The everyone-is-equal crowd love to blame billionaires for their money problems.
But really, money problems start in the brain, and that’s controversial to say. But it’s f*cking true.
The thing about a person’s approach to money is you can’t easily diagnose it. Most neuroscientists or psychologists don’t specialize in solving money problems – there’s ironically no money in it. Although they should help people master money, because it’s one of the biggest causes of suffering.
When you master money you have the resources to do almost whatever you want in life. And it’s not a business model or passive income that’s holding you back. It’s your brain. Many of us unconsciously pick up a bad money mindset from our family, community, or job. So…
You focus on saving instead of making money. Or see opportunities as expenses instead of investments with ROI. Or you see asymmetric risks through a skeptical lens that causes you to place every person online into a Lambo guru model and scream “that doesn’t work for me because I’m smarter than that.”
You can literally outsmart yourself into becoming poor and not even realize it.
That’s exactly what I did and it landed me a minimum wage job in a call center for acting so foolish. I was right… but I was broke. And I often had no more than $50 leftover from each paycheck. I couldn’t go on dates. I could only catch the bus. And I couldn’t even buy coffee.
I don’t care how noble you are or how much you think having money is evil… that’s no way to live, man. A man (or woman) should be able to indulge in some coffee once in a while or go on a basic holiday to Queensland and pitch a tent in the outback for weeks, mate.
The good news is your brain can change thanks to neuroplasticity.
You can train your brain to achieve any outcome in life that you might want, including becoming wealthy. This might sound disgusting but hear me out.
You probably know the marshmallow test.
Stanford, late 60s, heaps of weed. A researcher sits a 4-year-old down in front of a marshmallow and makes a deal: eat it now, or wait 15 minutes and get two. Then he leaves. Some kids inhale it immediately. Some kids white-knuckle it — covering their eyes, singing to themselves, sitting on their own hands.
And when the researchers tracked those kids down years later, the kids who waited were doing better. Better test scores. Better outcomes. Better lives, more or less.
So the story became: some people just have it. Discipline. Grit. The thing. And some people don’t, and you can basically tell which by age 4, and good luck amigo. It’s a beautiful Cinderella story with a happy ending.
Here’s the part nobody tells you.
In 2018, a team ran the study again. Bigger sample, controlled for the kids’ family income and background. And the effect mostly evaporated. What predicted a kid’s future wasn’t really the waiting. It was what the waiting was made of.
Because think about what you’re actually asking that kid to do. You’re asking them to believe a stranger who just told them that if they wait, more is coming.
A kid who grew up somewhere stable — where the fridge is full, where adults do what they said they’d do, where “later” reliably arrives — has no reason to doubt him. Waiting is obviously worth it. Waiting has always been worth it.
A kid who grew up where promises evaporated learned something different, and learned it correctly: take what’s in front of you, because there might not be a later.
Neither kid has more willpower. They have different forecasts.
And that changes what this whole conversation is about.
Because if patience were character, you’d be stuck with whatever you were handed. But it’s not character. It’s a prediction your brain has been quietly running for years about whether the future pays out.
Predictions can be updated.
That’s what the rest of this essay is about — not becoming a more disciplined person, but changing what your brain expects to happen when you wait. Because the difference between the people who build wealth and the people who don’t is almost never the marshmallow.
It's whether their brain believes the wait pays out.
For the last 12 years, I’ve obsessed over the psychology of money.
My battle with dark mental illness showed me how much our brain can create or destroy our lives. Once I solved that problem, I naturally progressed to how the brain impacts our money. It helps that I was working in a bank too where I saw it play out.
The single most researched brain mechanism associated with money is “delay discounting.”
It’s how drastically your brain devalues a future reward just because it’s in the future. Example: $100 now versus $150 next month. Most of us will choose $100 now.
There’s a part of your brain, sitting just behind your forehead, whose entire job is deciding what things are worth. Not their price — their worth, to you, right now. Neuroscientists call it the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. We’re going to call it the wanting brain.
Sitting above and to the side is a second region, and its job is the boring one: planning, waiting, overriding. That one’s the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The planning brain.
Every financial decision you’ve ever made was a conversation between these two.
People whose brains discount the future steeply spend more impulsively and save less.
The neuroscience here is unusually clean. fMRI studies show when people choose the delayed reward, you can watch the planning brain light up — and the strength of its connection to the wanting brain predicts how patient someone will be with money.
The pattern holds up on people the researchers had never scanned before. It predicts, not just describes.
There's even a study where researchers stimulated that part of the brain directly. Discounting went down, dopamine went up.
