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Part 4 - Money, Success & Abundance

Money is a touchy subject. People who have it often don't want to talk about it. People who don't have it often resent the people who do. The advice industry around money is full of either get-rich-quick scams or austerity-minded frugality preachers, neither of which gets you anywhere worth being.

This part isn't a get-rich book. It's about the relationship between you and money: how to think about it, how to behave around it, and how to build a life where there's enough of it without it becoming the point of your life.

Money isn't something you chase. It's something that follows when you do the right things long enough. The right things are: create real value for other people, invest in yourself as the asset that compounds the most, write down what you want clearly enough that you can move toward it, and adopt the kind of relationship with money where you don't grasp at it and you don't waste it either.

The rest is mostly tactics.

4.1 - Adopt the right attitude to money

The right relationship with money sits between two failure modes.

On one side: wastefulness. Spending on status, on impulse, on things that don't make your life better, often to impress people you don't even like. Lifestyle as performance. Money flows in, money flows out, and you're never quite ahead.

On the other side: frugality bordering on stinginess. Saying no to small joys to save a few dollars. Refusing to spend on quality. Tipping badly. Saving everything and enjoying nothing. The scarcity mindset that says there isn't enough, even when there is.

Neither is the goal. The goal is a kind of relaxed sufficiency. You don't grasp at money. You don't waste it. You spend on things that genuinely improve your life and the lives of people around you, you save and invest the rest, and you give some of it away because the giving is part of the point.

Four practical orientations:

The attitude underneath all of this is abundance. Not the manifesting-influencer version of abundance. The real version: a quiet trust that there is enough, that more is coming, that you don't need to grasp, and that the way you handle what you already have shapes what's allowed to flow toward you next.

4.2 - Increase your value to society

This is the deepest principle in the whole part, and the one almost everyone skips over.

Your income, over a long enough timeframe, reflects the value you provide to other people. Not exactly, not perfectly, but roughly. People who create a lot of value for a lot of others tend to be paid well. People who create little value, or who create value for few, tend to struggle financially. There are exceptions in both directions, but the pattern holds.

This sounds harsh until you turn it around. If you want more income, the question isn't "how do I make more money?" It's "how do I create more value?" The first question puts you in a scarcity loop. The second one puts you in a contribution loop, which is a much better place to live and a much more productive place to operate from.

Concretely:

Most of the people earning a lot are earning a lot because they've spent years getting unusually good at solving a problem the world has. There are exceptions (inheritance, luck, financial engineering, status games), but if you look at the people who built something durable, this is the pattern.

The corollary is freeing. If your income feels stuck, the lever isn't to negotiate harder or hustle more. It's to become more valuable. That can take years. It also pays off for decades.

4.3 - Invest in yourself

You are the asset that compounds the most. Almost any other investment will be outperformed, over a lifetime, by money and time you put into your own capability.

A useful frame: treat yourself as a product or a business. What does this product need? What does it need to be worth more next year than this year? What knowledge, skills, tools, health, relationships, and experiences does it need to acquire? Then go acquire them.

A few specific moves:

Over time, a meaningful share of what you earn flows back into upgrading yourself. The exact percentage doesn't matter much; the orientation does. You as the asset is the most important thing you're building.

4.4 - Define your goals, write them down, and let go of the wanting

Energy follows attention. What you focus on grows. This is not woo. It's basic cognitive psychology: your brain looks for evidence and opportunities related to whatever you've been thinking about, while filtering out everything else.

The implication is that if you don't focus your attention on specific goals, your brain has nothing to organize around, and life happens to you instead of through you.

Writing your goals down sounds almost too simple to matter. It matters. The act of writing forces specificity, and specificity is what makes a goal something your brain can actually pursue. "I want to be successful" is not actionable. "I want to launch this specific business by this specific date, with these specific milestones" is.

A few orientations that help:

When you decide clearly what you want, write it down, hold it in your attention, and act in alignment with it consistently, something does change in how the world responds. Call it priming, call it confirmation bias, call it the universe, call it whatever helps you stay with it. The effect is real, and almost everyone who has built something meaningful describes some version of it.

