How to conquer self-sabotage

via I Will Teach You To Be Rich:

You’re about to get advice from a guy who was recently listening to Pandora, heard an awesome song come on, loved it enough to search for the lyrics, and paused when he realized it was by Miley Cyrus. Then he (I) added it to his playlist.

When I look at you…

.

Let’s talk about FRIENDS WITH EXCUSES.

Do you have a friend who constantly makes bad choices, then asks you for advice?

• “Why doesn’t she ever call me back?” (Perhaps it’s because you make yourself way too available and your desperation oozes off you.)


• “I hate my job…” (yet have done nothing to change it except complaining)


• “Ugh, I really need to go to the gym” (but instead will continue making excuses, like how they can’t afford the $50 even though they pay that much in late fees every month)

They’re your friend, so you want to help. And what happens when you offer advice?

THEY ACT LIKE AN INSANE NUTCASE!!

“Oh, that won’t work because…” [EXCUSE1, EXCUSE2, EXCUSE3]. I don’t have enough money…I don’t have enough time…I didn’t go to X school…I don’t have the same genetics as you…I’m just not made like you.”

After a while, you start to wonder if you’re going to go blind from rolling your eyes so much.

But if we’re honest, WE’VE done the exact same thing!

I’ve seen it myself on my site.

How many of us have gone to IWT, or Jezebel, or Lifehacker, or a pickup site, seen ONE thing we don’t like, and said, “THIS SITE IS RIDICULOUS. THERE’S NO WAY THAT WOULD WORK BECAUSE [REASON 1, 2,3]. I HATE ALL [men/women/Republicans/Democrats].”

We go to these sites for advice, entertainment. We read them for years. And yet, how many of us have ignored their advice the entire time?

EVEN WHEN WE KNOW THEY’RE RIGHT!

We find one sliver of information that isn’t exactly tailored to our situation and say, “Aha! I knew this wasn’t for me.”

Have we truly lost the ability to take advice and apply the right parts to our situation? Should I kill myself right now?

Here’s a common example from commenters on my site. I teach some technique about earning more. “RAMIT, THAT’S TOTAL NONSENSE AND YOU KNOW IT. That would NEVER work for me because I [live in Norway/have an overweight cousin/skipped college/have an apple tree but not an orange tree in my backyard].”

It’s like they cannot pick and choose — and they don’t realize that good advice is mixed in with advice that may not be exactly applied to you.

These people want everything spoon fed to them — advice perfectly tailored to their age, gender, location, social situation, even diet. And if it’s not — UGH! RIDICULOUS!

This is not about internet trolls — it’s about self-sabotage

This isn’t about obnoxious internet trolls. It’s actually something more pernicious: self-sabotaging barriers.

When was the last time you had a perfect solution in front of you, and you stopped yourself from success?

We do this unconsciously. We see a result we want — oh wow, he lost a lot of weight…oh wow, she has an awesome online business — but I could never do that. This is “The Shrug Effect,” or a way for us to shrug and say, “Well, maybe that works for HIM, but not me.”

Why? It’s easier to take NO action than to change what we’ve been doing. Change means work. It also means acknowledging we may have been wrong for a long time…sometimes years.

At IWT, I’ve catalogued over 50 “shrugs.” People write thousands of emails a year asking questions like:

• “What if I don’t have an idea?


• “What if I don’t have 10 hours/week?”


• “Yeah, but will that work if I live in Spain?”

As your Surrogate Asian Father, heed my wise words: Cut the shit, people.

I’ve promised to always be brutally honest with you. So since we’ve been talking about starting an online business, I knew there would be a lot of doubts. Can you do it? What if you don’t have an idea?

I decided to look for the most CHALLENGING situation to test my material on.

Meet Primoz, a Zero to Launch beta student. He lived in Slovenia, where the average annual income is just over $32,000, where he earned $7/hour.

“It is so amazing to be able to do something
that you want to be doing.” – Primoz

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He had no special advantages: No rich parents. No SEO skills.

I gave him my material and set him loose to create an online business. Then I brought him into my video studio to interview him.

Look at him. Listen to his story at the link below. Listen to his accent! This dude is hilarious. And, by the way, he used my material so successfully and grew his business so explosively that he flew from Slovenia to the United States business class — TWICE — just to hang out.

If he can do it, so can you.

Here’s the link to hear Primoz’s story, in his own words.

How to conquer self-sabotage is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

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Personal Finance, behavior change, case studies, earn more money, lifestyle

I took great pleasure in saying NO

via I Will Teach You To Be Rich:

A weird thing happened over the last 8 weeks. I started getting scattered messages from people who couldn’t subscribe to my email list, no matter how many times they tried.

After I got more than 10 emails, I decided it wasn’t PEBCAK (Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard), and I had an IWT analyst look into it.

We discovered a minor bug: If someone unsubscribes, then later tries to rejoin, they can’t.

