Hey, Radicals, quick thank you before we begin today's podcast. Last week, I published the announcement for the inaugural Radical Family Camp happening in Indiana in April, and I put tickets on sale last week. As of today, all of the tickets are sold out for that event, which is just outstanding.

For an inaugural event, to sell out all the tickets in a week just blows me away, and I'm really, really grateful to you for your response. I rented an entire church camp. I have 28 cabins, and they're pretty high capacity, but as of today, those have all been filled.

And so I have created a wait list. I'm working to see if I can get access to a handful more cabins. I rented an entire complex of this large church camp that's there in Indiana, but there's a handful more cabins that I may be able to get next to the primary complex that I have there.

So if you are interested, make sure you go to RadicalFamilyCamp.com, put your name on the wait list, and we'll see if we can increase that just a little bit. Otherwise, hopefully, this inaugural event will go swimmingly well, and hopefully, every attendee will be thrilled with the event, and hopefully, we can do them more in the future in other places around the country.

But just a big, solid, hearty thank you from me. I really appreciate your response, and I'm excited to spend a really great time with you. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets, and today, I want to talk to you about mindset. Mindset is something that is clearly important in wealth building, and yet, it is something that has been difficult for me to talk about because I don't get into just kind of frou-frou, airy-fairy ideas. I want to really understand how my mind works in order to then harness it for my own purposes.

And today, I'm ready to talk to you about one component of mindset. I want to begin with a tweet. This comes from some random Twitter user named John Lefevre, and he writes this. I'm not exactly sure what the date on this is, probably a month or two ago. I've been waiting on this.

I had it in my files for a while, waiting to comment on it. "Could the outlook get any more bleak? Housing has never been more expensive. Transportation has never been more expensive. Food and energy have never been more expensive. Credit card debt has never been higher. Household savings have never been lower.

Health insurance has never been more expensive. Americans have never been fatter. Inflation is here to stay. Higher rates are here to stay. The labor market is cooling. Government spending and our national debt have never been higher. Our nation is politically and culturally divided. Geopolitical instability is fermenting," I think he meant fomenting, "is fermenting around the globe.

Illegal immigration has never been higher. Crime is exploding. World War III is a legitimate possibility. The constitution is under attack. The justice system has been corrupted and broken. The party in power is weaponizing the judicial branch to silence its leading opponent and calling for the deprogramming of 75 million citizens." That's the tweet.

Now, here's how we need to look at the world. We need to begin, before we ever go out into the world and look at things, we need to begin by consciously, excuse me, self-consciously examining our own perspective. As I approach my fifth decade of life, I am increasingly convinced that all of us go out into the world and we see exactly what we believe.

We see what we believe. We do not believe what we see. On the contrary, we go out and we see what we believe. I want to give you a long list of proof for that statement. Words fail me. You test it for yourself and you see if you don't find evidence to confirm your belief in what I have said.

But to me, this is something that I see all the time. And if true, that means that we need to be very careful about what we believe. The simplest example we can begin with is the classic discussion about the difference between a pessimist and an optimist. A pessimist is one who looks at the glass of water and says, "The glass is half empty." An optimist is one who looks at the glass of water and says, "The glass of water is half full." Now, the facts of the height of the level of the water column in the glass are not under dispute.

There is 50% capacity, 50% of the glass's capacity is filled with water. But the way that you interpret those facts or that fact is very much dependent on you and on your belief and/or some practical application. This is goofy, but it's real. I have to consistently teach my children not to fill water glasses to the normal 80% capacity because then when they get knocked over at our dinner table, we have quite a mess.

And so I teach them to fill our glasses to about 30% capacity so they're less top heavy and we have fewer messes at our dinner table. And so even the fact of the glass being 50% filled in and of itself can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on context.

It's all dependent on your perspective. Life is not as simple as these "facts" that this particular Twitter user is writing about. Some of these facts are clearly correct, I would guess. I mean, World War III is a legitimate possibility, and it has been a legitimate possibility ever since the end of World War II.

