The Simple Dollar (4 page)

All of us have a story to tell, a story distinct from every other story in the world. I could talk at length about my own story—and I share snapshots of it throughout this book—and perhaps you see things in those snapshots that you recognize in your own life.

For some of us, that distinct story has taken us to a negative place—painful experiences in your past, physical ailments, and other conditions.

Every negative in your life is a positive.
Perhaps you went through an experience in your life so horrible that you’re afraid to mention it. Yet here you are today, still walking forward, reading this book, and figuring out where to go next. Your story has power—the ability to bring about positive change in others, no matter what their background.

Here’s my own truth. I was born with an inactive thyroid and legal blindness in my right eye. When I was four years old, I started having excruciating earaches, which culminated in five different head surgeries, removal of a tumor, and complete deafness in my left ear. As you might imagine, I didn’t fit in real well in junior high with scars on the left side of my head and eyes that would jump around sometimes.

It would be very easy for me to be ashamed of these things and to hide them. I’m not ashamed, and I certainly don’t hide. They’re just part of who I am. Sure, sometimes I can’t hear people who sit on my left side, I can have difficulty seeing at times when I overwork my good eye, and I can gain ten pounds from simply sitting near cookies.

These “problems” don’t mean that I can’t do something. They mean I
can
. I’ve figured out how to overcome these things and keep moving forward in my life, doing the things I want to do. I can’t change the things that have happened to me, but I sure can use the things they have taught me and move forward from here.

If you’ve gone through something difficult and are still here reading this book, that’s not something to be ashamed of. That’s something to be
proud
of. You have the strength of character to survive obstacles that the people around you can scarcely imagine, and your story has the potential to inspire others. Don’t be ashamed—be proud of who you are, the good and the bad.

If you find this to be a difficult struggle, ask for help with it. Talk to your friends, or seek out a therapist who can walk you through things.

Just remember, you’re sitting here right now. You’ve made it to this point. That means you’re strong.

Quite often, people assume that if you’re rich, you must be happy. In truth, the idea that riches bring happiness is an optical illusion, an artifact of our natural competitive nature.

Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of Stumbling on Happiness, put it succinctly in a talk in 2004: “[A]fter basic needs are met, there isn’t much ‘marginal utility’ to increased wealth. In other words, the difference between a guy who makes $15,000 and a guy who makes $40,000 is much bigger than the difference between the guy who makes $100,000 and the guy who makes $1,000,000. […] [O]nce basic needs are met, further wealth doesn’t seem to predict further happiness. So the relationship between money and happiness is complicated, and definitely not linear. If it were linear, then billionaires would
be a thousand times happier than millionaires, who would be a hundred times happier than professors. That clearly isn’t the case. On the other hand, social relationships are a powerful predictor of happiness—much more so than money is.”
¹

Gretchen Rubin, author of
The Happiness Project
, points to several other key factors for happiness. “Long, deep relationships contribute mightily to happiness. When people move around a lot, it becomes more challenging to have these kinds of relationships. Feeling out of control is a big happiness drag, and if people feel out of control because of the economy, or because of job or family pressures, that makes it harder to be happy. People also are happier when they have a certain amount of fun in their lives—absence of pain isn’t enough, though it’s a good start! It’s easier to feel happy when you’re feeling energetic, so doing things that contribute to energy—having fun, getting exercise, going outside, getting enough sleep—will make it easier to feel happy.”
²

In short, happiness doesn’t revolve around financial success. Instead, it revolves around simple elements that we can all foster in our lives: building positive relationships with other people, cultivating low-pressure situations and minimizing high-pressure ones, and improving our personal energy level all contribute heavily to a personal sense of happiness. These things together also produce financial and career health as
well. Throughout the rest of this book, we’ll cultivate these ideas, see how they contribute both to personal happiness and personal financial growth, and also identify how they reinforce each other to build a happier life without constantly chasing the riches that bring a mythical happiness.

Finding happiness in the modern world can be difficult. Our lives contain a mix of happiness and toxicity, and untangling that Gordian knot can be a real challenge. Here are five simple ways you can take control of your life and put yourself on a sustainably happier path. Doing this will set the foundation for taking on more difficult challenges and living your dreams:

1. Make a list of the things that make you happy.
   Don’t include the things that are
   supposed
   to make you happy—the things you think should make you happy but don’t truly fulfill you. Instead, just watch your life for the things that really bring about happiness and make you feel good. Keep a notebook with you and jot down everything that brings you significant happiness over the course of a week. Walk through your home and the places you regularly visit and look for things that bring happiness.
   
2. At the same time, make a list of the things that make you unhappy.
   Again, pay attention to your true feelings. Things that you believe should make you happy are sometimes the things that are leading toward unhappiness. Keep this list for a week.
   
