Photos
Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
Do You Know The Greatest Mistake In Most Retirement Advice About Retirement Income?
Welcome back!
Do you need a certain amount of retirement income to retire? After reading many articles addressed to consumers about the need to save money for retirement, I have concluded that much of this advice is based on restricting assumptions about money. As a result, much financial retirement advice is bad retirement advice.
Most personal finance retirement planning articles compile the usual retirement planning topics and cite them as reasons to be afraid that you don’t have enough money to retire:
Most people have not saved enough money.
Prices will go up and up.
You will probably need more for medical expenses as you age.
And worst of all (!), you might live 20-30 years after retirement at age 65 and will probably outlive your money.
Retirement advice articles often list various expected expenses, to help you calculate which expenses will increase and which will decrease, to help you determine how much retirement income you will need.
One typical assumption of most retirement planning articles is that you will pay off your mortgage. Another typical assumption is that your retirement income will be limited to retirement funds, pensions, and Social Security.
Based on these assumptions, the articles give you guidelines about how much of your retirement funds you can tap into each year. The goal is to prevent you from running out of money in retirement.
As a result of unexamined assumptions, these articles omit any consideration of the single most important skill required to live those 20-30 years beyond retirement age in abundance: how to make money. Instead, they teach fear.
The assumption that produces money fear is that your retirement income will be fixed. After you retire from your job, you will not earn any more money.
In other words, you must face 20-30 years of money uncertainty. Your future depends on how much money you set aside during your earning years. Can you imagine a greater money limitation than the idea you have no capacity to increase the amount of money available to you?
If you believe the assumptions behind typical personal finance retirement planning advice, you have to imagine living 20-30 years without making any new money, completely dependent upon what you earned in your working life.
This type of retirement advice also makes another unexamined assumption. The decisions of other people will determine how much retirement income you will have available to you.
What decisions will other people make? Other people will decide whether or not you still have a pension. Other people will decide if you will still receive your Social Security income. Other people will decide how much interest you will earn on your “safe” savings accounts and CDs (certificates of deposit), and the returns on your mutual funds.
These articles create fear because they teach that your future depends upon your present. The underlying assumption is that you will have no other sources of additional income in the future. Your security depends on how much money you can earn and set aside right now.
What is the overall message of such articles? You are powerless to increase your retirement income after you retire from your job.
By Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D.
Author of No Money Limits For Real Estate Investors
National Best Books 2007 Awards
Winner
Business: Real Estate Category
Visit www.NoMoneyLimits.com for your Free “52 Heart Of Money Insights” ecourse.
No tags for this post.Related posts
Resolve To Find Yourself
“Resolve to find thyself; and to know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.”
Matthew Arnold
It’s that time of year again. Time when we make New Year’s resolutions. Here’s a resolution for you. Resolve to stop fixing yourself and concentrate instead on finding your true self.
The fundamental reason why most New Year’s resolutions are recipes for failure is contained in the word “resolve.” To “resolve” is to “re-solve.” In other words, it is an effort to once again attempt to “solve” a problem. This is why most “re-solutions” fail. You couldn’t solve the problem the last time. Why will you be able to solve it this time? What has changed since the last time you promised to “re-solve” the same old problems?
“The way it seems to work now, setting a New Year’s resolution is a recipe for defeat. It has come to be one of the nation’s most masochistic traditions.”
Stephen Shapiro
We’ve all heard Einstein’s definition of insanity: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Yet, each year many of us resolve to “re-solve” the same old problems using the same old methods that didn’t work the last time. And what are these same old methods? Determination, willpower, and resolve. Notice that. We decide that we will “solve” these unwanted problems by being “resolved” and “resolute.”
One of the most significant ideas I have ever learned is the difference between “problem-solving” and “creation.” By definition, problem-solving is an effort to make something go away that you do not want in your life. Creation is an effort to love something into existence that does not currently exist.
We are so conditioned to identify ourselves as problems to be solved. We are masters at finding problems in our lives that need to be fixed. We “resolutely” identify character flaws that we want to make go away.
This is the “problem” with treating yourself as a problem. Who loves having a problem? Who loves being a problem? Who loves being in debt, being overweight, being disorganized? The answer is: No one. Yet, typical New Year’s resolutions require you to fix what you don’t love about yourself. And so you put your energy and your attention into fixing what you couldn’t fix the last time you tried.
I am convinced that the single most important missing piece in our efforts to create the lives we would love to live-the one thing that is most “wrong” with each of us-is that we don’t know what is right with us. Notice how many “re-solutions” are renovation projects. In truth, you are not a project in need of repair. You are not a problem to be solved.
Concentrate instead of finding out what is right with you. Let’s start with your capacity to create. Nothing is more unique than this, and more uniquely human. Some animals use tools and build objects, such as dams and nests. But only human beings are true creators. People have the capacity to imagine beyond what now exists. People can create what they love.
And here, our language confuses matters. Success requires “resolve,” but it is a different kind of “resolve” than the effort to “re-solve” problems. Success “resolve” involves a firm decision to act. Success “resolve” sets creators apart from problem “re-solvers.”
The most powerful “resolution” you can make is to “resolve” to stop trying to fix yourself and to find your true identity as the creator of your life.
“There is no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love; there’s only scarcity of resolve to make it happen.”
Wayne Dyer
The most critical idea beneath this newsletter is that each of us is happiest when we are most uniquely ourselves. And we are most uniquely ourselves when we put our time, energy, and focus on creating what we love.
There is a world of difference between starting with the problem and starting with the outcome. In each case, you really do have a goal in mind. You want your body to be at its ideal weight. You want to be financially free. You want to be organized. Yet, with typical problem-solving “re-solutions,” the tendency is to start with the problem rather than the outcome.
