Author: Brand Smit

THURSDAY, 8 NOVEMBER 2018

Not making enough money, or struggling financially, is like being stuck in a small town your whole life because you don’t think you’ll be able to make it anywhere else. You were born in this town. You know everyone and everyone knows you. You know all the streets, all the restaurants, the best places to get fresh fruit and vegetables, the best swimming spots, the best place to look at the stars. Still, you’ve always longed to do more with your life. You’ve always wanted to experience more than just this small town, and to meet other people – different people, maybe even more interesting people; people with different points of view and different opinions. You’ve even thought about learning other languages. You’re often frustrated, sometimes lonely, often unhappy, but everyone is convinced you won’t make it anywhere else. (Look at so-and-so who tried, and look at where they ended up, people would always say.) So, you keep your dreams to yourself and slug it out to the end.

Meantime, the world is full of people who come from small towns, who had dreams, who pursued their dreams, and who believed that they, too, can make it in places bigger than the small towns where they were born and raised. They believed that not only would they be okay, but that they would be able to thrive in a bigger world with fewer limitations and more options – where they could experience more, learn more, and grow into the fullest version of themselves.

* * *

I smoked cigarettes for fourteen years. I thought of myself as a smoker. At social events, I knew who the other smokers were, and enjoyed puffing tobacco with them outside on the balcony or on the veranda. Then came the point when I got serious about quitting (or more serious than previous times). Within a matter of months I started thinking of myself as a healthy guy – a non-smoker. After a few years, I didn’t even smoke one or two cigarettes on occasion outside a restaurant. I had completely outgrown the smoker identity. Smoking was something I did years earlier, but from which I had moved on.

The same with views about money and struggling to make money. For a long time this was part of my identity. I saw myself as someone struggling to make money. I saw myself as someone who would have done better in a world where money wasn’t such a big factor. Other people also knew me as someone who never had much money – if they couldn’t guess, I probably said something that drove the point home.

Now I know that this identity of struggler-with-money was not the truth either. I was never by nature a smoker; it was just a bad habit I had for a few years. Similarly, it is not my truth that I have to struggle to make money. That I struggled with it for years had simply been the result of unintended bad conditioning, lack of proper education about money (for which I myself take responsibility because I have been an adult for almost thirty years), and – like cigarettes – a few bad habits.

* * *

When you are young, ideas about money and about making money sometimes come across as universal; that is, you assume that you share the same ideas and beliefs with your schoolmates and cousins and other people of the same age in your neighbourhood.

What you only realise years later is that beliefs about money, your relationship with money, how it works to earn and accumulate and invest or play with money, even how you spend it, were specific to you, and maybe your siblings. There is a good chance that your schoolmates and friends and cousins of about the same age, and other children in the neighbourhood, had a totally different education about money and related matters.

Of course, you get extended families, or neighbourhoods or communities where there is a degree of consistency regarding what adults teach their children about personal finance. Nonetheless, your relationship with money, and what you teach your children, or what you learned from your parents, cannot as easily be defined as religion or politics or culture, and in many cases the lessons are much more subtle. It is therefore easy to be totally unaware as a child of the effect it has on your development, or as a parent to be aware of what you teach your children.

* * *

A child grows up in a house where he is taught to dance and sing for his bread and butter. In fact, he is somewhat of bashful fellow, and he doesn’t enjoy it at all. It’s not who he is. The stage is not his natural domain. After many years he discovers that he would rather design houses. One can almost say that he is a designer by nature.

For me, the condition of worrying about money is like the guy who is seriously uncomfortable on stage. Being worried about money is not my truth. It doesn’t come naturally to me. It pushes up from inside and gets stuck in my throat. One can almost say that I am by nature a wealthy man who never has to be concerned about whether he has enough money.

What I do now is to confront these negative views and replace them with positive views. The end of the process is that I will be who I have always been deep inside but could not express. So, I am not becoming a new person. I’m just becoming who I’ve always been.

SUNDAY, 18 NOVEMBER 2018

It is said that you have to go out of your comfort zone if you want to succeed. For me, with making money, it was the opposite. I believed money was only to be found outside my comfort zone – if something was easy, or pleasant, it could as a matter of course not work. Something had to be difficult, unpleasant, and boring. Then, and only then, did I stand a chance.

