Chris Aimes, a copywriter on my list sent me an interesting email wondering “how someone who grows up poor can get over their bad beliefs about money”
Great question.
And one that I have personal experience with.
If you don’t know, I grew up in a small town in Ohio just outside of Cleveland where it was a big deal if you made $50k a year.
I remember being in highschool and thinking that if I could just make $50k a year, I’d be set.
That’s the kind of world I came from.
I don’t want to give you the impression that we were dirt poor, cause that’s not true.
I’d say we were lower middle-class.
But both of my parents had a very blue-collar mentality about money.
My dad worked in a 100-degree factory for 12 hours a day that made rubber conveyor belts for the coal industry.
And my mom held every job from being a waitress at Perkins (this is a crappy chain restaurant similar to Denny’s if you’re not familiar with it) to being a preschool teacher.
So I didn’t grow up with money.
And because of the way my parents thought about work and money, by the time I left for college, I wound up with some bad money beliefs.
For example…
When I was in highschool, I was convinced that rich people were complete assholes.
I honestly hated them.
I thought they were responsible for all the problems I had.
And that they were using us to get rich.
What’s interesting is that as much as I hated them, I also envied them.
Cause I wanted to have money.
This was made very apaprent to me in my senior year of highschool.
Cause I got a job washing golf clubs at a country club near my house.
Basically the members would pull up after their round, and I’d pull their clubs off the cart and wash them for ’em.
I get em all clean, and then take the clubs out to their car for them.
It was an easy job.
But I remember feeling like I never fit in there.
Even though I was a really good golfer at the time.
I felt like I was the “kid from the other side of the tracks”.
My family didn’t have money.
And we didn’t look anything like the people at the club.
So I had a huge resentment towards them.
And little known to me, this resentment I had towards rich people is something that would wind-up holding me back when I started my business a few years later.
Why?
Cause at my core, I hated rich people.
So why would I ever want to be rich?
Why would I want to be something I hate?
I had this unconcious bad belief about rich people running through my head at all times.
And when I finally realized it…
It was a big turning point for me.
I started to grasp the idea that I had to change some of my views about money if I wanted to have any.
So I went on a journey to break those views…
I read books like Think and Grow Rich.
And Dan Kennedy’s Wealth Attraction For Entrepreneurs.
Those helped set the stage for me.
And show me that a lot of the beliefs I had about money simply weren’t true.
And then later on I did something even better…
I actually started hanging out with guys who had money.
I hung out with guys who were making $200k, $500k, even a million dollars a year.
And one of my biggest learnings from that was realizing that rich people weren’t the evil people I thought they were.
They were just normal people.
And in fact, they were actually a lot nicer and more fun than the people my parents used to hang out with…
So seeing that…
And being immersed in it, really helped me to breakthrough some of those bad beliefs I had about money.
It helped me to see that what I used to believe about money wasn’t actually the truth…
It was just my parent’s version of the truth.
It wasn’t a fact.
It was just what they believed.
And that’s a big thing to keep in mind.
Most of your money beliefs come from your parents…
Or some situation when you were a kid.
They’re not necessarily true.
That’s just what they believed.
You’re free to have your own beliefs.
Make sense?
Hope so.
That’s all I got for ya today.
Enjoy your Sunday,
– Justin
If you want to hear more from Justin, he has a private email list for top marketers, copywriters and business owners. To apply to be on the email list simply click the button below that says “apply now”.
