Inside Week 3 of the Alchemist Nation Mentorship

Every week in the Alchemist Nation mentorship, the whole group reads the same book. Before I teach anything, every single person shares a takeaway. Then I layer that week's principle on top of what the room already found.

This was week 3. The book was The Richest Man in Babylon, published in 1926.

Here is what that hour actually looked like. The book is not the subject. The book is the lens. The mentorship is the subject.

One principle a week, fifty two weeks

If you have been around this community long enough, you know there are 52 principles we attack, one per week. Most of them were derived from a small set of foundational books. Five of them do most of the work.

That matters for how a session runs. We are not doing a book report. We are pulling a principle out of a book that has been in print for a hundred years, checking it against the other books, then checking it against what people are actually living through that week.

One person in the group put it plainly: financial success is built on simple and timeless principles. That is the whole reason the assignment exists.

How to tell a principle from an opinion

Here is the test I gave the room, and it is the most useful thing in this post.

If you hear the same idea in three or four unrelated places, from three or four unrelated people, in three or four different ways, it is not a coincidence. It is a principle. Go implement it today.

Principles have a frustrating quality. Once you can see them, you look back and find you could have done almost anything a little better. Aimed better. Judged better. Asked for more. Taken on less. The principles run all the way through, and they were running whether you saw them or not.

That is also why the same ideas keep reappearing across the reading list. Seventeen principles in one book, seven laws of gold in another. The overlap is the signal.

What the 1926 book actually says

The group surfaced most of it without my help.

Pay yourself first. Hold on to one tenth of everything you earn. Live upon less than you earn. Live on 70 percent, which several people noted is a gentler line than some of the other books draw.

Then the one that stuck to the room hardest. Do not eat the children of your savings. Meaning, do not go back into the account and spend what your savings produced. Saving is one thing. Not taking it back out when you think you need it is a completely separate skill.

And this one, which is underrated: seek advice from the competent. The book is blunt about it. Do not take direction on jewels from someone who sells glass and calls it jewels. Do not ask a shield maker about investing.

Here is what the book does not do, and it is worth knowing before you read it. It does not go deep on how to make more. It goes deep on how to work with what you already have. That is the gap the mentorship fills in the weeks after.

The debt reframe

Somebody raised the part of the book where the debtor goes to his creditors and names the fixed share he can put toward what he owes, while refusing to stop paying himself or to stop living his life. Ten percent to himself. Seventy percent to live on. Twenty percent to the people he owes.

Here is why that structure is interesting. It moves debt from an emotional daily weight to a fixed line item. Somebody in the room described debt as all consuming, where the thought is my debt, my debt, my debt, every day. That state does not help anybody pay anything down.

The reframe is old and it is not mine. Set the percentage aside, stop thinking about it, put your attention on earning instead, and let the plan do the paying. Focus on the next customer, the next service, the next person you can help.

The trap the room named is worth naming here too. When the fixed percentage does not cover the minimum, the reflex is to raid the other accounts to hit the number. That is how people end up back at square one, having technically hit the debt target and emptied everything else to do it. The alternative discussed was to talk to creditors about what is actually going out, and to go earn the difference rather than harvest it from a bucket that was never meant to be touched.

Environment beats willpower

This is the piece I want operators to take seriously.

Willpower is not a strategy. Moments of weakness erode quietly, and there is no alarm that goes off. Nothing flags it. Your environment is the only thing that reliably forces you to look.

So one idea that came out of the discussion, and I thought it was excellent: put the accounts you are not supposed to touch on a whiteboard. Write the threshold you are building toward. Keep moving the line up. Now, if you want to break your own rule, you have to physically walk over and erase something you wrote.

That is not silly. That is design. You have made the rule expensive to break, and you did it with a marker.

That conversation also surfaced that our net worth tracker shows where you are and not where you said you wanted to be, so a goal view went on the build list, live, on the call. That is what a small group gets you.

A is for abundance

Then we get to the week's principle, which is where I take over.

Abundance is more than money moving. Abundance is a feeling, and it has a physical component. I first noticed this in a yoga class years ago when the instructor described the pose we were in as an opener, and I started asking which positions do that.

I will not make any claims about your body here. What I will say is that posture, breath and movement change how you feel, and you already know that from experience.

So we did it on the call. Hands out like you are giving the universe a large hug. Look up. Smile. Imagine everything you are working toward flowing toward you. Hold it for a second.

Everyone felt better. And we agreed that we had done nothing. It cost nothing. It took seconds. It is completely repeatable.

That last part is the whole point. The most valuable state changes available to you are free, and you can run them as often as you want.

Anchor the trigger to something that already happens

A state you can produce but never remember to produce is worthless. So attach it to things that are going to happen tomorrow whether you plan them or not.

Your feet hitting the floor when you get out of bed. You are already stretching. Add one more stretch, look up, and go into gratitude right there.

The bedroom doorframe. Write the word smile up there. You are leaving that room at some point today.

The front door. That moment is usually a rush of keys and wallet and shoes. Use it. You are about to walk into the world. Decide what you are walking in there to attract.

The car door. The fridge. You open the fridge because you are hungry, not because you scheduled a mindset exercise, and that is exactly why it works.

Pick five or six. Add more as you find them. The human mind throws a new thought at you every few seconds, so the trigger has to be attached to the physical world, not to your intentions.

Why the group stays small

The mastermind gets big. The mentorship does not, on purpose. It has to be small enough that every person gets time and gets seen, and large enough that the room pulls you forward.

That is the format. A book, a takeaway from every person, then the principle. Fifty two weeks of it. Next week is a different book and a different principle, and the week after that is another one.

Key Takeaways

• The mentorship runs on 52 principles, one per week, most of them derived from a small set of foundational books. Week 3 used a 1926 text as the lens.
• If you hear the same idea in three or four unrelated places, treat it as a principle rather than a coincidence, and go implement it.
• The book's structure separates saving from spending what your savings produced, which the room found to be two very different skills.
• Setting a fixed paydown percentage and then moving your attention to earning is an older idea than most people realize, and raiding other accounts to hit the target is the failure mode.
• Environment beats willpower. A number on a whiteboard that you have to physically erase is a stronger rule than a decision you make in your head.

If you want to see how a week actually runs, the format and the current schedule are laid out at https://alchemistnation.com/mentorship, and the program resets and runs again several times a year, so the timing is not one shot.

*Educational purposes only. Not an offer or solicitation.*