Why Entrepreneurs always run out of money...

The people who fail are the ones who are building things for a specific result because they are operating in this story must get result for me to be free. And therefore if I don't get the result, I'll always be trapped. You see, if you think money gives you freedom, then you also will believe that losing money will lose your freedom. So you're never free at all. You're just a slave to money.

It's kind of an ironic thing that most entrepreneurs get into business because they grew up poor. In fact, the most successful people that I know grew up with nothing. I know more successful people who started with $0 than were handed something down from their parents who are already successful. I know very few of those. Most of the people that I know are first generational millionaires, myself included. And we all have this fear. Fear that we're going to go back this fear that we're going to go back to being broke. This is a very interesting thought train that we all have because it makes us motivated to move somewhat. But then we start playing defense, and the minute we start playing defense, we start losing our edge. And the minute we start losing our edge, we stop being aggressive. And the minute we stop being aggressive, we start losing and other people start passing us. So if you've ever experienced this cycle before where you make some money and then it sort of peters out and then you somehow lose everything, and then from that place, Phoenix rises out of the ashes and then you build your next thing and then what happens? You get defensive and you lose it all. This is the story of many entrepreneurs and it's a cycle that people get into because of a recurring theme in their brain. And that they're afraid that they're gonna lose money. And until they have nothing to lose, they start hedging against that fear. Once you've lost everything, you suddenly feel aggressive again, you're creative again. Cause you've got nothing left to lose. But this recurring fear plays over in our brain and prevents us from ever achieving everything that we're capable of achieving.

