ve always dreamed of doing, and leave the things on the store shelves where they belong.

The title of this section is a truism often attributed to Albert Einstein. It speaks to a fundamental truth about the world:
If you want something different out of life, you need to try something different
and change the rules a bit.

If I had not committed to trying something different in my life, you would not be holding this book in your hands today. Instead, my wife and I would likely be buried up to our necks in debt, I’d still be working in a career that stressed me out while dreaming about another career, and our children wouldn’t be getting the attention that they so richly deserve.

If you want to make change, you have to try something different. If you’ve made it this far in the book, you’ve likely had dozens of ideas for how to make change in your life. As you read through these final pages, ask yourself this:
Do I expect change to happen in my life if I don’t actually do some of these things?
Then close the book and get started.

People often tend to resist making changes in their life because they’re afraid of sticking their neck out. Such fears are based on the idea that we’re essentially helpless, like chickens in a henhouse hoping that the fox doesn’t catch us.

In the real world, success is often earned by the person who does make the change in their life to stand out from the pack. If you strive to hide in the crowd, you’ll simply be passed over time and time again until, of course, you become one of the nameless faces included in the latest downsizing. On the other hand, if you choose change, you stick your neck out—and you’re likely to be the first face seen when opportunity comes knocking.

If you simply keep repeating the behaviors of your friends who spend more than they earn, you’ll continue to slip slowly downward in a spiral of debt. On the other hand, if you choose change, you escape that downward spiral and likely retain all of the powerful positive relationships you had before while only eliminating the negative ones that were pulling you down.

Success comes from being different, not from simply repeating the moves of everyone else.

A thirteen-year-old truck sits in our driveway. I’ve driven it for the better part of a decade, and the wear of a dozen Iowa winters is beginning to show on it. There are a few rust spots around the edges and the paint simply doesn’t glisten any more, even after a good washing and waxing. It doesn’t run all that well, either—it desperately needs a new flywheel and, sometime after that, a new transmission.

Throughout our neighborhood, I can see shiny new vehicles parked in front of people’s homes. In fact, I’d say that my truck is perhaps the oldest vehicle on the block.

At one point in my life, this state of affairs would have bothered me. I would feel jealousy toward the beautiful cars owned by our neighbors and wonder if they thought less of me because of my truck.

After having clawed my way back from the brink of financial destruction, though, I see things a bit differently. Each month, the bills for those beautiful cars arrive in their mailboxes. Each month, those families have to make some hard decisions about what they can afford to do. They have to worry about toeing the line at work and jumping at every suggestion from their manager. They have to tell their children that they won’t be going on a memorable family vacation this year—or else they’ll put the whole thing on plastic and have yet another giant bill to fret about.

Yet, when I stroll through my neighborhood and chat with my neighbors, we see that we’re all equals. We’re all struggling through the challenges of everyday life. We all make mistakes, and we all have triumphs.

It doesn’t really matter, in the big scheme of things, what my neighbors think of my car.
It does the job that I want it to do—taking me to the library and helping me run other local errands.

Does it cause my neighbors to treat me differently? It makes a real difference only to a few of them, and those individuals, by virtue of caring so deeply about what car someone else is driving, are inherently negative people anyway, looking for criteria with which to bring someone else down. As we discussed in
Chapter 9
, “Cultivating People and Opportunities,” one of the best financial moves you can make in your own life is to minimize your negative relationships and stop caring what negative people think.

I buy things that have value to
me
, not because I anticipate the look of jealousy on someone else’s face. Such anticipation is pure negativity, because you are attempting to feel better about yourself due to bringing someone else down.

The less you worry about what others think of what you do, the easier it becomes to blaze your own path in the world without the shackles of debt holding you in place.

The preceding quote was popularized by television and radio personality Dave Ramsey, who often uses it to extol the virtues of getting oneself out of debt.
¹

In a much broader sense, however, it represents a key truth about any sort of change we undergo in our lives. Almost always, change feels negative at first. We’re breaking rules. We’re upsetting the expectations others have for us—and the expectations we have for ourselves.

To put it simply, change means choosing to live in a way that’s somehow different than the people around us. We have to make the choice to separate ourselves from what they expect—and what we expect from ourselves—in order to have a chance to touch the dreams we have.

Take me, for example. In my entire circle of friends and family, I knew
no one
that had ever attempted a writing career, let alone a self-employed career of any kind. It was an incredibly difficult choice to make—it took me more than a year to finally make it—and I faced a lot of doubt and resistance from many people in my life.

Looking back, the last two years of my life have been the happiest two years of my life. I made the change for myself, and my life couldn’t be better for it.

Committing to genuine change in one’s life is always an incredibly challenging thing. You have to shatter not only your own ideas, fears, and psychological barriers, but you often have to work through the fears and barriers of others in your life. Here are five final pieces of advice for finding the courage to go your own way:

1. Imagine the worst-case scenario.
   Quite often, the worst-case scenario of attempting change is a simple return to the state you’re at now. If you decide to commit to a new financial life and find later that it doesn’t work, what’s the worst-case scenario? You simply return to the financial state you’re in right now. If you decide to take on new challenges at work, what’s the worst-case scenario? You discover it’s beyond your reach, and you revert back to your old tasks.
   
2. Imagine the best-case scenario.
   What happens if your decision to make a change in your life works well? You’ll wind up in a better life position than the one you find yourself in now. When you pair that best-case scenario with the “worst case”—the way your life is right now—there’s no reason
   not
   to make a sincere attempt at changing your behavior.
   Trying change is much like asking a beautiful, intelligent, and interesting woman out on a date—she might say “no,” but how is that any different than where you are before you asked her? But if she says “yes,” all of your dreams might come true.
   
3. Take change one day at a time.
   It’s easy to jump in over your head, making a number of changes all at once in your life. The problem with that approach is that it compounds the difficulty of each individual change because of the number of routines, rules, and expectations you’re attempting to break all at once. Instead, focus at first on just a change or two, and work on those changes one day at a time. Ask yourself each day what you can do toward achieving your new goal and strive to make those actions a reality.
   
4. Minimize the impact of unexpected events.
   One of the very first changes everyone should make is securing their lives against the impact of an unexpected event. Commit to building up a month or two of living expenses in the bank and set up an automatic transfer each week to begin building toward that goal. Once you have that in place, an unexpected negative turn of events is no longer disastrous in your life, which means that you’re even more open to the positive possibilities of further changes in your life.
   
5. Don’t give up due to a bump in the road.
   We don’t just wake up one morning, decide that we’re going to change a major part of our lives, and then just cruise to victory. There will be missteps and minor failures along the way. Accept that. Don’t give up and undo the good you’ve done over a long period just because of a single mistake or setback.