There are some fundamental keys to wealth.
I remember when I used to think about a life where you wake up and there's more money in your bank account than there was the night before. You didn't really do anything, you just set up a system and now it's rocking and rolling.
You can do that anytime you want something in life.
Here's how:
Logic
I always use a principle of logic called inversion. Charlie Munger the self-made billionaire, and Warren Buffett made a 300 billion dollar company and they say it's because they understand inversion. To get what you want you have to think about what you don't want. What are the things that keep people from getting automated wealth?
The Idea Myth
There is a myth that it's all about the idea. I classify people that I meet by the myth that they bought into. I do this on myself too. I'm like “What myth have you bought into today?” I'd say about 90% of the world falls into the Idea Myth. I see it as an investor, people come to me and say “Tai I got the idea! I got the idea!” People wait forever for their magical idea, they think it's going to be something where they're going to wake up one morning and BOOM! They have the idea for the next Snapchat! It doesn't work like that.
If you buy into the idea myth, I can predict that 10 years from now, if I met you, you'll be like “I'm almost onto it Davis, I'm just waiting for something.” Don't be an idea myth person.
Structuring
Automation is about Structuring and Force of Will.
Structuring basically means having an organized system that can run on it’s own. It sounds complex, but once you get the hang of it, it’s actually a lot easier than it sounds.
You can structure almost any industry so it has some level of automated wealth. Instead of wasting all that brainpower on the magical idea, use it to think about structuring.
As the saying goes, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
Meaning, when the structure of all the parts is functioning well, it doesn’t matter if the idea is perfect. But, if you have an amazing idea and bad structure, it will never get off the ground.
Force of Will
Something that’s overlooked by most people is force of will. You give me one person with an amazing idea with no persistence/tenacity and they're never going to create automated wealth. You give me another person who has a so-so idea, but they're willing to push past obstacles, that’s the person I’d bet on everytime.
Like the old saying goes “to get what you want, you have to deserve what you want”
You have to grind at some level, even though you want automated income. There’s an inflection point. You have to put in some of the work on the front end before it becomes automated, but don't confuse that with unnecessarily working hard.
The Hard Worker Myth
Another myth that keeps people from getting automated income, is The Hard Worker Myth. People think that you need to just put your head down and work harder than everybody else, but that’s not true. Next time you go to a restaurant, look around at who works there. Who do you think is working the hardest? Is it the waitress, the chef, the busboys, or do you think it's the owner? I don't know who works harder between waitresses, busboys or kitchen staff, but they work a lot harder than the owner.
The owner makes more despite the fact that in terms of pure physical exertion, the owner does the least. That’s because the owner is using brain power instead of pure physical exertion.
Be very careful about grinding too hard, you’ll work yourself into the ground. Believe me, I’ve seen it. There’s definitely something to the thought of smart work though. You know that Pareto Principle the 80/20 rule, the Principle of Factor Sparsity. Well, without a doubt 20% of the work you put in in life gets you 80% of the money. It's been proven, Pareto was an Italian economist, and it's been proven over and over to be true. You can't just out hustle everyone, because if that were true, we'd live in a world where people doing physical labor would make 30 times more than people who are in glass offices. If you want to have automated wealth it’s important to exert energy purposefully and intelligently. Work smarter not harder.
The Wanter or Wisher Myth
You don’t want to be a Wanter or Wisher. You want to be a person of action. Don’t day dream of ideas without acting on them. Wanters and Wishers are the types of people that I never see achieve automated wealth. I've been able to automate wealth in different businesses and when you get it right it's insane.
There's some other things like The Front Loading Effect, Power Scaling and other things that I don’t have time to get into in this post.
If You Don’t Plan, You Won’t Eat.......simple
“The world doesn't respond to need, it responds to seed.” – Jim Rohn
I lived on the farm in my home village, and if you're a farmer in October and you're hungry, you can’t just yell at the Earth if there's no maize or tomatoes in the field. You can't just yell at the Earth and say “I'm hungry.” The Earth doesn't respond to that, the only thing the Earth does is respond to the seeds that you planted six months earlier in April. You can't be eating in October if you didn't plan. No matter how much you cry, no matter how much you want, no matter how much you wish, if you don’t plan, you won’t eat.
We live in a world where there's lots of different theories on what it takes to build wealth. There’s The Secret, and I believe in some of that, there's Positive Thinking and tons of others, but the important thing is to plant seeds. Without a doubt, the people who create automated wealth are people who are masters at planting seeds ahead of time.
Lao Tzu the philosopher said, “do what is difficult when it is easy.” Be the farmer who plants when he's not hungry, it's easy to plan then. Most people wish, and I hope this isn't you, because this was me, at one point my plan to make more money was to wish. I literally would sit there and go what if I won the lottery and it quickly becomes a negative spiral. It starts leading you into anger. You start getting mad about things you can't control. You start blaming things on the government, your parents, school, but the point is that's all in the past. It's important to focus on what you can control and not dwell on things that are out of our hands.
Stephen Hawking, one of the leading physicists of all time, said he used to think that time would reverse at some point. That the universe would contract and time would go back. You could go back in time. Then Stephen Hawking said he made a mistake, he said the arrow of time always moves forward thermodynamically, psychologically and cosmologically. That means for you and I, in practical terms, when you want and wish, you're focusing on things, that according to the laws of physics, cannot be altered. So Wanders and Wishers are always misplacing their energy.
Greatness is cool under pressure. If you're completely broke now, or you've made some money but you're plateaued, you're not going to want and wish your way out of this. It's good to be optimistic at some level, enough to give you hope, but that has nothing to do with people who make big money. Mark my words. I've been broke and I've made money. I will tell you right now, it wasn't because I started going hey I deserve more so this is going to happen. There's nothing wrong with doing that in minor amounts, but what's better is planting seeds.
The Momentum Creator
I just read an interview of the guy who wrote the book Catching Twitter, which is the first real story of the founding of Twitter. People don't realize Twitter was started in two weeks. Two weeks it went from idea to a beta version. That beta version wasn't that good, it didn't have hashtags or user names, but you know what they have?
Momentum.
If you're a Wandering Wisher, you must become a Momentum Creator. You know what the end result was of the momentum the Twitter guys created? They're worth over ten billion dollars. They weren't wanting and wishing. You must create momentum where you are. You have to transpose all that mental energy.
My favorite Thoreau quote sums up the vast majority of the masses of humans, “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, what is called resignation is just confirmed desperation.”