“In life there are no problems, that is, objective and external choices; there is only the life which we do not resolve as a problem but which we live as an experience, whatever the final result may be.”
Alberto Moravia
The most basic idea of success literature, such as Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, and the New Think and Grow Rich by Ted Ciuba, is that you get what you think about. In other words: What you focus on expands. Where your attention goes, energy flows. When you start with the problem, you are putting your focus on the problem, and not the desired outcome.
If you put your attention on solving the problem-being overweight, being in debt, being disorganized-you have not created a vision of the outcome. You are simply putting your attention on what you don’t want. You have identified yourself as a problem to be solved, not as a creator who can create what you truly desire.
“I believe life is constantly testing us for our level of commitment, and life’s greatest rewards are reserved for those who demonstrate a never-ending commitment to act until they achieve. This level of resolve can move mountains, but it must be constant and consistent. As simplistic as this may sound, it is still the common denominator separating those who live their dreams from those who live in regret.”
Anthony Robbins
You really do have a choice. It all comes down to what kind of resolution you make. You can focus on your problems and resolve that this time, you will finally “solve” them. You tell yourself: This time, the diet will work. This time, I will get out of debt. This time, I will get my finances organized.
Or you can decide to stop making such “re-solutions” that set you up for failure. Imagine the difference if you resolve to live your life as a creator. With this type of resolve, you can create what you would love to have or be. You can create the life you would love to live. The difference comes from finding your true nature as a creator.
Kalinda Rose Stevenson
Publisher of “Abundantly Alive Now! Newsletter”
http://www.abundantlyalivenow.com
PS. If You Could Discover The Combination To The Door That Swings Open To Limitless Wealth?! Would You Use It?!
The New Think And Grow Rich
http://www.abundantlyalivenow.com/resources/ThinkAndGrowRich/
Related posts
Putting The Now In Christmas
“If not now, When?”
The Talmud
Whatever your religious beliefs, no one can avoid Christmas. As much as you might want it to go away, Christmas becomes the 800 pound gorilla that demands attention.
The song might claim that “It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” but for most of us, Christmas is much too complicated to be all that wonderful.
Beyond any problems with having a religious holiday become a mandatory event engulfing the entire society, one particular aspect of Christmas makes it especially complicated. Christmas, more than any other time of the year, confuses time.
It makes us acutely, urgently, sometimes painfully aware of the current reality of right now in our lives. It does this by evoking memories of the past more than any other season. You can go about your life for the rest of the year, but Christmas forces you to stop and consider the people in your life. It can be a time of family, but it is also a time when people who don’t have families are acutely aware that there is something missing. And even harder, for people who have families but do not see them at Christmas. It can be a time of profound grief for those who are gone.
One of the reasons Christmas is so overwhelming is because it treats life as a series of snapshots rather than a movie. What is Christmas without a camera? Without a record of moments in time. Actually, a moment is too long. As a photographer, I am keenly aware that the time intervals involved in taking family snapshots are extraordinarily brief. The old box cameras were set with an f-Stop of 8 and a shutter speed of 125. That 125 is actually 125th of a second!
With better cameras, the photographer can adjust the shutter speed to be faster: 1/500th of a second. 1/1000th of a second. 1/1500th of a second. Or it can be slower: 1/60th of a second. 1/45th of a second. One second. In the world of photography, one second is a slow speed. Unless you have nerves of steel and ice in your blood, you need a tripod to get a sharp focus at one second. Think of it. One second in time, yet this snapshot becomes part of the permanent record of the way things were.
Maybe it is because Christmas brings out the cameras, and we have so many snapshots of Christmas, we have so many images of people frozen in a fraction of a second. Yet from these snapshots, we create enduring memories. The people change but the images in the snapshots do not.
“The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not our circumstances.”
Martha Washington
I suspect that one of the reasons there is so much stress and strain between the generations is that people try to freeze time to match the snapshots. In reality, we are all living in movie time, and except for that briefest fraction of a second, everything is constantly changing.
Times change, people change. Soldiers at war, children who move, parents far away. Deaths and births. In each Christmas season life has changed, people have changed, circumstances have changed.
You can bring out the old ornaments and the old snapshots of Christmases past. They don’t change, but the people do. And the fact that the ornaments and the snapshots don’t change, but the people do, is both a connection to the past and a reminder that life does go on.
“Realize deeply that now is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.”
Eckhart Tolle
Yet, life is lived only in the now. Not in the past. Not in hope of the future. But now.
Life is a movie rather than a snapshot. The real challenge of Christmas is to live in the “Now” rather than in the snapshots of Christmases past.
Now is the only moment you have. Yesterday is gone and tomorrow will not come. It is always that way. Tomorrow never comes. And yesterday is always past. All you have is right now. This is the moment you can choose to feel “Abundantly Alive Now!”
Kalinda Rose Stevenson
Publisher of “Abundantly Alive Now! Newsletter”
http:www.abundantlyalivenow.com
Related posts
Your ZigZag Path To Success
“Living systems require setbacks to flourish.”
Bob Pratcher
Do you ever get frustrated with your progress? Do you tell yourself that every time you take three steps forward, you then take two steps backward? Do you identify the backwards steps as setbacks and failures?
What if backwards steps are not failures at all? Would it make a difference in how you feel about your efforts if you knew that the pattern of “three-steps forward and two steps back” has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the way that all living systems work? What if going backwards is not a sign of failure, but is absolutely essential to progress?
This is the claim of Socionomics theory, which turns all kinds of conventional wisdom on its head. For example, socionomics claim that people are not in a bad mood because the stock market is down. Socionomics claims the stock market is down because people are in a bad mood. In other words, human emotions create the motion in the stock market, not the other way around.
