There are two theories of thought on how to pay down debt:

• Put all extra money on the highest interest, make minimums payments of others.
• Put all extra money on the smallest debt, make minimum payments of others.

I’m a very logical person and the math says it all; pay the highest interest off first. The reason is that you have to pay back less money. Depending on how much debt you have, you can finish a few months early because you avoid a lot of the extra interest.

I realized something, the vanity of paying off your debt disappears probably a week after you make your first over and above payment. The problem is that you don’t receive any short term gratification until the debt is paid off. I’ve been training myself to ignore the need for gratification in the short term, so I can continue working for the more long term gratification, but that really is a losing battle.

There has to be a reward in the short term of paying down debt. This is why I think going after the smallest debt is the best. Before I would of said tackle the highest interest. Finishing off a debt is just a great feeling because than you have extra money sitting around each month. You can take that money and put it against your next debt. It’s almost like a snow ball effect to debt payments.

Lucky for me, my lowest debt is also my highest interest. I’m hoping by the end of August to have no credit card debt. Yippie. Than it is onto a more long term student loan repayment plan. I will be paying it down as fast as I can, but there is just so much of it to pay back.

All self-help books give pretty much the same message: set a clear and defined goal, set a plan, follow plan and there might be extra stuff like auto-suggestion, affirmations, etc. If they’re all typically the same, than why do we keep find new ones to read? I used to think the root lied in procrastination, but I think it falls much deeper than that.

What do we associate with ourselves when we get a self-help book? We associate that we don’t like who we are or where we are in our lives. We get this book to change ourselves. Change is a verb, it’s an action. I always thought that getting the next self-help book was the way to procrastinate and delay the work, while still thinking you’re accomplishing something by reading it. I’m not convinced by that argument anymore because it never really applied to me.

Change also has another association to us: pain and struggle. Change requires us to step outside of our comfort zone. If you get a book on public speaking, it’s not going to get you on a stage speaking in front of an audience. You’re going to have to do it, eventually. I’m no longer convinced that excessively reading self-help literature is an act of procrastination. I think it is a continued search for something to numb the pain.

I think most people understand and have accepted that change requires some sort of pain or struggle. Continuing with the public speaking example, you know you’ll need to get up on the stage and speak while you’re nervous, while you bumble through sentences, while you sweat, while you umm and ahh your way through it. It’s a struggle. I think most people that excessively read self-help books are looking for something to the numb the pain. I’ve looked for self-hypnosis and NLP books with the hope that I could some how numb the pain or make my mind like it better.

The thing people seem to miss by this is that the act of getting on a stage to do public speaking isn’t what ends up changing you. It’s the pain and struggle that changes you.

I’m convinced that pain and struggling is a currency for change. To be a different person, you’re going to have to pay the price. It doesn’t matter if you’re starting your own business, public speaking or trying to pick up chicks, you got to struggle through the pain. You need to be embarrassed. You need to screw up. You need to have exciting highs and crashing lows. It is what is required to build this new person.

Pain and struggling is change. Put down the book and go feel the pain.