Diamond Bezel Bootstraps

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Diamond Bezel Bootstraps

I see you, man.  I see you.

You made all the right choices in life and pulled yourself up from the depths of the earth to finally succeed in the corporate world of America.  I’m watching you pumping your chest and can hear your roar! You’re standing in the middle of the arena and screaming to everyone who can hear you… “Are you not entertained!?” 

You are the king of the bootstraps.  You pulled on them so hard, that your bootstraps are broken.  I am now finally ready to mentor whoever wants to be mentored.  Because…..Do you see the bootstraps?  I wore them out and I am living the American Dream.

You’re looking around the room asking everyone else ‘why can’t you do the same thing?  I did it.’  And you’re thinking to yourself It wasn’t easy but by sheer determination, you were able to get to that mountain top.  Like Nike, you just did it, baby!

Are you hearing me?

If you can’t hear the sarcasm in my writing, I’ll tell you point blank – I am being sarcastic.  You act as if you chose so much in life.  Let me get this straight.  When you were up in heaven sitting next to God and the Apostle Paul, do you remember scrolling through your portfolio of available parents?

I mean my God, that must have been an incredibly tough decision.

Should I live in America or Africa?  Do I want to be a man or a woman? Should I be black, white or Asian?  Maybe a mixture of all three so I can be EXOTIC.

You:  Hey God, if I choose these parents, will I look like the mom or the dad.  I am just not feeling his jawbone, so I’d like more of her features, please.

And when you finally went through that gut-wrenching experience of deciding which parent should raise you, you had so many more decisions.

I mean, do you remember sitting around the dinner table deciding what town you were going to grow up in? How about what school you were going to go to, along with deciding who the next big influencer was going to be in your life?

The reason why I bring up the person who influenced your life is because that person passed by you and said the right thing at the right time when you were ready to really hear it.

You had nothing to do with that.

Yes, you may have decided to listen, but what if, that person sitting next to you that you are looking down on didn’t have that influence?  They didn’t have that person who showed up at the right time to say the right thing so that they could really take in what they had to say.

Maybe you were influenced a little bit more due to the country, state, and town that you live in. Maybe you had parents who were a bit more encouraging.

Or maybe because of the way you walk, and the way you talk, or the way you look, it made it more palatable for that influencer to want to influence you.

And here is the thing about it – more than likely you were influenced by someone who happened to be near you.  It is not like you sought this person out.  It is possible you did but more than likely, you showed up to work one day after someone decided to give you a job and gift wrapped right before you is the person who was supposed to mentor you.

It’s just like the person you decided to marry.

It just so happens that the one true love, the only person in the entire world who could love me the best, ended up in the school right next door to me.  And I didn’t even choose her, she chose me.

Study after study after study states that we are more influenced by the people in our circle than anything else.  We are social creatures.  We literally learn by watching the people closest around us.  Don’t take it from me, take from Tali Sharot who is a neuroscientist. She states in the book, Influential Mind, that the human brain is engineered to acquire knowledge within a social context.

This means we learn most by observing someone else’s life.

This is the reason I love being the dumbest person in the room.  So much to learn, so little time.  I have to sometimes be palatable to have people want me to be in the room with them.  I had to learn from my social settings how to behave for people to want to be around me.  Don’t believe me? Hang out with someone from New York and you’ll be thinking to yourself if they just enjoy being assholes.  Hang out with someone from San Diego and you’re wondering why they have to be so annoyingly nice and smile so much.

Point being, you didn’t so much pull yourself up by the bootstraps, you just followed the advice of someone before you.  You are not this great trendsetter of a leader, you are actually more of a follower.

AWEEEEEEE

Come here.  Let me put my arm around you.  Don’t let me make you feel like you are not great.  You totally are.  Can you give me a little roar?  A big roar?  That’s my little bootstrap puller.  Come on, let’s put these boots on for you.  And these boots are special, they are made by Gucci!

I am not trying to make you feel bad about your accomplishments.

I am really not and here is the flip side of this:  If I were to go to your small town and meet all of your friends, you could probably say that you are one of the more successful people from that town.  And yes, maybe you had a work ethic that your friends didn’t have.  The light bulb came on for you and you found someone else you decided to listen to that guided you in the right direction.  There you have it, a snowball of great choices to lead you financially in a better place than the other people.

If you feel like career choices were the only choices you had to make in your life, what about all the other aspects of your life?  Why don’t you pull yourself up by the bootstraps when it comes to:

• Marriage
• Money
• Health
• Children
• All the other choices you have to make

I am not knocking you.

Studies show that the more choices we have to make the more we want to go into a little corner and only stick to the things we know. It is just who we are as human.

I am writing this for two reasons.

For the people who are scared to make a change………I feel you

For the people who judge the people who are scared………you are scared about some things too, you may just have figured out how to make money.  Moving to a new town isn’t that bad, or starting a new job doesn’t have to be scary.  No big deal.

Maybe it is not about your career, or your wife, or your marriage, but there is something out there that is causing you to be just a bit paralyzed and if you could go do something that is just more familiar to you, you would.  The mentality of simply sticking with what you know.

If I told you that you should eat less meat so that you could be healthier, some of you would just reject that notion altogether.  I could give you statistics and show why you should make the change, but you would reject it right away.  Why?

Because the juice from a big juicy steak running down your chin is just oh so familiar?  I cannot give that up Armond!  Besides who wants to be an asshole non-meat eater.

That is NOT a social norm.

And let’s not even talk about maintaining a budget, and making sure you don’t overextend yourself.   No, no, that would cause me to have a disagreement with my spouse and I don’t want to fight anymore. It would definitely affect our families’ social norm.

My whole life and the whole meaning for this blog is to help you to make better choices with your money, your family and your life.  I am basically asking you to take advantage of the situation that has been given to you.  When you were looking at that parent portfolio in heaven, the smartest decision you made was choosing to live in America.

If you are one of those people who made it out of that small town and made a success for yourself,  I will be the first to stand at the front of the stage and give you a scratch and sniff that says you did it!  I just ask that you don’t look behind you and tell someone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Ask yourself this

Remember that you don’t know:

• Their situation
• Their childhood
• Where they are from
• Their educational level
• The people who were around them
• Who has been holding them back
• Bad choices they may have made that made life harder
• What they are afraid of
• And the social norms that make them feel comfortable

Even if we’re talking about Johnny who is sitting next to you in that classroom at the same time listening to the exact same teacher you are.  He doesn’t necessarily have the same opportunity that you have.  When you go home at night may be your mom asks you how much homework you have.  When he goes home at night he may have to cook dinner for his brothers and sisters.

I’m not knocking those diamond bezel bootstraps

I am not taking anything away from your diamond bezel bootstraps or saying that you shouldn’t be proud of your accomplishments.  I want you to encourage you to look for different areas in your life where you can improve and try to improve them.  The more you do that, the easier it is to do it again and again.

You also need to remember to be patient with the people near and far who are still trying to figure out which foot to put that boot on.

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros