Recently, I was reading a great article at The 99 Percent entitled The 40-30-30 Rule: Why Risk Is Worth It. I originally intended to include it in my weekly roundup, but as I thought about the 40-30-30 idea, I found that the connections to careers, personal finance, and life were profound.

What is the 40-30-30 rule? Simply put, it’s an argument that when you prepare for anything in life, only 40% of the preparation is physical – the rest is mental. Thirty percent of preparation is technical skill and experience, and the second thirty percent is the willingness to take risks.

This “rule” comes up again and again in all different areas of life. Here are several examples from my own life where I’ve seen it.

When I’m playing a game I’ve played a lot of times before, I have an intuition as to what move to make next, built from years and years of experience (the 30% that comes from technical skill and experience). However, I also find that it’s very easy to just keep using the same strategy over and over again because I’ve somehow come to the conclusion that it’s the best one. So, if I combine that technical skill and experience with a risky new strategy I’ve devised (the other 30%), I might lose – but I might also devise a way of playing that’s even better.

With investing, I have a good understanding of my own risk tolerance, an understanding built up over a long period of time (the 30% that comes from experience). Howver, I also know that if I don’t push against my risk tolerance a bit and look at new investment opportunities from time to time (the other 30%, risk), I’ll likely miss out on great opportunities.

I also see it in my career, both now and when I worked for a large organization. I would often have a well-worn daily routine that worked and got the things done that I needed to get done (the 30% that comes from experience), but if I really want to excel, I sometimes have to step outside the box a little (the risk-based 30%).

The 40/30/30 rule really does provide a great framework for success, no matter what you do.

Do something worthwhile (the first 40%) means that you’re willing to get up off the couch and do something. Maybe it’s getting ahead in a career. Maybe it’s getting into a new hobby. Maybe it’s simply getting a grip on your investments. 40% of the journey is simply trying.

Keep at it (the next 30%) is simply encouragement to not let a new initiative slide, because the more you work at it, the easier it becomes. Even more important, the more you work at it, the more the basic skills that make up the task begin to become natural to you.

Take risks (the final 30%) simply means to not do things the same way every single time. When you’ve become skilled at something, it’s easy to become wedded to the same routine. Never stop looking at what you do and trying out alternate paths. Not only does this grow your skills (making your basic routine even better), it also helps you to uncover new ways of doing things.

Great… so how do you do this? How can you apply the 40/30/30 rule in your life? The best first step is to figure out the area of your life where you want to improve. Do you want to get out of debt? Do you want to improve your skill at a musical instrument? Do you want to get a promotion at work? Do you want to become a writer?

Once you’ve figured out what you want to do, research it a bit. Figure out what things you’ll need to do to accomplish that goal.

After that, start practicing and building skills. The best way to do that is to start doing the thing you want to master every single day. For me, a thirty day project works well for this. I just commit to doing a certain thing every single day for thirty days (if that’s possible). At the end of it, I’ve usually vastly improved at whatever skill or attribute I was trying to develop.

Quite often, thirty days is enough to establish a positive new routine in your life, so keep it up. Keep doing that thing every day until it becomes truly normal and seemingly effortless.

Then, take a risk. Change what you’re doing a bit. Make it more difficult, or at least different. Explore something new. If you’re taking a walk every day, increase your walking pace a bit and use a stopwatch to slowly trim your time around the block. If you’re trying to break through at work, volunteer for a task that you might have avoided before, like giving a presentation. If you’re playing a game, try a completely different strategy and see how it works. If you’re investing, dig into some new investments that you haven’t looked at before and consider putting some money into them after you’ve studied them.

What you’ll find is that your already-built skill will help carry you through this new challenge and that the rewards of this new risk are great. You end up in better shape, with a better career, with a better gaming experience, and with better investments – or with improvement in anything you’d like to take on in life.

Over the last month, I’ve mentioned a technique I call “the five whys” two or three times. The technique itself is simple: when you see something in your life that’s not working like you want it to, you start asking “why” until you come to something where you can’t say “why” any more. When you find it, you’ve diagnosed the core problem – and, quite often, the solution to that problem is surprisingly simple.

