The Wealth Mindset Shifts— 5 Ways the Top 1% Think About Money
Wealth isn’t luck or talent - it’s a different way of thinking about money, risk, and opportunity that most people never learn
If thinking about money makes you anxious, that doesn’t mean that you’re bad with money.
You’re just operating from a belief system that isn’t wired to build wealth, and it’s not your fault.
I’ve worked with some of the top entrepreneurs in the world, and they are so good with money because they’ve actually rewired how their brains think about money.
So, here are the 6 steps to follow in order so you can think about money like a top-1% entrepreneur.
Step 1: Identify Your Money Story
Growing up, I never really experienced conversations around money until I was in my late teens.
And this resulted in me not having a spending problem, but a fear of spending.
You see, I would always think that I never had enough money. And I didn’t understand how investments work.
When I moved out of my parents’ house, I would buy normal things like groceries, paper towels, and toilet paper in as small a quantity as I possibly could, because I was operating from a scarcity mindset.
I thought to myself, what if I need that money for something more important?
In my 20s, I thought that this scarcity mindset was going to help me financially, and I now know that this just wasn’t true.
I even remember not wanting to buy a new razor, and I refused to buy a new razor head for 12 months because I didn’t think that I needed one, and they seemed so expensive.
Looking back, that one scarcity mindset actually did more damage to my own personal money story than any bad investment I could have made.
And that mindset directly came from how the people around me not just talked about money, but how they used money.
You see, if you think about the phrases you grew up hearing, like“Money is hard to come by, money doesn’t grow on trees, rich people are greedy, oh, we can’t afford that, be grateful for what you have.”
They’re instructions that your brain absorbed and accepted as truth about how money works.
And they have been subconsciously shaping your decisions ever since.
Research proves this. Behavioral economics shows that financial behavior is more accurately predicted by childhood money experiences than by income level or financial literacy. Your upbringing literally sets your financial mindset for life.
Now, don’t get me wrong, this is not about blaming your parents.
They are operating from their own inherited script about money from their parents.
So if you do not understand what money beliefs you are holding on to, you will keep being stuck in those beliefs and never think about money in the way that it could actually make you wealthy or successful.
So to identify your money mindset, we’ll use this question framework.
- How did your parents talk about money?
- How did you feel about money?
- How do you spend money now?
- Would you invest in a course or a business for yourself?
This is how you discover your money mindset and inherited beliefs.
Ask yourself these questions and rank yourself on:
- A scarcity mindset.
- A neutral mindset.
- An entrepreneur mindset.
So, where do you rank yourself?
Step 2: Stop Treating Money As A Scorecard
Early in my business journey, my husband and I were at dinner with a group of very successful entrepreneurs.
People were casually dropping numbers, revenue size, exits, portfolio sizes, and I sat there doing the math in my head, running every figure against where we were.
And I left that dinner feeling so deeply that we were behind.
That anxiousness set in, and I went home, and I started looking at ways to accelerate our business, bigger bets, faster hires, and other money moves that had no alignment with where we actually were in the business.
I was about to restructure our entire strategy based on someone else’s success because I was treating money like a Scorecard.
But then he pulled me aside and said something I’ve not forgotten since. We are not running their race; “we are running ours, and our pace has gotten us here, so trust the process.”
That single conversation saved us from a series of terrible decisions that could have cost us millions of dollars.
Not because those moves were wrong in theory, but because they would have been driven by the emotional gap, not a strategic one.
Social media has multiplied this problem by a factor of 10.
You are watching curated wins, revenue screenshots, cars, and vacations, all presented as if they represent the average.
So your brain starts to think of it as your own money performance review. And the result is always predictable.
You either overspend trying to close the perceived gap or you freeze entirely because progress feels pointless.
Both responses are emotional, and neither is a financial strategy. The deeper issue here is your self-worth.
If this is attached to your net worth, every slow money month feels like personal failure.
Every setback becomes evidence that you are not enough. But that isn’t a business or an income problem.
And the wealthiest entrepreneurs I know are not running a comparison scorecard against their peers.
Their only scorecard is their own trajectory from a year ago; that’s it.
The fix sounds easy, but it takes a lot to master: detachment.
Detaching your value and how you view yourself from your bank account.
Money is a result of the person that you need to become; “It’s not a reflection of who you are.”
The only comparison worth making is the one between where you are now and where you were 12 months ago, and what you know is possible for you to create.
That’s how you stop this destructive habit of treating money like a scorecard.
Step 3: Start Shifting From A Scarcity Mindset To An Abundance Mindset
Take the story of 2 business owners. Same industry, similar revenue, same economic conditions, hitting in 2020 during COVID, the pandemic.
# The first one cut their marketing budget by 80%, froze all hiring, and locked everything down.
# The second looked at the same landscape and saw that every competitor had just gone dark, and that attention had never been cheaper.
They increased ad spend by 40%, hired two salespeople, and launched a new offer directly into that silence.
12 months later, the first business was down 30% and still working to recover.
The second had doubled revenue and taken market share that the first business would never get back. Same market, same conditions, completely different response.
And here’s the part that matters. The first business actually had more cash in reserve.
The difference was not the resources; the difference was what each owner believed was possible in that moment.
One saw a threat, the other saw a window of opportunity. And by the time the first owner recognized the mistake, the window of opportunity had closed.
Now I want to be clear about what abundance thinking actually is because it is not positive thinking.
It is not just believing me and the money will come, that’s nonsense. Abundance thinking is strategic.
It means you believe money is renewable, that your ability to generate income is never fixed, and that opportunities are and always will be available.
