If reaching your goal took 300 hours of discomfort, how would you schedule them? All at once or over several years?

We don’t often think about it like this, but there’s no question that achieving anything worth talking about requires focus and therefore, sacrifice (since you can’t pay attention to everything at once…).

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The brilliance of Ramit’s approach to personal finance isn’t that he teaches you how to retire wealthy after a lifetime of ordering water while your friends are ordering wine, it’s that his approach targets behavioral change and the absurdities that keep smart people poor.

As you can see, sugarcoating the truth is something that Ramit spends little time on:

Earning more is also rife with psychological issues, most of which deal with getting out of your own way and confronting your own barriers. We’ll cover some psychological aspects of earning money, as they are central, yet often invisible, when starting out.

Finally, if you want to complain about how these tactics don’t apply to your specific situation, go away. Smart people take broad strategies and specific tactics and apply them to their own lives. Whiners complain about how it doesn’t apply to them. Don’t expect to be spoon-fed.

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I can’t help but wonder what keeps us paying the minimum on credit card debt and mortgage payments is the same thing that causes us to shy away from the sacrifices that make our dreams attainable.

Would you be willing to work every weekend for six months if it was guaranteed to double your income? How about quadruple?

Would the allure of high income and some measure of financial security be enough to offset the feelings of sadness when you see pictures of your friends playing reindeer games every Saturday night?

I’ve been reading a lot about habits and behavior recently and let me tell you…we are a strange species. Here’s the book I just read about this stuff: The Power of Habit

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This post was inspired by recent discussions with Jenny and Monique, who you should know about if you don’t already.