Three Examples
In order to illustrate this, I thought I’d use three real examples from my own life recently, as I’ve been using “the five whys” more and more lately to uncover the roots of some of the problems in my life.

Example 1: Crunching the Numbers
I usually calculate my net worth in a spreadsheet because I like the layout and the reports, but I don’t update it as often as I might like.

Why? It takes quite a lot of time to dig out all of those numbers.

Why? They’re stored in a lot of different databases and on a lot of different websites, which I have to visit individually to extract the numbers.

As a result, I’ve decided to give Quicken a shot again. In the past, I used Microsoft Money for about a year until I found that I didn’t like the reports it generated – I preferred what I had in my own spreadsheet. Quicken may be able to provide better reports (it looks like it will from the reviews I’ve read) and, even if it doesn’t, it’ll make it easier to retrieve the numbers I want to see. (And, yes, I’ll be posting a review of it in the near future.)

Example 2: Broken Exercise Routine
During the final push to complete my book, I abandoned my regular daily exercise routine because I needed absolutely every spare minute. Since I finished it, I’ve been having difficulty getting back into that exercise routine.

Why? Every morning, I feel fairly pressured to write content for The Simple Dollar instead of exercising.

Why? I have (post-book) writer’s block and my usual protection against it (unpublished posts that I have in reserve) isn’t there any more, because I used many of those in the final push to finish the book and the few days afterward when I simply needed to do something besides write.

Why? I’m lacking the “idea juice” I usually have and without it, my entire daily routine is disrupted.

So, my solution is to find ways to reinvigorate my creativity. Over the last few days, I’ve been spending time on brainstorming exercises, simple writing exercises, and so on, as well as just reading a lot – all of that while avoiding the keyboard. It’s really starting to help. Then, as I get back in the flow, I’ll be able to build up a backlog of articles again, enabling me to feel free to exercise in the mornings.

Example 3: Laundry Backup
We often wind up with a large backup of laundry, then find ourselves doing several loads on a single weekend day.

Why? Our laundry routine doesn’t work.

Why? One big problem is that our laundry room is literally as far as possible in our home from our bedrooms, plus the laundry room is back in the corner near the guest bedroom. Out of sight, out of mind. As a result, we often don’t even think about the laundry until the evening, when we’re just about ready for bed. Then, in the morning rush, we walk right by it.

Why? It’s more convenient to just ignore it in the morning and we’re too tired to deal with it in the evening.

A solution presents itself. Fill up a laundry basket in our bedroom in the evening and place it right in front of the door so that we’ll trip over it in the morning if we don’t deal with it. Then, when we go downstairs in the morning, we carry the basket down and we’re pretty much ready to drop in a load of laundry on our way out the door. I’ve started doing this and it actually really works.

Why It Works: The Path of Least Resistance
In the normal routine of our lives, we almost constantly take the path of least resistance when it comes to choosing what to do. What’s the path of least resistance to get from where we are now to where we want to be? We do this over and over and over again.

The only problem is that when we choose this “path of least resistance,” we often aren’t choosing the best path. If only we would choose to take some extra effort right now to remove some of that resistance, we might find a much more effective path to get where we want to go.

For example, the “path of least resistance” for me to figure out my finances was to use a spreadsheet because Microsoft Money didn’t do what I wanted. Of course, as I found out, the spreadsheet itself had significant resistance, so now I’m trying to use Quicken along with my spreadsheet (and maybe not even with my spreadsheet) to reduce that resistance, making the whole thing much more usable.

Another example: the “path of least resistance” for doing laundry was to just let it build up then do a bunch at once. The only problem was that we essentially would devote an entire day to laundry (usually Saturday was laundry day). I can reduce that big resistance by just filling up a basket before bed (a tiny resistance) and then carrying it down in the morning (another tiny resistance).

