TRANSCRIPT
How to prosper.
I remember once I had a friend. This is like 20 years ago. I had a friend who got an MBA, is rich, etcetera, and he was trying to convince me to invest my money in the stock market and how it’s really the smart way to go. Incidentally, he’s very wealthy now, quite rich. And would I like to be that? In some ways, sure. Who wouldn’t rather have money? Money, a lot of money, should certainly can make things nicer in a lot of ways. But I learned early on that investing wasn’t for me. Investing was like gambling, and it just stressed me out.
Now, why do I really not recommend investing? The main reason for me that I don’t recommend investing is that I think it’s a distraction from the real work, from the real investing. And this is what I told my friend when he was trying to convince me to invest my money in the stock market because I had saved a little bit. What I told him was that I do invest. I invest in myself. I invest in my emotional growth. I invest in my self-knowledge. I invest in studying my childhood and getting more in touch with who I really was back then. And I invest in working out my traumas. I invest in healing. I invest in growing.
I remember we were talking on the telephone, but I could just feel he faded away when I said that. No surprise, because that’s exactly what he wasn’t doing. Interestingly, his personal life soon fell into complete shambles with the destruction of several of the people who he was responsible for, and that was his fault. Why? Because he was focusing totally outside himself. He wasn’t focusing on healing himself. Meanwhile, I kept growing and growing and growing and improving as a person, starting deep within.
So how did I invest in myself? Well, for starters, the money I had, I didn’t want to have to think about it. I liked to work, and I saved anything extra that I had. I lived quite a bit below my means. That’s also been another real strategy of mine to prosper. I want to live beneath my means, save some money, so I have enough time and energy to really be able to focus my energy where my priority lives. And my priority isn’t on taking fancy vacations. It’s not on taking cruises. It’s not on going out to fancy meals. It’s not on going out and spending lots of money at bars and whatever. It’s having a little bit of extra money so I know that if I don’t need to work for a while or I don’t want to work for a while, I can actually just relax and be able to focus and put my energy into this really deep and painful stuff that I’ve been looking at.
So that I can really change the cycle of my life, change the cycle of being traumatized instead toward healing myself. And what I found is a lot of times very hard, stressful work does not facilitate me really growing. And a lot of times focusing on making money, which I love making money when I can do it, when I have the energy for it, but really my real purpose in life is not to make a lot of money and get rich. My purpose is to keep growing.
It takes a lot of time to analyze my dreams, to write in my journal, to really think and spend a lot of mental energy thinking about what I went through and making sense of it, and sharing it with people, and spending time talking with other people about what I’ve gone through and listening to what they’ve gone through and trying to make sense of the world. Doing a lot of reading on trauma and also finding out from other people in my life, in my history, what I went through. Doing all these different things that for me self-therapy entails. Also getting a good night’s sleep every night, being able to do a lot of relaxation, have a lot of good, clean, not too expensive fun. All these things have led me to really prosper in my life in a way that I think is actually a lot more unusual than prospering financially.
There’s a lot of people out there who figured out the game, who figured out how to go out and make lots of money and invest lots of money and get rich. And as much as that’s not my destiny, my destiny so far has been to prosper within, to really be much more of a healed and healthy person. When I look around the world, it’s like it’s not a lot of really healthy companions that I have out there, not a lot of really healthy peers, and certainly not a lot of them, especially who have much money. Most of them have actually quite a bit less.
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