You Get What You Pay For
“Everything Comes at a Cost. What are You Willing to do to Pay for It?”
Wanted to take a brief commercial break from the fashion blog entries. If you missed the first two entries about shoes, go ahead and check those out. Anyway, something has been on my mind lately…Cost. I’ve made a couple of interesting breakthroughs related to concentrative meditation (I’ll be talking about meditation and its value in a later entry). We all know everything has a cost, literally everything does. It may not be a cost you have to pay but someone or something did pay something. Your meal may be free but someone had to make it and something had to die for you to be eating it. Breathing may seem like it has no cost but it requires energy to breathe. A clever answer to the riddle “What has no cost?” is “cost is the only thing that has no cost” but even that isn’t true. The cost of no cost is typically a cycle of abusing and destroying that thing that has appears to have no cost. It creates a lack of gratitude for that thing because that is the nature of humanity.
You may want to read this book if you’re not familiar with how people operate with a “costless” resource
Most people only get “wealthy” in one of three ways: investments, talent, or luck. The reality is probably that it takes all three on some level but what I’m referring to is an investment that generates significant revenue, a high level of talent that people are willing to pay you at a high level, or luck in the form of a sudden windfall like inheritance, life insurance, a lottery win, or a lawsuit settlement. Funny enough, there are more ways to get financially wealthy than there are two becoming mentally or emotionally “wealthy”. When I say “wealthy” I’m referring to security at a level that makes your current status in that realm (emotional, mental) difficult to dislodge you from. In the case of the financially wealthy, it usually takes a path of poor but high-impact decisions to put you in a place where you are financially insolvent or unstable. It’s rare that people who are financially wealthy return to humble beginnings unless there was a series of poor decisions either baked into the way they became wealthy or were made after they became wealthy. I believe because there are several ways to become financially wealthy there are also several ways that others can disrupt that status. I don’t believe the same is true of emotional and mental wealth.
They say “no one can take away your education.” I believe that to be true, even if a doctor is no longer allowed to legally practice, he still has the knowledge to help heal others. Once you have truly learned something the only way someone else can take that away from you is to physically damage your brain. You are the one with the power to “forget” by no longer practicing a skill, but even then should you start practicing it again you will likely regain competency with that skill. Some people are born with a talent for a specific skill. That skill could be as nuanced as having a high level of agility as a running back or as inexact as the ability to learn and remember with relative ease. Even for those that have talent, there is no replacement for the cost of investment. Regardless of your talent level, you have to practice something to get good at it. I know professional pianists that spend 8 hours each day practicing. These are people who have hand-eye coordination and finger agility I could never have and they still practice 8 hours a day. It is a full-time job as they seek perfection in performing music professionally. There are people who are savants and appear to be able to master something relatively quickly, but even those people can fall out of practice with something if they don’t put in some time to maintain their skill level with it.
Only one way you can get and maintain most things…
In reference to the emotional, something I often struggle with when it comes to others is feelings. I’m a believer that feelings belong to the individual expressing them. We have control over our feelings and how they impact us and those around us. It’s the reason I can do the same thing around two different people and one person will laugh but another will get angry. One may say it is “my fault” they are angry, but I would argue that the emotions you feel are your own and because I cannot control you I cannot control that you are feeling that emotion. I believe it can be a subconscious attempt to use another person to manage something that we ourselves have control of, but it’s just a theory. In either case, what creates emotional “wealth” is time. Some people are born in an ideal situation that fosters emotional strength, but I’m starting to believe that most of us don’t get that kind of rearing because emotionally wealthy people seem to be rare. When I say emotionally wealthy I'm referring to people that are level-headed and balanced psychologically. They have a really strong understanding of who they are at the emotional level and are self-correcting, self-reflective people. These people are usually fairly accountable in managing their own emotions and don’t need assistance in handling themselves psychologically within personal relationships. The “wealth” part is the ability to handle oneself so well emotionally that you are able to assist others in their emotional concerns without it disrupting one's own emotional management. That’s not to say that the emotionally wealthy don’t visibly feel emotion. They are still human beings who get sad, angry, upset, irritated, happy, etc. They just don’t use others to manage their emotional health. When they are emotionally disrupted they can immediately figure out why and have a protocol to feel and work through that emotion rather than just feeling “x person made me mad” and assessing blame.
Im not responsible for YOUr emotions, I’m not the primary reason YOU are angry
So what am I getting at? The long and short of it is that your actions have consequences. If you stick your head in the sand concerning your issues all you end up with is a mouth full of sand. When I look at the impact humanity has on the world I know one thing for sure: Things get worse when you don’t manage them. That skill? You’ll lose it if you don’t maintain it. Your body? It will deteriorate if you don’t maintain it. Your psyche? It will move toward instability if you don’t maintain it. Everything concerning humanity moves toward a state of decay if it isn’t maintained. That is our curse. The natural world will move toward a state of equilibrium if it is left alone but humanity in its sentience moves toward chaos and destruction when it isn’t managed. What you want in this world is something you have to pay for. It doesn’t give itself freely and certainly isn’t maintained on its own. What you want requires sweat, discipline, and time on some level. The more rare something is and the more people want it the higher the cost will be. If you want something simple like a store cashier job, you can go get one fairly easily. Maintaining it usually requires some time in applying, taking an interview, and discipline in showing up on time and performing. If you want a high-paying prestigious job, say a neurosurgeon, we are talking about 10 years of time (after high school) to become qualified then going through the hiring process at a hospital or clinic then maintaining and growing within your career. Both of these roles require time to apply and discipline to show up and perform, but you get what you pay for. The easy role has a lower barrier of entry. The more difficult role has a much higher one. It is no different when it comes to financial, mental, or emotional wealth. If you want the big reward you need to put in the big time. In a world of microwaves, life hacks, learning social media, it is easy to believe that the things worth having don’t take much effort but life is not a reflection of that. You can scroll through an entertainer’s social media and believe that they just popped up and became a millionaire but there was a process there and either they or someone around them is working hard to ensure that person is popular and generating revenue. Even in the natural world, this is true. It may take only a moment for an elephant to get pregnant but it takes almost 2 years before that elephant calf is born, but that calf is functionally able to walk from birth. On the other hand, mice are pregnant for about 20 days. With humans, it takes 9 months, but even after that, it takes another 16-18 years for that baby to mature into a functional member of society. 18 years of time, 18 years of love, 18 years of resources to grow that child to a stable adult. However, there is no greater resource to humanity than the next generation. Those things that have the highest impact to change us for the better often have a much higher cost to pay. If you want something be prepared to put in the time to go get it because often there is not another way to get and keep it.
Take the shortcut if you want, but there is a reason the shortcut has so many more footprints and so many fewer success stories.