(Thanks for the inspiration Fire Guro)
Over a short weekend in NYC recently a lot of good conversations were had, together with good food and good weather. That's a perfect weekend for me. A good conversation often starts with a good question, so I tried to ask one of my best ones. It anchored what we talked about for the rest of the day.
"Do you think you deserve to be wealthy?"
Read that one again. There's more in there than you might imagine at first. This question causes us to define for ourselves what "wealthy" means, since it is not the same for everyone. It also challenges us to reflect on our self-image and judge whether or not we believe ourselves to be worthy of a certain standard. Lastly, it makes us consider what habits and behaviors we have that might influence our life's trajectory, and the outcome of our efforts. In the end, not an easy question to answer. It opened up a lot of discussion.
In my case, I think asking ourselves what we "deserve" is an important exercise. Not just about wealth, but about love, success, respect and the other things that make up the common KPIs we use to measure ourselves. For some, this line of enquiry suggests entitlement or birthright, meaning that one person may deserve these things and another may not. As a Buddhist, I can say that the answer to these for me is always emphatically "YES" but that I believe everyone else is born deserving of them as well. We are ONE. I concede that we may, through our thoughts and actions, relinquish the right to deserve these things. On the other hand, we are all allowed chances at redemption and by correcting ourselves we may recover the right as well.
For many of us, certainly for me, I struggled for a long time with my self-image and lack of confidence. For many years I would have answered NO if asked whether I deserved, literally, anything. As a handicapped foster child raised in a lower middle-class family in Chicago I felt abandoned (since I was) and unloved (I wasn't). We were far from wealthy but we had enough. As such it did not occur to me that I should (or could) deserve something more. In the beginning I did not believe I deserved a good education or a good career or a good partner or a good family or a good life. The truth is, I deserved all of those things and in the end I got them all. One of my best friends told me "You've aced it, Honeyman. You won in life. Take a victory lap. You deserve it." This was very hard for me to accept, but he was right.
I think it starts with learning to answer "YES" to all the questions about what we deserve. This means allowing ourselves to be happy, which is hard for many of us. It was very hard for me, too. Once I accept that I deserve something, I will put effort toward it with the assumption that I should have it, that achieving it is a natural outcome that I should expect. The sad part is that if I think I don't deserve something, I won't make any effort toward it since it seems impossible to achieve.
Back to the topic of wealth. For many people, including me, not growing up wealthy leads to an unconscious bias that wealth is not a birthright, not something we deserve. "The Good Life" is for other people. It's for the beautiful people we see on TV or in magazines, not us. The truth is that financial security and wealth (as we define it for ourselves) is a human birthright which we all deserve. By educating ourselves (education is also something we all deserve) we enable ourselves the power to decide how we allocate our resources (time/money/effort) to maximize our personal benefit. As Guro Jan Sorensen has pointed out in his excellent blog, Learn Fire, it is not a get-rich-quick sexy scheme. In fact, it is a careful, methodical process. Because of this, it works every time. There is really no luck involved, although luck might accelerate the process. If you follow the rules, you achieve wealth. That's it.
So why do I teach martial arts? Martial arts training instilled in me the confidence to believe in myself. Cycle after cycle, test after test, belt after belt, I proved to myself that if I trusted the process, my teachers, my training partners, I would improve and ultimately achieve my goals. This started in the dojo but later extended to every aspect of my life. Martial arts has allowed me to have the life I deserve. I am wealthy in every single way I measure. I am successful in my definition of success, which is all that matters. I am happy. I am happy because I deserve to be. I deserve a good life and all the things I associate with that. So do you. SO DO YOU.
Now, what are you going to do about it?
