Welcome to Under 2, an email series delivering short insights to empower your money life – in 2 minutes or less.
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There’s often a subtle, overlooked distinction between people who are financially successfully vs struggling, despite similar income and core circumstances (geographic cost of living, family size, etc.).
It’s the length of their outlook.
Research shows that short-term, extrinsic rewards encourage short-term, shallow thinking, which makes sense because our minds are strongly driven towards the achievement of rewards. If there’s something yummy always dangling right out in front, we’ll get really good at focusing on those dangling carrots and not much else. We’ll miss the forest for the trees.
Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible.
Daniel Pink in Drive
But intrinsically motivated effort, often driven by deeper interests and purpose, will result in better outcomes in the long run because progress itself becomes inherently satisfying – no short term prizes needed.
This is why I tend to shy away from recommending rewarding yourself with things like a shopping spree for sticking to your monthly spending limit. Indulging in the shopping spree is a vote for your spender identity (to use James Clear’s terminology) and misaligned with the underlying purpose for your desire to spend less and save more in the first place.
The trick is to get focused on the satisfaction of your innermost drive, your internal compass, not just reaching the next finish line so you can let the oh-so-pretty things on the Target endcap overcome you once again.
You can become more driven by your internal, long-term interests with practice and move away from externally driven, short-term thinking. For example, instead of analyzing how good of a value that advertised sale is, start analyzing how deeply aligned using your money for that product is with your bigger picture purpose and goals. Instead of grabbing the adorable ceramic woodland creature off the Target endcap, note that your decision to come to the store today wasn’t for getting cute spring decor.
By becoming more intrinsically driven in your decision making, you’re not constrained by illogical rules or restrictive budgets, you’re doing what you yourself truly want more than ever. It’s just about the way you ultimately want to be living, not what you want in the next 5 minutes or even 24 hours.
Try taking the long view to help clarify the now: ask yourself, “Do I still want to be __(spending money this way, not investing for retirement, ignoring my bank balance…)__ 1 year from now? 5 years from now? 10?”
If the answer is “no,” then you don’t really want to be doing it now either.
You can’t build a long-term future on short-term thinking.
Billy Cox
I hope you enjoyed this edition of Under 2, an email series designed to share quick bites of wisdom to empower your financial journey (while challenging me to keep it short).
All for now,
Lindsey