When you do the “five whys,” you’ll eventually find your way to the resistances in your life that are keeping you from what you want to be doing. When you dig into those resistances and find ways to break them, you make it much easier to go down the path you want to go down.

Why do you spend so much money each month? You might dig down and find that certain places tempt you, so just by avoiding them, you don’t spend as much. You might find that certain friends convince you to spend more, so focus on spending more time with your other friends.

Why aren’t you succeeding at work? You might dig down and find that it’s because you’re afraid to volunteer for projects, so you might overcome that by simply resolving to take the plunge on the next project that comes through. You might find that the politics of your workplace encourage you to avoid stepping up or that the entire company is poisoned, which might indicate it’s time to move on in your career.

You can use “the five whys” in every aspect of your life. If you spend some time thinking through the problems in your life in this way, you’ll almost always dig down from something that seems insurmountable to something that you can fix. That fix might lead to the big change you want or it might not, but no matter what, it’ll almost always change the dynamics of your life for the better.

We all do it. When we know we’re being watched, we’re on our best behavior. We often tend to perform better and we usually tend to make better choices, too. Then, when we think the focus is off of us, we relax and sometimes make different choices.

This effect, in which we act “better” when we believe we’re being observed by others, is called the Hawthorne effect, and it’s surprisingly powerful.

It’s easy to see examples of this almost every day in our lives. If we’re out with people we don’t know well and are trying to impress, we’re going to focus intensely on putting our best foot forward. We’ll dress well, attempt to be good conversationalists, and try hard to put positive character traits on display. On the other hand, when we’re home alone watching television, we’ll often put on old raggy comfortable clothes and curl up on the couch without combing our hair or anything like that.

Let’s carry that forward a bit. Let’s say we’re at a store with a friend and that friend is watching us as we make up our mind about whether or not to make a purchase. Simply by observing, that friend has an effect on whether we buy.

I see it even in my own life. If my financially conservative friend John is watching, I’ll tend to not buy the item and walk away. On the other hand, if one of my other heavy-spending friends is watching, I’ll lean more towards buying the item. The observer doesn’t have to actively participate at all in my purchase – simply by being there, they impact my choice.

In short, I tend to lean towards a “best behavior” in the eyes of whoever is observing me. That “best behavior,” though, changes based on who is doing the observing.

Some of you may scoff at this at first glance, but imagine yourself in situations in your life and how your actions and choices in those situations change depending on who is there and who isn’t.

For me, the intriguing part of the Hawthorne effect is how it can reinforce positive behaviors in your life. Just choose to surround yourself with people who reinforce the behaviors you want to exhibit.

So, for example, if I’m going to go do some comparison shopping for Christmas gifts with a friend, I’m far better off choosing to go with John than with other people. Why? John’s mere presence encourages me to dig for values in the gifts that I buy and not just go for the splashy gift, while others, by their mere presence, will encourage me to just go for the “awesome” gift without strong planning or thought.

If I’m trying to break a habit of drinking socially, I’m better off spending social time with friends that don’t drink. Again, just by their powers of observation, I’m more likely to make the appropriate choice. Of course, the reverse is true – if I enjoy drinking socially, I should choosse friends who also enjoy it.

If I want to go the extra mile at work and look like a winner, I should try to get into group projects with people who are really productive – the “stars” of the company – instead of people who just sit around and complain. On the other hand, if I’m just interested in passing the time at work, I should seek out those who are doing the bare minimum.

What kind of person do you want to be? It’s much easier to find the path to where you want to go if the people around you are on that same path. Just by their presence, you’ll innately want to please them with your actions, so you’ll make choices with them that lead you towards your own personal goals.

The Hawthorne effect really works. More and more, I gravitate towards friends and work associates that are the kind of people that I want to be.

I like keeping score.

Keeping score is an easy way for me to know how well I’m doing. It lets me judge, in a very clear way, whether I’m improving and whether I’m making forward progress towards my goals.

For a long time, I was obsessed with keeping score in various aspects of my life against other people. I’d keep score with the various gadgets we had. I’d keep score with who had the best trading card collections. I’d keep score with who had the best-stocked liquor cabinet.

