Neville's Financial Blog

NOTE: I wrote this essay for people I’ve seen throughout life who’ve tried to escape problems in any way (drugs, alcohol, partying, stupid relationships etc).

You can also listen to it in audio format here:
http://www.nevblog.com/audio/unhappiness.mp3

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WHY BEING UNHAPPY IS ONE OF THE GREATEST THINGS TO EVER HAPPEN TO HUMANS.
by: Neville Medhora

Most people try to focus on their happiness…we all have.

However, identifying what makes you happy is very hard.  Here’s why:

Imagine you have no clue what you wanna do with your life.

So you get a job.

You like that job just enough not to quit….and justify to yourself that it’ll be “good experience for the future.”

Eventually the daily grind sets in, and you start looking for greener grass.  You get another job….and for a while it’s SOOO much better than your last job.

But once again….you start yearning for greener pastures.

At this pace, it’s EXTRAORDINARILY unlikely that you’re going to find an occupation that makes you very happy.  Every new job (or business) you try is just a crap-shoot with this method.  You never know….sometimes the right thing will come along.  But it’s MORE likely that you’ll go through many wasted years in this search….and might even turn up empty-handed.

Perhaps there might be a better way to find out what makes you happy.  And that’s by finding out what makes you UNHAPPY.

Let me explain this method, and how you can find out what needs to be improved in your life.  I’ll show you the simple method I use.

In fact, I personally use this method anytime I feel a bit unsatisfied.  Whenever something in my life doesn’t feel totally right. Whenever I ask myself, “If these were my last few days on Earth, is THIS what I’d be doing?” ….and the answer is a flat out no.

Well, here’s the method:

First let’s divide up our lives into three parts:

• Health
• Wealth
• Love

That’s it.  Health, Wealth, and Love.

Health is well….our overall health.  How is it?  Is our body in an optimal state?  Are we feeding ourselves high quality fuel?  How do we feel about our physical state?  That is our health.  Rate the current state of your health from 1 to 10.

The next part is Wealth. How happy are you with your finances?  Are you very satisfied with your wealth? Satisfied with your income? Everyone always wants more….but how do you feel about the current level you’re at?  Rate the current state of your wealth from 1 to 10.

The next part is Love.  This refers to our relationships of all kind. With our family.  With our partners. With our spouses. With our friends. How happy are we with all these relationships?  Rate the current state of your love from 1 to 10.

So there we have it.  We broke up our entire lives into three separate areas:
Health, Wealth & Love.

We’ve also rated each one of those items on a scale of 1 to 10.

1 being completely and utterly dissatisfied.
10 being extremely satisfied and it needs virtually no improvement.

Well?  How did you do?

Almost always you’ll find at least one area that’s lower than you’d like it to be.

Now watch what happens here:
If there’s an area of your life that’s very high….such as a 9 on the scale….it seems you’re doing something very right.

Pretty much no action is needed in this case.  However in the parts of your life that are low and disappointing…..you need to take action.

You need to take action because of your UNHAPPINESS.  Not your HAPPINESS.

Did you see what we just did?  We now know what steps need to be taken…thanks to our UNHAPPINESS.

Okay…we’ve identified some problem areas in your life….Now onto solving those low areas of your life…..

To obtain any goal, you must overcome what preventing that goal.

For example:

• To obtain peace, you must overcome violence.
• To obtain wealth, you must overcome poverty.
• To obtain winning, you must overcome losing.
• To obtain happiness, you must overcome unhappiness.

So by first identifying what makes you un-happy…. It increases your odds of finding what DOES make you happy.

Being complacent never motivated anyone to do anything.  Being extremely unhappy however….has been the single greatest motivation for humans to take action EVER.

ALRIGHT…..

So you now have an exercise that can help you identify unhappy parts of your life.  But this principle of unhappiness can be applied to almost any part of your life.

Remember, by identifying what makes you UNhappy, you can see what DOES make you happy.

For example, let’s say you don’t really enjoy your job.  But you don’t know what else to do.

Well…let’s start at step 1 and find out what you DON’T enjoy about the job.

Perhaps you don’t enjoy that you’re always in one place and never get to travel.  This part of your job is a serious issue for you.

Immediately you can only start researching jobs that involve lots of travel.

Or perhaps you don’t enjoy sitting behind a desk and not interacting with people.  You’re a people person and you want to be in front of them all the time.

By seeing how this makes you unhappy, you can only search for jobs that involve lots of interaction and schmoozing.

Now it’s still up to you to develop the skills and talents needed to get a job of that type….but by paying attention to what makes you unhappy, you can at least guide yourself in the right direction.

So there it is.

An argument that identifying what you’re UNHAPPY about, can be more powerful than seeing what you ARE happy about.  We can always somehow justify how lucky and happy we are at all times.  And that positive outlook is great.

