Creating Options

“A man without options becomes necessitous and this leads to a lack of confidence and a scarcity mentality. Necessitous men are never free.” – Rollo Tomassi

As I continue to read, study and live I continuously re-learn the immense power that comes from the creation of options. The greater amount of viable, exercisable options a person is able to create the more power they have. Lets go through some examples:

1. A girl I know got accepted at two colleges and both colleges offer her scholarship money. She realized she now had two viable options for her future. Instead of merely choosing one or the other she decided to play them against one another. She incited a bidding war between the two schools for her. Even if she knew which school she intended to go to from the very beginning she has nothing to lose from putting the schools in a bidding war. By creating viable options she created real power. She ended up accepting 3 times the amount she was originally offered.

2. A man worked at a normal desk job. Instead of allowing that job to be his sole source of income he created 2 side jobs that provided him with $10,000 a year respectively. Now that he had created an extra $20,000 per year he became less dependent on his original job. That independence is power. The company now had less control over him because he no longer depended on that company for his income, his survival. This is why companies hate it when their employees go moonlighting. The employee’s creation of options takes away the power the company has over him. The man has taken power for himself by the creation of options.

3. A male arrives on campus with the goal of getting many women. Instead of choosing to just go for one at a time he goes for many at once. Many say no to his advances but many also accept his advances. Now he is no longer dependent on one single woman to fulfill his needs. With many women caring for him at once no one woman has much power over him. At a certain point our young male decides to get a girl friend. Even when he does he maintains his relationships with other women so even his girlfriend doesn’t have power over his actions.

4. Don’t forget about the most important place to have options: financially. By paying off your debt you give yourself the power to live lives you never could while indebted. You can’t pick up and go around the world when you’re in debt. Debt ties you down and restricts your options. Savings does the opposite. The more capital you have the more options you have. Mark Cuban has much more capital than I do so he can afford to take on a wider range of investments (options) that I cannot. The options that he derives from his savings of capital give him power.

The creation of options puts you in the drivers seat in every facet of life. The sooner we learn to be creating options in every part, and at every time, of our lives the better off we will be. By creating options in our life we stop one individual thing from having too much power over us. It takes power away from the ‘fate’s that be’ and puts it in your own hands. When you have multiple options one event can not ruin what you have created. Say the working man above lost his job. He’s ends up alright because he still has 2 other jobs where he is making $10,000 a year with opportunity to grow. He can at the very least support himself. The college male looses one woman; he’s ok, he has many more. Don’t let yourself start to run low in options. If you only have one source of income at the very least begin investing in dividend stocks. By creating options in every facet of our life we take the power we need to live the life we want.

Confidence, freedom and power are derived from viable options and the ability to exercise them. – Rollo Tomassi

Dousing Yourself in Reality

Constantly, we as human beings are “medicating” our existence with various substances that change our state of mind. Escapism has become the norm in today’s society. At work people escape to fantasy football and online shopping. When they arrive home they escape into the world of Scandal or The Walking Dead. Then they go to sleep, wake up and drink coffee so they can operate like their mentally alive in a setting where they really are not. Then, if they are lucky enough to go home on a weekend night, they consume alcohol which has the potential to alter their state of mind so completely they don’t even have to exist in their current state anymore. All this escapism implies that people think something is wrong with reality. Well… what could possibly be wrong with reality? Maybe the fact that reality is hard, but, maybe more accurately, it is that reality does not have immediate reward in the now.

The common issue listed with all the items listed above is instant gratification. Let’s look at the definition of the Instant Gratification: The term “Instant Gratification” is often used to label the satisfactions gained by more impulsive behaviors: choosing now over tomorrow. What is bold is the most important part of this definition. By choosing to instant gratification we choose the now over tomorrow. By choosing now over tomorrow we take our potential future and we subjugate it to our childish whims in the now. Let’s take finances for example. Compound interest is magical and the sooner, and more, you start saving the more you will have in the future. By delaying gratification, and spending in the now, you give yourself greater spending power in the future. If you just can’t stay away from that new car you can barely afford you have subjugated your future to a childish whim. Another example would be almost anything in front of a television. Video games provide that feeling of accomplishment. However, when you stand up, you have accomplished nothing real. You have chosen to spend your precious time playing video games in an imaginary world instead of achieving something in reality. Like the finance your time matures on a compound basis. If you invest in yourself by putting in hard time when you are young you will reap the rewards when you are old. Success breeds success. It takes a lot of discipline to subjugate yourself to a study or career that will gratify you in 10 years when a video game can gratify you within the 30 seconds of turning on the system. So I encourage my readers to douse themselves in reality.

Don’t let yourself be sucked into the drugs, entertainment, internet surfing, excessive spending lifestyles. Ensure you have a lifestyle that keeps these distractions on the side. Every time you feel the urge to binge watch a season of How I Met Your Mother instead choose to do something in reality. Yes, it is incredibly difficult, to force yourself to be disciplined even when you don’t want to. However, the choice is a simple one, whenever you want to escape reality push yourself deeper into it. Instead of playing another hour of video games or watching a t.v. show choose to go out and try a new restaurant, get a job, get a car. Every step into reality, even the tiniest one like taking a walk, is better than a medicating away from reality. After a while you will get used to pushing yourself out your door to achieve something real. At first it is hard but it will get easier and have faith that the returns will come. So, readers, jump deep into reality with me and learn to swim in the deep end. Together we will reap the rewards years from now while our peers still languish in the world of gratification their weakness has created for them.