Do I Really Need This?
49. Do I really need this?
If you are having financial challenges and there just doesn’t seem to be enough, or you always seem to be falling into debt, this is the Tool for you. Something that I noticed was that about a fourth of all things I bought I didn’t really need or hardly ever used. There was even a percentage of purchases I never used. So I started asking myself, do I really need this?
What I found was that when I asked myself that question, the answer was sometimes no. So I would give myself 24 hours and if I still wanted it, I would go back and get it. If it was too much effort to go back, I realized that I didn’t want it that bad or more importantly I didn’t NEED it. The pitfall is telling yourself, “I deserve it.” We all deserve the things in life, but if you can’t weed out the things you need and don’t need, you deserve to be poor, too. Happiness comes from the inside, not from things.
The more I learned the concepts applied in this book, the more I realized I didn’t have to buy things to make me happy. The impulse pathways that I wired into my hard drive really started to disappear. Asking the question, do I really need this, does not just apply to material things that we purchase. It can apply to the over consumption of food. Do I need this second helping of dessert? It can go with alcohol, do I need another drink? It can go for drugs, do I want to put this in my body?
The question, do I need this, also asks, why am I doing this? As you start to apply the principles learned in this book, you will begin to learn and see that you don’t really need these things to fulfill yourself. Sometimes curbing our appetites for things we would like to cut down on can be easily done by identifying what we are trying to fill by indulging ourselves. So if you are trying to cut down on “things” or destructive habits and they are becoming roadblocks to your success, put this Tool to use.