Let’s Talk Money

“It remains to be proved how fast the brain is capable of traveling. If it cannot acquire an eight-mile per hour speed, then an auto running at the rate of 80 miles per hour is running without the guidance of the brain, and the many disastrous results are not to be marvelled at.” – The New York Times, 1904

(reported on a debate in Paris between a brain specialist and a physician about the dangers of driving automobiles at high speeds—because the brain can’t keep up.)

Profit is priority

People begin startups for lots of reasons. Some want to make a difference in people’s lives. Others want to change the way people think or behave. Perhaps they want to inspire with their music or art or to fix something that makes them mad. All that is great, but if a company does not eventually make a profit, it ceases to exist. Whatever the motivation and purpose of the venture, we need to bring in money. To do that we need to talk about money and your attitude toward it because believe it or not it is your attitude that determines how much you get to flow through your life.

Money is a surprisingly difficult thing for most people to talk about. In fact, according to a survey conducted by Ally bank, 70% of Americans think that it’s rude to talk about money. People don’t like to talk about how much they pay in rent, or the amount of their monthly mortgage payment. Others find it crass to discuss it even though it is the thing that makes the world function.

University College London found that people were seven times more likely to talk to a stranger about sex, affairs, and sexually transmitted diseases than discussing their salary.

Wells Fargo found that 44 percent of Americans see personal finance as the most challenging topic to discuss with others, more so than subjects like death, politics, and religion.

And despite the fact that money is a leading cause of stress in relationships (and commonly cited as the primary reason couples divorce), Time Magazine reports that 40 percent of couples don’t discuss how they would manage their money before getting married.

In business, however, we have to talk about money all the time because cashflow management is crucial. We need an open mind and an honest assessment of costs, expenses, and the time between when expenditure leaves your pocket and when revenue hits the books. I often find first-time entrepreneurs reluctant to disclose even the basic financial matters. If, however, financial independence is an aim you must learn to talk about money as easily as you do anything else.

There is a lot to suggest that we fear loss more than we value gain, which is why most people prefer to avoid the topic altogether. The irritation of losing money is far greater than the thrill of a windfall. Russell A. Poldrack, Stanford Professor of Psychology, conducted a live experiment on people gambling with real money and found evidence that supports the theory. “Most interestingly, the reactions in our subjects’ brains were stronger in response to possible losses than to gains” he told Scientific American. It’s possible this tendency developed during evolution when losing a day’s food could mean death, while finding the same thing didn’t assure us of another day’s survival because we had nowhere to safely store it.

How does this relate to our willingness to discuss money? The loss of face you suffer when you find out that you’re not doing as well as your friends weighs far more powerfully on our minds than the self-esteem boost that comes from discovering that we’re doing well.

If discussing money is a tricky challenge for most people then discussing what financial independence is all about will be impossible. If you can’t discuss it you are unlikely to gain it.

Religion Influence

In the west the reluctance to talk money can also come from what we were taught as children in school and Sunday School. In her e-book, Going Broke with Jesus, Kalinda Stevenson, Ph.D., Master of Divinity studies, fluent in Hebrew and Aramaic (written and spoken) and committed to liberating people from ‘Bad Bible,’ so they can live rich, abundant, joyful, and healthy lives, demonstrates how taking an ancient text out of its societal and historical context leads to interpretation errors that are then often used to suppress people’s ambitions. Texts intended to free people’s creativity become twisted to mean the opposite.

For instance, the classic biblical quote (The word ‘Bible’ just means ‘books’ in Greek) about a rich man who is unable to enter the kingdom of heaven is one of the most misunderstood verses about money. Its misuse by those in power to make those without power less discontent has caused millions of people over time to fear money for loss of their salvation.

If Jesus existed, he spoke Aramaic and lived in an Agrarian society in which the King controlled all land. A rich man was someone who benefited from the King’s benevolence because the King was God’s representative on earth. To be bestowed land by the King was actually seen as a blessing from God. The rich were viewed with awe because they were ‘blessed,’ much as some people might be in awe of a TV icon today. Those who were not so blessed accepted their role in life to be in service to those who were. To provide great service might one day lead to a more blessed life. Becoming self-made in those times was not permitted. A son born to a carpenter could only become a carpenter.

