My family calls it “stupid money.” Stupid money means we have so much money we could just do stupid things. Buying planes, boats and major remodeling on the house tend to fall on this list. According to Joseph Murphy, author of The Power of Your Subconscious Mind you can use your subconscious mind to bring you riches. I’m not sure if this means you will soon be flying on your own private business jet, but I can tell you after years of just observing people there are those with a wealthy mindset and there are those with a poverty mindset.
Those who have a poverty mindset never believe that they will be wealthy and therefore never are. Even the lottery winners: the research backs this up, many are in the same financial condition within five years that they were before winning the lottery. Their challenge is that they never learned to manage small amounts of money so when they received large amounts of money they didn’t have the skill set to hold onto it.
But getting back to my point, while I have not yet been able to sleep and wake up the next morning with a million dollars in the bank, I think there is something to opening up your self to the possibility of wealth. Murphy talks about the people that we all know who work a few hours a week and make tons of money (Murphy 117). They do not not strive or work hard and do not believe the story that the only way you can become wealthy is by the sweat of your brow and hard labor; the effortless way of life is the best – do what you love and do it for the joy and thrill of it (Murphy 117). We’ve heard this before:
Do what you love and the money will come.
Keep in mind that this blog series is not about reviewing books, it is about learning things and part of learning thing is that I have to try it. (just wait until I get to the “How to write a novel in a month book”, but I digress). So I have begun to use some of these subconscious wealth-building strategies. Murphy notes that you will not become a millionaire by repeating to yourself over and over “I am a millionaire.” (Murphy 118). I know there are some goal setting schools of thought out there that tell you you should repeat to yourself over and over that you already are rich, in shape, good-looking or whatever. The problem is that if you start acting like you are already wealthy, you end up spending more money than you have and overcommitting yourself. Your wallet begins to start writing checks your butt and your bank account can’t cash.
I also don’t think Murphy means you can sit around and think yourself rich and do absolutely nothing, expecting someone to walk up to your doorstep and just leave you a bag of cash. If that worked I’d be sitting on my doorstep waiting for the dude right now (and he’s late by the way). Using your subconscious mind to become wealthy is more about changing your mindset. Recall earlier when I said that people in poverty mindset do not achieve wealth whereas people in a wealthy mindset not only achieve it but it seems to grow exponentially.
Many times people will say “I am wealthy, I am prosperous,” yet nothing happens. In fact, in some cases things are even worse. Part of this challenge is that your subconscious accepts what you really feel is true not just idle words or statements (Murphy 119). Murphy says instead say this: “By day and by night I am being prospered in all of my interests.” The affirmation does not raise arguments with your subconscious because it does not contradict your subconscious minds’ impression of financial lack. In other words, it accepts the reality of your existing situation but gets you moving in the right direction.
I recently started a variant, another one of Murphy’s suggestions – I calmly repeated the word Wealth a few times before I went to bed at night. My bank account did not change but all of a sudden I was flooded with other ideas about how I can create more wealth and eventually, do less work. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Another reason many people are not wealthy is they really believe that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” You need to qualify this. The love of money to the exclusion of everything else is what we’re really talking about here. No one on their deathbed wishes he or she had spent more time making money, but when used properly money can give you some peace of mind against the unplanned financial tragedies that challenge many of us, it can help give you better health by being able to afford workout programs, gym memberships and the ability to buy good food, not fast food and junk that resembles food; money also gives you the ability to give money to people who don’t have it possibly cannot earn it themselves, or to give it to charity.
If you think that everybody who has money is some sort of crook, you’ll probably never have money yourself. There are many people out there who have made a good living, in an honest way, and even provided people jobs while doing it. However, we usually just get to see the idiots on TV who got caught with their hand in the cookie jar. The nightly news rarely features a story about people who are honest and do good in the world (occasionally they do, but on balance, usually the news focusses on society’s problems, not our successes).
One of the most powerful methods to make money is to give to someone else. There truly is no such thing as a free lunch. If you want to receive you must first do something. You may have to give of your time, your talent or your treasure in order to receive. There is an interesting line in the third Karate Kid movie where the actor playing the “villain” Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith) says at the beginning of the final fight scene, that: “when you get, you give.” Great line – backwards thinking (but he’s the villain so it fits that he would be thinking backwards). The truth is:
When you give, you get.
I tell my students all the time that whatever you want most in life give it to someone else. If you want a job, help someone get a job. If you want to be rich help someone get rich. It is one of those amazing ironies of life that when you’re trying to help somebody else you are also rewarded. Maybe if you give away enough, you too will one day have stupid money.
Murphy, Joseph, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. New York: Prentice Hall, 2008. Print.
