Money is a social construct.
Money is not important to dogs or farm animals, or bacteria.
Yet still, money is one of the leading factors that keep the world in order.
These are the 7 lessons on money that I’ve learned in the last year that have helped me the most.
If you want more money, you have to ask for it.
I’ve been working with one of my freelance clients for a little over a year, and a few weeks ago, I decided that I needed to raise my freelancing rates in order to better allocate my time.
I’d love to tell you that I just called the guy and told him I needed more money, but I didn’t. Instead, I freaked out about it in my head for around 3 weeks. I let myself get super worked up and anxious over a single question.
This is a bad habit I’m working on.
Eventually, I did work up the courage to ask the guy for an increase in pay, and the craziest thing happened:
He just said, “sure.”
Sometimes, you just have to ask and see what happens.
No one will tell you how much your time and skills are worth.
When I started teaching private lessons in Jiu-Jitsu, I had no idea how money worked.
The fact that people were paying me to do Jiu-Jitsu with them was mind-boggling to my 21-year-old brain. I charged $50 per lesson and gave away every 4th lesson for free.
I did this until I realized that I’d have to teach 20 personal lessons to make just $1000 per month. I realized that I had to change my price in order to live. No one told me that my price was cheap (at first); they just took advantage of me offering a decent quality product at an affordable price.
I accidentally turned myself into fast food.
To avoid doing this yourself, you have to build genuine self-esteem and self-awareness of your skills. You have to get good at what you do and then develop the confidence that you are good at doing it.
Usually, you have to start with a leap of faith.
Most people do not want to pay you for anything.
If you work for free, people will hire you.
If you write a free ebook, people will download it.
This is not a good or a bad thing; this is just a statement. People like free stuff. They don’t mind paying for stuff, but it’s harder to get people to buy things than it is to give things to them for free.
Most people will take the free sample, but only a few will stay and become your customers.
This is how business works. Get used to it.
It’s not what you do, it’s how well you can do it.
When I decided that I wanted to do Jiu-Jitsu professionally, most people told me that I was going to be broke.
Most people also told me that writers are broke.
Most people are pretty negative when it comes to achieving and living dreams. They’re also wrong.
Our culture is broken existentially, and while I think about that a lot, it’s a problem for another day. The point is, if you’re undeniably good at what you do and aren’t terrible at sales (you don’t have to be good at sales, necessarily), you will live.
The best writers don’t just “make a living”, they make a very good living. The same is true with the best martial artists. Focus on getting good and putting yourself out there. The rest will follow.
If someone else is paying you, it’s more difficult to create a lot of wealth.
There are exceptions to this — obviously, there are plenty of high-paying jobs that do not require one to be an entrepreneur.
However, “making money” isn’t really the entire point. If you have money but no peace of mind, no time, and poor health, your money is less valuable. Your money is probably going to be spent on your physical and mental health in a desperate effort to give yourself more time on this earth.
For some people, having a boss gives them peace of mind and security. For me, because I’ve got an attitude (thanks, Dad), having a boss makes me feel like I’m being suffocated slowly.
For me, having a boss makes me visibly angry.
For me, having a boss makes it more difficult to make money because having a boss makes it more difficult for me to do a job.
You need to know yourself.
Your financial success will make people uncomfortable (including yourself).
Lots of people have a strange fear of money.
I still feel this fear sometimes. I’ve come a long way in terms of getting over insecurities, but I’m still not perfect.
I also don’t mean fear in the traditional sense of the word when it comes to money. People aren’t scared of having money. They’re scared of other people close to them having more money than them. They’re scared of this because they think that money changes people.
Money doesn’t change you. It exposes poor character—more on that in a second.
Obviously, I’m not talking about everyone here, but when it comes to financial success, your personal life will change more the more you accrue.
Your friends who secretly wanted you to fail will leave. Your family will look at you differently. You will look at yourself differently.
At first, this is going to be quite uncomfortable.
A love of money is not the reason people are evil.
There’s a narrative that I heard about from a bible quote or whatever that a love of money is the root of all evil.
This is a convenient argument because it’s easy. It’s easy to say that money makes people evil.
The truth, however, is complicated. Sometimes, people are evil, and sometimes those people have money, but that does not mean that all people who have money are evil. It does not mean money causes evil.
I don’t know what causes evil, but the ethics of wealth are far too complicated to be summed up into one sentence. Money might be a catalyst for evil in some people, but for others, it can give them the resources to literally change the world.
Some people make money and try to make the world a better place. Others make money and then buy private jets. That says more about them than the money.
A little over a year ago, I was fresh out of college, unemployed, existentially lost, and I had literally no idea what money was beside the thing that I didn’t really have access to.
In the time since I began to learn about money and wealth, I’ve started my own business, created a blog, published countless different forms of writing, and I’ve gone from amateur to pro in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
The most surprising thing about all of these different things I’ve done is that most of them began with a mindset shift, followed by a little help from someone who knew more than me.
My dad taught me how to start a business. I read about blogging from other bloggers. My Jiu-Jitsu coach has taught me how to promote my Jiu-Jitsu teaching skills.
As someone who literally didn’t know jackshit about money a year ago, I had to learn from everyone I could, and because I surround myself with so many different people, I’ve learned a lot.
I just wish I’d learned all these money lessons sooner. It’d have saved me many headaches and thousands of dollars.
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