Your Conditioned To Be Poor

The reality

Here is the reality, you'll never be rich. The childhood fantasy of being a millionaire or astronaut is a lot harder to achieve than you would expect.

The painful truth is that it is rare to achieve wealth overnight. You might be rich after many years of working and slaving, and maybe only when you are in your golden age years are you able to say you that are rich with some level of assurance.

This gets rich quick scheme mindset is exactly what will make you get poor quick.

 You see this so often with finance gurus that promise wealth from:

• Buying their course.
• Some questionable investments with exorbitantly high rates 
• Etc

Societies' views of wealth

After watching many finance videos, books and first hand I realised this:

• Society has brainwashed us into believing that becoming wealthy is only about taking action. Having the right mindset is equally as important.

In an interview with Oprah, actor Jim Carey once mentioned how he visualised making $10 million dollars and wrote that check to himself when he was a struggling actor. Years later when his acting gig took off in Dumb & Dummer he actually made $10 million dollars. He credits this to visualization, right mindset and taking action.

Scientific evidence on belief?

A study conducted by Carol Dweck and Greg Walton found that students that believed that they can grow their intellectual ability tended to perform much better than those that believed intelligence is a fixed trait like height or eye colour.

What you think, you become.

Your Conditioned To Be Poor

You've been conditioned to be poor since the day you are born. Poor not in the sense of living on the streets. If you live in a developed countries chances are you are much better off than many people in less developed countries.

The "poor" that we are talking about is the poverty mindset.

• This means that your thoughts and feelings are aligned to poverty which means it's harder to attain and maintain wealth.

A poverty mindset is:

• To hoard whatever gift/ talents and resources that you have because you are afraid you will never have enough.
• A cycle that repeats itself endlessly.

It's not necessarily that you don't have money but how you perceive your financial reality of money. 

Think back about the time your parents talk about money and making ends meet.

Parental upbringings

Think back about how your parents shape how you view money and how they spend their money. Your parents may be asking you to conserve electricity when not in use, reusing items that can be re-worn or maybe you've even heard your parents talk about how they can stretch their dollar further. 

Your parents might have said "we can't afford this", which are words to default to so that you don't have to think about the issue anymore. Hence, you say to yourself there is no alternative way to get the thing that you want.

This subconsciously programs you to defeat and settle with whatever you have. Most people adapt their financial views of money from their upbringing and how they have seen their own parents handle money.

Education system

Industrialization changed the way we work, it created the need for universal schooling. The education system as we know it is only about 200 years old. Before that, formal education was mostly reserved for the elite.

"Factory schools," as they are now called, originated in early 19th-century Prussia. For the first time, education was provided by the state and learning was regimented.

Hence, the industrial revolution which prompted these factory schools was to create workers that we're compliant, literate and did exactly what they were told.

Is there a way out of this poverty mindset?

Thankfully yes there is.

Kiyosaki talks about this in his book "Rich Dad Poor Dad", its the language that we tell ourselves to everyone because the language that we tell ourselves is the one that we actually listen to.

The language of:

• We can't afford this

Kiyosaki talks about how his Rich Dad taught him that this shifts off your mind to finding a solution and ways to afford it.

Instead, rather use the word:

• How can I afford this?

This forces the brain to search for answers, look for creative opportunities, seek and find solutions to get what you want.

The wording change isn't necessary to achieve the goal now or tomorrow but to change your mental response from doubt to belief.

I've seen this time and time again often in my own life, when I'm seeking a solution for my business, self-doubt comes in and finding a solution doesn't seem possible. To this day I am amazed how mentally asking myself how do I fix this problem has yielded a solution that I never thought possible. Most of the time, the solution may come many months down the road as I try different methods and strategies but having a mental mindset that an alternative solution is possible has seen me through many obstacles. It triggers an agile mindset as opposed to a limiting mindset.

Conclusion

You have the ability to achieve all that you want to if you truly believe that you can. Changing your mindset to be more innovative and entrepreneurial can open endless possibilities that you are seeking.

We are all born in an unfair world and start off with different advantages and disadvantages whether be it in geographic location, socioeconomic class, or physical appearance. And I'm all for improving the system but that will take many generations, chances are you will be long gone to fight the good fight.

What you can do now however is to improve your own circumstance, change your mindset, gain your knowledge, and pass it off to the next generation so that they can start life much better off than you did.

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