I’m obsessed with this movie called Touching the Void about these two guys who climb some gigantic mountain that’s never been summited by humans before because it’s like the death star of snow and wind and icy forlornness. But they’re into it, and they go and they summit and it’s all high fives and Woo-hoo we did it and I think I can see my house from here and then, on the way down, of course . . . blizzard.
I watch a lot of these types of extreme survival movies where people have to eat each other’s frozen bodies after a plane crash or cut their own arm off when a boulder lands on it and traps them in a canyon, but Touching the Void is high atop my list because, holy crap, what happens to one of the guys . . . I mean, just when you think things can’t get worse they get so much worse you find yourself screaming “Oh my God!” out loud even if you’re watching by yourself.
I’m not going to give away all the details because I really want you to see it, but I am going to talk about the ending, because this guy is served one colossal shit biscuit after another after another after another, and his mindset is the only reason he gets out of there alive (you know at the beginning of the movie that he survives, btw, so no need to thank me). He has to traverse an endless expanse of frozen glacier that could, at any moment, crack open beneath him and send him spiraling down into a giant, bottomless crevasse. Then, once he’s off the glacier, he has to stumble through an impossibly jagged terrain of boulders, all of which he does with a broken leg, a face that looks like a pepperoni pizza from frostbite and sunburn, frostbitten fingers, frostbitten toes, no food, no water, no sunglasses (so snow blind), covered in his own excrement, AND he has a really bad song stuck in his head.
He’s trying to use his ice ax as a crutch, which doesn’t really work, so he winds up slipping and falling and banging his mangled leg on rocks nearly every single step he takes, weeping and hollering in pain each time. But he never gives up, he just hops and falls and screams his way back to base camp, which, by the way, may or may not be deserted by the time he finally gets there. His team may have packed up and left him for dead. This agonizing journey seems to go on for nine hundred years, and if you’re like, Wait, is she describing my journey with trying to make money? listen up because there’s a lot of good stuff here that will help you escape the icy forlornness of your empty bank account.
The first and most important thing this climber did was to decide that he was going to live. This might seem like a no-brainer, the instinctual will to live and all, but . . . have you decided to live? I mean really live the way that you know you’d love to? If you’re serious about getting rich enough to live your life to the fullest, you have to decide to do it with the tenacity of a man facing life-threatening and unbeatable odds with a really bad song stuck in his head. Because the second something goes wrong or gets hard or costs a lot of money or time, if you have decided lite instead of decided for reals, the second the going gets tough you’ll be pulling out your favorite excuses, scripting convincing soliloquies on why quitting makes excellent sense, and weighing your options: Well, if I just give up and lie here, I reckon I’ll be frozen solid in a couple hours, won’t feel a damn thing after that, and then I can gaze up at the stars until I slowly slip away and the birds start picking at my tore-up leg.
You have to have a 10-ton gorilla of no-nonsense decidedness breathing down your neck to do what it takes, plow past your fears and subconscious hell nos, and leap into the unknown. Deciding means there is no plan B, you’ve yanked in your one foot out the door and now both feet are inside, fully on board, ready to kick some ass.
If you’ve made a backup plan, you haven’t made a decision.
The Latin roots of the word “decide” literally mean “to cut off,” meaning all other options fall away and you are committed to the decision alone. People have such meltdowns and resistance around making decisions, because they panic and fear that by deciding on one thing, they will miss out on all the other cool things they want to do. Meanwhile:
You can’t do anything if you try to do everything.
One of the biggest banana peels on the road to success is fragmenting your time and focus. If you’re all over the place, you’re half-assing a bunch of different things instead of kicking ass at one thing. Figure out how you’re going to get rich, make the no-nonsense decision to keep going until you reach your goal, and, as part of your reward, you’ll get to do all the other things you couldn’t do while you were busy sticking by your decision to get rich.
If you ripped this page out of this book and did just this one thing—decided with 100 percent commitment that you will get rich and stick to your resolve to do so until you’re rollin’ in it—you would be victorious. Because when you decide, you automatically become obsessed with thoughts of making it happen, you’re looking everywhere for opportunities, scary ones, your faith is strong like bull because if you didn’t believe getting rich was possible you wouldn’t have decided to do it in the first place, you’re grateful that what you desire already exists, it’s all you think about and has become real in your mind, you take huge risks, and you have zero patience for anyone who tells you it’s not going to work. Think about it—you can make a decision as menial as changing the color of your bathroom and you’re suddenly a force of nature, looking at the paint on walls you’ve seen a million times a whole new way, talking excitedly about nothing else, inspiring friends to leap behind plants when they see you approaching with yet more paint samples in your hands. A firm decision sets everything in motion—your mindset and your actions—and also alerts Universal Intelligence that this is how it’s going to be, and it starts moving everything you need in your direction.
Your desires are brought to you via thought, and you receive them by deciding to take action.
I want to point out here that when I say that the Universe starts moving everything you need in your direction, this goes for ideas as well as opportunities, people, and things. When you make a decision and alert Universal Intelligence to bring it on, you have to pay close attention to any thoughts and big new ideas that come into your head. You must catch yourself before your old conditioning can fling itself in your path and try to block the new you. What, just jump on a plane and show up on Uncle Steve’s doorstep to ask him for a job? No way! That’s insane! One good idea that comes in out of nowhere can change your entire life, but it ain’t gonna do nothing if you don’t act on it, and your subconscious is so ninja it can stop you without you even realizing what’s happening.
Brilliant ideas are love notes from the Universe that say: This is for you. I think you’re hot. And capable. Go share your stunning youness with the world.
I can’t tell you how much time I wasted (okay, forty years) pretending I could do things differently, instead of acting on ideas that seemed out of my reach or would have cost me money I didn’t want to spend. In other words, ideas that would have forced me to grow. I blazed by countless strokes of genius without even giving these ideas the time of day, just instantly tossed them aside as impossible. Next! Then back to complaining, spinning out, wondering why oh why can’t I get out of my suckhole? The Universe must have been like, I just gave you exactly what you asked for! Are you freaking kidding me?
A great example of a life-changing idea is one that came to our poor climber stranded on the mountain. One of the few possessions that somehow made it through his ordeal was his wristwatch. As he’s lying in the blinding snow gazing across the insane amount of ground he has to cover with his janky leg and empty water bottle, he picks a spot off in the distance where there’s a bit of an incline or a drop off or something noticeable that marks it, and decides he has to get there in twenty minutes. He sets the timer on his watch and no matter how much pain he’s in or what obstacles he happens upon along the way, all his thoughts, energy, and determination are focused on getting to that spot before the timer goes off. He said it was the only way he could handle crossing the devastating expanse before him without completely flipping out about how impossible it seemed. He took each twenty-minute challenge extremely seriously. He made reaching his goal before the timer went off nonnegotiable and urgent, and understood that if he blew it, a whole lot more was at stake than just losing against a wristwatch.
When we set out to make big changes in our lives, it’s very common for the beast of overwhelm to lunge. We still have everything going on in our present lives, and now we’re adding more stuff to our to-do list in order to achieve new goals? Are you kidding me? And it’s not just more stuff, it’s all the big scary stuff that we’ve been too wimpy to do up until now and it’s all so big and crazy and suddenly you feel like, Holy crap, I can’t move. Seriously, I think something happened to my arms, I can’t lift them. . . . And then, once again, mastering your mindset comes to the rescue. Overwhelm, just like calm, is a state of mind, and all you have to do is choose which party you’re going to attend.
Overwhelm: When you make the unhelpful decision to stop breathing, lose perspective, and forget you’re in control of your life.
Here are a couple of ways to beat the beast of overwhelm back into its cage:
The other critical thing chunking your time does is provide focus. Using the example of the dude stuck on the mountain again, during his twenty-minute spurts he was focused on nothing but the task at hand. This focus did two things: One, it strengthened his faith. What you focus on you create more of, and all he focused on was hauling his ass to the desired endpoint. End of story. No thoughts of stopping or failing or boohooing. He focused solely on the possibility of success and that’s what he achieved over and over, and each time he did, his faith got stronger. Second, this steadfast focus helped him maximize his time. The dude did not have the luxury of screwing around, writing his name with his pee in a snowbank, or making snow angels, he was in serious need of a glass of water pronto, so every second counted.
We too are going to die, and every second counts in our lives, but we tend to forget about this urgency and spend our precious time on Earth procrastinating, whining, focusing on and believing in thoughts that hold us back instead of getting the job done. People who spend eight hours a day at a job spend about three collective hours being productive and the rest of the time hanging out at the water cooler, staring blankly into the fridge in the break room, thinking about sex, watching ducks chase a dog around a bush on Facebook, etc. If you feel like you have all the time in the world to do something, you will take all the time in the world. If you have twenty minutes, the task will take you twenty minutes. Chunking down your time and demanding that you focus on one thing and one thing only creates urgency, maximizes your productivity, and frees up more time for you to do other things.
Time comes to those who make it, not those who try to find it.
Here’s a breakdown of the action steps we’ve gone over so far that will help you put a new bulge in your wallet:
A desire to grow is not the same as being negative about where you’re at.
Let your fear be your compass.
Remember that $85,000 I told you I manifested to pay for my big fat coaching package? Well I’ma tell you how I did it because it was right up there with one of the scariest, most uncomfortable things I’ve ever done. Once I decided to get coached at that level for reals, instead of running and hiding like I did the first time around, I acted on an idea that came into my mind the moment it arrived. This idea was not something that was fun or comfortable or anything I’d pass up having a full-body waxing session to go do, but I did it because my desire to kick ass was stronger than my desire to waste more time living the life I was living. I got the idea of someone I could maybe borrow that money from, someone who a) knew very little about coaching, and what she did know probably brought to mind words like “snake oil” and “manipulative garbage” and “bunch of weirdos”; b) is the most Frugal McDugal person I’d ever met, the kind who has money but never, ever spends it except to stockpile toilet paper when it goes on sale; c) believed in me.