Let's talk about how to be free of this fear. Can you imagine how powerful you are as an entrepreneur without this secret fear running your life that you're gonna fail, that it's not gonna work out. Now we see this play out in people who are just starting things and they just start things. They get on these loops of like, I'll buy this program or try this thing. So they never actually dive into doing anything. That's how that fear plays out. It plays out in other entrepreneurs by them getting success and then sabotaging and losing it all and then they have to start all over again. But it's still the same fear. It's the fear of losing money and it's the fear of not being able to make money in the future. In order to address that, we simply need to recognize why we think we want money in the first place. You don't actually fear running out of money or not making money. You fear what that is going to mean for your life. I'll give you an example. Just recently I invested in some things that. Well, let's just say I bought them at the top. I bought some Bitcoin at the top, I bought some growth stocks at the top and my portfolio just got smashed over the face. Smash, smash, smash. It came down quite a bit in about a 30 day period. Can't look at it after you buy it. It's so horrible. Did the right things. I thought I researched all of the proper things and did the right checks and you know, waited for pullbacks. Nope, I bought at the top and it came crashing down. And all of a sudden someone in my brain started googling all of the terrible things that might happen to me. Obviously my entire portfolio and my entire net worth was gonna run out. And obviously everybody on the Internet was gonna think I'm an idiot because I bought some bad or I bought some bad timing, right? And clearly all my clients and customers were gonna see me as a failure because I made all this money and I put it into the wrong. I started catastrophizing this entire thing like I'm gonna lose my house and I'm gonna lose. I just bought some stocks at the wrong time. That's all that happened. But my brain, who wanted to survive and keep me safe started kicking in all of this crap when I cast out. The ultimate fear is not that I am going to live in a small apartment. My fear isn't that I'm gonna have to sell my Tesla. I'll drive a Corolla, I don't care. My fear isn't even that people will think I'm an idiot on the Internet. I see your comments. My last name sounds like moron. I've heard that since kindergarten. I can handle all of those things. The thing that I was afraid of is that I would have to compromise myself and my creativity in order to make money. I don't actually care about money that much. And guess what? Neither do you. You care about what you think money is going to give give you, which is you'll Say freedom, but it's the freedom to be yourself. It's the freedom to express what you want to express. It is the freedom to create what you want to create. And we think that we have to have the money in order to do and be those things. The irony is that you get money as a byproduct of being and doing those things. We think we need money to set us free, free so that we can go be ourselves. But it's actually the fear of losing money, the fear of not having money that prevents us from being ourselves. It's when we shut ourselves off and then we start operating from this place of fear and scarcity like we're about to lose everything. That's when you turn yourself off. This is why I tell clients and customers that the best product and the best brand, because it's the same, is the one person genuinely you just, just haven't. Because themselves are going to come out their true essence and that energy that comes alive in them is what is going to fuel them to take the actions necessary to build a million dollar business. The people who fail are the ones who are building things for a specific result because they are operating in this story must get result for me to be free. And therefore if I don't get the result, I'll always be trapped. You see, if you think money gives you freedom, then you also will believe that losing money will lose your freedom. So you're never free at all. You're just a slave to money. You have to recognize that it's not money that you want, but what the money gives you. And freedom is too vague of a statement. You want the freedom to do what? And for most of us, that is be ourselves. It's express ourselves, it's connect with ourselves. It's operating from a place that is true to ourselves. And we think that we need money to do that, but we don't. The truth is, you could walk into work tomorrow and be your fullest self and smile at customers and your boss and everybody would notice you and wonder why you were in a good mood and you'd show up the next day and get promoted. The truth is, you would show up on your YouTube channel or your Instagram or wherever you create content and you'd show up as yourself and you start attracting your ideal clients and customers because they wanted you. You would start writing emails to your list. You would start creating products that were truly in alignment with who you are, which meant that they were unique in the marketplace and people were willing to pay a premium for them. My favorite story for this is actually Eckhart Tolle. Eckhart Tolle tells a story that when he was in, I think his 30s and 40s, he was a counselor. And every day his life looked like he would wake up in his apartment and he would go for a long hike and he would meet with one or two clients, he'd have a glass of wine and he'd go to bed and he loved his life. And he just went for walks, met with clients, read and drank wine. And one day he ran the numbers and realized that for the last several years he had been living below the poverty line. He had no idea, didn't care. And then from that state, with all that time and all that freedom, he wrote two of the best selling books of the last two decades. Now he's a multimillionaire. He wasn't following a step by step plan or a road to 1 million. Yes, that is the name of my podcast. He was simply tapped into who he was, didn't care about the results. I want that more than anything. And I know that actually the gift that losing that money in the market gave me was it made me realize I don't actually want this money. I'm upset about numbers on a screen. I'm not going to the bank to cash that. Like, I'm gonna be in these plays for the next five years. Do I really care that Bitcoin and Square stock and PayPal had a pullback? No. I'm actually secretly afraid that because there's a temporary dip in my net worth that I'm going to now compromise myself in order to make that money back. So the only real work is for me to be committed to operating from a place of my truest nature, of who I really am. The second thing to remember to overcome this fear is, is that money is easy to make. There's capital everywhere. You have excess of it everywhere. If you don't have money, you have debt, which is somebody else's money. There's just the world is swimming in money. You are watching this video right now. We talk if money was easy to make, it have a lot more of it. Guess what? It's that story in your brain that makes you afraid to lose money. When you think that money's hard to make, when it requires a lot of effort that prevents you from making more money and makes you more likely to lose. Lose it because you will be effortful about the money rather than easy about the money, loose about the money, happy about the money. And when your focus is on making Your skills better, becoming the best you possible. Money is easy. Money's everywhere. When you start focusing on the money, rather than doing the best work and being the best person possible, you have mixed up the priorities. But if you can remember that money's easy to make as a result of creating value, you remember to double down on your skills, on your uniqueness, and on where you have the most energy, which comes back to the first point, that you want to be the fullest you possible. It's what you actually want. So if what you actually want is to be the fullest you, and by doing so you make the most money, isn't that freedom? Isn't that the secret to life? And when you're in that zone, you don't care about how much money you make anyway, which gives you permission to make a lot of it. What we all want at the end of the day is excitement. It's freedom to express who we really are. It's freedom to be with who we really want to be and to create the things that we want to create. The truth is, the reason we want money is because we want to be free of it. We want money because we want to be free to do the things that we would do if money was not in the picture. Can you remove that now? When you give yourself permission to just do what you want to do.

Just seems like everything takes care of itself. My core work is helping entrepreneurs build million dollar businesses. And I know when they're going to hit it and it's when they feel this like lightness about it. When I have an entrepreneur who is like, can you tell me exactly what to do? I know they're going to fail because they're all balled up, intense about it. But when somebody is genuinely interested in a group of products or building a brand and there's like an enjoyment in the unfolding of the process, I know they're going to win. It's so. I wish it wasn't so much about this, but it is. If you can drop the heaviness around it and remember that it's supposed to be fun. And as a byproduct of it being fun, you tend to do a better job. And by you doing a better job, you make more money. If you can remember that, then you're home free. Building a million dollar business is a few pieces of the equation that you just plug in. But when you have to have the the result because you're afraid of what's going to happen, if you don't, you will fail. And life will continue to give you the opportunity to clear through that mental roadblock until you realize that it's just okay being yourself. In fact, it's the most profitable thing that you can be. I'm Ryan, Daniel Ryan with capitalism dot com. Thanks for watching.