The cultural forces that tell us we can’t get better

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Candidate,

If you're in NYC tonight, I'll be speaking at 92Y, where Matthew Hussey and I will be talking about love, money, psychology, & business.

It's funny, can you guess the most common question I get about love & money? Here's how these conversations go:

"How do you and your wife set up your accounts?" The most common question I get. This is like asking a chef what brand of knife she buys — it's not even close to the most important thing she does. When I probe, I find…
Most people ignore talking about money, then blow up at random symptoms ("How could you spend so much on THAT???"), and go through their lives without ever really diving deep to understand their partner. How could they? They rarely understand their own attitudes on money.
People think love & money should be easy, as if it should just come naturally to us. It feels "weird" to schedule time to talk about money, to read books together, even to see a therapist together.

The unspoken statement here: THIS SHOULDN'T BE THAT HARD.

And this is a trend I've seen in so many important things in life:

MAKING MONEY "shouldn't be that hard." (So we look for get-rich-quick schemes, increasingly esoteric trading strategies, and hot stock tips...instead of quiet, simple, low-cost, long-term investing.)

LOSING WEIGHT "shouldn't be that hard." (So we look for easy magic bullets, fad diets, and quacks...instead of simple, long-term changes.)

BUILDING A RICH LIFE "shouldn't be that hard." (But instead of ever sitting down and consciously deciding what our Rich Life is — and aligning our time and money with it — we buy whatever random bullshit we see on Instagram and then wonder why we end up unhappy. We love to buy things that make us unhappy in the long term, then complain about it, making us even more unhappy.)

In reality, this stuff SHOULD be hard. The most important things always are.

In the past, we understood some things would be hard, and that most people wouldn't do them. Now, however, our society has also taken a dark turn against hard work: It almost seems like it's become politically incorrect to suggest that hard work can get you results.

There is every incentive around you to tell you "it's not your fault," which then morphs into "there's nothing you can do to change it."

I read multiple articles in the New York Times insisting it's impossible to lose weight. Do you realize how ridiculous this is? How offensive it is to the people who've made massive lifestyle changes and achieved their goals and improved their health?

I read articles saying "wealth inequality makes it impossible" for millennials to become financially stable. Yes, there are serious systemic problems, which I've posted about publicly. However, whenever I see some millennial nihilist on Reddit bemoaning today's corporate hegemony, I always want to ask one thing: Have you ever read a single book on personal finance?

A bunch of internet whiners realize they've never cracked a single book about money. Page 55 of I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

Easy to blame the system. Hard to start with yourself.

It's important you reject the message that you cannot change.

Once you believe you can't change, you are doomed. Once you buy into the narrative that it's "the system," then that you can't change, and finally — why even bother? It's not that important anyway — the game is over.

I wish people who said "it's impossible to change" could shadow successful people for 5 days. They would see the secret habits of top performers.

Randy Pausch, who wrote The Last Lecture (great book), said:

"I got tenure a year earlier than people usually do. That seemed to impress other junior faculty members. 'Wow, you got tenure early,' they'd say to me. 'What was your secret?'

I said, 'It's pretty simple. Call me any Friday night in my office at ten o'clock and I'll tell you.' (Of course, this was before I had a family.)"

Anything important takes a ton of time.

But if you follow the messages in the media, you'll first hear that (1) time isn't that important — only passion, then (2) it's actually impossible to do, then (3) it's not even worth it anyway.

"No, you can't earn more. You should just be lucky to have a job. What? Become an entrepreneur? Less than 1% of people succeed. Anyway, who has the time? Only rich, entitled people."

Just look at the people giving this advice. Are they in situations you admire? Are they some anonymous Twitter user with a cartoon icon? Then why would you take advice from them?

If you've noticed this trend of the media & the people around you telling you it's impossible to change — and even trying to convince you that you don't want to change — send me a note. Let me know what you're hearing.