But I don’t see why identifying what’s making you unhappy has to be negative.  It’s simply a problem you’re having at the time.  And you’re in search of a solution.

Don’t identify what makes you unhappy just to complain about it…..identify what makes you unhappy and DO something about it.  Swirl ideas around your head that help you solve the problem.  Go seek out books and information that educate you more about the problem.

Is it a bad relationship that’s dragging the love part of your life down?

Seek out books about the problem you’re having to see what others have done.  Or perhaps it’s time to completely exit the relationship…this can apply to significant others, family, roommates, friends, co-workers…anyone.

Is your health suffering because you’re not taking care of your body?  Then take action by educating yourself about the subject, and implementing what you’ve learned.  Even better, hire an expert to help you work through the problem.  Use your extreme dissatisfaction with your health to take action.

Is your wealth not at a point you’d like it to be?

Then carefully analyze your situation to see why that may be.  Are you working at a job that doesn’t pay much?  Is there a small business you can start to make a little extra money on the side?

Use your dissatisfaction to research the hell out of the subject so you can get out of your low-income mindset and position in life.

Anyhow, let’s end this here……but I first want you to rate each part of your life again….to see where you could use the most improvement if any.

On a scale from 1 to 10, rate your Health, Wealth and Love.

Rate each one.

Write it down.  Right now.  It only takes a few seconds.

See which one you’re most dissatisfied with….and then you’ll know where to begin improving.

This is Neville Medhora.  Goodnight.

One of my favorite books EVER is How To Get Rich by Felix Dennis.

Towards the end of the book in chapter 19 he attempts to summarize the entire book into eight very-condensed bullet points.

I have written them out verbatim in order to remember them better:

This is one of those quotes I read in an interview that just stopped me cold and I had to write down:
http://www.layogamagazine.com/issue18/Departments/bikram.htm

This applies to business as well as relationships of all kind:

I’ve watched this fantastic Warren Buffet speech about 10 times, but have never tried this till now. He says:

Think for a moment I granted you the right to buy 10% of one of your classmates for the rest of his lifetime (and you can’t just pick someone with a rich father).  You’ve got to pick someone who’s going to do it on their own merit.

…and I gave you an hour to think about it.

…which one are you gonna pick?

He goes on to say you wouldn’t necessarily pick someone with the highest IQ or the highest grades etc. etc…. (watch the video if you want to hear what he has to say next).

This is a fantastic way to judge who amongst your friends or acquaintances you think will be the most successful.

I also have had a highly-favored saying (I have no idea where I first heard this) that goes:

“You are the sum total of the top 5 people you hang out with.”

So by my math, if you’re trying to become successful (in whatever field), it would make sense to hang out most with the top five people you would pick to own 10% of.

Try it right now in your head or on the sheet I’ve provided below…it’s kind of interesting :-)

To get you started, I’ve filled out your first choice already:

Enjoy :-)
-Nev

*This is kind of like my Best things about YouTube post.

People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily.

–Zig Ziglar

Since I work at home, during my “lunch break” I can do whatever I want whilst stuffing my face, and that generally involves something passive like watching Hulu or YouTube (I don’t own a TV).

If a new episode of Family Guy or The Office is out, I’ll watch that, but generally I watch something on YouTube which can be considered either educational or inspirational.

Something I’ve LOVED to watch over the years is Inside The Actors Studio.

They bring in a big celebrity and ask them personal questions about their journey to the top.

I don’t watch these interviews to become an actor, but rather for inspiration. Almost everyone on the show is considered “at the top of their game”, and you get a fantastic inside view of what makes them tick and how they got there.

If you watch a few of these you’ll see some clear trends most of the people at the top have had:

• Work ethic – Being consistently good.
• Some sort of strife in their life that makes them “prove” themselves to others.
• To them a loonng time to get to top.  Their success was many years in the making.
• Constantly making new things (movies, shows, books, projects etc).

The host, James Lipton, does a tremendous amount of research and knows everything about the person before they get on stage…then he just shuts up and lets THEM speak! Because of this, I’ve seen some of the BEST interviews with celebrities on this show.

To find something that inspires you, try going to YouTube.com and typing in:

(Name of some show biz person you admire) + Inside Actors Studio

If that doesn’t give good results, try the same thing on Google.com (some of the good interviews can’t be found on YouTube).

Here’s some interviews of people whom I learned something from:

• Conan O’Brien
• Chris Rock
• George Carlin
• Steven Spielberg
• Dave Chappelle
• Will Smith

I was reading a book about the male mid-life crisis (the third book I’ve read on the subject), and I came across this marvelous passage:

After doing MyBodyTutor for the Six Pack Experiment for several months….everyday…..I learned something:

The sheer power of consistency.

