Now I know many of you are thinking “Of course Amit!”
But deep down do you really believe it?
Consider this…
At church yesterday our swami (our equivalent of a priest) went on a tirade against making money and getting rich. He defined greed as as striving to get anything beyond your “basics needs.”
He declared that it wasn’t enough that greed was on of the “seven deadly sins”, but you need to go out of the way to fight it. He went on to stay how “greed” (his definition) has caused nothing but bad and how poor people are happier than rich people, who he claimed suffered lots of stress and anxiety over all the money they have.
His best line “It’s more enriching to do without!” (Tell that to all the poor people worldwide living on less than a $1/day)
I almost barfed.
This is the same insidious message that much of organized religions has used for hundreds of years (particularly the middle ages) to keep people down – as long as people stay poor it’s easier to control them.
“Money is bad, rich people are evil. And it’s spiritual to be poor!” Right?
Nothing can be further from the truth. And no other message can be more harmful to your prosperity and self esteem.
If you’re wondering yeah, I’m WAY happier, way more fulfilled now that I’m wealthy and successful.
Beats scraping by on $1277/month, unable to support my wife (we got help from our parents) and living in a place the size of a walkin closet. There was NOTHING noble or spiritual about THAT!
And what’s cool is I’m making a positive impact on the world doing what I’m doing (as apposed to all the spammers and black hat affiliate in our industry who are selling people acai berry pills using fake blogs – that’s the type of greed that should be rightfully condemned).
Being rich beats being poor any day of the week.
It’s the drive to make money and create value that has lifted and continues to life much of the world out of abject poverty and has greatly enriched our lives (keep that in mind next time you pull out your iphone!). Even the non-profit world has realized this with the success of micro loans.
Of course you already know this, but here’s the problem….
Most people have been programmed with negative lack beliefs from a very early age. It’s in their subconscious.
So when they’re 25 and decide to become rich they very quickly hit a brick wall. If you deep down believe that money is bad and rich people are evil then your subconscious mind will sabotage any effort
you make towards getting rich. Afterall you don’t want to end up evil, selfish and unhappy do you….?
If you seriously want to become rich you’ll likely have to carefully examine the beliefs that you’ve been feed since you were young and carefully examine everything that you’re taking in (TV, movies, news, church, etc) and ask yourself how all of this is programming you.
YEAH programming! Everything you watch and listen to goes right in you subconscious mind and is programming you at some level.
The #1 reason most people fail to get rich is because they’re programmed with so many destructive anti-prosper beliefs that it stops em dead in their tracks. Seriously it’s sad to see so many people fail when we live in a country (increasingly in a world) with such abundant opportunity.
Yes there’s abundant opportunity RIGHT NOW even while we’re in the middle of an economic meltdown. If you don’t see it then you need to stop listening to all the doom and gloom mass hysteria about the economy. Outside factors have NOTHING to do with your prosperity…I’ll get more into that point later.
If you want to live a rich and prosperous life then start by questioning and think critically about all the messages and programming you’re being exposed to. I’m VERY careful what’s goes into my brain, and constantly keep my guard against negative programming.
Do you even know what you believe?
PS Deadline for PPC Coach applications are 11th of Feb. And if you’re just interested and getting time with me and not willing to put some serious work in, don’t bother sending in an application.
It’s the LOVE of money that is the root of all evil. Money itself is neither good nor bad. It just is what it is, money. Money, and a lot of it, can be an immense blessing to your families, your community and the world at large. But with anything that you have in great abundance comes great responsibility.
You are such an inspiration and what you say is so true! Thank you for starting to blog again!
Jamie Birch hit the nail on the head.
money is not evil, but the LOVE of money is what causes people to do bad things.
Im sure amit was pretty humble when he was living off 1200 a month. I would say his circumstance forced him to be humble. NOw that he is rich there is nothing forcing him to be humble but he must put effort into proactively humbling himself (which im sure he is doing a good job at).
this is where humans can falter with money is that they are not good at humbling themselves. man is a natural enemy to God.