According to this theory, “Living systems require setbacks to flourish.” If this statement is true, it is a radical reframing of the “three steps forward and two steps back” pattern. It means that your setbacks are not personal failures. When you move three steps forward and two steps back, you are following the essential pattern of the all living systems.
If you read success literature, you will often see setbacks identified as tests of perseverance. The socionomics insight is deeper than this. Your setbacks are not signs of failure, and they don’t occur to test your character. They are simply part of the dominating patterns underlying human systems.
Instead of treating setbacks as personal failures on your part, what difference would it make for you to see setbacks as essential to your success? What if the secret to success is regular setbacks, not because setbacks strengthen your character to persevere, but because growth requires periodic pulling back?
Consider how often pulling back is necessary to gather strength. The archer with the bow needs to pull the arrow back to give it power to move forward. Muscles work only when they are contracted. The contraction of the muscle is the pullback that gives you strength. Martial arts teach pulling back as a way to gather energy. Using the energy of the pullback is the source of power.
Did you see videos of the devastating Southeast Asian tsunami? Before the tsunami wave hit, the water pulled back. Children ran out to gather exposed fish. And then the water crashed back in an enormous wave, swallowing up everyone in its path. The pullback of the water increased the strength of the wave itself.
And so, what if setbacks are not really setbacks? Socionomics identifies “three steps forward and two steps back” as the recurring pattern of all living systems. Why would you be exempt from experiencing the same zigzag pattern?
Abundance is also part of a pattern. Abundance does not come in straight lines. The root meaning of the word “abundance” refers to an overflowing wave. Just as waves ebb and flow, abundance comes in waves, with steps forward and steps backwards.
What would happen if you renamed your setbacks as pullbacks, and saw them as part of the universal process of gathering strength to propel you forward? Not because the setbacks build your character, but because the pullbacks consolidate your energy and gather strength? What difference would it make for you to recognize that both success and abundance follow a zigzag path?
Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D., Publisher of “Abundantly Alive Now! Newsletter.” http://www.abundantlyalivenow.com
kalinda@abundantlyalivenow.com
No tags for this post.
Related posts
The Diet And Money Double Whammy
“Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect, you have enough.”
Gail Sheehy
If you are like most people, there are two fundamental areas of your life you want to change. You want more money and less weight. Yet, for many of us, our lived reality is the opposite: we have too many pounds and too few dollars. My question for today is: What is the connection between too much weight and too little money?
“You can never be too rich or too thin.”
Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor
The Duchess of Windsor-a very rich and very thin woman-once made the comment that “you can never be too rich or too thin.” If this were just the mindset of one woman, her words would be a footnote in history, suitable for trivia games. But her words express the predominant mindset of our era. To be successful-especially for women-you need to be thinner than you are and richer than you are.
Taken together these twin beliefs are a double whammy. They are also a guaranteed recipe for failure. This formula means that you can never be successful, because you can never reach that magical point of “enough.” No matter how thin you are, you can’t be thin enough. And no matter how much money you have, you can’t have enough money.
If you start with the idea that you are neither thin enough nor rich enough, you start with the idea that YOU are deficient. There is something wrong with YOU and you have to fix it.
We live in a therapeutic age and are used to identifying ourselves as problems to be solved. And so, we start out to look for the hidden cause of our problems. When the problems and issues concern money and food, the whole matter becomes a tangled mass of opinions, judgments, false promises, and failed resolutions. How many diets are there? How many ways to make money? And so, determined to fix ourselves once and for all, we look for a solution, resolved to make it work this time.
“I told my doctor I get very tired when I go on a diet, so he gave me pep pills. Know what happened? I ate faster.”
Joe E. Lewis
But the diets don’t work and the get-rich-quick schemes don’t work, and so most of us reach the point of being both fatter and poorer than we were when we began. This is not the way it was supposed to work. What happened to getting thinner and richer?
With topics as complicated as money and body weight, I want to focus on a single critical idea as one step toward liberating ourselves from this double whammy of never being thin enough or rich enough.
The root of failure for many of us-no matter what you set out to do-is contained in the belief that whatever you are, whatever you have, whatever you do, it is not enough.
The only way to move beyond this double whammy is to stop trying to solve the problem of what is wrong with you. Instead of trying to lose more weight and make more money, you change your mind about what who you are. Instead of measuring success by measuring body weight and money, you liberate yourself from the idea that YOU can measured by pounds and dollars-or kilos and euros-or any other set of measures. YOU are not measurable.
“No Money Limits” does not refer to an unlimited quantity of money. “No Money Limits” means that you are not limited by money.
Kalinda Rose Stevenson
With this mindset, you stop trying to fix something “wrong” with you, and start to liberate yourself from value judgments determined by limitations. There is a qualitative difference I am attempting to identify here. Your goal is to liberate yourself from the idea that your worthiness can be measured by pounds and dollars. That is the real problem with a statement that you can never be too rich or too thin. It implies that until you reach a point that you cannot reach, you will not be worthy. This is the ultimate no-win situation.
I come from a background of teaching and preaching in churches and teaching in theological seminaries. For many reasons, I don’t do either one any longer. If I could identify one single reason why not is it this: The Church spends too much time telling people what is wrong with them and not enough telling people what is right with them.
I am convinced that what is “wrong” with most people is that they don’t know what is right with them.
I am currently writing a book about the connection between Christian beliefs and money. It is a huge topic and I have many opinions about the matter. Many of us have been taught such confusing messages about money. “Money is evil.” “Money corrupts.” “The rich will never get to heaven.” In fact, money is a tool of human intention, to be used for good or evil, as you intend. But the money itself is innocent.
If you start out on a diet and money-making plan-whatever plans you use-convinced that there is something wrong with you that you have to fix, you are setting yourself up to fail.
“The second day of a diet is always easier than the first. By the second day you’re off it.”
