Chris Do:

I am not obsessed with money. I've never been obsessed with money. Money was the result of value created for other people. Money is a scorecard of how much you're able to create value. If I'm able to solve a problem, a really big problem, then I will make more money. If I solve a small problem, I will make less. I have, like I said, more money than I can spend. I don't know what to do with the money we make. I'm obsessed about helping you make money.

Mo Ismail:

All right, Chris. So me and you have a lot of discussions on the channel, off the channel, but I want to start with this. You are primarily in the business of design, helping creatives understand the business world, understand money, understand the logistics of operating their passion, so to speak. So we get a lot of comments naturally, two plus million followers. Some people love it. Some people, it rubs them the wrong way or maybe they just don't have a bearing on the context of things that we're talking about. So we had a comment come up on one of our most recent videos and it said, "So are you just obsessed with money at this point or do you still consider yourself a designer?" I want to start there. When you hear that question, where does your head go? What is your response? And let's just open up the dialogue from there.

Chris Do:

I love this question, and I actually think responding to criticism is where we can grow. It makes us very uncomfortable to look at criticism because it attacks our whole definition of who we are, our own identity, and I think we need to get comfortable with that. I recently wrote a post on LinkedIn about learning to love your trolls. I don't consider this person a troll at all. So I look at this... And you and I have talked about this before, every form of communication according to Tony Robbins is either a cry for help or an expression of love. This does not sound like an expression of love. So it sounds like I cry for help. And what does that mean? He's not literally crying like, "Oh, Chris, help me. I don't understand."

But it's like, "Yo, bro, your videos are confusing. Your content seems to be geared towards one thing, and do you even do this anymore?" So let's break it apart. And the best way to break these things apart is to look at it objectively, not to have any emotional investment in the right or wrong response. So am I obsessed with money? It sounds to me like this person thinks all I care about is money, more money for me, more money, money, money. I'm living some kind of capitalist's dream. And to that I say, I used to work really, really hard so that I can get to a point in my life so I can save up enough money to have financial security for myself, for my wife, my two kids, and for my extended family, like my parents, my brothers... I don't have a sister, but my brother. Anybody who needs help, I would be able to help financially, that if there were any unforeseen financial catastrophe, I would be able to weather that storm.

Now, Blair Enns shared this on Twitter. He said something to the effect of, "If you can solve a problem by writing a check, you don't have a problem." I just want that to settle in for a second just so that you understand. If you can spend money to solve a problem, the question is, "Do you really have a problem?"

Mo Ismail:

That's fair.

Chris Do:

So a lot of people run into stress around money because they can't afford to spend that money. I've shared this story as well. I have a friend, well regarded artist, he has been working in the industry for decades. He told me that it broke his heart that his wife, who's from another country, her father fell ill, and she needed to get on a plane to see him, to make sure he's okay, but because finances being what they were, he could not afford the ticket in the time in which he could buy it.

And subsequently, her father passed away and it destroyed her and it ruined their marriage. And he said the marriage never recovered from that incident. And to me, that's so tragic that we don't have enough runway in our lives to buy a plane ticket. That sounds pretty extreme, but I bet a lot of people watching this episode are in that situation where a bad car accident, something happens like a roof caves in, and now you're just wrecked. And I hear this all the time and people live in this place where they just don't have enough to eat. So it's a bad place. So I try to get myself to a place where I can make enough money where those financial pressures and stress of not having enough are gone. Now, I've been very fortunate in my life.

Even though we grew up as refugee immigrants in this country, just a few years after starting my business, I learned the art of business and the business of art, and I was able to excel and make more money than I had a right to make, mostly because I had some degree of talent, I'm not going to dismiss that, a super strong work ethic and being at the right place at the right time. I'm talking about 1995 Los Angeles in the beginning of what would be known as the motion design industry where there are probably less than 12 companies in the world who were competing at the level in which I was competing at. So it meant that I had a one in 12 chance of getting a call for a gig. Those are pretty good odds in the world. So it meant that I can mess up a lot, that I didn't even have to have all the right answers, but I was able to succeed. And I wish that for anybody and everybody.