It is and will always be a legitimate possibility until it happens, and then World War IV will be a legitimate possibility. And it's up to us as human beings and what we do as to whether or not it will in fact happen and whether it happens in our lifetime.

Similarly, some of these things are clearly incorrect, clearly false. Household savings have never been lower. Nonsense, right? We go back a couple hundred years and household savings didn't exist in a monetary form. Now, I'm not here to be the hyperbole police. I'm just simply pointing out to you that whether you accepted all those statements as facts or not has a lot to do with your mindset, with your preconceived ideas.

And all of us do this. The problem that we need to face quite straightforwardly is that the way that we perceive the world about us impacts our actual lifestyle decisions. Here's another tweet from a user called SpaceBiker1488. Don't you love Twitter? "The worst part about political doomerism is that it encourages you to flee power.

Get out of the cities. Don't invest. Don't start a business. Don't run for office. Just hide in the woods waiting to die." And I think that tweet is quite appropriate because this user really does point out the truthfulness that certain mindsets, you basically seal your fate if you adopt certain mindsets.

And so what we need to be very consciously careful of is the kinds of beliefs that we have, the kinds of beliefs that we build into our mindsets, into our psyche, into our basic functioning paradigm. Here, I want to introduce a very valuable email from a listener of mine who wrote to me several weeks ago.

And this listener wrote to me from Alabama. He says, "Hi, Joshua. I enjoyed your episode 993 about wealth and poverty being contagious and agree with your ideas. Nicely done. I've previously run across a philosophical term which relates to the idea you expressed toward the end of the episode that I thought you might enjoy knowing.

Metaphorical truth versus literal truth. Metaphorical truth refers to an idea that's not literally true, but is so useful and advantageous to accept and follow that one should act as if it is literally true. A great example is all guns are loaded. It's not literally true, but it serves one well to act as if it were.

Thank you for all your great work." And thank you, Wayne, for writing me the email because this is, I had not heard the term, but it perfectly encapsulates the point that I was driving at in that episode and the point that I want to drive at today. Metaphorical truth is something that you can choose to affirm as being true because of its usefulness to your life.

As a lifelong gun user, gun owner, et cetera, I live by the truth of the statement that all guns are always loaded. I assume that all guns that I touch, all guns that I handle are always loaded. And it really doesn't matter if I've checked it once, I'm going to check it two more times.

It doesn't really matter if there's a flag in the breach. I'm still going to check it myself. And I'm probably not going to look down the barrel of the gun until I've verified three or four times that this gun truly is unloaded. And so the point is to say that there are things that you can call to be true.

You can say all guns are loaded. They are always loaded until you've proven about five or six times that they're not loaded. And then you finally accept that, okay, this gun in this case, it's literally true that it's not loaded, but we are very slow to get there. Now, in most things in life, we're probably not going to be so precise about every single thing that we believe, but we should take a very careful inventory of the beliefs that we have because the beliefs that we have about life are going to basically serve up the life that we have.

So for example, somebody takes that doomerism philosophy, everything is falling apart, get out of the cities, run away to the woods, it's the only place that you can go and just hide away. Well, as this user, SpaceBiker says, that really is going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of seeking to fight to change things, instead of going and becoming highly educated and forming a committee to change something or forming an organization to fight against something or becoming a judge or a lawyer or a businessman or whatever, you're just never going to do any of those things because you've got a doomerist fatalist mindset that's going to lead to your being impotent.

And so because you believe that you're going to be impotent, you're actually going to be impotent. What you believe about yourself, what you believe about your life, what you believe about your opportunities is probably going to come true. There's many statements by many famous and successful men that whether you believe something to be true, it is true for you.

If you don't believe it to be true, it's not true for you. And our world, sometimes we're just so awash in stories and examples of people who have created just incredible opportunities for themselves just simply due to the ferocity of their belief, when outside circumstances would lead none of us to say that somebody should believe something.

