Take the direct route to money

In the past few years I learned a very important lesson about money — it is a necessity.

Whatever everyone says about money not bringing happiness or about how chasing money is a waste of time and everyone who does it is wasting their life, it is not true.

Some of those who think that probably never had money problems or have enough money now that they forgot what it feels like to be broke and to spend most of your time thinking about how you’ll be able to pay your bills, to buy food and to pay rent.

What’s worse, the need of money can have quite an impact on everything you do.

It can take away the joy of spending your time doing something fun like watching a TV show, playing a video game or reading a good book. It can take away from the joy of working for the sake of improving yourself and your ability to do something. You’ll always be thinking about what else you can do or how to transform what you are already doing into an extra source of income. It can make everything less enjoyable because you’ll always think about those responsibilities that you have to take care of.

As someone who has tried very hard early in life to fix my financial situation by doing something I liked, by trying to “achieve my dream”, I can give you a piece of advice, if you’re in the same situation I was in a few years ago, that might fix quite a lot of your problems — fix your money situation first, then focus on everything else.

However you think of it, you need money to survive. You might need a higher amount or a lower amount depending on your life style, but you need to pay for things just like the rest of us. Food, bills, rent, clothes, gas, those things are not for free and they are a requirement.

Not having enough money to buy those things and being stressed all the time because of it will eventually make everything worse, and you’ll end up not enjoying the things you used to love.

The best way to fix your financial situation is to put all your efforts into trying to make money and choosing the easiest path to achieve that. In my case, it was getting a job. As much as I hated the idea of quitting my goal and as much as I wanted to work as a freelancer, I had to realize that it wasn’t working as well as I wanted. Even if it would have eventually worked, it would’ve taken too much time.

So, I decided to stop, temporarily, and get a job. I managed to get one fairly quickly and I worked for almost two years at a phone company. While the job was not great, I managed to solve quite a lot of the problems that I had before and my financial situation was better. I was less stressed and I could allow myself to relax a bit.

Once I lost that job I became once again quite stressed and quite worried about my financial situation. So, I decided to do what I did before — to solve that problem in the shortest possible way. I got another job soon after in a different country that paid way better and offered me way more free time.

I learned a bit more about money before getting this second job and I understood how important it was to save most of what I made. I did just that, and I used my savings to solve most of my new problems. Again, stress began to go away and I started to enjoy life and the things I once loved doing.

Ignoring the importance of money because some rich man on the internet tells you that it will not bring you happiness can easily put you in a pit of misery, and you’ll stay there for as long as you lie to yourself, thinking that your misery will go away by itself if you just keep on chasing your dream.

It’s okay to have a dream and to work for it. But real life will demand certain things from you, and if you’re not willing to do what’s required, you’ll have quite a hard time living a happy life. So here’s a bit of advice from someone who was in a miserable pit and managed to get out of it — take the direct route to getting a better financial situation, whatever that is, and then focus on everything else.

This only applies if your biggest problem is the lack of money, of course, but so many people ignore this that it’s important talk about this subject once in a while.