Microwave mentality is the belief — the expectation that success should be as quick as your fast food, same-day delivery, instant lottery win or instant messaging.

To rid yourself of it, you must promise that you’re going to let go once and for all of your lottery-winner expectations because, let’s face it, we only hear stories about the one winner, not the millions of losers. That person you see jumping in front of the slot machine or the news doesn’t reveal the number of times he/she has tried and lost in the past. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, the author of stumbling on happiness, says that if we gave lottery losers every 30 seconds on TV to announce not, “I won! “but “I lost, “ it would take almost 9 years to get through the losers of the single draw! If we go back to our mathematical chance of a positive result, again, we have a rounding error of zero- as in, you have about zero chance of winning the jackpot.

When you understand the concept of compound effect, you won’t look for quick fixes or silver spoon. Don’t fool yourselves into believing that a successful athlete didn’t live through regular bone-crushing drills and thousands of hours of practice. He got up early to practice and kept practising long after all others had stopped. He faced the sheer agony and frustration of the failure, loneliness, hard work, and disappointment it took become №1.

Your only path to success is through a continuum of mundane, unsexy, unexciting, and sometimes difficult daily routine compounded over time.

In the end, it always comes down to the choice you make daily or weekly about your life. Most of the choices are almost made when we are sleepwalking through life. Half of the time, we don’t pay enough attention to how the choices we are making today will affect us over time. For example, “how eating out lunch every workday will affect your physical health? How much strain would it put on your regular savings contribution? Does eating out often contributes to your goal of getting better physic or not?

Yes, it is convenient to eat out to save time on preparing your lunch every day. Suppose we look at this particular habit on a longer time horizon. You are spending $25 on lunch, and 5 days a week that multiplies to $125 worth of lunch per week, whereas if you had prepared and packaged your lunches in advance, that won’t cost you even $50 bucks per week, so you are saving $75/week just by changing one minor habit. Now, let’s analyse how would it affect your health over the long term. You cannot afford to go for a fine dining choice in your one hour of break more often than not. You’ll opt for quick-fix comfort food from fast food outlet where mostly everything contains saturated fat, salt and sugar at highly concentrated levels, which can lead to health implications such as accessive weight gain, heart problem, high cholesterol, and in some cases, it can be as severe as depression.

Categories: All Stories, Financial Philosphies