I want to give you another example. And to be clear, I'm speaking in analogies, because I don't want you to resist what I'm saying by following your preconceived beliefs about the job market is terrible, I can't find an opportunity. That's why I'm speaking in analogies. But this example that I'm about to give you is rather poignant.

It's a little bit uncouth, it's not excessively vulgar, but it's a little bit uncouth. This comes from John Morrow again on Twitter. And here is John Morrow's tweet. I always thought I would die a virgin. I'm in a wheelchair. I have less strength than a toddler. I need help eating, going to the bathroom, everything.

Guys like me didn't get laid. It was just a fact of life. But a part of me wondered, what if I'm wrong? In my 30s, I decided to test it. I hired a dating coach and started asking 10 women a day to have coffee with me. 10 years later, I've been on over 500 dates, four relationships of two plus years, two marriage proposals.

I said no both times. And my love life would make Hugh Hefner blush. Moral of the story, test your beliefs to find out if they are true. You might find the cage around you exists only in your mind. And from John's Twitter profile, the amazing guy, born paralyzed, hundreds of broken bones, pneumonia 16 times, built a business using a lip operated mouse, traveled the world.

You have no excuses. And if you look at a picture of John on his Twitter profile, he is profoundly disabled. I don't need to make the point more obvious, but any male red pill dating coach would come along and say, "Yeah, this guy, he's got nothing. He's got nothing." And yet, John's experience demonstrates the opposite.

Be very careful what you believe, because you're going to find in life whatever you believe. So, what can you and I do? Well, we can begin by systematically installing into our mindset appropriate beliefs. We can do that systematically, if not regularly. What I mean is that real belief takes an idea, a concept, and it looks for evidence of that.

I have a belief system that says that almost anything is possible. But that belief system has been buttressed by many, many examples. And so, when I come across a post by a paralyzed man, John Morrow, on Twitter, the one I just read you, then I just see constant reinforcement of my beliefs, because I've cultivated these beliefs, and then I've found evidence for the beliefs.

So, therefore, the beliefs get stronger and stronger and stronger. And the same thing happens the other side. If you cultivate a belief that is a negative belief, then all you see is constant and never-ending reinforcement of those beliefs. And I don't want to give you a lot of financial beliefs, but what I do want to give you is some mindset beliefs that will lead to your developing your own financial beliefs.

Maybe in the future, we'll talk about specifics of money. But here are some beliefs that I think are very useful. I'm now drawing this list from a man named Dickie Bush. Once again, I've built this entire show on tweets, so I hope you enjoy my show built on tweets.

But this comes from Dickie Bush. Dickie is a very popular writer. He left Wall Street Investment Banking, something like that, to build a writing business. And he's just a very wise and intelligent guy. I really enjoy his content. But he posted and shared nine core beliefs that shape the way that he sees the world.

And I think this is a good example of beliefs that you should consider adopting for yourself. Because whether these beliefs are literally true or metaphorically true really doesn't matter. They're true enough that if you adopt them as true, you will get better results in your life, in your finances, in every aspect of your life by simply adopting these things to be true.

Here's belief number one. Everything in this world is 100% rigged in your favor. I repeat, everything in this world is 100% rigged in your favor. When you go out into the world believing that there is a powerful force that is – I'm choosing to use non-Christian language for a moment.

I don't know. I don't even know how you do it. I believe that there is a sovereign God who has divinely orchestrated every single event in my life for my good and for my well-being, every single one of them. Now, whether I experience those things as what we commonly call blessings or whether I experience those things as whether we commonly call trials to me is entirely immaterial.

If it's a blessing, then I'm going to rejoice in the blessing. If it's a trial, I'm going to rejoice in the trial, and I'm going to let the trial have its work in me. So, this is something that, as a Christian, is very easy for me to accept because I consider it to be absolutely true.

I consider it to be literally true and metaphorically true that everything in this world is 100% rigged in my favor and that everything is that I have, again, an omnipotent sovereign God who is manipulating world circumstances for my good. It's a powerful belief, and I submit it to you for your consideration.

