If you’ve ever dabbled in the stock market, you’re probably familiar with terms like diversifying, gains & losses, bonds, index funds, mutual funds, and yeah, the super obvious stocks.
Now if you’ve gone beyond just a little dabble, you may have heard of fancier terms like puts, calls, options, and shorting. If those sound like a foreign language to you, don’t worry too much – most of these terms are just different types of contracts you have that define the timing, pricing, and execution of them. Generally, they’re used as a hedge against risk to protect your investments – to a certain degree.
Short selling, in particular, is when you expect a stock to go down in value by a specific date in the future. If you’re like, reallysure a stock is inflated and the company behind it is full of shit (I’m looking at you, Snapchat), you’d get a short sell option with the full expectation you’ll laugh your way to the bank at some specific date in the future.
Now that you understand the basics, you can see it probably makes sense to short sell something like a stock as a way to hedge your risk. On the flipside, it doesn’t make much sense to short sell something like a relationship. Would you really enter a relationship knowing it probably wouldn’t work out by a certain date and try to mitigate your risk against it?
Would you short sell yourself as well, knowing your “stock” will drop in value in the future?
Why do you do exactly that, then?
Your Self-Deprecating Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Say that five times fast.
Now we all know someone who roasts themselves by neatly packaging it with humor. Self-deprecating humor can elicit a solid amount of laughs, and for good reason; it proves you don’t really take yourself too seriously. That’s not really a bad thing, because – all things considered – we take life seriously enough. So when someone comes in and break the tension by roasting themselves into oblivion at the expense of their soul, then alright… I think most people can laugh.
But we all know someone who constantly throws out jokes about themselves over and over (and over) again (like being too fat), and it gets a bit old. Ok, ok. You’ll get a laugh out of me, but then it just gets to be overkill.
Then there is that person who basically talks shit about themselves any chance they get and don’t really say it in a humorous way; in fact, they’re dead serious. Ok, now this is just weird. Look, I get it. We’re our own worst critic, and our inner voice talks way too much crap than we should ever allow.
But when it gets so bad that everyone around them thinks, “we get it, you hate yourself”, it’s a problem. A very big problem.
And what happens when our brain begins to think we’re about as worthy as a McDonald’s ice cream machine? In other words, what happens when our brain begins to think we’re basically useless?
Side note: McDonald’s, fix your fucking ice cream machines.
You guessed it, you start manifesting your thoughts, and voila, you’ve begun to complete your self-fulfilling prophecy of self-deprecation.
Put another way, what you believe you achieve. If you believe you suck, you probably suck. Why? Because you’ll take actions reflecting the fact that you think you suck. And conversely, if you think you’re awesome, then you’re probably awesome. Same reasoning – you’ll take actions that reflect you’re cooler than the other side of the pillow. Cooler than winter in Antarctica. Cooler than your dad’s sports car from the 1970’s. In other words, one ice cold mother fucker.
Devaluing Your Existence
On a pretty much daily basis we’re presented with situations that give us an unlimited number of ways to react. While there’s never really a “right” way, there are definitely situations that require you to avoid the “bad” way. Even better, there are situations in life that require you to take some sort of action, instead of just sitting around on your mom’s couch eating Lay’s potato chips while watching reruns of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
And here’s the problem: you don’t take the action that you probably should because you’re scared. You’re selling yourself short.
Want to know why you don’t make as much as you could? You probably didn’t ask for it.
Want to know why you didn’t obtain the financing you potentially needed for a project? You probably didn’t approach Mr. Influential Run-Of-The-Mill Rich Dude because you thought there’s no way he’d give you the time of day.
Want to know why you’re not dating Heidi Klum? Ok, that’s a stretch. Want to know why you aren’t dating that person you’re crushing on? You probably didn’t give it a shot because you didn’t think they’d say yes.
See where this is going?
Sometimes, these situations are presented and played out on a minor scale, and you wouldn’t think twice about it. But over time, this stuff compounds. Big time.
Then again, every daily decision in your life shouldn’t and doesn’t need to have huge repercussions. We’d all be sweating bullets nonstop on the daily. What kind of life is that? But continually devaluing yourself lends to making decisions that aren’t always in your best interest.
Make sense?
The bottom line is this: stop short selling yourself and start pumping up your own stock. You’ll find it’ll be in your best interest.
