That’s why I had to write this book: to set the record straight about online businesses and generating wealth in general.
Alex Becker
PS: This is a long post for focused and curious minds only. So if you are a caffeine addict, grab a cup of coffee (like these clean bulletproof bean from Mlama, Tanzania), and follow through this post about WEALTH.
Pillar: an upright shaft that supports an overhead structure. (Merriam-Webster’s Online Thesaurus)
Oh Pillars! And the first thing that came to mind is a picture of these beautiful Greek temples. Good old style marble Greek Pillars. But in Alex Becker’s book, there are Pillars too, but pillars of wealth, and they count up to 10. These are your Core Beliefs, your basic yet essential weapons on your way to wealth.
This book is about grounding new beliefs in our heads, while eliminating old poisonous and limiting ones that we usually inherit from our environments. It turns out there is a way to win in life (at least financially) and there is a way that gets us there. Once we figure out the road, once we start making ‘a little bit of money’ we can’t help but want to make even more.
The reason why so many people get rich and others stay poor, is that those who have gotten rich came to a very low or bad point in life AND consequently they decided there is no way they are going to stay that way, they reached rock bottom and they know how things look, feel, and smell down there so they decided to promise themselves that no matter what they will escape serfdom, they said to themselves ‘By god I am gonna be financially independent’.
You have to reject the idea that to become rich you need to e special, a marketing genius, or lucky. The author warns us from the start, that is the number one prerequisite before plunging into the rest of the book.
I like how Alex compares the difficulty of getting rich to that of improving at video games, though I don’t pay video games, I could get his point, which is summarized in 3 parts:
- Believe you can get great at something.
- Then play the ‘game’ over and over again
- Don’t give up until 1 is accomplished
==>Break the limiting beliefs.
About Alex Becker
The most woke empty house billionaire business guy, also known as Alex Becker.
- He completed his four years term with the Air Force.
- He started looking for way to generate income online.
- He stumbled upon SEO.
- Alex started building websites, ranking them really good on Google, and started to make an income. At one point he got so good at SEO, within few months, that he was offered a job at a marketing agency; he took it.
I began to work on my own business every second I got so I could grow it enough that I could quit my marketing agency job. When I got home from my job, I worked. While my friends were playing video games at night, I worked. While everyone I knew was at the pool drinking on the weekend, I worked.
Then, two months later, I was generating over $20,000 a month from my business, not including my job’s paycheck. At that point, I quit my job and never looked back.
- With $6,000 in his retirement account, he went all in with his online business.
- He built an SEO business from scratch called ‘Source Wave’, scaled it, and then sold it.
- Founded HYROS, an ad AI-based tracking tool for businesses that spend 6 figures+ per month on ads. Hyros work with celebrity/influencer such as Dean Graziosi and Tom Bilyeu, eCommerce brands such as Billy Gene, Dan Henry, Kinobody, clickfunnels, and ImpactTheory.
3 Different Types of Businesses
- CF:
Cash Flow Businesses (CF) are the easiest to start. They require little to no capital.No staff or overhead. You can start a CF business from your bedroom if you want.
These businesses take a lot of time to run and manage, because it is usually a one -man operation; you will be the one providing a service to a client, marketing and promoting your services, and also the one doing the accounting and every other details. And that’s why, scaling this business is often not an option, and a well-defined cap on revenues, income & profits can estimated from the beginning. With all this being said, expect a profit margin up to 90%.
- High Investment Scalable Businesses (HIS):
This is the type of business that Venture Capitalists, like Naval Ravikant or Chamath Palihapitiya, are constantly looking for to invest in. These businesses oftentimes ‘explode out of nowhere’ even after years of being stuck or incurring losses.
These businesses are very scalable by their own definition. In a business like this, you need to pay close attention to every little detail: hiring the right people, studying competitors, and doing proper market research, etc…
Lunching a High Investment Scalable business requires some chunk of starting capital however. And that’s why, Alex Becker advises the reader who are still beginners to start with Cash Flow Business and then they can put their into a HIS business, should they want to. This model of businesses is very scalable, and usually can be automated.
