Change Is Coming

Saying "No" to a new income stream.

I see so many ways of making money that I have to keep reminding myself that I'm only here for a short time and I can't do everything.

Do you know how hard it is turning your back on money?

I used to try to give them away to other people just to get them out of my head.

I say "try" because I'd have conversations like this:

Them: "Oh I'm so broke, what can I do to make money?"

Me: "Try this, it's a really great opportunity"

Them: "Are you doing it?"

Me: "I'd love to but I'm already too busy"

Them: "Well, what's wrong with it?"

Me: "Nothing's wrong with it, it's a great opportunity?"

Them: "Well, why aren't you doing it?"

Me: " I'd love to but I'm already too busy doing something else"

Them: "There must be a catch if you're not doing it"

Me: "Fine. Stay broke"

Them: "Oh I'm so broke, what can I do to make money?"

I've resorted to giving them away on sites like this. I get the same response. But at least I manage to get it out of my head so they stop distracting me.

Just three things:

1. Develop the worst case scenario. How could it go wrong in the absolutely worst possible way? Most people reply to this by saying "That's easy, I don't sell anything". And I point out that that isn't the worst thing. Worse by far is being sued by a customer because the thing you sold caused an injury or death. Worse still is if the manufacturing process injures you? Is loss of your health possible? Whatever the worst case scenario is, find out and then ask yourself "Could I survive that?" If the answer is yes then go ahead. If the answer is no then walk away and find a less dangerous business idea. Ideas are cheap so you can always find a better one.

2 A great piece of advice from James Alltucher: always produce a product even when you offer a service. That way, if it all goes belly-up, at least you still have something to show for your time. And if it doesn't go belly-up, a product is a great way to scale up the business without working yourself into the ground. Boy, I wish someone had told me that 30 years ago.

3 Develop an exit strategy. This is not planning to fail. It's a way of recognising that the project is failing so you can get out before it ruins you. Set an absolute limit on one thing. It can be the amount of money you will borrow or the amount of time you will give. It doesn't matter what it is, it only matters that it exists. If you ever hit that limit, you know things are failing and, at that point, you can then decide to press on or walk away. If you press on, at least you now know that there's a problem. Boy, I wish someone had told me that 30 years ago as well.

The difference between an entrepreneur and everybody else is that everybody else sees failure as the opposite of success whilst the entrepreneur sees failure as the price of success. In other words, the entrepreneur understands that the only way to succeed at anything is to do it badly at first by failing. Dennis Waitley put it brilliantly:

Trial, error. Trial, error. Trial, success. Trial, error. Trial, success. Trial, error. Trial, success. Success. Success. Success.

Isn't that how we ever achieved anything in our lives? Isn't this how we learned to walk? Isn't this how we learned to talk? Isn't this how we learned to ride a bike? Then somewhere along the line, it became "normal" to expect success immediately and, if we don't, we give up at the first obstacle and become a failure. To the entrepreneur, this is just plain lunacy.

Now, can people become their own bosses without being entrepreneurs? Yes, if they become their own boss by accident. For example, a company might make someone redundant but keep them on as a consultant. I meet plenty of people in this situation and I always suggest that they build their business so they're not dependant on single source of income. Some listen to me because they're entrepreneurs but most don't because they're anything but entrepreneurs. The sad thing is that they're not going to survive. At some point in the future, they're going to be dropped. Why? Because they're not seen as employees but as independent business people and some entrepreneur will come along and offer a better service.

That wealth isn't money

Economists will tell you that money has exchange value whilst wealth has use value.

So money is whatever token is accepted for the purposes of trading things whether it be electronic ones and zeroes, paper notes, metal coins or even cigarettes or salt.

However, wealth is defined whenever you can actually use it. For example, a loaf of bread is wealth because you can eat it.

Furthermore, if you have wealth, you can get money but if you only have money, you can't necessarily buy wealth because the money only has value if someone else is prepared to accept it. As someone recently said to me, "Money is a giant confidence trick"

Wealth Has Use Value

If you understand what that means, you have discovered the Philosopher's Stone that Alchemists have searched for centuries to find. Forget lead. You can transform anything, absolutely anything, into gold. It is the Midas Touch. It is literally King Solomon's Mine.

