Fifi asks about how best to manage her money when her income from month to month fluctuates a lot with some months bringing in just enough for her to get by. She also wonders how best to manage her credit score and to boost her monthly income.
I give a broad answer covering:
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 You’ve heard it said a million times before, everyone has ideas but only a tiny percentage of people actually do something about them. Usually, people blame it on fear that leads to inaction or the lack of resources required to make their idea a reality. However, the truth is not everyone is cut out for the realities of taking the risk to run a business. No, they are not lazy, it has a lot more to do with the stories they have told themselves and the unshakeable habits they have formed over a lifetime. If you are in this situation before you can even contemplate starting a business you need a huge mindset shift and that may sometimes not be possible for you because you don’t want it. Rather than talking in riddles, I am going to give three very specific traits that I have noticed in friends that would hate the realities of entrepreneurship. 1: No Guilt When Not Productive In my personal world, when I wake up, I have to be productive as soon as possible otherwise an overwhelming guilt will sweep over me. My productivity is normally set by a to-do list rather than the number of hours that I work. Once I have achieved the goals of the day or at least the ones I realize were realistic then I can relax without feeling guilty. On the other hand, I have observed some people don’t see things in the same way and don’t carry this productivity guilt at all. They will wake up, watch some TV or YouTube videos, read a newspaper, play video games and before you know it, two or three hours have passed. They then have a shower and get ready and then lo-and-behold it’s lunch time and they haven’t done a thing. Importantly, they don’t feel guilty about it at all. It’s almost enviable the way they can relax like that. They don’t see that passage of time as a lack of productivity but simply as them carrying out rituals they enjoy before they get on to doing some work. 2: A Different Attitude About The Need For Relaxation Outside of scheduled holidays many believe you need to pace yourself and incorporate relaxation into your schedule. Nowadays many are raised with rituals like taking the weekend off or having a lie-in at the weekend but many entrepreneurs don’t see it like that. The typical entrepreneur normally wakes up to work on a project unrelated to his day-job in his relaxation times – her business is her hobby. So, if you have an employer then you see your free time as the time to work on the business that you’d like to make a reality. You see it as fun, not as work at all. Ultimately, if and when you do manage to transition out of a regular job this habit of using free time to work on pet projects does not go away. If anything it comes on with a vengeance, taking time to just chill is a struggle. My grandfather who died when I was less than three summed it up beautifully, he said to my dad, holidays are not an opportunity to do nothing, they are an opportunity to work on things you don’t normally get a chance to work on.  I was pretty much brainwashed to fully believe the same thing because my dad lives this reality. If we went on holiday he would take me along to shops; as we perused the aisles, he said we were checking out what they sell in whatever country we were visiting to see if it was exportable to Malawi. If we went on holiday to Lake Malawi he would pull out a piece of paper and start drawing the type of house he plans to build at The Lake in future. There were plenty of times when we just chat and he told stories but peppered along every holiday were instances of what many would call work. To him, and to many entrepreneurs drafting your plans is pure fun. Not everyone has been nurtured with these principles, beliefs and rituals so they don’t come naturally. That’s not necessarily a problem. 3: Completely Struggle To Keep To Plans My office is at home. When I wake up, no one tells me what to do. I have a schedule and I stick to it and for the most part I don’t even have to think about working my plan. It just happens like clockwork. “I wouldn’t get anything done if I worked for myself,” many friends have said to me. At first, I thought this was complete nonsense but now, at the age of 30, I realize that I was judging them by my own standards. Those that have said this to me know themselves better than I know them and if they think they wouldn’t get anything done, they probably wouldn’t. If you have gone your whole life doing things simply because you have been told to do them, e.g. teachers say do this, parents say do that – you will not all of sudden become a self-starter. Some people cannot work and achieve goals without having a higher authority to be accountable to. If you know this about yourself that is awesome because you stick to employment and don’t set yourself up for failure by going out and trying to strike it out on your own. IS THERE A SOLUTION? What if you notice one or more of the above traits in yourself but still want to pursue a business because you believe your idea is a slum dunk? Is there a solution? Yes there is: partner with someone! Find someone who has the trait of making things happen and sell your idea to them. Make it clear what your weaknesses are in making your idea a reality and create a partnership agreement where your partner makes up for your weaknesses. Sometimes accepting that you are lacking some very necessary qualities required to start an enterprise is the best way to actually finding the path to a fruitful business. Accept the way you are then find a solution for your weaknesses.  Want to Build a 6-Figure Beauty Business from the comfort of your sofa? Then my course is designed for YOU!
"Beauty" includes a WIDE range of products from the not so obvious non-perishable foods and crafts to the more obvious hair, makeup, fashion, health & fitness.  Human beings are hard-wired to conform. Back in the hunter-gatherer days you had to conform because if you didn’t you’d become a social outcast and that basically meant you spent a lot of time alone. No one would make friends with the guy or gal that had been relegated as unfit for the community for fear that they too would be tarnished with the same brush. Even now, the more homogenous a society is, the more you feel the pressure to conform. I grew up within a homogenous culture back in Malawi. Everyone pretty much had the same core beliefs so if you thought differently you just kept it to yourself. You wouldn’t admit you were an atheist or gay for instance, you would just keep it to yourself. Even then, some of my closest friends were gay but it was a secret that you kept sealed tight. As for not believing in a God, I had such strong views on the matter (I didn’t understand why you wouldn’t believe in God) that it took me about 7 years of living in Britain – a very Cosmopolitan country – to get my head around it being acceptable to be agnostic or simply not to believe. Anyway, I digress. WHY DO WE CONFORM? We conform because we want to be liked. That is the key reason. We want to be part of a community. We want social approval. Our own self-worth and value tends to be so wrapped up in what people think of us.  WHY COULD IT BE BAD TO CONFORM? Unfortunately, conforming is what keeps many people in wage slavery or stops them pursuing their dreams – we’re afraid to take massive action or even to take small risks because of what people might say. Quitting a job to start a business is a massive risk and a couple of negative comments are enough to discourage most people from taking the chance to create something special. WHAT YOU CAN DO TO GET RID OF THE FEAR OF DOING SOMETHING DIFFERENT Stop caring what everyone thinks. When someone gives you an opinion, you have no idea why they are offering that particular perspective.
Everyone sees life from a different point of view and everyone has different goals. Compromising your dreams based on other people’s opinions isn’t a good strategy for personal growth. Frequently, the people that will stop us are our very own parents; parents tend to be massively afraid of children breaking from societal norms. Good examples of people who believed enough in their dreams to stop conforming.  Sara Blakely: She is the founder of Spanx. In a Bloomberg Game Changers documentary I watched about her she revealed that she was so afraid of people thinking her idea was stupid that she told no one about it until it was already rolling. Now, she is the youngest ever female entrepreneur to build a billion-dollar company. She succeeded with real products when everyone else was going into tech. You have got to admire that. Arunachalam Muruganantham: He is a school dropout from a poor family in southern India and he completely revolutionised menstrual health for rural women in developing countries by inventing a simple machine for making cheap sanitary pads. It took him years to get to the perfect design. People laughed at him and called him weird as he carried out research on menstrual periods and it all culminated in his wife leaving him because he had become a social pariah. The irony was he started on this entrepreneurial path to help his wife. I have massive admiration for this guy. I’m giving you just two examples here but I could give you many more. I could even talk about my own life and the mocking that I went through in high school but I chose to use third-party examples. I hope these people inspire you to take some risk, to stop conforming and to ultimately take the massive actions that will buy your financial freedom. References: The Indian sanitary pad revolutionary, BBC How to fail your way to your first $1 billion, Entrepreneurs Institute  Want to Build a 6-Figure Beauty Business from the comfort of your sofa? Then my course is designed for YOU!
"Beauty" includes a WIDE range of products from the not so obvious non-perishable foods and crafts to the more obvious hair, makeup, fashion, health & fitness.  Children as a group are possibly the best salespeople in the world. When a child decides he wants something he will try to get it at any cost and only give up when he realizes there isn’t a chance in hell of getting the wanted item. This is why they are so successful in their pursuits. It has nothing to do with mother nature making them oh-so cute and impossible to say no to. I love watching kids, especially when I’m in a store to see how they go about getting what they want. Here’s what makes them so effective: LACK OF FEAR Children aren’t generally afraid to ask. They hear the word ‘no’ all the time but when they want something else they will ask. They’re willing to risk hearing ‘no’ because there is a chance that you might say ‘yes’. QUICK RECOVERY FROM REJECTION A kid can hear a very firm ‘no’, have a cry over it and yet five minutes later they are asking for something else, possibly even the same thing that was denied only five minutes before. When they come to ask for it again they usually have a new strategy. Lots of adults get overly deflated by rejection; they wallow in it for way too long before sliding on to the next thing.  POSITIVITY If your kid sees something she likes on TV she’ll ask for it even if the economy is going down the toilet. She doesn’t know about the economic situation and quite frankly, doesn’t care. She wants what she wants and she’ll fight for it. I’m always saying this but I’ll say it again. News, ALL news, is designed to keep us scared, negative and constantly in fear. You don’t have to watch a news channel for 5 minutes before the next bit of negative news comes on: someone died, or a plane crashed, or war has broken out in [name country] or there’s a new natural disaster somewhere in the world. It’s depressing and it has a long-term impact on your behaviour. For instance, when the recession started there was no end of bad financial news. It stopped many of us from taking risks such as starting a business. The collective psyche of people tells them to save more and spend less. Spend more and save less has only one outcome: the economy contracts even further, people lose their jobs and you have a never-ending cycle of contraction. For those that don’t immerse themselves in bad news, reject it and instead adapt their behaviour to make profit in a different way, the outcomes are different: in If You’re Not First You’re Last by Grant Cardone he says that when the economy is going down he ups his marketing spend and begins to take even more massive action because people’s default response is now ‘no’. You have to work harder to convince them to buy.  FOCUS ON THE GOAL In that moment when a kid decides she wants something that becomes her sole focus. She will try one strategy after another to get that thing until she gets it. She doesn’t get distracted. STRATEGY REFINEMENT Kids learn early what works. For some parents / aunts / uncles crying and whining work so that’s what they will do. For me, if you cry or whine I feel nothing. I hate criers and whiners. It makes me not want to give them what they want even more. I was raised like that. My dad would send you outside if you started crying and I’m glad he did because I learnt how to justify my wants instead. For kids that learn to argue their case and justify, the world is their oyster – most adults are amused by the stories kids can come up with to ensure they get what they want. I was once out visiting my brother in Indiana and my 3-year old nephew decided he needed money. His dad said he didn’t have any and he immediately said, “But Ant [that’s how they say Aunt in ‘Merica] Heather has money!” We all laughed. He didn’t talk much at that age but he was obviously watching things closely. CLOSING THE DEAL When does a kid stop? When he’s tried everything and decided nothing is going to work this time around. If we could keep a fraction of these sales skills into adulthood we would all be a lot more successful. Unfortunately though, before we reach the teen years we become socialized to behave ‘normal’ – we’re more fearful, we’re broken by rejection and we give up all too quickly. If you can dig out your inner child, you’ll sell way better and enjoy an overall more wealthy life.  Want to Build a 6-Figure Beauty Business from the comfort of your sofa? Then my course is designed for YOU! "Beauty" includes a WIDE range of products from the not so obvious non-perishable foods and crafts to the more obvious hair, makeup, fashion, health & fitness. |
Heather on WealthI enjoy helping people think through their personal finances and blog about that here. Join my personal finance community at The Money Spot™. Categories
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Heather Katsonga-Woodward, a massive personal finance fanatic.
** All views expressed are my own and not those of my employer ** Please get professional advice before re-arranging your personal finances.