If you are not where you want to be in life financially, it’s probably not your fault.

People like you and me and the vast majority of this planet’s population were programmed for poverty ever since the day we were born.

And the engineers of our poverty were well-intentioned teachers, parents, and coaches who didn’t even realize that they themselves were brainwashed and programmed for a life of financial discontent.

This programming is so ingrained in how we see the world that we never stop to even question it…

It’s as Orson Scott Card said:

“We question all our beliefs, except those we truly believe… and those we never think to question at all.”

Well, I know for myself at least, it never even occurred to me that the reason I was poor stemmed from beliefs I held so deeply about the way the world works that I had never even thought to question them.

It wasn’t until after I cratered my life into rock bottom that I started to wonder, maybe I’m doing something wrong here…

Truly, rock bottom can be a blessing because it humbles you pretty damn quick and it opens you to the possibility that maybe you don’t have all the answers.

And so I went on a search to find better answers so I could start playing the money game a bit better, and in this article, I’m going to share with you what I found… these are 5 things you have to stop doing to reprogram your brain for wealth and abundance.

These are 5 things that helped me personally escape the poverty trap.

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 1. Stop Waiting To Be Told What To Do

Even if you gave me $100 billion, I do not believe I could design a better system for pumping out mindless robots than our current educational system:

Show up at this time…
Sit down…
Face the front…
Raise your hand…
Wait to be called…
Read this chapter…
Write that report…
Take this test…
Leave when I say…

We have been programmed from our very first day of school to obey instructions.

Which actually makes a lot of sense when we’re very young because it’s important to socialize children so they can understand and abide by societal norms.

This is how we civilize that wild-monkey-child inside of us all…

But the problem is that this training never really evolves.. it continues on in the same exact way through high school and college.

Ultimately, this turns us into good little worker-bees who can show up, punch a time clock, and do as we’re told.

But there’s two problems with this for you as the individual:

First, mindless robots only get paid what mindless robots are worth…

Which isn’t very much considering factories (aka: schools) around the world are pumping out new models of robot every single day.

The second problem is that mindless robots can only do as they’re told….

And if you have to be told what to do, then you’re simply a cog in the machine, which means you are by definition, replaceable.

So the first thing you have to reprogram in your mind to get out of the poverty trap is this:

You have very little value to the world if you have to be told what to do.

The most classic example of this is when Warren Buffet went to Benjamin Graham (the godfather of value investing) and offered to work for him for free.

Benjamin Graham looks at young Warren (this guy who would go on to become the wealthiest person in the world) and he says these prophetic words:

“Even for free you’re overpriced.”

And this is because there was no value to Benjamin Graham in this transaction because he knew he was just gonna have to hold Warren’s hand and tell him exactly what to do.

The value of the education Warren would’ve received was FAR more valuable than any work he could possibly do for Ben.

So here’s the first subroutine you’ve got to program into your mind to get out of the Poverty Trap is this:

Abundance flows to the people who bring value to the world without having to be told what to do or how to do it.

Also, keep in mind that you are paid in proportion to the magnitude of the problems you solve…

So go solve some big, important problems that the marketplace values and I promise you WILL make more money.

But despite making more money, you will never get out of the Poverty Trap if you don’t reprogram this second belief.

That is, you have to:

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 2. Stop Equating Time With Value

So once upon a time, there’s this old plumber who’s hired to fix a backed up pipe… (or something, I don’t know.. I’m not a plumber).

Anyways, he shows up and the homeowner tells him that another plumber already took a look and said the pipes were toast. It would cost $10k to repipe the whole basement.

The homeowners hoping to get a second opinion.

So the plumber poked around in the basement for 5 minutes, and he’s doing the whole pipe-whisperer thing when suddenly he zeroes in on one pipe in particular…

He pulls out his piping tool (again, I’m not a plumber)… and he gives it a whack.

And voila, the problem is magically solved.

The homeowner is psyched ‘cause now he doesn’t have to pay $10,000 to replace all the pipes… that is until he gets the bill for $2,000 and thinks, This is outrageous. You were only down there for 5 minutes. I want an itemized bill so I can see what I’m actually paying for.”

Plumber says, Alright.. Takes back the invoice and writes on it two lines:

On line number one it says: For tapping the pipe: $1.00

On line number two it says: For knowing where to tap: $1,999.

The important takeaway here is that you’re not paying the plumber for his time, you’re paying him to solve a problem.

And how well he solves the problem is a function of his experience and skill.

Now listen, the world has programmed us to believe that Time is Money.

We’re told to show up, punch a clock, put in our hours, and collect a paycheck.

This reinforces the belief that what we’re being paid for is our time, and therefore our time is valuable…

But it’s not… see your time doesn’t have value… it’s what you DO with that time that has value.

Now, I know, this seems painfully obvious, but the truth is this is one of the hardest sub-routines to reprogram because we’ve been trained all our lives to equate time with value and it started all the way back in school.

See, you don’t actually progress from one class to the next based on when you master a subject…

No, you only move on after some predetermined period of time has passed… which we call a semester. We reward students more for simply putting in the time than we do their level of mastery.

Which is a dumb system, but let’s put that aside for a minute.

If you want to get out of the poverty trap and win the money game, you have to decouple your earning potential from your time.

So a salary or a weekly paycheck just ain’t gonna cut it.

Now, this is a really hard lesson to learn, even for brilliant people like Sam Altman (the CEO of OpenAI) who is now one of the richest people in the world…

He said this recently:

“The biggest economic misunderstanding of my childhood was that people got rich from high salaries.”

The truth is, it’s incredibly hard to build true wealth by trading your time for money.. the reason is because you only have so much time to exchange.

