Money dominates our lives.
You can curse it, blame it, and you can claim that you are above money and despise it. You can try your best to belittle it morally and intellectually. However, no matter what you say or do, money is still the center of our life. However, money is not an important center, it has nothing to do with the lasting values that make life worth cherishing.
This is one of the biggest problems we face. How can we coordinate ourselves with money, which is unimportant but at the center of life?
I have met many rich people who have great wealth, but they are stingy to give a penny for fear of becoming poor; I have met many poor people, but they always seem to have something to share with others. I have met many generous rich people, criminal poor people, liars and saints. One thing is the same: it is their attitude towards money that determines the way they deal with it, not how much money they have.
Money reflects a basic cruel reality-money or no money. But on the emotional and psychological level, money is purely a vague concept. It can be anything you want.
Imagine two different people. The first person's life revolves entirely around his own desires. He has an internal financial system to calculate the amount of money needed to satisfy his desires. Unless he has more money, he always feels poor.
At the most basic level of money, he feels poor until he can increase the money he has now to realize his dream. He may be a millionaire, and he is moving towards 10 million, but in his heart, he is still poor.
Another person, she regards money as a basic means of life. If she had an extra dollar in her pocket, she would be satisfied. If she had another ten dollars, she would feel very rich.
She doesn't base her happiness on desire, so she doesn't have to use this desire to measure her money. She has an extra dollar, so she can spend it as she pleases.
The difference between these two people lies not in their actual wealth, but in their attitude towards money. They may have the same wealth, but one person is measured by desire and the other by need.
He who measures wealth by desire will never be happy, because there is always another desire beckoning to him. People who measure property by demand can control their lives by controlling demand.
Some needs must be met. Even if people cut their financial needs to a minimum, they can't avoid the cruel reality of meeting the family's food and clothing needs.
When you don't have enough money to live, money becomes the center of your life, because you are troubled by lack of clothes and food, and your heart is soon filled with despair and anger.
If you find yourself full of despair and anger brought by poverty, you must be stronger than it. Go and communicate with your hopes. You must look back at your heart and find your self-esteem. I believe you can and will do better. Then you must look ahead and communicate with confidence.
The world is full of desperate people. Even those who want to help them can only do their best. They can only react to what they see. If they see a hungry person, they will let him eat; See angry people, will avoid; Seeing a hopeful person, they will help him realize his hope.
Show your hope, not your anger and despair, and poverty will soon leave your life.
When it comes to the despair of overcoming poverty, work is your only real friend. Work-any work-can rebuild self-esteem destroyed by anger. No matter how trivial this job is, it also establishes a framework for development and growth, so that you can stand up and climb up from here.
If poverty catches you, don't look for money, look for a job. Money will follow. In this way, you can move money out of the center of life and let it return to its original position. So that you can live a meaningful life.
Like the poor, money can easily rule the rich. Even if you don't care about money, sometimes it will distract you according to its own rules. Money will accumulate, so you must plan how to invest and pay taxes according to how much you earn. Money will become some kind of property, and it has its own rules. You must also take care of it carefully, otherwise it will soon occupy the center of your mind, even though you think that money will set you free.
So, how to deal with money? Although there are no strict fixed rules, there are several guiding principles that should be kept in mind.
The first one is that knowing how to be a rich man is as important as knowing how to be a poor man.
Financial happiness and peace are just a process of maintaining balance behind survival. You could fall down at any moment.
If you know how to maintain dignity and elegance as a poor person, nothing can disturb your inner peace except a huge financial disaster.
Knowing what is poor means cultivating an unmistakable instinct and distinguishing between what is indispensable and what is just wanted. It means knowing how to control your life, how to repair and maintain everything around you, how to shop wisely, how to stop shopping when you are overwhelmed, and how to enjoy the simple happiness provided by life.
This means not always thinking about what you lack, but finding surprises in what you have. It means knowing how to live a tasteful and creative life, rather than building your life on money.
If you learn not to forget poverty when it comes, it will make you sharper, stronger and more self-reliant. It will make you appreciate the simple gift of life. But you must learn how to live according to its laws and learn to embrace the constraints imposed on you by life.
The second principle is: stay away from debts in your personal life. The biggest enemy of financial happiness and inner peace is debt rather than poverty.
There are many powerful forces in the world that tell you the benefits of borrowing. They will tell you that borrowing makes you legal in the eyes of creditors. They will say, you can enjoy tomorrow's happiness at today's price.
They will put forward all kinds of convincing arguments and introduce all kinds of attractive motives. They will whitewash their debts and call them credibility. But all this is nothing more than one thing: you mortgage your future to repay your current expenses, which you never want to do.
Debt can bring you profits because it allows you to seize opportunities when they arise. Debt can help you now and push the problem to the future where you hope things will improve.
However, debt determines your future, and when your future has been decided, hope will die. You have promised that the purpose of your future life is to earn money to pay off your past debts.
If possible, please stay away from debt. Nothing is more sad than seeing such people. Their eyes are glassy and they are carrying the millstone of debt to endless distances. Their dreams and hopes have long been exhausted on this day.
This is the third principle: money tends to stay away from those who hoard it, but it will flow to those who share it.
If you are a hoarder of money, you have a lock in your heart; Nothing can get in and nothing can get out. If you are a sharer, you turn others into sharers, so money flows freely.
Money is like a language, through which people communicate with each other; People who speak the same language often get together. If your money talks about protection and hoarding, you will find that everyone around you is speaking the same language. You look at each other, wearing hoods and clenching your fists. These are the values you share.
If your money talks about sharing, you will find that people around you are willing to share their money, so your life is full of possibilities and hopes.
The fourth principle to remember is that money comes and goes. You must not cling to it for fear of losing it.
I often think of the old man who lives near my home. His life is not much better than poverty, and he is a cheapskate. He sells dog houses for a living. We live in a relatively poor area and people don't have much money to spend on houses, let alone dog houses. However, the man still insisted on selling the dog house at a price that the surrounding residents could not afford.
I used to need a kennel. I don't know his price. When I found him, I said, "There's only so much money"-only five dollars short. He said, "This is my price" and closed the door.
Now I drive by his house and see that his yard is full of dog houses, and the houses are falling down. He is in deep poverty, but he is unwilling to change the price. He has fixed the price in his mind, but no one agrees. His life can't be improved unless he gets rid of the belief that he won't accept any loss. He will die in a pile of dog houses, which will be on sale in the garage for five dollars each.
Learn something from this old man. His eyes were fixed on the kennels, not on what they could achieve. The value of everything is that they can help you in life, that's all. If you are willing to abandon your past, even if you lose something, you are still setting yourself free and your life is still moving forward. If you insist on the abstract rationality of property, you will become a slave of property and fall into the cage you built.
No matter how you choose to treat money, you must always remember a basic truth: money is just a commodity, a recognized exchange token. Money is meaningful only if it is exchanged. Great givers and sharers, rich or poor, use money to bring sunshine to the world. Misers, rich or poor, have closed the door between you and me with money.
Be a great giver and sharer. Everything else will come naturally, in unexpected ways.