It doesn’t take massive epiphanies to change your life, just a few subtle shifts in your thinking can transform the way you live. Your thoughts create your world and the way you think is so important that you should make learning how to think properly your number one job.
I have a simple philosophy: If my thoughts help me get what I want, they’re useful. If not, I change them. I’m not concerned about being right. I want to get it right.
Drop your ego long enough to shift your mindset, and all of a sudden everything changes. These three mindset shifts personally helped me make a huge difference in my income, lifestyle, and even my happiness.
How to Get Rich
This book kept me up until 4 a.m. I was in college, thinking about the type of future I wanted to build. This book provided a piece of wisdom that would change my life forever.
The book? Rich Dad Poor Dad. The mindset shift? Don’t work for money, build assets. Wealthy people don’t earn their money from income. They earn it from assets that continue to pay them again and again over time.
You can create intellectual property that you create once and pay you over and over again. I’ve done this with books. You can build a business that doesn’t require you to be there to make money. Investors put their money to work from buying assets like stocks, real estate, crypto, and even buying entire businesses.
Next, they create a flywheel. Profits from assets pour into other assets and those profits pour into more assets.
Wealthy people use money from assets to buy luxuries. Middle-class and working-class people use earned income and debt to buy luxuries.
You need assets. Relying on one source of income is a dangerous trap. Assets provide protection because you have money coming in from different places and you can keep growing new sources with the money created by old ones.
I put in a ton of work upfront — writing books, creating programs, and investing in myself to learn how to build assets. And after years of work, I now receive passive income.
How to Properly Use an Emotion That Drives You Crazy
Online entrepreneurs sometimes provide income reports to their audience. They say they’re not doing it to brag and that they’re doing it to teach and inspire. They’re one hundred percent doing it to brag.
I used to envy these top bloggers, influencers, business owners, etc. But instead of just feeling envy, I took things a step further. I’d ask myself “How the hell did they do that?”
I didn’t feel envy the way most people do. Most people feel envy and feel like they can’t reach the same heights as the person they’re envious of. I learned how to turn envy into curiosity.
Every time I see someone who has something I want I try to reverse engineer how they did it. I don’t plagiarize or copy, I just observe and see which strategies I can use in my favor.
Notice what makes you feel that twinge of envy and figure out how to scratch that itch for yourself. Negative emotions can be useful. If you don’t have the life you want yet, it’s okay to wake up angry and ready to tackle the world.
If there are people out there you feel don’t deserve the success they have, get in the field and outperform them. We all measure ourselves on the totem pole and the game of life is a massive competition.
Don’t kid yourself. That envy isn’t going away. At least use it to your benefit.
Escape the Matrix
I agree with most of the major criticisms of society.
There’s way too much wealth inequality in America. Gone are the days where you can own a home, have a nice car in the driveway, and feed a family of four with a single income.
Huge corporations get away with robbery when it comes to all the loopholes they get for being in bed with the government. Politicians are crooked. Wages haven’t kept up with inflation. Healthcare isn’t affordable.
You’re getting screwed, for sure.
While I share the diagnosis that the system is rigged, I come to a totally different conclusion. Instead of trying to fix the system by asking the system to fix itself, I decided to escape the system altogether.
I don’t understand how this point isn’t obvious to people, so let me try to explain it as clearly as possible. The elites in society have the politicians in their pockets. Lobbies control what politicians do, not voters.
Everyone in power has little to no incentive to help you. It doesn’t benefit them to help you and these are the last people you’d rely on having kind hearts. So, why does it make any sense to ask these people for help? Even the most well-intentioned public servants will probably get lost in the shuffle because of incentives.
Thomas Sowell put it well:
“No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems — of which getting elected and re-elected are No. 1 and No. 2. Whatever is No. 3 is far behind”.
No matter how much you think your favorite politicians care, they’re not on your team. Do you really think your tweets are going to topple oligarchs and the Kabal of people who’ve been running society since, you know, it began? Use your brain. Think.
I know you already understand this on some level even if you pretend you don’t. You’re just unsure what to do next. Think about ways to escape the system and make sure your life becomes less and less subject to the whims of elites. Become antifragile.
Some suggestions:
- Since wages are actually down vs. inflation, stop making all your money from wages. Online businesses make money 24/7
- Develop skills that go well with the emerging tech business cycle — writing, coding, e-commerce, design, media like audio and video, solopreneurship, freelancing, the crypto ecosystem
- In general, become a learning machine. I’ve read 150+ books, watched countless videos and podcasts, and taken a dozen online courses. If you want to short-cut the process, buy a course on a skill you want to learn and make money from. You spent $50,000 on college but won’t drop $500 on a course. Make that make sense.
- Get on Twitter and follow smart people. Twitter specifically is the best platform for learning because you can literally read the thoughts of the world’s smartest people. On Twitter alone, I learned a tax tip that saved me $10,000, discovered people who’ve helped me make thousands of dollars, and connected with people I’ve literally been able to do business with.
- On some level, you have to learn how to invest your money — stocks, crypto, real estate
Most importantly, let go of politics and the news. Just let it go. Focus on yourself and save yourself because nobody is coming to save you I promise.
You should be scrambling to get on the right side of the massive wealth transfer and the growing knowledge gap occurring in society. You should be very concerned. And you should dedicate the next five years of your life to catching and riding this wave.
Whether or not you will, well, that’s on you.