September 11, 2026

Are You Brainwashed Like Me?

The Culture of Minimums

Upon graduation, nobody was going to confuse me with a man deciding between a Corvette and a Toyota minivan. Budget-wise, nobody was going to confuse my apartment in the village with a home by the lake, either. Six children? Monthly family vacations? Those weren’t going into the budget.

Why?

Because I couldn’t afford them.

The intrinsic evidence of my paycheck was proof enough.

I did have a fantasy: a 2,400-square-foot home in the country on forty acres, with a gun range on one side of the property and a golf range on the other. But statistically, that kind of life was not looking too promising.

“But Mr. Phillips,” a young sapling might tell me, “I’m going to grow well beyond my parents. My house, my cars, my family, my entertainment—everything will go beyond what they had.”

Maybe.

But most of us build lives that look surprisingly similar to the lives around us. We earn in familiar ranges. We have a familiar number of children. We settle near familiar people. We choose familiar homes, careers, worries, and expectations.

Why?

Because we think we should.

That is culture.

Culture is simply a collection of habits shared by a particular group. Americans share certain habits. Teachers share certain habits. Mothers, teenagers, grandparents, entrepreneurs, victims, and victors all develop recognizable habits of their own.

And if you recall the Destiny Flow Chart from my other articles, habits begin with actions—and actions begin with thoughts.

Thoughts are where the road starts.

But are those thoughts really ours?

The Vocabulary That Builds the Ceiling

Language is an expression of thought. It is how we carry ideas from one mind into another. It also reveals what matters to us.

You will not catch me carrying on a lengthy conversation about butterflies indigenous to the Philippines. I don’t have the vocabulary. But I can talk about goal-setting all day long because I have spent years developing the language to do it.

Vocabulary. There’s the demon—or the angel—in the details.

When we talk about a toddler, we use a sweet little set of words. When that same child becomes a teenager who is late coming home, an entirely different vocabulary takes over.

The words we repeatedly use help create the culture we repeatedly accept as normal and live in.  We jealously defend that world.

However, there is one vocabulary that cross-pollinates almost every American subculture:

Money.

Unfortunately, much of our financial vocabulary does not promote growth. It places a ceiling over our thinking and then teaches us to call the ceiling “reality.”  Warm, fuzzy, normal, reality.

Stop me when one of these sounds familiar:

• Affordable housing

• Living wage

• Make ends meet

• Live within your means

• Cost of living

• Entry-level salary

• Starter home

• Minimum wage

None of these phrases is automatically evil. Some describe real conditions, and living within your means is sound financial advice. The danger appears when temporary conditions become permanent identities—when we spend all our imagination shrinking the dream instead of expanding our capacity.

What language might an achiever use?

• Target home

• Target income

• Build a surplus

• Expand your means

• Desired lifestyle

• Earning potential

• First investment

• Maximum value

Read those two lists again. Out loud.

OK, read them again.  Out loud and slower.  Think about each word.  Pause between lists.

You can almost feel the achiever inside you warm up during the second list.

The first list sounds familiar because we have heard it a million times—from the media, our parents, our friends, strangers on a bus, and nearly everywhere else.

The second list is less familiar. It belongs to a culture that specializes in focused thinking. Its members try to live life on purpose. Their dreams may begin with themselves, but lasting dreams must eventually serve other people. If your magnificent obsession is to open a hamburger stand, you had better serve somebody well—or your magnificent obsession will soon be magnificently dead.

“But Professor Tim,” you may ask, “what about people who had wealth handed to them?”

Great question. Most of the time, their inheritance won’t help you a bit.

The principle still stands: give a pile of money to a fool and it will eventually travel to someone wiser. Jealousy cannot teach us how to create value. It only distracts us from becoming valuable.

Maximum thinking is not buying beyond your means.

It is refusing to believe your present means are permanent.

Minimum Wage or Maximum Value

Do achievers build their thinking around the minimum? Even when they are broke or uneducated, do they make the minimum their destination?

No. They think about maximum wage—or, better yet, maximum value.

Yes, sometimes we need money right now. Survival is real. But even while meeting today’s needs, an achiever asks a different question:

Where can I create, learn, or deliver the greatest value?

Sometimes the answer is in a book. Sometimes it is in permanently removing a distraction. Sometimes it is in the people we meet. Most often, it is in the people we serve.

Once upon a time, America had a mountain of unemployed graphic artists. They applied everywhere. Design houses and large companies had stacks of résumés, and when the supply of available labor rose, the salaries being offered fell.

The person may have been priceless. The market still offered only so much.

One smart graphic artist chose a different measure.  He set a goal to design one hundred children’s menus for small restaurant chains around Chicago.

His pitch was simple:

“I’m a skilled graphic artist looking for experience.  I would love to design a children’s menu for you at no charge, as long as you let me place my teeny-tiny logo at the bottom.”

Many restaurant owners stopped listening at free and gave him the go-ahead.  Did everyone say yes? Of course not.  Many ignored him and moved him along.

But one menu led to two.  Two led to ten.  By the time he reached thirty-four menus, he never had to worry about making a living again.  Think about that.  Lets say it takes five hours to make one menu.  Thirty-four times five would equal 170 hours of invested valuable time to valuable people.  Twenty years later he has two other artists working with him fulfilling orders that all came from that early year.

That does not sound like minimum-wage thinking to me.

What did he choose to value?  People he served had high value.   Not his immediate wage.

Andrew Carnegie understood a version of the same principle. He arrived in the United States poor and began working in a cotton factory as a bobbin boy. Decades later, his partners named their new steel mill the Edgar Thomson Steel Works after J. Edgar Thomson, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad—a respected man whose name, reputation, and railroad relationship carried enormous value.

The lesson is not that naming something after an important person guarantees a contract. The lesson is that Carnegie and his partners saw more than steel and price. They understood reputation, trust, relationships, access, and influence as forms of value.

When everyone else is fighting over price, look for value they have not learned to see.

Besides, naming a company after me would at least get my attention.

Always look for value that can be transformed into wealth.

Give Your Hopes Movement

At the average dinner table, you may hear this phrase endorsed:

“Don’t get your hopes up.”

At an achiever’s dinner table, the parents would never instruct their child to keep hope small. They might say:

Give your hopes a plan.

Whether those parents are plumbers or philanthropists, that is achiever vocabulary. Give your hopes, your dreams, and your magnificent obsession a plan.

The late Charles “Tremendous” Jones famously joked that nothing ever goes according to plan—but if something does, we will try to work it in.

That does not mean plans are useless. It means a plan is your best current guess about the path to the goal.

The goal is the destination.  The plan is today’s best route.  When reality gives you better information, adjust the route.

The plan’s job is not to predict the future. It can’t. Its job is to keep you:

MOVING!

Nothing kills a goal faster than acting on nothing.

In the early days of my cleaning company, I needed one more major customer.  I chose Panera and pursued the account for four years.

Panera went nowhere.

But while I worked that plan, Ruby Tuesday fell into my lap. A chain of Olive Gardens followed.  Then the growing Buffalo Wild Wings chain chose us with very little sales effort.

Four years later, after I had given up actively pursuing Panera, Panera walked in with open arms.

From the outside, I may have looked like a genius.  In reality, I was a genius whose plan went almost entirely wrong—but who kept moving long enough for the goal to find another road.

Here is a little game I play.  When I meet someone who is happy in a career, I ask how they got there. The usual answer is, “That’s a long story.”  And it is.

They went to school for one thing, started working in another, met somebody unexpected, and were eventually told they would be good at the career they now love.  That does not sound like a flawless plan.  It sounds like directed movement.

Please do not go willy-nilly into the wilderness without a plan.  That’s a different look altogether.  Plans matter.

PLAN: Your best prediction of the path between where you are and your goal. A plan gives you direction, not certainty. Follow it until reality reveals a better route.

Let me change the achiever’s dinner conversation by one word:  Movement.

Don’t merely give your hopes a plan. Give your hopes movement.

Build a Larger Road

“Stay in your lane” usually means: operate within what you already know, what you are already qualified to do, what you have already done, and what other people already recognize you as.

There is wisdom in that phrase when it means focus.  Please, please, please stay focused. Keep your eye on the prize.

But as a philosophy for life, “stay in your lane” is usually a phrase from the culture of minimums.  Don’t reach beyond your present capability.

How would an achiever say it?  Build a larger road.

Learn more.  Meet more people.  Develop another skill.  Try something you are not yet good at.  Read the book.  Listen to the lesson.  Attend the seminar.  Ask the expert.  Make one hundred sales calls.  Accept the project that sits slightly beyond your current ability.

Your lane gets wider because YOU get larger.

I was twenty-five years old when I learned that this lesson even existed. At the time, my road could barely hold a golf cart. Four years later, it was wide enough for semi-trucks. My road has continued to grow ever since.

“Stay in your lane” now means something different to me:  Grow until you need a bigger road.

