Is everyone familiar with this pattern?

It doesn’t always happen, but a lot.

If you want to make money, it helps to interact with other people who make money and join their community.

But then when you end up making money, you have to keep interacting with them, maintaining your role in the community, which forces you to spend money. The cost of living that lifestyle eerily takes about as much material and emotional resources from your life as living your old one. As with any community, if you don’t maintain your role in it, you lose your place in it.

While in that community, you get more expensive stuff and status, but you have to maintain them. Instead of driving a used car you drive a luxury car. But you still have to maintain it. You go to nicer restaurants — limited by what you can afford as before, but having no more fresh fruit and vegetables than you would have eaten if you shopped and cooked at home to save money if you made less.

There are always people out there who want to get the last bit of money out of your pocket.

Despite the material affluence, you end up back where you began on things like free time, relationships, health, and your emotional state.

Again, not everyone ends up back where they started.

Some make money without spending as much as they earn, but they seem the exception. There are plenty of millionaires next door and people whose success or discipline is so great their spending never catches up to their earnings.

The way out

Life doesn’t have to leave you behind.

Whether freedom comes more from having more or needing less depends on the person. As does whether you consider your best strategy for yourself or your business to save more, earn more, or both.

The way out is to know your emotional and motivational system. What makes you feel how. Then you can create those things and not waste your time with things that don’t.

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• Do you decide rationally or emotionally? →