The paradox: desire blocks what you desire

A subtler layer is worth understanding here, and it's one of David Hawkins's most useful contributions (see Chapter 2.1 on Letting Go).

Hawkins argues that the very presence of strong desire for something makes having it harder, sometimes impossible. The mechanism: desire is, by definition, the state of feeling you lack something. If you sit in the feeling of lack, that lack is what your nervous system is broadcasting, and lack is what gets reinforced. The wanting itself becomes the obstacle.

You've probably noticed this in your own life. The things you've wanted desperately, you often didn't get, or got only after you stopped grasping. The things you wanted in a calmer, more confident way tended to arrive. The state you're in matters as much as the goal you've set.

This sounds like a contradiction with the rest of this chapter (write down what you want, focus on it, hold it in your attention). It isn't, once you see the combined practice. The goals stay clear and specific. What dissolves is the desperate emotional charge of wanting them.

A practice that combines the two:

The state on the other side of this practice is the one that actually attracts. You're clear, you're committed, you're moving toward what you want, and you're no longer in the state of lack that was repelling it. People who operate from this state tend to get what they wanted more often, and tend to be much more at peace whether or not they get it.

Goals plus release. Clarity plus non-attachment. Both at once.

Let go of money you've already lost

The same practice works backwards too, applied not to what you want but to what you've already lost.

Years ago I was running a telecom company. One of our biggest clients was based in Lebanon and usually worked on prepaid basis. At some point he started asking for credit, and we extended it to him. Slowly the credit piled up to around $20,000, which he kept promising to pay "soon, soon." Eventually he just stopped paying altogether. I would call to remind him, and he'd refuse.

One day I called him and said: "Hey, this is your last chance to pay the money."

He laughed on the phone. "Or what? You're going to come here to Lebanon and find me and extort the money?"

I said: "No. What I'll do is I'll forget that you owe me. And then that will become your problem, because you won't."

He laughed again. "Fine, fine." We hung up.

And that's exactly what I did. I let it go. I accepted that he wasn't going to pay. I grieved the loss. And then I forgot it, like it had never happened.

About a year later, an opportunity came up. We had a cheap destination from a carrier that was open for a short window of time, and I needed someone who could buy that destination from us at high volume for a couple of months. I knew the client who had owed me money was exactly the kind of buyer who could move that volume. So I called him and offered the deal.

He got on the call, surprised. "Is there some kind of catch here?"

I said no.

"But I guess you want to get that money back, right?"

I said: "No. As I told you, that money is not owed to me anymore. I don't treat it as something you owe me. I forgot about it. That's why I can call you now and offer you this deal."

"Fine, let's do it," he said, puzzled. "But I'll give the money back."

I said: "If you send it to me, I'll return it. It's not my money. Give it to charity if you want. But don't send it to me."

He was shocked. In that moment, he felt the actual weight of what he had done. I was offering him a chance to make a lot of money on a deal, after he screwed me. The karma had returned to its sender, and there was nothing I needed to do about it.

But the bigger lesson, for me, was something else. If I hadn't let the original loss go, I wouldn't have been able to pick up the phone and offer him that deal. My pride would have stopped me. My anger would have stopped me. The opportunity cost of holding onto that grudge would have been about fifty times the original amount I'd lost.

The lesson generalizes. If you've lost money somewhere, don't beat yourself up. Don't keep grieving it. Feel the grief, let it go, release the emotion. If it comes back, let it go again. Do it until you don't feel it anymore.

Don't get stuck in resentment or regret over lost money, missed opportunities, chances you didn't take, things you could have done and didn't. These are some of the most expensive emotional states to live in - not because of what they cost in the past, but because of what they cost going forward. If you're stuck in regret or resentment, your eyes are pointed backwards, and you can't see what's coming next. The opportunities ahead of you are walking past while you stare at the ones behind.

Feel it. Release it. Then turn around.

4.5 - Don't save on the essentials

This is among the most expensive mistakes you can make: saving money on the things that determine your quality of life and your long-term health.

Food, especially. The lowest-cost food is usually the worst food, and the worst food is one of the highest long-term costs you'll pay (see Part 1 on well-being). Spending more on good food is not indulgence. It's the most direct investment in your future health, energy, focus, and longevity that you have. Pay for it.

Same goes for:

The principle: spend without flinching on the things that materially affect your daily existence and your long-term well-being. Save aggressively on things that don't.

This is the abundance mindset in practical form. You're not denying yourself the essentials to feel virtuous about saving. You're investing in the parts of your life that compound.

4.6 - Avoid debt

Compounding works in both directions. The same math that grows wealth slowly and surely over time also grows debt fast and ruthlessly when it's working against you.

Consumer debt (credit cards, buy-now-pay-later schemes, high-interest personal loans) is the most damaging form. Carrying a balance on a credit card at 20-plus percent interest is a wealth-destroying habit. It eats years of your income with nothing to show for it.

A reasonable orientation:

The deeper point: debt borrows from your future self. The more of your future income is already committed, the less freedom you have in the present. Freedom is the real currency. Don't trade it away for things you don't need.

4.7 - Don't rush to upgrade your lifestyle

When income goes up, the natural instinct is to upgrade. Bigger apartment. Nicer car. More expensive restaurants. New clothes. The instinct is so strong that many people who triple their income still feel exactly as stretched as they did before, because their lifestyle expanded to match.

This is called lifestyle creep, and it's one of the main reasons high earners are often broke.

A better approach: let your lifestyle lag your income for a few years. Bank the difference. Build the cushion. Build the investment portfolio. Build the optionality that comes from having money you don't immediately need.

This doesn't mean live like a pauper while making good money. It means upgrade thoughtfully and slowly, not as a reflex when the new paycheck hits. Each lifestyle upgrade resets your baseline. The new bigger apartment becomes the new normal, and now you need more to feel the same way. The treadmill never stops.

The people who get genuinely wealthy almost universally describe this discipline. Not because they were miserly. Because they understood that the gap between what you earn and what you spend is the actual building block of freedom, and lifestyle upgrades close that gap faster than almost anything else.

4.8 - Be generous

This one is small in absolute dollars and big in what it does to you.

Where it's culturally expected, tip well. When you can afford to, tip more than required. The person serving you is making a small amount of money for hard work, and a generous tip can make their day in a way the equivalent amount won't make a dent in yours.

Don't bargain over small amounts with people who have less than you. You can negotiate a car purchase. You can negotiate a salary. You don't need to negotiate with the street vendor over a couple of dollars. The signal you send to yourself when you scrape over small amounts with people who don't have much is: "I don't trust there's enough." That signal compounds.

Help where you can. Pick up the check sometimes. Give to people who need it. Share what you have when sharing matters. Generosity is not naive; it's one of the strongest signals you can send to yourself and to the world that there is enough, and more is coming.

All of these are small financial decisions, and none of them are really about the money. They're about the mindset you're practicing. People who tip well and don't haggle over small amounts with people who can't afford to give them up are practicing abundance in a daily, embodied way. Over years, that practice changes how money flows in your direction too.

4.9 - Maintain good financial karma

How you treat money in small ways shapes how money treats you over time. Call it karma, call it pattern, call it the cumulative weight of small choices. The principle is the same: behaving with integrity around money creates a life where money flows; behaving carelessly or selfishly around it creates a life where it doesn't, even when the numbers say it should.

A few practices that hold this whole orientation together:

Wealth tends to find people who already have a real, abundant, contributing relationship with money. It tends to avoid people who are clever in small dishonest ways. This isn't mystical. It's that the patterns we practice in small things show up everywhere, and people, opportunities, and outcomes notice over time.

Pay for what you use. Pay back what you owe. Don't take what isn't yours. Help where you can. The financial life that emerges from this kind of orientation tends to be much better than the one that emerges from trying to optimize every transaction.

4.10 - Read Naval

If you want to go deeper on all of this, read Naval Ravikant. He's a startup investor and writer who, over the last decade, has assembled the clearest modern framework on wealth, success, and how they relate to a good life. Almost everything in this part owes something to him.

Four things worth working through:

A few of the ideas you'll find there, which echo and extend what's in this part:

Spend a few weeks with his work. The ideas in this part will land deeper after.