We’re revisiting my trip to see Dan in Cleveland, and today, Dan Kennedy and I are discussing the factors that keep business owners from achieving financial success.
You must have the right mindset and behavior to be successful.
Did you know we are less than one month away from our big event in Cleveland? Join me, Dan, and many other like-minded business owners on July 8th and 9th in Cleveland, Ohio.
Book your seat at paulgough.com/dan and email paul@paulgough.com if you have any questions.
P.S – Watch the full video interview on my YouTube channel here:
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[Paul Gough] What’s the one thing that keeps people stuck from ever getting to that type of life, do you think?
There are millions of business owners, but very few of them are living the type of life that they want.
What do you think?
[Dan Kennedy] There’s never a good answer. I hate the question. No offense.
But a big one is that they are in their own way cycle emotionally.
People have really bad relationships with money and a lot of it is, what did they hear at the top of the stairs when they were 8.
You know, conditioning, we’re then reinforced by experience, everything from actual practical financial illiteracy, which unfortunately our country is overrun with.
To all this cycle of emotional stuff and if you don’t understand that and you don’t like it, you don’t do something to change it and replace it.
It’s like dragging weights behind you in a marathon race. Everybody else is running free and you’ve got 150lbs of weight tied to your belt that you’re dragging down the road.
so that’s one part of the equation, I think. Another part of the equation is that people don’t understand, they don’t know why money moves from person to person, place to place, and how to be in sync with that rather than in conflict with that.
And that includes what we were just talking about is the idea that, if I’m really good at what I do, that should be enough, right?
Because that’s what I was told. And they think that’s why money.
But it’s not. It’s just not. It’s not how money works.
There’s a practical understanding of the truth about why money moves.
It’s always emotion, by the way. And there’s no shortage of it.
Despite what some politics may claim for reasons of their own. Walt Disney was right.
“There’s no shortage of money. There’s just a shortage of imagination and initiative.”
No shortage of money.
But there’s a lot of misunderstanding about its rules. Why it does this, why it does that.
If you’re going to play pool, billiards, this is a mini billiards table.
If you’re going to play billiards at a competitive level, you have to really understand physics, right?
Because shooting pool is about angles.
And you’re also going to understand physics to a certain extent.
Golf? You’ve got to understand why the ball does what it does when you hit it this way versus that way, etc..
You’ve got to know if you’re good at sailing. There’s all sorts of stuff you’ve got to know about how the wind works, right.
If you’re going to turn, if you’re going to get wealthy and you’re going to keep it, which is a whole other topic of conversation, then you have to know how money works.
And candidly, most business people do not. And so those two things, the understanding and the kind of, the relationship with it.
There’s a whole- I talk a lot about wealth intimidation, that people have been persuaded and have embedded that even wanting it, planning to have it, demanding it of a business or a practice for exchange of value, is- it makes them squeamish.
It’s somehow, you know, unseemly.
But you don’t get what you don’t play it for
Well, if you do, it’s generally stuff you don’t want.
Money has to feel welcome and accepted and respected in order to move to and stay in a place, so you see it all the time.
See, we’ve been trying to cure poverty with money since FDR and really on an accelerated basis, since LBJ.
Yeah, that’s a lot of years. We have poured just awesome amounts of money into the war on poverty, and we’re- we’re losing the war worse in 2023 than we were in 1998.
All we’ve done is actually produce more and deeper poverty because no matter how much money you give to somebody, if they have a bad relationship with money and they don’t understand money, they will find a way to disgorge it.
It will be taken from them.
If we give people stamps, food stamps, but we don’t teach them how to intelligently shop all the way down to simple stuff like, yeah, the convenience store at the corner accepts this, but this is not where you ought to buy your groceries right?
And here’s why. Guess what?
The money moves from the poor person to the rich person that owns the convenience store.
And so, and then we build a poverty industry around this.
Most of the money, of course, it disappears into the industry.
It doesn’t even go to the poor. We’ve waged the wrong war from the very beginning.
If we had waged a war of education, and motivation, and opportunity, we would have a lot less poverty.
And if you have a kind of a low poverty consciousness here and you can’t win that war by trying to increase your income.
There is a mindset issue to this and there’s a practical behavioral issue and then a practical business issue, and they all interrelate.