Money is the most misunderstood subject on Earth.
We’re misled by money because it’s hard to understand (by design). There’s a reason the finance industry exists. It’s to unpack the complexity of money for you for a nice fee.
I like to challenge my thoughts about money. It helps me get to the next level of my life. The problem is my 9-5 job didn’t teach me the hard truth about money. Only from the outside looking in does it all make sense now.
Don’t be misguided the way I’ve been. Here are the brutal facts on money.
Investing money is what sets you free. The rest is a mind virus.
Don’t save money by investing time, save time by investing money — Wisdom Theory
If there’s a great secret about money it’s investing. You should be obsessed with investing. You should take a course on it. You should understand every type of asset and why you need each one.
With the costs of everything rising at a record rate, the only way to stay ahead is to invest money that grows faster than the number of US dollars created out of thin air and the rate of inflation. Inflation is hard to calculate. When you play with the calculation, you quickly realize it’s either invest in assets or be torn apart financially by a legacy financial system that is currently being rebuilt.
My investing philosophy: Earn once, get paid twice.
Make money from the price of assets going up. Make money from any interest or financial return some assets offer. Combine the earnings with your regular income, and you’ve got a simple formula for basic, non-Lambo, freedom.
“The world rewards you for value provided, not time spent.”
Author James Clear said this. Time is how the factory worker age measured success. It’s not like that anymore.
If you’ve ever wondered how some Twitter gurus work 4 hours a day and make 6-figures, it’s because they’ve worked out how to create value. Once your own source of value is unlocked, you can use leverage to increase the returns without dumping more time into it.
For example, my online school has done well this year. I have a company running Facebook Ads to show the same product to more people. No more time from my side is required.
Build once + Use leverage to amplify + Add in other people = More money
Some people wait for a raise. Others give themselves one.
My favorite part of having a business: The ability to give myself a raise instead of waiting for someone else to do it. — Josh George
A job takes forever to get a pay rise. Data shows pay rises hardly happen. The reason is it’s not a management priority to pay you more money for the same work. So what do you do?
Not all of you want to be entrepreneurs. I get it. That’s why I love side hustles. A side hustle means you can give yourself a pay rise. You can simply put in more effort. But my favorite technique is to use creativity to boost my earnings.
You control your income based on your willingness or unwillingness to join the side hustle economy. There’s no limiter on magic internet money.
Meaning drives you further than $100 bills
Stop treating your purpose like a side hustle — M.IAMÖUR
A lot of people in their jobs work their faces off. The trouble is they don’t know why. They’re so removed from the problem their employer solves that it feels like stacking boxes one on top of another for a lifetime.
What’s in the boxes? Who do the boxes help? What if the boxes were full of food for homeless people?
I recently found a neat way to add more meaning. I sold a course. A few people contacted me and said they were unable to afford it. That got me thinking. I could let them go because they came from a third-world country.
I lose. They lose. Or I could just give them the thing they can never afford and receive payment through their gratitude and appreciation. The payment would be a sense that my life lessons actually have meaning.
Get paid from opportunities to extract meaning, especially when money isn’t an option for payment.
Time is tragically not replenishable
Money can be made back. Time is lost forever. Invest your time wisely. — Jose Rosado
People live like they’ve got all the time in the world. They get hung up on silly little debates on Twitter. The time you waste on BS can’t be recouped. You can’t ask the universe for a refund on all the time you pissed up against the wall.
Track where your time goes. Take note of the time you spend doing things you’d rather murder with a samurai sword. Time is wealth, not money.
Money will never be the same
If your idea of money is what it was yesterday, you will lose it to the people who know what money will be tomorrow
— Naval Ravikant
The idea of money is changing. A system of money that can be infinitely manipulated isn’t sustainable. Technology brought transparency. The current cash-in-your-pocket system has little transparency.
Some resist the advances of new forms of internet money like ethereum and bitcoin. This is foolish. Every country will one day have a digital currency. China did it. USA is going to do it. El Salvador really did it with bitcoin.
Old forms of wealth storage like bonds and gold are failing their base use case. The return on a bond is painfully low. Gold has been down 5% over the last 10 years. If you stay stuck in the financial past, you’ll miss the booming 2020s built on Web 3.0. You don’t have to agree, yet.
It’s enough to do the research and stay dialed in to what is happening. When the maturity of Web 3.0 is reached, maybe then it becomes a class of asset you want to be a part of. But don’t put your head in the sand and think the last thing to be disrupted by the internet — money — won’t happen. It will. Nobody knows how, yet. Although bitcoin and ethereum will definitely be part of the new financial system.
Ignorance equals poverty.
Retirement catfishes you
Imagine enduring a grueling 30-year career (counting the days until retirement), only to find retirement even more boring than your career.
We like to think this is the low-risk path, but that sounds pretty risky to me. You won’t get a 2nd chance. — Daniel Vassallo
A 9-5 job teaches you to cherish the fantasy of a future retirement. The real risk is to wait and see what retirement is like. Sabbaticals, months off, buying extra vacation time — these are all ways to play with the idea of retirement now. I don’t ever want to retire, though.
Tony Robbins says “to retire is to die.” I agree. I want to work for the rest of my life. The difference is I want to do work that has meaning. I want to forget about the dollar value so I can focus on the enjoyment value. This isn’t taught in jobs.
Jobs teach you that today is about what it will give you tomorrow.
Sounds nice. But what if there are no tomorrows left one day? Look at all the health scare stories on LinkedIn. Cancer can end your pretty retirement delusion faster than you can say “hold o-n-n-n, just one more day!”
Don’t be a delusional psychopath. Don’t wait for retirement.
Final Thought
Some of these money concepts are counterintuitive. It’s easy to dismiss them and say “but my life isn’t fair.” No life is far. Fairness is an idea that either holds you back or gives you the best form of motivation there is.
Take these facts about money and make your life fair. You now have an unfair information advantage to build off. No 9-5 job will tell you that.
This article is for informational purposes only, it should not be considered financial, tax or legal advice. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.
