My favorite Oscar Wilde quote is the following simple statement:

“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”

It’s amazing that an Irish poet and novelist who died more than 100 years ago can offer such an important tidbit of business and entrepreneurial advice. 

We live within our means because we choose to.  We are told when we are children that, when we grow up, we have to budget our money and “live within our means.”  However, that advice inhibits entrepreneurial thinking. 

As I slave away in an office 50 to 60 hours per week and continue striving (on the side) for the attainment of passive income (and an exit from the rat race), I can’t help but wonder what happened to the creativity that marked my childhood.  We were all very imaginative as children.  

Yet the shackles and burdens of “growing up” force us to ditch that imagination in favor of “living within your means.”  School is, in part, responsible for that.  Society is also to blame. 

As I find new business ideas to pursue, I know my efforts would be much easier if I still had the level of imagination I had when I was a child.  I’ve recaptured some of it in the past year.  The more I think about problems, the more I venture into “outside the box” solutions.  You’d be surprised how creative and imaginative you can be if you simply thought about how to do something rather than move on after declaring that you can’t do that something.

The word “can’t” is the worst collection of letters in the English language.  People who accept ”living within their means” use the word “can’t” a lot.  The day I dropped that word from my vocabulary, my ability to imagine and create increased threefold.  All of a sudden, I was thinking of ideas for online businesses, and I was even pursuing some of them.  I was no longer an employee living within the boundaries of his “means.”  I was an entrepreneur seeking to expand his means.

No successful business ever got off the ground without someone first thinking of the idea that created the business.  A lot of people have done it.  They simply ditched society’s tune and marched to their own tune.  It’s a lofty goal, but history has proven that it is attainable.   

I haven’t reached my goal.  But I know I can and will.  And I know that other people can achieve the same goal.  Imagination has that power.   

It all starts with imagination.  The recipe for escaping the rat race has always been the same.  The simplest of Oscar Wilde quotes confirms that it all starts with your own creativity and outside-the-box thinking.  We all have it. 

You don’t have to live within your means if you don’t want to.         

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