“I’ve suffered enough, now I get to live”: where the belief that money only comes through pain actually comes from

You have a list of reasons why you're earning less than you want right now. Three or four of them are sitting ready this second: no knowledge, no niche, too much competition, wrong timing, fear of failing, impostor syndrome, not cut out for it.

Half of that list was handed to me, word for word, by children. The youngest was ten, the oldest sixteen, and not one of them had ever tried to earn anything.

I've been collecting these lists for fourteen years, in different countries, in rooms of thirty people and rooms of three thousand. One day I gave the same assignment to kids at my children's training, purely out of curiosity.

The overlap included "not cut out for it" and "impostor syndrome," which a child cannot possibly own: there's no failure in his past to draw on, and no reason he'd know the phrase.

Which leads somewhere uncomfortable to live with: almost nothing on your list is a conclusion drawn from your experience. It's someone else's text, something you heard once, filed away inside yourself, and have treated ever since as your own clear-eyed view of life. The most durable line in that text goes like this: money only comes for suffering. For what's hard, unpleasant, done through gritted teeth and out of obligation. Getting paid for what you enjoy feels indecent, because if it comes easy to you, it doesn't count as work. In one room somebody phrased this so precisely that I wrote it down: a woman in the middle rows said, in the flat tone you use for the most obvious thing in the world, "I've suffered enough, now I get to live," and the man beside her finished the thought — earning more means suffering more, that's what responsibility is.

Nobody argued. Everybody kept writing.

Below I'll show where this text comes from, why it survives for decades, and what to do about it: three questions and one sentence that take it apart. But first the experiment with the kids, because they're the key witness in this story.

The same list, only the authors are between ten and sixteen

The assignment that starts all of this looks like this. I ask the room to write fifteen reasons why they aren't earning a million a month right now. Not three, fifteen, and any reason counts: rational, ridiculous, whatever surfaces, no trying to answer correctly and no trying to please me. If a million sounds small to you, make it a hundred million, the exercise doesn't change.

Almost everyone stalls between the fourth reason and the sixth. The first four are lying ready; past that there's nowhere left to draw from, and the pen hangs over the line. Kirill, fourth row, stalled at exactly four: no knowledge, no niche, no ideas, don't know what I want. Then the room starts filling in out loud: laziness, no expertise, fear of failing, impostor syndrome, not cut out for it, don't believe in my own strength, something inside pushes it away.

I came to adult rooms out of children's ones. Long before I worked with entrepreneurs I ran a program for kids called Power On Kids, and it's still some of the most honest feedback I've ever gotten.

The intro block ran three days and taught mechanics. Danila, eleven, asked what he liked, answered without hesitating: how to calculate ROI, the three types of customers, and the marketing funnel. Pasha, thirteen, said he'd gone through his list of friends and worked out who pulls him up and who pulls him down. The money came later, for the ones who went on to the two-month version: by my count, six out of ten launched projects earning thirty to fifty thousand rubles. Nikita, twelve, was making and selling holographic pyramids out of glass and plastic, and then set about building a rig that could throw a hologram off a phone.

No capital, no niche, no expertise, no idea what they wanted out of life. None of that stopped them from working through a funnel or auditing the people around them.

And at that children's training I gave them the very same exercise I'd later give adult rooms, with the question turned around. Not "why aren't you earning," but "why haven't your mom and dad earned a million." Fifteen reasons. Same honesty, same absence of correct answers.

The kids wrote. I read it out:

Laziness. Scared. Wrong country, the economy's in decline. Customers have no money. Too much competition. No startup capital. No knowledge. No goal. No decent team. No time for it. What if it doesn't work out. Fear of failing. Not cut out for it. Impostor syndrome. Fear of losing everything.

Go back a minute and reread what the adult room said: laziness, no knowledge, fear of failing, not cut out for it, impostor syndrome. Five items matched, and the ones that matched were precisely the ones an adult treats as the product of his own reflection and his own experience. "Impostor syndrome" out of a child who has never sold anything to anyone is a quotation, not an observation.