What I found, though, is that keeping score against other people in such ways left me feeling empty. Every day – every hour, even – there was another way to keep score against someone else, and I could never win all the battles or even most of them. Even worse, when I would lay my head on my pillow at night, it was just me. There was no one to keep score against, and even if I had a higher “score” in some aspect of life than others, most of the time I was left unfulfilled by that.

Over time, I began to find a lot of power in keeping my own score.

Net Worth
The primary way I “keep my own score” is by calculating my net worth quite frequently. I use my net worth as a score to judge whether or not I’m making successful, smart moves towards improving my personal finance state. I “win” if my net worth goes up. I “win big” if my net worth goes up by some specific amount each month.

Calculating your net worth is quite easy. Simply make a list of all of your debts and another list of all of your assets. Add up your assets, add up your debts, then subtract your debts from your assets. The resulting number is your net worth.

I calculate my net worth each month. I use a simple spreadsheet to do this – here’s how you can build one exactly like it.

Using Net Worth to “Keep Score”
Each month, when I calculate my net worth, I “keep score” in three different ways.

First, I compare my net worth to the previous month’s net worth. Obviously, I strive to have this go up each month, but during months where there are car repairs and other issues, it doesn’t. If I don’t see a decent increase from month to month – and having calculated this many times, I know what to expect – I’ll start digging for “why” this didn’t happen in order to improve my game.

Second, I compare my net worth to my net worth one year ago. This must be an increase – and hopefully, a sizeable one. I do this mostly to help me realize how far I’ve come over the past year, as it’s often an amazing reminder (particularly when compared to annual income) how our hard work is paying off.

Third, I look at the goals I set at the end of last month. Each month, I set goals for the coming month. Usually, these are “thirty day projects” of some kind, where I’m trying to teach myself a new normal behavior or two. One month, it might be minimizing our grocery bills to teach myself how to get the nutritious foods we need for less. Another month, I might go without spending a single dollar on entertainment. At the end of the month, I’ll reflect on how the goal went and see how it impacted my net worth – it’s usually a positive impact. Even better, I’ve usually picked up a good behavior or two by doing things this way.

Obviously, I also set goals for the next month. I usually pick a “target number” to shoot for – think of it as trying to beat one’s high score at an arcade game. I also usually define a “thirty day project” of some sort – sometimes two – to help me master a good behavior or two that will reflect well on my financial state.

During the month, if I feel like I’m on the verge of making mistakes, I’ll often calculate my net worth just as a quick reminder. It’s much like playing a game and glancing up at the score at the top of the screen – a quick reminder of how well you’re doing and a bit of a push to keep up the good work.

In a nutshell, keeping score is a key part of how I keep my personal finance in balance. It keeps me motivated and focused without causing me to “compete” in areas that are detrimental to my overall goals (like getting into “gadget wars” with friends).

Lately, I’ve been under a lot of stress – perhaps the highest level of stress I’ve been under since switching to a full-time writing career. I’m in absolute crunch mode with my second book, with a manuscript due in a few days. I’ve also been slowly moving into public speaking – and I certainly get a healthy amount of stage nervousness. There have been multiple medical issues with my family (two different child illnesses, plus an issue with my wife that I’ll post about in great detail later this week). There have been several family-related demands lately as well.

Add that all together – plus the usual issues with a busy household with two young kids – and I’m feeling the stress. I’ve not had time as of late to exercise with all of the demands on me, either, which is something that really has been useful over the last year for keeping me energetic.

One major thing I’ve noticed is how this has all directly affected my personal choices when it comes to spending. To put it simply, I’ve been more tempted than I have been in a long time to spend money without really thinking about it. In fact, just a few weeks ago, I wrote about one experience along those lines.

I’m not alone in noticing this phenomenon. In this article on MoneyCentral about stress and spending, the author makes the astute point that we often spend to relieve stress in the short term, but it adds up to additional stress in the long term.

