Now For The Nitty Gritty

My name is David, and for a long time I was looking for the pie in the sky, some great pot of riches that would seek me out, spill into my lap, and make me oodles of cash forever and ever. Work was always just “until the next bigger thing,” or “getting in the way of my real dream.” My bank account, or complete lack thereof, was always just one big idea from being full to overflowing. I knew I could do something, be someone, big. If only someone would recognize my talents, cut me a big advance, and set me to work, I’d show ‘em.

But it never came. No one ever saw me and appreciated me from afar. Up close at work, I got the occasional nod and “Good work, David,” even a few promotions, but never the CEO’s personal recommendation to head out the new company division. My big ideas were good, so good that I’m convinced a large global company stole one of them (more on that later), but I sat on them and sat on them until, you guessed it, someone else beat me to the market. 

I have a notebook that describes this from the 90s!

(Clear Kool-Aid, a portable device for holding and playing music back in the early 90s, white chocolate M&Ms? Yep, all of them and more. I even have documentation on some of them, but they wouldn’t hold up, and I ain’t lookin’, anyway. Like I said, I figured I didn’t have the connections or the resources to make it happen, and sure enough, I didn’t. Self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess. Wow, that’s hard to hear.)

So here I am, grown and “educated,” and even smart enough, but still nearly in squalor and stressed out over the state of my teeth and my car and the future of my daughter’s education. It just stands to reason that somewhere along the way I fell down in how to make, manage and relate to money.

And that’s what I aim to change. Growing hurts, though, and let me tell you that’s the hardest part. Changing the way you think means first admitting that you were mistaken, which means acknowledging that all those missed opportunities and fall downs were most likely your fault, and that they could have been avoided. But that’s why pain is a gift, I suppose. It helps you avoid the sharp edges in the future. 

Second, it means learning to think a different way. I once took a class in how to teach elementary kids to do mathematics, and they insisted that we learn to do math (really, just counting) in a different way. So, instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, they taught us to count 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 20 and so on. Strange? Yes, but it gave us a fresh way of seeing how those little kids would be learning to count to ten for the first time. Eye-opening. Brain-changing. But it hurt. Lots of adults in the room holding their heads and squinting their eyes shut trying to figure out how to do the next number. Changing your mind is possible, sometimes even necessary, but it’s hard. Habits do not want to die, they struggle to the surface, even when you’ve buried them and turned your back. 

So I’m going to change my mind, first and foremost. Then we’ll see what happens. And I’ll tell you about it. Step by step by step, because that’s the only way I’d ever learn about it either. Sometimes I may want to eat the whole elephant in one sitting, but it’s just too much. 

One. Bite. At a time.