Jackie Gleason
If you start a diet with the idea that losing weight is going to make you thin enough to be worthy of love-even from yourself-the diet will fail.
If you set out to make money, all the while holding the belief that money is evil, your money-making efforts will fail.
A much better way is to start with the idea that you are already worthy of living an “Abundantly Alive Now!” life, no matter what you weigh and no matter what amount of money you have in the bank.
“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.”
Charles Dickens
This difference goes back to the critical distinction between solving a problem and creating what you love. With the mindset of a creator, you can choose to create a healthy body and more money. The diet plan then becomes a matter of loving yourself beyond the limitations “too much” weight imposes upon you, and your money-making plan becomes a means to liberate you from any limits in your life caused by “not enough” money. Why not choose the self-loving mindset of a creator?
This article was originally published November 7, 2006
http://www.abundantlyalivenow.com/archive/AANN-2006-11-07.htm.
Find out how partnerships can be the fastest route
to real estate profit.
http://www.nomoneylimits.com/partnerforprofitsebook.htm
No tags for this post.
Related posts
Why Resistance Can Be Your Best Friend, Part II
“Objection is when I say: this doesn’t suit me. Resistance is when I make sure that what doesn’t suit me never happens again.”
Ulrike Meinhof
“Just do it!”! Nike made this imperative its slogan. From a grammatical perspective, “Just do it!” is a complete sentence. What is particularly relevant is that an imperative is a sentence without a clearly defined subject. “You” are the implied subject of the imperative, but “you” are not specifically named.
When it comes to resistance to any type of imperative-especially the orders you give yourself-the identity of the missing “you” is the critical element to decide whether resistance is your best friend or an enemy to overcome.
The truth is that “you” are more than one “you.” There is the conditioned “you” who you does what you are told, wants to please others, and obeys orders. There is another “you.” This “you” is the authentic “You.”
One of the enduring human questions is why people are different. Is it a matter of “nature or nurture.” Are you a simply a product of your genes or your environment? Were you born a blank slate or were you born with innate talents, gifts, and purpose? Or to put it in technological terms: Were you born a blank disc, a preformatted disc, or a preloaded disc?
Although people have argued these questions for generations, it seems overwhelmingly likely that each of us is a combination of genes and experiences. Most parents will tell you that children demonstrate unique temperaments and personalities, even before birth. To continue the technological analogy: Each of us was born a preformatted disc rather than a blank disc or a disc with the content already preloaded.
What happens when you try to play a disc with the wrong format for your player? It won’t play. I have an old CD player. Sometimes, it won’t handle CDs recorded with newer technology. The CD player and the CD are simply not a match.
And this is the problem with imperatives such “”Just do it!” The real question is: Which “you” is being addressed? It is the authentic “You” or is it the conditioned “you”? who does what you are told? And which “you” is giving the order?
These distinctions might seem a bit complicated to sort out, but that is exactly the point. It’s one thing to resist when someone else tells you to “”Just do it!” It’s when you are telling yourself to “Just do it!” that the situation gets tricky.
This when it is critical to ask which “you” is giving this order. Are you telling yourself to “Just do it!” because the “you” who wants to please thinks you “should” or because your authentic self chooses to “Just do it!”
“Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.”
Carl Gustav Jung
How can you tell the difference? The answer is: Resistance. Resistance to an imperative is a clear sign that your authentic “You” is refusing to do what your obedient “you” insists that you “should” do.
Let’s get specific. Let’s say that you decide to invest in real estate. You go to seminars, you buy courses, and you intend to get started-but you never do it. You tell yourself, “I’m too busy,” “I don’t know how,” “I don’t have enough money.” You tell yourself to “Just do it!”, but you don’t do it. What is going on here?
Here are two questions to help you determine whether your resistance is your best friend or your worst enemy. I have asked these questions to many people-students, coaching clients, friends, even myself-and have seen people discover amazing insights that move them beyond their own resistance to doing what they claimed they wanted to do.
In this example, the first question asks: “Why SHOULD I invest in real estate?”
You write down: “I SHOULD invest in real estate because…….
And then you write down all of the reasons why you SHOULD “Just do it!”
After you have written down as many reasons as you can why you SHOULD invest in real estate, you are ready for the second question.
The second question asks: Why do I REFUSE to invest in real estate?
You write down: “I REFUSE to invest in real state because……
And then you write down all of the reason why you REFUSE to “Just do it!”
Whether it is investing in real estate, writing a book, losing 25 pounds, learning skydiving, or anything you claim that you want to do, these two questions are extraordinarily powerful tools to get to the root of resistance.
Everyone can always answer the first question about why they “should.” When it comes to the second question, most people protest. They say, “I am not refusing to do this.” They always have good reasons why “I can’t,” but are very reluctant to even consider that the real problem is “I won’t.”
But if you ask this question-really ask it-and probe until you find the answer, at some point you will discover that the real reason you are not doing whatever you claim you want to do is that your authentic self is refusing to do it. Somehow, this thing that you are commanding yourself to do feels like a violation of your authentic self.
“The resistance that you fight physically in the gym and the resistance that you fight in life can only build a strong character.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger
And this is why resistance is often your best friend. Resistance is the guerrilla tactic of the authentic “You.” The real you-the authentic “You”-is rebelling against doing what you “should.” Somehow, doing this thing that the conditioned “you” is trying to force yourself to do is incongruent with the real “You.”
Resistance is the result of a conflict between “I should” and “I refuse.” And this is where we return to the theme in Part I. Resistance avoids the pitch, whether the pitch comes from someone else or whether it comes from your conditioned self. In either case, the imperative to “Just do it!” violates the authentic “You.”
When prodded and pushed to do what it does not choose to do, the authentic “You” turns into a two-year old having a tantrum. The more the authentic “You” is pushed to do what it does not choose to do, the more resistant “You” become to doing it.
“Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets.”
William Hazlitt
The fact is, “You” will not resist an action that is consistent with your own values, gifts, talents, and sense of purpose. “You” will resist when you are being pushed to do what “You” don’t truly choose to do. And this is the reason why resistance can be your best friend. Resistance lets you know when “You”-the authentic “You”-is missing from the imperative.
This article was originally published October 31, 2006
http://www.abundantlyalivenow.com/archive/AANN-2006-10-31.htm.
Find out how partnerships can be the fastest route
to real estate profit.
http://www.nomoneylimits.com/partnerforprofitsebook.htm
No tags for this post.
Related posts
Why Resistance Can Be Your Best Friend
“The path of least resistance is the path of the loser.”
H. G. Wells
Why is it so difficult to change? When you decide that you are going to make a change in your life, why do you find it so difficult to follow through? Why do you keep falling back into old patterns?
There is no simple answer to this question, because change involves so many factors. It’s something like playing the game of “Pickup Sticks.” I don’t know if children still play Pickup Sticks in an era of electronic games, but it was one of my favorite childhood games. You dump a pile of colored sticks on the table, and then attempt to move them, one at a time, without moving the other sticks.
I’d like to pull out one stick from the pile-the stick called “resistance”-to ask the question: Why do we resist change, even when it is something we claim we want, even when the proposed change would be “good for us?”
Often, resistance is labeled as a problem. Resistance is the enemy to overcome. We have all heard that claim that “What you resist persists.” Maybe this is true. And maybe the secret to change is to overcome our own resistance. Or maybe the situation is not so simple.
The idea that we are resisting what is “good for us” is a clue that maybe things are not what they seem. Maybe resistance to change is a way to protect ourselves against manipulation.
“The history of liberty is a history of resistance.”
Woodrow T. Wilson
Every day, we hear from people who claim to know what is good for us. The messages about what it “good for us” come from our families and our friends. The messages also come from a barrage of advertising, including floods of emails telling us that we must jump on the latest promotion to buy a book, join a program, or attend a seminar.
Dave Lakhani, in his book, Persuasion, makes the point that the difference between persuasion and manipulation is the intention of the one doing the pitching.
Our lives are filled with sales pitches. Soft sells, hard sells, it doesn’t matter. We are being told again and again, “I know what is best for you.” And what we have all come to understand is that much of what we are told is “good for you” is outright manipulation. Most of us have become very wary of sales pitches disguised as genuine concern for our wellbeing.
“The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs.”
John Dewey
It’s no accident that we use the word “pitch” to describe an effort to sell. It’s World Series Time again. Although I rarely watch professional sports, I sometimes watch baseball during the playoffs and World Series.
“A pitcher will never be a big winner until he hates hitters.”
Early Wynn
At its core, baseball is a duel between the pitcher and the batter. The pitcher intends to throw balls the batter cannot hit. The batter attempts to hit the balls, despite the pitcher’s effort to throw unhittable balls. Behind the windup ritual and the game of signals with the catcher, the pitcher is engaged in an elaborate game of manipulation. The best pitchers are the ones who can trick the batters with an arsenal of pitches designed to defeat the batter. What you see is not what you get.
“Pitchers did me a favor when they knocked me down. It made me more determined. I wouldn’t let that pitcher get me out. They say you can’t hit if you’re on your back, but I didn’t hit on my back. I got up.”
Frank Robinson
Pitchers can throw fast balls, changeups, sliders. The ball that seems to be heading straight across home plate suddenly drops into the dirt, and the batter swings mightily at empty space. Or the ball that seems to be outside the strike zone suddenly curves across the plate. And sometimes, the pitcher throws a perfect pitch straight across the plate. The pitcher’s intention is to have batters swing wildly at balls and not swing at strikes.
All too often sales pitches are the same as baseball pitches. They are intended to manipulate us into doing what is not in our own best interests. And so we have learned to distrust pitches and those who do the pitching. In other words, we have learned to resist being sold.
And while the World Series is on, we are also in election season, being assaulted on a daily basis with pitches about candidates and propositions. Right now, in California, anyone who turns on TV is assaulted with an endless series of ads about various propositions on the November ballot.
The State of California sent out a 191 page “Official Voter Information Guide.” 191 pages of fine print, outlining proposed laws, written in legal language that make it impossible to understand exactly what the laws are supposed to do.
Experts claim that the average adult reads one book a year. And yet, this non-reading population is supposed to read a 191 page legal document. Meanwhile, special interest groups are spending millions of dollars to run ads for and against these propositions.
Most voters have learned by now that the propositions themselves are an exercise in manipulation. They are not what they claim to be and do not benefit the people they claim to benefit.
So, in addition to pitchers who throw curve balls, politicians who spin the truth, advertising pitches that claim to know what is best for us, we also have families and friends attempting to persuade us to do whatever they want us to do. And except for the baseball pitchers, all of these pitchers claim to have our best interests at heart. At least in baseball, you know that the pitcher is trying to strike you out.
“The path of least resistance makes all rivers, and some men, crooked.”
Napoleon Hill
From this perspective, resistance to change is a way to protect yourself from manipulation by people who claim to have your best interest in mind, but in fact care only about getting something from you. In the face of such pitchers, your own resistance is your best friend.
This article was originally published October 24, 2006
http://www.abundantlyalivenow.com/archive/AANN-2006-10-24.htm.
Find out how partnerships can be the fastest route
to real estate profit.
http://www.nomoneylimits.com/partnerforprofitsebook.htm
Related posts
How Do You Get To Easy Street?
“Hard work has made it easy. That is my secret. That is why I win.”
Nadia Comaneci
I got an email from a friend this week. She has started work on a new business venture but has gotten distracted by family matters. One phrase in her email stood out. “This is not as easy as I had planned.”
