1. Money is the Root of All Evil
This oft quoted bible verse is oft misquoted and is one of the biggest lies we are told. The actual quote from Timothy 6:10 is: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”
You see, it’s the LOVE of the money, not the money itself, that is the root of all evil. We can all agree that money is necessary (some might argue it’s a necessary evil) that society has invented as a means of exchange. We exchange it for everything from the bare necessities (food, shelter, clothing, medicine, transportation) to life’s greatest extravagances if we are so “fortunate” to afford them, and all things in between.
However, money is not an end in an of itself. In fact, it’s entirely imaginary! It is simply a tool, albeit a very powerful one, that you can convert into just about anything you desire (except important things like love and happiness). It is only when money is valued above all (family, relationships, life, love, etc) that it is deemed evil.
2. You Must Attend College to be Successful
This is a huge lie! Interesting enough, one does not require a Bachelor’s Degree to earn a decent living. Case in point, there are many trades that not only pay more than some college degrees but have incredibly fast ROIs. Look, we’re not talking engineering, computer science, or medical degrees, but we can all agree that many types of Liberal Arts diplomas don’t guarantee high earning potential despite the mountains of debt they incur.
Plumbers, electricians, pipefitters, mechanics, MRI technicians, police officers, fire fighters, real estate appraisers, graphic designers, IT support specialists, software coders, utilities lineman, and many other trades can earn upwards of six figures plus in some markets, especially if one factors in overtime. Additionally, these positions often come with excellent benefits including pensions, healthcare plans, insurance, and training. None of them requires a college sheepskin.
Funny enough, it turns out that many of the world’s most famous and wealthiest entrepreneurs never attended college or dropped out. This list includes such luminaries as: Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, Jack Dorsey, and Bill Gates. These billionaires were all too busy starting and scaling successful businesses to, as Mark Twain famously quipped, “let schooling interfere with *their* education.”
College may be a great path for some, but it’s not for everyone, and it’s certainly not the only path to success (however you define it)!
3. Your Value is Determined by Your Wealth
Mother Teresa, Vincent Van Gogh, Rosa Parks, Anne Frank, and many others lived financially impoverished lives, but are remembered richly by history for their lasting contributions. I’m not suggesting that you sell all of your possessions, move to Tibet, and become a monk. But money is only one of many measurements, and I would argue, not the most important, by which you measure your life.
Teachers, social workers, humanitarians, missionaries, stay at home parents, and mentors change lives every day. What they give is more valuable than money. They give insights, advice, and the most valuable thing of all: TIME. They’ve decided that making a difference is more valuable than making money and those they positively impact would agree.
Once you’ve covered your nut, you are free to define your value however you wish and share that value in any way you desire. That may include sharing some or all of your money, but there are plenty of other ways to create value for yourself and leave the world a little better than you found it. Many involve no money at all. Consider donating your time, creating art or music, listening to a friend in need, participating in a beach cleanup, etc.
4. Social Media is Free
Lies, lies, and more lies! Most people have figured out that social media is not all it’s cracked up to be. Besides being an addictive time-sink, overuse of social media has been linked with depression, low self-esteem, and in extreme cases, suicide.
I think there should be regulations on social media to the degree that it negatively affects the public good.
– Elon Musk, Owner of Twitter
Social media isn’t free. It’s made to appear that way, but it’s a huge lie. Social media is paid for by advertisers who know WAAAAAAY more about you, your interests, income, family, homelife, spending habits, etcetera than they should. More than you should feel comfortable with.
Social media isn’t the product, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT. You and your personal data are sold at auction in real-time to the highest bidder. Social media companies employ psychologists to engineer addiction into their platforms with one goal: to monopolize your attention. In fact, there’s a new term for this. It’s called the “Attention Economy”, and again, you (or more specifically: your attention) are the product.
Happy scrolling!
