One of the most common misconceptions in the world we live in today is that getting rich is some complicated process. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, there are really only three ingredients that are required to achieve impressive financial wealth and once you know them I guarantee you will never see wealth in the same way ever again!
One thing that you need to know about me is that I absolutely love food and because of this I tend to liken many of my financial lessons to cooking and eating. One of my favourite desserts is cake and if you’ve ever baked a cake you’ll know that there are four key ingredients: eggs, sugar, milk and flour. Unfortunately, missing any one of these ingredients will lead to less than optimal results. For instance, your cake won’t hold together without eggs and your cake will be bland without sugar. Moreover, forget the milk and your cake will probably get stuck halfway down your throat because it’s too dry.
Well, the same concept can be applied to becoming wealthy. You can have two elements in place but without the third, you will never achieve the financial results you aim to obtain. What are these elements? Well, without spoiling them all right away, I can tell you that the first piece of the wealth pie you must have in place is value.
Value is a term we hear all the time but what is value really? By definition, something has value when it is desired by others. For instance, we know that IPhones have value because people line up outside the Apple store every year to buy the newest model. Alternatively, the internet has value because it allows us to work remotely, Facetime our family or watch cat videos our aunt sent us on YouTube.
Now, beyond probably having watched a cat video or two on YouTube, you may be wondering how value relates to you and your wealth building journey so let’s talk about that now. Whether you realize it or not, for years, you’ve been putting in the work to raise your own value as a person. Remember all that school you’ve done? That’s you adding value to your own offering to the world and it’s the same reason that young adults spend tens of thousands of dollars on college every year because they know that they can raise their value and trade that value to future employers by getting a post-secondary education.
The Two Es
Then, as you begin to progress through your career, what do you start to obtain? Experience and expertise. These two Es allow you to offer your employer increasing levels of value and this is why most people tend to make more money as they progress through their career. This is also why people seek out new designations or training to streamline their path to greater value potential which they in turn exchange for more money.
But, maybe that example doesn’t resonate with you. Maybe you aren’t an employee and instead run your own local business. The same principles apply. When you offer better customer service and a superior product, you’re more likely to get more clients and make more money. In short, more value means more money.
Now, you may be starting to wonder why you’re not rich even though you’re offering value similar to how I’m describing it and this goes back to when I said that in order to bake the perfect cake, all ingredients must be present. You see, offering value is just one piece of the financial prosperity pie and offering value in this 9 to 5 model is unfortunately one of the worst value distribution models. As such this is why likely none of your peers who work alongside you are rich via their 9 to 5 alone.
The Power of Scale
So, what is the next piece of the wealth pie? Scale. You see, you could be the best painter, musician or writer in the world but if no one’s ever seen your work then there is no hope in you achieving any level of success. The same issue arises when you have value to offer but don’t distribute it properly. This is again one of the limiting factors of how most people disseminate value. As I already mentioned, most people restrict the value they possess by only offering it to one employer or one localized team. For instance, if you’re a financial analyst for an investment company then chances are your analysis, aka the value you provide, is only serving your immediate team or a select group of people in the organization. As such, your value dissemination and income earning potential is limited. However, let’s say that instead, you had a following of 10,000 people who paid $5 a month to gain access to your stock market reviews. All of a sudden, you’ve gone from making say $150,000 a year as a financial analyst to $50,000 a month simply because you’ve increased your ability to scale.
This is a practical example that can be applied to most regular jobs but this notion resonated with me many years ago when I started to look around at the examples of rich individuals in the media and those I knew personally.
For instance, I would look at famous music artists and be amazed by their yearly income figures and it made me wonder what really contributed to their financial success. The value they offered was clear — an amazing album or more broadly a brand as a top entertainer. However, it was the scale that made them the money. From being able to disseminate their value through numerous world tours to album and merchandise sales, their ability to share value was what was driving their financial success.