I’ll absolutely agree with part of that. Overspending today will unquestionably lead to more stress in the long term. If you spend money today on something purely impulsive, you won’t have money to spend tomorrow on something genuinely important to you. That $30 impulse buy today means you stay in debt for a little longer and pay a little bit more interest along the way.

However, I think there are at least two more connections between stress and spending not addressed in that article that I’ve noticed in my own behavior.

First, when you’re stressed, you’re simply not as mindful as you might otherwise be. Normally, when I’m in a buying situation, I’m pretty mindful of the situation. I recognize the temptations around me and the subtle cues I’m being fed to buy more than I should.

When I’m stressed, though, I’m distracted. Stress is caused by something that’s on your mind, sapping away at your consciousness. When that happens, those subtle buying cues become radically more effective. Instead of rationally looking at the situations you’re in, you look at it with less than your full attention – and those subtle little cues take over.

Second, stress pulls you away from those important to you, and sometimes you overcompensate. While finishing up my manuscript and rushing to make my deadline, I’ve found myself working into the wee small hours of the night many nights. This leaves me exhausted the next morning – and I recognize that I’m not quite as “there” for my children as I normally am in the morning.

Then, when my son, who’s been wonderful through all of this, will innocently turn to me and ask, “Dad… can we go bowling?” or something similar, and that perfectly plays on my desire to do fun things with my children combined directly with my sense that I’ve not been doing quite as well as I have been lately. The end result? I’m far, far more susceptible to saying “Sure!” and going bowling than I would be under less stress.

To put it simply, a higher stress level makes it more likely that you’ll spend unnecessarily. Thus, the reverse is true: if you can reduce your stress level, it’s likely that you’ll also reduce the prevalence of frivolous spending in your life.

Having said that, here are the five stress-reduction techniques that work best for me.

Focus on what’s stressing you. I find that distraction and avoidance usually make me more stressed out. Instead, if I actually focus on what’s stressing me and attempt to come up with a real solution for the problem, I not only feel better in the short term, but I also contribute to a better long-term solution as well.

Talk about what’s stressing you. My wife is a wonderful listener. Find someone who will listen to you rant and rail about what’s bothering you. It’s cathartic.

Meditate. Spending twenty minutes praying or meditating deeply can really clear your mind of a lot of detritus and put you in a much calmer place. I find more rest in meditating for twenty minutes than in sleeping for two hours.

Exercise. Whenever I consistently exercise, my energy level is significantly higher, plus my stress level is naturally lower. I find that I feel much more able to deal with the challenges of life.

Eliminate a less-important life element. One big cause of stress is an overstuffed schedule. If you’re in this situation, seek out an element of your life that you can let go for a while and just let it go. Perhaps it means withdrawing from a community group. Maybe it means slowing down your schedule of washing the carpets. Whatever it is, step back and give yourself some breathing room in life.

The lower the stress, the less you spend.

I’ve written many, many times about how relevatory keeping a “thought notebook” in my pocket has been for me. Whenever I have a stray thought that might be useful at all to remember later, I jot it down in the notebook and then review it later, usually a couple of reviews a day.

Figuring this out has truly been world-changing to me. It’s helped me to retain good ideas, remember to do certain things, and record data that I’ll need later on (like addresses and phone numbers and such).

One of the big reasons this has been such a step forward for me is that, by default, I have a forgetful mind in terms of short-term things that I need to do. I’m great at remembering long-term things, like the date in 1989 when I had my appendix removed, but short-term things slip my mind all the time if I’m not careful.

Most of the time, such slippage is no big deal, but when it comes to things like remembering to, say, pay the electric bill, it can be a big deal. I have been late on bills before simply because I forgot to pay them – not because I didn’t want to pay them or couldn’t afford to pay them. The same phenomenon holds true for other personal finance tasks, like remembering to rebalance an account or to check on my children’s 529.

Luckily, such incidences are becoming much less frequent as I figure out more and more techniques to keep me from forgetting such things.

