How to Win the Money Game
The Amplified Impact Podcast
October 25th, 2023
Today, let’s dive into a captivating aspect of human psychology and how we relate to money.
Money can be a heavy subject…it’s often associated with stress and taboos.
But here’s the deal: we can change the way we perceive it. It’s all about reframing our expectations.
We tend to adapt quickly to new financial situations, so here’s the key. Approach money with a “must-win” attitude, not as optional.
When you see it as a necessity, you play the Money Game differently.
Remember, money is a tool. It can do a lot of good, and it’s not about greed.
So, let’s change the way we see it and make it work for us in the game of life.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Winning the money game gets a whole lot easier when you stop treating it as optional.”
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
All right. So one of the things that’s always really fascinated me about the human experience is how quickly we adapt or normalize to a situation and how just our expectations of what is normal really dictates the reality that we create for ourselves in a lot of ways. And I think about this through the lens of money in one sense, because I think it’s a framework that we all can understand. It’s a game that we all have to play. The Money Game is something that we talk a lot about here on this podcast, but it’s definitely not something that I used to think about as a game as I was going through my twenty s. I didn’t think of it like that. It seemed more of like this I don’t know, it seemed so much heavier than a game. It seemed so much more dire.
Anthony Vicino:
The consequences of money and everything that it stood for. And the idea of making money felt so much heavier and harder and more serious and more I don’t know. You think about when you’re a kid and you think about money. You think about men in fat cat suits with their pinstripes and their ties, and they’re in boardrooms. And I didn’t want anything to do with that. That wasn’t my idea of a good, fun life. And so I kind of rebelled against that through my twenty s and went off and did my own thing, not really realizing that money, though, it could be whatever you want it to be, it doesn’t have to be this big, serious thing. But because there’s so many taboos in our society and our cultures, our families, we don’t talk about money very often.
Anthony Vicino:
And when we do, it’s kind of almost with shame. That adds to the weight of the topic for a lot of people. And one of the things that’s really helped me in the course of winning the Money game, or at least playing it better, was reframing how I thought about it to actually make it a game, something playful, something to be enjoyed, something that we play because it’s not life or death, but because we choose to do it. Now, granted, when I was living in the back of the van and I was like dead broke and I was like, having to do the mental jujitsu of, okay, I got $20 left in my bank account. Am I putting gas in the car or am I getting dinner? I get that at that point it doesn’t feel like a game. It’s not very much fun. But when I started to reframe my expectations around money, the whole game changed. And we talked about this on this pod previously, about the idea of your baseline money temperature, which is that there’s probably an amount of money that you considered normal or achievable.
Anthony Vicino:
And for me, for a long time, that might have been like $100. For a long time, I remember I was probably like 28, 29 years old when I made $40,000 for the first time ever. Like, before that, I’d been a professional rock climber. I’d been working all these side jobs and everything, making, I don’t know, 25, $35,000 a year. And I had 40,000 in my head as like, that’s a lot of money. That’s a good amount out. And so when I finally made that, I kind of felt like I was swimming in the gold booyons. And then you quickly acclimate to that, right? But I spent a while at 40,000 thinking that was a good amount of money, because a lot of that had to do with the fact that my expenses were so low.
Anthony Vicino:
And so I didn’t have kids. I didn’t have any big responsibilities. I was just kind of a 20 year old dude out there in the world living in the back of a van. So my expenses were low. So 40,000, that went a long way in the course of my life. But I remember before that moment of 40,000, I would think about 40,000 as a lot. And then once I started making it, it became the new normal. And so much of my experiences with moving up through the levels of monetary wealth, the surprising thing on that is that a lot of times what moves the needle isn’t some new action, isn’t some new skill or some new applied resource.
Anthony Vicino:
It is simply just a reframing of expectations. The belief that this new amount of money is doable, is achievable, is not daunting, that it should be normal. So that’s going from saying spending $100 on a thing is okay or normal to suddenly that’s $1,000 or idea of making $100 a day versus $1,000 a day versus $10,000 a day. The thing that really moved me up through those levels was more of the belief that next level should be normal, that it shouldn’t be hard, and that more so than anything else, is what has really moved it the needle the most. But that’s an easy thing to say. It’s actually very hard in practice to live because humans are really good at expectation setting. That’s one of the things that separates us from the animals is our ability to forecast into the future a reasonable outcome, and then we can pivot and hopefully not die. That’s what the ability to future cast allows us to do.
