SATURDAY, 24 NOVEMBER 2018
I just read an article on currency trading. It’s about a strategy where you spend a few minutes every day looking at the markets, and with just one or two transactions you can produce enough profit to live on. After a few minutes I couldn’t take it anymore: “Hundreds of points profit a month?! And you just look at the market a few times a day?! Could it be that there are people who make money so easily?!
Remember: This eruption came after I recently realised that I had been carrying a particular blueprint in my head for years that dictated it had to be difficult to make money, that I even had to expect to struggle. Also remember that I have confronted this programming, and have already started deactivating it.
The truth is, the idea that some people make huge amounts of money without having to work very hard (to put it mildly), hits you between the eyebrows. You don’t want to hear it. You hear a voice that murmurs from deep inside you, “No … it can’t be …” You think of farm workers hunched over working in the sun for decades, of factory workers doing boring work for decades, of office workers who feel like they’re going to go mad after five years of listening to the rumble of the air conditioning system and the chattering of people sitting in the cubicle next to them trying to sell something on the phone … and then they hunker down and do it for another two or three decades.
And yet we all know there are people who generate millions through the buying and selling of products or property, or businesses or companies. There are entertainers who make millions by singing songs that other people write for them. And there are sports stars who earn loads of cash by posing with a razor for the camera and smiling broadly (and then shaving with a better quality razor).
I think the problem is that most people write these examples off as exceptions to the rule. I think most people expect ordinary people like them to earn their bread and butter in the sweat of their brow (or with an office’s air-conditioning system rumbling in the background). And because most people expect this to be the reality, they take actions to create and maintain this reality.
An cynical reader might ask, “What is ‘easy’?”
Of course, people’s ideas about what is easy differ. What I find easy is perhaps impossible for someone else, and vice versa. Many people also associate easy money with criminal activity.
If you’re sceptical about the possibility of making more money than you are making right now by working fewer hours, I suggest the following test question: Are you prepared to put $1000 on the table in a bet that there are no “ordinary” people who channel large amounts of money to their bank accounts in legal ways that you won’t regard as hard labour? Are you willing to take such a bet? If not, your position that it must be difficult to make money, that you even have to struggle, that the norm is that you have to spend at least forty hours a week “at work”, is not the real truth, but is simply how you were programmed. And how you choose to keep believing, because the alternative might require some serious introspection on your part.
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