Everything in this world is 100% rigged in your favor. Number two, every circumstance is an opportunity for progress. Every circumstance is an opportunity for progress. Now, we appreciate the wins. We appreciate the things that we can boast about, the things that we can express joy over of our great wins.

I'm rejoicing that my event sold out in less than a week. It's wonderful. It's fantastic. But let's say it hadn't. Could I have learned something? Was there an opportunity for progress? Enormous opportunities for progress. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you learn. But you have to build a big, strong stack of failures and learning events, etc., in order to ultimately win at the highest level.

And so one of the things that we need to cultivate in ourselves is an appreciation that all circumstances are opportunities for progress. Number three, every outcome in your life is 100% your responsibility. Every outcome in your life is 100% your responsibility. Now, notice the words. People are quick to say, "Every outcome in life is not 100% my fault.

It's not my fault." No, the word is not fault. I would not affirm the idea that every outcome in your life is 100% your fault. No, it's not true. All of us are subject to enormous outward circumstances. After all, if a sovereign god of the universe is ordering circumstances in my life, then clearly it's not my fault.

It's not of my doing. But that doesn't make it not my responsibility. So by adopting the mentality that every outcome in my life is 100% my responsibility, I am now empowered to do things. I have the right mindset, and now I start taking action. And what's amazing is that people who do this in their life find enormous resources start flowing towards them.

People who take responsibility for their life, who take responsibility for the outcomes, take responsibility for everything, wind up finding that they don't actually have to do it all. It's the attitude that changes everything. Every outcome in your life is 100% your responsibility. Next, number four. Everything you want, you must initiate yourself.

Everything you want, you must initiate yourself. I love this one. I love this one. I love the choice of words. Initiate. Start. Take action. Do something for it. To start it. To initiate it. Everything you want, you must initiate yourself. If you want to get rid of any of that list of bad things happening for yourself that I started off with, the tweet, you have to start with someone.

You have to start with yourself, and you have to start with doing something towards something. Now, the great paradox of modern life is while external circumstances, let me begin by stating it in a freedom context. It's hard for me to imagine a time in history in which our collective freedom has ever been lower, and yet our individual freedom has ever been higher.

What I mean is Big Brother has more power and capability today than ever before in human history. So, Big Brother can know everything about you, and there's all kinds of powerful forces that are arrayed against you, and yet you as an individual have never had more power and freedom of choice than you have today.

If you were to go back to the medieval era, okay, maybe the actual powers that controlled your life were much smaller. They were less centralized, but you had a lord of the manor, and you could just leave and walk away from the lord of the manor. You could get away from him more easily, but you as an individual had far fewer options because there just weren't as many opportunities in life.

Whereas today, all right, Big Brother may be really big and powerful, but you as an individual have more freedom. Similarly, we could apply that same framework to almost any of the complaints on this list. Housing has never been more expensive, for example. Is that true? Well, to an extent, certainly, and yet your individual housing choices, you have more choice today than you've probably had ever before in human history, because you can choose at what level you want to access the housing market.

If you want to live in a penthouse condo in downtown Vancouver, well, it's going to be expensive, and you better make sure that you earn the money. On the other hand, if you want to go live in a tent in the middle of some free land, you can go and do that.

You can get a tent for 89 bucks at Walmart, or you can make your own out of animal skins like our ancestors did, and you can go live on free government land, and you can spend the rest of your life that way. And I'm not actually being facetious with this example.

These truly are your choices, and you can choose anywhere along the scale that fits your imagined lifestyle of the way that you want to live. So in order for you to make change, though, you have to initiate it. You have to decide, "I want to be free of this problem," or "I want to access something." Everything you want, you must initiate yourself.

You have to start, and when you start, your brain will immediately bring to you solutions as to how you can accomplish things in your life. One of the reasons I branded 10 years ago this show Radical Personal Finance is this very concept, that I was so enthusiastic about the idea that an individual can make a difference, and I just felt like the ideas of individual choice were dramatically underrepresented in personal finance circles.

