David Krueger MD
A passage in one of Schumann’s
piano sonatas is marked so
rasch wie möglich,
meaning “as fast as possible.” A few bars later, he adds
schneller—“faster”—and
a bit later, noch
schneller: “still
faster!”
The Greek philosopher Epicurus
said, “Nothing is good enough for the man for whom enough is too
little.”
-
How
do you know how much is enough? Being able to answer this question
means having a sense of “good enough” inside,
which results in an internal affirmation of worth. If you equate
love and self-esteem with money and power, “more” will never be
enough.
-
Much
of our challenge with money stems from our difficulty to make one
small distinction: what we have
from who we are.
A Money Quiz
Answer the following
two questions with a single, specific figure.
-
My current
annual income is __________?
-
In order to insure happiness and
contentment financially, with no more money problems and worries, my
annual income would need to be _________.
- I have given this quiz to
hundreds of people. In more than 9 of 10 cases, their answers
indicate that their annual income would need to be about twice the
current level for them to feel happy and free from money worries.
Someone who makes $50,000 a year believes it would take roughly
$100,000 a year in order to be financially content; someone who
makes $500,000 - five times the first person’s magical number –
believes that the figure would need to be about a million a year.
-
- And,
in discussions with people after they take this little poll, there
is a “trailing double” effect. People who have actually seen
their income double over time have at the same time doubled their
“happy and content” amount. In other words, once those who
earned $50,000 achieve their hoped-for $100,000 goal, they then
raise the bar and believe that it would now take about $200,000 to
be happy.
- Even when you change the
numbers, the story remains the same. The story in this case is: “I
need twice as much as I have to be happy.” That’s just one
example of the common story threads; there are dozens of others,
just as irrational, and just as hypnotically compelling.
Making
peace with our moving target isn’t about learning how to aim
better, or creating a fixed target that doesn’t move even after we
hit it. Creating financial targets (goals) is an important part of
writing a new money story—but finding peace lies not in the target,
but in the shooter. Your new money story begins with determining not
what it is you want to have,
but who it is you
want to be.
Excerpted
and adapted from The
Secret Language of Money
by David Krueger MD (McGraw Hill, 2009)
www.TheSecretLanguageofMoney.com
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