3. Go through your list of things that make you unhappy and build a to-do list from it.
   For each item, think of an action you can take to eliminate the source of that unhappiness. Perhaps you’re made unhappy by a strained relationship—why not make a phone call to make it better? If someone at work is making you unhappy, resolve to find ways to avoid that person or perhaps pledge to face this person head-on. If possessions make you unhappy, pledge to sell them. If aspects of yourself make you unhappy, look into what it would take to change them—an exercise plan, a dietary change, or a set of coursework, perhaps.
   
4. Let a month pass; then trim down the happiness list to the two to five things that fill you with the most happiness.
   They might be things, people, or activities—whatever they are, these are the things that filled you with happiness in the moment
   and
   fill you with happiness on later reflection. These things point straight toward the core of what makes you happy.
   
5. Spend a week cultivating that happiness.
   Invest your energy in activities that revolve around the happiness. Avoid spending money or energy on activities and things that aren’t on that short list of things that make you happy. This might mean that you turn off the television for a week (because it leaves you indifferent) and instead play with your children every evening (because you feel happy when you do this). Engage in activities that are known to bring happiness along the way, such as moderate exercise and positive relationships with others. Then, after that week, reflect on whether the week was significantly more fulfilling than the way you normally spend your time.
   

In the end, the message is simple:
Be yourself
. Quite often, unhappiness comes from the areas where we’re restricting our true selves for some reason, and happiness arrives when we let our true self shine through.

Life hands you unexpected things all the time. Your car breaks down. You or your spouse get pregnant unexpectedly. A new person enters the picture and sweeps you off your feet. You get into an accident. An old college friend looks you up and asks you to throw in with his new startup. A loved one suddenly passes away. You get sick. Your spouse tells you that the marriage is over and walks out the door. You’re handed a pink slip. A lot happens.

Sometimes those events are positive. You get a great new job. A child comes along at the exact point when you’re emotionally ready for it. You fall in love and move clear across the country to follow that passion.

Your life is populated by unexpected events—things that can overwhelm you when they happen. One of the most amazing natural gifts as human beings is that you’re able to take these unexpected events, process them for a while, figure out some kind of plan to deal with them, and before long, that completely unexpected event becomes a normal part of your life. You deal with it.

Here’s the problem: You may be able to adjust emotionally, but you’re often completely unprepared financially for those unexpected events.

A new lover invites you to move to Toronto. Is it the right thing to do? You can tap your friends for advice—and often that’s incredibly useful—but the unexpected act puts you on unstable financial ground.

If that college friend pops out of nowhere and asks you to join that startup, can you? Will you be able to offer anything valuable to make the startup succeed? Do you have the resources to truly chase that opportunity in front of you? Can you handle what life throws at you?

Most of us see our lives as fairly predictable. We fill our days with similar activities and, for many of us, a life routine different than the one we have now is something that’s an almost-forgotten memory.

In Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book,
The Black Swan
, which discusses unpredictable events and how we handle them, he identifies this part of human nature as the narrative fallacy. “The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an
arrow of relationship
, upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them
make more sense.
Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our
impression of understanding.”
¹

To put it simply, our lives are chock full of random events of all kinds, but our minds, to make some sense of our lives, attempt to construct a story that makes it all make sense. The problem with this is that quite often, random events don’t make any sense at all—they just happen.

That’s why, when we look back at the past, we see something very orderly. We’ve created a very nice story that explains all the unexpected things that have happened to us. We come up with explanations for events that simply happen as a matter of chance.

Because of this, we often believe that our lives are less random than they actually are, and we fail to prepare for the unexpected events that are coming in the future. Our long-term plans, after all, rarely account for falling head over heels in love after a chance encounter, an offer to join a hot startup, or a serious car accident. But these things happen all the time.

Surprisingly often, the unexpected events in our lives are positive ones. We run into an old friend. A former coworker contacts us with an intriguing professional opportunity. We bump into someone interesting and find ourselves with a date. We’re swept off our feet by an exciting new interest. We see a box of valuable vintage video games at a yard sale. A challenging new project comes up at work—it involves a big risk but a huge reward. Unexpected positive events happen constantly—and they cause tremors throughout our lives.

However, without some preparation, we’re unable to take advantage of these opportunities. We can’t make a radical career shift because we have too many bills and not enough cash in the bank. We can’t take advantage of that incredible bargain because we’re running on empty due to living paycheck to paycheck. We’re afraid to jump on the challenging new project because it risks failure, which would deplete the bonus we “need.”

As a result, we lose out on those opportunities. We grow less confident and more tied to the routine of our life today—one that we’re unhappy with in some ways. We look for ways to soothe that unhappiness. Marketing is always there to give us suggestions on how to make it better with some of our hard-earned dollars that, in the end, makes the problem even worse.