The Missing Piece That Took Me Ten Years to See

There is a quote by Anaïs Nin that I read early in my life, when I was still a teenage.

It made sense immediately.

It landed in my head and stayed there, the way certain ideas do when you know they are true even if you cannot quite explain why.

I understood it intellectually the moment I read it.

But I did not understand it in my bones for another decade.

And I could not act on it for another decade after that.

Some lessons are like that.

They are too simple to be absorbed quickly.

The brain needs time to grow into them the way a hand needs time to grow into a new glove.

You can put it on, but it will not fit right until you have worn it for a while.

Here is what I eventually learned: you cannot change what you see until you change who you are.

And changing who you are takes longer than you want it to.

But it is possible.

Thank God for neuroplasticity.

The Water You Were Swimming In

I grew up in Hawaii with a strong scarcity mentality.

My immediate and extended family was steeped in it.

The sayings were constant, repeated so often they became invisible, the way water is invisible to a fish.

• Save for a rainy day.
• Don't count your chickens before they hatch.
• You can be rich or you can be happy, but you cannot be both.

Some of these were useful starting points.

Save for a rainy day is not bad advice when you have nothing saved. It teaches you to think ahead, to hold something back, to prepare for the unexpected. That is a real skill, and I am grateful I learned it.

But some of them were poison dressed up as wisdom.

You can be rich or you can be happy, but you cannot be both. That one burrowed into my brain and built a home there.

It taught me that wealth and goodness were mutually exclusive.

That money was a corrupting force.

That the kind of person I wanted to be and the kind of person who had resources were two different people who could never occupy the same body.

I carried that belief for years without ever examining it. It was just the water I swam in. I did not know there was another ocean.

The Car Test

The most important lesson I ever learned about money came from Harv Eker, the author of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind.

He said something that hit me so hard I still remember where I was sitting when I read it.

The idea was simple.

If you see a person driving an expensive car and you have negative thoughts about that person, you can never be wealthy. You can never drive a car like that yourself.

Because you would not be able to see yourself in that car with positive thoughts. Your own brain would reject the image before it had a chance to form.

I lived in Los Angeles at the time.

I moved there in 1986.

I was surrounded by expensive cars every day.

And I had plenty of negative thoughts about the people driving them.

There was one car in particular that I remember. A Rolls Royce with an iridescent rainbow-pattern paint job. The kind of paint that shifts color as the light hits it from different angles.

It was a beautiful paint job. On a car worth north of three hundred thousand dollars.

I hated it.

I would see that car and my brain would fire off a cascade of judgments.

• Some people have more money than sense.
• Even if you have money, that does not mean you have taste.
• What kind of person spends that much on a car and then ruins it with a paint job like that.

I was not just judging the car. I was judging the person who owned it.

And every time I did that, I was reinforcing a belief I did not even know I held: that wealthy people were not good people.

That money and character were inversely related.

That I could never have significant wealth because if I did, I would become one of them.

Here is a quick quiz for you.

Whatever car just popped into your head, you can never drive it.

Because if you did, you would have to label yourself as the kind of person who drives that car.

And you just told yourself what kind of person that is.

That is how the brain works.

It is not rational. It is associative.

It does not weigh evidence. It builds shortcuts.

And those shortcuts become the walls of the room you live in.

The Ten-Year Rewiring

It took me over ten years to rewire that particular circuit.

Ten years of catching myself in the middle of a judgment and stopping.

Ten years of consciously replacing the old thought with a new one.

Ten years of telling myself, out loud sometimes, that I could be worth over a million dollars and still be a good person.

The first hundred times I said it, I did not believe it. The old wiring was too strong.

The scarcity programming had been installed too early and reinforced too often. My brain had literal physical pathways dedicated to the idea that wealth and goodness could not coexist.

But here is what I learned about the brain. It is not fixed. It is plastic.

Neuroplasticity means that the circuits you fire are the circuits you strengthen, and the circuits you stop firing eventually weaken and get repurposed.

The brain is always remodeling.

You just have to tell it what to build.

If you want to understand how this works at a physical level, read The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle.

He explains how myelin wraps around neural circuits the more you use them, insulating them and making them faster.

Every time you practice something, you are wrapping another layer of insulation around that circuit.

Every time you think a thought, you are making it easier to think that thought again.

That is why the rewiring takes so long.

You're not building muscle-memory, you're building neural-memory.

