You Are a Badass at Making Money

CHAPTER 10
AND NOW, A WORD FROM MY
ACCOUNTANT . . .
was very fortunate to grow up in a safe, suburban neighborhood with lots
of room to roam and a tribe of kids more or less my own age. We’d make
forts by the river, build nests in trees, sled down Mrs. Randall’s huge hill,
catch fireflies in jars, play kick the can, lock my little sister and her friends
in the closet and issue them their orders: 1) Bring us each two peanut butter
and jelly sandwiches, no crust, twice as much jelly as peanut butter. 2) Take
off your underpants, wear them on your head. 3) Make a phony phone call
to the pizza parlor and order Mrs. Malloch (the old lady across the street)
two sausage calzones. You have ten minutes. For each minute you go over
you will have to eat one dog biscuit. GO! THE TIMER IS TICKING!
Our house was often the center of action for a few reasons, the top three
being: We had a ping-pong table, my mom bought Twinkies, and the burn
book. The burn book was one of many in a stack of medical books my dad
kept in his den, and it contained the most gruesome pictures of human
bodily misfortune you could imagine. Big, glossy, well-lit shots of people in
the hospital with half their faces melted, giant oozy pustules on their arms, a
foot charred black as a burnt marshmallow. We’d huddle around, and
whoever won the coin toss would get to open it and either flip through the
pages or make everyone stare at one particularly grisly shot. We never made
it more than a minute or so before the book was slammed shut and we’d
tear through the house, screaming our heads off.
I was too proud to admit it, but I hated the burn book. I got scared
looking at those pictures, imagining how much pain those people were in.
More than once I had a nightmare where I looked in the mirror and saw my

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own face melted off. But it was mostly the pain that I couldn’t bear to
witness and, to this day, I still become paralyzed when faced with even the
wimpiest injury, mine or someone else’s. My most recent mishap, which
involved having the entire toenail on my big toe ripped off—the details of
which I’m not going into because it wasn’t pretty and was pretty bloody—
got blown totally out of proportion. The doctor cleaned the toe and wrapped
it in miles of gauze and tape and I walked around with what looked like a
gong mallet sticking off the front of my foot for weeks. If I were a rational
adult, I would have removed the gauze two or three days later and replaced
it with some ointment and a simple Band-Aid, but I chose to keep limping,
showering with a plastic baggie over my foot, and favoring open-toed
footwear for as long as I possibly could so I wouldn’t have to take off the
filthy gauze mound and face what was underneath.
This is how so many broke people act when it comes to money. We’d
rather limp around taped to our ratty, unhealthy relationships with money,
afraid that if we peel back the layers, we won’t be able to handle what we
see underneath. But by confronting whatever lies beneath—be it our guilt
for wanting more money or our mismanaged investments or our less-than-
impressive plans for getting rich—once we give it attention and untangle it,
we empower ourselves to end the torture. Our attempt to avoid pain
backfires on us all the time. We don’t want to feel the shame and weirdness
we have about getting rich, so we stay broke and constantly feel shame and
weirdness when it comes to our lack of money. We don’t want to feel the
stress involved with managing large amounts of money, so we remain broke
and are constantly stressed out about money. We don’t want to make money
a central focus of our lives because we feel other things are so much more
important, so we remain broke and out of touch with our finances and, as a
result, we are constantly worrying/thinking about money, almost more than
anything else.
The very unfunny cosmic joke: In an attempt to protect ourselves from
pain, we perpetuate behaviors that create the very pain we are trying to
avoid.

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Thanks to our love of avoidance, the average person spends more time
figuring out which is the perfect angle to take the hottest selfie from than
she does figuring out what she really wants out of life, how much that will
cost, and how to increase her income in order to make that happen. I
personally bitched and moaned for decades about how broke I was, how
frustrated I was, and how I couldn’t see a way out. But my attention span
when it came to actually getting specific about the money I required,
applying myself, committing to learning new skills, or taking big risks was
literally nonexistent. I was Her Royal Highness of Denial. I had no idea
what my monthly nut was or what I was bringing in every month; I just sort
of squeezed my eyes shut, held on tight, and hoped I’d wake up at the end
of the month with phone service. I, like many people, toiled away as a
freelance writer because “that’s what I did” and “that’s all I knew how to do
to make money.” Instead of scrambling to find more writing gigs, my time
would have been much better spent stepping back, doing the math, and
accepting that I was in a complete dead-end situation: Twenty-four hours in
a day + just me writing + charging forty dollars an hour = I’m tired,
grouchy, and a really bad tipper.
We’re taught that if we keep working harder, somehow the money will
come. If this was true, all rich people would be bloodshot and gasping for
air instead of sailing around on yachts. When we focus on the money
instead of working ourselves to death, and get mighty clear about how
much we desire to make and what we can do differently in order to make it
happen, we open the door to new freedoms.
The number one thing that holds people back is resisting change.
You have to be willing to change something if you want to change your
financial situation. It’s that simple. You may have to put your ego aside and
ask for help from a mentor or a coach, you may have to take a job that isn’t
your dream job as a stepping-stone to get you where you’re going, you may
have to triple your rates, make sales calls to people who’ve never heard of
you, spend money you’re scared to spend, take a job where you feel like
you have no idea what the hell you’re doing and figure it out as you go

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along. If you’re playing it safe and you want to be rich, you need to stop
playing it safe. You need to shift your focus from where you’re at and what
you stand to lose and become consumed by thoughts of where you desire to
be and all you have to gain. You need to play to win instead of play not to
lose.
For example, I know someone who’s got a steady, good-paying job that
is the most boring job on the planet (in his words). He does media training
on the side, which he loves, and the side business is booming with very
little effort on his part—he’s so good, word of mouth has gotten him more
work than he can handle. He actually has to turn people away because he
doesn’t have the time to take on new clients and keep his day job at the
same time.
He desperately wants to make more money and do what he loves but
feels stuck—he’ll never get more than a 3 percent raise a year at his day job
and only has so much time to work with media training clients on the side.
Of course, he could summon forth his mighty inner warrior, quit his day
job, leap bravely into building his own business, and make millions doing
media training. But he doesn’t even see this as a possibility because he’s
buying into the fears and beliefs that only an idiot would quit a steady job