Analyst: “Should we prioritize fixing this?”

If you’re curious how I responded, this email exchange should give you a taste:

My response, 9 minutes later:

LOVE IT!! PURE JUSTICE!! You unsubscribed, now you want back in? You can wait outside in the cold and I’ll let you back in when I’m good and ready.

I’m not being punitive (that’s a lie, that’s exactly what I’m doing…and I love it). But I also think there’s a deeper lesson here:

Could I fix this technical issue? Of course. But I told my tech team to prioritize this ABSOLUTELY LAST since these people are not my target market. They already demonstrated that my material isn’t a good fit for them. In other words, I can’t appeal to everyone, so I have to pick my battles.

You can’t please everyone.

Like I told you in Tuesday’s post, I had some interior decorator ask me if I really had any credentials to teach personal finance. Why do I care about defending myself to her? I have bigger fish to fry.

Underlying this is our tendency to be PEOPLE PLEASERS.

I could have launched into some grand old defense of why my material is different than other people, and how many millions of readers have benefited…but why?

People pleasing manifests in subtle ways. For example, how many times have you said, “Sure, I’ll do that…it can’t hurt.”

And two weeks later, you have to go to some dumb party/event you committed to, which you actually don’t want to go to, and you hate yourself. It can’t hurt. Actually, it can!! There’s nothing wrong with helping other people, but when you start saying “yes” to things that are distracting and drain you of energy, you can’t make the maximum impact on the world.

The path to unapologetic mastery is FILLED with these day-to-day choices.

For example, I get emails from people saying, “Ramit, what’s the best checking account to use?” I ignore them, because hey dude who claims he’s been reading me for 3 years, if you can’t pick up my $10 book where I literally list the best accounts, why would I reply to you? Then 2 weeks later I get an angry email cursing me out and saying, “It would only take you 3 seconds to reply.” Yes, it would. Times 600 email requests/day. Times my mental anguish of responding to people who make me want to shiv my eye with a chopstick.

Too many choices = puke

The question to ask is, who have you consciously decided you WON’T dignify with your limited attention?

We started off the year talking about Unapologetic Mastery. That sounds like a good tagline…but when it comes down to making the day-to-day choices to get there, it’s easy to get crippled by TOO MANY CHOICES.

But if you want big change, you have to tackle a small number of BIG WINS.

Yesterday, I got a TON of emails from people who said, “I really want to start this business, but I have a lot of student debt and my job doesn’t pay me enough at all.” The answer is, get a better job, get financially stable, THEN tackle the business idea!

You can’t change the world if you’re worried about your bills every month.

When you’re financially stable and growing, you can do nice things for others (and for yourself). In other words, once you have a Big Win — like becoming financially stable — you can let that success “bleed” into other areas of life.

For example. once you’re earning more, you can buy back your time — like I do with a chef and someone who cleans my apartment — or even buy results, like with a personal trainer.

To live a rich life this year, we’re not going to tackle everything. We’re going to tackle ONE BIG WIN at a time.

Learning how to crochet, or visiting another country, can be on your to-do list — but just like I de-prioritized that weirdo’s request above, you also have to say NO to doing everything at once. This year, mastery starts with doing one thing, and doing it extraordinarily well.

So I’m going to make it easy for you:

This year, what would make more of an impact: mastering closet organization…or finding a new job that makes you excited to wake up every day?

I want you to really dig deep about what goals are going to get your BIG WIN this year. A good framework is, “If I succeeded at this ONE thing, would my success ‘bleed’ into other areas?”

GOOD EXAMPLE: “If I lost 15lbs and was able to fit into my high-school jeans, I’d feel more attractive and have more energy to spend on time with my significant other.”

BAD EXAMPLE: “I want to learn to speak Spanish because…well it would be cool.”

Don’t be that guy setting goals that sound good, but are doomed for failure. (Btw, I was guilty of that as recently as last year. My misery is your salvation.)

Another good framework is to look ahead to December 31, 2014. If you could be sitting on a beach (that’s right, you earned enough to fly there with a SO, and if you don’t have one, just tell me and I’ll send someone attractive to hang with you), looking back, what would be your 1 BIG WIN?

That’s what we’re going to pursue.

But you can’t do this from the sidelines.

I follow a bunch of fitness people and at the beginning of the year, when they posted “30-day challenges,” they were getting hundreds of comments per post. Now, just 9 days later, the number of comments has dropped to a trickle. Most people can’t even follow through for 9 days.

But if you want to make unapologetic mastery a WINNABLE RESULT, not just a tagline, join my free email list and I’ll send you material that will challenge, confound, and enlighten you.

The choice is yours.

Yes, I’m ready to make 2014 the Year of Unapologetic Mastery

Name:

Email:

100% privacy. No games, no B.S., no spam.

I took great pleasure in saying NO is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

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Personal Finance, behavior change, earn more money, miscellaneous, personal finance