There is one state that unites poor and wealthy people alike — the state of constantly feeling that they don’t have enough money.
What should be done about this? How can you make it so that money is enough? This is actually a very big question. It needs to be examined and understood. If you were living in the Soviet Union in 1970, this question might not even arise. But in a social society where choice exists, this question is important.
There are two aspects to considering this issue. Today we will find a solution to what to do so that money is enough.
- Objective situation
There is a situation in which you objectively do not have enough money. When you say:– I don’t have enough because I have to pay a loan.– I don’t have enough because there is rent to pay.– I don’t have enough because I need to buy food for my children, and I can’t buy certain foods.– I don’t have enough because of expenses for services, transportation, travel, clothing.– I don’t have enough for everyday purchases.
These are objective, rational reasons.
By the way, there is also a situation here where there is a point of normalcy: I don’t have enough money to maintain my current standard of living.
- Inner state
The second situation is nearby, and very little is said about it. This is no longer a rational reason, but an inner state.
Why does a person say: “Ten years ago I lived in a one-room apartment with my parents — and I had enough. Now I live in a three-room apartment with my girlfriend — and I don’t have enough money.”
Or: “Ten years ago I earned 300 dollars a month — and it was enough. Now I earn 5,000 dollars — and it’s not enough.”
A certain state is formed, an inner construct: I don’t have enough money regardless of the numbers. This is simply an internal state of a person.
Recently, an acquaintance asked me a question: “How much do you need to earn to live in America? In your area.” I said that it is impossible to answer this question. He was surprised: “How is it impossible? Well, how much?”
For housing, you can still give some kind of range — explain how much it costs to rent an apartment or a house — but beyond that, the assessment of the “cost of living” diverges very widely. Everything depends on who you are.
I tell him: “I don’t know, maybe you will eat in good restaurants three times a day — and you and your wife will spend 1,000 dollars a day just on restaurants. Or maybe you need to travel to another city once every two weeks and rent a hotel. You can rent one for 200 dollars a night, or for 5,000. I don’t know what kind of clothes you buy. Maybe you buy a jacket once every six months for 100 dollars, or maybe once every two weeks for 15,000. Everything depends on your demands. You are a fairly well-off person, you understand the difference between all these things. There is no answer to your question. It simply does not exist.”
What does “living in America” mean?
- For some, it is renting a yacht for five days once a quarter for one million dollars.
- And someone doesn’t even know that a yacht can cost a million for five days.
- Someone thinks a yacht costs 5,000 for five days. And they will also be right — depending on where and which one.
- Someone never raises this question in their life.
- And for someone else, it is a necessity.
He didn’t like my answer. He wanted to hear something simple.
And this is a huge delusion of a massive number of people — giving advice about money without understanding what is truly important and necessary for another person. How many pieces of advice I have received in my life from people who did not understand my construct, myself, or the perception and state I was in.
There is an illusion: that for children to have the right attitude toward money, they need to be taught money — for example, taught how to count. Interesting — who in modern society cannot count bills if they had a normal grade in math? What does it mean to know how to use money correctly? What does that even mean?
💡 And when we see two reasons: on the one hand, a rational reason, and on the other, a reason caused by an irrational state, this inner feeling of a lack of money, then this is the direction that we focus on to solve the problem.
Rational explanation of money
What is a rational explanation? A person says: “I have a mortgage, I need to pay it, so I need to earn money.” Or: “My children need to go to university, so I am saving for their education.” Someone says: “My children must study at a very top university — I will save on myself, eat sausages, but I will put aside 300,000 dollars for their education.” And he considers this rational.
Someone considers it rational to have a two-room apartment for a family — someone considers it rational to have a house of a thousand square meters for a similar family.
Someone considers it rational to go on vacation twice a year — someone considers it rational that vacations are not needed: it’s enough to go to the dacha.
And the fact remains: all of this is very relative and tied to the amount of money.
Today, there are many stories showing: “Look how this person dresses,” “In Silicon Valley, a car doesn’t matter,” “Clothes don’t matter.” Oh really? Then why does Bill Gates buy clothes from Loro Piana? Why do I periodically see very expensive cars? Who buys them? “Not real Americans”? And who flies on private jets? And who throws birthday parties — and what kind? Take a look.
Take Jeff Bezos and how he recently celebrated his wedding. And note that half of Silicon Valley was present at that wedding. Including people about whom they like to say: “Money doesn’t matter to them.”