You read in the book of mormon all the time about the ancient civilizations in the americas prospering and then forgetting about God. Then they are stricken down by disease, natural disasters, wars etc…the cycle goes on for generations and still today.
wanna know what will happen in the future? just study the past.
be careful there Isaac. Humility is just an inversion of the arrogant ego. in order to be free, one must release attachment to both humility and pride.
Please excuse my poor english, I am from Uruguay and my mother tongue is spanish. I will take soma pains to convey my thinking the best I can. I am afraid that I don’t agree with the majority of the things I read here. Please excuse me, but this forum seems to me a group of rich people with conscience remorse (which is indeed a good beginning in itself) trying to convince one another that there is nothing bad in striving to get more and more and more money, very much beyond their basic needs. Unless the concept of “basic need” be stretched to reach luxurious houses, superb cars, vacancies at the caribbean and a gross bank account. It seems as if there would be a little interior voice that makes that rich people couldn’t be satisfied with their richness -as never can be- unless they can feel in any way that they are also “good”, that they are “spiritual”.
Let aside the sense of remorse that can rightly arise in an aspiring loving heart of a rich man who feel himself anyway co-partaker of the grotesque inequality of the economic arrange of the world, the millions of people which their -real- basic needs are not met, the thousand of children dying of hunger every day, the wars that must be waged in order to maintain this state of things, etc. Letting aside all this, I think that the great hindrance of a taskmaster like riches is where it exact to put our heart. It is illusory to think that anybody can strive to accumulate riches without putting his love in it. The love, inevitably, is put in the money and in the egoistic prestige and lifestyle which it provides, for us and probably for our family (our widened ego). And this is valid not only for the rich people, who are actually only the little part of the “riches-strivers” who reached their goal; it is valid for all people, poor or rich, whose heart is put upon the pursue of material accumulations.
The fact that some little part of the money of the outrageous rich people can go to alleviate their consciences through charitable help does not diminish at all their attachment to money.
Every great spiritual teacher in the history taught the benefits of austerity, and lived accordingly. Christ felt
compassion for the rich young man, because He knew that his fortune was a severe obstacle to his progress in the spiritual path (then He uttered the parable of the camel and the eye of the needle). He also said that we can’t serve two masters, God and riches. Buddha, being a prince by birth, renounced to the enervating, slumbering luxuries of the palace and lived a life of austerities, which created the conditions for his enlightenment. He used to say that we must kill the ego and be sure that it is well dead. Sri Ramakrishna, the great bengali mystic, continuously said that “woman and gold” (or lust and riches) were the biggest hindrances in the spiritual path. William Law said, with his precise and crude metaphors, that accumulating riches beyond our needs is like to store eyes and hands, because with the exceeding money we could provide help that could be as such for the people in need.
Mahatma Gandhi, with enormous worldly power at his command, choose to live a peaceful, minimal, austere life, based on severe self-restrain. He lived under the precept of not to waste a grain of rice, and used to say that we must eat only when really needed, only the strictly necessary, and only after doing something for another people. As a corollary of his spiritual greatness, he died, like Jesus, blessing his killer.
The examples could be unending, but I think that my point is sufficiently clear.
Excuse me if I offended you in any way, I certainly didn’t intend that. We are all immersed in an ego-driven culture which determine our viewpoints up to an important extent. This culture conditions us to be satisfied and “happy” with the empty husks which it calls “riches and success” (a fake, temporary, insecure, anguish-begetting happiness). But we have the capability (and finally the necessity), as the prodigal son, to get up and return to the home of our father, where we will find true riches which can’t be corrupted by the rust, nor stolen by thieves.
I greet you reverently.
Hi Amit,
I noticed you are on PepperJam network, I am a merchant on PJN. It would be great to possibly work with you. If you have a moment, take a look at our site and let me know what it would take from a commission perspective to get you on board with us.
Best
Steve