You Are a Badass at Making Money

INCOMING THOUGHT
The Universe is constantly showing up, cup of coffee in hand, wanting to
discuss how to increase your finances and offer a helping hand. It connects
with you:
Via your intuition: I just know in my gut that I should buy this house even though it
costs way more than what I wanted to spend. It still feels right.

---

Via synchronicity: I wonder what ever happened to Janet from cooking class. Oh
look, there she is, calling me right now.
Via inspiration: Check out this awesome idea for a song that just popped into my
head out of nowhere!
Via desire: I just know I’m meant to be rich even though none of my screenplays
have sold yet.
Via coincidence: I just opened a book to the perfect page—it’s exactly what I
needed to read!
If you are truly committed to kicking ass, you’ll want to strengthen your
relationship with the Universe in the following ways:
Learn to quiet your mind and receive the information it’s trying to send you.
Trust that this information (aka your intuition) provides all the answers you’re
seeking no matter how terrifying/bananas/unacceptable they may seem.
Surrender and have faith that when you bravely head into the unknown, the
Universe has your back.
Accept that you don’t have to know how to do what you don’t know how to do
yet, and that the Universe will lead the way.
We all have the ability, through our thoughts, to harness the power of the
Universe.
If that doesn’t have you heading out to purchase a superhero cape and
tights, I don’t know what else I can say.

---

E
CHAPTER 3
SHOW ME THE MONEY
arly one morning while visiting my mother, I came downstairs to
find her standing in the kitchen in her bathrobe, empty coffee cup in
her hand, frown on her face.
“We’re out of milk for coffee,” she informed me flatly, clearly unamused
by the prospect of getting dressed and cleaned up for the brief walk down
the hill into town. She announced that she’d rather just head to the store
wearing her damn robe, sneakers, a baseball cap, and too much orange
lipstick, and finally commit to becoming, as she put it, an interesting town
character. “I’m in my seventies, I think it’s time.”
Mom has one of the most delightful senses of humor I’ve ever
experienced, and is hilarious in general, which is why I was so surprised
when she phoned one day to inform me, mortified, that she’d just learned
what the word “twat” meant. Really? I thought. Hadn’t she been calling my
brother one for years? But she was upset for real, utterly devastated, unable
to find one funny thing about a word that is—come on—funny.
This call came in during a time when my mother was an active member
on the board of trustees in her historic and charming suburban town. During
her tenure, she pleaded her case on issues that were near and dear to her
heart, such as protecting her favorite park from falling into the hands of
developers, planting daffodils in the median on Main Street, and keeping
the road signs along the scenic town reservoir to a minimum.
Apparently it was preserving the integrity of the reservoir that caused her
to place this particular call of distress to me, while facedown on her bed,
mumbling “Oh God” over and over through her pillow into the phone. From
what I could make out, earlier that day she’d posed an argument to a
roomful of upstanding and respectable fellow trustees that went something

---

along the lines of this: “It’s a slight bend in the road, why do we need five,
FIVE, signs with arrows on them before, during, and after the curve to alert
people to the fact that they need to turn slightly to the left? The signs are an
eyesore and a waste of taxpayer money and if you’re that much of a twat
that you can’t navigate the road without an arrow every two feet, you
shouldn’t be driving.” I was then to learn that this was not the first time
she’d paraded the word “twat” before the esteemed council—she had
apparently been flinging it around for years in response to the twats in the
mayor’s office responsible for passing her least favorite ordinances, the
high school twats who spray-painted Class of 2003 on the sidewalk in front
of the deli, and, most passionately, the stupid idiot twat of a drunk driver
who took out a phone pole on Elm Road last Halloween.
“I thought it meant ‘twit,’” came her muffled voice. “And Ginny Adams,
the head of the garden club and a full-fledged twat in the truest sense of the
word, thank you very much, is the one who pulled me aside and told me to
clean up my act. Oh God.” By taking a stand to end the twittery in her
community, my poor mother not only discovered the power of choosing her
words wisely, but she discovered that she’d unwittingly become an
interesting town character.
When you don’t investigate what’s going on with your words, thoughts,
and beliefs, you risk stumbling through life on autopilot. You may, for
example, automatically assume that your beliefs are founded in your own
truths rather than perhaps the truths of your parents and/or the people
around you. Or that your words accurately express your beliefs, instead of
being mindless regurgitations of stuff you’ve heard before or proof that you
have a lousy handle on vocabulary. And don’t even get me started on how
much time we waste spinning out on thoughts that are, shall we say, less
than productive. Once you wake up, become aware of your thoughts,
beliefs, and words, and start choosing them wisely, you can avoid staying
stuck in a life of excruciating ho-hummery (or worse), constantly being in
financial struggle or, as in Mom’s case, getting reprimanded for having a
potty mouth by someone who is a far inferior gardener than you are.
When we don’t master our minds, we risk building our lives on a
foundation of flimsiness.

---

Mastering your mindset is important in all areas of your life, and it’s
especially critical when it comes to money because money plays such a
massive role here on Earth. We literally can’t function without it. Realizing
you’ve left the house without your wallet is as alarming as realizing you’ve
left your journal on the subway or forgotten Grandma at the truck stop. Not
a day goes by where we don’t use money, or use something that was paid
for with money, or have an experience that is somehow connected to
money. Not. One. Single. Day. Money’s in the roads we drive on, the food
we eat, the music we listen to, the freedom we enjoy, the adventures we
have, the babies we birth, the showers we take, the poems we write, the
noses we blow—it’s everywhere, like dust or temptation or hormones in
high schoolers.
And yet we rarely, if ever, stop to investigate how we feel about money,
how we speak about it, or even what the hell money actually is.
So I’ma stop right now.