“How To Understand The Mysteries Of Money And Their Relationship To Mind”
In Step Four of The Ten Steps To Wealth, I encourage you to answer a very important question… “Did you learn to be poor?” I hope you find the time to seriously reflect on this question because as you’ll see below, it’s of critical importance.
For the past 5000 years, dating back to ancient Mesopotamia, desires around money have occupied and fascinated the minds and lives of countless generations. Today, little has changed.
Surplus money for the “good life” still occupies the minds of current generations.
Despite today’s embarrassing abundance of “increase your profitability”, “get rich quick” and “wealth for life” information… statistical and observable evidence demonstrates that the mysteries of money still remain an enigma for most people.
It seems that only a minority ever get to authentically enjoy the “good life” while the majority retain their positions on the “work/stress, not enough time, not enough money tread mill.”
My financial experience of growing up was similar to most people in that I couldn’t help but learn from my environment.
As you may know, both my parents were born Deaf mutes and of course they knew nothing about the ways of money other than earn and spend via the exchange of labour and time.
As a child growing up in the sixties, I vividly remember the American physicist and television personality Professor Julius Sumner Miller constantly asking the question ‘Why Is It So’? I remember it being such a fertile question and it stayed with me ever since.
With thousands of generations never coming within a bull’s roar of anything that resembles financial independence, have you ever wondered whether or not the generally assessable “how to” information is incomplete?
In the burgeoning knowledge economy, why there’s so much “how to” information around is not difficult to understand. What’s more difficult is why the positive effects of this “how to” information still seems to escape most people.
When it comes to decision making, it’s natural to think that you act through filters of purposeful, rational processes. But as economist Dan Ariely notes in Predictably Irrational, being rational is far from observed truth. “Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same types of mistakes.”
In The Buying Brain, Dr A.K. Pradeep, CEO and founder of NeuroFocus, makes a compelling case for 95% of an individual’s buying decisions being made beyond their level of conscious awareness. Others observe that it’s 95% of all decisions.
In his recent book Subliminal, theoretical physicist Leonard Mlodinow observes that the unconscious mind shapes your experiences of money and the world around you far more than you might realise.
It’s something Napoleon Hill observed. In Think And Grow Rich, first published in 1937 and inspired by the richest person in the world at the time, Scottish-American businessman Andrew Carnegie, Hill clearly directs his references to “mind” rather than “how to” strategies.
He didn’t write ‘shares and grow rich’, ‘trade currencies and grow rich’, ‘buy real estate and grow rich’, ‘get into business and grow rich’ or ‘market yourself and grow rich’. It was all about thinking and using ‘mind’ to change the structure of ‘brain’ so that mind could accommodate riches.
What Hill learned from 20 years of research and over 600 interviews with many of the world’s most successful people, was that when, and not until, you get the mind operating in a specific way, riches, in any number of different contexts, stand a better than even chance of materialising for you.
As much as 99% of your potential to succeed in experiencing the “good life” depends on whether or not you change the programming of your subconscious mind. But most people opt for “how to” strategies because they think that’s where their answers lie. And even though they try to skill themselves to the best of their abilities… they rarely if ever succeed.
Think and Grow Rich is founded on Hill’s earlier work The Law of Success, in which he developed 16 “laws” of success. Hill said that when applied, anybody could achieve success. He later condensed these laws into 13 principles that formed his philosophy of personal achievement.
Recently, Mark Victor Hansen noted that the years since have proven 2 of the laws/principles to be most important: 1) The MasterMind principle/process and 2) Know very clearly where you want to go… Both critical aspects of mind.
When you put “how to” strategies into minds that have been conditioned for the “work/stress, not enough time, not enough money treadmill”, the foundations, ie., the conditioning of those minds, do not have the necessary references or perceptions to successfully navigate the “how to” strategy through to success.
It’s the central reason why surplus money for the “good life” still escapes the minds of current generations. The Ten Steps To Wealth is an online eCourse designed to help you change such programming.
Because anything to do with thoughts, behaviour and emotions around money must first well from within mind, in future issues of Ten Steps To Wealth, I’ll be exploring different facets of mind and its relationship to money.
So stay tuned because over the coming weeks I’ll be opening up a rich tapestry of ideas that in some way, shape or form, will benefit you on your journey.
Warmest of regards
Paul