So here's like a little sidebar note. There's always a gap when you transition from one cycle to a new cycle and it's a paradigm shift. In that shift, whole groups of people, whole industries and businesses are wiped out completely while giving birth to brand new industries and new people and new ways of doing things. The internet is a classic example of just the beginning of a massive shift in how we do work. Zoom exists as a multi-billion dollar company today because of the internet. Netflix cannot exist in the way that it does today without the internet. And so you look at your cell phone, right? Everybody's got a smartphone, right? Everybody's got one of these things. How many different things did this one device display?

Well, I don't know about you, but I don't carry maps around anymore. And I used to carry around this book, a wire bound book called The Thomas Guide to Los Angeles, and this is the only way you can find somebody in LA. You look up their zip code or the street name and you figure out where they were, and then you would turn to page 44 and you look up A4 or something like that. Now I'm getting old here because people are like, "What the heck is he talking about?"

Mo Ismail:

You're dating yourself a little bit there on that one.

Chris Do:

Right. This replaced that. This also replaced something that some people would call beeper, but it's called a pager.

Mo Ismail:

Yes.

Chris Do:

Got rid of that. And some of us would have a GPS device, like a Garmin GPS device to give us turn by turn directions. That was a separate device. Some of us would wear a heart rate monitor to see how many calories we were burning, how many steps that we would take, a speedometer. And these are just a few of the things. Well, before you had an iPhone, you probably had an iPod.

Mo Ismail:

Yes.

Chris Do:

A thousand songs in your pocket, a brilliant marketing thing. Many of you carried a separate phone and a camera, two separate devices. So this one device eats away and destroys whole industries. Groups of people are laid off, they don't have a job anymore. The standard bearer back then were two companies, Nokia and Motorola. They were the kings of cell phone manufacturers. Now, when was the last time you bought a Motorola phone?

Mo Ismail:

Facts.

Chris Do:

When was the last time you bought a Nokia phone? And then prior to that, there was this thing called the Blackberry, or affectionately referred to by many of their fans as CrackBerry. Business people were on that thing like nuts because they could message each other. So SMS, texting, messaging, video conferencing, all these things are displaced. So these are opportunities for people when this paradigm shifts. So we must ask ourselves this one question, Mo, "Are there paradigm shifts happening right now?" And the answer is of course, there are. Some we can see, some we can't.

But one that unless you've been sleeping on a rock is called artificial intelligence or machine learning. So this is super disruptive. I say that because you're like, "Well, Chris, lucky for you, you were there in 1995 in Los Angeles, right?" But here we are, 2023. Where are you in the world? Have you heard of something called ChatGPT? And we're in version four. Have you heard of Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and the hosts of companies that have created little products and ecosystems around these main technologies? Well, you're here now, so you can ask yourself that question. That was a bit of a diversion or a tangent. Let me get back to the main thing, which is do I care about money? Absolutely. As a person who grew up with not a lot of money, it was my obsession. It was my driving principle as an entrepreneur to go out and make money so I can create that little cushion and live the American dream. And I know, too, if you want to live in Los Angeles, be married happily and support two kids going to private school, you better make some coin.

Mo Ismail:

You better make some bread. It's expensive out there.

Chris Do:

Let's get real. You want to live in a nice neighborhood, you want to live in a nice house, you want to drive in a nice car? You better go make some money. So a funny thing happened along that journey, which is I actually got to that place where I have financial freedom, where I no longer have to work. I could literally retire. How do I know? I asked my financial planner, John, and John said, "Chris, you could have retired years ago. The way that you live, how much money you have, you're set. You don't need to work anymore." And that was, I think, in 2013, 2012. So I haven't had a need to work anymore for over 10 years now.

So when this person's asking me, "Am I obsessed with money?" Yes, but not the way that you think. I'm not obsessed about making it anymore. I'm not obsessed about how much we have or how much we don't have because we have more than what we need and what we could spend. And now I'm obsessed about helping other people who are on their own entrepreneurial journey, whether they self-identify as creative or not, to help them achieve their level of success because I think I'm in this very privileged place, and I could easily do what many people do. It's just go and have a great life and forget about y'all. But I'm trying to help other people. So I have to help educate their financial IQ. I've got to get it up. They have to have a different relationship with money. Not only their mindset, their belief systems, but how to communicate, how they talk about money, how they design their business so that they can work less and make more so that they can have that rainy day fund.