Years ago, back I think before the show started, I read a story about a young programmer who had a dream to build his own website, didn't have any money, took all his savings, bought a tent, figured out an internet signal, I guess, this was pre-satellite internet, and moved out to the woods, I think it was in Sweden or something, and spent an entire summer living in the woods programming, came back from the woods with his working programming project, and launched his technology startup.

That's available to you. The barriers to that are all in your mind. They're all in a matter of lifestyle and what's normal, etc. If you want something, you can initiate it yourself, and that initiation will then start resources flowing towards you. Number five, every person you come across has something to teach you.

Such a powerful way to interact with other people. Every person you come across has something to teach you. Your arch enemy, your arch rival, your biggest opponent has something to teach you, and if you go out and interact with people looking for the lessons that you can learn, you will make enormous accomplishments and strides in your life, and all of your relationships will be bettered.

Your friendships will be bettered, because your friends will sense that expression of appreciation that comes to you when you listen carefully, and you look for the areas that they're really excellent in. Your enemies will ultimately be vanquished by you, because you learn from where your enemies are strong, and you figure out how to counter that.

Number six, everything is learnable if you can find the ideal scene. Everything is learnable if you can find the ideal scene. We are living in a day and age in which access to information has never been more powerful. If you can put access to information together with access to people – also, by the way, I feel I affirm the access to people has never been easier today than it is today – then you can learn anything that you want to learn.

It will take time, undoubtedly take enormous amounts of effort, etc., but everything is learnable. Number seven, everything you want will stand on the other side of a limiting fear. Everything you want will stand on the other side of a limiting fear. I'm afraid to talk too much about this one, because I would have to expose my fears.

And my base fear is usually wanting to look good in front of other people. For whatever reason, I'm sure it's a common human thing, but one of the themes of my life has generally been that I like to look good, I like to have a good reputation, etc., and I can identify specifically in that particular fear how many times that fear has held me back.

I have podcast episodes about it, a practical application of it, but wanting to look good in front of other people has limited me in many ways. Now, your fears may be different, but everything you want will stand on the other side of a limiting fear. That's such a powerful concept, a powerful belief to install in your mind, so then you can tackle the fears that are limiting you from going after things.

Just this week, in my own thinking, I was listening to a motivational video while I was exercising, and I enjoy these because they're kind of a hodgepodge. There's tons of them on YouTube. Go to YouTube, search "motivation," and there's all kinds of dudes out there that are cutting up all these interesting clips, etc.

And I heard some speaker make the comment of, basically, a variation of, "What is that thing that you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail?" I can't tell you how many dozens and dozens and dozens of times I've heard that question. I can't tell you how many dozens of times I've carefully considered it.

But then I realized afresh, "Wait, I know what that thing is. I know what that thing is. Now I know why I'm afraid of it." And it laid out for me kind of a clear vision of something that I was missing. So, adopt the belief that everything you want will stand on the other side of a limiting fear.

Number eight, every investment you make can have positive returns if you choose so. Every investment you make can have positive returns if you choose so. Isn't that powerful? Especially in a financial context. Sometimes your investments compound and make you enormous amounts of money. Sometimes you lose your shirt. You know which lessons you're going to remember the most keenly?

It's the ones in which you lost. I was recently talking about learning. One of the things that I have come across, I've done a really deep dive into learning science. And one of the things that's fascinating to me is that getting wrong answers is actually one of the most effective ways to learn something.

Getting wrong answers on a test especially is one of the most effective ways to learn something. And I figured this out myself just through introspection before I heard the external research for it because I remember very specifically a test question that I got wrong in first grade. This is how deep a failure can go.

In first grade, my brother and I were being homeschooled by my grandmother. So, we would get up every day and we ride our bikes a couple miles down the road to my grandmother's house and we would do school underneath my grandmother. My family was all teachers. My grandmother was a teacher in her career.