What the kids added on top is more interesting still: the economy's in decline, customers have no money, too much competition. A child hasn't entered a market, hasn't lost clients to a downturn, doesn't read the business pages. He didn't derive this. He heard it.

This is usually where I get pushback, and the pushback is fair: the kids were asked about their parents, so of course they recited their parents' complaints. Exactly. That's the whole point. What an adult takes for a sober analysis of his own situation, his child already knows by heart and could dictate on demand. Nobody sat that child down and gave him a lecture on why the family never got rich; kids pick it up on their own. It comes out of the air: out of the kitchen in the evening, out of the tone the father uses on the news, out of the voice the mother uses about a new bill.

And now the question I consider the million-dollar one. Did you write down even one item from the children's list? Then where did you get it? What if there's no lived experience behind your item either, and you came to believe it exactly the way those kids did, just by watching, and have spent years since explaining your life with it?

From there people start working through the inventory out loud: you need money to start, you need discipline to lose weight, my metabolism is off, I'm big-boned, I live in a country with bad economic prospects. And almost every time it turns out no hypothesis was ever tested: a sentence was heard once and left standing.

The research says the same thing, only drier. Cambridge researchers David Whitebread and Sue Bingham, in a report for the UK's Money Advice Service, showed that the cognitive foundations of future financial behavior, the ability to delay gratification and to plan, are largely set by around age seven, long before a first paycheck. Psychologists Brad and Ted Klontz call these money scripts: unconscious beliefs about money formed in childhood that go on to drive adult decisions.

The most unsettling piece I found in a Psychology Today review, which, citing work by Norvilitis and MacLean, reports this: parents staying silent about money predicted credit-card problems in their grown children more strongly than the family's actual debt or income did. So what gets passed down isn't poverty. What gets passed down is the way money went unspoken in the house.

Somebody else's small oven

There's a story I tell every time I need to explain the mechanics of transmission.

A young woman is cooking a turkey. Before it goes in the oven she cuts the end off the bird and throws it away. Her daughter asks: mom, why? She answers honestly: I don't know, grandma did it, my mother did it, that's how it's done. The daughter won't let it go and calls the grandmother. Grandmother says: no idea, my mother did it that way. They get through to the great-grandmother, and she laughs: my oven was small, a whole turkey wouldn't fit, so I cut the end off.

Forty years, three generations, a family law. Built on somebody's small oven that hasn't existed in any of their kitchens for decades.

The same thing happens with money, it's just harder to catch: you can see a turkey, you can't see a sentence. I went deep on the cultural layer in a piece about why it feels shameful to charge for what comes easily to you, including the school report card and Superman refusing payment for saving the bank. What interests me here is different: how this thing is built on the inside and how to take it apart.

Three layers, and only the last one is actually yours

Beliefs sit in layers, and each layer comes off differently.

The first layer is the easy one. Ready-made formulas that circulate like folk sayings: money comes the hard way, you have to work and grind to earn, all rich people stole it, nothing comes for free, everything has its price. They're easy to work with precisely because they're groundless: we can't even remember where or when we first heard them, and we have no evidence any of it holds.

The second layer is craftier. These are concepts woven so deep into the culture that we don't register them as claims, so we never argue with them. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. None of us remembers picking that up, but the program is installed and running. Out of it grow the quiet fears people rarely admit out loud: if I get rich people will envy me; if I get richer I'll change and lose my friends, maybe my husband, maybe I'll realize I don't need him. The whole "spirituality and money don't mix" bundle sits here too.

The third layer is the heaviest, because it's unique to each person and you will never dig down to it on your own. Vishen Lakhiani, the founder of Mindvalley, told me this one about himself when we met in Croatia at his Mindvalley U. His company was already turning over millions, and yet he had no personal money left: it drained away, he gave it out the moment anyone asked.

Getting to the bottom of it took a hypnotherapist, and a school memory surfaced. There had been a wonderful teacher, the best of his life, and that teacher was deeply unhappy; his wife had left him. The child put two and two together and wrote down a rule: a truly good teacher has to be unhappy. Then he grew up and built an education company, which is to say he took the teacher's place himself. And he dutifully bled money to satisfy a rule he had never chosen.