Clearly this led to the potential for corruption and oppression. “Jesus,” says Dr. Stevenson, “is not talking about being rich, but about the overthrow of the existing order of things in which those who are rich and at the top of the social system will lose their advantage unless they share that wealth for the benefit of society.” In this story, the rich man refuses the call to discipleship or revolution forces.

In that society this verse had a different meaning than the one handed down by the King James version 1500 years later. It was a recruitment campaign to a revolutionary cause no different than the ‘Your Country Needs You’ propaganda campaigns in the first world war.

It has little relevance to us today when one can become wealthy out of hard work and genius and use that money to share and create more benefits. People can still be bestowed power and wealth, but they can also create it as well. That was not possible in the time of Jesus. A carpenter was born to a carpenter, a shepherd born to a shepherd. Learning new trades or swapping positions in society was impossible. The word ‘rich’ is also a deliberate mis-translation that was introduced several centuries after the original text was written. In Jesus time there was no concept of rich only the blessed powerful and the rest of society that existed to serve their needs.

“What is profoundly disturbing to me,” Says Dr. Stevenson, “is that the real intention of the money stories seldom get taught at Sunday Schools and Churches. Instead these stories of the outlaw hero’s attempt to set people free from economic and religious abuse get turned into biblical urban legends warning people about the evils of money… there is no power in ignorance of money. Yet church leaders speak so often about money being something ungodly….
You can find religious verses that seem to proclaim these rules. But when these verses are put into their own contexts, the strident clarity of the Bible verses turns into something else. The verses become pieces of a larger whole. And very frequently, the Bible verse that is so confidently proclaimed as, “the very word of God” turns out to be a distortion of the original intention behind the Bible verse.

-Kalinda Stevenson

As another example, in Timothy 6:10; ‘The love of money is the root of all evils,’ is often misquoted as ‘Money is the root of all evils.’ Taken back to its origins the word ‘money’ is never used because it had little relevance in an Agrarian culture.

The original text translates to, ‘avarice (greediness).’ ‘Avarice is the root of all evils,’ changes the meaning completely. We all get that. Now it makes sense. Of course, greed is something we don’t want or need in life and will be the root of many problems. One can, however, be poor and greedy or rich and greedy. One can also be poor and generous or rich and generous.

Were the misquotes accidental or deliberate? No one can say for sure, but it is clear that biblical translations have been in the hands of the powerful through time and used to suppress the poor when it suited a political agenda (God’s Secretaries by Adam Nicolson).

Money is energy

I grew up poor. There is no salvation in it. There is nothing nostalgic or glorious about it. It sucks to be poor. I was bullied because I was poor. Girls turned their backs on me because I was poor. After playing soccer for my high school I had to walk 5 miles in the pouring rain to get home because we did not have a car at the time and I didn’t own a bike. On the edge of town was a fish & chips shop, its delicious aromas wafting out into the night air. I didn’t have pocket money so I went hungry until I got home.

I worked at nights and weekends on a farm at the expense of my homework. I went to bed in three layers of clothes, mittens and a hat because we had no indoor heating. I washed in melted snow mixed with frozen sheep droppings when the water pipes froze. I wore odd-sized shoes and trousers two sizes too small. I ate braised lamb hearts and fried cow’s tongue after the butcher threw them out, but in an attempt at fair balance I have to say my mother was a genius at turning offal into delicious meals. I sifted through Monday’s trash cans for Sunday’s newspapers. Being poor sucks. Period.

Give me financial independence as an alternative and I’ll take it any time. I hear people, who were never poor, saying things like ‘well it probably helped build a strong character or developed your determination.’ If that were the case then all kids who grow up poor should be like that and they are not. My two siblings and I are completely different characters even though we all grew up the same.

