Introduction

Three core ideas that we'll come back to in every part of the book:

• Money screws us up in self-deceptive ways. This is especially unfortunate, because the point of self-deceptive problems is that you lead yourself astray. You end up wasting your life trying to 'solve' other problems, staying blind to what you actually need to do, or, worse, actively believing that the real problem applies only to other people.

• You are at constant threat from your craving for simplicity and certainty in an inherently complex and uncertain world. You cannot see self-deception head on, but you can come to see its effects. The main ones, in terms of both frequency and intensity, are the ways in which you desperately grasp for simplicity and certainty.

• There is a better way. You can overcome self-deception. You can train yourself to improve the money maps in your brain, which of course, is where your relationship with money is written.

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