REPORT BACK: PIRATE TO PROFESSIONAL

Money. That one simple word can conjure an extremely wide spectrum of thoughts, opinions, beliefs and feelings. We all have stories we tell ourselves and others about money. It is central to our lives no matter how much or little we have of it and it seems as if its influence on our decisions is inescapable.

If your story sounded anything like mine, money is seen as the root of all evil. Capitalism the wretched hellscape imposed on us all by the corrupt and heinous architects of our despair without our consent or wellbeing in mind and there can be no escaping its clutches. The love and desire of money only served to make us selfish, greedy, unethical and inevitably empty and unfulfilled inside all the while the rich became richer and the poor stayed poor. But what if we told ourselves a different story?

The funny thing about stories is they aren’t real. They may be loosely based in some experience of reality, but our experience of reality is also a projection of the stories we tell ourselves. So what if we shifted our mindset surrounding money? What if we simply made up some other story for ourselves that better served us? What if money was just a flow of energy, capitalism just a silly little game and the depth of our understanding of the rules could serve to increase that flow, allow us to serve others and live a life of joy, abundance and fulfillment? Though this sentiment may come from a place of relative privilege, I can’t help but to enjoy this story so much better.

Ryan Roi’s financial education course formerly known as Pirate to Professional, now called The Artful Dollar, came in to my life exactly when I needed it. For years I had watched money come and go through my life with no real understanding of how it worked beyond earning it and spending it and saving a little on the side. When I had it life was easy going, when I didn’t I struggled. It had been the core issue of arguments, disagreements, debts and my inability to acquire the most basic needs through life. The stories I believed saw the pillars of capitalism as nothing more than a competition between the two classes, the capitalist class - those who coercively controlled the means of production through private property and the profit driven distribution of goods, and the working class - those forced to sell their labor to the wealthy in exchange for meager wages, inflated goods and services. Thus I grew to abhor capitalism, chose to identify and live into a life of anti capitalism and saw money as the necessary evil that was the root of all my financial woes. The irony is that these stories didn’t serve me and in fact kept me poor, stressed about money, simultaneously disgusted yet envious of those with wealth and nothing more than a collateral pawn in the game of capitalism.

Ryan’s 4 month course not only equipped me with the practical skills and systems to manage the flow of money into my life and an in depth knowledge of the various ways to passively grow that money, but largely shifted my entire mindset towards money and it’s influence on my life. I went from feeling that money had power over me to embodying my own empowerment over money. I’ve gone from a mindset of scarcity to abundance where I no longer work for money but instead make it work for me. Money has become my pawn where I can strategically shift it into place to serve me and make gains for my future. This has opened up a whole new world of possibilities where I no longer have to live or play small, where I can grow and expand infinitely, achieve all that I desire and do more good in the world than I’ve ever been able to accomplish before.

None of this is to deny or minimize the obvious treachery that money and capitalism has allowed some to wreak on to the world around us, nor have I become a championing apologist for this bankrupt system. I am simply acknowledging that I have chosen to change my relationship to it, that I’ve allowed myself to acquire the knowledge necessary to navigate it with power and use it as a force to bring about more good in the world instead of being its victim, that I have shifted the stories I tell myself so that they serve and empower me and those around me and this course has undoubtedly been a huge purveyor in that shift. Thank you Ryan for all that you do, you are a beacon of light in a once seemingly dark world and to that I owe the debt of my gratitude, a debt I am more than happy to accept as such a debt no longer frightens me. Whatever your relationship is to money at least do yourself a favor and learn how to make it serve you. You owe it to yourself.