Or Mark Zuckerberg. They say money doesn’t matter to him, although dozens of times they have shown how much his T-shirt costs. And at the same time: he bought up all the adjacent houses in Palo Alto. They say that an underground space connecting six houses was created inside. They had an illegal school for three years for 20 children, not approved by local legislation: a huge amount of security work, an unreal amount of service staff.
What rationality is everyone talking about? That he “dresses somehow differently”? Maybe he just doesn’t have taste? This is a question of a sense of beauty, a question of an inner state, when within a certain society you activate certain behavior, understanding what is appropriate and what is not. This is a question of an inner state of taste in many things. And this is not judgment. This is a normal understanding of what a rational life is and what is not.
And what do we slide into? When people say: “Well, buy something simpler, live rationally — then money will be enough.” In parallel, there are other methods: hang a vision board, glue on yachts, ships, airplanes, scatter pictures of money…
I remember one story, of course surreal. There was one person in Moscow. He arrived in an old Maybach — they used to be beautiful — and invited us to his house for a sauna. We arrive, enter the house. At the entrance, something like renovations: some people are doing something. He says: “They’re doing renovations for me.” And then we go inside — every 15 meters there is a stack of fake money lying around. Someone asks him: “Why did you scatter money here?” He says: “This attracts money. You need to be around money.” You look at this and think it’s strange. What is this? What does “attracts money” mean? What kind of feeling, what kind of relationship with money is this?
And then the question arises: “Is it normal to hang a vision board, a dream board on the wall? Is it rational? And is it rational to make an expensive purchase? And in what case will this purchase really help you start earning more and feel calmer about money? And in what case is it just an expense that should not have been made, and with which you will look strange? Strange — with this bag, or this jacket, or these shoes. It will be visible that the purchase is random, inappropriate.”
I have seen many such businessmen: they bought expensive things, and it was obvious that they did not have 30 suits from Brioni, Kiton, or Tom Ford. It was obvious that they bought one, at most two suits, and this action did not correspond to them. This is not a question of taste, not a question of feeling life, but simply randomness.
Rationality has a very serious impact. People work, and a boss considers it rational to spend 5,000 dollars a month. Therefore, he sincerely does not understand why someone should earn more than 1,000 or 2,000 dollars. “That’s how it should be,” he thinks.
I have a channel about artificial intelligence. There I talked about how I made a down payment for a robot. We discussed that robots may soon become inexpensive. And soon there should also appear cars that drive themselves and transport people. Elon Musk promised a Cybercab that would cost about 200 dollars a month — a car without a steering wheel, it takes you where you need to go. And someone writes: “Why pay for a self-driving car if you can hire an immigrant driver for 1,000 dollars?”
First, the person does not understand that you cannot hire a driver in California for 1,000 dollars a month — it doesn’t matter whether he is a legal or illegal immigrant. The minimum hourly wage here is 18–19 dollars an hour. There is no work for 1,000 dollars here. Even illegal workers receive the same 18–20 dollars an hour, not to mention the fact that you do not have the right to hire a person illegally.
People simply do not understand what they are saying. They have their own idea of rationality. They consider their own rational. And they throw at you a rational explanation — rational for them. And your actions may seem irrational to them.
I remember the 90s: in Minsk, they started selling still water in bottles. I kept looking at it and thinking: “Strange people buy bottled water if you can drink it from the tap.” In the U.S., many people still drink tap water. And in many restaurants, you simply cannot buy bottled still water, because it is considered normal to drink tap water. They bring you water for free, and put a lot of ice in it — for them, this is the norm. Why spend money on something that is free?
This is a very interesting line of reasoning: why spend money on something that is free?
Just like in the previous examples, a huge number of people reason like this:
- why buy this or that car if there are cheaper cars?
- why buy expensive clothes if clothes are just clothes?
- why buy paintings or a good mattress?
And someone says the opposite: “You need to invest money specifically in this, you need to invest specifically there.” You look at such people and think: “Why? Why exactly there?”
💡 It turns out that each person has their own rationality. And it's important to note that in most situations, a person can reduce their rationality. What does this mean? It means that you have the ability to reduce your needs. Instead of eating two sausages, you can eat one. Instead of eating a whole sausage, you can eat half.
The state often says the same thing: “It’s okay, you need to endure. There is inflation — eat half a sausage instead of a whole one.” This is exactly a reduction of rationality. You can also reduce your rationality — go to some coaching, to a course.
But you can change rationality — and make another mistake.
A person unreasonably rents expensive housing. Unreasonably makes purchases. Saves money for children’s education that they don’t need. Or saves money for retirement and dies at 45. This is also an unreasonable action.
What should be done about this?
