The Psychology of People Who Become Millionaires

At 18, I had about $2,400 to my name. At 39, I have a 9-figure net worth. And honestly, nobody's more shocked than I am. So what changed? I don't have a higher IQ, don't have a trust fund, didn't get a huge lucky break. The real thing that changed is how I think about money. Many of you are probably closer to this, and you're wondering what to do next, but maybe not sure where to start. This video is for you because the difference between these two things I'm going to show you. For decades, scientists believed the human body physically could not run a mile in under 4 minutes. Doctors said it could make your organs fail. Coaches said it's impossible. Then in 1954, Roger Bannister ran it in 3 minutes, 59 seconds. But what happened next is kind of more shocking. Within 46 days, someone else broke it. Within a year, 3 more people did. So basically, it wasn't a physical limitation. It was psychological, just like money. People aren't broke because they lack ability. Most of the time they're broke because of what they believe. Like, think about it. Most of us grew up hearing stuff like money doesn't grow on trees, money's the root of all evil. These sayings get planted in our heads when we're kids and they quietly grow. So if you're stuck, you might not be broken. You're just running the same operating system the bottom 90% were taught. I'm gonna walk you through 6 broken mindsets about money, and I'm confident you're gonna see yourself in one of them, probably multiple. No shame in that. Because facing that fact is where you break through. As we go through these, I want you to get real with yourself because you can't fix what you won't face. Archetype 1: The Martyr. So have you ever caught yourself saying things like, "I'm doing this for my family. I just need to grind a little longer. Once I hit my number, then I'll slow down." That's the martyr. "What I do, I do for my family." Sounds noble, but it's a lie. A man who told himself he was sacrificing for others when really he He just couldn't let go of his need for control. This is everywhere. So grind culture tells you that if you're not bleeding, you're not trying hard enough. And while I'll push you to achieve your goals, it is important to remember this: suffering itself will not make you money. It's often the opposite path to wealth. Instead, it's the path to burnout. Burnout doesn't make you a hero. It actually breaks you and makes you poor. And like, look at the numbers on this. A medical finance analysis calls burnout financially expensive. So burnout leads to reduced productivity and efficiency. Even a 10% drop in productivity for a high earner due to burnout can mean tens of thousands of dollars a year. If you burn out 5 years earlier, that's $300,000 per year on average for people who are in high-paying careers. And I just want you to know I've lived this one really hard. Like when I was in finance, I told myself I was grinding for my future, my freedom, my family one day. But really, I was grinding because I was scared to stop because stopping meant that maybe what I was doing wasn't actually working. So I wore my exhaustion like a badge of honor. I'd brag about 80-hour weeks, and then I sat at a desk so much that my back started killing me too. So I realized I gotta stop turning my pain into the plan. And if you're nodding your head right now thinking that's me, here's what you do. I want you to do option 1. It's something I'm like lightly calling the suffering audit. So I want you to take out your phone, Write down every single thing you're doing for someone else. Next to each item, answer these two questions: Who actually asked you to do that? Does your spouse beg you to work like that? Is this creating wealth or just being busy? Most martyrs realize that 70% of their sacrifices are self-imposed. Nobody asked for them. So pick one on the list and delegate it, delete it, or do it differently. The 3 Ds. You gotta stop wearing your suffering like a badge. If that's not you, you could be archetype 2. The Speculator. And I want to make sure you stick around for the last one because most of you guys have it somewhere inside of you. So I see this one everywhere. It's like, do you ever hear yourself saying things like, um, this next one will be it, I need to catch the right wave? This is the Speculator mindset, and this is chasing hit after hit, scheme after scheme. Because here's something I've learned throughout my career: jumping from one big thing to the next is not bold, it's exhausting. And more than or not, it it actually keeps you poor. So the Speculator never builds anything that lasts. They're addicted to the thrill. I love a good deal. I love opportunities, but there's a massive difference between a calculated risk and basically disguised gambling addiction. If it's not you, you know a Speculator, don't you? Crypto, NFTs, next course, day trading. They never stick with anything