Reprogramming the Poverty Consciousness

I have been reading a lot of motivational books and books about setting up businesses lately with an eye to the future.

It seems completely obvious if you think about it but one particular book has hit me straight between the eyes with the truth that schools and universities are and always have been intended to prepare children to become employees, not bosses. There is also a social conditioning to fear money so that if you are poor, you fear you'll never have any money and if you somehow become comfortably middle class or even rich, you fear losing it. Money often controls its users, not the other way round as it should be with what is essentially just a tool to facilitate, not an end in itself. This is because there is no financial education to help youngsters overcome this fear and maybe societally, that suits.

Perhaps this explains why 70% of successful entrepreneurs have apparently not been to university. They've been prepared to take chances that more educated people might not.

However the traditional (and still standard) parental advice; 'Study hard, get good grades and you'll get a good job' is undoubtedly somewhat simplistic or even outmoded in today's society where there is no longer job security or company loyalty in the vast majority of jobs, so people may as well take their chances via other routes.

The book is called 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' and features the advice a young boy received from the two 'dads' in his life, his natural father who studied hard, got good grades and became a teacher, but never a well-off one as he paid so many taxes and the man who became a second father to him, his best mate's dad who taught him how to think differently if he wanted to be truly successful and rich just like him and how he followed that advice and found it worked.

Certainly my grandfather's world where his company looked after him and his family for over 30 years and even had its own theatre and sports centre are long gone for most people, though perhaps the loyalty of yesteryear just made employees less dissatisfied wage slaves than they are now, rather than happy per se, as the engineering work my grandfather did was undoubtedly boring and monotonous, but there was no expectation then that a job should do much more than put food on the table and pay the bills, never mind provide any kind of happiness or spiritual fulfilment. My grandad's generation were just grateful to have survived WWII.

To get back to the book, another eye-opener was the contrast of how an individual is taxed on everything before they know what they have left and then continues to be taxed on spendings,  savings, private pensions and even after death via death duties and benefactors through inheritance tax, whereas a corporation spends everything it wants as well as needs to, and then only pays tax on the rest!

In view of this, I think I'll register myself 'Laura King inc' at Companies House pronto!

I went to a school where there was an unspoken understanding that we were a school of shop assistants and farmer's wives, with perhaps a smattering of teachers. It took me a long time  as an adult to believe I could achieve so much more for myself, other than being able to write and facilitate. On the plus side, I haven't been over-educated, which I have observed in some, can be just as much of a handicap to realising one's true and full potential when it can also lead to false beliefs about oneself plus overconfidence in one's abilities and intellectual inflexibility.