The problem in the mirror

We started our kids in home school yesterday.  We’ve been called crazy by a lot of people, but I’m okay with that.  Generally, those people that call us crazy are also the same ones that keep asking for money because they don’t have any food.  They don’t have any food because they wrongly prioritized their income and paid the cable and internet bill instead of buying food.

It’s been 2 ½ years of hard budgeting since the last time I had trouble paying rent or buying food.  Maybe more.  I guess I learned the right way to do things, and now I do those things constantly.  These are the same people who try to show off their brilliance by doing intelligence tests on Facebook.  It takes 5^th grade level math to run a budget.  Maybe even less than that.  But 70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.  Where’s the intelligence? 

I think we’ve become caught up in a race to learn useless knowledge.  I think there is a belief that states “if the answer is simple, the answer is wrong”.  And people just keep trekking after supremely complex answers to simple problems.  It takes knowledge learned in 5^th grade to balance a budget.  Yet 70% can’t.   

So it leads me to believe that there is considerably more to the economic failures of individuals than is originally assumed.  I guess you could say I try to look at root causes to solve problems.  And one of the ideas I’ve thought about is the root cause of financial failure in most people is victim thinking. 

In victim thinking the problem is always someone else.  It is never the individual.  Because the person believes the problem is never their fault, they never work to fix whatever the problem is.  It’s easy to blame a manager for not getting promoted.  It’s hard to say “I’m a lazy bum”.  But frequently that’s the case.  It’s obvious from people on the outside, but not so obvious from people on the inside. 

I think it narrows down to a basic fact: you can either admit the problem is you and start succeeding, or you can blame other people and give up.  It’s a simple choice.   But a hard one. 

As Dave Ramsey has said though, if you admit that you are the problem, then you can also know exactly what to fix to get rid of the problem: you.  You are the only thing you can change in your life.  You can’t change your past.  You can’t change your race.  You can’t change your ethnicity.  But you can change your blaming, complaining mindset and turn the world inside out.

As for book recommendations today, I’d say QBQ! The Question Behind the Question by John Miller.  It’s a short book, but a good one.