You are not just learning a new idea.

You are building new physical infrastructure in your brain.

The old roads are paved and lit and have been traveled a thousand times.

The new road is dirt and dark and you have to hack it out of the jungle by yourself.

But if you walk it every day, eventually it becomes a road.

Then a street.

Then a highway.

Ten years.

That is how long it took me to build a highway from "rich people are bad" to "I can have resources and still be a good man."

Why It Matters

Once I began seeing the world differently, I began experiencing the world differently.

That is not a metaphor. That is cause and effect.

The world did not change.

The same cars were on the same roads.

The same people were driving them.

The only thing that changed was the filter I was running the data through.

And when the filter changed, the experience changed with it.

I stopped resenting people who had what I wanted.

I started learning from them.

I started asking questions instead of passing judgments.

I started seeing possibilities instead of threats.

The money did not come all at once.

But the opportunity to build something did.

And when it showed up, I was ready for it.

The old version of me, the version that believed wealth and goodness could not coexist, would have turned it down without realizing what he was doing.

The new version said yes.

This applies to everything. Not just money.

Hurt people hurt people.

That is another one of those sayings that is simple and true and takes years to really absorb.

If you are walking around with old wounds, you will see threats everywhere. I know I did.

You will interpret neutral actions as hostile.

You will push people away and then blame them for leaving.

You will call it discernment when it is actually the scar tissue talking.

Until you heal the hurt, the world will keep looking like a dangerous place.

Because you are seeing it through the lens of someone who has been hurt.

You are seeing the world not as it is, but as you are.

The healing is the same process as the wealth rewiring.

Catch the old thought. Replace it with a new one.

Do it again tomorrow.

Do it a thousand times.

​Build the new highway one step at a time.

Compassion, patience, empathy. These are not personality traits you are born with or without.

They are neural circuits.

They can be built the same way you build a bicep. Daily reps. Consistent load. Time.

Doing The Daily Reps

I will not tell you it will take ten years like it did for me.

Maybe it will.

Maybe it will take less.

The timeline does not matter as much as the consistency.

Think of it like building a muscle.

You do not go to the gym once and come out transformed.

You go every day.

You lift the weight.

You put it down.

You come back tomorrow and do it again.

The changes are invisible for weeks, sometimes months.

Then one day you catch your reflection and realize you look different.

The brain works the same way.

Pick the value you want to build.

• Abundance
• Compassion
• Patience
• Confidence
• Self-trust

Whatever the old wiring is preventing you from accessing.

Then do the daily reps.

When the old thought fires, notice it.

Do not beat yourself up for having it.

That is like being mad at your bicep for being tired after a set.

The old thought is just the muscle you are trying to remodel.

It fires because it is strong.

Your job is to follow it with the new one.

Old thought: That guy is probably a jerk.
New thought: I do not know anything about that guy.

Old thought: I could never do that.
New thought: I have never done that before, which means I do not know yet whether I can.

Day after day.

Rep after rep.

The old highway gets a little less traffic.

The new one gets a little more.

That is the whole thing. There is no secret technique.

There is no shortcut.

There is just the willingness to show up and do the work that nobody can see, for longer than feels reasonable, until one day you look at the world and realize it looks different.

And then you remember: the world did not change.

You did.

The Invitation to Put It On the Mat

This week, pay attention to your judgments.

Not to fix them. Just to notice them.

• When you see someone with something you want, what is your first thought?
• When you see someone doing something you have never tried, what story do you tell yourself about them?
• When you feel resistance to something unfamiliar, what is the belief underneath that resistance?

Write it down. Look at it.

Ask yourself where it came from.

Ask yourself whether it is true or whether it is just the water you have been swimming in.

If it is not true, replace it.

Not once.

Every time the old thought fires, follow it with the new one.

That is how you build a new brain.

That is how you change what you see.

That is how you become someone who can receive what the old version of you would have rejected.

It took me ten years. It may not take you that long.

But it will not take zero. So start today.

The world will still be here tomorrow.

The question is which version of you will be looking at it.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Today’s training:

The Decision Drill

Write down a decision you’ve been delaying.

Then answer:

• Worst case
• Best case
• Most likely case

Make the decision.

📚 Leader’s Library

Book I recommend this week:

​Algorithms to Live By by Brain Christian​

Why?

Because every day we need to make decisions so we might as well have a system of making better decisions easier and faster.

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck