I've been thinking a lot about money and success lately. Not necessarily in the mode of not having it and wanting more of it, but more in the sense of what are its base principles, and how do wealthy people really leverage it. To me, this is a skill to be learned, as opposed to a hope that it will follow you.
So here's the base I've been thinking about — influenced by the likes of Alex Hormozi and some other YouTube online educators.
Money, at its base, is an exchange for time. Anyone can exchange their time for money. You can work for a coffee shop or for McDonalds or for your neighbor mowing lawns, and be paid largely for your time executing repeatable services.
The person paying gets something done without spending any of their own time. So their lawn gets mowed and they can work on something else in the meantime. The person getting paid, though, has to spend their time mowing that lawn in exchange for receiving the money. It all seems fair and balanced here.
But this is not the case with wealthy people.
Wealthy people apply leverage to that. They find ways where they can input the same (or less) amount of their time, and receive 10 or 100 or 1000 times the return in money paid to them. So, in the case of course creators, for example, a camera man may make one online course that teaches others how to shoot weddings and make money, and then that course makes money for the next year without the camera man touching it at all. He's leveraged his service so that the returns far exceed the cost of time he needs to put in.
So, as often in the case of life, it seems unfair. Let's say in the example above, the camera man who created his courses has become super wealthy, and the lawn mower has a middle-income life. In many cases the lawn mower is actually working harder than the camera man on the daily, but he does not employ any leverage over his time. That's the difference. He's just trading time for money. Hard work still applies, but it's maybe worth a look at your career to figure our ways to apply more leverage to your opportunities, so you can spend the same time, and multiply your returns.
Of course, there is another mindset about enjoying life and simple pleasures of hard work, and not always searching to maximize an arbitrary wealth number, which doesn't mean much in the end, but that's for another day.
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