Is it pretentious to talk about wealth?

Are you put off by terms like lucrative, prosperous, and wealth?

In this episode, Mindie and Sean share their perspectives and trace their early ideas of wealth through their upbringing. Plus, they share waysides to elevate your wealth consciousness.

Mindie:  Welcome to The Lucrative Society podcast. We are so excited that you’re here. This is our premiere episode and in this first conversation, I wanted to not only introduce ourselves, but also introduce this topic of “lucrative.” Sean, as you know, we got an interesting comment when we posted our podcast cover around for comments on social media. Somebody wrote, “That title sounds so pretentious.”

Sean:  Mindie was thinking… Exactly.

No, I thought it was really an interesting comment because I think it showed so much of where they are right now in their reality. I found that people who are put off by terms like lucrative, prosperous, wealth… They are kind of having a funny bone hit. Where it hurts because they don’t feel like they’re wealthy. And so when they hear about wealth, it feels like an impossibility, it just pushes their buttons.

Mindie:  I can understand that because I was that, or at least more like that, earlier in my life. The interesting thing to me is that if you look up the definition of lucrative, it simply means profitable. So for us to say this is a lucrative society or a profitable endeavor, somehow that becomes pretentious. As if we’re better than someone else because we’re making money. But the reality is we all have to make money. We’re all in this same game together. The thing that it got me thinking about is how that mentality is acting as if it’s a zero-sum game. I really enjoy that concept because if you’re winning, Sean, that doesn’t mean I’m losing. Zero-sum game is when if somebody gains, someone else loses, it has to balance each other out. But we’re not talking about that. You can win and I can win, and our clients can win, and our friends can win, and our families can win.

Sean:  Yeah, and when it comes to creating wealth, I think a lot of our opinions about wealth are based on our upbringing and our interpretation of our upbringing. Because you came from the North side and you were surrounded by…

Mindie:  The North shore of Chicago.

Sean:  Yes, so you had more wealth around you maybe than I did, but a couple towns over, we had wealth, and I had a different opinion. Like you might’ve seen it as materialistic.

Mindie:  I definitely saw it as materialistic, which I very early on raged against. Probably, knowing what I know now, because I was like, I want that. How come my family’s not like that? How come I’m not getting a car on my 16th birthday? A lot of the people I knew and went to school with, that was just normal for them. And I was like, well, where’s mine?

Sean:  Yeah. So I was a bit on a different perspective, which is “I want that.” I was very clear about it. When I was a freshman in high school the teacher said, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said, a millionaire. All the kids were like, that’s not an occupation. I’m like, yeah, it is. And so my mentality was always, Hey, how do we get the nicer car? The nicer home?

Mindie:  Yeah. And I love that too because now my mindset is like: a millionaire? That is basically an occupation. Cause if you know about investing and passive income and all of these things that you and I have learned about later in life, it could be. It could be your occupation, which is pretty awesome.

So, I want to speak to anyone that’s listening to this podcast and really talk to them about choice. Because when you come with the attitude of, Oh, well that’s so pretentious, are you being like I was and saying, “Okay, I want that”? But the way that I’m going to skirt around it for my own ego, I thought it was more noble to be poor or struggling. And then I played that out well into my thirties with my business decisions and various financial situations. But it all came down to this choice of saying, Okay, now I can recognize I want that. And, oh, by the way, I think it is awesome. I don’t think it’s a negative thing anymore.

Sean:  Well, I think a big thing that most people don’t understand is who you hang out with has a big impact on how you perceive creation of wealth and the impact of wealth. You know, when I met you, you were living in Portland, you had a lot of artist friends, you had a lot of writer friends. And so you weren’t surrounded by wealth consciousness and it was…

Mindie:  It was the opposite… The starving artist / starving writer mentality.