Her words got me thinking about the expectation that doing something new should be “easy.”
One of the biggest of the big lies of our times is that success should be easy. I did a search on Google on the word “easy.” Google brought back 2,490,000,000 websites. Look at that number. Almost two and a half billion web pages using the word “easy.”
The expectation that success should be “easy” has been drilled into us by too many get rich quick schemes, too many promises of instant success, and too many sales claims that some product will make things easy for you. Easy, easy, easy.
This is especially evident on the internet. We hear too many stories about 24 hour promotions leading to a million dollars in sales, without knowing how many years lay behind that instant success.
Speaking for myself, I’d like to find success on the road named Easy Street. Unfortunately, taking a stroll down Easy Street does not usually lead to success. Easy Street is usually a dead end road, leading nowhere.
If success is so easy, why do so few people succeed? The truth is that success is rarely easy. Most successful people attribute their success to hard work. And hard work is not easy.
“If you like things easy, you’ll have difficulties; if you like problems, you’ll succeed.”
Laotian Proverb
I used to teach Biblical Hebrew to theological students. Hebrew is not an easy language for English-speaking adults to learn. The alphabet consists only of consonants. Vowels are noted with a system of lines and dots. And words are written from right to left. One of my students approached me one day after class early in the semester, and with great frustration asked, “How can I ever learn this stuff?”
I knew that Mike was a professional pianist and singer and had left a successful career as an opera singer to start theological seminary. I asked him if he could read music. He seemed a bit annoyed that I would even ask such a question, and said, “Of course.” Then I asked if he knew how to read music the first time he looked at a sheet of music. He looked startled and then I saw a flicker of awareness in his eyes. He got my point. I didn’t have to say anything else.
Reading music had become so easy for Mike that he no longer had to think about it. Learning to read Hebrew is no harder than learning to read music. It is also not easy. Learning any new skill involves hard work and it also takes time to learn. Stephen Covey traces the stages of development from unconsciously incompetent, to consciously incompetent, to consciously competent, to unconsciously competent.
Mike had already reached the point of being unconsciously competent when he read music. This is another way of saying that he had reached mastery. In contrast, after two or three weeks of studying Hebrew, he was consciously incompetent in Hebrew, and frustrated with himself because he was not already a master of what he had barely begun to study.
“What is easy is seldom excellent.”
Samuel Johnson
The word “ease” is related to the word “easy” but they are miles apart. What is ease? Ease is what happens when you have reached mastery of whatever it is that you set out to do.
The quotation from Nadia Comaneci says it all. Nadia awed the world with her gymnastics at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. She made it look easy, as she flung her tiny body around the parallel bars. But that skill came as the result of years of grueling work in the gym. That is the real sequence. From incompetence to mastery by way of hard work. Hard work got her there, and she made it look so easy because she had reached a point of ease.
This is the very definition of mastery. When you reach a point where you make the difficult look easy. The price Nadia paid, the price any truly successful person pays, is hard work.
“Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day.”
Seth Godin
But even hard work is not enough for real success. If one of the biggest lies of our times is that success can and should be easy, the idea that hard work leads to success is equally misleading.
If Easy Street is a dead end, traveling down Hard Work Street is no guarantee that you will find success at the end of it. In fact, Hard Work Street can be as much of a dead end as Easy Street. Hard work by itself is not enough to lead you to success.
Why? Because sometimes you are on the wrong Hard work Street. Just working hard is not enough. You need to be working toward something that is authentic for you.
One of the reasons that so many of us work so hard with so little result is that we are working at cross purposes with our true selves.
So the real question is, Are you working hard to master a craft or skill that is the right craft or skill for you. Are you trying hard to be what you are simply not meant to be?
Hard work would not have been enough for Nadia to succeed as a gymnast if she didn’t have some sort of natural facility and body type for gymnastics. This is why you don’t see female Olympic-level basketball players who are five feet tall and gymnasts who are six feet four. No matter how hard she worked, tiny Nadia would never have stunned the world as a basketball player.
My student Mike could read music, play the piano, and sing with an amazing trained tenor voice because he worked hard to develop his innate talents.
And so, my friend was onto something when she commented, “This is not as easy as I had planned.” Success is not easy. Success requires hard work. But hard work doesn’t have to feel hard when you are doing something that is authentic for you. I’m going to give the last words to Alan Alda.
“You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you’re doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.”
Alan Alda
This article was originally published April 11, 2006.
http://www.abundantlyalivenow.com/archive/AANN-2006-04-11.htm.
FREE EBOOK: Do You Know The Money-Making Secret In The Monopoly Game?
Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D.
Author of “No Money Limits For Real Estate Investors: Discover The Money-Making Secret In The Monopoly Game That Will Turn Your Money Struggles Into Money Abundance
http://www.nomoneylimits.com/
kalinda@nomoneylimits.com
Related posts
The Power of Focus In An Attention Deficit World
“It’s not that I’m smart, it’s just that I stay with the problems longer.”
Albert Einstein
I once took an evening Learning Annex class with Richard I’Anson, an Australian travel photographer. He was wonderfully engaging and informative. I loved his photos and bought his Travel Photography book at the end of the evening. Of all that he said that evening, two comments have stayed with me.
His first memorable comment was, “The difference between a professional and an amateur photographer is about one hundred thousand photographs.”
The second was his comment about the slides he reviewed for a stock photo library. He said he reviewed 30,000 slides submitted by thousands of amateur photographers, and the biggest problem he saw was that almost all of those 30,000 slides “were not sharp enough.” He said he thought the problem was that people were taking pictures with telephoto lenses without using a tripod.
Taken together, these two comments capture the essence of excellence: sharp focus and enough disciplined effort applied over a long enough period of time to develop expertise.