I bought a plane ticket to fly to her house the moment the terrifying thought took over my brain (which cost about a thousand dollars more than usual thanks to the last minuteness of it all) and arrived on her doorstep, surprising the hell out of her. I risked being vulnerable to this person, I risked her thinking I was out of my mind, irresponsible, very possibly in a cult. And I will never forget the pained face she made when I told her how much I needed. But after much uncomfortable discussion, she forked it over. And I proceeded not only to make the money to pay her back in less than a year, but thanks to the fact that I’d faced my terror and asked, along with getting a year of some of the best coaching I ever got, I went where no Jen Sincero had ever gone before. I took huge, terrifying risks on a consistent basis, hired a team to create videos and improve my online structures unlike the old days of doing it all myself, created new products and services, upped my rates and reached out to clients who were “out of my league,” sat my ass down and wrote a book that became a New York Times bestseller—basically I did all the things I was too scared/cheap/lazy to do before, and all of which led to the seven-figure business and brand I have today. And it never would have happened if I hadn’t started by doing something I soooooooooooooo did not want to do.
IMPORTANT $85,000 NOTE: If you’re reading this and thinking, Oh yeah, I’ll just scoot on out and ask all the many people I know with $85,000 lying around for a loaner, I want to be clear. The price tag is irrelevant; transforming your life is about your desire and your decision, it’s not about what solutions may or may not be right in front of you. If you decide you absolutely must manifest a certain amount of money to provide yourself with the resources to get rich, be it $80 or $80,000, the money exists, it’s just a matter of how serious you are about getting it for yourself. One of the fastest ways of talking yourself out of doing what you need to do to succeed is collapsing into victimhood, deciding that other people have more available to them, and that you have it harder, so why bother. You very well may have it harder than most people, but people who’ve had it even harder than you have done miraculous things with their lives. Success is not about where you’re at, it’s about where, and who, you decide you’re going to be.
When you decide to get rich, the options are out there, and while they might take awhile for you to wake up to, when you do, it will all come down to how badly you want change.
Human beings have unlimited potential and most of us are just scraping the surface of our powers. If you’re not where you want to be financially, think about where you’re holding back. We pretend we’ve done everything we can and we work harder and harder doing the same things we’ve always done, hoping for different results. Meanwhile, there is almost always a solution right in front of our faces that we’re ignoring because we’ve decided it’s out of the question.
Getting rich is not necessarily about working harder. In fact, it is usually about working less, because you’re making smarter choices. When Kelly hired her first employee, she no longer had to work as hard as she was working AND she massively increased her income. So much so that she purchased two, count ’em, two new printing machines, hired a second employee, and started looking for a bigger space for her business. All within a few months. And it all started because she made the decision to grow and did the one thing that scared the living crap out of her that she knew would get her to her goal.
Sometimes the scary risk we need to take to get to the next level is spending money we don’t yet have. It’s the money version of leap and the net will appear, and it’s a very controversial topic, because basically what I’m saying is go into debt, and debt is the big bad wolf in our society. But debt, like everything else, is all about your mindset. Spending money you don’t have recklessly, living beyond your means, digging a deep old hole for yourself with a mindset of fear and denial and no real drive or plan to pay it off is one mindset. I am not recommending you do this. I am also not recommending you go into debt if you feel there are other options—this is a last resort option but a viable one only if you’ve got the right mindset in place. Going out on a limb and demanding of yourself that you rise to the occasion and do not stop until you make the money back is the mindset I’m talking about. It’s like when you want to go on a trip but you can never find the right time. Buy the damn ticket, book the hotels, get everything in place, and then work your schedule to fit around it. If you wait for time to open up, it will never happen.
Same with this—if you wait to have the money first, it may never happen. I did this over and over when I was stretching myself to get out of my rickety-ass lifestyle and become rich. I got new credit cards to pay for my coaching, and then did everything my coaches told me to do, no matter how terrifying, to make the money back, and each time I paid my debts off within months. If I had waited until I made the money I needed at my then income of thirty grand a year, I never would have been able to hire a coach and feed myself at the same time. I had to take the terrifying leap of going deeper into debt, but I did it with total faith in myself, because I was ready to turn my life around. Taking these types of risks is about being in charge of your life rather than a victim. It’s about having faith in the Universe, and yourself, that you can and will manifest anything you desire. It’s about who you become in this process.
If you need to take out a loan to rent a space to put your new store in or borrow money to pay your new assistant, put a plan in place to pay off your debts and demand of yourself that you make the money back. You don’t get anywhere sitting around inside your comfort zone. Receive and spend the money with faith and gratitude that it’s coming back to you, keep your frequency high and your focus strong, demand of yourself that you do everything, especially taking many more scary leaps to new heights, to make the money back, and do not stop until you do.
Suggested Money Mantra (say it, write it, feel it, own it):
I love money because I am a fearless, badass, moneymaking machine.
Please fill in the blank:
I’m grateful to money because ____________________.