My father was unemployed most of my young life, and even after I left home to start a career, he was mostly a beneficiary of the tolerant British welfare system. He started and failed in over a dozen startups. Sometimes out of desperation he took a regular job as a delivery driver or taxi driver, but it never lasted long before he fell out with the bosses and was fired.

When I tell people that, they expect my next statement to be that he was abusive or an alcoholic, but he was neither. We never had alcohol in the house because we couldn’t afford it.

Although not academic, he was highly intelligent and could hold long conversations on any subject under the sun. He read voraciously, but even that can’t explain how worldly and authoritative he was on so many topics. He had impeccable manners, which he taught to all his children. Even when we were eating braised offal we did so as though we were dining at a palace, the table set with mismatched cutlery and tableware, but all rightfully arranged like a royal banquet.

His parents had been poor too and I often wondered how a man in an over-sized cigarette-burned, floppy, orange cardigan knitted for him by my mum, false teeth, comb-over hair and sandals could talk and behave like a titled aristocrat.

As a teenager, I resented our poverty and blamed my father unfairly. Then at church the village rector would spew out misquotes as the word of God and I would listen to ‘Money is the root of all evil.’ It made me feel better about our life as though I was actually blessed to be poor. This was until it came to my fifteenth year and time for confirmation classes.

For those classes we had to spend an evening a week for several weeks at the rectory listening to a rotund Rector Thomas pontificate about the sacrament and our duties as Christians. It was while sitting in his fine lounge in a beautiful manor house with expensive antiques, fine art, and gold statues, forced to listen to an obviously very well-fed man wearing a tailor-made suit, while my stomach rumbled and my feet were soaked through rotting shoes, that I started to question facts from myth. Rector Thomas had a comfortable living and he was telling me how blessed I was to be poor. I decided there and then that I no longer wanted to be poor.

When I was sixteen years old, I was as voracious a reader as my father. The local town library was my savior. The building was split into two sections, one for books that could be loaned out and one for reference books which had to be read in the building. The latter is where I started to spend more and more time. The library was located in what had once been the town jail. It was a clunky, dark building and the reference section was located behind an intimidating iron door. Hardly anyone ventured through that door, and I was left undisturbed for hours.

I was fascinated by biographies, but I often just roamed the shelves of this Aladdin’s cave of a room and pulled books at random. I became equally fascinated with books on psychology and physics, especially quantum physics.

This was the 1970’s and the library was in a market town dominated by sheep and cattle farming. Not many farmers had an interest in quantum physics, so the books were like new. The librarians knew my mother who worked part-time at the town’s only delicatessen so although it was technically against the rules, they let me take the reference books home so long as I returned to swap them every few days.

For the first time in my life I learned from these science books that everything is energy. It was a revelation to me. I still meet people today who have no concept of this, and if you are one then this information will change the way you view money and financial independence.

Everything in our universe is made of the same basic building pieces. There are 12 particles of matter and 4 forces of nature that mix and interact to create every experience in our lives. For our purposes here, it doesn’t matter what they are or what the boffins call them. Everything is made of combinations and groupings of these same energetic, jiggling things. What determines the difference between a table and a tree, or a human and a dog is the vibration of jiggle.

It is, however, not just things that are energy. Everything is energy. Every activity and every concept is also just another form of energy. Sex, conversations, relationships, exercise, politics, dining, travel, and yes indeed money, are simply energy in different forms.

The cool thing about energy is that it follows universal laws. One of them states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed only converted into different forms, ice to water, magnetism to electricity, labor into money, money into an investment etc.

I had always viewed the world as a complex assortment of things. Money was a thing to have and hold. If you had it you were wealthy, and if you did not you were poor. Thinking of it as energy released me from that limiting thought. I understood that energy flows like rivers and winds and I started to think about money in the same way. Through my work on the farm I got hold of a small amount of money. My relatives told me to start a savings account. That, however, contradicted the concept of money as energy. Locking it away would be akin to damming a river. I was highly criticized when I chose to spend it instead.

