(Introduction)
I’ve been making money since I was fifteen years old – and by making money I mean earning something other than pocket money because I mowed the lawn. I started by delivering newspapers in downtown Pretoria for National Press; the next year I recruited subscribers for the same company. In my second year at university I worked in a men’s gift shop, and two years later as an assistant at the Religious Studies Department. The year before I graduated I delivered food for local restaurants, and about eighteen months after graduation I started teaching English.
All this work can be sorted under the category of someone asked me if I can do something; I agreed; I did the task, and they paid me.
I have also made a small amount of money over the years by selling items – mostly stuff that had filled up space in my apartment that I advertised, but also books that I wrote and self-published, and materials that people could use to improve their language skills, or that could help them to help other people do so.
And then I have also had mixed success with “playing around” with money; buying something at price X and selling it later at price Y.
Seeing that I have been making money for over thirty years, and have made money in various ways, what exactly do I mean when I write that I have – or had – a historical problem with making money? Is it the manner of making money – okay if someone tells me/asks me to do something, not okay if I have to take the initiative? Is the problem with risking money to make money? Do I have a problem identifying a market and coming up with a product or service to meet a specific need?
Long story short, I don’t think any of this is a problem, although it will probably be easier to make X amount of money with one method rather than another.
(End of introduction)
SATURDAY, 19 JANUARY 2019
I can have nice clothes, nice shoes, nice sunglasses, a good quality cap, good quality digital devices and earphones. I can have a debit card with money in the bank. I also have no problem imagining myself riding around on a good quality bicycle. I can enjoy a good meal at a nice restaurant, and even give money to someone else if the opportunity presents itself. With all this, I experience no resistance from problematic programming.
Where programming still throws rocks in the road, is with me doing things and receiving a lot of money as a result. Or rather, I can do things and receive money – as long as it’s just enough to keep me alive.
And yet, I don’t have a problem having money. I know I can manage money well. When I have money, I know how to deal with it – to enjoy it, but not to waste it.
The problem is to make myself receptive to receiving ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times more money than what I need to buy food, pay rent, and generally live a simple life. That I could be the recipient of a million dollars … that I could do things and then receive thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars – that’s where I’m still missing a few planks in the bridge I have to cross to get to the other side.
Monday, 15 April 2019
One does wonder: Why make more money than you need to live a simple life? One reason is that things can change quickly – you can lose your job, get sick, a war can break out in the country where you’ve made yourself at home. So I don’t want money to live lavishly. I just want more certainty than we currently enjoy. And to be able to do and enjoy some things we can’t afford to do at the moment.
MONDAY, 18 MARCH 2019
Whilst taking a shower I thought of two domain names I own, and how I finally decided that I would never be able to sell them. I thought of making money in general, and of financial markets. I think about how I have deactivated barriers in my programming. I thought about how fast it happens/How fast does it happen? Thought of religion, and about how I was programmed for twenty-plus years in a particular religious tradition and associated mythology, and how it was critically deactivated in a matter of no more than two years. Also thought that it wasn’t just the academic course I had been studying; that other people sat with me in the same classes and studied the same material, and their religious affiliation came out more or less unscathed. Thought again about the research I’m currently doing on the stock indices, and how at the end it doesn’t seem too hard to make money, but not too easy either. “What’s difficult, and what’s easy?” I wondered. Thought again about what I still considered to be my bad/flawed programming, or programming that I had picked up, because surely my parents didn’t mean to program me in a way that would make it harder for me to survive and find happiness in the world. Thought again that the flawed programming was that I thought it must be hard to make money: It must be a struggle. “Do I still struggle?” I wondered. Not really, I thought. Trading is a little more difficult than I thought it would be, or it’s taking a bit longer to work through all the options, but I’ve already made a lot of progress, even in terms of profit and loss. “But what’s easy, and what’s difficult?” came the question again. I knew it was important to answer because for decades I believed it must be hard to make money, to be successful, to make your dreams come true. It must be a struggle. But how difficult? When has one struggled enough?
“The answer you’re looking for even though you haven’t asked the right question,” emerged the thought from the part of my brain that hadn’t actively been talking out loud in the shower, “is that you’ll never make it. That was your actual programming. The struggle part is just because you have to do something. You have to try. Otherwise, what are you doing with your life?”
In fact, the sum total of the lessons I observed in my parents’ lives, and of the lessons from the church, and of Radio Pulpit, and of Job’s struggles that had ceased after seven lean years but my parents’ struggles were never-ending – though there were times of hope when one could almost have believed the struggle was over – was that it was never going to happen.
Is that why I have also come close several times … only to retreat every time, for reasons I could never fully explain to myself? Is it because there was a deep conviction not only that I should struggle, but that it would never happen for me? That I will never be successful. That I will never be financially comfortable. That I will always struggle – because it had been written that way long before I knew what was going on around me and inside my mind.
It goes without saying that this is a superficial worldview. It goes without saying that this is merely the result of a child observing the world of adults and making assumptions about how life works, and these assumptions becoming entrenched in his mind. Because it doesn’t have to be that way. But once the seed has been planted in your brain that it is so, and should be so, and you fail to pull the poisonous plant out early enough in your adult life, it will always continue to grow, eventually becoming the dominant plant in the Garden of your Thoughts, which determines how you think about things, how you speak, how you act, how you dream, how you make plans, how you make money, and how you spend money in the hope that you’ll make more money, and how you spend your time hoping you will do better – someday.
“Is it easy to make money?” is the wrong question. “Is it difficult to make money?” is also the wrong question. “Should one struggle?” is not so much the wrong question as it is a stupid question.
The canvas is clean. The paint cans are full of rich shades from my past, and from my imagination, and from what other people will gladly teach you when you open yourself up to it. Will financial independence ever happen for me? The fact is, it started happening for me years ago – I just kept myself blind to it every time, and turned away from it. And made it in other ways, and in other areas that had nothing to do with money.
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