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The single greatest skill that separates broke people from wealthy people is not intelligence luck, okay? It is mastering the psychology of money. I went from being 100 pounds overweight, broke, arrested six times, to building companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And it is not because I'm special. I am no different from you, is because I stopped letting my broke mindset run my actual life. So if you want to build real wealth, you need to break free from these six limiting beliefs that are keeping you broken. The first limiting belief or system of beliefs that is keeping you poor is what I call the money script. Every financial decision that you make, what job you take, how much you charge, how guilty you feel, spending a certain amount of money is all controlled by this subconscious script that you probably didn't even write yourself. And this is actual science. There's research by financial psychologists that talk about the four types of money scripts that predict financial behavior. And these scripts are actually formed in childhood before you're even conscious enough to understand what money is. As I go through each of these, I want you to think about which one you unconsciously follow yourself. I will tell you what I am at the end, or at least how I grew up. Okay? The first one is a money avoided. These people believe that money is bad and that they don't deserve it, okay? They will sabotage their own success. They often work in helping professions that have very low pay and they feel guilty about wanting to have money. So if you grew up hearing people say rich people are greedy, money is the root of all evil. That's probably the script that you have in your head. Now, on the other hand, we also have money worshipers. Okay? So if you're a money worshiper, you believe that money will solve all your problems and bring you happiness. Okay? So a money worshiper, they chase money obsessively, but they never feel like they have enough. They hoard, they prioritize, work over relationships, always believing that a certain amount of more money is going to bring them happiness. Oh, I just haven't made enough yet. I need to make a million dollars. Now it's 10 million, now it's a hundred million in order to be happ happy. Now there's the money status script. People who suffer from the money status script tie their self worth to their net worth. They overspend because they want to keep up appearances, hide their finances even from, like spouses if it's not what they think it should be, and they feel anxious when other people are wealthier than them. So it's like the typical keeping up with the Joneses. Like, you're looking in the the yard of your neighbor and you're like, dude, I need to have a better yard than him. Research shows that this script is actually linked to lower well being and increased unhappiness. Now why is that? Because you're constantly comparing yourself. Right? The last one is money Vigilant people. Okay? These are people who are chronic savers who live below their means, but they experience constant anxiety about their financial future. They're usually secretive about money. They never feel secure, even when they have plenty. So I want you to think about, of those four, you might be a mix of a couple of them, but think about the one that you identify with the most. Think about how it affected you growing up. So when I went through these, I was like, I definitely identify the most with money vigilant. Which probably sounds weird because you're looking at me and you're like, I see jewelry and I see makeup and hair and all. I'm going to be really honest with you guys. I spend nothing compared to how much money I have to the degree that when I had $100 million net worth, I didn't even want to spend over a couple million dollars on the house. In fact, I rented for three years at that point in my life and didn't even own a home. And that is because it's the constant anxiety of like never feeling secure, even when you have plenty. So Alex actually knows this about me, which is a terrible habit. But when I feel like I'm not making as much money or less profit for a couple months, even though it affects nothing about my personal life. Cause I don't even take money from my business. I just start to spend less money. I don't look at things, I don't buy stuff. I tell people, I'm like, don't buy that. What are we doing? I tell my whole assistant team. I'm like, ah, we don't need that. No, let's cut here. Let's go through our, our finances and cut stuff that we don't need. I realized it was a pattern that I had in my past that I was bringing into my current day life that wasn't serving me. And so something I tried to start doing the last few times that's happened where I've just felt that urge to spend less money, I go spend more money. It's probably a worse behavior, but it's telling my brain, like, listen, you're gonna listen to me. This is irrational. I'm not going to listen to you. And so I will spend money even when I have that impulse not to, to teach myself it's okay because the evidence shows it is. And whatever's happening in my brain has nothing to do with what's happening on the outside. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to think about the phrases that you heard growing up. Maybe it's, you know, one, money doesn't grow on trees. Be grateful for what you have. Rich people are greedy, okay? Those things are not lessons. They're other people's thoughts that you took on. And so once they get written into your subconscious, then they start dictating everything about your life. What jobs you take, how much money you charge, what you believe you deserve, how much money you spend, when you should be anxious versus excited about spending money. So here's how we want to rewire our brains to think about money differently. Write down your earliest memory about money. What did your parents say about it? How did they behave with it? That's probably your money script. And once you see it, you can rewrite it. And so your new script, for example, could be, money is a tool that lets me create freedom and help more people. Once you change that internal script, your external results will start to update. It takes a lot of the emotion out of it. And once you associate positive feelings with that new narrative, you start to actually see that your behaviors align with it more. The next limiting belief keeping you poor is what we call a wealth ceiling. Here's the truth about it. You will sabotage. Say it's a $200,000 opportunity if you still see yourself as somebody who only pursues a $50,000 opportunity. Now, why is that? The amount of money that you have is capped by how you see yourself. Just like the partner, yet you have, just like the job that you have, just like the house that you live in. The research on this is very clear. Your self concept acts as a thermostat. If you see yourself as somebody who earns $100,000, you'll unconsciously strive to maintain that level, right? And you will not pursue a level above it. That's the really important piece. Now, if you make $150,000, you'll probably spend an additional $50,000. If you make $80,000, you'll stress and work until you're back at the a hundred thousand dollars. See what I'm saying? So for me, for years I was, I'm scrappy, I'm surviving, I'm getting by. And I remember because I got stuck when I was in my first job making around $85,000 a year. It was like I created this identity around it. I knew logically that I could make more. But one, I remember the moment I started making more. I started to compete, and then all my money started going towards competition fees. The second piece is that I remember so many times when I knew I was about to start making more. It's like I would almost sabotage myself by getting wound up in it. I was like, oh my God, what if I up? What if I mess up? What if I don't actually make more? And I didn't realize at the time that that was like me regulating my internal temperature. And so if your identity is, I'm somebody who struggles with money, you find ways to keep struggling. But if it's I'm someone who creates and manages my wealth and can make more money if I choose to, then you're going to find a way to live that out. So here's how you change this. Okay? I want you to write this down. I'm the kind of person who. And then finish the sentence, honestly, whatever your current financial identity is, I overspend, I underspend, I save too much, I save nothing. Then I want you to put a line down that piece of paper on the other side. Right? I'm the kind of person who builds and manages wealth with ease. You don't need to feel like that person yet. You don't need to act like them just yet. I just want you to actually write it down and not be repulsed by what you see on the piece of paper. I'm serious. Every time you now make a decision for money, I want you to pull up that piece of paper. That's all I want you to do right now. And the thing is, is that the moment that your self image expands because you're constantly reading that, reminding yourself of it, writing a new sentence to put in your brain, your income is going to follow that. The next limiting belief people have is thinking that they should buy liabilities instead of assets, maybe just not even knowing the difference. You were programmed to consume, not to build things. And that's why a lot of people stay broke. Okay? Robert Kiyosaki, he wrote Rich Dad, Poor dad, one of the first books I read on money. He put it very simply. He said the rich buy assets, the middle class buys liabilities thinking they are assets. Wealth is actually fairly simple. There are two categories. Assets, liabilities. An asset puts money in your pocket, a liability takes money out of your pocket. And a lot of people spend their entire lives buying liabilities. And Wondering why they can't get ahead, they ask, can I afford this? Instead of, will this pay me back? What's my return on this? Now, how do you know the difference between an asset and liability? I'll break it down in the most common cases that you probably can relate to. Your car, liability, okay, loses value immediately. Has insurance, which is bull. Gas, maintenance. It happens to it all the time. Your house, you live in liability. I know this is very controversial, but it's true. You have a mortgage, property tax, insurance, repairs. It doesn't generate income. The next one, a course that teaches you a skill, asset. Now, how does that. An asset, because it pays you back through increased income, because you've invested in your skills. A rental property, an asset, it generates monthly income. A designer handbag, sadly, a liability, okay, loses value over time, doesn't, you know, generate any income. I've had that discussion with Alex before. Equipment for your business, that is an asset if it helps you generate more revenue. It's a liability if you don't use it and just sits there. So when I started filtering all my purchases through that, is this an asset or a liability? My wealth compounded because I realized I was like my money, if I don't put into either of these things, actually it's just a liability. Money sitting in the bank, it's just deteriorating over time. So my money actually can become a liability if I don't do something with it. And that's when I really started learning how to invest in things that create money, in skills that create money, in learning that creates money, and