Hello Forevercashers! It’s that time again: Forever Cash FRIDAY! Woot woot!
Today I want to set a challenge for you: find your “reason why”.
Everyone needs a Reason Why they should change what they are doing right now. I hope I have shown you that if you follow the conventional wisdom given to you by the companies whose incentives are exactly opposite to yours, you are being screwed. You are being milked for your money. They are getting rich while you are stagnating. That should make you mad and give you some power to change things.
Without a reason, however, most people won’t do anything.
Do you know anyone who is overweight and sick, knows it, and yet does nothing to change it? Then, one day he has a heart attack, or one of their loved ones does, and overnight, he changes his ways and starts slimming down, starts running, and most importantly, keeps it up until he is in great shape. What made the difference? Why did it take a heart attack to change his behavior? The answer is leverage. Earlier I talked about good and bad debt and how leverage can be used in your favor or against you. A why is a different kind of non-monetary leverage you can use in your favor. The moment that person looked death in the eye, he realized that the price he was paying for his behavior was his own life. That was finally a powerful enough reason to change. He became scared to the core, and it created leverage to make him change his ways forever.
People do anything only for one of two reasons. They either want to get away from pain, or they want to get toward pleasure. When the person in the prior example realized that the bad habits of overeating or smoking were creating heart-attack-level pain, he was suddenly willing to do whatever it takes to get away from that pain. Before that, food was associated with pleasure, and, while there was some pain from being sick or obese, the pleasure of eating exceeded the pain of being sick. Now things are different. Eating poorly now is associated with pain and death, and eating healthily is associated with living. If that association was made strongly enough, the person will do anything to get away from that acute pain. If consequences are drastic enough, the new behavior will even stick long term.
But it doesn’t have to be a heart attack that might make such a person change. It might be the birth of a child, and the realization (the pain) that he/she might never see that person grow up if he/she doesn’t change those eating habits. Wanting to see the child grow up is something that has tremendous positive association, something that means tremendous pleasure. Therefore, if the promise of pleasure is big enough, it also can trigger a dramatic and lasting change in behavior. But it only works if the person is aware of the reason why they need to change their behavior and see the consequences of their action or inaction—be it positive or negative.
So the why is the driving force behind lasting change and lasting success. This applies to every part of life, including your financial life. If you have a big enough reason why you need to be financially secure, independent, free and Forever Cash wealthy in exactly eighteen months or three years or five years from now, and if that reason is big enough, you will do what is needed to get there. The steps are easy, but many people don’t do them because they don’t have a Reason Why.
I can’t overestimate the power of what I just wrote. For example, watch this video and tell me your heart doesn’t go out to this guy.
In case you can’t see the video, it is a news story from a few years back about a sick man with no job and no options. He robbed a bank for $1 in order to go to jail to get medical treatment. He felt like that was his only option.
Obviously I’m not encouraging anyone to abuse the system like he did, but the fact is that none of us want to find ourselves in a desperate situation like he did. That can be a reason why.
So your homework this weekend: find your reason “why”. What are your running away from, and what are you running towards?