by Jim Harmer
Money has been a great blessing for our family. It has allowed me to buy our family a fabulous home, go on vacations, and more importantly, to fix so many problems and stressors that come up by simply paying for a solution rather than stressing.
Yet money itself doesn’t make us happy. In fact, at some statistical point, money does absolutely nothing to make us happier. The journal Nature Human Behavior published a large study titled “Happiness, income satiation and turning points around the world” of over 1.7 million people, in which they asked about their income level and their satisfaction with their life (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0277-0). The study essentially found that if a person in North America earns between $65,000 and $95,000 per year, they are significantly more likely to have stable emotional well-being than those who earn less. Interestingly though, they found that happiness in life peaked at about the $105,000 per year income level for an individual (more for a household) and that those making more money than that were unlikely to be any happier. The phrase “Money can’t buy happiness” is unquestionably true, but it certainly can buy a reduction in stress if spent wisely.
This study confirms what I have experienced. When I was worried about my business’s survival and “making it,” I was extremely stressed. Then I reached a level where my motivations at work were more about making products for my audience that would delight them, working in the business just for the love of the competition, and enjoying the people I got to work with.
Years ago, a psychologist friend and I were talking around a campfire one evening. I asked him what his favorite question was to ask his patients to understand their problems and how he could help them. He said he started most of his sessions by saying, “Pretend with me that you have gone to sleep for the night, and now have just woken up. When you woke up, you found everything in your life is much better than the day before. What changed to make your life better?” I found the question to be rather intriguing. We talked about it at length and I was surprised to hear that around the campfire, every answer given was something to do with finances. They wished their debt was eliminated, or to win the lottery, or to be able to move to a bigger house, or get a raise at work, etc.
I continued asking that question in conversations for a very long time. I even asked the girl making my Sweet Onion Teriyaki foot-long at Subway one time, and the guy fixing my tires at the mechanic shop. I suspect I have asked that question of nearly 100 people over the years. Only three people have ever given me an answer that wasn’t a wish for financial gain. Not health, not relationships, not a stronger spiritual connection to God. No, it’s money the world wants.
I could finally understand it. The lack of money can be a major stressor in life and will largely control one’s time, yet it doesn’t take earning very much more money before a satiation point is reached, and suddenly, more money becomes irrelevant to one’s happiness.
One day at a family reunion, someone brought out a time capsule we’d buried five years prior. In it, there was a video message that we’d recorded to ourselves. Here’s what we had dreamed of: “We’ll probably be in our first house, and it’ll probably just be a little one. We’ll probably be saving up for a cruise someday. I’ll probably be working [as an attorney].” Ha. Our goals weren’t anywhere near where we’d ended up.
Yes, my business was successful, but as I looked back on my net worth calculator from the previous years as I tracked my personal finances, I realized there would be no way we could be where we were if we hadn’t spent the money we’d earned well. When most people have a high income, they live like it. They get a massive house on a mortgage and buy cars, vacations, and stuff.
Emily and I shared one base model Nissan Sentra for many years. She drove me to work and we crammed three little car seats in the back. We were millionaires before we bought a second car for our family. We lived in a starter home in a starter neighborhood and allowed ourselves just $200 per month each in buying fun stuff. Yes, our income was an amazing blessing for us, but we would have sunk under a pile of debt when the business dipped if we’d lived like most people would when they have a high income that they think will last.
Frugality had been a trait that served us very well, but I admit that sometimes we had it to a fault. I had an idea to give my kids a printed “golden ticket” for Christmas that they could redeem for a trip with Dad anywhere in the world. I hesitated and squirmed over whether or not I should do it for about a year. We had plenty of money, but it still just felt unnecessary and overly extravagant—even though it could be a really special experience for my boys to make memories with me one on one. In reality, there was nothing keeping me from doing it. We were saving and completely out of debt and had plenty to make it happen, but I still hesitated for too long.
Eventually, I pulled the trigger. I gave my two little boys a golden ticket. My older son, Ruger, cashed in his ticket for a trip to Japan. My younger son was only four at the time so I didn’t think he could handle much of a plane ride so we drove to a city a few hours away for a snowmobiling and skiing adventure in the mountains. At that age, he couldn’t really tell the difference between a few hours away and a few countries away, anyway.
Those two trips were perhaps the best two weeks of my life as a parent. Even four years later, I don’t think a single week has passed that the kids don’t mention something about those trips. Each child felt so special that I spent an entire week just with them individually. Cole and I talk about our snowmobiling adventure in Burgdorf, and Ruger and I talk about the snow monkeys and the terrible food in Japan.
I can hardly believe that I nearly missed those opportunities with my boys because I was pinching my pennies too hard and was almost too focused on work. I also realized that money should never be an excuse. I had as much fun with my 4-year-old in a city just a couple hours away as I did with my 7-year-old in a country far away. It wasn’t the money that made those experiences so special, it was the dedicated one-on-one time. Yet, in planning those trips, all I could focus on was the cost. It was the cost that nearly kept me from that memory.