These are the two qualities implied in Einstein’s statement, “It’s not that I’m smart, it’s just that I stay with the problems longer.”
You might not be interested in photography, but photography holds many valuable lessons for our attention deficit world.
A tripod is the overlooked secret of success in photography. A sharp lens and fast shutter speed are not enough if you can’t keep the camera steady. If your shutter is fast enough, you can handhold the camera and the pictures will be sharp enough. But for a longer exposure, you need a stable foundation. This is what the tripod will do for a photographer. No matter how long you keep the shutter open, your camera will stay stable.
Compare this kind of long and unshakable focus with the epidemic identified by Linda Stone as “continuous partial attention.”
“The recent emerging Technology Conference in San Diego-a lively gathering of geeks and entrepreneurs building companies and tools for the Web-took “The Attention Economy” as its theme. Naturally, several speakers emphasized ways that companies could prosper in the scrum of technologies targeting our minds, eyeballs and wallets. But one of the most interesting talks came from a former Apple and Microsoft executive named Linda Stone. Her emphasis was less economic than social. It was a plea to consider an epidemic she identified as continuous partial attention.”
Steven Levy
Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11899893/site/newsweek/
“Continuous partial attention” is the opposite of Einstein’s long focused attention on a problem. Continuous partial attention is also the opposite of I’Anson’s claim that you have to take a whole lot of photographs to learn your craft. Any skill requires similar focused discipline over time to achieve mastery. The problem is that we live in a frantic society, and more and more of us are constantly wired to make sure that we don’t miss anything. The result is that we miss what is most important.
“If you’ve lost focus, just sit down and be still. Take the idea and rock it to and fro. Keep some of it and throw some away, and it will renew itself. You need do no more.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Yesterday, was one of those days when I could not keep my attention focused on writing a simple article long enough to get it done on time. I had just returned from several days out of town, and was attempting to catch up after being away. I felt like a bumblebee gathering nectar, flitting from task to task and unable to finish anything. In other words, I had a day of continuous partial attention-a busy day with no discernible accomplishments.
And to make the point even clearer, the area where I live had a swarm of small earthquakes yesterday. In this area, earthquakes are a fact of life, and small temblors occur fairly often. It was just a reminder of how unsettling it is to feel the earth shake beneath you, no matter how many times you have experienced earthquakes before.
Continuous partial attention keeps all of us hopping from activity to activity, never settling long enough to develop mastery and never being fully present wherever we are. With BlackBerries and iPods, laptops and cell phones, with email and instant messaging, we have reduced our attention spans to nanoseconds and our ideas to soundbites.
“Stone first noticed the syndrome a decade ago when she was creating a product for Microsoft that let people interact in a “virtual world.” She found that her test users wanted to fade in and out while conducting other activities. This turns out to be the way most of us work-and live-today. With an open communications channel the e-mail keeps flowing, the instant messages keep interrupting and the Web feeds keep coming. CPA stems from our desire, Stone says, to be “a live node on the network.”
Steven Levy
Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11899893/site/newsweek/
On days when I am distracted, I often think of what I have learned from photography. Rule number one is: You need a clear focus to get a good picture. This means you need to hold the camera still. And at longer exposures, you need a firm foundation. In other words, you need the equivalent of a sharp lens and a stable tripod.
“It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.”
David Bailey
I also remember another perceptive comment by another photography teacher. The teacher said, “If you can’t find anything interesting to photograph, simply look at something for a full minute. If you still can’t see anything interesting, look at the same object for five more minutes. Keep your attention focused in one direction, and something will catch your eye that you will not see in the quick glance.”
This is part of the wisdom of Einstein’s approach. You will see more when you stay focused on a problem. The longer you look, the more likely you will be to see something you did not see before.
“One very important aspect of motivation is the willingness to stop and to look at things that no one else has bothered to look at. This simple process of focusing on things that are normally taken for granted is a powerful source of creativity.”
Edward de Bono
Whatever you are attempting to accomplish in your life, the secret of success is a clear focus, a stable foundation, and long enough attention to achieve mastery.
This article was originally published March 21, 2006.
http://www.abundantlyalivenow.com/archive/AANN-2006-03-21.htm.
No tags for this post.
Related posts
What You Really Need To Retire
“The only real security is not insurance or money or a job, not a house and furniture paid for, or a retirement fund, and never is it another person. It is the skill and humor and courage within, the ability to build your own fires and find your own peace.”
Audrey Sutherland
Did you read the two money articles in Parade Magazine on Sunday? The first article is their annual cover story about what people earn. The second article makes the bold assertion: “What You’ll Really Need To Retire.” The point of the article is that retirement costs much more than people realize, and most people are not saving enough money.
“Most people save too little for retirement, partly because they don’t realize how much it will cost. Well, brace yourself. It’s a lot more than you think. Here’s why:
Your retirement savings must last 20-30 years. That’s how long a healthy 65-year-old is now likely to live.
The cost of living will more than double during those years, even if inflation averages a modest 3% a year.
To make sure your money lasts as long as you do, experts say, you can’t afford to withdraw more than 4% to 5% of your life savings every year, adjusted annually for the rise in the cost of living.”
Lynn Brenner
Parade Magazine
http://www.parade.com/articles/editions/2006/edition_03-12-2006/wpe_lede_story_retirement?prnt=1
After reading many such articles, I have come to the conclusion that most of the financial advice addressed to consumers is bad advice. From the perspective of conventional wisdom, the advice makes sense. The problem is that conventional wisdom is not very wise because it is based on a limited understanding of money.
So what is wrong with this article? It rounds up the usual suspects of retirement planning and lists them as reasons to be afraid that you don’t have enough money to retire:
“ Most people have not saved enough money.
“ Prices will go up and up.
“ You will probably need more for medical expenses as you age.
