Updating your money beliefs

to make more and stress less

Hey today I want to talk to you about money beliefs.

Because money is one of the things I’ve thought about the most over the past two years and I realized if I had removed some of these beliefs earlier it would’ve been easier to make money and have more fun.

Hope it helps you:

Start: May 2022, Konstanz, Germany

In May 2022, I took a writing course called Ship30for30.

In one of the breakout rooms I met another student named Billy. Billy was a young middle aged man maybe late 40s but had the energy of a 25 year old. He had just retired himself from a successful enterprise sales career through real estate. We got along fairly well and he offered to invest time in helping me find direction.

In a couple of those conversations, I noticed something peculiar about him:

He spoke in terms of 100,000s.

I’m not joking. That was his base unit of money. He thought and spoke about 100,000s.

• “Let’s say you get a new job and they’re paying you $800,000.”

• “You could take $300,000 and do X.”

At first I thought he was pulling my leg.

But when I realized he was serious, I got a little confused because I was used to thinking in terms of 1s and 10s. Back then Döner Kebab inflation hadn’t really hit (they were still 5 euros) and that was my main expense outside of a couple hundred euros for the room I rented.

But I had a full circle moment with all this last month.

May 2024: My Sister’s Graduation

When I realized my sister was graduating from college, I figured it would be nice to give her some money.

She’s going to Spain to teach for a year and it’ll cost her like 3,000. So when I was talking to my mom about this, I realized my default assumption was give her 1000 or pay for the whole trip. (sorry Kirsten, if you’re reading this I decided on 1000)

That’s when it hit me:

My new measuring block is 1000.

It’s the base unit I think in. And this happened subconsciously without me realizing.

In selling our coaching program over the past year, I’ve asked 709 people to pay us 6800 (we track every day). It’s desensitizing and just doesn’t feel like a lot of money anymore. Don’t get me wrong, if you want to gift me 6800 I would gladly take it. But what I’m saying is conversations around $1000 creates about as much stress as conversations around $10 used to.

So this all kinda happened through exposure therapy:

• “Yeah, the investments 6800.”

• “Yeah it’s just 6800 bucks”

• “If you want to more forward, it’s 6800”

And it’s been helpful. But on a conscious level, I’ve been working to update other parts of my internal software related to money to get better results too.

Here are a couple beliefs I didn’t realize I had playing in the background:

1. Making money is evil

2. The upper limit problem

3. Money is scarce

Making Money is not evil (lying is evil)

In the Bible, Jesus allegedly says,

Easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than a rich man enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

When I read that, I was pretty bummed.

But then I talked to one of the smartest people I know, whose spent half a decade studying these things, and he told me he’s certain Jesus never said that and it was added in after the fact to control the population.

Whether Jesus actually said that is up for grabs, I guess.

But my favorite philosopher, Epictetus, who held a similar attitude toward money, also made a counter point in his lectures. He said that while most people lie, cheat, and sell their soul to win money, if you show him an ethical way to make money and he’d happily take it.

And in modern society there are a million ethical ways to make money!

So it’s possible you also have the making money is evil belief running in the brain especially if you grew up in America where pop culture nearly always depicts rich people as evil:

That said in some countries like Ukraine (where my one friend basically purchased his law degree/exams without ever studying), the belief around rich people being evil is even worse because corruption is so widespread.

But again if you believe making money is evil, your subconscious will feel uncomfortable striving for it and you’ll likely sabotage yourself without realizing it. I know this has happened to me.

The truth is, making money in a beautiful way is great because money is simply stored up energy that you can deploy to get what you want. It is a great tool with lots of uses and it’s perfectly reasonable to pursue wealth. I wish I appreciated this earlier.

Next, we have the upper limit problem.

I wrote about that here:

You can read the post if you’re curious but the big idea is pretty simple:

We have an internal level of success that we’re comfortable with (kinda like a thermometer) and as the temperature rises part of us gets uncomfortable unless we realize it’s ok to go up and to the right.

Removing Scarcity

Next is removing scarcity.

A lot has been written on this so I will keep it short

But basically, if you believe money is scarce you will act in a way that reflects that.

In reality, money is not scarce. They literally print it out of thin air and for most of us the 1-10 million it would take to be completely free to live life as we see fit is such a minuscule part of the worlds wealth that it’s laughable that it causes us so much stress.

So that’s it for today’s post.

I struggled to get it out because I was partying with my sister at her graduation this weekend. But hope you found it useful.

If you had a family member graduate as well, congrats and have a great week!