Financial Success in an Economic Crisis?

Perhaps with success, financial and otherwise, it all comes down to asking the right questions.  Who has time to think about success? you ask.  Now a days it’s tough enough just to make ends meet, or so the story goes if you listen to the pundits and the media.  Agreed.  These are challenging times, but just as the government and financial sectors are having to review (we hope)  their decisions to see where things went so wrong, this could be a real opportunity to reassess your own house; how you’re running your business and, while you’re at it, your life. That comes down to asking the right questions.  Some questions  may seem basic and make sense, for example, take the question, are you fulfilled by the job you’re working at, or by the career you’ve chosen?  That question makes sense.  But maybe that’s the wrong starting point.  Perhaps the first question should be:   is the job of your profession or career, to fulfill you?  For some people the answer could be yes, for others no.  Maybe your career’s job is to give you financial security, or mental stimulation, or social interaction, but not to fulfill your deepest inner needs.  If that’s the case and you’re asking your job to fulfill the needs that art, or a hobby, or an avocation, or a partner should fill, you’re never going to find balance.  And, strange as it may seem, that’s actually how I think we’ve ended up in the situation we’re currently at.  We haven’t asked the right questions and we began to believe that the answer to every question was the same – money.  Money became the sole solitary answer.  It was going to fulfill all of our needs, so we took our eye off of how where and why it was being made.  We did away with regulation, with basic common sense, all in the service of this one focus.  Now the boat is taking on water and everyone on board is panicking and running for the lifeboats.  But it’s not that the boat is going under, rather it is completely out of balance. It can be set right again, but will take a combined effort.  It’s not going to be the President, or Congress or Wall Street that saves us, or bails us out (to continue the boat metaphor) it’s going to be each one of us finding what’s important, asking the right questions, making the appropriate choices and cumulatively setting the ship, that we’re all in, back on course.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for money, but it really goes down to a place for everything and everything in its place.  Money is one aspect of what defines success.  We forgot that.  We asked it to be the end all and be all, and in doing so, we let the wolves mind the store.   When you ask any one thing to be everything, it has a tendency to become nothing.  So, from my perspective, a big part of the shift we need to make in order for our financial lives to prosper is a philosophical one.  Ask the right questions.  See what’s important.  What makes you, you? What fits where?   Now, make the appropriate decisions.   Maybe it doesn’t look like a one-to-one correlation, but if all of us do that, things will turn around more quickly than all of the bailouts, laws and legislations combined.