Automatic transfers and bill payments have perhaps been the most useful tool for me in this regard. Every payment I have that has a static payment amount – meaning it’s the same every single month – is automated. I also have a number of automatic transfers into multiple savings accounts that are geared for specific goals.

An “inbox” is always in place on my desk. Whenever a new bill or other item to deal with comes in, I put it in that inbox and it stays there until it’s dealt with. I just go through the items in it two or three times a week and deal with what I find there.

A daily “to-do” list posted in several places reminds me of the things I need to do every day – in other words, defining my normal daily routine. I even include such mundane things as my hygiene routine on this list, but it also includes things like daily work tasks. I also have an instance of “check your idea notebook” and other such things on it.

Google Calendar helps me keep my schedule straight. I have monthly reminders of several different bills and other personal finance tasks on there. These calendar entries automatically send me reminder emails as the day gets closer. Beyond that, I also have every birthday and other event that I can possibly need to remember on it – and these also send reminders to me.

A strong mail-handling routine also helps things from falling through the cracks. All mail is collected in a central place in our home (the entryway table) and is processed in a batch once or twice a week, with all junk mail getting tossed and all bills going in my personal inbox. Doing a batch processing of the mail and having a prescribed way to handle all of the pieces keeps individual pieces from falling through the cracks.

The end result of all of this is that I rarely forget important little things. I don’t rely on my brain to keep all of this stuff straight – instead, there’s a “net” of safeguards and systems that help me to not lose anything through the cracks.

Isn’t it all kind of redundant? Yes, in several places in the system, I’ll see multiple reminders of the same thing. It can be kind of annoying to see mentions of my parents’ anniversary in three different areas.

However, such redundancy pretty much ensures that something important won’t slip by unhandled. I’d rather have three notices of my parents’ anniversary and remember it than just one notice and forget it.

If you have as strong a tendency towards short-term forgetfulness as I can have at times, it’s really useful to get a system in place that’s redundant and really easy to maintain. This system works well for me.

When I first started becoming interested in cooking, I went through a short period where I watched a lot of programming on Food Network. The idea behind it – in my own mind – is that I could learn about cooking through watching and then I could immediately apply it in the kitchen.

What I found is that I would absorb a few good ideas or techniques, but I would have absolutely no desire to go out in the kitchen and actually employ these new ideas and techniques. Instead, I always had this vague sense that I had somehow already accomplished the cooking effort for the day, so instead I would prepare something incredibly easy and call it good enough.

My only success, in fact, came when I would actually be in the kitchen preparing the meal at the same time as the hosts. I would do this by using the DVR, pausing when I needed to. If I didn’t do that, I usually wouldn’t bother. Not always – there were rare exceptions to this – but usually.

What I found instead is that if I actually wanted to prepare a meal in the kitchen, I was a lot better off reading about the technique and visualizing myself doing it. If I had no idea, I could always watch a YouTube video, but usually a passage from a technique-heavy cookbook like Joy of Cooking and some imagination would do the trick.

I never really thought about this again until recently, when I had a long chat with a guy who has a side business revolving around home repair and remodeling. He related a very similar experience to my own. Whenever he’d catch a show or two of a program like This Old House, his motivation to actually get out and do something went straight downhill.

What do these two experiences have in common? After watching someone else accomplish something, we felt much less compelled to go out and accomplish the same thing ourselves and, often, felt a subtle sense of having actually accomplished something merely by watching someone else do it.

There’s a biological explanation for this: mirror neurons.

Mirror neurons are neurons (i.e., pieces of the brain) that fire both when a person acts and when a person observes the same action performed by another. In other words, parts of our brain respond exactly the same when we do something or when we watch someone else do that same exact thing. Like, for example, preparing a meal or watching Paula Deen prepare one, or do a home repair project or watch Bob Vila do that same project.

To put it simply, we often get the same feeling from watching someone else do something that we would get from doing things ourselves.

When you think about it this way, it pops up time and time again in our lives. We feel happy when we read about someone else experiencing happiness and sad when they experience sadness. We feel a sense of accomplishment and joy when the hero overcomes adversity. We feel fear when the monster is sneaking up behind the hero on screen, even though there’s no monster in the room with us.