Let me land the plane on the whole, "You can write a check, you don't have a problem." A couple years ago, prior to moving to the house in which we live in, my wife had this dream, this desire to remodel some parts of our home. One of her places, her sanctuary is the bathroom. We have a massive bathroom. It's really big, okay? It's bigger than my first bedroom. It's enormous. And she's working with an architect, designer, and a builder, and she gets to make all the decisions from the faucets to the finishes, what kind of shower we're going to have, the cabinetry, the lighting, all the kind of stuff. And she was a little stressed out. I said, "Honey, what's wrong?" And she said to me, "What if I make the wrong decision? It's a lot of money and I don't know what to do."

And she's stressed out and she goes, "What do you think? I need you to pick between these two things." And I told her, "I cannot pick. I don't know how these parts fit into the bigger thing. I can make a really good decision on one part that is bad for the whole, and we don't want to do that. You can make the decision." "And what if I get it wrong?" I said, "It doesn't matter. Here's the cool thing. Make the best decision. Do your homework. Try to imagine this. And if you get it wrong after they install it, sit with it for one day. If you don't like it, tell them to rip it out and do what you want again. It's only money." And she let out this big sigh. Now, nobody wants to throw money out the window. And we even like less the idea of wasting perfectly good raw materials, but that all of a sudden released this burden that she was carrying.

And I know that's a pretty extreme example. I would've been slightly sad that we would put in one kind of marble and then rip it out and put in a totally different kind. But I knew that if I could spend some of the money that we made to alleviate the stress my wife was feeling around this decision to embolden her, to empower her, that's what money's supposed to be for.

Mo Ismail:

So that's your feeling around why your obsession exists, to alleviate that pressure and that need for it?

Chris Do:

No, no, no. Let me clarify. So the original question is, "Am I obsessed with money?" I was, I'm not, and I am, but not the way that you think I am. I'm not obsessed about making more money. I have, like I said, more money than I can spend. I don't know what to do with the money we make. I'm obsessed about helping you make money. There's a great quote, and I'm going to screw it up a little bit, from Zig Ziegler. He says, "You can have everything you want if you help enough people get what they want." This is critical. So the more I help other people, guess what? The more opportunities come to me. And in not pursuing money, trying to help educate people, I'm going to actually make more money. So the person who's asking this question, "Chris, are you obsessed with just making money?" Because if I was, why do I continue to release content that I know I could sell and only offer it exclusively behind a gated paywall?

You need to really think about that, friend, because we've now probably released close to 2000 videos, maybe more at this point because we're on some kind of really consistent release schedule with our videos. If I was obsessed about money, why are you even watching my videos for free? Shouldn't I just be doing that behind a gated paywall? How much of content from very well-to-do people do you know is available to you without strings? You could just watch it. You could just learn.

Mo Ismail:

Yes.

Chris Do:

And the answer is probably not that many. So I think the question is a little bit misguided. Now, I can tell that for a lot of people, when they run into one or two pieces of content, I teach people how to make money, they go, "Oh, this guy's only caring about money." And that's fair, that's a fair criticism, but you're not really looking at it much deeper than a knee-jerk reaction and what they say about that expression. You can't spell knee-jerk without being a jerk. So there's some truth in there, okay?

Mo Ismail:

I have never heard that one, but I'm here for it nonetheless.

Chris Do:

Only because I made it up.

Mo Ismail:

Okay, okay.

Chris Do:

Yeah. And then the question is, "Are you still a designer?" And that's meant to be I think an insult, like, "Bro, you still design?" "Bro, you lift?" It's one of those kind of questions. So it's a question statement mostly designed to stab at you, to pick you apart-

Mo Ismail:

A hundred percent.

Chris Do:

Because they've made this decision of what a designer does, looks like, talks about, and is obsessed over. And let's get into this. So what do we think a designer is? A designer makes something, right? Because usually there's another word attached to designer, a graphic designer, a web designer, a user experienced designer, fashion designer, an interior designer, a designer who designs interiors, someone who makes graphics. So there's a lot of making that's built into this word, and I can understand that because maybe I've used it that way myself. But I was reading Marty Neumeier's book, I think it was the Brand Gap. I'm not sure.