- Long-Term Investment Businesses (LTI):
This is where you can ‘park’ your money and can expect sometimes as high as 10%-15% ROI per year. Think investing in rental properties or in restaurants. It is relatively safe form of investing (as long as the economy doesn’t collapse) and the businesses you invest your money in are still sell-able.
Decide to Become Wealthy at Any Cost
The longer I live, the more I am certain that the great difference between men—between the feeble and the powerful, the great and the insignificant—is energy, invincible determination—a purpose once fixed, and then—death or victory!
Thomas Fowell Buxton
By god, I am going to get rich! It’s a personal decision, a kind-of an intimate transaction between you and you only, you have your own reasons and motives and no body has the right to ask you about them. Just make them fuel you. Alex Becker, and throughout the book, emphasize the importance of getting to a very low point or extremely bad situation in life where for some people this decision becomes inevitably, and hence becoming wealthy becomes inevitable. (it’s just a matter of time)
Most people never become wealthy. Why? They never decide to get rich. And why? Because, they don’t believe that they can get rich because of X, Y, and Z.
As selfish as it looks on paper, and in life, believing it, seeing it, perceiving the whole thing before it comes to fruition is an indispensable prerequisite to actually getting it.
You may not a be spiritual person, you may not believe in superstitions, and stick only to reason and rationality, even so, you got to have this one belief, a one that has nothing to back it in today’s reality but that you have to have to get to your destination.
Reject Getting Rich Slow
This one from Becker really reminds me of MJ DeMacro’s The Millionaire FastLane. I wouldn’t even be surprised that DeMacro inspired Alex to go on and achieve what he has achieved so far
Don’t be “mildly miserable” like the rest. They are wrong, and that’s why they are the stuck traffic fighter who end up in jobs they hate because it’s ‘secure’.
The slow low risk way to getting wealthy is not risk free at all. In fact, its risks are uncontrollable. You are gambling your future’s outcome on variables outside the scope of your control; things like the economy, the value of the currency you are holding your savings in, the performance of the company you are working for(and whether or not they are going to lay off some employees when the going gets tough).
getting rich slowly requires you to spend 71 percent of your days for the rest of your young life at work.
The big reward at the end of the work tunnel. It’s an illusion! You might day before even get to there.
Get-rich slowly:
- extreme financial hardships
- zero control on your financial future
- spend 71% of your young lifespan on work(5 days out of 7 a week)
- No chance of getting your dream/fantasy life
- Constantly living under financial stress (worrying about money all the time)
- All you your decision are based around money (or the lack of it)
Separate Your Time from Your Income
Everyone have limited time (24 hours a day), so trying to tie your income to your disposable time is a very bad idea and it is literally putting a cap on how much money you will be making from the start. It’s been said over and over again, nobody ever got rich alone. You need other people to help you produce, sell , promote, communicate, and eventually buy from you. This is the reason why many successful business-people are good at dealing with people. And even the ones who are not so good at dealing with people and still went on to be successful, often you will discover that they hired the right employees to take care of that for them.
And so, you are facing two options:
=>Either you spend all your time trying to do everything by yourself, and therefore your income isn’t under your control
=>Or you increase the value of your time and completely separate your time from your income
Instead of spending our time working, we should spend our time creating systems that do the work for us.
- Clone yourself, either by hiring a super productive team, by building or buying, or subscribing to AI/tech/tools, that will bring your expenses down and profits up. (Examples would be using services like Fiverr Business for outsourcing and hiring across borders, solutions like Tipalti that will take care of your Invoice Management + TAX, VAT, and Global Payments to your clients/suppliers, companies like Ripl for upping your branded content game on social media, or using Yelp for Business to connect to new customers, or Banking easier with Bank Novo, or IncFile for incorporating your LLC or Corporation for as low as $49)
- Find a process or formula that works, then clone it.
