Cash Chronicles is intended to be a site about general topics related to economics and finance. I enjoy writing about the details of investment products, macroeconomics and the politics that effect our daily lives. When you think of what powers this site though, it’s really one thing, and that’s motivation.
As I have pointed out in previous posts, this site was started in 2016, being inspired by other bloggers who wrote about financial topics and were able to share their struggles along the way to becoming Financially Independent and Retired Early or F.I.R.E. It’s a pretty saturated genre on the internet now and when I started I had dreams of writing and earning a basic income to the point where I wouldn’t necessarily need my job anymore.
Not long after I initially started writing, I lost my job, moved out of town, started a business, failed at it, moved back to town and found a regular job again. In the midst of that journey, I not only lost my job and a business, but long time friends, partners and my old world view.
I started this blog back up again after a long absence after I realized a number of things about myself. Being unemployed made me realize I don’t like to be idle. I don’t really like to sleep in and I don’t want to just exercise and watch Netflix all day. It made me realize that having a day job gave me a sense of structure that actually pushed me to do more throughout my day outside of my job than if I had all the time in the world. The experience of having too much time brought me back to my college days when I decided to get a job in order to study harder. Although this sounds counterintuitive, it makes sense for me. For example if I only have 2 hours after work to complete a task, then I am definitely going to get it done.
I also realized that I actually enjoy writing about topics that I am naturally curious about. Be it local politics, investment products or fashion. Taking the time to organize my thoughts and being forced to research what I am talking about, rather than just producing an Op-Ed, helped to expand my knowledge at the same time as honing my craft of writing. If you are reading this and you have always wanted to write or always wanted to find a way to express yourself, consistently writing is a challenge that pays off.
The Power of Habit
As I have mentioned before, motivational speakers like Gary Vaynerchuck and Tony Robins have inspired me to take a new approach to life in the difficult personal times I have had in the past few years. Working in finance and especially on Wall Street can warp your outlook into thinking that life is measured by the yardstick of money and titles. In reality neither of these really have much of anything to do with your happiness and sense of fulfillment.
What these speakers really helped me understand was the power of breaking down big goals into smaller and smaller pieces until they becomes small tweaks in your daily habits that over time produce drastically different results in your life.
For example, I wrote about 33 posts of about 1500 words each before I gave up on my blog the first time. That was about 3 months of posting those 1500 word articles 3 times a week. It was a challenge to keep up the consistency and the output and continue to produce content that I thought people would find interesting.
When I gave up after 3 months of no one really reading my blog despite all the work I put into it, I thought I could never achieve the even greater task of doing something like writing a book. However, later on, when I started to take a different perspective, I realized that all that writing I did had produced about 50,000 words of content. The average 200 page book is about 60,000 words so I was literally 2 weeks short of having wrote the equivalent of a book. Why didn’t I look at this as a great achievement as opposed to looking at my site as a failure? Essentially it was because I was writing for a monetary goal and I was seeking validation in others. These 2 things will never produce the inner drive and motivation to keep you at it day in and day out.
Gary Vee (as Gary Vaynerchuck calls himself) has mentioned in one of his many videos that if you are doing it for the money you will almost certainly never make it. However if you learn to love the process, then you take yourself out of just trying to reach an imaginary finish line and you start enjoying the ins and outs of your daily habits and will derive pleasure from the achievements you start to bring to yourself as a result of changing your mentality and your daily life.
A Perspective Seeker
I mused to a friend of mine the other day that I have been feeling very philosophical lately, she told me she doesn’t see me as philosophical but rather as a perspective seeker. She mentioned that I am constantly seeking out a new view of life in order to appreciate what I have in the now and to take stock of how far I have come. This is so important to do in order to not get caught up in the hum drum of daily life.
I thought of this as I saw the tributes pour in for rapper Nipsey Hussle, who was killed recently. I didn’t know his music very well but was familiar with his presence at sports games and from his wife Lauren London. As people have been sharing his words of wisdom and his journey though, I have started to appreciate the personality that was.
One of my favorite lines that I heard him say on a radio interview today was that as a rapper there are really just a few islands of success that you can latch yourself onto. One being the Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovene island. Another being Jay-Z and Roc Nation, Another being Sony etc. However Nipsey didn’t really want to change himself to adapt to any of these models so in his words he had to “take the stairs.”
I can’t picture a better metaphor for putting your head down and getting to work. Think about that for a moment, just trying to get to the top of a building by taking the stairs instead of taking the elevator. Initially you will have to watch people shoot strait to the top. As you start your climb, it won’t look much different than when you started. If you ignore the elevators though and keep moving, you may get tired along the way but will start to find yourself getting higher and higher. At the same time you will be getting stronger and your endurance will grow. This is experience that someone taking the elevator will not have had any of on their way to the top.
By the time you arrive at the top, there will be a sense of relief but there will also be a sense of satisfaction about the will and the drive that it took to accomplish that climb. You’ll realize that it’s the journey that made you mentally stronger and will have forever changed you in the way that you approach challenges going forward. It will make you prepared to make another climb, whatever that may be.
Change Your Mind and Change Your Life
That’s one of the sayings that I have been hearing a lot lately. Embracing this has completely changed my outlook. I now realize that I want to keep people around that push me to achieve more and want me to succeed. I also recognize the people dragging me down in my life and even if they are close to me, the need to let them go until they find a point when they can find their own peace. I may need to let them be until they can change their own mind about themselves and the world around them.
Surrounding myself with positive people that push me to look at the world in different ways has helped me bring my blog full circle as well. No longer do I try to model mine after other blogs that are trying to all copy the same approach with just slight tweaks. Consistent, creative production and being true to what I want to write about are what drive me now and what powers the writings in this blog.
So excuse the break in the finance topics because this post is about pushing all of ourselves a little more until we start to change our own lives and the lives of people around us for the better. I dedicate this to all the grinders who are taking the stairs like the late Nipsey Hussle.
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