5. You Must Keep Up with The Jones
Competition is drilled into us from a very young age and tends to follow us throughout our lives. Our parents, in their own good intentioned way, tell us to get good grades, go to college, land a job at a solid company, work hard, and live a model life in the suburbs.
Societal norms reinforced by advertising further drive this message home. Social Media hammers this in your head everytime you death scroll the highly curated lives of your friends, family, and influencers.
God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.
– William Shakespeare
And through it all, you continually compare yourself to others. It starts with grades in elementary school. Then it morphs into the college admissions gauntlet (who checked all the boxes (grades, sports, clubs, SAT scores) and accepted to what colleges). You get through all of that. Then comes the job, the car, the house, the spouse. You know the game. In this blog we refer to it as ‘keeping up with the Jones’.
Yet a comparative life is often an unhappy one. Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” Ask yourself if you feel better or worse when comparing yourself to others who have things (material or otherwise) that you aspire to. Chances are you feel worse. I know I do. We call these emotions envy, greed, desire, obsession, and the like.
True happiness is often accompanied by gratitude for what you have and what you’ve accomplished. By seeing how much you’ve grown as a person. Chances are the person you are comparing yourself with is nowhere near as happy as they appear. They are likely trapped in the same predicament as you or worse, enviously peering up at next echelon, and/or incredibly insecure and fearful.
It all looks so great from the outside though! And that’s the whole game…
Always remember: You are already awesome! Stop worrying about everyone else.
6. I’ll Be Successful When…
Stop believing the insidious lie of you’ll “be successful when…” I hear so many folks complete this sentence with empty tropes such as: ‘I make or have some amount of money’, ‘live in such and such a place, drive this or that car, travel the world’, and the like. Good luck!
The problem with defining success this narrowly is that you are always chasing a moving target, a receding horizon. This is why so many outwardly successful people keep driving themselves so hard. Once they acquire that ‘thing’ that defines their success, the satisfaction of acquiring it is fleeting. Their success horizon recedes further and further into the distance. This is why they constantly need to lock onto to their next target. Some call it the hedonic treadmill.
I like to say I know I’m successful when: I can choose what to do with my day; wear whatever I want to wear; spend more time with my family, do work that is inspiring, eliminate negative influences from my life, take a few months off, make a difference in somebody’s life, and so on.
How you define success ultimately determines your happiness. Never arriving at today as you ride the hedonic treadmill? Not a recipe for success or happiness.
7. You’re Foolish to Follow Your Dreams
This is probably one of the hardest, scariest, and most destructive lies on this list. You have dreams. You have dreams that you’ve let slip away for one reason or another. And you carry that pain of loss and failure around with you. I know the feeling all too well. It sucks.
Worse, we surround ourselves with those who will constantly remind us of our failures. These ‘I told you so’ people are too frightened to go after their own dreams. And they have absolutely zero interest in seeing you or anyone else achieve theirs. Why? That’ll make them feel worse for not pursuing their own dreams. They lift themselves up by keeping you down.
To add insult to injury, our education system does a lovely job of crushing creativity and creative thinking. Why? It’s designed to get us on the societal rails (go to college, get a good job, be a good obedient worker bee, buy a house in the suburbs) and keep us there. Your dreams, from their perspective is a hinderance to a properly functioning society.
Many of the greatest entrepreneurial success stories come only after a person is out of options. When they find themselves at a major crossroads in life that leaves them with nothing left to lose. So, they finally go for broke and make their dreams come true.
In other cases, it’s those with dogged perseverance or who are willing to put everything on the line to bring their dreams to life. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Jonathan Larson come to mind. These folks don’t care what others think. They see their vision and bring it to life. To hell with the naysayers!
8. Simple Living is for Losers
Okay, ‘simple living’ means different things to different people. For me, it means living below my means so that I can lessen my financial stress and enjoy life without having to worry about how I’ll pay for it. I understand that my definition may have a bit of contradictory message, but hear me out.
The problem I see with most people is that they want everything everyone else has. Why? Partly societal programming and partly a comparative lifestyle (comparing themselves to others). Social media has made this issue worse by allowing everyone to see everyone else’s fancy vacations, expensive colleges, homes, cars, etc. It’s taken the whole ‘keeping up with the Jones’ thing to a whole new and depressing level.
I’ve decided to no longer compare myself or my lifestyle with anyone else’s. I really don’t care what kind of car you drive, what kind of house you live in, how big your wife’s engagement ring is, what school your kid got into, or anything you’ve materially or otherwise acquired. Sorry, I really don’t.
Instead, I’ve decided to eliminate clutter from my life. I only buy things I actually need and will use. So, by eliminating superfluous crap from my “wants and needs”, I have more money to spend on the things and people that actually matter.
I’ve found that the more you have, the harder you have to work for it all because you don’t own your stuff, your stuff owns you. Less truly is more especially if you seek financial freedom. Of course, if you want to work yourself into an early grave to accumulate more Jones’ impressing crap, that’s entirely your choice!
9. Climb That Corporate Ladder!
If you’ve read this far, you know that this is absolutely a lie. As someone who has spent the better part of my career climbing the corporate ladder and often finding myself at the top of it, I can, in no uncertain terms, express that the happiest day of my life was the day I got off it for good and started working for myself.
Landing a corporate job can be financially rewarding and often comes with nice perks. But ultimately, you are not the master of your own destiny. Significantly allotments of your time are dedicated to the advancement of a cause other than you own. You are working for the enrichment of others. Period.
I’m not saying you won’t be fulfilled or happy in the corporate world. You very well may. All I’m saying is there’s no guarantee. If the “Great Resignation” tells us anything, it is that most people are seeking happiness and success elsewhere after having dedicated too much of their lives to the advancement of the ‘mission statements’ of others.
10. The ‘Money Equal Happiness’ Lie
I was once a member of, well let’s just call it a “club”, of presidents and CEOs. This club’s members were very successful financially and had all the trappings of success. They threw lavish parties and arranged fancy trips for the membership. I remember attending one such event at a member’s home that was so large, I had to ask “the help” where the exit was. I had, quite embarrassingly, become lost in its endless corridors.
Yet, despite all of these outward appearances of success, many of the members I got to know were in bad marriages. They had “problematic” children and suffered from chronic stress and other health problems.
When I was admitted to the group, I thought I had won the networking lottery and gained access to an elite brotherhood of executives. What came away with was quite different. I learned very clearly that their particular brand of success (materialistic, competitive, ostentatious, workaholic) was not worth pursuing. Not for me anyway. It was nothing but lies. It was, from my vantage point, literally eating these people and their relationships alive. I decided to terminate my membership and seek out a different kind of ‘success’.
And I’ll be forever grateful to this “club” for showing me the light before I plunged further into the darkness.
11. I’ll Be Happy When…
Just like I’ll be successful when, happiness is not a destination. Happiness is a state of mind. Happiness is the result of showing gratitude for what you have and who you share your life with. It’s an appreciation of all you’ve accomplished up until this moment. Because that’s all there is.
There may be things standing in the way of your happiness. And you will be well served to address those so you can experience happiness for yourself. There are likely many good and positive things you don’t acknowledge because you’re so focused on the things that make you unhappy.
But let me tell you this: Don’t ever confuse happiness with the absence of unhappiness! These are not the same thing. Not even close. Think about it for a moment especially if you are using drugs, alcohol, or other mechanisms to mask your suffering.
When you live a comparative life, happiness will always be fleeting. Happiness is internal, so don’t let externalities decide for you. Happiness is an attitude of gratitude. It’s find inside you.
No thing, place, person, or accomplishment will make you happy. These things may provide temporary pleasure, but pleasure is not happiness. It’s the illusion of happiness. Be happy now for what you have. Look at how far you’ve come. Bask in all you’ve accomplished. Then, let it go. Once you’ve done this, happiness will find you, wherever it is you are right now.
