10 Things Your Financially Successful Friends Have Given Up
#4 – They’ve given up on (accidental) gambling
This post is a huge wake-up call.
(Even if you’re already financially successful.) We all need reminders once in a while when our financial life gets out of control.
I’ve spent 9 years studying my friends who are financially successful. I stalk the sh*t out of their wealthy little lives to find the nuggets.
I save the gold I find in my note-taking app.
I’m going to distill the best wisdom they taught me in a few, short, sharp paragraphs. This will feel like drinking soapy water. But stick with me. You’ll be cleansed of all financial sins if you do.
Here are 10 things your financially successful friends have given up:
1. They’ve given up hanging around dead-beat losers
In some ways, the money game is a lot like the law of attraction.
Who you spend time with determines your income.
Your financially successful friends don’t believe in luck, if you dig deep. They believe you make your own luck or die trying. Luck is earned. Luck is an equation:
Creativity x Effort x Years = Money
The best way to look at friends is to notice their financial habits.
Are they always in debt?
Do they have a credit card?
Do they spend everything they make?
Here’s the hard part: many of them probably do. So do you divorce these people?
YES.
Sounds harsh, I know. But you have to understand: you attract the financial habits of those around you. If you don’t want to do hard donkey work forever, it’s a decision you have to make.
Maybe all friendships should be evaluated based on financial education – or at least willingness to learn about finance.
2. They’ve given up trading time for money
There are limited hours in the day. Everyone you know, including you, is slowly dying from birth.
You can’t beat inflation, high taxes, and currency devaluation with hard work.
Your financially successful friends understand the greatest concept in history: passive income. They understand that if they can generate it they can also unlock the compounding nature of this superpower.
Those who remain broke refuse to understand passive income. They call it a scam. “Ahhh ... you can’t make passive income mate, it’s just a sales pitch.”
Learn passive income or work for the rest of your life. Choice is ours.
3. They’ve given up envy
There are two types of people:
Person 1: “He’s a millionaire and therefore he’s a bad person. How dare he make so much money. How dare he steal from the poor. I don’t have the same options he has.”
Person 2: “He’s a millionaire. I don’t like the guy and how he acts but that doesn’t mean I can’t learn a thing or two about money from him.”
I try to be person two. Elon Musk is a great example. I’m not the biggest fan of how he acts but I can 100% learn a thing or two from him despite it.
The reason person 1 drowns in their own hopeless vomit is they’re full of envy.
They’re pissed that someone has done financially better than them. Instead of fixing the root cause of the problem they take the easy way out.
They fling mud at anyone who is wealthy (time rich, not necessarily financially rich), and waste the precious hours of their life.
Your successful friends are happy when people they know do well.
They cheer on their fellow human competitors and see it as free learning, rather than tear them down and further divide countries like America.
4. They’ve given up on (accidental) gambling
Many people may never play the lottery or go to a casino.
Yet they’re still filthy, dirty gamblers. Let me explain. Many people invest money accidentally with a short-term mindset.
They trade in and out of stocks
They buy crypto based on the latest hype
They believe in foreign exchange trading
Unless you’re a hedge fund or work on Wall Street, these short-term strategies don’t work. Why? Human psychology. There is so much about the world of money you can’t predict or will get wrong.
You’ll see patterns where patterns don’t exist aka being fooled by randomness.
Your successful friends made money with a long-term strategy. They got wealthy slowly. They didn’t YOLO $1M on a meme stock they heard about on Reddit and wake up in the passenger seat of a bright Yellow Lambo with an underwear model on the hood staring at them.
Gambling = no plan
Gambling = short-term strategies
Gambling = a lack of financial education
Stay the f*ck away from gambling unless you want to go broke.
5. They’ve given up being brainwashed by HR departments
HR departments are actually just clever marketers in disguise.
They came up with the idea of the corporate ladder to get billions of people to trade in their lives for service.
“You can climb the ladder too. Work hard. One day you’ll get the corner office sonny Jim.”
