When I started this goal I think I was a different person. My beliefs and feelings about money have taken a strange turn from the “can barely pay attention to them” to “can’t stop thinking about them”. I went from frugal to incredibly risky in my investments. When talking to my life coach last week about my 10 life categories and rating myself on each one and then deciding which ones I was interested in working on, money/finances were scored around a 7 and were at the top of the list of priorities for work.

What would a 10 in money be? I think I’m sometimes a 10, but then sometimes I’m a 3. A 10 in money, for me, is realizing that money is merely a tangible representation of energy and focus. You breathe it in and you breath it out. Lots of money can electrocute you, or it can power a giant beautiful machine. Being in debt is like being at the bottom of the ocean with no air… you can’t breathe, you’re trapped… but actually, it’s not exactly like that because there is no reality to debt. It’s all mental. You can’t die from being in debt. If you feel like you’re in debt, you can’t breath. If you feel like you have more than enough money, you’re powerful. Energy and focus create and spend money, not vice versa. I think. If you take a deep breath and build a giant beautiful machine, you’ll exhale money like air, and if it’s a valuable beautiful machine, you’ll inhale money back in. You spend money to make money, and make money to spend money. It’s self-defined in that cycle, and has no other meaning. That’s what I think having a 10 relationship to money means.

Caring about finances for a year has turned into doubling down on my ideas about money and putting those ideas into practice. It’s a big gamble about there being no real gamble when it comes to money.