But in it, he said, "What does it mean to be a designer, to design?" And then he pointed to Nobel laureate, Herbert Simon's definition of design, one who devises a course of action to go from an existing condition to an improved condition. So am I a designer? Yes. Maybe not the way that you think. Am I the person who's sketching logos and putting together swatches of materials? Very rarely do I do that. I'm talking about probably 10, 15% of my time is spent doing something like that, mostly for our thumbnails, mostly for my keynote presentations, or maybe I'm designing something for a t-shirt or some kind of fashion thing I'm working on. Now, the kind of design I'm most interested in as a 51-year-old man is I want to design people's lives. I want to help them achieve what it is that their life was meant to be.

I help them to achieve their fullest potential. That's the kind of design I'm interested in. So a life designer, a business designer, a culture designer, a communications designer. To the highest level, a mindset designer. So for some people, their head's going to hurt hearing things like this because it's like, "Yo, bro, I just want to move some type around on a screen." That's cool. That's cool. And the more power to you. And I'm not trying to flex anybody, but when I went to school, I learned that pretty quickly and I got bored of it. I can do it.

I've judged competitions, I've done work that has won a ton of awards, and I just feel like I need to move on to the next part of my life. I don't want to be stuck in the same place. I put in my 10,000 hours. And if you're not sure, friend, here's what you need to do because you don't know me from Jack, and I think that's fair. If you search my name, Chris Do and my design company, it's called Blind, B-L-I-N-D, and you type in the word awards, you'll see the kinds of things we've won and the work that we've produced. That's it.

Mo Ismail:

I want to take this in a direction based on everything you said because I believe you've answered this person. If you were having a conversation, maybe they would take you down a different rabbit hole. But based on Tony Robbin's definition of understanding communication, either a cry for help or an expression of love, I would consider this definitely a cry for help. I don't know this person's life, and I don't usually do a lot of talking in our conversations, but I'm going to take some time here. I think the reason why people like myself and other people that look up to Chris and learn from Chris need Chris in their life is... Let's just reference Maslow's hierarchy of needs for a second, just very briefly. At the bottom, you have the physiological needs, which is your shelter, food, clothing, and what makes you able to get all that is money.

After that, you have safety, love and belonging, self-esteem, and then at the top you have self-actualization. Many people that are listening to Chris right now, whether you want to deem that fortunately or unfortunately, it may not even be any level of fortune, it's just where they're at in their life, are still on the base of the pyramid, which is physiological needs. And when you're in that state, like Chris said, you can't really think about things that are happening in self-actualization, which is questions about morality and bigger thinking and improving the current paradigm. So you need an outsider who is in that place now to feed you that information.

Me and Chris have had countless conversations and in reflection months after, I'm like, "Dude, I don't think I was even in a place to be able to process that level of thinking because it's so far removed from where I'm at now because the decisions then where I was making them were from money." So what he's able to do, because he says, "Help people achieve their fullest potential, life designer and whatnot," is get people closer to that self-actualization tier before they're actually there because they're unable to actually tap into that thinking because they're still on the money needs. That's number one. I personally think that this person is not at the self-actualization stage, and his cry for help is, "I need to become more comfortable in talking about these money things." Now, that's just my perspective of why someone like you is needed for people like us, where we're at.

Speaker 3:

Time for a quick break, but we'll be right back. Welcome back to our conversation.

Mo Ismail:

The second part that I want to talk about is for the designers out there and the creatives out there that are actually challenged with talking about money, I'm happy that there's somebody like you in the space making these conversations normal because there's a lot of emotional baggage that we have around that conversation, and I say we because I'm definitely still a part of that group. My question is, when you're in that place when you need money and you need to hear about money and you are technically obsessed with money, what do you need to do to get out of that position of, "This is icky, this is something I don't want to talk about. This is something I don't want to obsess over," when it's a means to an end that you absolutely want? That's where I kind of want you to take this, if you're willing to take it there.

Chris Do:

Well, I'm willing take it there. I think before we go there, I just want to respond to something that you just said, Mo, which is I think this person says to themselves, "Well, I don't want to like this person," me, "and therefore I'm going to find something to criticize."

