Don’t Get Caught Up In The Behind Effect

I just finished reading an economic article, and it momentarily put me in a dampened mood as I was ‘forced’—I use the term lightly—to take a look at my own world from infancy to present. Despite being pleased with what I have accomplished given my background, I still get caught up in what I like to call the ‘Behind Effect’. That is what I call what I am about to discuss in this post.

The Behind Effect is when someone can get caught up in their own head about how behind they are in life compared to others, even though if they just take a step back, they would be able to snap out of it with a logical view.

But when you read things like “It is a personal failing rather than an economic failure, of why one is not well off on the social mobility ladder absent an intellectual deficit.” As a low-income individual and now once again a college student, it can make you feel as if you’ve failed at life.

Everyone has different tools in their toolbox.

However, when you step back and realize that you had personal obligations, such as dying parents, raising kids, or any personal responsibility, or traumatic upheaval in your world, you have to realize that sometimes others have tools that are not in your toolbox.

Some of these tools were passed down from their parents; this isn’t limited to financial means, while all you had was a rusty wrench and some bent nails.

How could you build a life from the ground up resembling a life that someone has built with proper tools and materials from a toolbox with a rusty wrench and bent nails?

It becomes almost impossible—or at least, that is the strong feeling that we hold onto. Expecting to do it at the same time as someone with the right tools and materials, now that is almost entirely impossible, but to eventually build a life of resemblance that, thankfully, is not.

Because, the truth is, it is up to you at a certain point to dust off all that you’ve been through and go out and collect the tools needed, to find them.

And it might take you a while.

In fact, it will most likely take you longer. Because someone who has had to find their own tools, learn what they are, what they are used for, while overcoming personal obligations or trauma will inevitably have hiccups in their journeys.

Dusting oneself off does not mean invalidating what one has gone through nor does it mean it doesn’t have an everlasting effect; it just means that the world is perfectly okay with letting someone live in the past, hurt, battered, bruised, and upset, and this really is a pick-yourself-up-by-the-bootstrap scenario.

As achingly painful as it might be to accept this for some, the sooner it is understood, accepted, the better because then the so-called magic happens.

Life starts over once we take a personal form of accountability.

Life begins to happen for you because now accountability for ourselves becomes a given, a choice. Looking out for ourselves after a rough start is like a second chance at life.

We get to protect ourselves when no one else would.

We can retrain our minds and build new pathways.

Learn new habits and reap the fruit of our labor.

For me, that looks like becoming a college student again after a rough start, literally a rough start from infancy through adulthood.

If I had to do over the last 10 years of my life but it meant changing everything, even if the mistakes could be written into non-existence, I wouldn’t do it, because I am happier than I have ever been in more areas of my life than just one.

Even though social mobility is something I am still working towards, like attaining my degree, building the investment fund from the ground up, there are areas of my life that no matter what amount ends up on the balance sheet, the amount itself would never come to close to the value of what I have achieved outside momentary success.

And for me, that is a win, so when stepping out from the Behind Effect, I quickly remember that the only reason I momentarily get caught up in it is because 1) personal economic prosperity is still in progress 2) I am still healing traumatic wounds and the insecurities that have come from them.

Thank God for the tool of self-awareness because as time goes on, it gets easier to understand my own emotions and thoughts. Therefore, allowing me to continue to build the life I envision, have always envisioned, for myself.

And I hope the same for you, whenever you find yourself stuck in the Behind Effect, have a real honest conversation with yourself and then go do what is needed for you to have the life that you want.

Note: Building a life of resemblance does not mean building a life of comparison or having all of the same things as the next person. This was written from the perspective of wanting a life of personal economic prosperity, as we have either witnessed others achieve or have read in great detail about their achievements.

An example being I am an investor and have learned a lot from the works of very well-off affluent investors, and I seek to have a great degree of success in the very same field as them; however, that is the extent of the resemblance I seek.