Midas Touch
The Hidden Psychology of Charging More
Dear Permission to be Powerful Reader,
My father was obsessed with saving money.
Obsessed with turning lights off.
It was one of the fastest ways to incite his wrath.
I’ve spent a long time worrying about money.
I was sent away to school, and that was expensive.
I felt personally responsible for my parents’ sacrifice and suffering.
Money was always in short supply.
I noticed other families didn’t worry about money the way we did.
We would drive through rich neighborhoods and dream of a better life.
But I also felt undeserving of it.
When I became a freelancer, I charged bottom-of-the-barrel rates.
I worked for bottom-of-the-barrel clients.
Clients don’t just buy your work.
They buy you.
And when they smell that you don’t believe you deserve your asking price, they punish you for it.
You must believe you deserve the money before you get it.
But asking for more money always felt like pulling teeth.
I can remember the first time I went from charging $1,000 to $2,000.
That was a big deal. I had to wrestle with myself to justify it.
A few years later, I was charging $10,000. Then $20,000. Then royalties.
Each leap redefined my concept of money. I had to become a different person each time.
There’s a big difference between the copywriter who charged $1,000 and the one who charged $20,000.
One lived on Upwork.
The other joined masterminds to network. To rub shoulders with the titans of the industry.
The $1,000 copywriter was a gamble.
He wasn’t trusted to handle a project on his own.
Clients would hack his copy to death, and he didn’t yet have the confidence to stop them.
Everything was his fault.
The $20,000 copywriter was beginning to teach his ideas.
He quietly wrote 40 webinars in three months…
For a well-known marketer’s entire mastermind.
Using his own system.
He infiltrated exclusive circles.
He worked with the best in the business.
Every single time I made a leap to a higher income, I felt nauseous.
Like I was a fraud faking it.
Like sooner or later, they were going to find out.
It’s an overwhelming sense that you shouldn’t click send on the invoice.
The Zoom call where you name your price.
They ask you how much you charge…
You feel a pit in your stomach.
Then you feel dread.
Your voice cracks as you name a price you’ve never charged before.
Then you brace yourself…
As you wait to be laughed out of the room.
But I always took the challenge.
I had a natural impulse to ask for more on the next project.
I had to dig deep to find the courage.
It’s the kind of anxiety that makes you lightheaded. Like you’re about to pass out.
There’s an old-school anime called Golgo 13 about an assassin for hire who never fails. He charged $3 million per target, and I loved how cold he was about it.
Either you pay, or I walk.
No beating around the bush. No shame. No apologizing.
Stone cold.
That became my benchmark.
Every time you ask for more, your sense of deserving it increases.
I had to change my relationship with money in several ways, and that process is still evolving.
One breakthrough came when I realized I was terrible with finances. I was so busy chasing clients and incurring expenses that I rarely made a real profit.
It was a vicious cycle.
No profits meant more hunger. More desperation. More acceptance of bad deals.
The less you need a client, the better your work becomes.
Hunger makes you ignore red flags.
It makes you less discerning.
You make bad choices.
Like accepting an hourly rate.
Now they own your schedule.
They nickel-and-dime you to death.
A flat fee is better, but even that has limitations.
Flat fees create hard deadlines on projects that might benefit from time and experimentation.
Because once your bills are paid, the clock resets.
You need another check.
Royalties are better because they pay you over months or years.
I’ve had projects continue paying me years after the work was done.
Now income isn’t directly tied to labor.
Congratulations. You’re no longer a beast of burden. You’re just a slave.
Royalties felt like freedom, but they’re just a tip.
I used to get paid 3% royalties by one client.
At the time, it felt like wealth.
But here’s the proof of my poor man’s mindset:
What about the other 97%?
If I could create the marketing for products that made millions, why was I celebrating the 3%?
And if I could create the marketing for products that made millions...
Why not build my own?
I had just spent the past fifteen years mastering my craft.
That’s long enough to drill your craft into your bones.
And now that I had mastered it, I see the big picture.
I had absorbed all the lessons needed to build my publishing empire.
It was drilled into my muscle memory.
My body knows exactly what to do.
When I wrote for Agora, they taught me how to write a high-end publication.
I didn’t know it at the time.
I was focused on headlines and conversion rates.
But having worked with hundreds of clients, I learned something from each of them.
At some point, I realized I had read all the books and logged more hours than anyone I knew.
I had the entire business model pressed into my body from years of repetition.
I had a business degree.
I had read the books.
And years of repetition had burned the business model into my nervous system.
I developed a model in my mind slowly over fifteen years.
I just needed to stop thinking like an employee long enough for the system to emerge.
Freelancing was futile. But it wasn’t a waste.
It was the journey I needed to take to understand how to build the machine myself.
I wanted to build something that worked without me.
No gatekeepers.
No surrendering control.
This is all of the thinking that has gone into the business I’m building.
So in one sense, I built a list of over 100,000 subscribers in less than a year.
But that would have been impossible without the fifteen years of freelancing that came before it.
After the ten-year mark, I went from a guy who was struggling and overwhelmed to a guy who understood exactly what was happening.
I became self-aware.
I understood that I was dangerous.
But now I see the bigger picture.
And I’m going to share it with you.
Tony V.
Editor-in-Chief
