Mind Management What Drives You? And how important is money?

The new generation of business school graduates is, it seems, more interested in family, friends and job satisfaction than in the pursuit of the almighty dollar. survey carried out by Instituto de Impresa in Spain and Manchester Business School researched final year MBA students from 25 countries. Asked what factors would influence their choice of career after graduation, respondents rated job satisfaction number one, followed by the opportunity to spend adequate time with their family and friends. Next most important was the corporate culture and the ethics of the organisation they worked for. Money ranked fourth on their priority list. So, it seems, obscenely high salaries and perks are less important than good old-fashioned job satisfaction.
How come many of us are getting richer, faster than ever before, yet simultaneously more and more of us are diagnosed as suffering from depression? Is our quest for money and success producing new generation of wealth-accomplished people who are also Prozac junkies? People who use every means available to satisfy their ego drive to obtain money and power tend to self-destruct. The corporate ladder is not meant to be climbed by the amateur. Miss one rung and you may find yourself tumbling to the bottom at harmfully alarming rate.
Harriet Rubin, contributing editor to the US Fast Company magazine, quotes psychologist Caroline Myss as saying: “The end of hierarchy has left people liberated but also confused. Up until the 1960s, the longer you were with an organisation, the more respect you gained. Now experience doesn’t count. To get to the next level of success requires burst of energy that many people don’t have.”
Many of us are money driven for psychological reasons. One of those motivating reasons is fear. Fear of not having enough money. Security is priority for many of us and some of us see this in the form of wealth accumulation. And this is where mind management becomes all-important. Balance in your life is the key.
Even if you had what many would term “not lot of money”, it is likely that you are still in the top 10 percent of the world’s richest people. Sure there is connection between income and happiness. We all want to have enough to purchase what we want or be able to retire “comfortably”. To deny this relationship would be disingenuous, not to mention flat out wrong. There is no question that lack of money causes lot of unhappiness. But the secret to being happy doesn’t lie in earning lot of money, but rather in gaining control over what you have.
You don’t have to be millionaire to be happy. So ask yourself why financial happiness is so elusive for some people? The answer is simple. How much you earn or have simply isn’t everything. There are other factors. And you can change or control these factors and develop some habits that will make you feel better, happier and more in control of your life.
Change # 1 Get organised Develop your own easy-to-manage filing system. Organise and control your time. People who can find things quickly are much happier than disorganised people.
Change # 2 Set budget Balance your chequebook once month and know that your monthly outgoings are well within what you earn.
Change # 3 Buy what you need, not what you want Curtail your expenditure by asking yourself do I really need this or do I just want it.
Change # 4 Save at least five percent of your income Set up bank authority to transfer five percent of your net income into an investment amount.
Change # 5 Minimise credit card debt
Get rid of revolving credit card debt ie, carry balance on your cards that is paid off every month. You will be lot happier.
Society places heavy emphasis on money. Many of us let money control us instead of us controlling it. Money in itself is not that important. What is important is the impact people allow it to have on them. Money itself is neither good nor bad. It only has power in the hands of its user. M