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I shall tell you of one experience I had recently. An old English gentleman and I had a conversation on the subject of a telephone bill. Although he knew he had to reduce it, he couldn’t find a good enough reason to do so. I said to him: “Sir, this is very simple: there are assets, and then there are liabilities. Your telephone bill is your liability that holds you down in one way or another. Personally, I’d reduce my liabilities to a minimum and invest money in my assets”.
He agreed with me entirely.
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There is one big issue I have both with psychology and with economics. They both focus – or used to focus – primarily on the “negative”. Economics studied scarcity of goods and money, while psychology preoccupied itself with the study of abnormal. John Cleese had exactly the same problem with psychology
, particularly family psychology.
, particularly family psychology.Thanks to such approach, we’re meant to believe that, one, nobody is normal, and, two, there is not enough wealth to go round. Thus, firstly, we may end up diagnosing ourselves with everything except the proverbial housemaid’s knee; and, secondly, we’re conditioned to believe that wealth can only belong to a few lucky ones.
The law of attraction works in both ways. If you focus on abundance and all good things, you will get more of those. If you focus on poverty and scarcity, you’ll get more of that. Which is the reason, for instance, why I think that charitable programs directed at alleviation of the poverty burden are quite useless: they do not treat the causes of poverty. They do not change those outdated mechanisms of thinking and behaviour that are alone responsible for the fact that poverty is so pervasive.
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The title of the post is from John Ruskin’s essay, Unto This Last: Four Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy. And there one finds a poignant thought:
The vital question, for individual and for nation, is never ‘how much do they make?’ but ‘to what purpose do they spend?’
Indeed, why does it matter if or not you make enough money if you spend most of it on your liabilities, on things, sometimes immaterial, that only consume money without reproducing it? Today, the entire Advertising industry is based around this very question: what product to market, and how, so that people had the purpose to buy it?
There are a lot of economists and sociologists today who recognise the emotional aspect of economic behaviour, and not only among consumers, but among businessmen, too. A decision based on intuition again and again turns out to the right, successful, and profitable one. The question of purpose always highlights a bigger picture that involves not only logic, but also intuition, insight, and gut.
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Yet this question about “spending” shouldn’t be seen solely in the context of economic relations. Time is one of those precious commodities we can easily hoard. To what purpose do we spend it? Are we pouring it into our assets – study, work that brings us satisfaction and income, travel, communication with people who make a positive difference in our lives? Or are we spending our time on getting on with life that gets in the way? Are we dedicating our time and hence resources to things and people that don’t deserve it?
Where are our mental powers directed? Are we focusing our mind of something negative we cannot change, or are we directing it towards the positive things that we can influence? Because, unlike money, time and the damaged nerves cannot be regained that easily, if at all.
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This is not to say that we must become frugal in everything we do. Simply, we must be open-minded enough to see the true value of what surrounds us. We must be creative to find means to reduce liabilities and limitations in order to produce and attain more assets. Be it free time, free money or just better well-being, knowing how to multiply it is infinitely more important.