I will tell an interesting story. I rented fairly expensive housing. From the outside, it looked very expensive, especially in those years. Later, people’s perception changed, but back then it raised serious questions. Often I heard advice: “Rent simpler housing. Better go on vacation.” I answered: “Listen, I spend 90% of my time in this housing. At that time, I had one child, and my wife spent almost all her time at home. I myself was at home at least half the day. It seems to me that this is exactly where it is worth investing. This is more important than living who knows where, but going on vacation once or twice a year.”
This is simply my choice. Even if for someone it might look strange. Someone will say: “It’s better to save this money for retirement.” And for me, this is a big question: why should I save for retirement now? There is always this internal slider — where to set it? This is a very subtle moment.
There is one blogger who periodically pops up on social networks. He is at Patriarch Ponds in Moscow, interviewing girls, asking questions about the number Pi, capitals, and so on.
In one video, he asks a girl:
– How much should your boyfriend earn?
– Definitely more than me.
– And how much?
– Well, at least a million.
Then he уточняет:
– Actually, 15 million.
He was literally thrown back. He asks:
– What do you mean 15 million?
She:
– Well, 15. So that we can go on vacation, go somewhere.
And it was clear: the girl truly knows what it means to live on 15 million. She understood what she was talking about. And he did not. For him, it was a strange, unreal number. But if a yacht in France costs a million dollars a week, then earning 15 million a month, you can live simply, but once a year rent a yacht. But if you can afford a yacht for a million dollars, then most likely your other expenses will be completely different as well.
I watched the reasoning of young Russian entrepreneurs — they already have money, companies, an audience. They calculated: to be able not to work and have enough money for life, you need 40 million dollars.
I sit and think: “Okay, let’s say he has, say, 40 years left. Let’s assume he wants to live 200 years, but let’s be realistic — 40. That’s 1 million dollars a year. 80–90 thousand dollars a month. And if you rent a yacht for a week — the entire annual budget is gone.”
Someone will now say: “What yacht? What empty talk is this?”
But I can give examples where 40 million dollars disappear instantly. That amount of money may not be enough even to participate in certain investments. It will not be enough to enter some projects, to create something serious.
I know that today I could launch projects worth tens of billions of dollars. I understand the scale very clearly: what projects could be launched for tens of billions, what for hundreds of billions, and even for a trillion dollars I would find an application. But what is important is something else: for people, these amounts themselves are just an internal abstraction. Something that exists as an image, not as reality.
Someone says: “I want to help people. My task is to give 50 million dollars to charity.” Is that rational or irrational? Maybe it is completely irrational — and there is no need to do any charity at all. Maybe for your life it would be more rational to give that money to your employees as salaries.
For me, one of the big questions arose several years ago, when I was managing one of the largest global companies in the field of IT education. ****Hundreds of thousands of people studied there, and the community numbered in the millions. I had about 30 directors. And almost all of these people were in very serious financial dependence: not enough for mortgages, loans, vacations, for a normal life. A person works an enormous amount of time, and shareholders constantly demand: “Faster! More!”
And I had a question: “Why, while managing such a large company, do people still live on the edge of shortage?” This is a typical Russian reality.
At OpenAI, in the U.S., everything is different. When the company reached a valuation of about half a trillion dollars, management allowed employees to sell their shares. This almost never happens. Usually, shareholders keep employees dependent and give them nothing. Moreover, later the company gave every employee a bonus of over one million dollars — to everyone who was officially employed. And all employees immediately became dollar millionaires. Someone might say: “Well, that’s because they have a lot of money.”
💡And I will say differently: this is a different approach. This is an approach where the company does not want employees to live in financial dependence. When employees receive large sums, some of them may leave.
I realized this very clearly because over all this time I hired and fired thousands of people. Once I gave a person a bonus equal to six months’ salary. I thought: “That’s it, now he’ll work with insane motivation.” He quit a week later. I was surprised. And they told me: “He received exactly enough money not to work for six months. And he simply decided to leave because he finally could afford it.”
Many people think that if you give someone a lot of money, they will become more motivated. Some managers therefore think the opposite: “Okay, then we’ll pay them little. Otherwise, they’ll leave.” And people really do leave, because they don’t want to be slaves. All of this is a question of rational and irrational attitudes toward money.
And here the main question is: what is rationality and the energy of dependence on money?
All of this comes down to the source of internal energy — to the force that either creates a feeling of sufficiency or forms a state of shortage. Look: both stories — rational and irrational — converge into one thing: inside, there is an energy working that determines whether you have enough money or not.
One force says: “I have enough.”
