Money does grow on trees.

Not only is that literally true (many a smartass child has pointed out that money’s made of paper and oh…well fancy that…paper grows on trees dad. Duh!) but it’s also figuratively true.

And it’s figuratively true in two different but related ways.

Firstly, just like the seemingly abundant supply of leaves that appear from thin air every spring, 97% of the worlds money supply is created out of thin air by private banks every time someone uses their credit card or takes out a mortgage or other loan.

Secondly, you as an individual can collect money like apples in an orchard if you truly understand what money is…like rich people do.

How do I know this?

What are my credentials?

Am I a millionaire?

No. But 12 years ago I was homeless, living under a tree in a park and selling the Big Issue on the streets of London.

So there is that.

Personally I can’t think of a better way to learn how to make money as easily as picking apples of a tree, than becoming homeless, living under a tree in a park and selling The Big Issue on the streets of London.

Why?

Well of course I didn’t realise it at the time, but my 7 months of living in Battersea Park and 12 months of selling The Big Issue taught me everything i needed to know about what I call Money Magic.

I’m going to share what I’ve learned with you in a minute, but before I do that we need to be very clear about what money is.

Money is your servant.

It is yours to command.

Money is the creation of mankind, it’s an idea.

In fact it’s an agreement about an idea.

It was created to serve us and make life easier, because the barter system becomes unwieldy when there are too many producers/consumers involved.

Yet I’m prepared to bet you…well…money, that instead of feeling like one of the creators and masters of your faithful servant money, you feel like money is your master and controls your life.

Instead of commanding money to act on your behalf, money commands you to act on it’s behalf

I bet you work for your money, instead of letting your money work for you.

If you are like 99.9999% people, the above is true isn’t it?

If not, I can’t imagine why you’re reading this blog post.
(Except to check that I know what I’m talking about. How I am doing so far?)

My point is, that all of the tips, tricks, tools and techniques I’m going to show you, in one way or another, help to put you back in the correct and proper relationship to money…as it’s master and commander, rather than it’s (wage) slave or servant.

So as I was saying, my not-got-a-pot-to-piss-in park living position, provided the perfect paradoxical state of being for me to perform Money Magic i.e. I desperately needed money to buy food and I couldn’t afford to fail, but at the same time i was happy and free and unreasonably grateful for my very existence.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but when it’s combined with the curiosity filled willingness to experiment and play of a young child, it becomes it’s Great Great Grandmother of it!

For most of the ten years since i left the park, I’ve “lived simply, so others could simply live” as Ghandi put it.

For me this meant no rent and so no need for a job or to claim benefits.

Living in The Gift, as it’s called.

No bank account, no credit card, no debt.

I also had no interest in fitting into mainstream culture, so i was very happy living in community style squats with artists and artisans and activists (and yes, arseholes and addicts too…at times i played both those roles myself, more of that in future posts)

We went skipping for food (getting food out of supermarket skips, not jumping rope) and charity shopping for clothes.

All this meant my Money Magic skills went unused.

But then in 2012 my soul purpose evolved (yes they do that) and all of a sudden making money became very important to me again. I’d got used to just enough money appearing, at just the right time for me never to have to worry about it.

For the first time in ten years I needed to make money.

In many ways, learning to live without money is a more valuable skill than the ability to make money, but now I was on a mission to create and develop a business called Inspiration Engineer and that business required funding and that meant I needed to get really good at making money again.

The amazing thing was that once I started to remember and apply what i learned back in Battersea park, the money started magically rolling in – £25K in less than 6 months; then £30K in 4 weeks – without me getting a job, committing fraud, prostituting myself (as if I could earn that much doing that)  or involving myself in any get-rich-quick online schemes (of which this is most definitely not one, so if you’re into that type of thing you’re in the wrong place).

This more recent experience of doing Money Magic has proved to me that the techniques I used to make £hundreds selling The Big Issue are scalable and as such are equally effective at making £thousands and potentially £millions.
(Ask me again if I’m a millionaire this time next year)

Combined with hindsight about my exact park living prosperity practice, it’s also enabled me to breakdown exactly how Money Magic works and exactly how to do it.

It breaks down into the following 5 Step Process. Follow the steps faithfully and you’ll be picking up Dead Presidents like conkers in Autumn.

1. The Gratitude Attitude

This is the first step and as they say…that first step’s a doozy!

How can you be grateful, when you’re worried and stressed because you’re overdrawn, maxed out on your credit cards and the rent is due?

Well you have two choices:

1. give all that shit up and go and live in a park
2. cultivate an attitude of gratitude by practicing daily.

Don’t worry, I’m just kidding.

I don’t seriously believe that anyone has to “give it all up” unless of course they feel soul called to do so, as I did.

My problem was that I was so ignorant, immature and stubborn, that my soul always had to use extreme measures to teach me what i needed to learn. Chances are you’re not as big a twat as I was, so your soul will be gentler with you.

