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Financial Success Is Possible in Almost Any Field, and Lack of Education Doesn’t Have to Hold You Back.
Money’s never driven me. What drives me is freedom, autonomy, and choices. I never want to feel trapped.”
“It’s like being a duck. Calm and unruffled on the surface, but paddling like hell underneath.”
Feel the Fear. Have the Doubts. Go for It Anyway.
because of her commitment to work, called
SECRET 1 Financial Success Is Possible in Almost Any Field, and Lack of Education Doesn’t Have to Hold You Back. SECRET 2 Working Hard Doesn’t Mean Working All the Time. SECRET 3 Focus on Fulfilling Your Values Rather Than Financial Gain. SECRET 4 Loving What You Do Is Much More Important Than What You Do. SECRET 5 Feel the Fear. Have the Doubts. Go for It Anyway. SECRET 6 Think in Terms of Trade-offs, Not Sacrifices, to Find a Workable Equilibrium. SECRET 7 Sometimes You Just Have to Shrug It Off and Have a Good Laugh. SECRET 8 Appreciate Abundance.
“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” To a nail, the whole world is a hammer. To an underearner, the whole world is a limitation.
“This was a for-profit event,” she said with exasperation. “But when I told them my speaking fee, they went into shock. ‘What fee?’ they said. ‘We can’t pay you a fee.’ I told them I couldn’t do it for nothing. It would go back to everything that I’m working to change. It’s not right to ask women to have economic empowerment and not practice it themselves. “I have to have my knowledge valued,”
I once asked a screenwriter friend who’s always helping people polish their scripts why she never takes payment. She sighed deeply. “I guess I don’t have the confidence to charge,” she said, quickly adding, “but I feel lousy about myself always doing things for free.” Continuing to give our time away creates a self-perpetuating downward spiral of diminishing self-worth.
an entrenched underearner openly admitted her prejudices toward the wealthy: “I’m drawn to people who get by with very little. They have greater joy and less encumbrances. They’re so much happier. I saw it growing up, with my friends from wealthy families. All that money looks really good from the outside, but there isn’t much freedom and playfulness.” There was no way these women, with this attitude, would ever let themselves become financially successful.
The irony is that few people work harder or obsess more about money—or rather, the lack of it—than underearners do. As the artist Willem de Kooning once aptly remarked, “The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.”
“Women think you have to make a choice to do good or have money,” said Joline Godfrey. “I never understood that. Why do you have to make the choice?” She always wanted to be a social worker, she told me, but was also determined to make “significant income.” She didn’t see those goals as mutually exclusive. After college, she found a job in the social work department at Polaroid. “In 1977, I was probably the highest-paid social worker in the country,” she said, laughing. “Everyone in my class thought I sold out, that social workers shouldn’t be working in private industry.” That’s not at all
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Underearners unwittingly throw banana peels in their own path in all sorts of ways, like applying for work they’re not qualified for, creating problems with coworkers, procrastinating or leaving projects unfinished, hopping from one job to another, always stopping just short of reaching their goals.
How do you knw if you are hopping for thw right reaoma loke to find what makes you happier or if youre making the right deciaions to stretch yourself.
The common thread is their propensity to be scattered, distracted, and unfocused.
My goal : be less of all of that.
As a rule, underearners believe the world controls them. High earners know they control the world.
“You can’t come from much more of an unsupportive background than mine. My mother thought I was worthless. So did my ex-husband. But I think success has to do more with what we believe and take responsibility for. Everything that happened to me is a choice I made. So when a woman is in a situation where she’s not making what she needs, well, she’s the one who agreed to do the job.”
It's Ok to take a role that pays ess if it's temporary, is teaching me things frokm foundationl bottom level, and i can make more after this training.
There’s a fine line between loyal employee or devoted wife and sacrificial lamb. Underearners haven’t a clue where that line lies. “Do I like my work?” one underearner responded incredulously when I asked the question. “I’m doing this to get my daughter through school. And my husband off my back. Period. Yeah, I feel trapped in a job with diminishing returns. I have stress-related stomach problems. But what can I do?” Subjugating our needs for the sake of others inevitably leads to resentment, depression, burnout, and breakdown.
