There’s More to Life Than Money
Of all the things I do as part of my “work,” making money plays only a small role. Despite having written some popular articles on the subject, I spend little time thinking about money these days.
I don’t even bother to set financial goals anymore. That seems totally pointless to me.
Sometimes months go by, and I don’t even know how much money I’m currently making. I just know there’s always plenty and that I’m earning more than I’m spending. The gap is wide enough that I don’t need to do any special budgeting or fussing with figures.
The reason this works for me is that I focus on creating and delivering value. I know that as long as I keep doing that, I don’t have to do anything special to try to make money. New opportunities just keep showing up. It’s not that difficult to maintain.
I remember when I was at a conference in 2004 where Dr. Wayne Dyer was speaking. He said that people would come up and say, “You know, Dr. Dyer. Some people say you’ve made a LOT of money.”
Dr. Dyer’s response was, “They would be right.” 
He went on to say something along these lines: “It’s not my fault! I just keep doing what I’m doing, and there’s always plenty of abundance there.”
At the time it was hard for me to relate to this mindset. It seems a bit too unrealistic and exceptional. But still… I wondered what it would be like to live at that level, where you could just assume abundance and it would be there for you. No striving or struggling. It took a few years, but I’m finally grasping what that sort of mindset feels like.
I’d say it’s not really a complete mindset by itself though. I doubt very much that Dr. Dyer focuses a lot of attention on trying to make money. I think most of his attention is elsewhere, wrapped up in the material he writes about. And that’s exactly where it should be.
Having written about two dozen books, it’s safe to say that Dr. Dyer has internalized the concept of creating and delivering value. I have it on good authority that his books sell quite well too. (We share the same publisher.)
Incidentally, Erin and I finally had the chance to meet Dr. Dyer in October at the speakers’ dinner for the I Can Do It! Conference. We only spoke with him for a few minutes. He was very warm and friendly.
This whole abundance mindset might sound really annoying if you’re dealing with financial scarcity right now. I can totally relate. I’ve been there, and I’m sure I’d have been equally annoyed if someone said this sort of stuff to me back then. I’d have been vehement that making money was NOT easy because I tried very hard to do that and failed big at it. Ironically the real problem was that by focusing on making money, I was making a huge mistake.
The key is where you focus your attention. If you focus your attention on making money, I can virtually guarantee that you’ll have a long and difficult road ahead of you, filled with setbacks and disappointments. If money is really what you seek, good luck with that. All you’ll do is give more and more of your power away, and you’ll end up living a pretty empty and shallow life.
Another corrupt form of thinking is to focus your attention on attracting financial abundance. Law of Attraction promoters often present this as a good idea. I once thought it was a good idea too. Now I realize it’s a dead end. It will just run you in circles. The irony is that in order to enjoy real financial abundance, you want to be thinking about money as little as possible.
I know it sounds like focusing on money is the right idea. I assure you that it’s a mistake. If you need to take several years to figure that out the hard way like I did, be my guest. But you’ll be really pissed that you could have saved yourself all that trouble if you simply let these ideas sink in a bit deeper. I hope that on some level what I’m saying strikes you as common sense. But I know I’ll be getting emails five years from now from a few people who went the other route. I hope you aren’t one of them.
Try to recognize the truth that focusing on CREATING and DELIVERING value is the smarter, more sane approach to long-term financial abundance. You may start out a bit slow at first, but eventually you’ll learn how to get good at both pieces of this puzzle. Once you have both aspects working reasonably well, it’s awesome. Just plain wonderful. And it leads to a really fun and exciting life too. Lots of freedom. Lots of joy. Plenty of cash. And yet the cash doesn’t even matter.
The nice thing about having plenty of money is that you can largely ignore it. You can focus your attention on doing more important, more interesting, and more enjoyable things. The funny thing is that it’s this sort of focus that creates financial abundance in the first place. Then you come full circle and realize that you never needed money at all. You just needed the courage to go after your dreams full steam ahead, even when you were dead broke. You needed to stop hiding behind a lack of money as an excuse not to live your best life.
If I could learn and apply this lesson while going bankrupt and having less than $100 in the bank, surely you can apply it today. I learned that I could create and deliver value even when I had no money and few resources. It wasn’t the greatest value in the world mind you, but at least it was something. I focused on creating something people would like and enjoy. Then I got it into their hands and made sure they enjoyed it. Back then it was a simple computer game. Today I do pretty much the same thing with blogging. The content is different, but the overall strategy is the same.
The DELIVERING part needn’t be complicated. If you just create something and share it online, other people will spread it around if they like it.
If you’ve been putting your value out there for months and months, and you haven’t been able to generate much interest from others, that should tell you that your mistakes are on the creative side. The feedback is that people don’t care for what you’re producing. You think you’re creating value, but the world is saying, “Not good enough; we don’t need or want this.” So you need to adapt to that feedback and use it to improve. Let it encourage you to go deeper within yourself, so you can be more genuine and authentic. Become more real and less phony. Keep working at becoming a more expressive creator until people start to take notice. Then you’re golden.