So patience with money isn't a personality trait you're born with. It's a measurable circuit — and circuits strengthen with use.
Every time you choose the future payoff over the instant one, you’re training the exact wiring wealthy behavior runs on. Sick, right?
The next way your brain can help you become wealthier is with what’s known as “future self-continuity.”
Hal Hershfield’s Stanford work found that people who see “me at 65” as the same person as “me now” save more money.
He found a cheat code too.
Rating your current-vs-future self activates the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, and the less that region distinguishes future-you from a total stranger, the steeper your discounting and the worse your saving. In follow-up studies, showing people age-progressed photos of themselves measurably increased how much cash they allocated to retirement.
Your brain treats future-you like a stranger, and you don’t lend strangers money. Fix that and you save more.
Next for training the brain to be wealthier comes effort-based dopamine. This mofo can ruin your life if you don’t understand it. Mastering how your brain uses dopamine can help you build wealth.
The average person suffers financially because they’re stuck in cheap-dopamine loops. They scroll TikTok and get spikes of dopamine. They consume relationship p*rn, money p*rn, career p*rn, and even real people doing it in bed p*rn every single day.
They even get stuck impulse-buying stuff they don’t need and having packages delivered every day to their doorstep from a not-so-friendly Amazon guy (or robot).
When we engage in this behavior we train the brain to seek instant rewards.
The solution is to rewire your brain toward effort-linked reward. This comes from not impulse-buying stuff, being disciplined, doing hard things, and seeking goals that take months, years, or even decades to have a payoff.
Delayed-payoff behaviors help your brain to enable you to build wealth.
It’s why all the passive income, faceless Youtube, FBA ecommerce, book funnel, sell-ya-Substack-for-$5-a-month-and-become-a-millionaire folks are literally programming your brain to be poor and eventually become a homeless beggar.
Wealth doesn’t come from cheap dopamine or short-term gambling. It comes from hard work, doing hard things, extreme patience, and mastery that takes time.
We now need to talk about scarcity and stress from money problems.
Financial stress and scarcity measurably tax the prefrontal cortex — the same region you need for good money decisions — which is why being broke can make it harder to think your way out.
Being poor is literally a mental illness.
Reframing plays a role here too. For example, I had $1.2M stolen from my digital wallet in 2021. I reframed this to “Losing $1.2M helped me make $6M shortly after (true story).” Cognitive reappraisal (deliberately changing how you interpret a situation) reliably engages prefrontal regions and dampens amygdala response.
You can train the brain to respond differently to financial stress.
It helps you reduce panic so your decision-making circuits stay online and don’t freeze up, leading to indecision, overthinking, and overwhelm.
And what you focus on becomes your reality.
Attentional bias is well-studied. Anxious brains preferentially detect threat. That bias can shift with training.
Applied to money, chronic financial anxiety makes you scan for danger rather than opportunity, and that’s a habit of attention, not a fact about the world.
Once you shift this in your brain you start to see opportunities again.
In a similar vein, loss aversion is real. Losses hit harder than equivalent gains, and this shows up in the amygdala and striatum. It’s why people hold losing stock/crypto positions too long and won’t take the risk that would actually build wealth. I’m guilty here by the way. I’m still holding Bitcoin after massive losses.
If you fix your brain’s financial programming using these proven neuroscience techniques, only then can you become wealthy.
If you don’t fix how your brain sees money, then even if you win the lottery, you’ll still piss it all away because your brain told you to due to faulty programming.
Some of this may have gone over your head. It’s very neuroscience-y.
The bottom line is if you do hard things, take calculated risks, find asymmetric bets, are patient, add real value to people’s lives, see opportunities instead of scams, and invest with a long term view… it’s hard NOT to become wealthy.
Most people are stuck in an invisible dopamine loop caused by their phone and they can’t escape. It’s like an echo chamber full of p*rno bros telling them “you can get rich over here” when it’s actually just cheap dopamine disguised as red pill content.
The fundamentals of getting wealthy have always been the same: build a business, become an owner, invest in real assets that have value, go slowly, build real skill and gain experience, become a practitioner, and never be dumb enough to believe you will make-money-while-you-sleep.
This stuff feels like what my daughter learns in kindergarten yet it’s painfully true. The moment you think you’re missing out or there’s some magic wealth hack, you’re screwed up the butt without a c0ndom in a g*ng bang full of passive income bros driving Lambos, screaming give it to me baby.
Understanding human psychology and the brain is the greatest wealth builder and wealth compounder on the planet. Study it. Apply it. Get wealthy. Then give me a kiss.
P.S. Now for the “practical” part of getting wealthy.
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