27 Tiny Financial Lessons That Will Make You More Money Than 4 Years of Business School
You don’t need an MBA to be wealthy.
Photo by Alexander Mils on Unsplash
Money is not about planning and spreadsheets it’s about dopamine and serotonin. Your level of wealth is determined by your psychology, not a formula on a spreadsheet.
Poor people ask themselves $5 questions. Wealthy people ask themselves $50,000 questions. Poor people ask: how can I cut back on my $5 coffee? Rich people ask: how can I start a business to make an extra $50,000? Get wealthy by asking yourself better questions.
Your level of wealth is a reflection of your choices. Behind every wealthy person is a collective of small decisions that enabled them to build assets and reduce their liabilities.
Starting your own business will rewire your brain. Making six figures through a business is not hard. Find 2–3 clients who will pay you $5,000 per month and you’ve got a six-figure business. Congrats.
A broad skill stack is better than a deep skillset. Providing value that someone will pay for comes from the intersection of different skills. Pick five disparate skills. Become proficient to be in the top 25%. Sell the combination of skills, not any one particular skill. Breadth > depth.
You don’t get paid for your effort. You get paid for your value. No one gives a sh*t how much effort you put in or how long it took you to learn a skill. They ONLY care if you solve their problems. Marry your customer’s problems, not your solution.
Wealth is built on solving problems at scale. Solve a problem for 1000 people, and get paid thousands of dollars. Solve a problem for a million people, and get paid millions of dollars.
Building wealth is a process, not an event. If you think one event will make or break your wealth, you’re playing the lottery. Focus on the process of building wealth to make being rich a certainty, not a lottery.
Learn the skills to make WIFI money. The internet gives you more leverage than any entrepreneur, president, or celebrity prior to the 1990s. It’s free and permissionless, with few gatekeepers.
Only take financial advice from people who are actually wealthy. This is basic. ONLY listen to those who have achieved what you want to achieve. Ignore your poor uncle Bob who provides unsolicited financial advice at each family BBQ.
Build your financial system and then your financial system builds you. Your financial system makes building wealth a default. Remember, you don’t rise to the level of your financial goals, you fall to the level of your financial systems.
Being wealthy has nothing to do with qualifications. Look at the richest people in the world. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey. They are neither degreed nor decreed.
The best skills to learn to be wealthy have nothing to do with finances. If you can learn psychology, copywriting and content creation, you have all the tools to create wealth online. Anytime, from anywhere in the world.
An unlimited budget for learning will create an unlimited potential for wealth. Consume books, blogs, podcasts, and magazines. Gather all the information you can to improve your life and then implement the lessons you learn.
You will not be wealthy as an employee. The tax structure favors money earned through equity or business rather than salary. As a business owner, I decide how much tax I want to pay. As an employee, the government decides how much tax you pay.
Starting a side hustle or a business has never been easier than before. You don’t need any expertise, the approval of gatekeepers, or permission from your friends and family to start creating. The internet creates 8 billion monopolies.
Just make sure you align your side hustle with scale. Starting a cupcake-making business will not make you rich. There is no scale built into the business model. Anything you decide needs to leverage the internet in some form.
Treat some of your money like a venture capitalist. Take financial risks with limited downside and unlimited upside. It’s okay to speculate with a little bit of your money. Place a lot of small bets and see which ones pay off. Just make sure no one bet can bankrupt you.
Surround yourself with wealthy mentors. You’ll be exposed to better thinking and opportunities. Proximity to success makes success a default.
Don’t do what everyone else is doing. Working 50+ hours per week building someone else’s dream and then retiring at 65 and enjoying your final 20 years with arthritis is hustling in reverse.
People buy from people. Productize yourself through your specific knowledge, unique experiences and reputation. You can escape competition through your authenticity. As Peter Thiel said, ‘competition is for losers.’
If you’re high-value, forget working for others. Start a one-person business instead. When you create value, you need to learn to capture it, not sell it to someone else for an hourly wage. Create a course, blogs or media around your experiences.
Don’t be afraid to outgrow mentors and coaches. Most mentors are for a particular reason or a season of your life. Once you’ve passed that level, find new mentors. It’s nothing personal. Most of my ‘old’ mentors have actually become friends after our mentor relationship was over.
The best personal finance strategy is the way that allows you to sleep at night. Optimize your personal finances to make your life better, not worse. Any investment or personal finance strategy that keeps you up at night is a terrible strategy. Aim for reasonable, not perfection.
Building early financial momentum will pay the best financial dividends. The start-up cost of overcoming ignorance is high so start early. You can make more money while spending less time and effort. Automate and liberate.
Earn with your mind, not your time. You can scale your thoughts. You can’t scale your time beyond 24 hours.
You want to win the money game so you can be free from it. Having money won’t make you happy. But not having to worry about money will provide a level of freedom and autonomy you can’t buy.
In short, there is no one thing that will make you wealthy.
Being wealthy is an aggregation of many LITTLE things done together over a long period of time.
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