in assets for my business that create money. Here's how you can start spending on what matters. Okay, I want you to look at the last 10 purchases that you made. And then next to each one, simply write asset or liability and be honest with yourself. And then all I want you to do is just commit the next time that you buy something to just ask yourself, is this a liability or an asset? Does it put money in my pocket eventually or does it take money out of my pocket? The next. Limiting belief is one of the hardest ones to break. I know this because I still find myself breaking it on a continuous basis in the weirdest ways. But that is the scarcity mindset. Okay, this sounds crazy, but having a scarcity mindset actually can make you dumber. Here's the truth. You either operate from scarcity or abundance. And I don't want you to feel bad here because as humans, we are supposed to operate from scarcity. Which one you choose to lean towards and train yourself into will determine how much money you make. The scarcity brain really just says, there's never enough. I need to protect what I have. I need more. You know, if that person has more means less for me. Think about what that meant like a thousand years ago. Meant like, somebody else has all the berries. And you're like, I need more berries because I need berries to feed my children and my pack. And like, you're trying to get their berries because you're like, oh, you can't. There's only a certain number of berries and I need to make sure I get them and not you, because what if my family dies? That's how your brain's working. Except it's working and thinking those thoughts about something that is not finite. It's something that's infinite. There's money being made every day. Scarcity actually changes your brain the more that you give into it. When you perceive resources as scarce that are not like money, your cognitive bandwidth shrinks. You make worse decisions. You can't plan long term, and you only focus on immediate value. So we need to reprogram these thoughts. People with a scarcity mindset, they hoard money. They don't invest their money, right? They're only thinking short term, kind of survive, right? And they see every opportunity as a threat. If you can tap into training yourself to have an abundant mindset, everything will change for you. Abundance mindsets, they say there's always more to create. I can afford to invest. I can afford to give some berries to my neighbor. I can take calculated risks because there are opportunities everywhere. And it is not a finite resource. It is seeing the world and all of the things it has to offer as an infinite pie rather than a finite one. So for me, for example, when I operated from scarcity, I was terrified to spend money on things that made my life better, made me better, made my business better. Because I felt like, what if. What if I never make money again? What if it stops coming? What if something changes? Especially in the first few years of business, I would say the first three, it was really hard for me to get out of that habit. And then the shift actually really happened when I realized money is almost infinite nowadays, okay, but it is renewable. Skills, relationships, opportunities, those things compound. And so the more that I invest into myself and the more and I invest in my business and the more and I invest in my life, the more I get back tenfold. And I realized that I needed to train myself out of that habit. So I'll tell you, the first thing I did. I Hired a Coach that was $40,000 a month when we were literally making $50,000 a month, right? And my scarcity brain was like, oh my God, you just started making this money like you're going to go broke. What if it stops tomorrow? My abundant brain was like, well you made 10,000amonth, then 30,000amonth, now 40, like next month you're probably going to make a hundred and this skill is going to help you make even more. And so I said, you know what, I have to just ignore that voice. I'm not going to listen to it. I can have those thoughts. I don't need to listen to them and follow their directions. I can go with this one inst instead. And the cool thing is that that coach that I hired that was 40, 000amonth was the reason I was able to scale one of my companies to the degree I did, which then I was able to sell the company for tens of millions of dollars. I'm sure you're thinking, okay, but how do you build an abundant mindset? Okay, here's what I want you to do. One is just become aware of when you make decisions from fear versus from possibility. Okay, when you think, I can't afford this, going to reframe it, how could I afford this simplest thing you can do? The moment you stop asking yourself, how do I protect what I have? And you start asking yourself, how do I create more of what I have? That's when you start asking say like higher level intelligence questions and you stop sabotaging your finances. And that's the thing I realized for myself. I was like, oh, I talk to myself like I'm poor even when I was had a lot of money, to be honest. And it wasn't until I realized that that I was like really able to step into that next realm where I was like, I'm giving into like the survival mechanism that exists in all of us humans. Rather than retraining myself into this abundance mindset, the next step we have is loss aversion. Okay, I want to define this for you. Loss aversion is why you keep losing investments, avoiding risk, and basically saying stuff where you are. Because if you want to break this limiting belief, I want you to listen closely what I'm about to explain. There was a winning research by, it was like Daniel Kahneman and some guy named Amos, okay? And it showed that the pain of losing $100 