Anthony Vicino:
And so we’re pretty good at it, and we’re not great at bullshitting ourselves because that would potentially get us killed out in the savannah. And so it’s not one of those things that you can just kind of fake it till you make it and be like, yeah, a million dollars is my new normal. And I think that’s where a lot of people go wrong when it comes to the affirmations. They look in the mirror and they’re like, money flows abundantly to me and all this stuff, and that doesn’t really work that way because fake it till you make it doesn’t work because it doesn’t fool the people that need to be fooled. And the most important person that would need to be fooled in that equation is yourself. And you could tell yourself like, a million dollars is no big deal, but if you don’t deep down in your balls, believe it or ovaries believe it, then it’s not going to come to fruition. And so the thing more so than that mental jujitsu of saying this is the new normal, what I found helpful is to play the money game differently, to go at it with a different intent, with a different intensity. And I tweeted about this the other day that winning the money game gets a whole lot easier when you stop treating it as optional.
Anthony Vicino:
When you go into the game and you start treating it as I have to win this game, you start playing it differently. And you know this from your own personal experience because I’m sure there’s been times in your life where your back has been up against a wall. You got a bill, you got a tax bill or something came out of the blue, a medical expense that you didn’t expect. Suddenly you were floating along and you’re accustomed to making $1,000 and having $1,000 of expenses every month. And now you got this new bill and you got to come up with another 1000 or $5,000 in the next 30 days or everything’s going to fall apart. And somehow, some way, you found a way to get that money, whether that’s going and taking more shifts or getting a side job, going to work with somebody else or selling some stuff on Craigslist, you found a way to get the money. And I think the reason that you did is because you had no choice but to do that. And when you start to go towards your money making journey with that type of intention, which is I have to do this, there is no other option.
Anthony Vicino:
Like I have to achieve this, then winning the game becomes very easy. But taking that type of intensity into every single day and playing the game all out and leaving it all on the court, that’s hard and that’s why most people don’t do it. But it’s actually a relatively easy reframe. If you just go into every day like today you’re waking up and you’re saying, I want to make more money. Okay, well, it’s not a want, it’s a need, it’s a must. So what are you going to do? This is morbid. But one way that you can kind of motivate yourself here is to think about like worst case scenario. Imagine a scenario where a loved one is sick or dying or something’s happened and you need that money to go do the thing, to go help them to save their life and use that as the motivation to get out there and do the thing.
Anthony Vicino:
And that’s something that still to this day surprises me. When I want something, typically, like when I want to go buy something that’s kind of expensive, I don’t like pulling out of resources, like my savings or anything like that. I think about, okay, what am I going to go do to make that extra money so that I can have that thing? So if I wanted to go buy something for $5,000, I’d sit down and say, okay, what am I going to do today to make an extra $5,000 so that I can have that thing completely guilt free and just playing that money, that one’s important for me in the sense that I could just go buy the thing. But by making it a challenge to say, I need to play the game hard today to get this result, it’s different. You’re no longer coasting through the money game, which I think is very important if you actually want to win, and you have to want to win. That’s the other part of it, too. If you don’t really want to win the money game, then you’re never going to. As with all things in life that require practice and obsession to get great at, if you want to be great at money, you got to kind of obsess over it, and you have to be okay with that.
Anthony Vicino:
You have to give yourself permission because a lot of people will tell you, oh, that’s greedy, and it’s bad. And it’s not because you can do a lot of good with money. You can take care of yourself, your family, your community, the world. You can do all sorts of things that are fantastic with money. Trust me, it’s awesome. It’s way better than the times when I didn’t have it. So don’t deem humanize it, but all right, that’s going to do it for me, guys. I’ve been rambling for a while here.
Anthony Vicino:
I appreciate you all. Catch you guys in the next episode.
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