Why Every High Earner Is Driven By the Same Thing — And It Has Nothing To Do With Money
For the longest time I believed that if I was just successful enough, I would get everything I wanted.
My mother’s love. Her appreciation. Her admiration. Her acknowledgement.
I have not told this part of my story before. It has been a shameful part of my past. One I spent years denying and forgetting. And finally two years ago I allowed myself to unpack what really happened.
My mother told me I was too stupid to amount to anything. That nobody would ever love me. That I would end up on the street eating dog shit.
I am sharing this with you. Not for pity. But because I know that you too have a painful story like that somewhere. A teacher. A lover. A breakup. A firing. Something someone said that sits like a thorn in the middle of your heart.
And in today’s newsletter I want to share how you can remove that thorn. Because that event — whatever it was — may be driving you toward success right now. But if you achieve it and you don’t understand what comes next, you may be in trouble.
That is exactly what Eric Mitchell helped me see in Episode 216 of The Business Growth Architect Show — Founders of the Future.
The Question That Started Everything
Eric Mitchell leads over 200 people and has interviewed thousands of self-made millionaires. His criteria was simple — you had to be self-made and earning more than a million dollars a year. And he asked every single one of them the same question.
Why do you want the money?
Not one of them said because it is money.
His journey to that question started in 2004 when his mentor looked at him across a dinner table — after a successful site visit, more money than he had ever made in his life — and asked him the same question.
Why do you want all this money?
Eric could not answer it. He did not even understand the question. And the look of disappointment on his mentor’s face cracked something open that sent him on a decade long search.
What he discovered after thousands of interviews is that every answer falls into one of five buckets. Five reasons. That is it. Every high earner on the planet is driven by one of them.
None of them are money.
I will let Eric walk you through all five in the episode. But I will tell you mine.
My Two Drivers
For most of my career I was driven by the need to prove something.
Not to myself. To my mother. The woman who told me I would eat dog shit. I was going to show her exactly who I was and what I was capable of.
In 2004 I sold my company to Bill Gates for millions of dollars.
She never needed to know.
And I thought naively that I had figured it out. That one massive success like that meant I had cracked the formula. That everything I touched from that point forward would work the same way. I was going to repeat this. Over and over. Easy.
What I did not understand was that I was still chasing the same thing. Still trying to prove something. Still running on the same driver without ever examining it.
I see this all the time. Many of my high net worth friends — people with more money than they will ever need — are still consumed by the fear of not having enough. Still grinding. Still anxious. Still chasing. Not because they are greedy or broken. But because the driver has never been examined or adjusted. They achieved the thing and kept running as if they hadn’t.
Eric calls this the collapse. The moment you achieve what you have been driving toward your whole life the driver disappears. And if you do not replace it you keep running on empty wondering why nothing feels like enough.
Two years ago I had a massive awakening. I realized I was still trying to prove something. And it simply was not working anymore. The inner work I had been avoiding could not be avoided any longer.
That is when everything began to shift. Slowly. Uncomfortably. And then something quieter and more powerful emerged.
I wanted to inspire.
Not because of what I had survived. But because of what was possible on the other side of it. Every founder I work with, every person who listens to this show, every woman who is told she is not enough — I want them to see what becomes possible when you stop listening to the wrong voice and start building from your own.
That shift — from proof to inspiration — changed everything about how I work, how I lead and how I measure success.
Eric has a name for both of those drivers. He has a framework for understanding exactly where you are in your journey and what comes next. And he shares it all in the episode.
The Thorn That Drives You
Here is what I know after this conversation.
The thorn does not get removed by pretending it was never there. It gets removed by letting it drive you somewhere worth going — and then consciously choosing what drives you next.
That is the work. And it is available to every single one of us regardless of what the thorn was or who put it there.
Eric also shared something in this episode that stopped me cold. A story about a Marine, his wife, and a room full of smokers that will change how you think about motivation, emotion and what actually drives human behavior. I am not going to tell you how it ends. You need to hear it for yourself.
A Closing Reflection
My mother was wrong about most things.
But the hunger she created in me was real. It drove me further than I might have gone otherwise. It made me prove something to myself that needed proving.
And then one day I realized I was no longer proving her wrong.
I was proving myself right.
That is the shift Eric is talking about. From wound to wisdom. From proving something to someone who may never acknowledge it — to building something that matters long after the moment has passed.
You do not have to know your why perfectly. You just have to start asking the question.
Why do I want the money?
Sit with it. Be honest. Let the real answer surface even if it surprises you.
Because when you find it — really find it — everything changes. Including what you are willing to do to get there. And what you do with it when you arrive.
That is the practice. And it starts again tomorrow.
Episode 216 with Eric Mitchell is worth your time. He has asked this question to thousands of people. And he will help you find your answer.
Let’s grow,
Beate