- It is better to have a business that has a 30% profit margin, but that can be scaled to $10 million a year and then can be sold for tens of millions than to have a one man run business, that will turn into a chaos the minute you get sick and be hospitalized for few weeks.
All you need to be working on right now, is excellent business-planning, automation, and properly cloning yourself through effective hiring, and the next thing you know, is that your time-consuming intense business is turning into a time independent money-making machine.
Take any business idea you have in your mind right now and ask yourself the following questions:
- Can the process be automated?
- Is generating $500 worth of sales requires the same amount of energy and steps as generating $10,000 if sales?
- Can the business be scaled, by hiring more staff and/or developing technologies and solutions?
- Does the business have the potential of significantly rising in value in the next couple of years, and eventually be sold for tens of millions?
The most successful businesses out there, have their owner(s)’ time separated from their revenues & profits.
=> They’ve created a process that works at soling a particular problem process, a process that customers want. They’ve priced the process competitively. And the rest takes care of itself.
Accept That You Must Be Better Than The Rest
- As egotistic as it might sound, this is one of the most important pillars that Becker presents to us through this book.
By wanting to become wealthy, you are also saying that you want to accept the challenge to be better at making money than 99 percent of the people on this planet.
- Follow the Belief,Actions, & Results (BLR) System.
- Embrace the power of accepting the necessity of greatness
Remember that desiring to be wealthy is by its nature desiring to put oneself into the top 1%. If it was much more common to be wealthy in our society, then the logical conclusion is that it doesn’t take more than being average. Unfortunately, this is not the case in real life. In fact, last time I checked one of those Credit Suisse annual reports about Global Wealth Inequality, it was 0.9% of the world’s population who owned more than half of the assets.
It’s Been 100% Your Fault
Blaming your current situation in life on family, friends, teachers, environment or government is a waste of your time.
You need a complete shift in your attitude towards your reality.
Take back your life from your “whys”.
Controlling your future outcomes is up to you as well
Adopting an Abundance Mindset
How you act reflects the type of mindset you have either towards money, or any other endeavor. The belief in abundance is required here. Anything that has to d with scarcity thinking will hold you back. And so if you want to keep going when the going gets tough in business, you should never have a mental limit to how much money you can make.
- Mr. Never Take Risks (Super Scarcity Mind-Set): “I am going to spend my life working for someone else making him wealthy, save some of what I earn and hopefully I can retire by the age of 65. Starting a business is too risky for me. Entrepreneurship is not my cup of tea”
- Mr. Watch But Not Do (Extreme Scarcity Mind-Set): “It is simply not possible and it sucks, so why should I bother?!”
- Mr. Brute Force (High Abundance Mind-Set): “I know it is risky, and sometimes it will suck, but I am going to try anyway, because If I constantly throw Sh*t against the wall, I know that eventually something will stick”
- Mr. ‘Ladies’ Man (Educated Abundance Mind-Set):
=>Takes calibrated social risks.
=>Acknowledges the fact that he will never be liked by everyone.
=>100% Confident that he will get what he wants eventually & Self-aware.
In wealth, you only need to ‘get laid’ once.
Alex Becker
It’s hard to have an abundance mind-set & beliefs without actually having abundance.
=>That’s why, you have to trick your mind into believing we have abundance in the here and now, thus altering your core beliefs.
Achieving Abundance as a Newcomer of Wealth
**When you have a limited mind-set, you only focus on ways and trick that will help you save money.
By solely focusing on conservation, you will never be able to expand.
Abundance = Progress
Scarcity = Lack of Progress
Instead of directing your energy towards saving extra dollars here and there, so you can SPEND them later, Smart Entrepreneurs focus on putting their money towards their projects, so that every dollar can bring 5, 6 or even 10 dollars.
==> Adopt this 5th pillar into your life immediately.
