This is good, and I think there’s something even more fundamental about this. A little introspection on why you want to get rich fast will lead pretty simply to greed. This is a problem. Greed will override your rational decision making and not in a good way. Success is always going to be a combination of intellectually based planning and trusting your gut. Greed will compromise both at exactly the wrong time.
Greed is what tells you that 2x you’ve made gambling can easily be turned into 4x — after all you’ve already done it once. Greed is what tells you to hang onto a stock to try and sell it at it’s highest peak. Basically, greed always wants more. It will never tell you that you’ve gotten enough and should stop, even if you know you’re at the point you calculated as risk starting to outpace reward. And it might just be that the situation has changed, and you know it in your gut. But the only way you’ll be able to trust this instinct is if you’ve first mastered your greed, otherwise there is no way to determine whether the instinct is genuine.
Mastering your greed is a fairly simple thing (though not necessarily easy). The first step is to recognize and acknowledge it. Moments like gambling or stocks are pretty easy to see, but look in your everyday life too. When you wait till the last second to cut over in traffic as your lane ends. When you avail yourself of extra free samples at the store. When you speed up your step just a bit to get a better place in line. Everyone is different, but I guarantee you will have little actions scattered through your day where you make a greedy choice. I’m not suggesting these or others are necessarily bad, but be aware of the greed in them.
Once you do this, you can practice being not greedy. Use the slow lane in traffic. Pick the long line at the grocery store. Say no thanks to samples offered to you. There’s no need to do this all the time, but do it here and there to practice what it feels like. Learn to be ok with it and you will find your greed dissipating. You’ll still know that it’s a suboptimal choice, however the subconscious urge to be greedy will fade away.
Another trick is to watch your self-talk after a less than ideal outcome. E.g. at the grocery store when you find yourself inadvertently in the slow lane even though it was the shortest, or when your lane in traffic stalls out. If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself wishing you had gotten in the other line. Your brain will be searching for where you made the bad choice and how to do better next time. Again this reaction is not inherently a bad thing, it’s how we improve. But when it’s being driven by greed, it reinforces that greed and buries it deeper into your brain.
