Most of us have a number in our head. The one that means we've finally made it: €10K months, €500K years, the first million. We tell ourselves that when we hit it, we'll slow down. We’ll finally book the trip and stop feeling behind.
The problem with that however is that the number KEEPS moving.
There's a concept from research called the 2.5x salary fallacy.
The idea is this: regardless of what you currently earn, most people believe that making roughly 2.5x their current income would finally make them feel secure.
- The person earning €40K wants €100K.
- The person at €100K wants €250K.
- The million-euro earner wants €2.5M.
It's not greedy per se, but it’s how the brain is wired. Psychologists call it “the hedonic treadmill”. As your income rises, your expectations rise with it, and the finish line moves just as fast as you're running toward it.
I came across this concept recently and recognized it immediately. Not just in my clients, but in myself too.
The conversation that kept happening everywhere
I've just come off the most concentrated month of client work I've had in a long time. Ibiza with my Self-Made Millionaire Mastermind clients. The Gold Mastermind workshop. Back-to-back coaching sessions. Rooms full of women building seriously ambitious things.
And the same tension kept surfacing, no matter the revenue level.
I've built something real. The version of me from five years ago would be proud. So why does it not feel like I thought it would? Why do I still feel so restless?
Because most of us are still waiting for a revenue number to answer that question. And it never does.
Rich is not a revenue milestone
The first mindset shift that keeps coming up in my rooms: rich is not what's in your bank account. It's what's in your day.
For some, rich looks like picking up their kids from school without being exhausted and snapping at them. For others, it's waking up on a Tuesday and choosing what to work on, not being dictated to by the inbox. For me, rich is protecting Mondays and Wednesdays as people-free days where I get to create, think, and work from passion rather than obligation.
The money makes those choices possible. But the choices and the freedom are the actual point.
Instead of building toward a revenue number, try building toward a specific Wednesday you want to live. What time does your day start? What are you no longer doing? Who handles what you're currently carrying?
The time-for-money trap at every level
Mindset shift two is one not enough people are talking about.
When you start a business, trading time for money makes complete sense. You build skills, you get clients, you grow. But most business owners never actually stop doing this. They just do it at higher prices with higher pressure. They go from charging €50 an hour to €500 an hour and call it scaling. But the model is identical. The moment they stop, the income stops.
The honest question to ask yourself: if you could not work for 30 days, what would actually happen to your revenue? Not what you'd hope would happen, what would actually happen?
If the answer is that it would stop completely, that's not a judgment. It's just honest information about where you currently are. And it's information that lets you start making structural decisions to put distance between your hours and your income.
Stop waiting for permission
The third shift is the one that gets said quietly at dinner, once everyone has stopped performing.
So many women are postponing their actual lives until the business is ready. I'll slow down when I hit that number. I'll take the trip when the team is stable. I'll turn off my phone when the launch is done. And then launch after launch, milestone after milestone, life keeps getting pushed forward.
80% of my clients admit to being physically present but mentally elsewhere, at dinner, at the birthday party, on the holiday.
What I've seen in the women who've made this shift: they weren't necessarily working less. Some were working the same hours. But they stopped waiting for permission to give themselves what they already wanted. They stopped treating their life as a reward for working hard and started treating it as the reason for it.
A client said something to me in Ibiza that I haven't stopped thinking about. She said she'd spent years building toward her highest profit year ever. When she got there, she was happy for about five minutes. Then she realized she felt awful, exhausted, and didn't even know how to enjoy it.
We are so trained for the chase that we forget to design a life we can actually land in.
Rich life is not something you earn at the finish line. It's something you build into how you're running things right now, deliberately, not perfectly.
If these are the conversations you want more of, this is exactly what happens inside my masterminds. Comment ‘MASTERMIND‘ on Instagram and I'll send you the details.
Or apply directly at: https://fastforwardamy.com/applicationformeng
Leave a Reply