What School Failed to Teach You About Money

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. I put out episodes four times a week for almost 10 years now to help you learn and grow and improve yourself because if you can improve yourself, then you can improve your life. So if that's what you want to do, hit that subscribe button. Today, we're going to be talking about money. We're going to talk about something that most people obsess over but barely even understand in the first place. And everyone has some sort of money story, but rarely do people take a step back and actually look at the idea of money and say, what importance do I give money?

0:47What is the role that money plays in my life? And the good part about this is this is something that we get to decide. Now, up until this point, if you listen to this episode, you probably haven't actually decided that. What is the role of money in my life? What is my story around money? What is the importance that I give money? But I really want to open you up to start thinking about that because so many people for a lot of their lives stress about money. I did this for a really long time. We chase it. We stress over it. We judge ourselves by how much we have or how little we have. But really do we take a step back and be like, well, what is money?

1:25Have you ever thought about that? Because here's the real mind bender. Money isn't real. It's all made up. It's just an idea. It's this collective agreement that we all just believed into existence. And once you realize that, you can actually free yourself from being ruled by it. And you can decide your relationship with money and the role that it plays in your life. What's really interesting about it is as you remove yourself from your old story about money, you change your relationship with it. You're not emotionally tied to it as you had before in the past. You actually play the game of money better and you end up making more money, which is really interesting.

2:03So today's going to be really in depth. We're going to dive into the actual history of money so you can actually understand it from like bartering to gold coins to digital dollars that we have today. We're going to talk about how kings started creating IOUs and turn them into modern bank accounts, why money is a psychological game more than it's actually a financial game. We're going to talk about what happens when currencies actually collapse and people's entire lives and savings vanish overnight. And then we're going to create your own real purpose of money and what it means in your life and how to reclaim your power and realize that money is not going to make you feel any different about yourself.

2:44Okay. And so hopefully I want you to have less fear around money, more clarity around money, and a lot more freedom to choose how you relate to money and hopefully make a whole lot more of it as well. And so really what I want you to understand is you get to rewrite your story around money. For a lot of my life, I stressed out about money and I equated money to safety or money to self-worth. And after I hit a major milestone in my life with money and nothing in my life changed, the only thing that changed were really digits on a screen, I kind of took a step back and I was like, what the hell have I been doing this whole time?

3:24Like, what do I do now? And don't get me wrong. Money is very important, but we overplay its importance in our life massively. Money will not make you happy. Money will not solve your problems. The only problems that money solves are money problems. And so let's talk about real quick so you can understand the history of money and see how it's morphed into what it is today. So it makes a whole lot more sense because most people don't even understand money in the first place and they don't teach you this in school. They probably don't teach you this in school on purpose because if you knew more about it, you probably would play the game better.

3:55And most governments want to kind of keep people down a little bit. So when you look at it, it's really, really simple. Before money, there was something called bartering. Hey, you've got grain. I've got wool. Let's trade. We just trade. It was simple until it wasn't because what happens when I don't need your wool and you don't need my grain? What happens to the farmer when his goods are out of season? So at some point there was this need to create a form of stored value so that I could sell all of my fruit when it was in season, get something from it and be able to use that in the time when all of my fruit was out of season.

4:34And so it created this need for something that everyone would be able to accept. Something that held this universal trust between us, but a really standardized value. And so this is where the early forms of money came in. And so around 3000 BC in Mesopotamia, they started using silver bars and clay tablets to track trade. About 1000 BC in China were when the actual first coins were made out of bronze and copper. And then in around 600 BC in Lydia, which is modern day Turkey, was when the first gold and silver coins were stamped by kings. Now, this is a really important thing that I want you to understand, okay?

5:12Okay, here's where the thing that you really need to know. The coins back then were made of something valuable, like actual coins of gold or actual coins of silver. So if you had a one gram gold coin, it was worth exactly one gram of gold. Even if the government that made it just dissolved, you still had a gram of gold, which was inherently valuable if you went to another country or another part of the world. So what changed? Well, what changes, there's kind of these king's IOUs came in town. And so imagine that you're a merchant and you don't want to carry around 200 pounds of gold with you. So instead, you store your gold in the king's vault and he gives you a stamped piece of paper that says, this certifies that John has 100 gold coins stored with us.

6:02And that piece of paper then became your money. And so over time, people stopped redeeming the paper for gold and the paper just became the value. It was this weird thing that shifted. And so when you look at a piece of paper, the piece of paper has no actual value in it. And that's where everything started to shift is our money that we have now is worth absolutely nothing. What I'm going to share with you is really when I got this, it really like broke my mindset out of my deep attachment to money. and my stress that I had 30 something years of my life around money. When you realize what I'm about to share with you, okay?