“ And worst of all, you might live 20-30 years after retirement at age 65 and will probably outlive your money.
The article then goes on to explain all the ways you can calculate how much money you will need, what costs will go up and what costs might go down. (It assumes that you will pay off your mortgage.) It also assumes that your own sources of money will be retirement funds, pensions, and Social Security. It even includes a handy chart telling you how much of your nest egg you can safely withdraw each year to avoid running out of money. The unexamined assumptions of the article create fear in the minds of people.
“People are very insecure. It’s a common thread. All of these people have security questions in some way, whether it’s Social Security, retirement security. People feel that gaping holes are being cut out in their safety nets.”
James Clyburn
The whole article demonstrates what I call “money limits.” I could write a book about the money limits contained in this one article. (Maybe I will!) This article will not teach anyone the single most important skill required to live those 20-30 years beyond retirement age in abundance: how to make money.
Every single one of these money fears is based on a single assumption. After you retire from your job, you won’t earn any more money. This is one of the biggest money limitations imaginable.
You must anticipate an uncertain future in which the money available to you is limited by the amount of money you amassed in your earning years. The article wants you to imagine living 20-30 years without making any new money, completely dependent upon what you earned in your working life.
“The main purpose of Social Security is to redistribute wealth, to make an increasingly large number of Americans dependent on government for their basic needs in their retirement years.”
Neal Boortz
The article also depends on another assumption, which is never stated explicitly. The related assumption is that the amount of money you have available to you in retirement also depends on the decisions of other people. Other people will decide whether or not you still have a pension, whether or not you still have Social Security payments, the amount of interest you earn on your “safe” savings accounts and CDs, and the returns on your mutual funds.
No wonder the article is based on fear. Your only security is to amass as much money as you can while you are still earning an income, and then use it very carefully before it is all gone. You really can’t depend on these other sources of additional income. In other words, you are essentially powerless to increase your wealth after you retire from your job.
There is another way to approach retirement planning based on a different assumption. The fact that you retire from a job does not mean that you retire from the capacity to make money. The fundamental difference is that you continue to make money in retirement and that you take an active role in creating new money.
Compare the idea that you must stockpile enough money to last 20-30 years with breathing. What good would it do to tell yourself that you need to store up enough oxygen to last you 20-30 years?
Or how about food? Imagine storing 20-30 years worth of food in your house, because you can’t accumulate any more. You have to be careful to use only a certain amount of the food every day, always worrying that you will use too much. When your stockpile is gone, you are doomed to go hungry.
Both examples are ridiculous. You can’t save the air to breathe later. And unless you are living in a bomb shelter somewhere, no one suggests that you need to stockpile enough food to last 20-30 years.
But when it comes to money, the conventional wisdom paradigm changes. Instead of being something that flows, money becomes fixed. And whatever you amass during your “earning years” determines how you will live the remaining years of your life, if you are actually so “unlucky” that you last 20-30 more years.
Fundamentally, it comes down to the difference between earning money and making money. It is no accident that the retirement article follows the cover story, “What People Earn.”
The retirement article simply repeats the conventional wisdom of so many articles addressed to consumers. It treats money as a commodity you can use up or save, but it doesn’t mention a single word about how you can create more money in your retirement years.
“Retirement, we understand, is great if you are busy, rich, and healthy. But then, under those circumstances, work is great too.”
William E Bill Vaughan
“Making money” is not the same as “earning money.” Making money is a skill that very few of us ever learned as wage and salary earners. When you “make money,” you increase the amount of money available by selling something at a profit, not because you get more in your pension or Social Security or from the pitiful interest that the bank might pay you on your savings or CDs.
The two articles in Parade Magazine assume a consumer mindset. Consumers “consume” money. They don’t “make” it. As a consumer, you “earn” money from wages and salaries and “earn” interest on investments, but you have not “created” more money.
The article describes a consumer’s future, when you are retired from your job. You have earned all the money you will ever earn, tucked away in some sort of “safe” investment, or you depend on a pension or Social Security. The article does absolutely nothing to suggest that a retired person might find ways to “make” more money.
We live in an entrepreneurial age. People who have businesses understand that money is not only a commodity to be earned and then used up. Money is also a product you can create.
If you have a business, you already know the difference between earning money as an employee and creating money in business. If you have always been an employee, it might take some getting used to the idea that your future is not limited by the amount of cash you have on hand and the economic decisions of former employers, banks, and governments.
“Who knows whether in retirement I shall be tempted to the last infirmity of mundane minds, which is to write a book.”
Geoffrey Fisher
There are so many ways that people retired from their jobs can create more money. They can produce products, invest in real estate, trade Forex currencies, trade in the stock market, write books, and consult, as well as a thousand other methods to make money.
The alternative to finding ways to create money is to live with the vision of your future imagined by the Parade Magazine article. It offers specific steps to retired consumers about prudent ways to save and consume money. It tells you nothing about how to make more money. If you follow this strategy, you face a future shaped by a powerless worry that you will outlive your money.
When you know the difference between making money and earning money, you won’t have to fear a future limited the amount of money you already have in savings accounts, IRAs, and pensions. And you don’t have worry about outliving your money.
It all comes down to knowing how to create money. You will either face a future of money limits or you will understand that you can continue to make money during all of those wonderful 20-30 years you live past your job.
This article was originally published March 14, 2006.
http://www.abundantlyalivenow.com/archive/AANN-2006-03-14.htm.
FREE EBOOK: Do You Know The Money-Making Secret In The Monopoly Game?
Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D.
Author of “No Money Limits For Real Estate Investors: Discover The Money-Making Secret In The Monopoly Game That Will Turn Your Money Struggles Into Money Abundance
http://www.nomoneylimits.com/
kalinda@nomoneylimits.com
Related posts
Syndicate
Subscribe to this site's RSS feed.