Another says: “I don’t have money.”
One allows you to save.
The other forces you to spend everything down to zero, without understanding where the money goes.
My wife has been in a state of “not enough money” for the last 13 years, regardless of what access she has to money. For many years I watched how she managed to leave 1.50 rubles on her card — or, already in America, 1.26 dollars. And I could never understand how it is physically possible to spend money in such a way that one and a half rubles remain in the account. When a person earns 10,000 rubles a month — that’s understandable. But her amounts were completely different. And still: one child, two, three, or four; Minsk, Moscow, America; different income levels — nothing changed. It was always the same internal state. What kind of energy is this? Why does it work like this?
For me, it was the opposite. All my life I knew how to save money, since childhood. Recently my sister recalled: when I bought a chocolate bar with nuts, I would save the nuts for later. First I ate the chocolate, and then the nuts. She said: “You always knew how not to spend everything at once.” And indeed, I knew how to save. But in one year the situation flipped: I started earning much more. Access to money increased. And in that very year I developed a state in which money was always not enough, no matter what I did:
– I reduce expenses — not enough
– reduce even more — not enough
– start saving — not enough
– increase expenses fivefold — still not enough
Interestingly, spending five times more worked. But the state of “not enough” remained unchanged. And at some point I realized: reducing expenses does not affect the internal state of shortage in any way. And you have to stop listening to people who say: “Reduce expenses — and you’ll have enough.”
Because reducing expenses changed absolutely nothing. And here an important question arises: what is better?
- To spend X and live in a state of “not enough”?
- Or to spend 100X… and still live in a state of “not enough”?
Robert Kiyosaki recently said something that many perceived as a provocation. He was asked: “How much debt do you have?” He answered: 1.2 billion dollars. And then added: “People are afraid of debt — but why? If you owe the bank 20 million, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank 1.2 billion, that’s the bank’s problem.” Of course, he explained: these debts are not restaurants and cars — this money creates new money. This is a different construction of debt: debt as a tool for earning.
Is this rational or not?
In my videos, I said that many people save money for their children or save “for their future selves.” I added: there is a high probability that you will never use this money. You must acknowledge this and relate to it calmly.
A close person comes to me and says: “Listen, I’ve been walking around with your thought, and it rethinks everything. It’s true — I worry so much, save, think so that there’s enough somewhere, but in fact a huge part of the money I save… I may never use it in my life at all.”
And this is indeed so. Not necessarily because a person will die earlier than expected. Circumstances may simply change. For example:
– you may start earning a thousand times more — those old savings will become insignificant,
– money may be frozen, taken away, or devalued,
– you may go bankrupt in another space,
– you may move, and access to those accounts will disappear,
– you may leave it to your children, and the children will spend everything on charity, on research into multicolored dog eyes, or on growing a new type of fir tree,
– you yourself, at the end of your life, may suddenly decide that all of this should be given to charity, and live modestly.
And almost every person, if honest, can stop earning money altogether. I’m talking about the modern world, of course, not war zones. But in general, one can at least go live in some kind of temple.
This is a very interesting aspect. Many people don’t like it.
💡 For example, I personally do not have the ability to stop earning money right now. And ****my wife does have that ability. She hasn’t worked for 16 years, and everything is fine. But I created these circumstances myself. This is a very important point: I myself built a system in which I cannot not work.
A year ago, friends of my mother came to visit us from another state. They talked about how they came to the U.S. in the 90s with 200 dollars, how difficult it was, how they saved on subway rides. And it sounded like it was hard for them, and for me, when I arrived, it was supposedly easy. But I explained to many people that it was harder for me. Because they came from a country where there was no opportunity to earn 5–10 dollars an hour, there was social housing, there was no choice, and there was no habit of everyday comfort. They came to a place where basic things became more accessible.
And I came with a huge suitcase of demands: for the level of housing, for service, for restaurants, for everyday habits, for the quality of medicine, for certain schools for my children, for the pace of life, for assistants, drivers, secretaries, an office, a structure. I was accustomed to different consumption. And this is the hardest thing to recreate anew.
And when I say that I am a hostage of the fact that I cannot not work — this is a normal perception of the reality of money. So can I not work or can I? Of course, I can not work. I can go on government support, I can go live in a commune, I can choose a different lifestyle. Do I have such an opportunity? I do. Someone will say: “That’s wrong, you took responsibility. You have children. You must provide them with education, opportunities, a future…”
Did I take responsibility for my children to get into Harvard or Stanford? Or to give them an education costing a million dollars? What specific responsibility did I take for myself? And did I take it at all? Where was this contract signed?
