You Are a Badass at Making Money

PUSH IT REAL GOOD
I went on a rafting trip down the Colorado River, and a friend of mine and I
had to hike up from the very bottom of the Grand Canyon afterward to get
back to my car. We ended up getting off the river a bit later than expected,
which meant we had to haul ass the entire eight-hour hike up the side of the
canyon if we were going to make it before the sun went down. While still
on the raft, I had visions of a leisurely hike up, stopping every so often to
take a dip in the stream that ran beside us for the first few hours of the
climb, taking selfies to impress everyone far and wide that I’d hiked the
mother of all canyons, and, most important, resting. A lot. I was a far cry
from what one would call in shape, which is why, when we finally neared
the top of the Grand Canyon as the sun was setting, I was wobbly kneed,
exhausted, and not altogether sure I was going to make it the final quarter
mile without soiling myself. I remember, as I was begging my body to keep
it together while chanting my mantra, Almost there, almost there, I heard
my friend yelling a word that I knew I understood but that did not register
right away. I turned around to look at her and saw that she was pointing up
the hill to the bus that had just pulled up. The bus that would take us back to
our car, parked several miles away. The bus that only came every forty-five
minutes. It was then that I realized the word she was screaming was Run!
If, moments before all this, someone suddenly appeared on the trail with
a clipboard and a survey and asked me if it was possible for me to run at
that very moment, my answer would have been absolutely not, and not just
because I don’t think I can, but because it’s physically impossible.
However, if the clipboard person had promised that, if by some miracle I
could muster up a run, I’d be rewarded with a place to sit down, a
cheeseburger, a beer, and the first shower I’d had in over a week, my
answer would have been different. So, with my sights set on not sitting on a
bench in the dark for forty-five minutes, sweaty, filthy, starving, dying for a

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tub of moisturizer, I did the impossible and ran the rest of the way up the
hill and made the bus.
We all have habitual places where we stop—a certain threshold where
something gets too intimate or too expensive or too close to success for our
comfort. Crossing this threshold is exactly what we need to do to exit our
comfort zones and transform our lives, which is why it’s so terrifying to us
and why our subconscious minds gather all the king’s horses and all the
king’s men to make sure we run away, run away! We’re usually totally
oblivious to this stopping point, and have a lifetime’s worth of excellent
excuses we use to back our way out of greatness, i.e., I’m not scared of
investing in myself, but that class is way out of my price range or I just
realized I don’t want to write this book that I’ve been working on for years
and am almost done with, I want to write a different one. If you’ve made
the decision to make the kind of money you’ve never made before, blasting
through this terror threshold is critical. So keep an eye out for the rallying
cry to retreat, understand that you have arrived at the magical door to the
other side, focus on this truth instead of the desire to get into bed and read
magazines, and break on through to the other side.