Focus on ‘What Is’ Instead of ‘What If’
Discover the number one problem that is depraving you of what you want right now.
Learn everything you can about that problem
Work on the problem until it’s fixed
Move to the next problem and repeat from 1 again until it’s fixed.
Don’t try to learn and speculate about the possible things that can go wrong, just focus on the number one obstacle in front of you.
you must stop thinking about it and stop planning it, and just take action.
Alex Becker
Avoid being locked down in “perfection paralysis” land at at costs. Action is your only way to remedy!
=>Master the only immediate problem you have in the here and now.
Hurry up and make mistakes. The most guaranteeing thing you can do to fail is to never try anything.
Mapping Out Actions That Achieve Goals
The fact is big, giant & successful companies take a lot of time to become profitable. Good things often take times(including learning the piano, or learning a new language), and if you are in doubt about this just ask Warren Buffet (e.g. Amazon didn’t reap a profit in 20 years)
Confusing, right? How can popular companies be worth so much money without being profitable? Because they are moving in the direction of global domination and will be massively profitable because of the amount of leverage they are gaining.
Alex Becker
Creating a plan to reach your target is, in many cases, more important than the target itself. They say that each one minute spent planning can save up to ten minutes in execution. And whether that is right or not, one cannot deny the benefits of planning, even if the planning part would differ so much from the executing part later on, something which will inevitably happen from time to time, it is still helpful and relevant thing to do before jumping into uncharted business territories
Traffic fighters often miss this and think about their goal as a “success event”. They are only capable of noticing the event. They can sketch the map, seeing the trees for the forest is practically unimaginable for them
Questions any aspiring businessperson should ask him/herself:
- How much money will you be making?
- What will you be known for?
- How long will it take you?
- Would would be your ideal customer?
- What will your product be?
- How many customers do you need to reach your monetary goal?
- Who needs to support you to reach your main goal?
You need to completely ‘re-engineer’ how you define your goals.
HOW MULTIMILLIONAIRES PLAN & REACH THEIR GOALS:
Very few of them make their fortunes in a ‘single event’ (it’s not like the lottery)
Even the massive buyouts you hear about them in the news, are the result of hundreds upon hundreds of tiny events leading to the BIG ONE EVENT.
These tiny actions themselves can be further decomposed into daily ‘micro-actions’
The first thing they do is SET GIANT TARGETS
STEP1: Wat is Your Big Goal?
=> This cannot be vague or blurry. It must be clear and quantifiable.
=> You must have a clear end in mind as well as a ‘way’ to get there(e.h. selling real estate, growing avocados, providing a service to stopover travelers, etc..)
Use your imaginary ideal lifestyle and how it looks like in your mind to define exactly how big your goals should be
In this section of the book, Becker introduces a simple exercise: It consists of writing down what you want in specific details. However, he also suggests not including any ‘Grand’ or super Grand desires such as owning mansions, private jets, or sports team, as they will impede and ‘complicate’ the process.
Example:
- Make $500,000 in Sales.
Step2: What Are the five smaller goals you must achieve to reach your bigger goals?
=>List these smaller goals in chronological order
Example:
- Reach a daily output of 200 Cold Calls/day
- Reach an average daily Sales of 20sales/day
- Have Access to more contacts to cold call
- Improve your sales pitch
- Write 5000 words per day
Sign up for more Affiliate network
==> These will make your bigger target much more manageable. And, it will shift your thinking from “How can I make X amount of dollars?” to “How can produce or make X, and sell Y amount of it in Z years or months?”.
Step3: Break down each the smaller steps into even smaller tasks:
=>Write a Sitemap for Google Crawlers
=>Write at a pace of 1000 words per hour (84 words/5minutes)
=>Apply to more affiliate networks after my first $10,000K check.
Focus Solely on What Gets You Paid
Everything that can be delegated, eliminated or outsourced must be delegated, eliminated or outsourced.
