The Illusion of Money: Why Chasing Money Is Stopping You from Receiving It by Kyle Cease

CHAPTER 1
WELCOME TO THE
ILLUSION
Imagine if Michael Jordan, at the height of his legendary basketball
career, got amnesia and completely forgot who he was. After coming to,
he struggles to get a day job, finds a mediocre relationship, starts
watching a lot of TV, and gets used to living an ordinary, unfulfilling life.
In this alternate reality (with many different obvious plot holes) he’s now
walking around thinking he’s an average guy and trying to figure out
how to make ends meet while getting more and more unhappy with his
life.
If you met him, you’d probably be obsessed with trying to help him
remember that he’s one of the greatest basketball players who ever lived.
You’d be doing everything in your power to get him on the court so he
could realize how amazing he actually is. But imagine him completely
believing and defending that he’s just an ordinary guy—and explaining
to you that he has bills to pay and he can’t just spend his time chasing
some dream of playing basketball all day.
You’d be going crazy listening to him complain about how hard it is to
get by because you know about the hundreds of millions of dollars and
total fulfillment he’s missing out on by not trusting that he has this
insane talent and value that he could bring to the world. Every time
you’d go to the Applebee’s he now works at, you’d be trying to convince
him to leave and do this thing you know he’s amazing at, but he’d
remind you about how, if he stays there another two years, they’ll make
him assistant manager—and that he needs that kind of security in his life.
You’re sitting there, trying to show him who he actually is, because he
has no idea, and he’s angrily defending this new, small life because he
can’t see what’s beyond it from his limited perspective.
This is how I see most people. No matter who I talk to, they seem to
have amnesia about who they really are.
I may not know you personally, so I don’t know your story or what
you do for a living, but here’s what I do know: you are a brilliant,
creative genius. I don’t need to know anything about you to know that.
I’m not trying to pump you up or make you feel special—it’s a fact. And
don’t try to argue with me about it—first, because this is a book and I’m
not actually in front of you, so you’d just be talking to a book, and more
importantly, because it’s the truth. Every voice in your head that tells you
anything other than that is a lie you’ve been told by the world that has
made you forget what you actually are.
After working with thousands and thousands of people from all over
the planet, I’ve come to learn that every single person has the exact same
level of unique brilliance in them, we all just access it in different
amounts. How much we’re accessing our brilliance depends only on how
much we’re attached to the limited story that cuts us off from it. If you
could find a way, for just a second, to let go of your limited story that is
telling you that you’re not a genius . . . BOOM—your genius would
show up instantly.
So every single one of us is holding on to an idea of ourselves that is
only a tiny fraction of what we can truly become. In letting go of that
idea, it doesn’t mean we’re all going to be able to dunk from the free-

throw line like Jordan, but it does mean that each one of us has a totally
unique gift that is waiting to come through in an equally badass way. But
when we’re living in our amnesia and believing our small story, we
spend our lives stressing about things that would be completely taken
care of if we stepped into the magic of what we actually are.
The reason this book is called The Illusion of Money is because money
is one of the biggest excuses we give ourselves for why we can’t follow
our highest calling and step into what we are meant to become. If you
want to be a writer, a painter, an entrepreneur, or anything else, but spend
all your time working at a job you don’t like just because it pays the
bills, that’s using money as an excuse to disqualify all your unlimited
talents and creativity. If you want to travel the world but don’t because
you think you can’t afford it, that’s using money as an excuse to not
connect to the infinite possibility and synchronicity that is available
when you take the first step and show up. I get that there are details
about those types of situations that your mind might be pointing out as
examples of how those things might not work—if any arguments like
that came up, realize that’s the limited part of you arguing for its
limitations. If you stopped arguing for your limitations, you’d start to see
how it’s all possible instead of how it’s impossible. There are a million

The Illusion of Money: Why Chasing Money Is Stopping You from Receiving It by Kyle Cease