A rule like that assembles itself out of anything: one couple, one character in a film, one stranger who happened to be standing there at the right moment.

How one sentence from my father held my income down for over two years

I'm fifteen. I walk in on my father in the middle of the day; he's watching a program about wealthy people and says, to nobody in particular, God, I hate these successful people.

I walked past. I didn't even register the moment as an event; it surfaced years later, in a session on myself. But in that second a chain finished building itself inside me, silently and without my participation: if I become successful, my father will hate me, therefore being successful is not allowed.

Two years later I'm taken to the first seminar of my life, network marketing. The mentor draws a figure on the board and says: diamond, ten thousand dollars a month, that's a successful person, and from that point your life changes. And the two programs locked together: success equals my father's hatred, success equals ten thousand dollars.

After that I spent about two years unable to break that number, and it's the same invisible income ceiling people mistake for a hard limit in the market. It wasn't that I didn't know what to do: I knew, I was studying, reading, implementing, I had tools, funnels, people. It's that every time I approached that mark the whole thing would come apart in some new and very convincing way, and I'd produce very grown-up explanations for it: the market, my partners, wrong moment.

That's the nastiest property of beliefs like this. They can't be dismantled from the inside, because they sit in the foundation and get guarded as your own. Until you pull the sentence out into the light and look at it separately from yourself, it won't feel like a belief. It'll feel like reality.

I pulled it out years later, in a session on myself, when that scene with the television finally surfaced and I saw it had never been my thought at all. The following month came in around twenty thousand. No new strategy, no new team, no new tools appeared for me that month; all of it had been there before and had been working before. It simply stopped shattering against one number every time.

"So you're telling me to lie on the couch and visualize?"

This is where I always get an objection, and the objection is a fair one.

No, I'm not saying you don't have to work. I'm not saying there won't be hard stretches, trials and challenges. There will be, plenty of them. I'm saying exactly one thing: from the fact that hard things happen, it does not follow that change is only available through hard things. Those are two different claims, and you added the second one yourself.

Go back to the woman from the opening. "I've suffered enough, now I get to live" contains an entire accounting system. The suffering has already been paid into the register, it's sitting in the account as a deposit made, and a disbursement is now due against it. The logic is flawless except for one detail: the register doesn't run in that direction and never has. Nobody is going to credit you for having had it hard, because there's no one on the other side of the counter. And while you wait for your payout, you aren't doing the things people actually pay for.

The self-check is simple. When something comes easily, you start hunting for the catch. It can't possibly be this simple. That second of distrust is the belief, running in real time.

There's a flip side I walked into myself. In the club we spent a while deliberately making the challenges invisible, removing friction, moving people along gently. And we got a bottleneck: people stopped feeling that they were growing. Without resistance growth doesn't register, there's nothing to measure it against. This is also where burnout gets confused with tiredness, with the load itself treated as proof you're on the right path. So pain really does work as a measuring instrument. The error starts when the instrument gets mistaken for the engine, and people start piling on suffering in the hope of moving faster.

There's a lab version of this error too. The psychologist Justin Kruger and colleagues gave two groups the same poem, telling one group the author had spent eighteen hours on it and the other four. The eighteen-hour group rated the text higher and put a larger dollar figure on it. The effect is called the effort heuristic, and here's the part that matters: it gets stronger the harder the quality is to judge on its own terms. We pay for suffering exactly where we can't evaluate the result. Replications in 2023 came back mixed on the monetary piece, so this isn't a law of nature, but the tendency is well described.

The camel, the needle's eye, and what the line actually says

I thought about the camel for a long time, because waving off a sentence that's two thousand years old would have been cheap.

I'm not a theologian and I'm not claiming an interpretation, but after years of working with money and with people I read that line differently than it usually gets read. The more external components a person's wealth has, the more reasons he has to be unhappy. Every new thing, company, status, house, car is one more point where it can start to hurt. It really is harder for a rich man, if he's balancing on what's outside him. It has nothing to do with dirty money: the more external supports you have, the less stable the whole structure gets.

That's an entirely different claim from the one usually extracted here. People take it to mean "don't reach for money." What it says is "don't build yourself out of things." The first strips you of a resource, the second strips you of an illusion, and that difference matters.