Remember, it’s not always about working 80 to 100 hours a week, driving yourself towards burnout and inevitable health issues. A person who works as little as 10 hours per week but DIRECTS a total of 400 hours per week out of his employees/team will accomplish far more than he will ever do on his own.
The things that you are doing and are contributing little or noting to getting you paid are your income stealers. These are literally stealing from $$$ from your bank account each time you spend time on them and not on your ONE thing; the thing that gets you paid.
They Give Money to People That Get People
One thing you gotta realize is that you will never be able to get rich without other people.
What is money, then? Money is power over other people.
Wealth is power. By trying to get rich, you are in essence trying to gain some form of power over others, so you can buy their labor, time, and products with that power.
You have to become a great influencer on other people’s decisions. You have to persuade and convince them.
==> This is why, if you could learn one thing only, you should be learning how to sell.
- Don’t just sell products. Instead, provide and sell emotions.
- Being comfortable with people
Finding Competitive Friends and Suitable Mentors
Birds of a feather, do flock together
Imagine if, right after reading this book, you spent every waking minute working at getting rich like a psycho. Seriously, picture waking up, turning on your computer, working for twenty hours, and stopping only to pee and eat whatever food you own that doesn’t need to be cooked, then passing out from exhaustion and waking up four hours later to do it all over again. Then imagine doing this for months and months without taking breaks or vacations or even weekends off.
Unlike the other ‘mind-set pillars’, this one can and should be applied in real ‘physical’ life.
The best way to trigger the kind of obsessed work ethic is being a part of a community of like-minded people. It will push you to compete in a friendly way.
Look around you right now and try to closely examine your environment. Do they care about money or do they watch Drama on TV? If the answer is the latter, then you are more likely to want to fit in to the group’s ritual, and probably you have little or no motivation at all to do something out of the norm.
Join as many free groups of people you want to be like right now. People already successful at their own businesses, people who have created massive wealth, or currently doing so.
=> Then, keep track of the ‘leaders’ within these groups, and find out where they hang out.
=>Make friends with them, and ask them questions.
The minute you start talking to your circle of friends about opportunities to make money, to kill it, and they respond with disinterest, mockery, and skepticism, then you know you are operating withing a damaging group that is only putting you down.
Start by joining free Facebook groups with people you can relate to what they are doing or had already done what you want to do. Pick up the leaders out of these groups and try to reach them. After successfully reaching them, fear not! ASK THEM QUESTIONS! Also try to build relationships with people above your level, but not that much above your level. Use these groups to keep motivated and continually learn from the best around you.
MENTORS can help you go through the obstacles and hurdles you are going to go through much faster and with less trouble.
a Mentor: Someone who has arrived in your own terms. Someone, who has already accomplished what you are aiming to accomplish.
Look for a mentor who is at a level ‘above you’, but not way too much above your level.
=> Example: If you are not generating any income at the moment, and you shouldn’t be approaching a mentor who is earning $100,000 a month. The line of communication between you won’t be clear and you wouldn’t relate to each other. Instead, you should be focusing on getting a mentor that is generating $3000 to $5000 per month for instance.
AVOID false mentors:
- There are two types of mentors:
- Those who make 90% of their income mentoring (think Dan Pena lol)
- Those who make most of their money from their main business, and mentor on the side
The Final Word
- Society’s safe route to wealth generation is not that safe
- Decide you will be rich at any cost
- Dodge the Slow road to wealth
- Believe you are better than the competition
- Take 100% responsibility for all mistakes incurred
- Delegate, Outsource, Eliminate
- Clone Yourself, and Operate on Auto-Pilot
- Break down those giant targets into smaller milestones, and then break down further
- Focus on the one thing that gets you paid, and resolve to do that only! This is your ONE thing!
- Hang out with people who have achieved or are achieving what you want, pay for the privilege if necessary! (Like Attending The Rich Dad Summit)
- Believe that there is out there all the wealth you want to get
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