You Are a Badass at Making Money

partied every day.
Because Spain is right around the corner from Italy, I decided one
weekend to take the train to Naples and visit my relatives on my dad’s side
of the family. I couldn’t wait to party in the old country with my cousin
Valentina, check out the local scene, get to know her better, and present her
with the giant chunk of hash I had hidden inside a box of tampons for her.
When I arrived, I discovered, much to my horror, that our big Saturday
night out involved gathering a bunch of her friends together and strolling
around the plaza, eating gelatos and people watching. If we were feeling
especially wild, we’d go back and get another gelato. It was like going into
rehab. As disappointed as I was, I couldn’t help feeling a pang of shame
every time we passed a bunch of staggering American twentysomethings,
drunkenly shouting “Oh solo mio!” in the streets.
Unlike American me, Valentina grew up with a bottle of wine on her
dinner table, and was not met with a raised parental eyebrow and a Just
what the hell do you think you’re doing? should her underaged hand reach
for it. This is partly why she was having wholesome, Annette Funicello
evenings out, and why I was on my way to waking up in the emergency
room with a stomach-pumping tube shoved down my throat. And returning
home with my hash untouched.
To her, booze was no big deal, it was part of everyday life. A bottle of
wine had the same excitement factor as the loaf of bread next to it on the

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table. To me, however, it was taboo, dangerous, as thrilling and irreverent as
smoking cigarettes or calling people’s parents by their first names. I was
over twenty-one, nobody was the boss of me anymore, I could do whatever
I wanted, and so I did, no matter how nauseated it made me.
Our environment shapes everything from our drinking habits to our
financial situations to our physical appearance, and the longer we immerse
ourselves in certain surroundings, the more they influence us. Ever notice
how people start to look like their dogs after a while? Or how you start to
say tomahto instead of tomato the longer you hang out in England? And I
don’t know about you, but I have a closetful of stuff I bought on vacation—
a twenty-five-pound knitted woolen sweater from Iceland, rings for all my
toes from India, a pointy straw hat that makes me look like a drink umbrella
from Vietnam, all of which I wore constantly while away, none of which
have yet to leave my closet now that I’m home.
When it comes to money, who and what you surround yourself with has
a huge effect on how you perceive it and feel about it. Your environment
helps define what you consider to be expensive or cheap, a wise or stupid
purchase, and how much you’ll allow yourself to make. In fact, here’s a
sobering exercise: Take the average income of the five people you hang
around with most, and you’ll most likely find yours.
Had I stayed in Italy and hung out with Valentina, I probably would have
avoided the bloated twenty pounds of alcohol weight I gained in Barcelona
and I’d still have the bracelet my grandmother gave me that I lost wagering
on a drunken game of darts one night (I suck at darts, what was I thinking?).
At that time in my life, however, I ran with a boozy tribe, I prided myself on
my unbroken record of downing a beer bong in under ten seconds, I wasn’t
interested in the finer things in life like good health and waking up in places
I remembered walking into.
Without giving it much thought, we accept our environment to be
“reality,” to represent what normal life looks like—doesn’t everyone know
how to do a keg stand? This is why, when you decide to upgrade your
income and standard of living, it’s important to put yourself in the new
environment you’re intent on creating for yourself as best you can: It not
only jars you out of your old way of thinking, believing, and being, but it
gives the new environment an opportunity to start having an effect on you
and to start becoming your new idea of normal instead of As if! Me?

