How to Create Wealth By
Overcoming Negative Influences

The top business people will all tell you that if you want to learn how to create wealth, you have to take a good look at the people around you.

Identifying the Enemy

You are a reflection of the people around you. Generally, your family, neighbors and friends see you as someone who possesses the same overall potential and abilities that they do, whether this is true or not. Even if you have advantages over them – natural abilities or earned leverage - they will see themselves as having offsetting advantages that can’t help but "even things out."

It is impossible to have companionship in this world without discussing our potential and our limitations. Barriers to wealth building are caused by limiting self talk based on vertical messaging (messages from older family members), self messaging (new coding from your own research, such as through self-help guidance), and horizontal messaging (messages from friends, acquaintances and colleagues).

Vertical messaging exists in families and is inheritable in the same manner as money or physical things. Detrimental vertical messaging that confuse and frustrate us as we learn how to create wealth is passed down without regard to fault, since it is impossible to tell where much of it originated. But it is the responsibility of enlightened individuals to put a stop to the destructive messages once recognized so that we and our future generations have a chance to prosper.

The gift of positive vertical messaging is pretty much a function of good luck, but self-messaging through personal development is the space where you create your own luck -- and with the development of a millionaire mentality, the possibilities are infinite.

The horizontal messaging that coaxes you into believing that you can't do something before you even try are all around you. Most of those messages were created by people who are not successful themselves and would feel much more comfortable if you did not become successful either.

But the primary barriers to learning how to create wealth come from the wealthy and powerful themselves, through the institutions they have developed that fence other people out in their treatment of wealth building as a "zero sum" game (i.e., "I lose if you win").

If you move ahead of your peers economically during your life, it will make them wonder what their failings were that caused them not to pull themselves up as well. They would much rather believe that they did the best they could with what they had given their natural class limitations. They are terribly uneasy that the people around them might find out how to create wealth and prove to them their limitations were not as insurmountable as they thought.

This phenomenon explains a lot of irrational prejudice in our society. For years it made no sense to me why bigotry existed against people who have suffered some of the greatest misfortunes and exploitation in history (going into this phenomenon in more depth is a topic for another day, but we all know who these people are). I found it hard to swallow that an enlightened society would make the lives of its most vulnerable classes more difficult, yet we see it happening all of the time.

When you fully examine the concept of horizontal messaging, though, it becomes less of a mystery. We are copying the exclusionary tactics of the privileged classes from our own power vantage point – our level of control and influence over each other.

Like with the spread of Protestantism and Vulgar Latin, the rich and powerful aren't controlling how we apply these exclusionary tactics once they expose us to them. They don’t care if we learn Latin or become religious fanatics, or if we decide to exclude people from any of these endeavors to create more hierarchies under us that make ourselves feel superior. All that they did was create the playing field itself – how we choose to play is up to us.

Next: Mastering Wealth Creation One Step at a Time

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