First of all, I LOVE that GIF. It so nicely expresses how I (and I think I’m not the only one) sometimes feel.
Your desired future and mine are very similar. I always see myself in a cabin close to a lake and a small town where people all know one another, but within driving distance of a larger city. I would still work freelance on projects for my town, not something that nobody really needs but something which actually helps the people and the town.
Makes me wish I had been a doctor or vet instead of an IT engineer. It would have made small town life easier.
At home I’d try out new techniques like vertical hydroponic farming to grow my own food, I’d have some solar panels or other ways of generating my own power. And of course a nice porch where I could cuddle with the girls (yeah, why not have more than one even if their periods unfortunately synchronize over time?) and maybe look at my kids running around playing with the dog.
Like you I realize I would need a ton of money to get there, and it is certainly not getting any less as I get older. And yet I have never seen wealth as a goal, only as a means to an end. So running wealth-subs and setting wealth goals is difficult.
The key I suppose is in finding a way to reframe the concept so that wealth is a goal but doesn’t feel like one.
For me, I maintain the idea of accepting wealth into my life. I don’t actively pursue it but I hold in my mind the idea that it is there to support me whenever I need it. A goal is that I would never have to check my bank balance and be able to buy anything I wanted. And when I do check my bank balance I always visualize an extra 1 in front of whatever number shows up as an exercise in visualization. Simply because I feel it should be there, the bank must have made a mistake.
This avoids me feeling like I’m chasing wealth I don’t believe I need to be comfortable.
I also see handling money as a game or form of art. There’s a skill to it which most people lack and it makes for an interesting and challenging pastime which makes me smile when I do it right. So I don’t do it for the money, that’s simply the end result of doing it right, like a little red hotel on a monopoly board. It’s satisfying to see.
But I don’t have the same passion (or desperation, a very effective one) for wealth that I see with some people having great successes here on the forum. I don’t know if that is the challenge I face at running wealth subs and seeing great results.
As far as the unexpected bills go, that sucks! All I can tell you is that it’s probably best to release the idea that it is somehow related to running RICH. I have found that once you mentally anchor things to one another, it is hard to get rid of that link. So I do my best to anchor my positive results to the subs and commit the negative results to my mindset or the universe giving me a teaching moment.
Sometimes I catch myself thinking I’m being delusional. Like some religious people claiming all good and bad things must be the will of a deity, not all things, good or bad, are linked to subs. Subs don’t have that power (and said deity certainly doesn’t micro-manage that much).
As a well-developed individual I acknowledge that in the end I and I alone carry the responsibility for it all. I manifested it, I wished for it somehow, even if the subs may have given me an edge. I simply got what I was asking for.
Then I consider if there’s any harm in relating good things to the subs and conclude that there’s not. But there is an upside however, as I’m teaching myself to trust the subs as something which can help me cause good stuff.
So when something good happens, I try and say to myself “you know, RICH or AM could have helped manifest that” and when something bad happens I say “what thought, action or behavior might have brought that one on and what could I have done differently?”
For example, when my upstairs neighbors moved in with their exceptionally noisy kids, it took all of my focus to convince myself that there was something to learn from it and that I must have done something to bring this upon me. I quickly concluded that I’d been telling myself for years that I wanted to renovate the house and add sound-proofing in. Then I told myself (and the universe) that there were less impactful ways to teach me. Why make me suffer this much when it could have been gradual instead?
Once I finally came to terms with it, it turned out the neighbors were decent people and the man happened to be in construction. By now, a significant part of my house is renovated and my home office had ludicrous amounts of soundproofing. And it cost me a fraction of hiring a contractor while helping me learn how to do things myself and overcome my fear of change. Bad things, something I manifested myself, but also an opportunity to grow.
On the money front, I’ve been doing that visualizing a 1 exercise every time I open my app, and even though the lottery still hasn’t come to its senses (see what I do there, I never lose the lottery, they simply made a mistake) I did get offered a job at the place I’m currently working. Starting January I get a 600 bucks month raise and a year-end bonus and my salary would be about 700 bucks higher compared to the norm with opportunity to rise another 1000 a month over the next few years.
So the question is, how can I link this to subs? It certainly isn’t a massive windfall. In the grand scheme of things I am still an employee and not an entrepreneur. Saint and Fire still haven’t made me their partner even though it frustrates me to no end that my thinking process might help them evolve subs exponentially and I have been unable to convince them to take a chance on something which could be truly magical for SubClub and its clientele. Which is my failure, not theirs. I’m also not a millionaire by the end of the year as far as I know right now.
But I am further along than I figured I would be a year ago. I get to work from home or close to home, allowing me to have a good work-life balance. I get supported in my growth and studies and I will have certain opportunities in the future since the job is for the federal government which always looks good on a resume.
I could have had my miracle wealth, but I might have required me to sacrifice in other areas of my life. Instead, I get an above average growth in wealth and my personal life, giving me time to focus on everything which matters. I may have subconsciously told the subs that I had other priorities besides wealth.
Somehow, since I’ve been running wealth subs, everything financially seems to be going in the right direction overall, at a higher speed compared to pre-subs. But we are talking a span of 2 years now.
Is it because of the subs? Maybe they cleared out the cobwebs and made it easier for me to see what needed doing and have the courage to do it. So sure, why not?
Thank you, subs, for clearing things up for me. Thank you for helping me grow, even though consciously I still have hope you’ll help me find my privately owned island while I am still young enough to enjoy it. I just might have to do some opening up my mind to the possibilities first.
But my comfortable financial growth could be the subs, so I say let it be because of the subs. They showed me what to do like a teacher would, without asking me to sacrifice like Scrooge did in his youth.
I am DarkPhilosopher and I approve of this essay.
The mental image that sentence created is hilarious.
