Okay, so hopefully you regular readers aren’t bored yet, but my latest book, “Getting in Touch with Your Innner Rich Kid,” and the response it has gotten from the beta test readers, has really got my verbal pulse pounding.
The book compares a unique experience I had, of going from a dirt-poor environment of a poor kid school to being a student at the local rich kid school. It’s kind of, well, an anthropological study as much as a self help book. (first edition available only thru my website, or in ebook format via amazon.)
One of the things I learned in comparing these two cultures was this: in the poor kid school, I was purposefully and relentlessly taught to be poor.
This was not obvious, and I doubt that it was even consciously done on the parts of most of the people doing it. They were simply passing on their own poverty-thinking culture. But I see the promulgation of “poverty thinking” everywhere these days.
Now when I talk about wealth, let’s understand, this is not dollars. I once asked a professional wealth manager (he managed over a billion dollars of various people’s assets) to define “wealth,” and he replied, quite soberly, “it means different things to different people.” From this I derive that “wealth” is not a dollar amount. That’s only one facet of a bigger picture.
My poor kid training made me completely ignorant about such things. It happened on every level; I never once learned anything about money management, like how to balance a checkbook, how to take out a mortgage, or god forbid, how to fill out a 1040 form. And that’s just the basic arithmetical element of money mangement, never mind the higher levels of wealth consciousness.
So while I am eager to jump up and start saying one should do this or that, it is more important to know what one has been taught to do that one should now stop doing. A toyota lean approach to wealth manifestation, so to speak. And that starts with undoing the poverty thinking that many people, like me, were taught.
The first thing to do is to eliminate the negative energies that push wealth away. Resentment is at the top of the list. There’s also anger, fear, mistrust . . . These are all emotions that, in the poor kid school (and in the nightly television crime dramas), are relentlessly encouraged.
So my book is much more about UN-manifesting poverty as it is about manifesting wealth. It’s about stuff to stop doing. Anger and resentment require huge amounts of energy, yet they seldom lead to positive outcomes. Conversely, you will notice rich people never seem to work very hard. That is your first clue.
© Justin Locke
