I write fairly often about money, in fact most often. It is certainly an important subject but today I want to focus on needs. Food, water, shelter, clothing, transportation, books, giving, saving and love. I won’t discuss all of them.
Every time I show this list I’m often asked why books and giving are needs? I believe when you stop learning is when you start to die mentally. Your brain needs constant challenge. It’s a fact that people who retire early have a much higher mortality rate than those who continue to work.
A study of Shell Oil employees shows that people who retire at age 55 and live to be at least 65 die sooner than people who retire at 65. After age 65, the early retirees have a 37% higher risk of death than counterparts that retired at 65. That’s not all. People who retire at 55 are 89% more likely to die in the 10 years after retirement than those who retire at 65.
The opposite is true; I see people who have worked well into their 80’s and 90’s living healthy fulfilled lives. George Burns, Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood to name a few. Working should not be drudgery. You should not have to work 10 hours a day 5 or 6 days a week unless that is what you choose to do not what you have to do. If your focus is on your needs and not your wants, then working should be easy.
The one thing about working is that you are constantly learning and to be constantly learning you need books, lots of them. I recommend a book a month at a minimum. Dan Kennedy recommends one or two books a week along with periodicals and magazines, the guys a mad man. He is working well into his later years and still has goals he sets every year, but he does not have to work. Dan’s focus is on his needs not his wants. Is it a coincidence that Dan had a bankruptcy at one point in life? I find it very telling how many great successes today had to lose it all to find themselves and when they did the common thread comes back to needs. Dan didn’t just lose all his money, he went through a divorce as well. He lost everything because his life was focused on wants and not needs.
Wants make you do dumb things like borrowing money for things you don’t need, which leads to slavery.
So why is giving a need? I believe when you don’t give you lead a selfish life which puts all of your focus on yourself. When you can’t see the needs of others around you then all your focus, inner and outer, is on you. This leads to focusing on your wants which will make you a selfish Scrooge and will send you to the poor house. However, your subconscious mind cannot feel poor when you are willing to give away some of what you have. The more you give the more your subconscious mind will trust that you have more than enough. When your subconscious mind relays this information to your success mechanism than your success mechanism will produce income with alarming ease.
If you are unfamiliar with your success mechanism read Psycho Cybernetics, by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, it will change your life. In it Dr. Maltz shows how humans, like animals, have an inner mechanism of survival and survival require success. A squirrel that has never experienced winter instinctively knows to gather nuts for the winter. Birds that have never experienced winter know not only to fly south for the winter they instinctively know that south is the direction they need to go to be safe for the winter.
Under this same premise when our success mechanism, presumes abundance and prosperity, it attracts prosperity and abundance. I’m not talking about the law of attraction. I’m talking about your success mechanism creating actions, internally, to provide you with prosperity and abundance Our mind is one of the greatest computers ever created. The programmer controls the output. If you focus on your needs, instead of your wants, you program your mind to give you what it needs and in turn it will give you what it wants.
The late Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying “it is the eyes of others and not our own eyes which ruin us. If all the world were blind except myself I should not care for fine clothes or furniture.”
Consider your needs next time you think of borrowing money for anything from a house to a car and God forbid using credit to purchase anything else. Somewhere in your basic needs you will find contentment and in contentment you will find peace.
To your lifelong prosperity,
David Mulvaney