I Spent 12 Years Asking the Wrong Question
The question was “why is this happening to me?”
I asked it as a shy kid. I asked it with $38,000 of courses on my laptop. I asked it at two funerals.
It took me a long time to figure out it was the wrong question. This page is the story of how I found a better one.
I’m Riley Younger. A blue-collar, sixth-generation rancher and jack of all trades who set out to become a millionaire. Here’s what happened instead.
The kid who kept to himself
I was shy. Borderline mute, honestly. I wet the bed for close to 12 years as a little guy, and it beat my self-esteem down a little more every single day. You can’t carry that much shame as a tiny human and come out thinking you’re “normal.”
So I kept to myself. And by 16 I’d turned that into something louder. I became a rebel and ran with the misfits.
(I like to think it’s in my blood. There’s a chance I’m related to the Younger Brothers, the outlaws who rode with Jesse James. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.)
A book on a shelf
Senior year, I wanted to drop out. Stay in school, get a safe job, work 40 years and hope retirement is great? That never made sense to me. I wanted to live now.
Then I found Rich Dad, Poor Dad sitting on my parents’ bookshelf. I couldn’t put it down. Somewhere in those pages I realized I was an entrepreneur. I just didn’t have a business yet.
My parents said no to dropping out. We compromised on online school, and that changed everything. Suddenly I had a laptop, an internet connection and all the time in the world.
$13.46 and a slot machine
I built a little website, slapped some Google ads on it and bought some Bing traffic. I spent about $50 on ads.
I made $13.46.
I was in the red. It didn’t matter. Money had shown up online, while I wasn’t even working, and it lit me up on a cellular level.
That $13.46 was the most expensive money I ever made. Because from that day on, my laptop was a slot machine and I couldn’t stop pulling the lever.
Since about 2012 I’ve spent roughly $38,000 on books, courses, workshops, webinars and coaches. I filled notebook after notebook. Hours a day, for years and years.
And I never really got anywhere. No real momentum. Smarter on paper, same life.
The wake-up call you never want. Twice.
Two of my best friends took their own lives, a couple of years apart.
It crushed me. It sent me deeper into addiction, anxiety and depression. There were nights I wondered if I was next.
I’m still here. And I want to be honest about what got me through, because it wasn’t a course.
It was a slow rebuild. I stopped chasing the high of “someday I’ll be rich” and started working on my health: body, mind and spirit. I rebuilt my self-esteem from the ground up. I tried to understand pain, trauma and addiction instead of running from them. I let myself look for real answers, even if all I found at first was a little bit of truth.
The question that changed everything
Somewhere in that rebuild, the old question started to crack.
“Why is this happening to me?” turned into “What if this is happening for me?”
That’s not pretending the pain didn’t hurt. It did. It means I get to decide what it means. The worst years of my life could be the end of my story, or they could be the reason I finally started looking for what actually matters.
That’s alchemy. Lead into gold. And it’s the easiest, hardest thing I’ve ever learned to do.
A handful of teachers helped me see it. Alan Watts, who taught me there’s nothing to “get.” Bob Proctor, who said to remember who you are. Eckhart Tolle, who showed me how to quiet the overthinking. Earl Nightingale, who said the mind grows whatever you plant in it. And Dean Jackson, who convinced me that how you think is the highest-leverage skill there is.
Those 12 years didn’t fail. They were tuition. I just didn’t know what class I was taking.
Becoming a philosopher
These days I call myself a philosopher. Not the stuffy kind. The original kind: a lover of wisdom.
Here’s what I believe. Life happens for you, not to you. Your inner world creates your outer world. Change how you think about what happens, and what happens starts to change.
I’m not writing this from a finish line. Who ever finishes? I’m not a guru. I have 12 years of notes. I’m just a student, sharing what I find.
What I teach
Everything I share comes back to one idea: inner change leads to outer results.
- The Top 7 Mentors (free). Out of the 47 teachers I learned the most from, these 7 changed the most for me, with the one idea from each worth keeping.
- The Genius Mentor Master List ($27). All 47 mentors, one insight each, and the thread that ties them together.
- The Inner Game To Outer Results ($97). My course. The whole thing I wish I’d had 12 years ago, in order, with workbooks.
Start here
If you’ve bought the books and the courses and still feel like you’re circling something, start with the free list. Read it in one sitting and skip the parts that took me a decade.
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Keep smilin’,
Riley
I’m really glad you’re here.
