A man with a net worth of $100 million doesn’t feel rich or happy — he lives with a sense of lack, because someone else is worth $200 million.
A man who lands a job paying him 5,000 more than his last salary — when he’d hoped for just a 1,000 raise — feels rich, because he can now meet his wants as well as his needs, and still save 2,500 every month.
A barefoot child, given a pair of shoes with a small hole in one, feels rich and happy — because he’ll no longer be hurt by the burning road.
Life will never be 100%. Your experience of it depends on what you focus on — abundance or lack, reasons to be happy or reasons to feel like a victim.
- The day we learn to see everything we have as a privilege, not a right, we start experiencing happiness and bliss.
- The day we stop comparing ourselves to those who seem to have more, we start experiencing contentment and abundance.
- The day we learn to be thankful for what we have — because we could easily not have had it — we start experiencing the power of gratitude; we attract what we’re grateful for.
- The day we learn to give the world what we need for ourselves, we start experiencing the power of the universe, which gives back manifold what we give out.
Your state of mind is a magnet that attracts more of itself — choose a mindset of abundance, happiness, and gratitude, and watch it multiply in your life.
Define how much is “enough” for you. Without that definition, you’ll keep seeking without ever enjoying what you already have — a chase that lasts a lifetime, because you never know where to stop.
There’s a quote I once read: “When your needs are less, you have more.” This doesn’t mean, ironically, that needing less gets you more materially. What it really means is that when you’re truly aware of your needs — and I mean your actual needs — you start to see anything beyond that as richness.
Like the boy who got the shoes — his need was simply to protect his feet from the burning road. Or the man who hoped for a 1,000 raise and got a job paying 5,000 more. These people know what their needs are, unlike someone with no clarity on his own needs, who keeps comparing what he has to what others have. Imagine the difference in happiness between these two.
Being aware of what — and how much — actually makes you happy is the beginning of richness. And once you define it, you may realize you were already rich, long before now.
