One of the reasons why I do not set financial resolutions is because of the prospect of negative uncertainty. It's easier for a person to say "I want to quit drinking" however, drinking is not the urge to consume, it's about being financially disciplined enough to have the money to afford as much drink as you want but choose to channel the money somewhere else.
A lot of people fail to understand that their habits are directly funded by how financially buoyant they are. Sometimes, people go ahead to stop drinking because they cannot afford to drink and not because they achieved the discipline to stop drinking.
The Negative Freedom Money Brings
The only way for a person to understand if they've achieved their resolution is if they have the money to fund the things they actually aim to stop doing. Some of the times, our money subconsciously controls us, but we do not know it because we feel we're the ones making the choices, we fail to understand that the people we truly are, are the version that has money to buy anything they truly desire.
Most of the things we always aim to achieve financial freedom, without making resolutions to cut off the things that leak us. For example, family. A lot of people could have attained the height of financial accomplishments, but they didn't.
Now the reason wasn't that they weren't hardworking enough
It goes deeper
.....the reason was that they fail to curtail or check the things that would take this money immediately after they achieve it. Sometimes, the intent is good, the plan is top-notch. A person might work really hard and still fail at the end of the day because of external factors they couldn't control.
Having an external emergency is one of them, a person might aim to get to some certain figure, but along the line, their mother gets ill and requires surgery to get them up and doing. Now planning for surgery wasn't there, sometimes even if a person was smart enough to own an emergency fund to tackle issues like this.
Emergency funds Might Not be enough
It's very likely to underestimate our financial commitments
It's still possible to have problems that would eat up one's emergency funds and these issues aren't even solved yet. So many people fail to acknowledge that it isn't them, it's about the things they didn't plan for. It's vice versa.
People who make resolutions, for example, to stop eating junk, forget to understand that they need to first find a way to tame their cash flow, direct it to somewhere more impactful, or work on finding the ultimate way to control their money instead of the other way round. Now, the problem isn't the action. The problem is the ability to fund the addiction, when one's can control the ability to fund their addiction, it's relatively easier for them to say they can make a workable resolution.
Failing On Unforeseen Circumstances
Another thing is, people do not look at the underlying reasons for making a resolution, they might set a realizable, reasonable and achievable financial benchmark for themselves, but they go on to fail because of the underlying conditions surrounding them. That said, a lot of people fail to hit it and this brings a feeling or mentality of failure when they cumulatively succeeded.
However, no one wants to calculate an achievement they cannot see or place their finger on, we do not want to acknowledge the fact that we made efforts because we cannot visibly arrive at some particular statistics, and it becomes difficult to achieve some mental closure.
Most of the time, I tell people to aim to be better than they used to be
Growth is equivocal to success even if it's not calculable
Because in life, some of the things we work hard for do not yield instantaneous dividends, they take time to yield and if we place yearly assessments on our endeavors, it becomes difficult to get the exact amount of effort we've put in. In reality, I try to just do better than I've always done, and try to check the results in 3 to 5 years.
Our lives are like a compounding machine. While I agree that some people can get lucky, I use to tell people that luck doesn't spawn when the efforts are below minimal. Everyone needs an element of luck to hit it, but when we have done the underlying homework that comes with it, it's wrong to say we're unlucky. The right word to use is, "unfortunate".
The Real Definition Of Luck
Being unlucky is because we've made the right preparations and put in the work and it didn't go our way. Being unfortunate is not making plans or taking risks, or even working towards a goal and expecting to be lucky after all. This is sheer stupidity. A lot of people set resolutions without the adequate machinery set in place, they wouldn't just fail, they'll waste time and not even learn any lessons at all.
Sometimes, we should focus on the amount of effort and not the results. It's easier to calculate results but not easy to calculate the level of effort because these things are determined by so many factors. In reality, there's no need to build an imaginary mansion when you don't have the tools. Faith or hope without the necessary work takes you nowhere. There's no crime in admitting what we are, it helps us build realism. But in finance, we reckon with the past and present in other to mold the future.
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