Increasing Your Real Worth

Do you know what you are worth? Are you happy with it? Discover how to develop infinitely increasing self-worth.

What are you worth?

When people used to read printed newspapers, the Parade section of the Sunday paper ran a cover story every year about what different people earned. When I first read this annual feature, it made me sick, and I know I was not alone. Everyone I knew read the article, and studied the pictures, career roles, and earnings. No one I knew liked what they learned. They would measure themselves against the examples in the article, and come up short. They weren’t good enough.

It seemed that almost everyone had a better career and earned more. To make matters worse, I was behind on my bills, doing without things that were necessary, like dental work and car and home upgrades. Seeing other people doing well did not make me feel good.

Great teachers said that I should be happy for them, but my gut reaction was not happiness, especially when I didn’t have a promising plan to strike it rich.

I was more prone to feel resentful when it seemed their good fortune was ill-gotten — or had come to them for no good reason. I was envious. Envy hurts us. Being envious requires us to think of ourselves as lacking or poor, and that is likely to cause things to happen to make us poor.

Why do we think less of ourselves when we see others doing well? We tell ourselves that we have less, that we are less. If we do that enough, we believe it. And then we tend to make it so.

Great teachers tell us that it’s better to view others’ good fortune with good will. It is better to be happy for them and believe that good fortune is our destiny too. It’s better to expect good things for ourselves and let go of envy and cynicism. But that is easier said than done.

Parade’s parade of people doing way better than me did not sit well.

Fortune magazine lists the world’s wealthiest people, a practice in our culture of holding up those who have amassed great fortunes as if they were great people, examples of the greatest people in a society that measures a person’s worth in dollars. Some of these billionaires may be…