Summary
Joe tells the long, winding story of his relationship with money — not the usual “I changed my routine and got rich” narrative, but a series of epiphanies that changed how he saw money, and with it how much money he had. It begins in childhood: his grandfather made and lost a fortune, his father treated money as supremely important and seemed to value people for their wealth, and young Joe rebelled by deciding money was evil and anyone who wanted it was bad. He spent his twenties figuring out how to be poor.
After butchering fish in Alaska and a stint in international stock lending he hated, he leapt into the arts for seven years — only to discover that the controlling, soul-killing system he’d run from was exactly the one he’d run into. That cracked open a string of realizations: he doesn’t actually know he wants the things he thinks he wants until he has them; saying yes to what feels good now (rather than chasing the future) gave him energy; and noticing that billionaires also feel they “don’t have enough” revealed that his problem was never what he had but what he thought he had. A daily gratitude practice took him from $40,000 in debt to money in the bank within months, because seeing abundance let him see opportunity everywhere.
The story keeps unfolding: needing to be needed limits wealth, while wanting to be unnecessary empowers people and grows money. A gut-punch in a hammock in El Salvador revealed he’d taken the relationship with his father — chasing love he couldn’t get — and projected it onto money. Healing that let him follow his real love into coaching and teaching, get paid in alignment rather than by the hour, and finally relate to money without rebellion. Now, with plenty, his gratitude practice is no longer about proving he lacks nothing; it shows him there’s nothing to fear in losing it, so money never gets to define him the way it defined his father.
Key Concepts
- Money chasing can be a projection of chasing a parent’s love
- Feeling lack creates and sustains the lack
- Wanting to be needed limits wealth; wanting to be unnecessary grows it
- Saying yes to what feels good now gives energy that chasing the future drains
Key Quotes
“The issue that I’m having isn’t what I have, it’s about what I think I have.”
“Me feeling like I’m in lack creates that lack. Me defining myself in lack at least supports that lack.”
“That’s where the security lies, not in how much money you have.”
“If you want to be valuable, you’re disempowering people and you make less money than if you want to be unnecessary because then you’re empowering people and you make more money.”
“All I had done is taken a relationship that I had with my father and put it on, projected it onto money.”
“It allows me to receive it in such a way that I don’t get defined by it. And that was the thing that I was always scared of when I was a kid.”
Transcript
So, I wanted to share my story about how I related to money over the years, and it has a lot of different twists and turns, a lot of epiphanies in it. And the reason I thought I would share it is because every time I share one of these stories, it seems to have a positive effect on somebody’s relationship with money. It changes the way that they see money. It changes the way they relate to it, and therefore changes how much money they have. And so, I thought if I put all these stories together, it would have a profound effect on anybody out there who’s wrestling with money issues. And one thing to know about this is that it’s not going to be your typical, you know, “I woke up every morning, I changed my financial routine, I swore that I was going to kill it, and then I got some money.” Like, it’s it’s not anything that you would expect. So, let me just start with my childhood, which is where my money issues began. My dad’s dad grew up in a very poor situation, made a lot of money, and then lost it. Made his money in real estate, lost it in oil. And so, my dad got to see this massive decline in wealth, going from somebody who was important in the town to somebody who was one of the poorest people in the town. And so, for my father, money was incredibly important. There was something in him that knew what it was like to not have anything. When I was young, it felt to me that my dad cared more about money than he did about me at times. And and you know, like he cared more about having a Rolex, or he cared more about driving a Cadillac, than he did about how I was doing, or how much time we spent together. And that wasn’t entirely true, but it’s definitely how I felt. I also didn’t like the way that my dad handled money. I felt like he thought people were special or good because they had money, not because of who they were. And so, naturally, I started rebelling against that perspective of money. Money became something that was evil, something that was bad in my system. Anybody who wanted money was bad, anybody who thought about money too much was bad, anybody who wanted expensive things was bad in my in my mind. So, I just kind of entered the world that way. And of course, in the world you need money, too. So, I had this internal conflict like, oh, I want to buy this truck, but I can’t particularly want money. And so, I spent a lot of my early 20s figuring out how to be poor. I found workarounds for things. I figured out how to get that truck really cheaply by buying it in a like a in a salvage yard and then fixing it up. I I spent a tremendous amount of time figuring out how to get what I wanted without having money. And so, there’s this constant war inside of me around it. And then I graduated from college and the first thing that I did is I went and butchered fish in Alaska. So, I started to just how do I make enough money in 3 6 weeks so that I could basically pay off some debt and figure out how to like exist, get an apartment or something like that. And I did that and it dawned on me for the first time, oh, right, people kind of have to work for money. I had always figured out a way around it, but eventually I’m going to have to start working for money. I didn’t like that at all. And at some point, I just thought, okay, I’m going to make as much money as I possibly can so that I can be an artist, I can be in a band and do what I want to do, I want to have freedom. Which I find a lot of people get into that trap and and sometimes exist to it until they’re 50 or 60. Luckily for me, it only happened for a couple of years and so, I went into international stock lending. I had three promotions inside of like 18 months, but I hated it and I was rebelling against it the whole time. I to today feel sorry for the people I worked for because on one level I was doing like some crazy good stuff and on another level I was kicking against them the same way that I kicked against my father. So, at some point I said, you know what? Screw this. I’m not going to do international stock lending anymore. Like this is horrible. This is soul-killing. This is crushing. this horrible thing. I’m going to just pursue the arts and I don’t really care how much debt I go into. I’m just going to pursue the arts. I’m just going to take the leap. So I did. I took the leap and after 7 years of pursuing the arts and I did some music and I did writing and then I did film and I had gotten to this place where I was being invited onto television sets and doing observing directing roles and what I realized was that the thing that I was running away from, international stock lending, was the same thing I was running into. That it was the same thing. There was one person who had all the control, that everybody was working hard, everybody in the system wanted to be someplace besides where they were. They were all trying to get somewhere else and I remember the star of the television show saying to me every time I come to work it’s like having a little piece of my soul ripped out of me. That was like the star. I’m like, what is like this is exactly international stock lending, it’s just in Hollywood, California. It’s not in San Francisco. And at that moment I recognized something that was really critical, which was everything that I think I want, I don’t actually know that I want it. I just have an idea that I want it. But when I get it, I may or may not want it. Like this guy at the time Hummers were a big thing, these big cars and it was like, oh, that person who wanted a Hummer, they wanted it, but then they got it, they’re like, oh, I can’t find a parking space. Everybody drives around me going, oh, look at that and like people write on my car that I’m an idiot and then and the fuel prices went up. I guess I didn’t want this Hummer. I thought I wanted the Hummer, but now I guess I don’t want the Hummer and I realized like this was life for so many people, but for me that I spent six or seven years going after something that I thought I wanted only to realize and sacrificing for it, only to realize it’s not what I wanted. And so that was the next like massive epiphany in my system was, “Oh, I need to say yes to the stuff that feels good in the moment. The stuff that’s like, oh, this is something that feels good and I don’t really know what feels good, so I’m just going to say yes to everything.” So that’s what I did. I just went out into the world and any opportunity in front of me, I just said yes to. “Yeah, I’ll do that. Yes, I’ll do that.” And pretty soon there was more opportunities than there was time. And so I had to start picking what I really wanted to do out of the things that were offered to me. And this was a huge moment to start to recognize, “Oh, if I was doing what I loved, I wasn’t burning out. There was actually a lot of energy in my system every day.” And that was a massive recognition for me from going from “Oh, I’m going to do this for the future” to “I’m going to do this for right now” gave me a tremendous amount of energy. The next thing that happened was one day I was driving along in LA. At this point, for whatever reason, I had gotten to know a couple billionaires and I realized that they were walking around their life feeling like they didn’t have enough. Like they didn’t have enough love or they didn’t have enough money or they weren’t number one or whatever it was. There there was just wasn’t enough in their world and they were driving around and I was driving around and I was like, “I don’t have enough.” I constantly I’m thinking I don’t have enough. I’m like, “Oh, that means I’m the same as a billionaire. Me and me and a billionaire are the same thing.” And it was such this weird thought and it just clicked so quickly that the issue that I’m having isn’t what I have, it’s about what I think I have. It was this moment that I recognized even though I was poor in Los Angeles, I was wealthier than almost everybody on Earth. Meaning like I was still in the top whatever, what 10% of people on Earth. And I’m like, I’m walking around like I think I’m poor when I have food and I have a place to stay, and they’re thinking that they’re poor, they don’t have enough, and they have a billion dollars. Like, what’s going on here? And so every day my wife and I spent 10 to 15 minutes being in gratitude with each other. We were doing a gratitude practice that we teach nowadays, one that’s very verbal, very viscerally felt. And we go back and forth just saying all the things we were grateful for in the financial reality of the world, like having enough food or having enough money or having more than enough money or being able to travel or whatever it was that we were doing. And within a incredibly short period of time, I went from $40,000 in debt, which I gotten into pursuing arts and meditating a ton, to having 50, 60,000 dollars in the bank. It was like, I think six months, maybe maybe eight, but it was a very short period of time. And I recognized at that moment, oh, if I’m going around defining myself as what I don’t have, if I’m seeing lack everywhere, I’m not seeing the opportunity. And as soon as I started seeing everything I did have, I saw like this tremendous amount of opportunity everywhere. And I remember this moment when I went outside and I just looked at everything. I was like, holy 20, 30 people made money on everything I see. Like just just like the paint on the road that separated the lanes, somebody made money painting it, somebody made money making the paint. 20, 30 people made money in the paint factory. Somebody made money selling the paint. Somebody made money being the distributor of the paint. Somebody made money like having the patent on the paint. Holy crap, I just saw this thing that I thought wasn’t was scarce is like incredibly like it’s a ubiquitous is there’s it’s all over the place and it just keeps on getting bigger. We literally have more money today than we did 10 years ago. So it’s like this growing expansive infinite thing called money and the only thing that makes it not that is our thought process that there’s not enough of it. And so that was a huge epiphany because it hit me far more than just around money that me feeling like I’m in lack creates that lack. Me defining myself in lack at least supports that lack. Whether it’s love, whether it’s money, whether it’s attention. Just it was just this mind-blowing moment for me and financially it just changed my world. And inside of that 6 months I went from a lot of debt, especially at the time I thought it was a ton of debt having plenty of money. It was an amazing situation and I went from trying to struggle as an artist and trying to get, you know, films and television shows made to doing large-scale video art installations for a wealthy guy in LA. And and that was just like an an amazing turnaround. I I would trade most all my money today for that that feeling of oh, there’s plenty. I have plenty. It’s good. Like that is where the security lies, not in how much money you have. In that time period I was reading all about money. I was learning about money. I stopped thinking that I didn’t understand it. I was like, of course I can understand this and and frankly money is quite simple and I was sharing with this guy who I was doing art for these ideas that I had around money about um about like where I thought the price of oil and price of gold was going to go and where I thought the stock market was going to go and the historical trends because I’d been doing some reading and I ended up being right and he ended up saying, “I want to I want to have you work for me not as an artist. I want you to to help us make money.” And I was like, “Yeah, that’s not really exciting.” He’s like, “Well, you think about it. You just think about whatever it is that you want to do in the world, you tell me and I was like, “Well, I like the art. Like this is what I was fighting for.” The more I thought about it, the more I got into this idea of I there’s plenty I saw, “Oh, that means there’s plenty of ways that I can be a benefit to the world.” and then the idea dawned on me, “Oh, I want to do venture capital work and I want to do some work around consciousness on the planet cuz I was deeply into consciousness at the time.” So, I said, “Hey, if you want me to work for you, I will do venture capital around the environment because I feel like that’s a really important thing for us as humans to care for and venture capital is the biggest change agent on the planet and I want to do nonprofit work around consciousness for kids, helping kids if they’ve had like trauma and how to like help their consciousness grow.” And so so that’s so he said, “Yeah, yeah, let’s do that.” And so that’s what started this 12-year movement in me of doing work in the environment particularly around agriculture and doing work with kids on consciousness. And that was going well, like not at the beginning with the investment, like that that I had some ups and downs there um because I felt like I needed to be needed. And that was when I recognized this moment which was also mind-blowing which is that great investors want their investees, the things they’re investing into work without them. That actually needing to be needed limits a huge amount of people’s financial growth. Because what they want is to feel like they’re in value valuable. But great investors, they want to feel like they’re unnecessary. Great CEOs want to feel like they’re unnecessary, that the whole thing can run without them. Right? And then that that was this next moment of really understanding wealth differently, which is if you want to be valuable, you’re disempowering people and you make less money than if you want to be unnecessary because then you’re empowering people and you make more money. And you can do more stuff with your time. And so that was this big click in my system of oh, oh my gosh, and that’s started to improve my capacity to invest and my ability to invest. So, then the next thing that happened, and this I alluded to earlier in the story, was I was in El Salvador and I’m hanging out on a hammock. I’m reading this thing that says this guy from Sequoia Ventures invested a half a million dollars in WhatsApp and he was now a billionaire. I was like, well, and this kick just came hard and solid right to my stomach just like boom. And I thought to myself, what what is that? I know that feeling. I know that feeling. So, I closed my eyes and without thinking intellectually, I just somatically felt where where do I know that feeling from? And what I recognized was that was the feeling of me chasing my dad’s love. Me chasing my dad’s love and not getting it. And I realized, oh, I’ve been chasing money trying to get like really wealthy in venture and I’m not getting it. And this guy got it and the fact that I didn’t get it, like I could just feel the shame of it. But the moment that like the reason that this like unlocked something in me wasn’t because I felt the shame, it was because I realized all I had done is taken a relationship that I had with my father and put it on to projected it onto money. I was just like, “Okay. Dad doesn’t love me and I have to chase it. Money doesn’t love me, I have to chase it.” And that recognition was amazing because it allowed me to know exactly what I needed to heal inside of myself. I started moving more into where my actual passion was. I started moving more into teaching. I started moving more into coaching. And I had found coaching kind of serendipitously because some of my investments weren’t really good. It’s a And that means that the CEOs needed coaching. So, I started coaching them and then other people wanted me to come and coach. And I realized, “Oh, I’m probably not going to make as much money doing this because venture pays better.” At least I thought at the time it did. Um but but this is what I want to do. This is where my love is. This is what I was meant to do. And so, I just started following that. And I did both for a while. I was just coaching some folks and doing venture work and doing nonprofit work. And then that ended and I was just coaching. And And there is this moment of recognition that I am going to make less money to do the thing that I love. it didn’t matter to me at all because I stopped chasing this thing outwardly. And I was just being self-possessed and and and noticing in myself like what really deeply matters to me. And it was the first time that I was fully not rebelling against money. It was the first time that I I wasn’t reacting to money like I was taught to as my child. I I had diminished it over time, but this was the first time that I really felt free of that interaction with money. and and it was good and I was happy and I was like, this is a good life. I’m happy. It’s very calming. And then uh COVID hit and I got super bored cuz I couldn’t do these classes that I would was doing live. And serendipity happened and Tiago Forte came to me and said, “Let’s do a course.” And we did a course and all of a sudden I saw this way that we could actually create more money. And and by creating more money we could touch more people. And by touching more people we could have a bigger impact. And on some level chasing impact didn’t mean anything to me anymore either. Like the chasing of impact was a lot like the chasing of money. But if this is what wanted to happen, hey, let’s let’s see what happens. And as long as we’re enjoying it, let’s keep going. And this is when those epiphanies started stacking up. Oh, if I’m going to do it, I’m going to enjoy it or I’m going to burn out. So, we’re going to enjoy it. Oh, if I’m going to do it, I’m not going to chase it. I’m going to invite it, see what what wants to come, interact with what’s actually real, and take advantage of the situation. We just kind of poured all the money that we had back into the business so that we could have bigger reach so that we could grow something. But now what’s happened, which is like incredibly interesting, is we still pour all the money from the business back into the business so that we can do things like make this YouTube channel, so that we can do things like hire people to get the word out and get more facilitators, etc., etc. But the private stuff that I do, the coaching stuff that I do, the the going into companies that I do, like that is now making as much money as as venture because what I’ve noticed is like I don’t want to get paid hourly anymore. I want to get paid in a way that is I get a percentage of the value that I create. So, when I’m out doing stuff for folks, I’m doing it for stock or I’m doing it for a part of the benefit as much as I can because that actually puts me in deep alignment with the people that I’m working with. And so again, I kept on instead of chasing anything, I was just operating from a set of principles that I had learned, which is like oh, how do I be in connection? How do I be in alignment? How do I do something that fuels me, that feeds me? And this is like where the company is being built from. And this is where my world is being built from. And now, the newest weirdest thing that’s happening is there’s a lot of money. And so today, the practice that I have is really showing gratitude not for It’s It’s actually goes back full circle where I’m now showing gratitude, but it wasn’t like I’m showing gratitude to show that I don’t have lack. I’m I’m having gratitude for the financial situation we have. It shows me that oh, there’s nothing to be scared of in losing it. I’ve been poor before. That’s not a problem. And it allows me to receive it in such a way that I don’t get defined by it. And that was the thing that I was always scared of when I was a kid. I was really scared that I would be like my father, defined by the money, where it’s this thing that I have to protect or this person that I have to be.