6:42We now run on something that's called fiat money. Fiat is Latin for let it be done. And fiat means, fiat money means this has value because the government says that it has value. Not because it's backed by gold or it's backed by silver or any of that. Not because it's rare, but because we believe that it's worth something. So if you have$100 United States bill, it's just fancy ink and cotton. The ingredients, I searched it in a$100 US bill worth about 17 cents. But we treat it like it's a golden ticket. So back in the day, you know, 7, 8 ,000 years ago, whenever it was that I said that all that was happening, a gold coin was worth whatever the gold amount was in grams.

7:30Now our piece of paper is worth almost nothing. But it's only worth value because we agree to it. Because we've all bought into this story. And you want me to prove to you that it's not really real? Because I have to really kind of, the point of the beginning of this episode is to break you out of the bullshit that you've been believing for so long, so that you can start to rewrite your own story around it. I want to really like disconnect you from your old emotions around money and story around money. So I want to prove to you that money is not really real. Many countries' money have become worthless overnight.

8:05So like, for instance, Germany in the 1920s after World War I, Germany was drowning in debt. And so they started printing a bunch of money to pay it off. And this led to hyperinflation. At one point, prices were doubling every few days. A loaf of bread went from costing one German mark to 200 billion marks. What? That's crazy to think about. So think about that for a second. Imagine if you work your entire life, you lived in Germany this time, your entire life to become rich and wealthy. And just like that, all of your wealth meant absolutely nothing. A loaf of bread went from one mark to 200 billion marks.

8:47People's life savings became worthless overnight. There's actual photos of kids playing with stacks of cash like Legos in the streets because it was cheaper than toys. Right? In Zimbabwe in the 2000s, the government printed money to deal with economic collapse and land reform issues. Inflation hit 89.76 trillion percent. Yeah, that's a real number. It's 89 with 21 zeros behind it. They started issuing a$100 trillion bill. And that$100 trillion bill still couldn't buy an entire tank of gas. So people lost their entire savings virtually overnight. and it happened in Russia in 1991. It happened multiple times in Argentina and it's happened many other times in countries around the world.

9:33Could you imagine, and this is where I really clicked in my brain and got it. Could you imagine putting all of your stress in your self-worth, in your everything, working your whole life, putting all of this stress about making money and trying to build up your self-worth and then quote unquote making it in life and your currency just disappears overnight. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. At that point, wouldn't you be like, oh my God, what a waste of life. That would really wake you up, wouldn't it? Well, you don't have to have that happen to you in order to go, huh, maybe I should wake up from this dream that I'm in.

10:14Because the truth is money is an idea. Money is a shared hallucination. It's just a game that we're all playing. Sure, do you have bills that you need to pay? pay? Yes, it's a game that we're all in. Money helps. But money's not going to give you meaning in your life. It's not going to give you purpose. It's not going to make you love yourself more. It's definitely not going to give you peace in your life. Money's not going to fix any of those things. So then what is the point of money? So let's strip it all down. The point of money, as we said at the very beginning, is to exchange value in some sort of way.

10:44That's it. It's a tool. It's like a hammer. With a hammer, you can build things. You can also break things with as well. But here's the mistake that most people make around it. And I've said this many times so far in this episode, and I did this, is I let money become my metric of worth and happiness and stress or lack of stress. And many people let money become their metric of worth. And, you know, one of the major reasons why people get a divorce is because of money. It's not that the love between them disappeared. A lot of times it's just that money becomes so stressful and they let this thing that doesn't exist in the first place come in between the love between these two people.

11:30And people believe that money will make them feel secure or important or finally like they're enough, but it won't. And I can promise you that. And your old story around money, if you're one of these people who has a lot of emotions around money, or maybe you grew up poor like I did and all of this, your old story around money can really hijack your emotions and you realize that your story isn't even your story. It's someone else's story around it. If you grew up without money, your nervous system might be tied to the fact that safety is money. Like money equals safety. That's what I always thought.

12:06That's what it really was for me. Like I'll be okay once I have X amount of dollars in the bank account. But I promise you, just trust me, that is a losing game. Listen, I want you to make as much money as you want to. I want you to be wealthy as you possibly can be. But I want your mindset around money to be correct because making money was not gonna change any internal value that you have. It's a losing game. Money is not a replacement for your self-worth or for love or for purpose or connection or healing or any of those things. All of those things, you have to give to yourself. You will not, I promise you, I need to kind of wake some people up.

12:48you will not get any love or purpose or connection or healing or self-worth from making something that's just a piece of cotton that's printed on it. You have to give those to yourself. And working to remove yourself from the emotion around money is important. I don't expect that this episode is just going to completely wake you up and get you out of your emotion around money. But hopefully it kind of wakes you up a little bit to go, well, next time I'm stressed out about money, I can remind myself what this is. And then I can remove the emotion from it, maybe look at it logically and solve the problem better.