long enough to let its compounding do magic. So ask yourself, are you building something real? Are you just jumping on a bandwagon? Because you get rich by choosing better and smarter. And for me, this was my 20s. I jumped from opportunity to opportunity like a frog on a hot plate. I mean, asset management, then I had a fashion startup, then I was in consulting, and then another side hustle. I thought it was, I don't know, being entrepreneurial, diversified. But I think I was really just scared of commitment. Like if I picked one thing, I might just really miss out on something. And, you know, if I'm honest, you know what I built during that time? Nothing like half-finished projects and a resume that looks like I couldn't hold a job. Shiny doesn't really compound. And there's actually incredible studies on this. There's one from Barber and Oden, which talks about how trading is actually hazardous to your wealth. So they studied 66,000 individual investors over a bunch of years. What do they find? The most active traders, they underperformed the market by almost 7% per year. The least active investors, guess what? They performed the best. The problem is that often this overconfidence leads to doing more trades, and the Speculator trades movement while the Builder profits from time and not doing much of anything. So how do you beat this? I'm gonna give you an option. The 12-month commitment contract. I want you to pick one business or opportunity, just one, not the sexiest, the one that's actually making money. And I want you to write down something like what I do. I commit to specific business opportunity for 12 months. No matter what shiny object appears, sign it, date it, put it somewhere you'll see every day. You're literally not allowed to start anything new until those 12 months are up. So new crypto opportunity? Sorry, bud, got to pass. Because this compounding only works if you stay long enough. One year. Can you do boring for one year? Now, if you're like, no, Codie, I can't, I got option 2 for you, which is the graveyard list. Get out a piece of paper, you title it Projects I Abandon. List every business idea, side hustle, investment, or opportunity you've started or quit in the last 5 years. Next to each one, write down why you quit. Found something better, got bored, I don't know, it was too hard. And really look at it. It's not a list of failed opportunities, but it's probably a pattern. So you got to ask yourself, like, what if I just stuck with one of these for 2 years? Where would I be now? And then take your list, shred it, delete it, burn it, and pick one thing and try to stick with it. Because the graveyard is full of mostly potential. Your bank account actually needs you to stick with something. Then we got our third archetype. This one's one of the toughest. The avoider. This is the type of person who says, it'll all work out eventually. I'll deal with it later. I mean, I need a little more time. I mean, look at me, I'm a nervous wreck. You can't build wealth with your eyes closed. It's like an ostrich in the ground. If you ignore money, it's going to control you. Doesn't always mean you're bad at money. You're scared. Of it. You know, you're scared of what you'll find when you actually look at it. But here's the reality. Ignorance is actually not bliss when it comes to money. It's really expensive. So you got to ask yourself honestly, why am I avoiding looking at my bank account? Why am I avoiding looking at debt? Do you keep making excuses to avoid digging into your finances? There's a term actually for this. It's called financial avoidance, and it's a known psychological pattern. What happens is it actually causes you harm to do this. Long-term damage in the form often of monetary things when it comes to not looking at your money, but it actually increases long-term anxiety. And so there's a couple studies like this one from Sages and Grable where people who score high in financial avoidance, they save less, they carry more high-interest debt, they delay retirement planning, they have higher financial stress. So like just avoiding it doesn't actually help you at all. It makes it worse. There's also real data that shows when you say things like, I'm bad with numbers, it's often a defense mechanism. It's like self-handicapping. So when people say finance isn't my thing, they're protecting their identity, not telling the truth, because it's kind of like an ego protector, specifically around debt. You know, when I started my first business, I racked up some serious credit card debt to fund it. And instead of facing that head on, I just— I literally, you guys, I don't know if you've ever felt the same way. I couldn't look at it. Like I made minimum payments sometimes and I told myself I'll deal with it when I have more cash flow. And the interest kept piling up and I like would try to forget my login actively, but the stress was there nonstop. Then one day, finally, I sat