When you’re operating from scarcity, your brain is fully occupied with the immediate threat and genuinely less capable of processing long-term opportunity.
You’re not being cautious, you’re being neurologically constrained by a belief you never stop to question.
So the next time financial pressure hits you, before you make any reactive move, ask yourself one question:
Is this a strategic response or a fear response?
Because they can look identical from the outside. The question is, what is driving the decision?
If you’re not asking it, you’re probably not choosing; you’re reacting. And a reaction is not a wealth-building strategy.
That’s how you shift your thinking to being proactive, away from a scarcity mindset into an abundance mindset.
Step 4: Start Thinking About Money As A Tool, Not As A Reward
In 2017, Richard Ter won the Nobel Prize in economics, largely for his research on something called mental accounting, the psychological tendency to treat the same dollar completely differently depending on where it came from or how it’s mentally labeled.
His study showed that people who receive a windfall, a tax refund, or a year-end bonus are far more likely to spend it on luxury items than they would have if it had come from their regular savings.
The dollar is identical; the behavior is completely different. Why?
Because it feels like a reward. This bonus or refund arrived outside of normal effort, so the brain files it under free money and immediately looks for something to spend it on.
The label changes the decision entirely. And Ther’s point was not that people are irrational, it’s that the way you mentally categorize money determines what you do with it long before strategy ever even enters the picture.
When you think about money as a reward, the mental question is what can I buy?
But when you think about money as a tool, the question changes to where can I put this money so that it generates the highest return?
Treat every dollar like it has a job, and if you are not assigning it one, someone or something else will.
A normal person gets $10,000 and asks what to buy. An entrepreneur gets $10,000 and asks where it multiplies.
And that habit repeated consistently over a long period of time creates a compounding gap between you and everyone who treats money as a finish line.
So the next time you have money in your Venmo account or your Cash App from friends paying you back for putting your card down at dinner, stop viewing that as free money to spend and use it to save or invest instead of spending carelessly.
And when that bonus or refund money comes in, ask yourself where you can put that money so it can grow or be invested into something that can level you up, like a course or a new skill.
Step 5: Investing in Yourself Before Investing in Anything Else
I’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into my own education, and I’m still not stopping.
There was a day when I realized that the income gap between what I was making and what I wanted to be making was directly related to the skills I didn’t have.
So, I decided to invest in myself and my education. And this got me access to rooms and information where I could elevate my thinking.
Where you are right now, and the amount of money you want to make, are simply limited by the knowledge you don’t have to be able to get there.
And I even do this today in small doses with things like legal contracts and terms.
Still to this day, I invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to be in rooms that make me uncomfortable, rooms where I don’t feel like I belong, yet because I know where I want to go and there is still a delta from where I’m at to where I want to be.
So, I have to keep putting myself in those environments that force a behavior change.
It forces me to learn something different, which then I need to put the work into in order to actually be ready and prepared for the moment I’m in that room.
Warren Buffett has even said multiple times that the best investment he ever made was not a stock, a business acquisition, or a piece of real estate; it was a $100 Dale Carnegie public speaking course.
He was young and terrified of speaking in front of people; I can totally relate.
And he was so scared that he structured his entire college schedule around avoiding it.
But he recognized it as the one skill that was quietly capping everything else he wanted to build; his ability to attract partners, raise capital, and earn trust from the people he needed in his corner all depended on being able to communicate clearly and confidently.
So, he paid the $100 and did the work.
Today, the frame certificate from that course hangs on the wall of his office, not his University of Nebraska degree, not his Columbia business school diploma, but the Dale Carnegie certificate, because in his own words, it is the one that actually changed what he was worth.
Your income is directly tied to the scale of knowledge you have and the problems you can solve because of that knowledge and thinking.
The bigger the problems you can solve, the more you get paid, and you can’t solve big problems without investing in your own skills.
So, how do you start investing in yourself?
Look at your last 3 months of discretionary spending and see where you could have set aside money to spend on enhancing your skills.
Once you have that number, look into courses, classes, or networking events that can allow you to get into a room with successful people who are doing what you want to do.
Or making the kind of money that you want to make.
When you surround yourself with these people, their success will rub off on you, and you will learn so much from them.
Step 6: Build Financial Systems, Not Rely on Willpower
If your investments, savings, and paying bills require you to always log into your account, move money around, that requires a certain discipline, and let’s be honest, most people don’t have any discipline.
It’s hard to maintain, and this will end up slipping.
If someone requires you to make a manual decision every month, you’ve created a recurring opportunity to make an emotional decision instead to buy something or spend the money on something that won’t build your wealth long term.
I have all of my accounts doing automatic investments every single month, and the smart thing to do here is not to listen to all those people saying time the market.
I’m never going to be someone who tries to time the market.
What I do is use dollar cost averaging for any investments, so I’m constantly putting more and more money in, and it grows faster and faster.
The solution is to remove yourself and your emotions from the equation.
- Automate the flow of money into your bank account.
- Automate your investments.
- Automate your debt payments, and have this set for each time you get paid.
And the good thing is that cash isn’t in a permanent place; it can still be moved or invested in bigger things, it’s still liquid, and you’re still in control of it.
So this week, when you look at your paycheck and decide how much money you can set aside to automate towards savings and investments each month.
Then set up those recurring transfers for every time you get paid, and then completely forget about it.
And when you check back 6 months from now or 2 years from now, you’ll be surprised, hopefully, at how much you’ve invested and by the returns of your investment because your money grew by sitting there, and now you’re thinking like the top 1%.
Thanks For Reading 🙂