Money is simply one of many forms of flowing energy. Most people I meet today consider money as a ‘thing,’ and something to be attained, collected, saved, or held. To them financial independence is like a summit on a mountain, a place to be reached, or conquered.

Money isn’t something to get and hold. It is something to allow to flow in your life. Money flows in. You allow it to flow through and out. Then more flows in. You let it flow through and out and so on. The more you do this, the greater the flow. Then one day a great amount flows in and through and out. That is financial independence. You can’t own or hold financial independence, because the moment you do you stop its flow and it will stagnate just as would a river if you decided to dam it.

Learning this was a revelation to me and I had one of those lightbulb moments when I thought about my father’s failed startups. My dad didn’t think this way. He saw money as a thing and have or have not. His mind-set was about how much money he could make out of a transaction, not what difference he could make by using that money wisely… keeping it in flow. In his life, the experience of money was always one of stagnation.

Think of any successful person you come across in media, like a Warren Buffet, a Bill Gates, or a Richard Branson. They are all billionaires, but they are not Kings in castles sitting on a mountain of gold. Money flows through their lives. They create companies, many of them, they invest and create more flow, they are philanthropic converting money energy into another form of energy.

Despite how media, banks, and politicians might describe money, you cannot own money any more than you can own the air that you breathe. The universe is abundant and expanding. Yet some people still fear a lack. Of course, we always get what we attract. If we fear money or fear not having enough because we don’t realize it is simply flow, we end up experiencing lack. Yet, money can be attracted as easily as the air that you breathe.

You do not fear that you will not have enough air to breathe; you breathe in and out all day long knowing that your next breath will be there when you need it. You do not concern yourself with worrying about how your next breath will come; nor do you feel compelled to “stock pile” air so that you will have enough when you need it. You expect it to be there in abundance when you need it and so it is. You do not need to “save air, ” it will always be there when you need it, just as abundance can always be there when you need it if your mind set supports this.

An interesting thing happened when I started to think about money this way. Keep in mind I had no money at the time, not even an allowance, and what I had made working on farms did not go very far. I spent the money gained from working on the farm on spectacles. I had been short sighted for years, but could never afford to do anything about it. Money started to show up in my life, but in small amounts. I was left 800 pounds in a Will (a lot back then for a 16-year old). I got a summer job that was supposed to be for a grown man, but he didn’t show up and I happened to be in the right place at the right time. I earned a real wage for a few months, which I reformatted into a second-hand moped. That allowed me to travel farther so I could work at nights in a restaurant kitchen about 15 miles away. There were not many restaurants where I grew up so the only way to get work was to travel far and wide.

At seventeen, I was able to play for my local pub darts team. The legal age of drinking was eighteen, but no one cared or checked in such a rural place where everyone knew everyone else. I could not get into any trouble without someone watching out for me or reporting back to my parents so good behavior was a given. On my first night playing for the team, an away leg at a famous pub in a larger town, I won the fantasy raffle and was handed a plastic bag full of coins as a prize.

I spent most of it on my first vacation, a visit across country to a place I had never seen before. Travel was the thing I wanted most and the flow of money in my life made it happen. I have since visited more than 56 countries and before I changed my attention from travel to building businesses, $330,333 in annual salary was flowing through my life. That gets a lot of luxury travel experiences. It all started with the first realization that money flows like air. Breathe it in, breathe it out. Never try to cage it or hold it. Of course, for many of you this is completely contrary to everything you have ever been taught.

Note I am not talking about buying things like yet more pairs of shoes that sit in a closet unused for years. That is the same as holding money. It stagnates. I am talking about putting money to work. I reinvested my small amount in a mode of travel that got me access to better paid work. I converted some of that into travel which ignited my passion for travel and exploration. It was a deliberate choice.

In business, the same rules apply. We cannot bring in money and then lock it away in a bank account or buy more inventory than we need. We have to find ways for it to flow. We expand, we add product lines or services, we acquire other licenses or businesses. Money must flow.