As Warren Buffet said:

“If you can’t find a way to make money in your sleep, you’ll be working until the day you die.”

Alright, this takes us to the third thing you have to stop doing to get out of the Poverty Trap:

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 3. Stop Being So Transactional

When we’re young, we’re positively reinforced for every little things we do.

“Good job, Julie. You got an A on your test. You’re so smart. Here’s a gold star. Keep it up and you’ll make honor roll.”

Over time we grow accustomed to getting a nice little pat on the head whenever we do something well…

Now, the problem with this is that we start to get a little entitled… and we stop doing things unless there’s some gonna be some sort of reward for that action.

For instance, I remember taking English 101 in college and on the first day of class the professor not only gave us a syllabus with all the required reading for the semester, but he also gave us a list of “recommended additional reading”.

Another student raised their hand and asked if there would be any bonus points given for reading those books, to which the professor said no.

That moment is so vivid in my memory because I recall thinking: “Then what’s the point in reading them?”

I was so fixated on the grade that it never occurred to me that the reason I was in school was, ya know… to actually LEARN something.

See, for me in my 20s, everything was a transaction and I carried this mindset into my work.

My thesis was simple: If you want more out of me, you’ll have to put more in.

I was entitled and expected to either be praised or compensated for every little thing I did.

As a result, I created a very linear relationship between my work and my pay.

I never went above and beyond, I did exactly as much as I thought was fair in exchange for how much I was getting paid.

In the end, this mindset held me back.. it’s the reason I was passed over for countless promotions.

I had to learn this lesson the hard way:

That if you extract equity for every little thing you do, your work will never compound…

Thus denying you the opportunity to achieve quadratic growth, which is what you need if you want to build true wealth.

So the easiest way to do this is by simply stretching the time horizon upon you which you expect to be compensated.

The minimum wage employee expects to be compensated at the end of each week.

The entrepreneur needs to be prepared to work for years before they get compensated.

Case-in-point, my partner and I launched Invictus Capital in 2019, but we didn’t a single dollar out of the company in the form of salary or distributions until 2023.

That’s 4 years of putting in the work before we were finally compensated for our efforts.

If you want to reprogram your mind for abundance (and not poverty), then you need to stop treating everything as a “this for that”.

Stop being so transactional and trust that great work never actually goes to waste… it might just take awhile to reap the fruits of your labor, but I promise.. when those fruits finally bloom, you’ll have far more than if you were constantly stripping that tree.

Alright, speaking of doing great work… the next thing that you’ve got to stop doing if you want to break out of the poverty trap is:

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 4. Stop Tolerating Mediocrity

In school, it didn’t really matter if you got an A or a C because in the end:

C’s get degrees.

In this game, excellence and mediocrity are rewarded equally.

Which reinforces the lesson that:

You will move forward in life so long as you put in the time and hit the minimum standard.

And this begs the question:

Why put in the extra time and energy creating something amazing when the prize for getting a 98 is the same as for getting a 72?

Well, here’s why:

Because in real life, where making money is concerned, being excellent at what you do is a decisive advantage.

Unfortunately, that’s not the lesson most people leave school with, and as a result, they never learn how to produce truly extraordinary work.

Instead, they’re just “putting in the time” and going through the motions…

And then they’re left confused why they aren’t getting ahead in life.

You can’t expect ordinary actions to yield extraordinary results. If you do what everybody else does, you’ll get what everybody else gets.

And the truth: Everybody else ain’t gettin’ all that much.

If you want to get ahead in the money game, never forget these immortal words from Will Durant:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

So remember: how you do anything, is how you do everything.

And the people most consistently winning the money game understand that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.

Alright, this leads us to the fifth thing we have to stop doing if we want to break out of the poverty trap:

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 5. Stop taking money advice from Poor People

Now, you’ve probably heard it said 1,000 times before that your Network is your Net Worth.

And this is true, but not for the reason most people think…

See, most people think the value of their network is based on what that network can do for THEM… on what opportunities that network can provide them.

And sure, if your family is good friends with the Dean at Harvard, then that doesn’t hurt your chances for sneaking past admissions.

But that’s not the true value of your network.

The true value of the people you surround yourself with is in their ability to challenge you to think differently, to set loftier goals, and to provide a standard against which you can measure your own actions.

If you’re the smartest person in the room, you need to get in different rooms, because every room reverts to the mean.

This means that if you’re the smartest, most hard working, and ambitious person in the room… you’ll slowly get pulled down…sucked down to the level of the people around you.

On the other hand, if you’re the dumbest, laziest, and least driven person in the room… you can’t help but to get pulled up to a higher level.

Here’s the brutal truth:

If you hang out with 5 alcoholics… you’ll probably become the sixth.
If you hang out with 5 millionaires… you’ll probably become the sixth.

Unfortunately, when you’re young, you don’t really have a choice about who you hang out with, right?

You’re more-or-less stuck with your family and classmates.

And because, like we’ve already established, MOST people have been programmed for poverty, this means most of what you’ve learned about money is coming to you from poor people.

Now, as a good general rule for life:

• Don’t take fitness advice from unhealthy people…
• Don’t take relationship advice from single 19 year olds…
• And don’t take financial advice from poor people.

But this, in a nutshell, is how the poverty programming trap perpetuates itself.

One poor person passing along well-intentioned, yet completely wrong advice to the next generation of poor people.

You will never get out of the poverty trap until you break this cycle to learn a different way of thinking about money.

Now, if you’re ready to reprogram your mind for wealth and abundance, then check out the video linked below called “This theory of INVESTING changed my life”.

I’ll catch ya over there!