Change your mindset to change your bank balance.
You are a badass at making money by Jen Sincero is a highly motivating book on personal finance that describes how to shift towards becoming wealthy. Sincero discusses how the combination of your thoughts, emotions, and language trickle down to influence our probability of becoming rich.
The key message is that you must focus your mind on specific, positive thoughts about being wealthy. E.g. How much you want to make, what you will do with it, how it will make you feel, and how this will be a great place to be. Sincero is not pretending that money will magically appear once you change your thought patterns. Rather, she suggests that these thoughts will translate into actions.
Some points :
- It is difficult to talk about money honestly and can feel tainted to want to be rich
- Think of it as being wealthy facilitates you doing your other stuff
- Though don’t be deluded into the power of wealth: you can be rich or poor whilst happy/sad or good/bad
- You need to love yourself as money allows you to be the most you you can be
- Subconscious thoughts and language are interrelated, they drive emotion, which generates action
- So if you think or speak negatively about wealth it will elude you
- Re: negative thoughts about yourself: How would you feel if someone else said that to you so why will you say it about yourself?
- Identify and challenge your limiting beliefs about money
- E.g. “I am not good at saving because…”
- Many of these beliefs stem from childhood
- Visualise and write down the specific detail of your life (or things) you will do when you are as rich as you want to be
- It needs to be tangible and emotional
- Calculate the amount you want and repeatedly visualise on it
- Change your focus to what you have and what you desire, instead of what you don’t have or other negatives
- Focus on getting rich, not avoiding being poor [same message as Rich Day, Poor Dad]
- Don’t allow the pursuit of perfection to prevent you from getting started
- Need for perfection can become procrastination
- Take the next action that feels right, even if you don’t have a plan
- Must be willing to put yourself out there if you want to get rich
- If you fully commit to a project then you should not have a plan B
- This also ensures you are not fragmenting your effort
- Good ideas will come to you but you must be receptive to them
- [See Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic]
- Be specific about the tasks to complete and divide big tasks in order to combat feeling overwhelmed
- Making a financial commitment (including taking on debt) may force you to make more money
- You will most likely be the average of the six people you spend the most time with, in terms of income as well as personality
- Options of things to do:
- Start a business: work on sales, leverage your time (i.e. outsource)
- Expand current business: get a coach or find passive income opportunities
- Quit the job you hate
- If you like a job that doesn’t make enough money, ask for a raise
This book doesn’t come with a 17-step guide to becoming wealthy, but then any book that does is probably just a scam. It is also more so focused on getting rich, rather than simply getting out of debt.
I think it’s also worth reflecting that this book promotes the “thought → action” mantra. There are many other psychology books that are more along the lines of “action → emotions/thoughts” i.e. fake it until you make it. I’m not sure which is more effective in personal finance but concrete actions are definitely needed. So you must be able to translate supratentorial processes into specific tasks if you are to attain your visualised state of wealth.
More books like this:
- The psychology of money by Morgan Housel
- Your money or your life by Vicki Robin
- Rich dad, poor dad by Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter
Here are one, two, and three other summaries/reflections on this book.