After those trips were over, I returned to the business and was more motivated than ever to make progress. My goals for the following year were to simply reinforce the income streams of the business by bringing in more customers to the same offerings, improving the conversion rate on the website, and further diversifying the income. In short, I would focus on the simple actions in my business that had brought in 90% of the results and not get distracted by other things.
I did allow myself one side project, however, that I could work on as a way to diversify my income further. My one expansion project for the year was a new website where I would teach online business to others who wanted to create their own website businesses. I originally titled the website ColdFishSticks.com—remembering the experience of eating cold fish sticks in the Florida hotel room with Emily when we were poor. Quickly, however, I realized that was the dumbest possible name for a website, and I changed it.
I spent an entire day trying to find a new domain name for this new website. Finding a good domain name is hard because there are hundreds of millions of websites and most of the good .com domains are taken. I got the idea to title the site “Income School,” a site about how to earn an income.
Unfortunately, the domain name “IncomeSchool.com” was already owned by someone else. I looked up his name and contact information by doing a “Who Is” search, and I called him on the phone. He wanted $10,000 for the name, but I was able to negotiate the price down to $2,000. For a short and memorable name like “Income School,” I felt it was a bargain.
I decided that on this website I’d share every detail of how I created a site, got website traffic, and then monetized it. I included every detail—with screen recordings of me doing every step so that anyone could learn to do it.
I even created a video course showing every detail of how I made the flash sale that had earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single week. I h
ad to laugh when a customer emailed in a complaint that they didn’t think the strategy was helpful for them. I had sold this person an exact step-by-step recipe that had earned me hundreds of thousands of dollars in a week by using a unique tactic that I hadn’t seen others in the market employing, and yet this guy didn’t feel it was worth $50 to learn. Why? Because he saw an incredible result, and immediately his mind told him that he didn’t belong there, couldn’t do the same thing, and should instead flee from the opportunity.
Humans are lazy lumps of lard when it comes to opportunity. We flee from opportunity and success by nature. We are one of the only living beings capable of making long-term decisions, and even so we aren’t particularly good at it. When we stare opportunity in the face, we fear what that new thing may bring into our lives, and we shrink down to the comfortable place we have always been.
I have a mental image I imagine any time I feel myself fleeing from a new opportunity that seems intimidating. It’s strange, I’ll warn you, but it works for me. I picture an anaconda catching a rabbit. Side note: I have no idea if anacondas even eat rabbits. I picture it coiled up all around the rabbit and ready to squeeze the life out of it. Then it coils its head back, about to plunge its mouth around the rabbit. It stares the rabbit straight in the eyes, and … it gets squeamish, loses its appetite, and slinks away. That’s what we do when we have opportunities and flee from them. Instead, we need to stare success right in the eyeballs and give the anaconda squeeze. Crush the life out of the opportunity and go in for the kill.
I want to illustrate the importance of my bizarre “anaconda squeeze” analogy with a true story. I had a meeting with a man who was relatively unknown until a few months previous when his book went viral. Almost overnight, he had 300,000 readers talking about his book.
After a chance meeting, I struck up a conversation with him and found out that he was struggling to monetize the audience he had grown, and the book royalties were almost all taken by the publisher. My jaw hit the floor. With an audience of his size and in the niche he was in, he should have been earning six figures per month but he hadn’t yet figured out how to capitalize on his idea.
I had worked with online audiences for years and knew exactly how he could create a business around the audience he had grown. I set up a meeting with him and pitched him on a business venture which had virtually no downside for him.
I started the meeting by saying, “Look, today I want to write you a massive check—bigger than you’ve received in your entire life.” You’d think that would make anyone feel ecstatic, right? Nope. I could immediately read the expression on his face, and it wasn’t excitement. It was terror. The anaconda lost his stomach for success.
He experienced a lot of success in a short amount of time, and his subconscious was intent on pulling him back down to where he was before the success. He felt, “I don’t belong here. This is dangerous. I’m outta here!” He told me he was very interested and excited by the idea and would get back to us in a few days with a decision. As soon as we left the meeting, I told the others that he was going to decline the offer. I knew the anaconda had lost its stomach for further success.
Now that you recognize what an upper-limiting problem is, you’ll see it everywhere. Whitney Hansen from The Money Nerds Podcast was so excited about her idea for a podcast that she called in sick to work to record 16 episodes in two days. Then? She never released the podcast for over a year because she felt too scared to launch. She had an idea and saw the potential for it, took the first steps and started to taste early success, so her mind fought her to stop and turn back to the safe life she’d lived before. It’s a good thing she broke through her upper-limit problem. She now gets 50,000 downloads per month.