Wealth Has Use Value - so if you find a way of increasing that use value, you increase wealth. A gold nugget has a value - current £852 per ounce. I shape it and declare it to be art. Now it's worth £100,000, £1 million, £10 million, who knows? Where has that extra money come from? I created it by increasing the use value of the gold. I could've done that with anything. Potatoes have a certain use value but if I make vodka, evidently that has a greater use value if you look at the increase in price. Stop and think about that. No matter how little money you have, you always have the capacity to create wealth. How much wealth? Well, if you came up with a cure for cancer, you could write your own cheque. The poorest person in the world can have an idea that increases wealth. That also means wealth is unlimited.

Why Is This So Profound?

Surely, this is trivial because it's all about money? No, it's about the opposite of money. It's about wealth. Money is trivial but wealth is anything but.

Let's look at a common lie:

Richest 62 people as wealthy as half of world's population, says Oxfam  

This is just not true. These people don't own 50% of the wealth. They only own 50% of the money. Well that's fine, they can own all the money they want because it has no intrinsic value. But they don't even own 50% of the existing wealth. Sure, they own some of it. And they certainly don't own 50% of all the possible wealth because wealth can increase.

The trouble with this lie is that if you think wealth is money, then you try to solve money problems by using money. But as money is the problem, you're just adding to the problem. That's like trying to bale out water in your lifeboat by pissing in it.

These "rich people" need you to believe this lie so that their worthless money can buy things (remember the confidence trick). As soon as you realise that you have the wealth and they don't, they become powerless.

Money brings slavery but wealth brings freedom. Real freedom. The freedom to choose about things that matter. Things that have real value. You realise that exchanging something of real value like your time for something that has far less value like money is not a good exchange. Then you can see jobs for what they are: intellectual and economic slavery. Wealth means people doing work they enjoy because that is where they produce the greatest value.

Wealth will end world poverty. As more people generate wealth, not only do they increase wealth, but they also show others how to do the same.

Wealth will end wars. Is that possible? If we understand that wealth comes from people (and can only come from people), then where's the sense in killing people to get their wealth? That's as stupid as killing the golden goose to get all of the golden eggs inside it.

Wealth Has Use Value - so the greater the usefulness, the greater the value. That can be greater in number of people who want it or greater in desire of a small group of people who desperately want it. This is the Wealth Exchange Gradient. The worst exchange is your valuable, irreplaceable time for money in a job. An average life is about 30,000 days, so do you really want to swap any of them for the average wage? Is that really the best swap you can manage?

Wealth Has Use Value - so different wealth have different values to different people at different times. A loaf of bread isn't worth much in our modern societies. But if the economy collapsed tomorrow and it suddenly became hard to get food of any type, your bread suddenly increases in value.

Wealth Has Use Value - so the best exchange you can get is to "sell" something you have that has a low use value to you but has a high use value to other people. Crude oil is a classic example. To the Arabs, it was useless but to Western society, it was necessary to drive the economy.

It doesn't matter what "scarce" resource you mention, the story is the same: the Earth's population has more than doubled in the last 50 years and those "scarce" resources haven't become scarcer.

And that even though we tried to make arable land scarcer by building our cities on it which always bemused me - "oh look, only 1% of the Earth's surface can grow crops so let's cover it all with concrete and tarmac". In spite of that, we still produce a glut of food. America has pulled a wad of land out of food production and into bio-fuel production. In spite of that, we still produce a glut of food.

Just look at how much we waste

I disagree with you that it will take a "drastic drain on resources" to elevate the poor to a decent lifestyle. But let's say you're right. As a world, we spend about £1.7 trillion a year on arms and war. Are you really saying that if we stopped killing each other, we wouldn't have the resources to deal with poverty?

 World Military Spending

Military spending: how much does the military cost each country, listed

Personally, I don't believe that we need to wait for that to happen. We can turn the lives of the poor around by making the rich happier. There's a claim that if all of the world lived like Europe does, it would require two Earths and if all of the world lived like America does, it would require three Earths. I've not seen the calculation so I don't know if it's right. But let's say that it is. Here's the problem: all that conspicuous consumption of resources isn't making the vast majority of Europeans and Americans happy. In fact, they're miserable. But technology is helping. I used to be aghast at the walls of CDs, videos and DVDs people used to own in their personal collections. It seemed such a waste of resources. That's all disappeared now to be replaced by the cloud and MP3 players. Now people don't print out the majority of the photos. They keep them on disk and have displays that rotate them. That's more resources saved that can be diverted to other means. Newspapers are dying thanks to online news providers. That's even more resources saved that can be diverted to other means. Each innovation in wealth has led to the use of less resources which means that they can be placed elsewhere into creating further useful things.

Are these things making us happier? Well, even if they're not, we're being miserable at a much lower rate of consumption.

Ooh look, it doesn't need a drastic drain on resources, it just needs us to use those resources better - which is what wealth is all about.

That notwithstanding, I'm a great believer in greed, selfishness and self-interest. I describe myself as the greediest and most selfish person I know because I want to live a long and happy life in a beautiful world filled with all of the good things life has to offer. I happen to understand that for me to have that, I have to get other people to work with me to get this and then we can all get to share in the results. But that's a damn sight easier than doing all of the work myself or having to fight other people to get a smaller version of it and then having to fight to keep it for the rest of my life - that sounds really tiresome.

There are only 4 steps. They're simple but they're not baby steps. That is why most people don't do them - because they look really difficult. The good news is that the difficulty is all in your head. The really bad news is that the difficulty is all in your head and so it will only go away by determined effort on your part to overcome your poverty thinking.

1. Understand "Wealth has use value. Money has exchange value". Repeat it to yourself regularly. Make it your mantra. It's a tiny concept but it's a massive paradigm shift. You must stop thinking of wealth and money as the same thing and start thinking of them as two mountaineers helping each other climb - or two legs helping you walk if you prefer. So wealth allows you to create money. In turn, money allows you to create more wealth.

2. Write a list of all the wealth items you have and what money exchange rate you can get for them. If you haven't fully understood step 1, you will find this step hard because you will only think in terms of conventional "wealth" like property, silver and gold or high valued antiques. If you do that, you will miss out on a monstrous number of wealth items that have you have that that much higher exchange values than those things.

3. Work with the one that gives the best exchange rate.

4. Periodically, re-check because things change. If something else is giving a better exchange rate, change to that. At least twice a year. But also whenever an opportunity arises that changes things - because opportunities will always arise

That's it.

No rocket science. No complicated mathematics. As old as the pyramids. As new as the Cloud. Never changing. Always the same. But always fresh

I don't care where you are in the world but right here and right now, you're surrounded by wealth opportunities if only you would focus on them

"But Phil I live in the middle of a desert"

Sand.

As sand, it has a use value as a component in concrete.

Now turn it into glass. All of a sudden, it has a different use value and a different exchange value

Now turn it into silicon microchips. Once again, a different use value and a whole different exchange value.

And all we started with was sand

When you focus on "Use Value", you will suddenly discover that you're a shopkeeper with a massive shop stocked to the ceiling with saleable items. In fact, you'll find yourself with so much stuff to sell that you won't have the time to sell it all which is why I advise selling the most valuable stuff first.

The real skill in wealth building is to find those wealth items in your possession that have a low use value and transform them into a higher use value then sell them on. But that's what step 4 is all about. As you discover new uses, your stock will have to be re-valued

It was a Steve Jobs moment

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.

I learned that the people ahead of me were no different from me. They just did things differently and if I could learn what they did, I would get their results.

I learned and I got the results.

It also meant that I could learn to do anything. I may not be as good at it as the best in the world, but I could still do it well enough to achieve my purposes

The only problem is that once you've learned that, there are no more excuses.

My favourite quote about money is this:

Money will either be a good servant or it will become a terrible master

So life becomes very simple: either you are in control of money or it's in control of you. Now the exact amount is irrelevant. I have known multi-millionaires who are completely disinterested in money and I have met "poor" people who are obsessed by it; it dominates every waking thought.

When people tell you not to be influenced by money, they are giving you good advice because influence means that it's money who is in control. If I understand your words correctly, you are already a slave to money by choosing to deviate your passions where there is money. In other words, you're allowing money to be the important decider and not something else. Take two questions:

"How do I make money?" - money is in control

"How do I make money doing this important and valued work" - ah now, this is a different question because now you are asking how can money serve you in your goal of doing this important and valued work.

So find your calling first. Then look at ways of making money serve you in expression of your calling.