Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa March/April 2020 | Page 61

Y
ou have probably asked yourself this question in
many ways over the years to the point that you have
stopped asking, and it started with the urge you have
to succeed. You may have wanted a new car, a new house on
the beach, a new wife (just joking), you just wanted more.
By having reached new heights every day, and then
realising that time is going by and something is wrong,
and you don’t have what you want. You think, “Well, do I
really want it?” And you say, “YES!!!” More time goes by and
you owe more money to your family, and to your friends,
and to your credit cards, and to your suppliers, and to your
employees, and even to your enemies.
You begin to think, “Why did I even start? Look at all those
people that work from nine to five. They have a life, and what
do I have?” You slowly decide you don’t need a new house,
and you decide that a new car is a wasteful expense, “Why
would anyone put so much money on a car that hardly gets
used?” You say to yourself, “I was wrong, I can admit it, I was
wrong for buying into the dreams.”
Yet something inside you knows. You know that you were
born for success, you know that you are simply missing
something. Well, you are almost right. You are missing 12
laws about money! Know them and you will have money,
ignore them and you will not have money, guaranteed!
A warning: The reason most people fail most of the time
is that they insist on listening only to what they want to
hear. Since this article is designed to get you out of this trap,
what you are going to read is not what you want to hear, but
I can assure you, it is what you need to hear. It’s not going to
be easy, but it is going to be super effective. Ready?
The first law I call “Eye Opening”. The only thing that will
guarantee your success is by taking responsibility. Every
failure you’ve ever had was the result of failing to take
responsibility. But what is responsibility? To understand
responsibility, we can think about responsibility as a scale
where at the top we have responsibility and at the bottom
we have no responsibility. You can observe that when
you are responsible, you cause; and when you are not
responsible, you are an effect. The scale of responsibility
goes from no responsibility or effect at the bottom, to
responsibility or cause at the top.
The most effective thing in the universe is the physical
universe. Anything physical is the effect. If you ask a piece
of wood how it feels you will wait a long time for an answer.
You can hit the piece of wood, use the piece of wood, but
the piece of wood will never wake up in the morning and
say, “I am hungry.”
It is irresponsible to blame your car for the accident.
The car is a dead thing and is the effect. A rock, a chair, or
anything physical does not decide anything, they don’t
cause anything, they are placed, they are effect. The lowest
level of responsibility is effect. It is when one is oblivious to
his causation, like at times when you lost unexpectedly. It is
the assumption of the position of no cause, or the position
of total effect, like when you are blaming others for your
condition. Effect is the lowest position on the scale.
Just above that low level we have “Problems.” Problems
are two opposing forces. You say, “I am right,” and someone
else says, “You are not.” You have one person pushing
against a person at more or less equal force. The end result
of a problem is loss of causation. One or both parts will
deteriorate into effect. For example, say your wife wants
to buy new shoes, and you consider it is not right, that is a
problem. At the level of ‘problem’, each side of the problem
is flipping between momentary cause and momentary
effect. While it takes two to create a problem, it only takes
one to solve it.
You can solve any problem by increasing responsibility,
going up the scale. Either by overwhelming the other side
(and creating an enemy), or by stopping to push against the
other side and becoming cause. For example, a child says, “I
want an ice cream.” Mom says, “No.” The child can convince
his mom to give him the ice-cream (he overwhelms her),
or the child can say, “I don’t want the ice-cream,” and the
problem stops being a problem from the child’s viewpoint.
He raises his responsibility to the next level.
The next level of responsibility is ‘Personal Causation.’ It’s
when you consider that anything you do, you create. What
you bring about is your own doing, and you do not consider
that things others did, or caused. For example, if I hit you it
is my fault. If I have an accident, I don’t blame the car. But if
someone hits me, I don’t think it is me, since I can prove I
was hit by someone else.
It is when you say, “I am willing to take responsibility for
what I have created, but not to what you or others have
created.”
The highest level of responsibility is ‘cause’, of which
you are responsible. Responsibility is defined as being
able and willing to determine the result on all viewpoints.
Life is composed of many viewpoints, and when you take
one viewpoint, one opinion, you make yourself right and
make the rest of the viewpoints wrong. Which means, “I am
responsible only for that, and all the rest is not me!” When
you are responsible, when you are a cause, you know that
anything that happened to you and anything brought
about is because of you. You know that you are the creator
of the good and bad, the wins and losses.
It is interesting to note that success is a measure of the
degree of causation. You first consider that you can, then
realise you are the cause, then you’ll achieve success. In
those areas you consider yourself the cause, in those areas
you consider yourself responsible, then things will go well.
You have no problems. You will experience ethical pleasure.
As you go down the scale, life introduces you to more
and more problems. Problems are the manifestations of
drops in responsibility. It is the finding of fault with others
as a substitute for responsibility. Your first problem only
ever appeared when you blamed someone else other than
yourself for your situation. Hence the bigger the problem,
the lower the responsibility.
So, why don’t you have money? The first and most
important reason is that you are not taking responsibility
and don’t see yourself as the cause. You don’t realise that
money is something you are able to determine as the result
of all viewpoints. ‘How do you become responsible and
what are the other 11 success laws’ is something you will
find in the next month’s article: Why Don’t You Have Money?
Part 2.
SA Real Estate Investor Magazine MARCH/APRIL 2020
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