My mother was a teacher, etc. And so, we had a very traditional structure because of this teaching background. And I remember that my grandmother gave me a test. And one of the questions on this test was, "How many digits are there?" First grade test. "How many digits are there?" And I sat there and I very carefully thought and I said, "Well, I know that there's not 10 digits because 10 is two digits put together.

So, I know that I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. There's 9 digits because I know that 10 is two numbers put together." So, I confidently wrote 9 on my paper. And I felt so proud of myself in first grade. I don't know why, but this emotion of pride is just written.

Actually, I didn't know why because I got it wrong. But I was so proud of my right answer that I figured out they were trying to trick me because they thought, because I had studied 1 through 10, they thought I would put 10, that there's 10 digits and I know there's 9 digits because I know that 10 is not.

So, I turned in my paper and I got it marked wrong because zero is a digit. I felt so humiliated. Here, I thought I was the smartest guy in the world. And here, I thought that I had beat the test and they were trying to trick me. And it turns out that if I just put 10, I would have been right.

However many years later from first grade, I still remember that one test question because I got it wrong. And to this day, I have always known that there are 10 digits in the world. That's it in our system anyway. This is life. We always remember the wrong questions. And so, one of the things that we need to do to learn effectively is basically start piling up as many wrong questions as possible.

In language acquisition, one of the most valuable things about going out and speaking the language and using the language is you very quickly figure out which words you forgot, which words you don't know. And so, you're out in the world and you're trying to come up with a word and you say, "I should know what that is.

How do I not know what the word for shoe is or door handle or whatever this is?" But you need it and you don't have it. Well, you go back, you look it up, you study it, you'll never forget it again because you got it wrong. And so, lessons come to us this way.

And it's such a powerful belief to install in ourselves and to install in our children that every investment you make can have positive returns if you choose so. Number nine, every person you come across has a strong desire to feel validated. Every person you come across has a strong desire to feel validated.

Again, magic key to interpersonal relationships. We're all longing for appreciation, for validation. And if you go out in the world offering that to people, appreciation, validation, you'll have friends everywhere. Now, I don't think that's a comprehensive list of all the belief systems that you need. I'm specifically avoiding giving you specific financial ones because I want you to create them for yourself.

There are some very clearly financial belief systems that you can install. And if you let your mind go through the areas of income generation, expense reduction, investment returns, avoiding catastrophe, investing wisely, etc., excuse me, optimizing lifestyle, then you will discover how to build those beliefs. As you install into your operating system high-quality empowered beliefs, you will see nothing but opportunities.

You'll see nothing but evidence to reinforce those beliefs. I will give you one financial example. If you are ever offered a promotion at your work, if you're ever offered a significant increase in pay, you probably should take it. Even if you don't stay in the job for a long time, you probably should take it because that promotion, that paycheck that you get will fundamentally transform how you view yourself.

Years ago, probably a Zig Ziglar tape, I don't know. I heard a motivational speaker that cited a study that someone had done, and they had taken a job description, a job offering, and they had put an ad in the newspaper, and they chose two comparable metro areas. I don't know, Chicago and New York.

Who knows? Denver and Miami. I don't know. They ran this ad in two different cities. The actual words of the advertisement were identical. The job description, the necessary qualifications, etc., identical for these two ads. The only thing that was different between them was the pay scale. For the sake of example, one was offering $120,000 and the other was offering $60,000.

They received massive numbers of responses to the $60,000 ad, and they received many fewer responses to the $120,000 ad. The idea is that this little experiment demonstrated that people judge themselves not by their job qualifications, but by their salary level. The job qualifications were all the same. The description was the same.

The necessary qualifications were the same. The only thing was that there were a lot fewer people that saw themselves as $120,000-a-year earners as compared to $60,000-a-year earners. And I've seen this again and again and again in business, that it's very difficult to go and make an enormous jump in your income.

