You Deserve A Rich Life

Start by ending your "never enough" mindset

In 2011, I started meditating, thinking that it might help me move beyond the lingering anxiety of the financial crash. (Even today, I see this negatively affecting investors; at every decline in markets, people extrapolate out to another certain crash to come.) At the time, I was having nightmares thinking about people’s terror as their investments declined and the world turned upside down for a while. Indeed, meditating helped me relax and put fluctuations in perspective, i.e., to be greedy when others are fearful, per Warren Buffett.
 

But I was shocked to find that my twenty-minute, twice daily meditation had a second remarkable side effect: to help me break free from a destructive mindset of “never enough.” In our work—and achievement-obsessed culture, it’s easy to fall into the trap of feeling like we can never stop working, never stop doing—that there is never enough. And because my grandfather’s generation lived through the deprivations of the Great Depression, I understand where that scarcity mindset comes from. But at some point, we must all realize that when we look at the world this way, we set ourselves up for a lifetime of exhaustion, illness, and unending dissatisfaction with the things we have achieved. We miss the unbelievable abundance and gratitude that comes from being enthusiastically engaged in the present moment.

Meditation helps me get out of that trap, to reprioritize my days in a deep, intuitive way—not just how I balance investments but how I balance the rest of my life. It doesn’t make me less ambitious, but it helps me understand what’s truly important so that I’m not wasting energy in any sphere. And those days when I think, “I’m too busy to meditate,” I remember what the Dalai Lama has said. When his schedule is twice as packed, he doesn’t reduce meditation time. He doubles it.

Meditation works for me. You might find other ways to create space in your life for abundance thinking. But remember this: you don’t have to earn the right to deserve abundance in your life. This is something we are all born with, though most of us are taught to think otherwise—by our families, our jobs, our culture at large. Once you begin to think of your resources as truly abundant, that mindset reaches beyond your finances and touches every area of your life. You become empowered to custom design the life you want to live and brave enough to seize new opportunities to make that new life a reality. You can put your time and energy into creating enriched and more rewarding experiences for yourself and your loved ones—pursuing your passions, giving time to the causes that matter to you, and courageously moving forward with optimism, joy, and resilience.

An abundant future is yours for the taking. And your first step on that path is the simple decision to overrule those nagging voices in the back of your head that warn of scarcity. You do deserve all the abundance that life has to offer. Don’t let anyone—yourself included—tell you differently.

Jonathan M. Satovsky founded Satovsky Asset Management in 2007, which provides advice on over $2 billion in assets and manages more than $500 million. Previously, Jonathan spent over thirteen years at American Express Financial Advisors, joining the Chairman's Advisory Council as one of their youngest top ten advisors. He is the author of Your Rich Life: A Human Approach to Investment and Building the Wealth of Your Dreams. Visit www.satovsky.com Connect Jonathan M. Satovsky