Mo Ismail:

Correct.

Chris Do:

I've been down this rabbit hole with other people before. So they say something like, "Do you still design?" I'm like, "No, because I've evolved from that, but if you want to look up my body of work, you can." And then they look it up and it's hopefully impressive to them or at least it's substantial enough, or they're like, "Well, what have you personally designed?" So it's like now I can't even run a design company, they want you to know what I've literally touched with my mouse pen or my mouse hand. What did I touch? And it's like, "Okay, where does this go? Do you want to zoom all the way back down to my student portfolio or pre going to college? Where does this end?" And so they're going to pursue some kind of narrative that supports like why they are where they're at.

Mo Ismail:

Yes.

Chris Do:

Now we have another sister channel that focuses only on design. And if you look at the way that channel's growing versus the way our main channel's growing, you can see where the interest and attention is. I go where people are interested, I go where I can be unique, different, and valuable to people. And currently, this is where I'm at. I talk about mindset, marketing, how to make money. I'm not obsessed about money because I think it's really easy to make money, but then the people that I try to help say, "Well, easy for you to say because you have X, Y, and Z."

Mo Ismail:

Yes.

Chris Do:

So what I have to do is I have to go back in time, try to forget everything I've learned, try to pretend like I'm not confident, that I don't believe in myself, that I don't have the same skillset that I have, and try to help people where they're at, not where I'm at. And so I have to go back in time, okay? Now let's answer the question, which is, "What is the thing that's hurting people and why they can't make money?" Okay, now, you don't have to listen to me. In fact, you don't have to listen to anybody. I really believe this.

Mo Ismail:

Major trigger warning here or a sign before the movie, "You don't have to watch this."

Chris Do:

You don't have to watch this. So if we don't have a problem or a challenge in our life, we're not looking for an answer. I'm not looking for a video on how to do plumbing because I'm not looking at that as a problem I have right now, okay? So you have to ask yourself why are you on the internet looking for ways to make money? There's a high probability it's because you need help to figure out how to make money. But when you see a video that teaches you how to make money, what's the first thing that you say? "Bro, why are you obsessed about money?" Well, so here's the thing, and I say this in all earnestness, which is if you are doing something that's working really well for you, if you're working the kinds of hours that you want, your pipe is full, getting paid a good amount of money relative to what you're doing, you have enough money saved up, you don't have to change that.

You can continue to refine your craft, do whatever you need to do. Do more of that or just work less. That's fine too. So for those people who show up on our channel saying, "I need help making money, but you're an idiot, I don't want to listen to you." I say, "Okay, it's fine. My approach doesn't work for you. Find someone that is close to the way that you like to make money, doing the things that you like to do, and reverse engineer what they're doing." Sometimes they have content to help you. More often than not, they have none. So you have to just figure it out. I just try to make it really easy by giving you the blueprint or the roadmap or the breadcrumbs so that you can follow along, step by step, and apply it your own way so that you can get yourself in a position where you're financially more stable and hopefully increase your financial runway so you're not living from check to check.

That is all. You don't have to listen to me, you don't have to listen to anybody because if you love what you're doing, more power to you. I've made a commitment this year. For the first time in my life, I got a personal trainer. I usually just go into my own gym, lift some weights, eat what I need to eat based on the scraps of information I've been able to pick up. I'm clearly not obsessed about working out, but this year I want to get in the best shape of my life so I hired a personal trainer. Whatever that personal trainer tells me to do, I do. If he says, "Eat this much protein, eat these supplements, lift this many weights, walk this many steps," I just do it or I do the best that I can. I don't sit there and question and debate, "Why does it have to be 5,000 steps? Couldn't it be the 3,500?"

I don't say, "Why do I have to increase my weight load every single time that I'm able to hit a certain number of reps?" I just do what I'm instructed to do. And maybe that's a clue as to why some people are stuck. They just don't want to listen. They take in information and they discredit the information, or they chair pick two or three things that they'll do, but they won't do the whole plan. Hormozi has this thing, he's quite famous for saying something like this where he is like, "What do you want?" "Be a millionaire." "Okay, I'm going to tell you how to do it. It's going to take three years longer. You're not going to make any money for three years, but by the third year, you're going to make a million dollars." How many people take him up on that offer? Zero people. So maybe people just don't want to get what they want. They like saying they want something, but they're not willing to do it.

