Brief: Lottery Win or How to Identify Limiting Beliefs

This is going to be short but important. Have you ever wondered what you would do if you win the lottery or did you dismiss these kind of thoughts directly because you don’t believe in this kind of luck or you don’t play?

I had once a scenario where me and other people were asked this question. And we had time to prepare this and other questions for like at least two days.

To be honest I was kind of surprised with the typical, superficial answers others gave. Like they wanted to buy certain stuff, live in another country and so on. Besides that putting the money aside and keep it invested so that it grows. … It felt like people weren’t aware of the power and responsibility that comes with this amount of money.

When it was my turn to speak I told them that I would mainly invest it into organisations and communities that don’t have a lobby in our society. Trying to enable real and better democracies than the ones that we have. You see, I attempted to answer the question with a different mindset. A mindset of giving back into the circulation. Using money as a tool to enable elements that are important to me in my life and not to keep it all for myself.

However, this hopefully just gives you an outlook on such questions that we can answer them deeper than just what we would do in the first moment.

You may ask yourself “Okay, all fine and good but what has this to do with limiting beliefs?” which is a good and correct question. So far these aspects haven’t really been highlighted.

Let us go together through a possible lottery win and how it could impact our actions.

So, assuming we win the lottery, what’s the next step? Resigning from the job you hate? Moving to another city, country, or just another flat which provides you more comfort and place? What about the things you daily interact with? Get a new smartphone, new computer, new car, new TV? New fridge, new stove? Did you always wanted to learn something like photography? Buy an expensive camera. Wanted to learn playing an instrument? Buy it. Hate seeing people at the gym? Buy fitness equipment for your specific fitness room in your new house or flat. You want to experience the world? Start traveling the world, costs don’t matter. Go shopping all the clothes you could possibly want.

When will you hit a limit where you notice that buying more and more stuff won’t make you more happy? When will you notice that because you can buy everything that you won’t make use of anything that you actually got? Like you still only have 24 hours per day, you can’t indulge into everything 100%.

But that’s actually beside the point. I want you to write your own list of things that you would change. After you finished that take a look at the list again. Which of the actions are really, really coupled with money or actually with the mindset of being free from one limiting belief?

If you take our list we could take a look at the point of “resigning from the job”. I guess you need this job to have an income to survive every month which I won’t blame you for. The important part is here that you hate your current job. The question would be to identify why this is the case. Is it the work environment? The type of tasks you need to do with your current job? Try to specify it and see what parameters you need to change to improve your life in the end.

The same goes for photography or an instrument. For sure some friends may have an old camera and instrument which you can use to learn the skills. You don’t need to have the most expensive stuff to become a photographer or musician. Just like you don’t need an expensive type writer to be a writer. No, you just need paper and pen. And even in this case you actually just need to be a storyteller as the most basic requirement.

You see many things we can already start from our current situation. We don’t need money to give us the freedom and power to do certain things.

I have used here the example of money and a lottery win because for many people money is their main constraint in life. However, I want you to reflect on what your main constraint in life is. Maybe it is your health, a disability, constant pain, your family, your social background within the society that you live in? Maybe it is your level of intelligence or education that feels limiting for you.

Once you found your limiting factors you hopefully also became aware where you don’t have that strong limits.

Let me end with a metaphor. Just like a river goes around a rock at first, you will also notice that a rock doesn’t need to stop you from following your path and sometimes even over time this rock gets dissolved. So when you feel like you can’t do something. Ask yourself first ‘Why?’ and second ‘How can I still achieve my goal?’.

“Brief” posts are much shorter posts and don’t try to explain every thought but try to paint a picture.
They are statements and open questions to the reader and not discussions.
“Brief” is the German word for “letter” and English word for “short”. If you speak it out loud, you realise it sound phonetically identical to “breathe”. So, take these “Brief” posts as something to consume, reflect and relax. As a distraction from your daily life.