This is what I want. This is why I want it. I am willing to commit to it and take aligned action toward it. And I am willing to be surprised and delighted by possibilities I cannot see from where I am standing. This is “Or Better”
In February 2024, two days before we were supposed to close on our dream home and three days before the movers were scheduled to load everything we owned onto a truck headed across the country, the amount of cash we needed to close changed.
The banker told us we needed to create another $56,000. My intuition said $80,000.
I couldn’t explain the extra $24,000 yet. I simply knew that $56,000 wasn’t the number I was working toward.
I wanted that house. Very specifically, unapologetically, absolutely wanted that house. We had fallen in love with it and with the life we could see ourselves living there. I could picture mornings in that house, the view from my office, quiet mornings sipping tea on the deck, family and friends gathered around the table.
I’m good, but I’m not 56K in 48 hours good. I knew I needed at least a couple of weeks to create the additional cash being demanded. And with the movers coming in three days but a month left on our lease, we had to decide whether we were still going.
Our life in Florida was already dismantled, most of our furniture sold and belongings in boxes. We could postpone the move until the house was certain, or we could keep moving toward an island in the Pacific Northwest without knowing whether we would actually have a home waiting for us when we arrived.
Throughout the process, I had been saying the same two words:
“Or Better.”
This house, “Or Better.”
Saying it was easy when the house still seemed inevitable. Now I had to mean it.
There is a version of “Or Better” that sounds wonderfully surrendered while secretly containing a very specific request to the Universe: Please surprise and delight me by giving me exactly what I already decided I want.
I had done some of that. I could say the words while still clutching the outcome, leaving the Universe plenty of creative freedom as long as all roads eventually led to the same front door.
Then we decided to go.
I was going to do everything I could to create the money. I would ask, make offers, follow leads, move money, and take every aligned action I could see. And if we arrived in Washington without a home to move into, we would figure out what “Or Better” meant when we got there.
That was utterly terrifying.
“Or Better” had been a guiding principle in my business and teachings for more than a decade, but I think this was the first time I believed it with every fiber of my being.
I started asking everywhere. I made offers. I asked for referrals. I generated a list of thirty-one ideas for making cash, from selling my art to OnlyFans and everything in between. Then I took action on the one I thought was my best shot. I followed conversations and opportunities as they appeared. People came back to me asking for things I hadn’t originally planned to sell, and those conversations created possibilities I couldn’t have anticipated when I first sat down to make my list.
Somewhere in the middle of all that activity, another business owner dropped into my DMs to tell me, “Desperation isn’t a good look on you.”
I laughed because desperation wasn’t what I was experiencing. I wanted the house fiercely, and I was willing to participate fully in creating the possibility of having it. I had also released the belief that I needed this particular outcome in order to be okay. I could make another ask without needing the person on the other side of it to say yes. I could hear no and keep moving. I could follow an unexpected opportunity without demanding that it look like one of my thirty-one ideas.
Desperation grasps. Determination grounds.
Money is repelled by the first and seduced by the second.
If there’s something you want fiercely and you’re ready to stop grasping at the outcome without giving up on the desire, let’s talk. Book a complimentary Prosperity Breakthrough Call. We’ll get clear on what you want, what you know from where you’re standing now, and the next aligned action that puts you back in motion.
I can’t prove that surrender caused the money to flow. I can tell you what changed in me when I stopped grasping at the house as the only acceptable outcome. I became extraordinarily available to ideas, conversations, asks, and possibilities.
Within 23 days, we created the $80,000.
My intuition had been right about the number. By the time the banker was satisfied, the move was paid for, the delays were absorbed, and we bought the necessities we needed after closing, that $80,000 was exactly what the whole experience required.
We got the house.
And I still believe that if the house hadn’t been ours, whatever came next could have been “Or Better.”
You don’t need thirty-one ideas before you begin. You need the next aligned one. If there’s a financial goal you’re ready to move toward, book a complimentary Prosperity Breakthrough Call. Bring the number. Bring the desire underneath it. We’ll figure out what movement looks like from here.
I’ve written about the entire wild journey of buying this house in a five-part series. If you want the receipts, the numbers, the asks, and all the plot twists, you can start there.
Long after closing, I kept thinking about what it means to leave room around a desire.
I believe in being wildly specific about what you want. Name the number. Name the house. Name the amount of debt you want gone, the balance you want sitting in your retirement account, the revenue you want your business to generate, the scholarship fund you want to create, the number of people you want to serve. Give your desire edges. You’ll never reach a destination you haven’t defined.
Specificity gives you somewhere to move. Once you choose a destination, you can make decisions in relationship to it. You can commit resources, recognize opportunities, measure progress, and choose aligned actions that move you towards the reality you have consciously chosen while allowing you to remain in right relationship with yourself, your values, your money, and the life your business exists to support.
Underneath that specificity lives a feeling, and it’s that feeling “Or Better” serves.
You want to pay off the debt because you are craving freedom. You want to build a retirement account because imagining a fully funded future creates warmth and safety in your body. You want to create a scholarship fund that helps Black and Brown children attend the school of their choice because you want your prosperity to participate in healing generational wounds.
“Or Better” leaves room for the Universe to deliver the experience underneath the desire in ways you may not yet know to ask for.
This is what I want. This is why I want it. I am willing to commit to it and take aligned action toward it. And I am willing to be surprised and delighted by possibilities I cannot see from where I am standing.
“Better” doesn’t always mean more. More money may be better. So might the same money with half the hours. A bigger business may be better, and a smaller business with extraordinary margins, work you love, and enough spaciousness to enjoy the life your business is funding may hold something you were actually asking for. The largest contract may satisfy the number, while another opportunity brings relationships, visibility, freedom, or a completely different future you couldn’t have included in the original request because you didn’t know it existed.
If prosperity can only arrive wearing the costume you’ve already chosen for it, you’ve given the Universe a very narrow doorway.
I want you to fling the doors open.
I want you to ask specifically and move decisively, without assuming that the version you can imagine from here represents the outer boundary of what is available to you. I want you to choose a destination knowing that every step toward it gives you information you didn’t have when you chose it.
You make the offer and learn something about what people want. You ask for the introduction and meet someone you didn’t know existed. You spend the money and discover what the investment can actually produce. You hear no and learn what you want to ask next. Someone hears what you’re creating and says, Have you ever considered...? A possibility unavailable from the starting line becomes visible ten steps farther down the road.
Each aligned action changes the landscape from which the next action will be chosen.
That mechanism doesn’t require a metaphysical explanation. Movement creates encounters. Encounters create information. Information expands the possibilities we can perceive and act upon.
And yet sometimes what arrives through those possibilities feels so exquisitely timed, so far beyond anything you could have engineered, and so delightfully outside the limits of what you knew to request that you’re perfectly happy to see the Divine’s hand in its creation. And sometimes you get to be the hand. Your introduction, your money, your yes, your invitation, your generosity may become the possibility someone else never knew to ask for. “Or Better” can move through us as easily as it moves toward us.
We don’t need to know exactly where the line between causality and synchronicity lives. Both are woven through our lives. Sitting still waiting for the Universe to deliver something we have refused to choose gives it very little to work with, while grasping an outcome so tightly that we can’t recognize anything outside it makes our world smaller.
So choose.
Move.
And leave room.
The house taught me that I can want something enough to cross a country for it while leaving enough space around the desire for life to surprise me. I can name what I want without making my safety dependent on receiving it exactly as imagined. I can listen to the banker and listen to the knowing in my own body. I can imagine thirty-one actions toward one destination and allow the thirty-second possibility to come from somewhere I never thought to look.
That’s the relationship I want you to experience with “Or Better.” Bring your desires, commitment, discernment, money, a willingness to ask, and the next aligned action you can see. Trust yourself to respond to what happens after you take it. Let the destination become clearer as you approach it, and remain willing to discover that the life you are trying to create may be available through a door you didn’t know existed when you began.
Maybe you’ll get exactly what you asked for. The number. The contract. The house. The life you can already see so clearly that you could walk through it in the dark.
I hope you do.
And I hope you leave enough room around what you want for something you couldn’t have imagined to find you, too.
There are dreams you can name from where you are standing today, and there are possibilities you will only become capable of seeing because you began moving toward them. Your job is to choose, to participate, to trust yourself with what you learn along the way, and to keep the door wide enough for surprise.
Want what you want.
Go toward it with your whole heart.
And when the Universe asks for a little creative freedom, give it some.
“Or Better.”
What do you want? Really want. Name it. And if you’re ready to stop circling it and start moving toward it, book a complimentary Prosperity Breakthrough Call. We’ll get specific about the destination, look at what’s between you and it, and find the next aligned action you can take now. You bring the desire. I’ll bring thirty years of financial strategy and a very healthy respect for “Or Better.”
P.S. Profit is Protest, and so is creating enough prosperity that your wildest dreams become someone else’s unexpected blessing.
Desperation grasps. Determination grounds. Ooooofff dayumn Shaneh! It's definitely going in my quotes book. And for that thank you.
You're absolutely right. As the fog has cleared the soul's become immensely specific for me. And delusional too, as some people might say. The weird thing though? That determination only come from the soul desires, not from the mind ones. There's always a time and place to everything. Isn't it?
Like today, even if I "think" I wanna clear out my debt, it doesn't feel right. At all. In my body.
But moving into a place within a month, completely within our budget without any compromise?? That feels absolutely right!
Well, at least I now know being desperate is the reason I'm still unemployed and dealing with debt collectors. But no matter how much shadow work, actual work, I still have to deal with barely surviving and the Universe essentially laughing in my face.