is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining a hundred dollars. Losing feels twice as bad as winning feels. This is why as humans, we hold losing stocks, you know, hoping that they're going to recover instead of just cutting our losses. We stay in dead end jobs, we stay in bad relationships, we don't negotiate salaries, we avoid investing because the fear of loss outweighs the potential gain. So for me, for example, I stayed in a terrible job for probably two years longer than I should have because I felt like if I ended it, I was losing. But the funny thing is, like, staying in that job cost me way more. It was like money, mental energy, mental health, who knows how many years off my life. Because the fear of loss was bigger than the logic of leaving. Your brain is designed to protect what you have, not to pursue what you could have. And that is why most people never actually take risks to build well. And then they say, oh, there's something wrong with me. I feel like, what if I lose? I'm like, there's nothing wrong with you. You're a human. I don't know how many times I have to say this, like, we're all wired this way. I'm wired this way, you're wired this way. If I can do it, you could do it. Promise. Okay, so here's how you break that cycle. You need to reframe every loss as tuition. If you lost $50,000 on a business venture, abundance is going to say you paid $50,000 for an education that will make you millions. When I change that frame for myself, the loss stopped controlling me. In fact, recently I had a business decision and there was, you know, about a $3 million delta between what somebody was saying something was and somebody else was saying something was. And I ended up just going and agreeing with this person because I said, I think this is the right way forward. And I think that I actually should have defined terms earlier in the relationship to make it more clear I hadn't done that. And so, you know, when I was telling the story about this, it was just a week ago, I said, Yeah, I paid $3 million to learn this lesson. And you know what? I would pay $3 million again to learn that lesson. The last limiting belief might be the most important one to break. And this is what we call the time trap. Most people spend their entire lives trying to save money, and that is what keeps them from making money. Ironically, they forget that money multiplies, but time doesn't multiply. Okay? And that is why you want to save time instead of saving money. So here's what I mean. If you make a hundred dollars an hour doing anything worth less than a hundred dollars an hour is costing you money. So if you spend two hours cleaning your house instead of hiring someone, $50, you didn't save $50. You lost $150. Because two hours at $100 minus the 50 you didn't pay. Wealthy people understand this. They buy time. They hire assistants, meal prep services, housekeepers. Not because they're lazy, but because their time is worth more. They put it elsewhere. Guess what? I didn't just do this now when I had a lot of money. I did this when I first had barely any money. The first thing I hired was an assistant. When I was barely had enough money to hire somebody, six people from my team, I hired an assistant because I said, you know what? This is what rich people do. They hire people to get their time back, and if I have to, like, take care of this and that and the house, then, like, I'm not going to be making money. And it was the best decision I ever made. Whereas poor and middle class, they tend to sell time, right? They're trading hours for dollars and do everything themselves to save money and then wonder why they're not getting ahead. And so when I started filtering every decision through, does this buy me time or cost me time? Everything changed. I stopped doing the $10 an hour tasks. Hired help. I automated things, and I focused really on the work that was, you know, say, a thousand dollars an hour. And you can calculate how much money you make per hour by asking yourself, how much money do I make in a year? And divide it by how many hours a year there are. That's it. So, like, right now, I know how much I make per hour. So then I'll ask myself. I even have it on one of my asana cards for people. I'll say, is this worth, you know, $50,000 for Layla to do this, if it's going to take an hour? Now, here's the thing. If you're able to do this, you will make more money in less time, which then you reinvest into more leverage, and then that leverage creates freedom for you, because things that you have leverage on, they take less of your time, create money. They're how you get free, right? So how do you get out of that trap? Calculate your hourly rate, your annual income divided by 2000 work hours. Then audit your time, ask yourself, how many things am I doing that are not worth this? My favorite thing that somebody will do in one of my companies is they'll come to me and tell me that they're doing tasks that are not worth how much I'm paying them. My favorite thing in the world. I had someone do it recently. They said, look how many hours I'm spending on admin tasks. And they had actually gone through their calendar for the last four weeks, and they calculated it, and I was horrified by how much time. And I immediately hired them assistant and they started literally three days ago. That's all. Because anybody who thinks in terms of getting a good return, I'm going to hire that person for somebody else as well. So here's my challenge for you. I want you to pick just one of the shifts from this, and I want you to say, this is the one where I think I'm going to get the most gains. I'm going to start practicing this week. And if you like this, don't forget to check out my next one and subscribe.