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Go test-drive the car you’d love to buy, every week. Walk around in the
stores you can’t wait to shop in and try on clothes. Stroll through the
neighborhoods you’ll buy a house in one day and pick out the one you like
best. Hang out in the international terminal of the airport, go to the marina
and check out the boats, watch documentaries about people rafting down
the Grand Canyon, show up on the free days at the gym you’re going to join
—whatever it is that turns you on, go soak in it.
Back in my money-free days, I was living in Los Angeles way over on
the east side in a neighborhood I didn’t like but could afford. I braved
crosstown traffic several times a week to go hang out in a neighborhood all
the way on the west side, by the beach, that I really wanted to live in but felt
was too expensive. I loved the idea of living by the ocean, hearing the
waves crashing while I drifted off to sleep, taking long walks as the sun set
over the water, waiting in line at the bank alongside guys in wet suits
holding surfboards under their arms. That’s how I wanted to roll. Only
problem was, that’s the way a lot of people wanted to roll, and finding a
place to live at the beach cost basically twice what I was paying at the time
in the neighborhood I hated. Or at least that’s what everyone said, including
Craigslist.
I made the thirty-five-minute drive to the beach nearly every other day
anyway, set myself up at a coffee shop in the neighborhood I wanted to live
in, and pretended I’d just walked there from my place. I told everyone who
stood still long enough that I was looking for an apartment, hung up flyers,
read the obituaries, told all my friends and asked them to tell their friends—
I did everything but put on a sandwich board and hand out my phone
number to people on the sidewalk. For months, I couldn’t find anything
anywhere near my price range, and then one day something came up on
Craigslist that was three blocks from the beach and only a hundred bucks
more than what I was already paying. It sounded too good to be true, and
when I went to the open house, it was packed, because apparently everyone
else thought it was too good to be true too. But the ad didn’t lie: It was three
blocks from the beach, crazy cheap for that part of town, and it was “cozy.”
What the ad didn’t say is that its last tenant was a Toyota Corolla, because
the apartment used to be a garage. A one-car garage, let us be clear. But I
wanted to live by the beach and this place was my ticket in, so I wrote a
love note about the apartment on my application, called the landlord and
told him how serious and tidy I was, showed up the next day while he was

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painting the place and brought him a pastrami sandwich on rye, and finally,
probably just to get me to leave him alone, he rented it to me.
I realize that me moving into my dream one-car garage isn’t all that
compelling a financial success story, but the reason I’m sharing it is because
it was a stepping-stone. It put me in the environment that I dearly desired to
be in, and it was from that cheerful little crap heap that I took my first big
steps toward making real money, which resulted in me moving out of the
garage and into a real live house soon thereafter. But while I was garaging
it, I fancied the place up the best I could, painted the bars on the windows a
nice bright white, made mobiles out of shells and rocks and hung them from
the ventilation pipes on the ceiling, and covered the cracks in the warped
garage doors with frames purchased at the dollar store and filled them with
photos of my friends. The fact that I could smell and hear the ocean, that I
could ride my bike everywhere and swim whenever I felt like it made a
gigantic difference in my energy and my outlook on life. I felt inspired,
happy and in my element, and I had also proven to everyone, including
myself, that I could do the impossible—I found an apartment in Venice
Beach that was cheap.
We are energetic beings driven by emotion, so if your surroundings
depress you, it’s critical that you do whatever you can to brighten things up.
Slap on a fresh coat of paint, clean your windows, hang up pictures from
magazines of places you’d love to live in or visit and look at them all the
time, get some plants, tidy up your clutter, throw a nice bedspread over your
ratty couch, and if you’ve got sheets thumbtacked over the windows,
please, get some damn curtains. I have some friends who are getting ready
to sell their house so they cleaned the crap out of it, painted the rusty back
door, weeded the yard, patched all the holes in the walls, did all these things
to fancy it up to sell and were mortified that they didn’t bother to do it while
they lived there because it completely changed the feel of the place.
You don’t need to spend loads of money or time on this—little things
can make a huge difference—and this is much more than an adventure in
Martha Stewart Land. This is an investment in your potential. Beauty can
grow from the muck, but not without the proper nourishment and energy.
Shabby is as shabby does, so take one day, one little day, and spend it
tending to raising the frequency of your surroundings.
This goes for everything in your physical environment. The clothes you
wear, the food you eat, the music you listen to, the places you stroll—be

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very conscious of what brings you joy, purposefully participate in those
things as best you can, and ditch anything that brings you down or makes
you yawn.
My friend told me this hilarious story about having a French roommate
who was watching her get changed one day and said, in her thick Parisian
accent, “Your underwear makes me believe you are sad and hate your life.”
My friend looked down at her utilitarian cotton panties, an old pair from a
five-pack purchased at Target and thought, But they’re bikinis, at least