Common examples:
- Living far away to save on rent, spending four hours commuting every day.
- Refusing to pay for professional services — housekeeping, consulting, repairs, assistants — insisting on doing everything yourself, with lower efficiency and poorer results.
- Fearing the “tuition” of trying new things. When facing the unknown and uncertain, retreating from exploration, avoiding experimentation, unwilling to accept the risk and loss that comes with learning by doing.
Time, attention, decision-making capacity, management bandwidth, health, opportunity, energy, relationships, reputation — cost is not only money.
This principle is not hard to understand. But it is very hard to live by.
Because the mark that poverty leaves on a person runs too deep. It is branded into the bone.
Scarred by having had nothing.