Mo Ismail:

Yeah. I personally think it's deeper than that. I just think you're just a very kind and reasonable person.

Chris Do:

What is it?

Mo Ismail:

I think this comment is predicated on the fact that this person's life, as it pertains to money, is not where he wants it to be. Therefore, he can find his scapegoat for his commentary. Because if you look at the... This is a whole thread. This isn't even just one comment. And by the way, we're just targeting this one comment. There's thousands of these comments that are exactly the same, and my reflection is it is they are deflecting their own issues around this topic and using you as the scapegoat, which I think is fundamentally a broken concept because it goes against the mindset that you push out, which is, you say this quote all the time, "Do you want to be right? Or do you just want to get the job done?" And I think someone who leaves a comment like this is just seeking validation for their own thinking as it stands right now, rather than trying to get the job done and move forward and progress.

And I'm not trying to pick a fight with this person. I'm just saying I know that behavior from being someone in the social space constantly reading comments. And there are sometimes... I know you used the word trolls at the beginning. There are sometimes conversations that lead to no end because it's just to rile you up. You even said it like, "Well, this person says, "do you design?" Well, I ran a design company. "Well, what about you designing?"" Well, it's like, "Do you understand the fundamental thesis behind the Futur in general, which is to teach people that are practitioners at their craft how to build and run a business around it?" Which is a language they do not understand. A big part of that language is money. And I think it was Hormozi, again, just to bring his name up again, he had this video that kind of broke me when I was watching it at 3:00 AM in the morning.

He was like, "Many people that get into business make the mistake of deciding do they want to be the person that runs the business or do they want to be the technician?" But you can't be one and then try to do both and then get upset when you're not doing what you want. And I think you're talking to a lot of technicians that don't understand the language of business, that you introduce them to it, they are now aware of it, then they have to make a fundamental decision in their life. "Do I want to operate this business or do I want to continue doing the thing that I love doing and have someone else run the business or have no business and work for somebody?"

And the only way to do that is to get past this barrier of terms, definitions, and language that some of us, depending on the stage where we're at, don't understand that you have to bridge that gap for us. So I think this is just a troll, in my opinion, who doesn't understand the whole thesis behind the Futur. And also, so freaking what if you're obsessed with money? People not obsessed with money are the reason why we can't make more money. I'm still someone who has weird things around money that I have to continue to shave off of my being to continue to make progress in entrepreneurship.

Chris Do:

I don't want to go as far as to make any assumptions about anybody in their life and their position. I think it's semi legitimate criticism if you're new to the channel, if you don't really understand what we're trying to do. And I don't want to make the assumption that somebody's watched the journey from the beginning to now, and they understand where this is all going. They've watched a couple of videos and are like, "Well, every video..." Well, clearly not every video is about that. What they mean to say, "Every video I've seen seems to be around the subject of making money and how to negotiate or to price your services. And are you still in love with design?" That would've been a more kind and generous way of asking this question, but that's okay. I can hear that. I have no problems with people sharing their thoughts and their feelings in whatever way.

Like I said before, when we meet someone who's doing what we think we want to do, our most logical way of explaining it is to take them down a peg somehow, to punch a hole in it because to accept that they're doing what we do but have such different results, it hurts us emotionally. When you see somebody who is super shredded, young or old, the first thing you might think of is, "They're probably juicing. It's not natty." I mean, that's a natural reaction.

Mo Ismail:

A hundred percent, a hundred percent.

Chris Do:

Right? It's like, "Oh, they're cheating. They are HGH. It's steroids. It's whatever it is they're using," because we can't accept that you know what? We don't watch what we eat and we don't exercise the way we're supposed to. And this goes across the board. So if you see an entrepreneur who's doing really well and they're a little bit younger than you think they should be... And younger than they should be it's just younger than you. So if you're 40, they're 30. If you're 50, they're 40. It doesn't really matter. It's all relative to that person. Again, what are the thoughts you typically think of first? "Oh, they inherited the money." Nepotism, right? "Somebody in their family hired them, gave them a big break, whatever. They are a nepo baby." All that kind of stuff.