I remember very well how in 2004 I got a job as a programmer for 100 dollars. I was happy. It was enough. Then — 1,500 dollars as an employee. Then we opened a company, started paying ourselves salaries of 700–800 dollars. A wife appeared. We lived on one to two thousand, and it was normal and calm. So where was the rationality — or was rationality somewhere completely different?
When you have to think about how to take care of hundreds of plants you planted, or find yourself a piano teacher, or buy different paints for drawing, or make an endless number of purchases for children, or think about gifts for 50 school birthdays a year, or take care of a family vacation, or choose between business class and economy, or think about buying some antique items, or think about how to properly invest money and which businesses to enter, or shoot a large volume of video and create articles for future aspects, investing money, energy, and labor into it?
Is this rational or not?
The most important thing to do is to stop lying to yourself. You need to look at yourself honestly:
– what is rational for me, and what is not?
– where does the energy of anxiety about money arise in me?
– where does it disappear?
– why in some months do I worry, and in others I don’t, even though nothing has changed?
Here’s a recent example. We were driving with Polina and discussing the cost of groceries. She talks about the Trader Joe’s chain: “Well, this is a cheap store, I sometimes buy groceries there.” I say: “No, it’s middle class.” But her brain does not want to accept that there are cheaper stores. Because if she acknowledges that, she will automatically activate an internal mechanism of saving. And she doesn’t want that.
There are situations where I try to explain to children that we are not saving money — we simply cannot afford something. There are people who save for three years to buy an expensive computer for their child. Or they say: “Give money as gifts, let him save up.” I forbid giving money to my children. And others do the opposite. This is a very specific construct that can lead to an inadequate perception of money in children.
I remember how I worked as a project manager, earned a thousand dollars a month. And I had a system administrator with a salary of 250. And one day he buys himself a phone for 400. And you stand there thinking: “What is happening? Why does a person who earns four times less have a phone that costs more than mine? Why does he spend one and a half of his salaries on a gadget? What kind of rationality is this?”
In my perception with children, I build a very simple logic: if a child needs notebooks, pens, a computer, clothes — and I can afford it — I buy it. If I cannot — we simply don’t buy it.
But then the question arises: what does “I can afford it” mean, and what does “I cannot” mean?
Formally, I can afford any computer. But in reality, I see that in overall volumes this crosses a certain boundary, becomes something excessive. And I say: “We won’t do this.” Considering that there are many expenses, one has to make decisions that from the outside may look irrational.
– “Dad, why does our dog eat for 600 dollars a month, and you don’t give me 20 for this thing?”
– “Dad, yesterday we went to a restaurant and paid 400 dollars! And you said that we can’t buy paints for 30 because we already have enough paints for this month. Where is the rationality in this?”
We live in a very difficult time of defining what is good and what is bad. It was much easier to live and feel freedom in the Soviet Union. It was much easier 50 years ago. It is much easier to live in a society where everything is unified. And we live in an impossible time of many circumstances and choices, where it is very hard to make a decision.
So what should be done?
- Go to a restaurant or not?
- Buy paints or give up the restaurant instead?
- Reduce the dog’s meat and switch to dry food or still buy yourself a sweater?
- Drink coffee or skip it? What is more correct?
💡 It is important to start observing yourself. Just start seeing that there are states and influences in which it is almost impossible to determine the truth. The quantities are immeasurable, the cause-and-effect relationships are not obvious, there are aspects that do not lend themselves to rational explanation at all.
There are popular videos: “Calculate how much money you spend on coffee. You spend 4 dollars every day, and if you saved it…” But what if I drink coffee not for caffeine, but because it’s an atmosphere? This is being in a certain atmosphere, not a question of the coffee itself. Then I can not drink coffee at all. Why make it at home then? I can simply not drink coffee if I can’t afford it in a café, or drink it at home if I want to. Or maybe I won’t want to at all.
The question is your ability to easily give something up. Easily give up both a restaurant and paints, and a T-shirt, and any purchases, or your job, or your apartment; easily understand that at any moment you can move to live in fairly difficult conditions.
It is important to stop deceiving yourself. And here the question of balance from the point of view of money appears. Balance is a very complex energy. Do you have it?
What do I recommend you do? I suggest starting to track the very fact of the manifestation of this or that energy in yourself. Not resolving the situation in terms of how to earn more money, not fixing the situation so that it’s enough — because materially you will not resolve this situation — but observing what is happening in your life.
Why are there people who do not think about money, they always have enough, and there are people who endlessly deal with money, and they constantly have problems with it?