Allowing Yourself Small Luxuries
Sometimes the best way to overcome a temptation is to give in to it.
Say you are dieting and you feel a strong temptation to eat pizza and ice cream. You might make your life a lot easier and free up mental energy to do more productive things than battling that temptation if you indulge yourself in a very small size ice cream.
Or say you suddenly have this huge desire to want to go for a foreign vacation, somewhere exotic and where you’ve never been to before. Again, you can save yourself the whole recurrent battle of keeping the desire in check if you just travel to Cotonou beside us here and indulge yourself in a vacation-like experience there.
For me I often face temptations, it is the downside of being exposed to too much information. I get to come across a lot of things that interest me and give rise to expensive temptations. In just the past one week, I have come under the temptation to buy a new high-end laptop, to buy the Google Pixel phone, to buy a Samsung high-end phone and to travel to Mauritius. And that is just in one week. You don’t want to imagine how many temptations I have faced in the last one year!
Yet I have satisfactorily been able to handle all these temptations because I give in to them in a small way. I allow myself small luxuries. It is amazing how buying a N9,000 Bluetooth headphone can wipe away your temptation to buy a new laptop and new smartphone. That amazing feeling of having overspent has a magical way of clearing all your other expensive thoughts. Even going to an expensive Chinese restaurant can wipe away the desire to travel out of the country.
There is, however, one thing that you need to do to make this small luxury cure effective. You must always keep most of your money out of easy reach. When you have N6 million in your ATM reachable savings account, a N9,000 Bluetooth headphone is not going to cure you of all your expensive urges. The magic is in having as little as N25,000 in your account so that when you get the N9,000 debit alert and see the balance of N16,000 you feel like you’ve made a very significant purchase. And for me, spreading my after-investment money across six different bank accounts help me achieve than effect easily without completely running out of money. It makes those little luxuries feel really really expensive and cures me of the big luxury temptation.
Originally published at www.olafusimichael.com.