For Mom
I had to learn to love myself and value myself first before I could give to others. I think that’s the key. When a woman puts her needs first, then everything starts to fall into place, including the money.”
What I'm doing right now is practicijng fully loving myself nd putting myself first so i can give my best in everything else and to everybody else.
“There is no such thing as a problem,” the author Richard Bach assures us, “without a gift for you in its hand.”
I fervently believe that whatever challenges we face are, in truth, our Higher Power, our inner wisdom—whatever you wish to call this inexplicable guiding force in our lives—knocking at our door with a gift in hand.
“We turn to God for help when our foundations are shaking only to learn it is God who is shaking them.” I would never have written my last book or pursued a career in financial education if my first husband hadn’t plundered my trust fund. Once we realize our challenges are purposeful, they need no longer be painful. Once we stop seeing them as stumbling blocks, we can start using them as stepping-stones.
The inner work of wealth means identifying and overcoming those internal barriers that trip us up. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about life, it is this: Nothing changes until we do.
As Einstein once noted, “Our problems can not be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
The mind is the most powerful tool you have for transforming your relationship to money and your ability to earn it. As Buddha observed, “All that we are arises from our thoughts.”
This takes guts, no question about it. The closer you get to achieving your goal, warns Senge, the stronger the forces pulling you away become, the louder your brain protests, and the more urgently you want to revert to old patterns. I’ve seen it repeatedly in my groups for underearners. They’d fall apart at the brink of success. They’d get cold feet, feel guilty, doubt their abilities, recall the pain of old failures, worry they made the wrong decision. My advice was always the same. It’s OK to feel bad. Just don’t let it stop you.
You’ve got to be willing to be uncomfortable. For us pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding creatures, that’s a very tall order.
The real work in raising the bar is to stop doing the same old thing you’ve always done, to try out new strategies, to ignore false alarms, to resist the urge to quit, and to refuse to fall back into familiar terrain. The ability to tolerate discomfort—doing what might not feel good, but doing it anyway—is the only way you’ll ever complete the path to financial success. It helps to keep in mind that the discomfort is temporary, but the payoff is extraordinary.
Always keep this front and center in my mind.
“It’s time to start living the life we’ve imagined,” writer Henry James chides us.
Your intention becomes your reality.” It does so by focusing your energy and narrowing your choices. What we focus on expands, what we give our attention to grows stronger. “Our intentions cause us to pay attention to certain stimuli while totally ignoring a plethora of other possibilities,” notes Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate University. “This is the psychological process by which we construct our reality.”
Your financial destiny hinges on these daily, sometimes tiny, decisions. And it’s a whole lot easier to make them when you’re purposely headed in a particular direction toward a specific destination. Every time you act on your decisions, keeping your promise to yourself by honoring your intention, you build self-esteem. Stronger self-esteem only enhances your chances for success.
If you want something you’re actually afraid of, having it isn’t really what you truly want.
“We have time to do everything that’s important to us. The secret is to be decisive about what’s really important.”
If you were on your deathbed, looking back at your life, what would make you feel happiest and most satisfied with how you lived?
Knowing that i made the people i interacted with temporarily and deeply connected in my life happy and i tught them things that were vluabe nd helpwd them live their best life.
knowing that i helped in making my marriage a beautiful one where sachin and i are very happy with each other, our life, our families.
most pressing priorities. “Before I had these priorities, I was easily distracted by things that momentarily interested me. For example, shortly after doing this workshop, a man starting a business in China asked me to be on the board. They were going to have an all-expense-paid weekend in San Francisco. Now, there was a time I would have dashed off and done it, because it sounded interesting and I was proud to be asked. But Chinese business is not one of my priorities. It could’ve been fun. I would’ve met interesting people. But it would have taken me away from my partner, the book I’m
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(her top five: “good health, work that counts, close family, robust spirituality, and close friends”).
VALUE-CLARIFICATION EXERCISE
Do this
Knowledge
Being free
Being generous
Life partner
Comfort
Making a difference
Happiness
Health
Self-discipline
Self-esteem
Influence
Intimacy
Using my talents
Kindness
