Yes, that’s me. Until several months before. I kept saying, “I could do nothing. I don’t have any skills. I can’t change my current situation.” So, there I was. Working hard under a big company, getting an average monthly salary, but barely could save a penny. Then I dream of, “I want to be a millionaire someday.”
How can we become a millionaire if we can’t save, let say $100 from our salary? Even if we did save $100, at what age will we become a millionaire with saving alone. Plus, when we keep the money in a bank account, the bank would take some fees because we use their service.
So literally, it may take up to 850 years for the monthly $100 saving to become $1,000,000. I don’t think any current human is able to live healthily until 850 years old where at last is able to enjoy the wealthy life. From my point of view, I don’t want to be like that. What I want to become is a millionaire who could enjoy this life at the best age and share my wealth with other people. I couldn’t do this if I’m 850 years old.
So, how can I realize my dream if I can’t do anything? No, I can’t. It’s mandatory to do something in order for this to happen.
Reason for Thinking Negatively about Ourselves
Our minds made us think like that. For example, when we searched for things like ways to build passive income, we kept saying to ourselves, “This is hard to learn. I don’t have the skill. It takes too much time.”
When these negative thoughts floated around our head, our subconscious mind downgraded us from the inside and we won’t want to start any of them. By this, we won’t make any changes, and at the very least, we won’t be able to increase our saving. These negative thoughts are poisonous and they slowly downgraded us to the point where we won’t be able to believe in ourselves anymore.
Other than above, this was also affected by external. One of them was the school. We were taught to think that, “We need to follow orders with no excuse. We have to work hard under other people to receive money. There was only one correct answer and there will be a penalty if answered wrongly.”
We had no freedom to express our own opinion during school time because the things that we learned from school was to be good students and follow every rule provided. We were guaranteed to have a good life if we do so. But in reality, we could not survive even if we get a full-time job. We’re restricted to be doing certain things due to the company regulations and constantly afraid of getting fired for any reason. Is this the life that we have always wanted? Constantly feeling afraid of the surroundings and no freedom? Nobody wants such a life, except we were taught to accept this kind of life so that we won’t get into any trouble.
Effect Towards Our Future
We have seen what is happening to our world with the majorities are typical work-follow-rules-in-nine-to-five-job-and-get-paid-every-month societies. They do the work that sometimes didn’t even improve themselves for the better, the same work, the same salary, thinking, “I will be able to retire and live a good life after 50 years old with my saving.” Well, it is a good and simple dream which most has already been achieved by many of the majorities.
Sometimes, I myself have been fed up with the world and just thought this is it. I don’t want to be struggling with the thing that I don’t have, so I just stay in my stressful nine-to-five job and be patient until I reach my retirement goal.
But the problem is there will be many unexpected things happening in our life. Something occurs may be affecting our steady income which turns our life situation change 180 degrees.
For example, the Covid-19 situations or any accidents that could cause us to lose our only income. When these happen, we as ‘good citizens’ don’t know how to handle the situation because we are so afraid to do anything. We who never encounter trouble cause us to be panicking over the big problem that suddenly affects our life.
Hence, we blame the governments and other people because we believe that they are responsible for all the things that happen to us. Of course, they are responsible for these kinds of things because it’s their job and some of the governments and great companies even took some action to help these ‘poor good citizens’ but when it is not enough for everyone, we blame them even more.
These are the problems that we would encounter if we keep thinking “I can’t do anything.” We would be panicking due to sudden changes and blame everyone else for the problem. In the end, we get nothing. We never get to live a simple and happy life in the 50s nor become a millionaire as we dreamt.
Simple Things to do to Escape from “I Can’t do Anything”
The first thing that we can do to overcome this problem is to change the way of how we think. When finding a skill or thing that can improve our life but we have never done it before, don’t think the phrase “I can’t do it,” instead “I never did this but I could give it a try. It works for this person, so it may work for me too.” I get this solution from watching one of Sorelle Amore Finance Youtube Channel videos and I’ve been doing this to rewind my mindset. Even it is a simple thing that only involves our mind, the feeling after the changes is completely different where I become more positive and refresh instead of the stress feeling of the ‘cannot’ thoughts.
Don’t think the phrase “I can’t do it,” instead “I never did this but I could give it a try. It works for this person, so it may work for me too.”
A direct example that I get from Sorelle to change the way we think is instead of thinking “I can’t afford this. It’s too expensive” we could think “I prefer saving for now so that I could buy a better version of this thing in the future even it is more expensive.” Can you feel the difference in the feelings that we put in both of these mindsets?
The second thing that we could do is try to learn many skills or things that could improve our life or in order to achieve our dreams. For example, we could learn writing to start a blog website, designing using Canva to start a print-on-demand store, and cleaning our house using Konmari methods. There are a lot of skills that we could learn free or paid on the internet range from easy to difficult. If we think we don’t have time to learn hard stuff like Photoshop, we could learn an easy skill like feeding a stray cat. We can learn one, two, or as many skills as we want to depending on our own situations and goals.
There are a lot of skills that we could learn free or paid on the internet range from easy to difficult.
Besides that, when we weren’t able to do well with the first skill that we’ve learned, it’s alright to pause working on it and learn the next one, two, or more skills. The learning of the skills doesn’t need to take months. In fact, we could just learn it in one day and try using it maybe in a week to see whether we love doing it or not. After that, then you are able to choose which skills do you want to go further towards the journey of your goal.
The last method that I would like to share is being consistent with what we have planned. Let say, we want to get $1000 for the first year after we start our eCommerce store for print-on-demand t-shirts. After in-depth research, we found out that we need to have around 1000 designs to make sure people would want to look around our store and buy something from there. Thus, we start planning to create 10 designs a day in order to achieve the 1000 designs target by the end of this year. But after several days of struggling and we barely get 5 designs a day, and it seems so far away from the target of 1000 designs. We love creating designs but the daily target seems very hard to achieve making us think that we have failed. Actually, no. We are not failing. We just barely begin our journey. Even we don’t achieve our daily target, just keep designing. It’s fine to just get one design than nothing. This means we have something to put on our store.
If we completely stop the process of designing, that’s when our dream vanishes. We may not achieve the 1000 designs target and get $1000 by the end of the year, but our designs are increasing and becoming better, more people will visit our store, and they will be looking at more designs each day. Maybe in a year, with the increasing of our designs and improvement of the quality, we’ll be able to make one sale. That is an achievement for us. This may not be a lot, but it is still a sale. There are people who love our designs. So, remember, failure is a process and consistency is the key to success.
Failure is a process and consistency is the key to success.
Conclusion
Change the way we think of ourselves. Don’t ever say we can’t do anything. We are more than capable of doing so many things in this world. The problem is we just need to overcome the hardest part of not doing it. We might fail so many times but if we stop our journey when we fail, we will never reach the end. Because the end is our success.