It's very difficult to go from a $50,000-a-year job to a $250,000-a-year job, because when you're a $50,000-a-year earner, you see yourself as a $50,000-a-year earner. And if all of a sudden you make this enormous jump, your financial thermostat breaks. And in many ways, you look around and, "How do I sabotage myself quickly to get out of this because it's uncomfortable?

I don't fit here." But once you become a $250,000-a-year earner, you now are that person, and you see yourself that way. And a $250,000-a-year earner doesn't often wake up and say, "Let me go and apply for a $50,000-a-year job." The financial thermostat model has always been very powerful to me.

The example that I give is quite simply this. Let's imagine that, you know, my listener base varies enormously in terms of wealth and income, etc. But let's use a pretty good number. Let's imagine that you woke up and you look in your bank account or your investment account, you look at your net worth statement, and you discover that you have a net worth today of $20 million.

$20 million. How would you feel if you woke up and you looked in your bank statements and you discovered you had a net worth of $20 million? Now, most people would feel pretty good. They would say, "That'd be amazing to have $20 million." Now, I want you to imagine something different.

I want you to imagine that—what name do I use? Donald Trump. I want you to imagine that Donald Trump wakes up today, and he has a meeting with his accountant. And the accountant says, "Mr. Trump, you're worth $20 million. That's your net worth, $20 million." How do you think Donald J.

Trump would respond to that? Would he feel happy? Or would he freak out? You know the answer. How is it that two men could have very opposite reactions to the same facts? A $20 million net worth comes down to their belief system. If some guy's got a million-dollar net worth or a $500,000 net worth, and he wakes up with $20 million, he's going to feel great, because his belief system is, "Okay, I deserve $500,000 or a million dollars in net worth." But if a guy's got a belief system that, "I'm a billionaire, and I deserve to be a billionaire," and he wakes up, and he's a multi-deca-millionaire—did I get my prefixes right?—20-millionaire, whatever, simplify it, then he's going to have a very different response.

The point is simply to secure in your mind that your beliefs about yourself matter. Now, I don't know if it is possible to make enormous changes in belief overnight. I don't know if you can believe the secret, and you can just tell yourself, "I'm a billionaire, I'm a billionaire, I'm a billionaire," and somehow that's going to do something for you.

I don't think it does anything. I don't think it's possible, because I think that you could repeat every day, "I'm a billionaire, I'm a billionaire, I'm a billionaire," and you're not going to believe it, because you know you're not a billionaire. You're not even a millionaire. I don't think it's possible to make enormous jumps, but I think it's possible to make modest and significant jumps.

If you're earning $80,000 a year, then I think it's very believable that you could earn $105,000 a year, and then once you're earning $105,000 a year, I think it's very believable you could convince yourself that you're worth $140,000 a year, and once you're earning $140,000 a year, I think you can convince yourself that you're worth $200,000 a year.

And then once you're worth $200,000 a year, I think you can convince yourself you're worth $300,000 a year, and so on and so forth. So look for those things. You may not believe, for example, if you have a habit of yelling at people, you may not believe that you can become a non-yeller, but I think you can believe that you could yell less.

You may not believe that every person you come across has something to teach you, but you could believe that most people you come across have something to teach you. And the list goes on. The point is, go with what you can believe, but recognize that your beliefs are malleable, and it's up to you to set them, to establish them, to determine them, and then to follow through.

Be careful what you believe, because you're going to see, in the world around, all of the things that you believe. Be very, very careful with your beliefs. Choose to adopt a set of beliefs that will serve you. And even if they're not guaranteed to give you the life that you want to live, choose a set of beliefs that are more likely to give you the life that you want to live.

And what will happen is, in the fullness of time, your beliefs will determine your reality. So, choose wisely. We all know that words have power, but there's one word that stands out, because when people say it, lives are changed. It's not a big word, but when you say it, the life of a kid like me can be changed.

It's yes. Yes. Yes. Yes to becoming a monthly supporter of Shriners Hospitals for Children. Please go to loveshriners.org to say yes right away.