Hey Folks,
Welcome back to part 3 of my “foundational books” review blog post series. I just made that name up right now, I feel pretty awesome about that. I should go back and edit my old blogs and make myself sound like a genius. Haha, no thanks. No covering up for me!
OK, onto the review. I’ll warn you outright; this book will try to get you to come to his weekend workshop. It also involves a lot of what I call “magical thinking” which probably won’t work for you and seems really hokey. However, if you can figure out what he’s trying to say the book is entirely gold.
First, the reason I think this book is pure gold is because it goes into the beliefs that we have about success and money. As you all know, from my other posts, that I am a big believer in changing your beliefs. This book gives you a huge swath of beliefs to choose from, to start digging into, and for me that is incredibly valuable. More often than not as I was reading this book I was thinking to myself “holy shit I actually believe that one.” Acknowledgement that you believe something is CRITICAL to changing it.
Ecker calls it the “money blueprint.” A set of beliefs that you have that all of your financial decisions stem from (including who to marry, what job to get, when to have kids, ON TOP OF all the stuff you buy). This is the bottom of your belief structure and while it might take you a long time to get there, once you start examining those beliefs you will come out on the other side transformed.
Yeah, I used the “t” word. I love that word! It’s awesome. For me, transformation is so much more important than simply “changing” or “fixing”. Changing and fixing approaches the problem as if it’s the actual problem. Transformation says “ok, what if the problem wasn’t in fact the problem, but something else was the problem?” It’s like trying to trim weeds by cutting the flowers. Eventually you know you have to try something different.
Ok, let’s get back to magical thinking. Simply stating out loud “I will be a millionaire someday” will not get you to be a millionaire someday. This is a lot of what Ecker says to do in his book. It might work for some, but for most it’s like trying to put whip cream on top of a plate of shit. You can’t heap nice things on top of shitty things and expect the shitty thing to be different. You have to get rid of the shit altogether. If you have one of the beliefs he talks about, such as “I just have to fix this next problem and I’ll finally make it!” then you will never make it no matter how much you say “I will make it!” You have to have a completely different attitude, something like “wow, this is a great opportunity” and THAT will be the way to make it.
I have to give Ecker credit though; doing this kind of belief work in a book is very challenging. It requires a lot of trust on the part of the person examining the belief and I only know how to do it in person after establishing a lot of trust. Coming up with a way to do it in a book is pretty awesome, even if it does come across as hokey and makes people who believe transformation is a cult leave bad reviews on Amazon.
When I finally make it as a coach (hahaha) I’m going to give all three of these books to every client of mine. They really form the trifecta of what I view are the three most important aspects of money; managing it, having a good attitude about it and having a long term goal with it. I’m really grateful for the authors (Ramit, Joe and Harv) having written these books and laid out such amazing groundwork for me to work from.
As always, please send me an email or leave me a comment here if you would like to discuss!
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