When I sold my first company, I decided to share my sudden abundance with some family groups. I gave them each a lump sum. My intention was that they would let it flow, spend it on travel or a remodelled kitchen. Without exception, they deposited the sum in a low interest-bearing savings account where it all sits today. Its value in real terms has diminished as the interest rate never keeps up with inflation or the ever-increasing costs of goods.

The lump sums are stagnating in real terms. In other words, the energy is diminishing. A decade later not one of them has taken that money energy and converted it into another form of energy that could benefit them, and as a result not only has the net worth of each not changed, it has diminished.

Flowing into retirement (our lives flow too) they are cutting costs and downsizing, all fearing losing what little they have.

Fear of Losing

By far the hardest part of thinking about money this way is after a windfall. I felt this acutely after selling my first company. I could have called it a day and gone back to a life of travel and that was very tempting, but I felt compelled to build another company, one I knew no one else would dare try. It was not a new idea for me. I had the idea years before and everyone I respected in my industry told me it was a bad idea.

In the back of my mind, however, was the fear of losing all that I had just gained. Only one thing can happen with that mentality and sure enough I made one bad investment after another. I had to work very hard to turn my mind around, and it was at least 2 years before I got myself back into a way of flow both in business and life. I share that because I want you to know that I am no different to you or anyone else. I fear loss and success as much as the next person, and because of that I use all the tools and techniques taught in my books and course. They work. If they didn’t, I would not have written this.

Dr. Taryn Crimi, says it this way.

We would like to share with you our recommendation on how to welcome abundance in every aspect into your life if it is your wish to do so. Rather than determining exactly how abundance can flow into your life by focusing so intently on only your income, pay-checks, clients, and customers you block the infinite flow of abundance from coming to you any other way. The universe is infinitely abundant and it seeks to serve. Allow your heart to open to all possibilities that abundance can come to you. It may be a gift, it may be an idea, it may be a stranger, it may even come in the form of a trade. There are an infinite number of ways which all that you desire can manifest.

We realize that it is very hard for the human mind to simply shut off the need to plan, and know “how” something is going to happen. In the old energy nothing could get done if you did not have a step by step process of how it was going to come about. But that is no longer the energy. It doesn’t take so much work on your behalf. Now you must learn to allow. The problem lies with needing to know how and when rather than simply allowing it to come. Knowing without a doubt that it will manifest is what brings it into being. When you put restrictions and limitations on how and when this manifestation can come to you it only hinders the process. Decide what it is you want to manifest, allow and expect to receive it in the path of least resistance, and as each step is made known to you, take the action required to manifest your desires into physical reality.

Cellular biologist, Bruce Lipton explains in his book, Biology of Belief –
“The function of the mind is to create coherence between our beliefs and the reality that we experience. We generally perceive that we are running our lives with our wishes and our desires. But neuroscience reveals a startling fact. We only run our lives with our creative, conscious mind about 5 percent of the time. Ninety-five percent of the time, our life is controlled by the beliefs and habits that are programmed in the subconscious mind.”

So, my advice to you is to change your perspective of money. Let it flow. Let it blossom. Let it flow. You will be delighted by the results. Then you will also see that financial independence is not a terminus at the end of a journey but just a state of more powerful flow. Instead of hundreds coming in and going out, it is millions. Whereas you can dip into the hundreds and buy a nice dinner (just another conversion of energy from one format into another) with financial independence you can dip your hands into the millions and take a private jet trip to Necker Island. There, the money converts into salaries for the staff, supplies from the locals and profits for the owner (who of course is Branson and knows how to keep the flow going). Who knows what other magical things it will do on its journey of flowing.

Have you ever thought of money as energy that must flow?

It is a tricky concept to grasp.

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Resources:

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Although not strictly about money, this is a recording of a meeting with, Mike Tan.

Mike, is a serial entrepreneur who invests in impactful businesses in a way that creates digital opportunities to share the rewards. Note how easy it is for him to talk about money, investment, and impact all in the same breath.