I blame Hollywood.

Think of all the movies and TV shows, including “reality” TV, feed us a false image of how rich people behave. Perhaps there are some truly rich people that are as reckless and impulsive as they are portrayed, who manage to stay rich for the long run.

But for the most part, Hollywood has sold us a lie. The vast majority of rich people are thoughtful and strategic. But that doesn’t look sexy on screen.

Watch the video below to see how this false image is costing you.

Transcript:

Does being rich mean being mindful or mindless with money?

When you think of being rich, how do you picture it?

Go with me here: imagine yourself being rich and feeling like you have more than enough money. You don’t stress about money anymore. Now imagine yourself shopping as the rich version of you. Do you picture yourself at a luxury store, roaming through and picking out whatever items, be they clothes or electronics, and scooping them up with hardly a thought about price? You don’t care, you’re rich and rich people don’t concern themselves with such trivial things as prices. Or do they? Do you imagine the rich version of yourself taking a look at the price tag and thinking about it for a minute?

The way that you envision this very scenario will help you figure out very quickly if you can ever be financially fit. Seriously. A central quality of a financially fit person is mindfulness – one who plans, is methodical, and who thinks things through. But if your very idea of being financially successful looks like the very opposite, that being rich means that you are mindless about money, then any efforts to manage your money will be sabotaged from the get-go.

It’s very hard to stick with a way of being that runs counter to the notion that you have of success. If you picture being rich as a person who doesn’t think about how they spend their money, and you’re trying to feel rich, it’s going to be hard for you to swallow any advice about the way to getting rich is through thoughtfulness about your spending. You might intellectually understand and even agree with the sound logic behind smart money management, but as I always say, unless your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about money are all aligned, you can’t make progress towards being great with your money.

Visions in our mind of what being rich looks like are a thought, which has been successfully programmed by all the TV, movies, and stories you’ve been told about how rich people spend their money. Think of Wolf of Wall Street and how cavalier and reckless the main character is depicted as he spends extravagantly. As ridiculous as it was, people actually believe that this is how rich people spend money. And then everyday people start spending this way.

Now it’s gone from Hollywood to Main Street and you witness people spending like this with your own eyes, even though, very likely these people can’t actually afford to spend the way that they are. And now you’ve become programmed to think of being rich as this image as a thoughtless spender. It’s so ubiquitous that your mind absolutely accepts this as the truth about being rich. It doesn’t occur to you that this is a thought, one that is not real or true with a capital T.

It definitely doesn’t occur to you that this thought is a limiting thought, at all. If anything, it seems that this is a thought to aspire to. You believe that this is what success and freedom looks like. It’s a limiting belief because it’s not real and it’s not true and it encourages you to act in a way that sabotages your goals.

So now, if you carry opposing beliefs, one that money mindfulness is the right way to go, and the other that mindless spending is the way of the rich, then you’re going to be pressing the gas on your spending while also slamming the brakes. You’ll go no where and maybe do some damage to your finances along the way.

So what do you do?

The first thing is to recognize that the vision of mindless spending as being rich, is actually a limiting belief. For some reason I feel a collective… awww man, really? I was looking forward to that? I’m sorry if this disappoints you.

Once you’ve accepted that,  then you do what you should do with any limiting belief that you identify: dismantle and replace it.

Let’s start with the first part, recognizing that this is a limiting belief. First, you have to see that this is a belief, not a fact. Until now, you may have thought that it was a fact that rich people are mindless spenders. They’re not, at least not the ones who are sustainably rich, not just rich for a few years.

And that’s an important distinction to make while you continue to watch and witness behaviors or rich people in made up stories, which includes reality TV by the way, and the way you watch them behave in real life. First of all, there are many people who appear rich, who are not actually rich. There are plenty of rich looking people who are anything but. It’s all smoke and mirrors and debt.

Even if reckless spenders are in fact rich, they might not be rich for long with their mindless spending. There are so many, many examples of people whose money did not last long because of their mindless spending. I’m confident that you can think of three examples in about three seconds.

The truly rich people that I personally know and know of, are incredibly thoughtful with their money. They plan and think in advance. And they’ve mastered the ability to delay gratification. It might look like they casually purchased a Lamborghini on a whim but a true rich person has thought about it for awhile, planned for it, and thought it through well before going to pick up their fancy new ride. In the moment it can appear care-free and thoughtless but behind the scenes it was actually a mindful decision.

It’s pretty impossible to witness that mindfulness though. You don’t see it depicted on TV that rich people mull over a spending decision. You don’t see them put things in their Amazon cart and let it sit there for days while they think about how these purchases fit into their budget, you just see a bunch of packages show up and all the new clothes and whatever but there are few examples whether on TV on in real life where you watch people think and plan.

It’s usually done when they’re alone or with very few people in quiet, private moments. No wonder there’s no vision in your mind of rich people being mindful with money management. It’s also just not sexy. It’s much more fun and exciting to think that there is a class of people who spend without a second thought.

To be sure, there are probably a very few people in the world who can in fact spend like Jordan Balfort in Wolf of Wall Street and actually get away with it and remain rich for the rest of their lives, but not even Jordan Belfort is one of those guys. I don’t personally know Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or anyone like that, but I guarantee you that they did not act like that when they had the amount of money that the rest of us have, otherwise, they wouldn’t have gotten to where they have arrived.

So now that we’ve hopefully established that this vision of rich people mindlessly spending is not a fact, but a belief, now we can dismantle and replace it. Now, every time you catch yourself day dreaming about spending your money thoughtlessly, you’ll need to identify that thought as the fantasy that it is. Simply tell yourself that it’s not real.

It was a set of images that you saw on a screen that has little relationship with the lived reality of sustainably rich people. You’ll have to catch yourself many times, perhaps over weeks and months, to truly wake up to the spell that you’ve been under with this belief. Once you’ve done it enough times that the image no longer represents the truth to you, you can replace it with an image of a rich person, or yourself as a rich person, being mindful with their money.

Literally imagine a person sitting a desk, thinking about, planning for, and sitting with spending decisions, while, and this is unbelievably super important, enjoying being in this quiet, pensive place.

Rich people aren’t just mindful of their money, they enjoy thinking, planning, and strategizing what they’re going to do with their money. They see and understand the game of money and that appearing mindless is the trap of the game, when the reality, that few people know, is that mindfulness with money is actually the way to win the game.

Imagine yourself enjoying, or at least feeling contentment and satisfaction while spending time managing your money and thinking through your spending decisions. Remember that your feelings have to be on the same page in order for this to work so imagine positive feelings while imagining yourself as a rich person who is being mindful about their money. Envision this scenario often and intensely and that will really help you seal it in.

Then it will be so much easier to take financially fit action. Your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors will all be aligned with being mindful with money and so naturally your actions will follow. Do those actions enough times and you will build new habits that make financial fitness your default way of being to where you don’t really have to try so hard anymore, it’s easy and natural.

Spend the next minute or so thinking up a powerful image of a rich person or yourself as the rich person you will soon become, as you now understand them to be, maybe even write down what you’re visualizing to bring it to life more, and recall it over and over again, and then I’ll catch you in the next video.