But through the experience of having nothing and being nobody, my soul taught me that gratitude is our default state.

It’s not so much that we should count our blessings and be grateful for what we have that others don’t (although those are good practices to do in and of themselves) but that it’s infinitely more powerful and magical to simply realise that gratitude is the natural response to experiencing life and existence as it actually is – One Big Fat WOW!

We all know that life is the greatest gift. Without the gift of life we can’t experience any of the things we love about being alive.

The natural response to receiving a great gift is gratitude. This is why when babies are not hungry or in pain, they quite naturally fill to the brim busting with grateful joy for no (apparent) reason.

The reason is simple.

Babies haven’t yet learned to think about all the things they want and don’t have and all the things they have and don’t want.

Instead of being distracted by the obsessive compulsive voice-in-the-head that tortures the rest of us for our entire lives, they are focused on what is happening right here now.

They are experiencing life in it’s rawest state. If there is no pain or hunger right now, then there is simply the joy and wonder of the mystery of being and the natural feeling of gratitude that all beings feel when they receive a great gift.

Now you may be thinking “Yes, yes that’s all very well, but fluffy hippy philosophy about how babies feel grateful even when they’re rolling around in their own filth, isn’t going to help me make more money…let alone make it magically!”

Au contraire.

This realisation of the nature of existence and our true default state, made me the richest Big Issue Seller in London.

And it wasn’t even close.

When I first started selling The Big Issue (before I understood the power of gratitude) my overall attitude was one of anxiety.

If I didn’t sell, I wouldn’t eat and the way I sold, it would be very difficult to keep that up for a whole day, so I needed to sell a fair number per hour.

My modus operandi was to stand outside the Post Office on Victoria Street (which was an excellent pitch) and at the top of my lungs, at a furious pace, I’d chant…

“Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen, get your Big Issue magazine here, the only magazine that helps homeless people help themselves, always better to teach a starving man how to fish than to give him food, I may be homeless but I’m not useless and thanks to the Big Issue I’m in business. We have an interview with Brad Pitt in this weeks Issue, Ladies, quite fancy him i do, but not as much as that Jonny Depp eh, wouldn’t mind juggling with his giblets…”

Now this approach worked better than just standing there hoping people will take pity on me as most Sellers did (some of them had serious addictions/mental and emotional problems so I’m not judging them, just observing) and on average I’d sell 5-8 mags an hour and with tips that would mean around a £5-£8 in my pocket.

So if I worked three hours, I’d have enough to buy food for the day and to buy another 20 magazines for the next day (Homeless people could buy the magazines for 50p each and sell them for £1.20 at that time a 70p profit per mag).

But after a couple of weeks when I was fully feeling ridiculously grateful for just existing (like a baby) and I started to sell from that place of gratitude, using exactly the same pitch I could sell 15-20 mags an hour and instead of averaging £1 profit per mag from tips, I’d be averaging £3-£3.5 profit per mag…because quite a few people would just give me the money and say…

“keep the magazine, so you can sell it on”

and quite often people would just give me a fiver (or sometimes a tenner) and a smile.

So now I’m earning around £60/hour.

Selling.

The.

Big.

Issue!

That’s as much as a plumber, dental hygienist, physical therapist, web developer, systems analyst and plenty more jobs that require lots of qualifications and training.

And because I had very low costs, I only needed to work for an hour in the morning and could take the rest of the day off to chill in the park being all mystical and shit.

Due to my sheer disbelief at how much clear and tangible difference The Gratitude Attitude made to my sales (it really did feel like I was doing real life magic) I would experiment with it to see if it was really for real.

Over the first couple of months I developed certain practices (what i called visceralisation exercises, because they made my body buzz with appreciation) that would power up my gratitude attitude.

So when I was in what I’d call a “low gratitude state” (i.e. when I was tired or hungry) which would be a normal state for the average person, I’d deliberately pitch for an hour in that state. Low and behold I’d be back to selling the standard 5-8 mags and making £5-£8 per hour.

But then I’d take just ten minutes out to do my visceralisation exercises to get my WOW back on and I’d start selling again… and in that next hour I’d invariably sell 15-20 mags and make £50-£60

Every.

Single.

Time.

I’d experiment by trying it out on crap pitches in quiet spots with low footfall.

I’d try it out in the late evening after most of the office workers had gone home.

I’d pitch when it was raining and on Sunday evenings when it was dead.

It didn’t matter.

I’d always significantly (at least double, usually triple) increase my sales and my profits if I sold from the WOW, from a state of gratitude.

Or as I came to think of it, a state of grace.

Now of course your inner cynic (Yea Yea Yeah buts Yeah buts say…

“Yes but that’s just anecdotal evidence. Where is the empirical evidence that gratitude can have these kind of effects?”

It’s here:
This shit is real

Unstoppably Yours

Chris Paradox
Founder