Some people mistakenly believe these to be beneficial qualities to have and based on what your friends or family think, you may have started to believe it too.
Thankfully, you have me to tell you that you absolutely should NOT be humble or frugal. Adopting these traits will make you less successful, cost you a lot of money and lead to a worse life.
Don’t be Humble
To be humble is to have a modest or low estimate of your own importance. What are the consequences if you are a humble person?
Because you deem yourself to be unimportant, it results in people walking all over you. You’re taken advantage of, don’t speak up for yourself and don’t think you should be in control. Playing it safe and letting others take the spotlight means you never rise to the top. By being too timid and not taking any risks you create your own barriers to success. Your ideas are not taken seriously, people don’t respect you and often ignore what they have to say because you tell them you are unimportant. How can people give you what you deserve if you’re telling them that you’re not worthy of it?
The only time you should be humble is if you’re already enormously successful. When you are, your success and importance is obvious. Elon Musk doesn’t and probably shouldn’t excessively act important because their success speaks for itself. But understandably, some people who do achieve great success act very important. That can perceived as being arrogant, a clearly negative trait, and this is where people mistakenly jump to the conclusion that you should therefore be humble.
But that doesn’t apply to you because you’re still on a journey to achieving greatness and for you to get there, other people need to believe that you are worthy. In the 90s an entrepreneur created a website where you could buy books. What if he went around meekly telling people that he was “just an online book seller”? If he did, people would take him for his word and believe it. Do you think Amazon would be where it is today if he was humble like that?
You cannot achieve greatness if you are humble because that mindset is clearly paradoxical to success.
Don’t be Frugal
To be frugal is to be sparing with your money. You’re also likely to be frugal if you’re humble because why should you have important things if you’re not important?
But being frugal can actually cost you money. Most of your skills not unique. Ask yourself, what is your actual unique skill that you do much better than anyone else? Answering emails is probably not one of them. Whether you’re a YouTuber doing your own video editing or a real estate doing their own paperwork, these are tasks other people can do cheaper and faster. Even if they’re only 50% as good you are, your time is limited, so they can spend more time on the task and still get a better result than you could.
What is the one thing that you actually have to do yourself? You’d be surprised how your eight hour day can actually be filtered down to one hour of work that only you can do. The rest can and should be outsourced so you can spend more time on the high value tasks. Let’s see how this would help you make more money.
Let’s say you have an eight hour work day and can create $80 of value an hour. However, you’re currently spending four of those hours on low value tasks, like replying to emails, scheduling meetings and organizing paperwork. So you’re only able to make $80 x 4 = $320 a day. By outsourcing the tasks to a $20 an hour employee or freelancer, you now earn $80 x 8 - $20 x 4 = $560 a day. That enables you to make $60K more in a year, all while opting out from tedious tasks and doing the work you actually enjoy.
Some people praise those with a DIY mindset but boasting that you’re doing everything yourself will cost you precious time and money.
So be bold, assert your worth and focus your time on work that creates the highest value. You’ll be destined for a happier, more victorious life.