"They probably cheated." "They got a lucky break. They got some investment money from an angel investor, and then they were able to make it." Or, "Everybody gets lucky once. I bet they couldn't do it twice or three times in a row." Or, "They're of the right skin color, the right height." Or, "They're just really beautiful, the doors open magically for them." What they don't realize is okay, some of that is true, but maybe a lot of it is just because people are obsessed with improving themselves, creating value for others, and they are therefore being able to reap the rewards of that. I don't think there's anything wrong with being obsessed with money. I am not obsessed with money. I've never been obsessed with money. Money was the result of value created for other people. Money is a scorecard of how much you're able to create value.

And we know this already. If I'm able to solve a problem, a really big problem, then I will make more money. If I solve a small problem, I will make less. And that's how I look at it. And so since meeting my girlfriend then, now my wife, I've not gone to the bank ever to type into my ATM to get cash. And I'm talking about when I was 22 years old. To this day I have zero idea what's in our bank account, how much is liquid, how much is tied up in the market, what is where. I just don't even know. And you know what? Maybe this is a very privileged thing for me to say, I don't care because I don't need to know because we have enough. And maybe that's the place we want to get to, each and every one of us, to have enough money that we don't even need to know anymore.

Mo Ismail:

For me, this conversation is much deeper because I look at it as moments in time of me knowing you and when I've had resistance to your feedback and your response was, "If you want what I have, do what I did." And I think at the core of this, we need to be checking ourselves when we're consuming any kind of content for that matter, whether it be from someone like yourself or another person. It's like, "Something about this led me here. Usually that means there's a desired future state that I want, and I assumed that this would get me there." And if my immediate reaction is to show resistance or rebuttal or troll, then you are holding on to that current version of yourself, which is not going to serve you to where you want to go. Check yourself in that moment and ask yourself, "Where is this resistance coming from? What's causing me to feel this way? If I played this out to its end, what does staying in the thought process that I have right now and the behavior that I have right now serve me relative to where I want to go?"

And if it's like if what Chris is saying has helped him get to a certain spot, and that's where you want to go, the decision is very simple. Either you resolve that you actually don't want what Chris has, therefore his information is null and void relative to what you want. Or like, "Yo, let me just listen to this person and do what I need to do based on what he's saying." So let's lay in this plane with this last piece. For those that are still struggling around the concept of money, around the negotiation, around saying a price, around upping their rates, that need to hear this incessantly because we need to be reminded more than we do learn, what do you tell them to continue to resolve this feeling that they have, to overcome it or to make peace with it so they can become as equipped as you are in the business landscape? What do you tell that person?

Chris Do:

I would have to have a dialogue with this person because this is such an individual question, but the best that I can do right now is to give you a pretty broad answer, and hopefully it addresses this concern for many people. Now, if we ask ourselves, "Why do I think what I think? Why do I believe what I believe?" And we start to travel back in time to see when each idea first took root in our mind, and we connect it to the experience and are able to look at it objectively, we'll start to realize we formed patterns of thought with very little information. I'll give you an example. Okay, when I was a kid, we're talking about in the eighties here, I think I'm in junior high, and the trend was Velcro wallets. Usually brightly colored nylon, Velcro wallets. Everybody had to have them, and all the cool kids had them.

I didn't even have a wallet. So I asked my mom, "Can I get a Velcro wallet?" My mom's cool. "Let's go to the flea market," aka the swap meet. "We'll go and pick out something, okay?" And then we went to the flea market and we saw an abundance of people selling Velcro wallets. I picked out one, it was blue, and she was trying to negotiate the price and the way that she negotiated the price, it scarred me a little bit. It was both people manipulating each other. Like the seller and my mom's like... And my mom's a true negotiator. And I, as a kid, am feeling very uncomfortable because I'm thinking, "If the vendor asked for $30, just pay the $30 and let's get out of here." My mom was trying to get it to get down, and I was hurting her negotiation process by being too eager to buy.