The method: three questions and one sentence

Now the tool. A belief like this doesn't come apart through affirmations. The most common mistake looks like this: someone learns about money blocks, goes to the mirror and starts muttering "I am wealthy and successful." That can't work, because the new sentence is weaker than the old one: the old one has stood for twenty years and grown a hedge of justifications, the new one showed up this morning. You have to loosen the old one first, and only then put something new in the space it leaves.

The order goes like this.

Start by writing out your own phrasings, your own, in the exact words they use inside your head. Mark the ones that land, and definitely the ones that make you angry and want to argue; anger is a hit too. Out of that list take no more than three for the coming week. Each one needs several returns across the week, and at ten items your attention smears out and nothing moves.

First question: is this a fact or an opinion? Answer honestly. If a survey of a million millionaires existed and 999,999 of them said it was hard, you'd be obliged to call it a fact. No such survey exists. So what you're holding is an opinion, and it has an author, and the author isn't you.

Second question: does this idea help me or get in my way? Say the answer out loud, and that's not mysticism. As long as the belief lives as part of you, there's nothing there to argue with. Spoken out loud, it becomes for the first time a separate sentence with an author and consequences, and only then can you weigh it.

Third question: who did it differently? Find living people, ideally people you know rather than abstract billionaires off the internet, for whom it worked without the suffering. The goal isn't to prove the sentence false. The goal is to prove it isn't always true. That's enough to crack it, and a crack is all you need.

Only now the replacement sentence, the step where most people fall apart. It has to be a full opposite of the old one, with no "not" and no negation of any kind, and with a pronoun about yourself. "Money only comes the hard way" does not turn into "money doesn't come the hard way," which is the same belief with a ribbon on it. It turns into "money comes to me easily and with pleasure." Or "I create large amounts of money in my life easily." A phrasing built on "not" leaves the exact image you're trying to leave sitting in your head: to process "not hard," you first have to think "hard." I watch this happen in sessions constantly, which is why I insist on the affirmative form.

And an honest caveat, without which the tool turns into a promise. All of this works on beliefs that aren't backed by your own painful experience. If there's real trauma under the sentence, it needs to be worked with differently and not alone, and no replacement phrasing is going to help.

Where this thesis breaks

Two places where I argue with myself.

First. Money genuinely does bring problems, and that isn't a belief, it's arithmetic. There's a line I say on stage that lands badly with a lot of people: today's "have to" is yesterday's "want to." Want a million, get a million's worth of problems. The scale of your income equals the scale of the problems you've learned to hold. The difference from the belief is that the problems arrive as a consequence, not as an entry ticket, and there's no way to pay with them up front.

Second. Removing a belief doesn't substitute for skill. My ten thousand hit a ceiling with the tools already assembled, which is why, once the ceiling went, there was something there to fire. If the tools aren't there, then clearing the program leaves you with free hands and a very clear picture of what to go learn, but not with money. Which isn't a bad outcome either: at least the learning now runs into something instead of a wall.

Now look at who else is in the room

The list of reasons you use to explain your own life was written by children. Not figuratively. Literally: I have both sheets, the adult one and the children's one, and half the items are shared.

Kirill got to fifteen that evening. We went through them one at a time, and not one survived the first question about fact and opinion. He walked out of that room holding fifteen sentences that weren't his, every one of which he'd taken until then for his own lived experience.

And now the unpleasant part. While you were reading this, there is most likely somebody at home. He isn't listening to your lectures about money; you don't give any. He's listening to the tone you used looking at the electricity bill, and the voice you used about the neighbor who started his own thing.

He's already writing his list. Silently, without a single lesson, exactly the way you once wrote yours.

Though the sheet does travel in the other direction too. Bogdan, fifteen, came to the program after his mother, who runs her own business. Here's what she says on camera afterward: "He sat me down in front of him and started telling me what's stopping me. Why aren't you expanding, why aren't you hiring, why are you still working like this."

Fifteen years old, sitting there taking apart the beliefs of a mother who owns a company. Using that same first question: is this a fact or an opinion?