The other day I received an email from a reader with 10 powerful questions she wanted me to answer. No introduction. No small talk.
Just a list of questions and “Thanks for your time” at the bottom.
Naturally, my first response was, “What?!”
But as I read the questions more carefully, I thought, “I can turn this into an article.” I was truly impressed by the quality of the questions of my reader, Mary.
So I wrote back to thank her for the inspiration. Here are my answers:
I always worked for financial freedom. But I chased the wrong thing. I wanted emotional freedom.
Money doesn’t make you happy. And yet, we need it to live. So what do we do? Try hard to make more money? Or, be content with what we have?
The problem is that both options come with high costs.
We’ve all heard about the research that says you won’t be happier if you earn more than $75K or some other magic figure.
We’ve all heard about these studies by now. And yet, it doesn’t make a bit of an impact on the way we live.
At least, those findings never changed the way I chased money in my life. And neither did it change anyone I personally know.
The problem with these averages is that they are averages. And yet, mindless writers keep quoting this research that says money doesn’t make you happy.
In the midst of challenging times, we often think we’re going through the worst time ever. And when we’re in the middle of adversity, we think it never ends. That’s why we always say things like, “my life is over!”
No, you’re not dramatic. It’s just one of our thinking errors. It’s difficult for us to judge a crisis while we’re in it.
In hindsight, it’s much easier. We can look back and think, “I survived that. I will survive other difficult things in the future.”
But when we face illness, financial problems, or adversity in our relationships, we’re quick to think it’s THE END. And once we get stuck in a negative thinking pattern, we lose motivation.
Accelerated learning is something we should all strive for. But too much advice on the internet promises the impossible:
That stuff only makes us skeptical. That’s because you and I both know that these types of claims are BS—it’s nothing more than cheap clickbait. But why are we still baited by these headlines?
We’re optimists! And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Look, we all know that there’s no such thing as 1,000% growth in a short period of time. We also know that we can’t finish a 300-page book in 30 minutes. Mastery doesn’t work that way. There are no shortcuts.
However, getting good at something is also not totally unattainable. Because like these above extreme claims, there is a counterculture that says it takes 10,000 hours (or more) to master a skill. As you might expect, I’m more on the side of that it takes longer to get good at something.