And, quite often, those emotional rushes are enough to fulfill us, reducing our drive to actually accomplish things.

Let me put it as simply as I can. If you want to succeed, do. If you want to follow, watch.

After a period of watching a lot of Food Network shows, I began to realize that I wasn’t actually becoming a better cook or, frankly, cooking much of anything at all. Instead, I began to read a lot more about cooking, often in the kitchen with the book open in front of me as I mixed something up and threw it in the oven.

The same phenomenon repeated itself when I dug deep into my own personal finance recovery. I would read lots of tips and often feel a strong sense that my finances were already in better shape because I had read it. It was only by continually pushing myself that I was able to actually improve my financial life, not just rely on mirror neurons to give me a sense that it was improving.

Watching and reading about someone else’s success is a great starting point for your own success. But that’s all it is, a starting point. It’s up to you to take the next step and actually do something. Don’t trick yourself into a false sense of accomplishment just because you watched someone else succeed with these tactics.

What are you going to do today?

When I was in seventh grade, a bunch of twelfth graders grabbed me one day. They tossed me in a trash can, popped a lid on it, then rolled the can (with me and some trash inside) out into the middle of the school’s parking lot. They then administered some kicks to the can and left me there.

I crawled out as they were laughing and high-fiving each other, grinned, shrugged it off, and went on about my business. It was the right attitude to take. A few other seventh graders provided an enormous reaction to the situation – telling the principal, throwing fits, challenging the much older kids to fights. Those reactionary kids were subjected to ever-escalating forms of bullying and hazing, while the ones who just shrugged it off were at worst ignored and at best given an occasional positive recognition from the much older kids.

Now that we’re all adults, we might think that such bullying has been left behind. This is playground fodder, after all – the nonsense and torments of high school is in the past for most of us, right?

The truth is that even as adults, we’re subjected to bullying in various, more subtle ways – and our reactions to that bullying often determines our futures.

Don’t believe me? Take these ideas into account.

Advertising is a form of bullying. The purpose of an ad is to make you somehow feel less adequate if you don’t have the product they’re pitching. In essence, it’s psychological bullying – the point is to make you feel inadequate while the people who have the product are superior to you.

“Keeping up with the Joneses” is a form of bullying. Again, when your peers have certain status objects, these objects can subtly make you feel jealous and make you feel less adequate than you once did. They have a nice new car and you do not – why not? Again, when you buy into the “keeping up with the Joneses” mindset, you’re agreeing to feel superior when you have things they do not and inferior when they have things you do not – mutual bullying.

A boss like Bill Lumbergh, forcing you to work on Saturday and Sunday, is a bully. He’s a bully because he has power over your freedom and he knows it. Such a boss knows that you’re financially reliant on the job you have and that your situation in life, if you were to be fired, would be disastrous. So he uses that power like a club to beat you into submission and to make you give more and more of your time and life energy to the organization.

Fortunately, we have weapons that we can use to fight against financial bullying.

The biggest tool is an appropriate sense of “enough.” You don’t need more things. You don’t need better things. If you’re reading this, in all likelihood, you already have abundance in life. Sure, it’s fine to have some desires, but those things are just that – desires. They don’t define who you are and they aren’t a requirement for living. You already have enough.

Another tool is self-confidence. You don’t need products to make yourself worthwhile – you already are worthwhile. You’re surrounded by people who care about you. You have countless opportunities to do many, many things every day to make the world a better place.

Yet another tool is financial independence. If you’ve been careful with your spending and put yourself in a position so that if you did lose a job it would not be the end of your world, then you’ve got a great deal of financial independence. You can’t be beaten down due to your “need” of a salary any longer, which gives you the freedom to take risks at work and explore new potential areas of employment without panicking or being afraid.

In the end, the solution to bullying is up to you. Do you choose to let the world tell you what to do? Or do you choose to walk your own path with your head held high?