Action Step Eight: Go Read The Big Leap
No, this isn’t an advertisement. No, the author of the book The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks, is not my brother-in-law who I’m trying to help out. I’ve never met him, but honestly, that book is so vitally important at this step of your journey in becoming a goal animal that it’s mandatory reading. Go read The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks (The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level, HarperOne, 2010). What we just discussed in this chapter about reaching an upper limit to your success and backing down from opportunity is exactly what the entire book is all about. My ability to reach higher goals has significantly increased after reading that book.
Anyway, I was telling you about the book The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. It was as if the author had seen deep into my soul and helped me see things I had no idea were there. In the book, Hendricks describes what he calls the “upper-limit problem” and how one of the things that keeps us from transcending is that we are stuck doing work that is not within our “zone of genius.”
The upper-limit problem means that we achieve some level of success, and we immediately work to bring ourselves back down to mediocrity. We feel uncomfortable being super-performers because we have told ourselves so many negative things about ourselves that it doesn’t feel like who we really are.
At first when I began listening to the book, I didn’t realize I was allowing myself to frequently hit an upper limit of happiness and success before coming back down to mediocrity. Yet now I notice myself doing it on an almost weekly basis. Before I took my family on an amazing vacation, I found myself stressed to the max with my websites and working from early morning to late at night.
My wife asked me what I was so worried about. I told her there was a dip in traffic on one of my sites and I wasn’t sure what was causing it. She asked me if it was normal to see a very temporary dip in traffic like this. I realized it was. Yes, it’s perfectly normal to see fluctuations if one of the articles hasn’t been shared around on social media lately or if it’s the holiday season when fewer people are searching online. Suddenly, I realized there was no actual problem. The week prior was Christmas. There is always a dip in traffic the week of Christmas, and I knew that perfectly well. The issue was not that I couldn’t figure out the problem. What was actually happening was that I just had a wonderful Christmas season with my family. I had hardly checked on work at all for weeks. We were just about to go on an amazing vacation with the kids. The problem was that I had hit an upper limit of happiness and success. I felt out of control because I felt like I should be worried about something or working hard on some insurmountable problem, or else this happiness and success would go away. I had an upper-limit problem.
I even feel this problem creeping into my life right now. While I have worked on this book for years, now that the January 1 publishing date grows closer, I feel myself wanting to hold back and not open myself up for criticism. I find myself saying, “People are going to rip this book to shreds in their reviews. It won’t matter that I talk about so many of my failings and weaknesses. They’ll just focus on the fact that I talk about achieving my goals and they’ll say I’m self-centered and conceited.” That may be true, but I think the actual fear is upper-limiting.
You have analyzed your work energy, decided on what you need to work on and what actions will get you there, and you’re seeing your first bricks stacked up behind your house. Now is when the problems start. In the last chapter, you learned how to avoid good ideas at this point, and now you are going to read The Big Leap and learn how to not upper-limit yourself.
“Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.”
—Suzy Kassem
With my main site stabilized and a new small team working to help me maintain the 90% actions in the business, I felt ready to slowly expand my business again. I had learned so much from my mistakes that I wanted to start over from scratch, so I decided to grow a second site.
I would apply the same work energy formula to my work on this second site. Essentially, I would pick a topic for the site and focus only on creating one new piece of content each day—the 90% action. Along the way, I’d feed my work energy by waking up each morning and looking at my stats of traffic from the site. Nothing motivates me
like looking at those orange dots on the map showing people around the world visiting my sites. “Look at me, Ma! People are coming to my website!” Then, after I achieved solid traffic to the site by groundhogging the 90% action, I would continue those actions as I began to optimize the business for further monetization.
One day I was looking over websites for sale when I found a listing for a survival site. The site was earning a couple thousand dollars per month, but had strong traffic. I bought it for $32,000. After the purchase, I immediately changed the organization and design of the site to one I knew from experience would do better. Within a matter of weeks, the site traffic and income spiked. I hired a teenager to write a few more articles on the site, but eventually that stopped as well. I simply left the site and did not do any further writing on it for a few years. I had never left a site like this and thought the traffic would go down quickly, but I was wrong.
Actually, the rankings on search engines were consistent for many years, even when I added no new content. The site grew to earn over $5,000 per month consistently and I eventually sold it for $184,000. With the purchase price and the money I’d earned on the site for the years I’d owned it, I made 15 times my original $32,000 investment.
Building From Scratch
It was time for another website, and again I applied the same work energy formula for accomplishing the goal. This time the topic was boats. For many months, I’d saved money and eyed boats. I am not from a boating family and had never water-skied in my life, but who wouldn’t love the wind in their hair as they magically walked on the water? I spent many hours researching boats and finally settled on a gorgeous new 32-foot pontoon boat with a 150hp engine. I drove to the dealership and wrote a check for the boat. The salesman asked me if I wanted any help hooking it up to my truck when I suddenly realized I didn’t even own a truck, and I’d just bought a very large and very heavy boat. Not kidding. That’s how well planned this was. I’ve always been more of a “ready, fire, aim” type of person. I sold one of our vehicles and traded for a truck the next day so I could drive my purchase home.
