Why chasing money is the fastest way to repel it

Picture a stray cat loose in a neighborhood. One group of people spends their evenings chasing it, cornering it behind bushes, lunging for it between parked cars, and never quite catching it. Another group ignores the chase entirely, sets down an open can of tuna, and waits. MJ DeMarco uses this image to describe what he calls the money scam: the belief that money is something to be hunted down directly, cajoled or pried away from someone else, rather than something that shows up in response to an offer.

People caught in this scam, which DeMarco calls money-chasers, tend to ask the same kind of question over and over on entrepreneurship forums: what's a good business to start with fifteen dollars, or how do I make a million dollars in six months. The question itself gives away the problem. It treats money as prey, something tangible you stalk, rather than what DeMarco argues it actually is: a mutually agreed store of perceived value, moved from one party to another once both sides agree a fair trade has happened.

That distinction matters because perceived value and actual value don't always match. If you sell someone something and later they discover it wasn't what you claimed, the perceived value that got the money moving has collapsed, and so has the trust that makes future trades possible. Scam artists throughout history, DeMarco points out, have understood this better than most honest entrepreneurs: they get rich because they're skilled at generating perceived value that never has to be backed up by anything real, at least not until they're caught.

His fix is to erase the word money from how you think about your goals and replace it with what he calls value-vouchers: a way of forcing yourself to ask, before anything else, what problem you are actually solving for another person, and whether you can deliver the real thing you're promising, not just the appearance of it. Four things have to happen in order, he argues: you create real value, you communicate that value honestly, you reach an actual agreement with someone else about it, and then you deliver on what you promised. Skip the first or the last step and you haven't found a shortcut to money, you've just become a more polished version of the cat-chaser, wondering why the thing you're hunting keeps disappearing every time you get close.

For the next week, try removing the word money from how you talk to yourself about your goals, and replace it every time with the specific problem you're trying to solve for someone else. Before you get excited about any new idea, write down honestly what actual value it delivers, separate from how good it might sound in a pitch. Test your own offers the way a skeptical stranger would, asking whether this would still hold up if there were no logo, no clever headline, nothing but the bare product or service itself. Then build the exchange deliberately in order, creating something real, describing it honestly, reaching a genuine agreement, and delivering exactly what you promised, because skipping any one of those steps is where perceived value quietly turns into a scam, even an accidental one.