Sean:  Yeah. Whereas at the time when I met you, I had just started making a ton of friends that were entrepreneurs, wealthy, had known and figured out and discovered ways to create money in their bank accounts and have an abundance and all that. And so some of the early conversations we had with money are not at all how we talk today. Cause I was like, “Hey Mindie, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, there are wealthy people in Portland. What are you talking about?”

Mindie:  I know. Let’s share that story because it’s so telling about where we were at at that time. So my thought, within my coaching business was, “Well Sean, how could I possibly charge more than I’m currently charging (which wasn’t that much) because nobody has any money in Portland. And you said to me, “Mindie, Brendon Burchard lives in Portland. I think he’s got some cash. I think there are people in Portland that have money.” And I was like, well, of course there are. It wasn’t like I was oblivious to that concept, but I didn’t know those people. I wasn’t hanging out with those people. And honestly, to be very clear about this, I think that I probably didn’t want to know those people at that time because I still had that perception.

Sean:  Yeah. I remember talking to Ryan Moran from Capitalism and he said, the quickest way to become a millionaire is to be friends with millionaires because how they think, how they spend, how they save, how they discuss things about life, and you’re learning about what they’re reading. Plus, you’re going to be introduced to opportunities that will create wealth for you yourself. And so a big thing when we started dating is I was like, you need to upgrade the wealth of your friends. And we, of course, have done that together. Even today, something that stuck with me when I was younger, something my father said, and you and I have really done a wonderful job here is, “If you want to be wealthy, you need to be around wealth.” That might irritate some people and that’s okay. That’s just where they’re at right now. But I was like, “Hey, let’s move to Scottsdale.” Scottsdale is one of the wealthiest cities in the country. And even in Scottsdale, we kept repositioning where we were living, inching out way up the wealth ladder until the place that we are now, which I’m very happy to say is something that was a dream at one point.

Mindie:  Yeah, I really like that advice from your dad. I’ve thought about that a lot. Something that Sean’s father taught him and then I learned as well, was it’s great to have the smallest house in a wealthy area of big houses. You can basically get your foot in the door, into that neighborhood. Even if you have the tiniest house or not the wealthiest land or whatever. But just being in that space can help elevate your wealth consciousness. Now, I have a question for you because as you were talking, I’m thinking, well there are probably some listeners that are saying, well how could you just ditch your friends? That sounds terrible.

Sean:  It’s not that you ditch your friends, it’s that you start adding new friends and then you see how you feel around them. And I find that people in my peer group, cause there’s definitely people that are wealthy that I don’t want to associate with at all. You can be wealthy and broke. Broke is a mentality of scarcity. It’s never enough. I need to take something from somebody else for me to gain and that mentality, I’m not down with. But when it comes to actually creating abundant wealth, where it’s got elements of contribution back and giving back and making a difference, those kinds of friends I started adding to my life. And it’s not that I had to kick out these other friends, it’s just these other friends that didn’t want to create wealth kind of self-selected out and they didn’t want to have conversations about books like I did.

They didn’t want to go to the juice bar and the gym. They wanted to keep playing an old story, maybe stuck in an old pattern, and complain and be victims. And so I would say, I love the comment that I learned from one of my mentors, Matt James. He said that when you raise up your vibration, people around you either rise up to meet you or they disappear. And that doesn’t matter if they’re friends, family, employees, whomever it is. If you raise up your consciousness, if we’re going to call it that instead of vibration, you raise your consciousness, people are either going to be inspired because they look at you and see you as an example and they’ll meet you there. Or they’re going to be like, “Oh, this is too rich for my blood and I’m out.”

Mindie:  So true. We will look forward to many, many more conversations together and with you, the listener, on The Lucrative Society. There are some awesome, really exciting interviews coming up. I cannot wait for you to hear them.

Thanks so much for listening. Make sure and subscribe to The Lucrative Society on iTunes and leave a review of the podcast.

Mindie & Sean [singing]:

Don’t worry, Be happy..

Cuz every little thing’s

Gonna be alright.

Oh yeah, man.

I’m saying don’t worry

About a thing…