down and looked at the actual numbers. I made a plan and I felt like an idiot because the plan wasn't that hard. I just delayed it because the fear of looking is usually way worse than the reality. So you got to face the good, the bad, the ugly. And if you're an avoider, Here's where you should start, or at least where I did. Sometimes I can't go deep. I'm like, I don't want to spend an hour on my finances, but could you have a 5-minute truth session? Set a timer for 5 minutes. Open 3 things: your bank account, look at your actual balance, your credit card statement, look at what you owe, last month's spending, scroll through the transactions. And all I want you to do is say, okay, what's my plan to spend less and save more or make more? And after 5 minutes, write down 1 sentence. Okay, tomorrow I'm gonna do it again. Maybe I'm gonna take this one action. By day 7, you're not gonna be avoiding anymore. And then the last thing that you should do, if you really wanna take this to the next level, tell somebody you trust, do a little accountability text. So look at your money and send them a number. I have X, I have $847 in my bank account. Because avoiders avoid alone. But when someone else is watching, weirdly we show up. And I really don't want you to go it alone. I want you to bring your people along with you. Actually, there's a wild story about this guy, James Clear. I don't know if you know him, he's known for writing one of the best-selling books of all time in nonfiction. But he actually started out as a broke trainer. He was not born confident, he says. He was a personal trainer emailing a few hundred people once a week. No audience, no leverage, no platform. And he made a scary decision, which was to write publicly and consistently and own his asset. So his newsletter compounded for years before really anybody knew him. But because he kept doing it, even in the quiet, when the book launched, he wasn't selling belief. He was activating a market that already trusted him. So newsletter first, business second, fortune last. And I actually really did something similar. I didn't have a lot of belief in myself to build a big business, so I started building an email list. Email list is now over a million people, but it started out with like me and my mom and my dad, and they probably never opened it. You know what I've noticed? The most successful people today, they all have email lists. And the ones that I know, they use a company called Beehive. This team is incredible. Like, if you realize the power of being able to get your information into somebody's email inbox, you'll never go back. They have an ad network so you can upload stuff. You can get paid for your newsletter. They have paid subscriptions. You could sell digital products. Everything's built in and they handle all the backend because I'm not good at that. Reporting, invoicing, ad sales. You just write. So if that sounds like maybe one of your next moves, something that you need to do in your life, then I got something for you. You can go to beehive.com/codie. It's spelled B-E-E-H-I-I-V and use code CODIE30. You get 30% off your first 3 months. It's also really inexpensive. I don't want you to wait. And I also don't want you to be like this next archetype we're going to talk about, which is the hoarder. This one's fascinating because it's the opposite effect. This person thinks if I just save enough, I'll finally feel safe. That's the hoarder mindset. It's not that you're broke. You could even be rich, but your mindset around money is broken. So you don't spend, you don't invest, you don't live because you believe money equals safety. And so the more you have, the safer you're supposed to feel, right? The problem is it actually traps you more. So if you're oversaving, underspending, obsessively budgeting, or terrified of investing, that's actually a way to shrink your wealth. The point of money isn't really to accumulate it. It's to use it, to build it, to grow, to live. It's a tool. Money sitting in a savings account at 0.5% while inflation is eating at it at 3%. Not a great idea. Money you're too scared to invest because the market might crash. I don't know. This is a precautionary saving that can become pathological. There's research on precautionary saving that shows initially makes you feel better. Past a certain threshold, it becomes decoupled from actual risk. Basically, that means that at a certain point, saving actually doesn't help you at all. In fact, it has a negative effect. And this one actually happened to me after I made my first real chunk of money. I had a big bank account pretty quickly and I froze. I kept it in cash. I didn't invest for years. I just hoarded it like a little Scrooge McDuck. I think I missed a lot of opportunities because of that. My friends were compounding in real estate and businesses and I thought I was being smart and they were being risky, but I was being a coward. And so the breakthrough