Western consumerism teaches the vast majority that we can have it and we can have it fast, therefore it is no wonder the credit card is the god of the masses. Indeed, many people would shed tears if they had to give up their credit cards.
This is NOT about credit cards, but it IS about things they can do for us - purchase things when we don't have the money to pay for it. I'm talking about...
Instant Gratification
At the touch of a keypad of various sorts, we can have just about any service out there, sometimes within minutes.
The Internet gives us the ability, not only to obtain things that, a little more than 20 years ago, would take days to get it, if you could ever get it at all!
We don't need to cook our suppers. Why not go to the local fast-food joint and have it in a matter of minutes with just a short drive to the place - or the drive-thru.
There are many, many benefits to all this, but there are also drawbacks:
On Delaying Gratification
The first and foremost is the fact that, as a nation of consumer-oriented people, we have lost the ability to delay gratification.
This is why shrewd and downright evil, unscrupulous marketers out there can create inferior products and snag hundreds of thousands of naieve seekers of the All-American Big Red Easy Button. It is a HUGE industry!
Unfortunately, that inability to delay gratification makes Westernized peoples impatient people. They got to have it and they got to have it NOW! Old fashion mastery takes a lot of time and effort - something most people today can't deal with.
However, a handful of people in these societies have been endowed with the ability to delay gratification. These folks are the artists, song-writers and athletes that entertain the masses. It also includes entrepreneurs, many of whom are aware of the snares of consumerism and have made discipline their friend.
In our learning curve having a good mindset as recommended here in your training is critical to our being able to get to what we define as success. Totally agree, an overused and sometimes poorly used term, yet if we are careful to define what success means to us, not having it be just monetary, it will help give impetus to reaching our goals.
Thank you for the time you have invested in creating this. Love that it has bubbled up on a surface that includes me. '-)
Linda
Reply
Didn't take me long to put this out. It all started on Notepad and had it within an hour, from start to publish. It's why I try to stick with things I am well familiar with in my campaigns because otherwise, I could spend days on a single work, and that's not prophetable, being tied down to liabilities as I am. That's just one more thing that behooves me to include in the section about interest and passion in our campaigns.
By all means, success isn't the money. That's one way it gets misused, unless one's goal is solely to make money and forget the human beings who pay for the work.
Most definitely, success to me is in being able to pay it forward, as we are taught here, and is one thing that has gone to my heart. Success depends on your worthy ideal and how you approach it.
I like to say things that help build up my readers, and this, in and of itself, is a success to me, because I have not always been able to do this due to the negativity I lived in in the past.
I still have to get my ducks in order, but I'm getting there a little bit each day.
In all of the time I've been here, I've never seen another place on the Internet, no matter what it is, that comes close to the philosophy of paying it forward as done here!
Best wishes :) -Sherry
Daniel
And, I do enjoy reading your posts here, I find them very inspiring and well written. Take care and keep up the good work. Best wishes :) -Sherry
Keep up the good work!
Shawn>>
Now that I'm not living under my previous landlord's roof, he has stopped being so contemptuous and is much more respectful, so it's getting better all the way around. the only thing - I badly need my own Internet connection. All the time I've been at WA now, this is something I've never achieved.