______________________

MONDAY, 29 OCTOBER 2018

10:23

A system rather than a one-off goal. The question is, what are the components of a good system?

1. Regular exercise, enough sleep, and a healthy diet.

2. Meditation: At least 5-10 minutes every morning and every evening (clears the obstacles so the subconscious can present ideas and solutions).

3. Regular expressions of gratitude for what you have and for what you’re in the process of creating and receiving.

4. Read, learn and listen: There’s always more to learn, and better ways to do things.

12:43

If it’s not natural for you to get on a stage and address people, you will experience the event as stressful. If it is natural to you, you’ll enjoy it and you will be more relaxed about it.

I find it extremely stressful to worry about money. This is clearly not my natural condition. It can thus be said that it seems to be my natural condition to have money in abundance, and to never worry about it.

It only makes sense to then also conclude that this process of getting an abundance of money is indeed a process in which I will become what I’ve always been but could not be due to misunderstandings about how the world works, and how I was supposed to go about doing things.

16:19

On 12/10/18 I wrote: “I thought I had rebelled against the ideas I grew up with, but I only rebelled against certain aspects. The expectation of failure had been fully internalised.”

One could say I thought I was addressing the problem, but in reality I had missed the elephant in the room.

“What elephant?” I would have asked, pressed against the wall.

“Don’t you smell it?” a smart person would have inquired.

“No,” I would have answered.

“Then why are you pressed against the wall so tightly if there’s no elephant pushing you against the wall?”

“Because I like walls?”

______________________

FRIDAY, 26 OCTOBER 2018

13:18

I’m reading another wealth mindset book (You Are a Badass at Making Money: Master the Mindset of Wealth, by Jen Sincero). I wonder, for the record, why I reckon I, too, can join the “lucky” few who make enough money to become financially independent.

Here are the reasons:

1. There’s a massive amount of money in the world (according to one source, 80 trillion dollars), with a massive amount of money (about 5 trillion dollars) ready for people to channel towards them. (Remember: money doesn’t know you; it doesn’t care where it ends up.)

2. I’m smart enough to learn what I need to learn.

3. I own and have access to incredibly powerful tools and resources – a computer, a smartphone, stable high speed internet access, and bank accounts.

4. I’ve developed various skills over the years that increase the likelihood of financial independence – the production, publication and distribution of text and other material; self-confidence to engage in conversations with strangers; basic knowledge and understanding of financial markets, including how to open accounts, trade, and manage capital; how to sell, market, and advertise products or services on the internet.

5. I know I’ll be able to do even more good things with more money than I do now. I know I’ll be more of the good I already am.

6. I have already confronted many obstacles in my subconscious that have prevented me over the years from taking the right steps to make more money, and I have started deactivated them. I have a strong suspicion more obstacles lie in wait. I know that I will also identify these obstacles, deactivate them, and replace them with beliefs that will strengthen my efforts to be more successful. I know that because I find it interesting to discover and confront these obstacles, although it is emotionally uncomfortable, because I know I end up with interesting notes about it.

7. I understand that you don’t have to think about making money because all the money you can ever dream of already exists. I also understand that you need to make yourself receptive to it, view yourself as worthy of it, and take action to receive it.

21:15

Again important to mention when talking about money:

1. You are a programmable, and already programmed, organic robot. This programming includes the language you speak, the cultural practices with which you fill your life, how you dress, the type of jokes you make, the sport you play, the religion you adhere to, and your preferences in food and drink.

2. Your view of adult life, your expectations of how your life will be as an adult, your view of how one makes a living, the income class you expect to find yourself in as an adult, your relationship with money – are you a spender or a saver? are you smart with money or are you wasteful? is it a struggle for you to make money or is there no limit to the amount of money you can make? – are all also part of the programming you received as a child.

3. If you want to improve your life and possibly also the lives of other people, money is an invaluable resource.

4. Words are important. How you speak and the words you use affect what you believe and how you feel and ultimately what you do.

* * *

Jen Sincero, the author of You Are a Badass at Making Money, mentions in her book that every person has a relationship with money and that it is a useful exercise to write a letter to money as if it were a person. I think this can also work as a dialogue:

[…]

MONEY: If I can do so much for you, why don’t you have more of me?