It’s blatantly obvious being consistent in something is powerful, but I never really HAVE been consistent at anything.  Look at my blogging habits for example.  Right now I’m blogging everyday, but there have been MONTHS in between posts at times.  Inconsistency.

Even through school I would have strong periods of doing well in all my classes…followed by a total fall-behind.  Inconsistency.

So when I did the Six Pack Experiment and used MyBodyTutor I had to answer everyday to Adam (whom I didn’t want to disappoint), and also to NevBlog readers (whom I also didn’t want to disappoint).  I also had a solid end goal in mind (getting a six pack) which I didn’t want to miss.  TRIPLE accountability definitely helped me stay on track.

Adam probably used the word “Consistency” more than any other during that experiment…and how true it was.

As Earl Nightingale put it:

Plan out what you want to do for the day.  Accomplish it, and that will be a successful day.

Have 5 or 7 successful days in a row, and you’ve had a successful week.

Do this 4 times and you’ve had a successful month.

…then year.

…then lifetime.

Imagine a bricklayer building a wall.  He starts with laying a single brick.  He may be able to lay 200 bricks in a day.  Everyday he continues laying the bricks, and after a while an immense building can be made.  However it all happened with single bricks, day after day, week after week of diligent work.

It’s such a simple concept I truly don’t think I’ve ever applied till this Six Pack Experiment!  Imagine…I’m 27 years old and never ONCE have been consistent for over 3 months in anything.  Definitely a late bloomer.

However lately I’ve been keeping the consistency up.  I learned that after about 120 days of MyBodyTutor the eating habits I developed stuck around.  I’ve done 30 day experiments before in consistency, but it seems it takes me 4X longer to learn than most people to learn.

The crazy thing is, when I’ve applied consistency to something and its done very well….I wasn’t even working that hard! Usually I would just do a moderate amount of work each day towards the goal, and if I do that little work EVERY DAY it usually ends in a BIG RESULT.

SO I can either be inconsistent and garner decent results with periods of laziness followed by working very hard.

-or-

Just be moderately productive EVERY DAY and garner BIG results.

I choose the 2nd.

I 100% accredit this notion to Earl Nightingale.  I heard this on his Direct Line series of tapes.  If you don’t know who Earl Nightingale is, do yourself a favor and AT LEAST do a YouTube search on him.

He tells a story (and I’m paraphrasing here):

During the Great Depression, there was an over abundance of people going around to businesses “asking for jobs.”  They’d literally go up to a place of business and ask if they had an positions available.  No one was hiring.

Well I had a friend, who during the most severe economic crisis in American history, got a great job and prospered.

Why did HE get a job while MILLIONS could not?

The millions who could not find employment remind me of the story of the man who told the stove, “Give me heat, THEN I’ll add wood.”

My friend took the opposite approach:

First, he sat down and decided what type of work would be agreeable to him.  Something that at least moderately interested him.

Next, he learned ALL HE COULD about that business.  He devoured books from the library on the subject, took notes, read articles, asked question to people already in the business, read trade magazines and EVERYTHING HE COULD FIND about his prospective job.

Next, he made a list of the places he wanted to work, and he did something VERY DIFFERENT from the millions of others:

He went to the business and asked to speak to the manager/owner and said, “I believe I know quite a few ways I can improve your business very quickly….and quite significantly” Right away the managers were interested and he got hired almost immediately!

You see, businesses ALWAYS have a position available for someone who can increase their profits or add tremendous value.  They DON’T always have positions for someone just looking for a handout.

By simply doing a few weeks of research, my friend was FAR ahead of millions of potential job applicants.

This reminds me of a A LOT of people right now….they’re simply looking for jobs.  However if they simply took some time and effort to learn more about a particular industry, they could easily see how to add TONS of value.

Harvard MBA applying for a job?  WHO CARES.
What can you do for me?  That’s what matters.

Even for my own business HouseOfRave, I’m not hiring.  However if someone came up to me and said, “For $5,000 I can almost guarantee your profit will go up by $10,000/month…”

…do you think I’d say no?

One of my favorite things on this Earth is:

Sitting at the state capitol building.
…in the wee hours of the morning
…alone
…reading

I have easily spent hundreds of hours here.

It’s open 24 hours, heavily guarded, meticulously maintained, and extremely quiet at night.

There is something that is simply marvelous about sitting on one of the war memorials inscribed with the names of thousands of people who have died, sacrificed and fought for the unbelievably cushy and enjoyable life I get to lead.

I sit there and read.  Or plan. Or think.

It’s truly a humbling experience that reminds me we all stand on the shoulders of giants.

I sometimes wonder if others have such a remarkable place to call their own.