F*ck corner offices. The best office is a home office.
Your financially successful friends don’t fall for this scam. They know that even if they get to the top of the ladder and become CEO, they’ll have to give up all their free time and never see their family again except on Christmas.
The corporate ladder is the worst way to make money.
6. They’ve given up building other people’s dreams
Financial success means you don’t have to get told what to do anymore.
Constantly being told how you’ll work, when to work, and what to work on is exhausting. It’s a counter-intuitive operating system for a beautiful brain that loves curiosity and creativity.
Your financially successful friends may start by building other people’s dreams, but they don’t stay that way. They eventually back themselves and build their own thing.
Maybe it starts as a hobby or side hustle. Doesn’t matter.
There's only so long you can live life and ignore the dreams you’ve had since childhood. Sitting in an air-conditioned office at an email job isn’t the dream. For many of us, it’s what we’ve settled for (I did for 10 years).
Wealthy people are builders. They build with a vision.
7. They’ve given up believing in the retire-at-65 idea
The modern money game is based on the lame idea you work hard then retire at 65. Then at 75 you die after 10 years of play.
Am I the only one who thinks this idea is bat-sh*t crazy?
Retirement makes it okay to delay living until the future when it’s NOT.
Your wealthy friends are different. They seek to retire early from work they don’t like doing, to do work they enjoy. Retirement needs to be reborn.
8. They’ve given up hating rejection and failure
Society has become soft.
Some people get one little no and they demolish their dreams and hide away at home, secretly in anger. When your financially successful friends get rejected or fail … they don’t get angry. They get even.
They take all the disappointment and turn it into energy. They use the energy to fight back. They make the system fair rather than expect utopian vibes to fix it - which probably ain’t gonna ever happen in our life times.
Rejection is financial redirection.
9. They’ve given up the “life ain’t fair game”
Thinking we’re born with some disadvantage is an excuse.
Plenty of people have disadvantages. Writer Jon Morrow can’t move his body from the neck down and is stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
He could have said life isn’t fair and retreated to a nursing home to live out his days. But he said ‘screw that’ and found a way to generate enormous wealth. That wealth helped him take his health issues and improve them, rather than be ruined by them.
Your financially successful friends understand you get what you give.
If you give sh*tty life-ain’t-fair vibes, you get them right back. Unfortunately these vibes don’t pay bills or improve your life. All they do is take everything that could be positive and dump them out at sea with a boat anchor attached.
As you wave goodbye to all those opportunities the negativity drowns your soul. It’s how people die at 25 and get buried at 75.
10. They’ve given up asking for permission
School, college, job interviews, corporate life – these are all permission slips.
You’re always dependent on someone else to approve your goals. Your financially successful friends live in the permissionless economy.
Shoot from the hip and ask questions later.
Their mantra is act first, apologize later.
The one part I don’t like is the apologize piece. Stop apologizing for being alive and breathing air. And wanting to make some cashola so you can take your sweet little kid to the beach for a day and play.
We apologize because we love to people-please. Corporate life hardcodes this toxic virus into our minds. It’s only once you let money set your mind free that all the bad programming is undone. You start to see the world differently.
Final Thought
There’s always someone who is more financially successful than you.
The point isn’t to win the game and get the castle on the hill. The point is to see how money drives every single belief and behavior in your life. If you can understand money at a deeper level, you can understand why you do what you do.
You can escape the mind virus that destroys many people’s lives and go on to discover a life beyond money. A life bigger and better than money. But money is the enabler. Money unleashes time. Time is the currency of life.
This isn’t a how to get rich article. It’s a how to be free one.
Sell or be sold. Learn from more successful people rather than envy them and fling mud at them like a pig living in its own filth.
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hahaha "F*ck corner offices. The best office is a home office." Love that
I don't plan to ever retire. Provided I can continue to make money writing about topics that I enjoy, I reckon I'll keep that up till my eyes give out.