ME: I’ve put in a lot of effort to have more of you in my life, but few of my efforts have paid off.

MONEY: Other people don’t try so hard and they have more of me in their lives than they can spend in a lifetime. Why do you think I spend so much time with them, and so little time with you?

ME: I’ve always thought people who have so much of you in their lives are either lucky, or they do things that impress you. I’ve been very lucky about some things in my life, but not with you. And I have clearly never done anything that impresses you.

MONEY: Am I currently in your life? How much do you see of me now?

ME: I see enough of you to stay alive and live fairly well, but not enough to do other things I’d like to do. You’re not enough in my life to sustain me if I were to be in an accident, or to last me to old age. I would definitely want much, much more of you in my life.

MONEY: You wanted to become a hermit at one stage. What was that about?

ME: I think I didn’t want a relationship with the world. Or maybe I resented the fact that I needed you so much in my life, but had so little of you. I might have not wanted a relationship with you at all.

MONEY: Do you want to be a hermit now?

ME: No. I know it would be a very limited life. I would mean very little to other people.

MONEY: What would it mean for you to have a good relationship with me, to have as much of me in your life as you need – to even have me in abundance in your life?

ME: I’ll be more relaxed. I will experience things and see places that I now just know about. I will be able to better assist my parents. I will have a better relationship with both my sisters, but especially with my older sister. I will teach other people – including people close to me – how to improve their relationship with you. I will be able to assist animals in need. I will share you with people who will assist me in my endeavours.

(Just had an insight. In this conversation, you speak to “someone” whose power is unlimited – indeed, “someone” with power over life and death. However, it seems to be a challenge making this “someone” happy. And sometimes this “person” is present in your life, and sometimes not. There is no doubt that you’d like more of this “person” in your life, seeing that “he” can enable you to do so much, he can give you so much protection, and he can empower you to experience so many good things. Is it just me who seems to be confused between money and “God”?)

______________________

SATURDAY, 20 OCTOBER 2018

On the idea of blueprints you received from your parents (see December 2017’s “Upgrading my financial intelligence” and “Confronting my blueprints – and fixing them”):

1. My blueprint was not failure, it was struggling.

2. Like any set of active beliefs, this story of the blueprint isn’t just a factor during your childhood. If you continue to confirm to yourself that “it” is simple how it is, the blueprint keeps its hold on you. It is indeed like religious beliefs that you don’t grow out of. As long as you keep believing something is true, keep seeing certain “truths” in your life, it will remain true for you, no matter how old you are. [20/11/18: If everyone grew out of their blueprints, no adult would remain a follower of the religion to which their parents exposed them as children.]

3. I have a new blueprint: I, Brand Smit, do not have to struggle. That I believed for years that was how it was supposed to be was a mistake. My parents never intended to teach me that particular lesson. Certain things happened, but I was never meant to internalise them as the Holy Truth.

WEDNESDAY, 24 OCTOBER 2018

I am caught between a rock and a hard place. I have made it a habit the last few decades to dig deep in my soul for all kinds of secrets, for all kinds of interesting things that make me who and what I am and that make me do what I do.

For example, I have begun thinking about the programming I received as a child in terms of adult life expectations, and more specifically programming about money. What I’ve discovered was that I received a few lessons that made the likelihood of eventual financial success slimmer than it could have been. (For example, that my life was part of a cosmic game between Good and Evil and that I had limited control over my own success, or that my own success was subject to this cosmic game – if the Cosmic Game Master found it necessary for me to be a complete failure, there wasn’t much I could do about it.)

The problem? Most of these lessons I learned from my beloved parents.

Here’s the rock: I would like to dig deeper, to better understand myself, and to understand what I need to change to do better in the future. And the hard place: I may discover more things that might put my parents in a bad light.

A possible conclusion: My parents are just ordinary people. Of course they made mistakes, as their parents had made mistakes, and their parents’ parents before them, and so on. What is important is that these “erroneous lessons”, this “erroneous programming”, were meant to help – and it could have, had things ended up working differently.

Therefore, if I dig deeper, I may discover mistakes my parents had made, but all that reveals is that they are just ordinary people who tried their best. This is a conclusion which I, and I believe my parents, can live with.

______________________