This same principle can be applied to athletes and business people too. For instance, when athletes play, millions of people tune in to witness their skills in action which means they are sharing value to a ton of people and are paid handsomely to do so. Alternatively, we see that business people who reach the largest audiences also make the most money. For instance, Apple, the world’s most valuable company worth over $2 trillion has shared a ridiculous amount of value throughout the world. To date, the company has sold over 2 billion IPhones worldwide and that’s just one of the many products they offer!
Once this key principle of wealth generation clicked in my mind, I knew I had to get a piece of the scale value pie. How did I do this? By copying the dreams of every 13 year old on the planet and starting to make content on YouTube. By doing so, I was able to use my expertise as a CPA and disseminate financial information to the masses and now this endeavour makes me over $100,000 a year, an amount that is hard for most people to achieve when scale isn’t part of the equation.
Now, I know that not everyone wants to make content on YouTube like I do so let’s go over a few more examples of providing value at scale that may relate more to how you can see yourself expanding your income. One example of mass value dissemination comes in the form of selling products. I just mentioned to you that Apple has sold billions of IPhones so clearly selling physical goods can make you wealthy. However, I understand that most people aren’t up for creating a manufacturing plant in their backyard or hoarding boxes upon boxes of product in their garage. It’s for this reason that the sale of digital products is your best bet if you want to share value at scale while also sidestepping major overhead hassles.
Whether you realize it or not, there are people out there who want the knowledge you currently possess. For instance, maybe you’re a teacher who creates amazing lesson plans. That’s likely a product a lot of other teachers could benefit from. Alternatively, maybe you’re a great cook and can sell your top recipes to younger generations who struggle to boil water. I know from past experience that it’s easy to think you have nothing of value to sell to others but I can guarantee you have some sort of skill or experience others could benefit from. And, if push comes to shove, you can always learn a new skill that productize that knowledge down the road so there really are no excuses for you not to be value sharing at scale either now or in the near future.
At this point, you’re probably wondering what the third element in the wealth pie is, given that if you can offer value and reach a lot of people then just like Apple, you can make a ton of money. This is true but as I just said, getting to a point where you have value to offer and have people wanting your goods or services takes time. And, what do you need to wait out this time? Patience.
The Importance of Patience
If you ask me, patience is the key trait that separates those who succeed financially and those who don’t and let me tell you why. Everything worth having takes time to obtain. For instance, while the merits of a degree in this day and age can be debated, you can’t get a degree in a day or a week. For most people, it takes 4 years to get a degree and even longer if you pursue graduate studies like I did. Alternatively, to build a business, it can take years or even decades to truly start to see the financial success you want to achieve. Finally, let’s take a look at investing. I don’t think there’s an investing video on the internet that doesn’t preach the fact that if you invest for the next 40 years, you too can become a millionaire. All these examples are proof that achieving anything significant takes time and unfortunately, this is a lesson I had to learn the hard way.
Before I got serious about making videos on YouTube, I tried every single online business model you can think of. I tried dropshipping, Amazon FBA, social media management and guess what? I failed at them all. Why did I fail, you may be wondering? I failed because I didn’t take the time to learn and master these business models to the degree where I would start to actually see some positive results. It’s like trying to get a degree but only completing half your classes. Fortunately, after numerous failures and about a year of wasted time, I learned that I needed to do two things: focus and be patient. Focus was required because what I failed to tell you was that I was actually trying to get all these business models off the ground simultaneously which definitely didn’t increase my chances of being successful.
However, the other element I missed out on incorporating was patience. YouTube is a long-term investment and it took a year and a half to see the first fruits of my labour. Let me tell you that first paycheck from Google felt so good and the ones I collect are even better but they would have never been possible without patience.
Therefore, just like the cake analogy I shared earlier, you need all the ingredients to arrive at the best final product possible. Without value, you have nothing to offer. Without scale, your income generating abilities will be limited. Finally, without patience, you will never get to the point where you either have value to provide or have the scale that will make all of your wildest wealth dreams possible! But when you do have all these three elements in place, I promise the rewards will be sweet!