CHAPTER 3 — IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY

Purpose Matters — But Paper Still Pays the Bills

One of the biggest myths you hear about money is this: “If you just find your purpose, the money will magically follow.”

It sounds deep, it looks good on a meme, and it keeps a lot of people broke.

Purpose is powerful. It gives you a reason to get up, a reason to keep going, a reason not to quit when life gets disrespectful. But purpose by itself doesn’t guarantee profit. There are people walking in their calling every day who still don’t know how they’re going to pay rent.

My own calling? I’ve known since I was young — I want to pour billions into youth and the overlooked.

Books, programs, platforms, scholarships, whole systems built for kids like me. That purpose kept me alive through decades as a hospital orderly. But it didn’t automatically load my bank account. I had to learn the money game on purpose.

That’s what this chapter is about: not worshipping money, but understanding it so you can fund the purpose God put in you.

Money Is Just an Idea

Here’s the part nobody broke down in school: money is an idea. Not magic. Not a personality trait. An idea we all agreed to believe in.

Back in the day, every dollar in America was backed by real gold locked in government vaults. If you had a paper certificate, you could walk into a bank and swap it for gold on demand. That was the deal.

Then one day, in the middle of economic chaos, leaders changed the rules. They removed the gold backing, kept the paper, and told people, “This still has value because we say so.”

The greatest robbery in history happened without a single mask, without a getaway car. The whole country shifted from money you could touch to money you simply trusted.

If money is an idea the government can remix, then you can learn to remix it too.

Most people never get that far. They trade hours for dollars, complain about their check, and never realize they’re stuck in the weakest level of the money game: selling time instead of selling ideas.

Trading Time Is the Lowest Level

Ask most people, “How do you make money?” and they’ll say, “Get a job. Put in the hours. Collect the check.” That’s trading your time for a fixed amount.

Even a lot of business owners never graduate past that mindset. They think about money as simple markups and hustle. Buy something for $100, sell it for $163, and brag about your “63% profit.”

But what about the cost to get the item? The shipping? The rent? The employee who sold it? The broken inventory? The credit card fees?

When you subtract everything, that “63%” might be closer to “you barely made gas money.”

Real money doesn’t chase products — it chases solutions. It flows to the people who notice a real problem, use creativity to design a better answer, and put that answer where people can easily get it.

Money flows to the person who mines their own ideas and solves a common problem at the right time, in the right place.

Your Imagination Is a Money Machine

One of my favorite lines from Jay Electronica talks about imagination being the “factory that makes legends.” He’s right. Long before anybody cuts you a check, your imagination has to clock in.

The greatest minds in history have been saying the same thing in different ways:

• Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge.
• Shakespeare said imagination can turn people into something greater than they are.
• Chance the Rapper joked that some people are so poor, all they have is money — meaning they’re rich in paper but broke in purpose, ideas, and love.

Kids understand this naturally.

Give a child a ball and ask, “What is this?” They say, “A ball.” Ask, “What can you do with it?” and the magic starts:

• “I’d put balls atop the house so my dad never falls off the roof again.”
• “I’d put them on my feet so I never have to walk.”
• “I’d stack them high and make a new kind of building.”

That’s not just cute — that’s raw innovation. A ball becomes a safety device, a new type of shoe, or a futuristic building. If those kids had the right timing, mentors, and tools, any one of those ideas could become a real company.

The problem isn’t that you don’t have ideas. It’s that school and survival taught you to stop trusting them.

School Trained Your Memory, Not Your Money Mind

Dr. Michael LeBoeuf breaks mental skills into four basic moves:

• Observe and pay attention
• Memorize and recall
• Analyze and judge
• Generate new ideas and imagine what doesn’t exist yet

School spends almost all its time on the first three. Watch. Remember. Repeat. Then, once you’ve memorized enough, you get promoted to criticizing other people’s ideas. Very rarely are you trained to create your own.

No wonder most people feel stuck. We were graded on how well we copied the answer key, not on how boldly we could redesign the game.

But the marketplace doesn’t pay you for what you remember. It pays you for what you can imagine, build, and deliver.

Your Idea Factory Needs Better Fuel

We all have an idea factory inside us. Some people just have higher output than others — not because they’re better humans, but because they feed their mind better fuel.

Fighter jets don’t run on regular gas. World-class athletes don’t eat junk before a championship game. In the same way, your creativity can’t run on cheap information and TikTok drama and still produce million-dollar solutions.

You upgrade your idea factory by feeding it:

• Biographies of people who built something from nothing,
• Books about money, tech, and business models,
• Conversations with people who think differently than your circle,
• Real problems your community is facing right now.

Imagination + information + courage = ideas whose time has come.

Victor Hugo once said nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has arrived. No army, no system, no gatekeeping can fully stop it. The question is: will you be the one brave enough to carry that idea?

Foreclosures — My Eyes Opened

The first time I ever stood inside a foreclosure auction, I didn’t have a strategy. I just wanted to see how the economic game was being played. The room looked nervous — people holding folders, whispering numbers, trying to calm shaking hands.

A family’s entire history could be purchased for the price of a used car. I watched a house that someone probably cried over sell for less than the cost of a Honda Civic.

In that moment, something snapped: money rewards courage and timing.

When fear enters the market, prices collapse. When solutions enter the market, value rises.

Money is not kindness or cruelty — money is timing, pattern recognition, and organized belief.

And when you recognize patterns before other people are ready to act, you are no longer just working for money — money starts working for you.

“Difficult takes a day, impossible takes a week.” — Jay-Z

Translation: hard isn’t a barrier — it’s just the price of changing your whole story.

Millionaire Math — Turning Ideas into Numbers

Let’s zoom the camera out for a second. A million dollars sounds wild until you break it down:

• $1,000,000 a year ≈ $84,000 a month
• That’s about $2,740 a day
• Or 1,000 people paying you about $83 a month for real value you deliver.

It can be done by selling a million ten-dollar items, or by creating a $700 course for about 1,500 people.

Or in my case, it’s simple: make a million people happy, and ask each one for $1.

Still a challenge? Absolutely. But it’s not magic; it’s math. And math can be planned for, tested, and adjusted.

The goal of this book isn’t to promise you a million dollars. It’s to show you how million-level thinking works so you’re not scared of big numbers, just prepared to grow into them.

Old Me vs. New Me

Old me believed the highest way to earn more was to work harder or ask for a raise. New me realized that systems break the trade-time-for-dollars trap.

Old me thought ownership was a luxury. New me learned ownership is security.

Old me would grind for a check. New me designs something that can multiply without me being present.

Old me asked, “How can I make $1,000?” New me asks, “How can a system make $1,000 every week while I sleep?”

Micro-Exercise — Pattern Spotting

Look around your city:

• Which stores are empty?
• Which stores are always busy?
• What are people complaining about online?
• What products or services are inconvenient?
• What do people stand in line for?
• Where is embarrassment, delay, or frustration happening?

Wherever behavior is changing, money is shifting. Because money follows frustration, scarcity, convenience, access, and unmet demand.

Your eyes are a telescope into tomorrow’s opportunity — if you learn to listen.

You are not chasing money — you are learning to see what others ignore.

Wherever there is confusion, delay, embarrassment, or wasted motion — there is hidden profit and purpose waiting for someone brave enough to organize a better answer.

Money is not your enemy and it’s not your god. It’s a tool — a flexible tool that begins as an idea, flows through systems, and responds to those who learn how it truly works.