kind of came when I realized, wait a second, this is just a tool. And it's like leaving it, my brand new tool that I just got in the toolbox, never using it. So now I keep enough cash for emergencies and opportunities, but everything else that's going into my business. Now, if you're a hoarder, I think there's a really easy first step experiment. Take $100 and I want you to put it to work this week. Now, what does that mean? I don't want you to put in your checking account somewhere it can grow. The only rule is that you can't change that for 90 days. So you can't go spend something and then pull it back out. You can't go spend something, then return it. One investment in 90 days. Your investment needs to be ideally in something that is for you. So maybe it's $47 to go to Main Street Millionaire. Maybe it's $47 to buy a couple books and learn some more. Archetype 5: The trapped employee. So this type of person says, I hate my job, but I have to say that's just life. This type of employee mindset is so broken. There is nothing wrong with being an employee, but you shouldn't hate what you do at least every day, all day. Because it means you stop dreaming, you stop building, you settle. And no one has ever gotten rich settling, as far as I can tell. I'm not saying quit your job tomorrow, but if your job funds your life and kills your soul, that's not really a strategy. I am Jack's wasted life. So you don't have to burn it all down, but you got to wake up. Stuck people have a hard time getting rich. Instead, you're going to have more resentful nature. Research actually calls this cognitive depletion, which is basically where you do repetitive tasks that you hate continuously, shows that when work drains your energy, and violates your values, your brain actually has less capacity. You run at a lower level when you do things you hate every day. So that means you're probably not going to be able to learn new skills, execute long-term plans, build on nights and weekends. So you might not even be lazy. Like everybody's like, just get out there and do it. You might not literally have the capacity. And I was a poster child for this one. Big 7-figure job in finance, great benefits, all that. I was pretty miserable. I stayed for 12 years. And then I realized I was trading my life for a job that I hated. So I started building on the side. And when I finally left, it was the best decision I ever made, not because it was easy, but because it was honest. So if you're trapped, start building the exit. And one way that I like to think about this is I want you to think about your 6-month escape fund. Calculate 6 months of basic expenses. This is the number that you have to go find the next thing that you'd love to do. You know, I, I opened a separate account called my Freedom Fund. Automatic transfers every paycheck. I do 50/30/20, but you can pick out how you want to do it, and drop some cash. Once you have a few months saved, everything changes. Then you're there by choice. So you write down what your liberation day could be, and then you build towards it. The next archetype: the apathetic. These are the people who say, I'm just not into it, I'm just too chill to stress about this, I really don't care about success, you know. It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care. We've all met this person. The problem is it's actually that your fear is driving just about everything. Because if you're doing this, you act too cool to care because you're scared to fail trying. So often these people criticize hustle because they never committed and they call ambition cringe because they don't know what it feels like. But you know what is actually cool? Being obsessed, building something. The opposite of toxic hustle isn't apathy, it's that you're obsessed with something that you like. Broke people pretend not to care Rich people get obsessed. You know, if you're saying I wasn't really trying, then you're just hoping that if you fail, people will think it's not your fault. So if you're apathetic, here's my wake-up call. I like the 30-day obsession challenge. I want you to pick one thing you're obsessed with for 30 days, one skill, one income stream, one strategy. Show up daily. For the next 30 days, I'm X. I'm just gonna learn about Pokémon trading cards, if that's what you're into. Every single day. And the truth is there's a way forward if you're all of these. Maybe if you saw yourself in one or more of these mindsets, you're beating yourself up. Don't, because your mindset isn't fixed. It's software, and software can be updated. The 4-minute mile wasn't broken by someone working harder. It was broken by someone who changed what they believed is possible, and that is possible for you too. But first, you got to name who you are, then you got to stare them in the face, then you got to tell them you never want to be that person again. That is what it takes to change a broke mindset to a very, very rich one.