So I go away, not scarred but an imprint has been made in my mind that negotiating for money is a sign of bad taste, poor manners. Only poor people negotiate in bazaars, open markets like this where if you walk into a legitimate store, you just pay them the money, you get what it is that you want. Pretty straightforward. So now I'm walking away, feeling uncomfortable talking about money. Now, if you continue that thought, that emotional energy, the resonance of that one incident, you're like, "That's a dumb observation of one small, very minute thing." And then I talked to people who grew up in entrepreneurial families, whose mom or dad or brother or sister, whoever it was, was out there helping people to feel comfortable about themselves, educating them, spending hours talking to them about decisions they're about to make and then gently easing them into a buy state.

And then they are able to close the sale. They have an entirely different relationship with money, with negotiations, and business in general. So each and every single one of us is going to have a different relationship. You might have heard maybe one of your parents saying, "Money is the root of all evil," or, "The love of money is the root of all evil." Or your parents might have been taken advantage of. You might have been taken advantage of where a high pressure salesperson knocks on your door and pitches you some magic soap that you don't really need to buy, but you feel so caught up in the motion of it all that actually buy. And then you're yelled at by somebody like, "Why'd you buy that? Stupid, it doesn't work." You see? So we're having these ideas and emotions imprinted into us, and we carry these ideas, not often examining where they came from.

Okay, now you know this because Matthew Encina has talked about this before. When Matthew Encina finished school, he and a bunch of buddies started a design company. They had a nice go at it, and then they hit hard times and things didn't work out, and so everybody had to disband. And that experience hurt him. It scarred him in a way that he became scared of entrepreneurship because he didn't like the sting of failure. Up until that point in time, he was the golden child. Everything he did always worked out. He was the one that was going to change everything for his family. He was going to be the first person to do this, most successful at doing that. So recording a W was too much for him to carry. And so he wound up working for me for a really long time. And finally we had this conversation and it was about addressing the inner dialogue, which is, "Why are you afraid to go and start a business?"

And he said, "Because I don't want to fail again." Now, the real dialogue should be, "When did you start this business?" "Oh, when I was just straight out of schools, in my early twenties." "What do you think someone who's in their twenties without any business training, mentorship, what is the likelihood of them succeeding?" "Oh, actually not that high." "So if they were to fail again, and if you were their friend to support them, what would you say to them? Would you say, "You're an idiot, you're a fool for thinking you can make this happen?" What would you say?" And then I can't remember exactly what he said, but it's to the effect of, "I'd support them. You're a young person. Entrepreneurship, lot of risk. You're going to fail. Failure's part of the game, and it's okay for you to fail. Just get back on that horse and go for it again."

So this is the problem. We have unhealthy relationships with money, with negotiations. It brings us stress and we're usually conflict averse. We don't want to do anything that creates tension between us and another person, right? This is why we can't hire people. This is why when clients tell us to do something, we know we don't want to do it, we agree because we don't know how to address points of tension without it ending in a moment of conflict. So we don't have the skills, we haven't had anyone to pattern after, to mod ourselves after so that we have a healthy way of looking at how conflict is addressed, raised, and then resolved.

Mo Ismail:

I love it. I love it.

Chris Do:

I hope this conversation around, A, having a conversation with people who might be your biggest critic showed you a different way of looking at it. It's actually not an attack on you, it's just people are a little confused and they need help in understanding it. It's my sincerest hope that you, A, understand a little bit more about the motivation behind what it is that I'm doing, how I got to where I'm at. And if you're still struggling with the money mindset, perhaps today is a good day to start a different relationship, to tell yourself a new story.

Speaker 3:

Thanks for joining us. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app and get a new insightful episode from us every week. The Futur Podcast is hosted by Chris Do and produced by me, Stewart Schuster. Thank you to Anthony Barro for editing and mixing this episode. And thank you to Adam Sanborne for our intro music. If you enjoyed this episode, then do us a favor by reviewing and rating our show on Apple Podcasts. It will help us grow the show and make future episodes that much better. Have a question for Chris or me? Head over to thefutur.com/heychris and ask away. We read every submission and we just might answer yours in a later episode. If you'd like to support the show and invest in yourself while you're at it, visit thefutur.com. You'll find video courses, digital products, and a bunch of helpful resources about design and creative business. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time.

‍