13:24Because when emotions are high, logic is low. So maybe I shouldn't look at emotion. Maybe I shouldn't look at money emotionally. Maybe I should look at it logically and just play the game better. And it's important because it's really important that you see money for what it is and not put so much emotion or self-worth into it. It actually makes it way easier to play the game of money. And in turn, you will make more money if you have this mindset around it. It's like, for instance, the best athletes are the ones that stay calm under pressure. The ones where it's like the end of the game, the pressure is on and their face looks like nothing's happening, right?

14:00They have no emotions while playing the game. It's the same thing around money. It's also a game. If you watch somebody play poker, usually the best poker players are the ones that just play it logically and they don't put any emotion into how much they win or lose. It's the exact same thing. When you don't put so much emotion into it, which I understand is hard if you're struggling to pay bills and you're trying to get yourself out of debt, but you just have to start to look at it from a different perspective. And so how do we start to unplug ourselves from this illusion? Well, the first thing you need to do is you need to like recognize the game, like name the game, recognize that money isn't real.

14:37It used to be real when it was, hey, this gold coin is worth this amount according to the king. And if the king ends up dying and we get taken over by another country, if you have that gold coin, you could go to another country and it's still worth something. But you have to recognize that no matter what country that you live in, if it's not backed by gold in some sort of way, it ain't real. And so just recognize that that's just the game that we're in. It's just the way that we've been taught. It is a shared agreement, not a universal truth. The other thing to do, Just ask yourself better questions.

15:08Instead of saying stuff like, well, how do I make more money? How do I become rich? Ask yourself questions like, what does enough look like for me? Maybe what you want to do is you just want to get to a certain number and then say, I'm retiring. Okay, cool. Well, then look at that number and make a commitment to yourself to get to that number and then retire. Ask yourself questions like, how do I want to feel around money? Am I trying to impress people? Am I trying to show my self-worth through it? Do I want people to like me based off the car that I buy? okay, why? Ask yourself these questions.

15:40Another thing that's really important too is to start to look at money and redefine what wealth means to you. Real wealth is not being worth$100 million. I know people that are worth over$4 billion and have no time. I would say having time freedom is way more wealth than being worth billions of dollars. Feeling aligned with your values, that sounds like worth. Time freedom sounds like worth. Being present with your kids, instead of having to constantly work? That sounds like some worth there, right? Some wealth. What about what lights you up? That seems like something that's wealth right there.

16:19And so money is really just a tool. It's not something that we should be worshiping. Money should serve you, not the other way around. You know, use it to fund your growth. Use it to create change. Use it to have experiences, to do whatever it is that you want to in the world, but don't let it define who you are. What you need to do is you need to decide what money means to you. Like the real moment of truth is to realize that money means whatever you decide that it means. Not what your parents taught you or what you learned about it from your parents. Not what society shoved down your throat.

16:53Not what your broke uncle or rich but miserable boss believes about it. It's your turn to write the story. This is your life. This is your story. So why don't you, if you're 47 years old right now, write down what money actually means to you. From this moment forward, not what it's meant up until the first 47 years of your life, not what you learned from your mom, not what you learned from your dad or your grandpa. Define what money means to you and what role it plays in your life. What's the point of money in your life? Is it for safety? For freedom? For impact? For play? For experiences? What do you want to use it for?

17:34you know this isn't about abandoning money or pretend that it doesn't matter i know that money matters you have to pay bills you have to feed your family we're not throwing away the game board that money is we're just choosing a different strategy when we're playing the game and it's really exciting because at this moment when you start to think of it this way you get to design your own money philosophy and that is huge so instead of chasing a number you can chase time freedom. You can chase experiences. You can chase creative expression. You can chase generational healing. You can chase doing what lights you up, just doing what's fun.

18:10You can build a relationship with money that's not so stressful, but it feels empowering or it feels peaceful or it feels true to who you actually are. Not something that's just driven by fear or rooted in shame or keeping you in survival mode. Because once you really understand this illusion that we're believing in, and you really understand this money is just a tool, it's your chance to stop playing by default and start living your life more like a design. Money is not the meaning of life. You get to come up with the meaning. And so your life isn't just about collecting numbers in your bank account.

18:49What you should be figuring out is what feels aligned in your life, what feels fulfilled, what feels free to you in some sort of way. You know, are you using money as a tool to build your life or are you letting it quietly dictate who you think you're allowed to be? So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me in at Rob Dial Jr., R-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And if you're out there and you want to do some more in-depth coaching with me, you want to join some of my weekly coaching sessions, I have stuff like Mindset University.

19:17You can learn more about it at mindsetmentor.com. Once again, mindsetmentor.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode, make it your mission, make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.