Your ability to make + keep money is tied to your level of personal growth/development.
I think directly, how both are connected is mainly with having a handle on your emotions and not allowing them to influence how you make decisions and take action, or not. Much of the game of life is mental, arguably one of the main sources to solve for to achieve lasting success.
Indirectly, I'm leaning more into thinking it's about who you become in the process, in that the expanded capacity to handle complexity, uncertainty, and delayed gratification that comes with genuine personal development.
Also, discovered this statement recently that wealth is what you keep out of the totality of what you've made. My mind gave a strong nod as though it is something it has known all along, when in reality this was the first time I could pinpoint this truth so clearly from lived experience.
The distinction matters because making money and keeping money require different skill sets.
Making money entails an aggression, risk-taking, and opportunism. Keeping money demands patience, discipline, and the ability to resist your own impulses.
Both require emotional mastery, however test different aspects of it.
Another ongoing process
Coming back to personal growth, the territory itself can be a vague process to work on. You'll have to look inside and discover all these seemingly undesirable things about yourself and come up with ways to solve them, hopefully, directly, instead of indirectly.
Direct work is confronting the root cause, e.g examining why you self-sabotage or where your scarcity mindset originated.
Indirect work is treating symptoms like starting more side hustles when the problem is that you impulsively spend what you earn.
Against the backdrop of having to live one's life with all the changing circumstances happening in real time, I can understand the logic behind why most people avoid this inner work altogether. It's uncomfortable and easier to blame external circumstances/chase the next opportunity and keep convincing yourself you just need to make moar.
I mean, we've all seen how greed, which is an indirect manifestation of fear, gets hold on people, what it makes them do to the point of destroying what they've built for marginal gains they didn't even need.
Greed whispers that you will finally feel secure when you have more. That "more" threshold keeps moving because the fear underneath never gets addressed. Someone with unresolved scarcity will feel poor at any income level.
Fear, on the other hand, is the dragon that never really dies. You just get better at recognizing and understanding its patterns, then choosing not to let it pilot your decisions.
New lens
For my part, I'm doubling down on personal growth as the most practical financial strategy available and beyond some abstract self-improvement project.
An example here is developing emotional resilience to weather market downturns and dry spells without panic-selling my position, both financial or otherwise.
It is said that the people who consistently make and keep wealth aren't necessarily smarter or luckier but just that they've developed a higher tolerance for emotional discomfort and a clearer understanding of their own psychology. A game within the game.
Thanks for reading!! Share your thoughts below on the comments.
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