Three specific practices helped me build mine:

1. Reading

2. Listening intentionally

3. Association

Reading

Books are among the fastest and most explosive road-building tools ever created.  An astonishing amount of humanity’s knowledge has been recorded somewhere in a book.

I try to remember that when I catch myself endlessly scrolling through social media.

Even fiction challenges the imagination.  When you read, your mind must build the pictures.  Strong ideas connect with what you already know.  Unfamiliar ideas wait at the edge of your understanding.  As you revisit them, that narrow mental path can broaden into an eight-lane freeway.

Reading also lets you have a conversation with the author.  Weird, isn’t it? But it is true.

The author presents a world and you respond:

“Yes—please go on.”

“I disagree, but I can see where you are coming from.”

Or, “What the heck are you talking about?”

People say they receive so much from reading the Word of God. Why? In part, because it becomes a conversation:

“Lord, I agree. Keep going.”

“Lord, I don’t understand, but I am trying to see what You are showing me.”

And occasionally: “Lord, that is a very interesting collection of names I cannot pronounce.”

What do we receive from reading?

A conversation large enough to enlarge us.

Listening Intentionally

Choose the sounds around you. They matter.

A baby begins learning language by hearing rhythm, syllables, repetition, and tone. Sounds become associated with meaning: Mama. Dada. Bottle.  That relationship between sound and thought continues for the rest of the child’s life.

Now replace the rhythm of syllables with a drum kit and a powerful melodic hook.  Music and ambient sound carry information.  They can redirect mood, attention, memory, and behavior.  

Businesses understand this.   Retailers choose tempo, volume, and genre to influence the atmosphere of a store.  A dentist’s office probably does not use heavy metal to settle anxious patients.  A law office hoping to project grave seriousness may think twice before filling the lobby with bubbly K-pop.

Even the simplest sounds deliver instructions.

Ahem.

Your phone goes ding.

Do I really need to explain what your mind does next?

I will never ask anyone to blindly abandon their taste in music or live in frightened silence.  I am asking you to become mindful of the sounds around you.  Many were placed there to serve somebody else’s intention.

Choose when you want silence.  Choose white noise before sleep.  Choose music that supports the atmosphere you want at home.  Most importantly, read the lyrics you repeatedly place inside your mind.  Companies spend millions crafting hooks that stay with us.  The least we can do is decide whether the thought attached to the hook deserves to stay too.

Those hooks may be really, really good.  But so is your future.

What would an achiever choose to hear?

Association

Association is the human version of atmosphere.

Spend enough time with people who say, “That will never work,” and their ceiling will eventually begin to feel like yours.  Spend time with people who ask, “What would make it work?” and possibility becomes normal.

Association does not mean discarding everyone who is struggling or surrounding yourself only with wealthy people.  It means choosing some relationships that stretch your vocabulary, your expectations, your faith, and your sense of responsibility.

Pursue a large goal.  If the goal is big enough you need different people to make it happen.  Different association!  People with resources, skills, and their own association to help you.  Find people whose lives force you to build a larger road.

Then become that person for somebody else.  The circle of life.

Change the Words, Change the Direction

This article is really about language.

Words mean things. Much of our common vocabulary was created to describe ordinary life and preserve the status quo.  Achievers need language that directs thought toward growth, service, responsibility, and movement.

Dr. Carol Dweck calls the larger distinction a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. A fixed mindset treats present ability as a verdict. A growth mindset treats it as a starting point.

Which culture do achievers practice?

My prayer is that we embrace the culture of achievers—not merely to collect money, things, power, and stuff, but to find peace.

Achievement is not endless exhaustion.  It is not reckless debt.  It is not pretending limitations do not exist.  It is seeing reality clearly without granting it permanent authority over the future.

The culture of minimums asks:

What can my present life afford?

The culture of achievers asks:

What must I become to carry the life I can see?

Being an achiever helps us escape traps such as victimhood—and there is no peace in victimhood.

VictorSHIP, on the other hand?

Now we’re talking.

My daughter, as young and naive as she is, has been watching and hearing Dad change his vocabulary to an achievers vocabulary.  She is coming along just find.  She volunteered a piece of her own achiever vocabulary.  It may be the best of all.

When the subject of giving up came around, she said:

“I’m too young for this.”

Too young to surrender.  Too young to mistake one failed attempt for a final verdict.  Too young to let today’s capacity determine tomorrow’s life.

Come to think of it, so am I.

And so are you.

Do not shrink the dream until it fits your life. Expand your life until it can carry the dream.

Read Victorship: The Goal-Getter’s Guide to Victory.