We polled readers for post topics. The same items came up over and over and over again: 1) money, 2) networking, 3) opportunities in the future and 4) how to maintain a healthy social life while doing all three. We’ve decided to outline a book and see if people are interested. If so we’ll create it. If not, here’s the introduction and how we think people should re-evaluate the rules they have been told to follow.
Introduction
Almost everyone who picks up this product is going to jump directly to the making money section of the book. Unfortunately? That will practically guarantee they will never “make it”.
Below is a list of 10 basic axioms to follow if you’re serious about success.
1) Obligations Are Now Gone: If you are starting at ground zero, you have absolutely no obligation to anyone. This includes your best friends, your teachers and even your family if they are not going to help you succeed. Everyone encourages you to join the Peace Corps or worry about “the children” and other social matters that are now irrelevant to you. We will reiterate. All obligations for you to do anything are now gone.
It is important to note, this does not mean you will live a life without consequence, it means that you will no longer have an excuse of “obligation to someone else”. This means every action you make is going to directly impede or help your future success and the only person you get to blame is yourself.
To wrap up on the obligation piece, this is not “cold hearted”. It is much more cold hearted to donate your time and help 20 people when you could have donated several hundred thousand dollars (or even millions!) that will help thousands of people instead. If Warren Buffett never became the investor he is today, billions of dollars would go to waste. By signing a giving pledge, he will do more for society by himself than thousands of workers combined. In addition, he can pay for thousands of people to pursue their own dream of working for charities. Just remember, without his donations they wouldn’t be able to work in the first place.
2) No More Third Party Pump Up Sessions: If you waste your time watching emotional videos about “going out there and taking the bull by the horns” we have no doubt nothing will be accomplished. These types of seminars, websites, videos, speeches etc. are all used to create a cult following. If you get 1,000+ cult followers who “feel good” from the event and one of them converts (law of large numbers) then more and more people will join the cult. It is an emotional Ponzi scheme.
Self-doubt is normal and it is something you will have to learn to deal with. If something “pumps you up” then you’re being sold something on the back end. Stop consuming it. Reading about the struggles of someone else will not benefit you, if you need to read stories like this it means you’re not taking your own life seriously.
When an outrageous success story can actually impact your life emotionally it means the creator of the content is converting your nervousness into positive energy. The “sale” is simply converting deep seeded insecurity into positive pump up energy to make you buy some product that won’t actually get you anywhere.
Finally, to wrap up this point, when you’re getting into higher risk situations the only thing that will help you perform better is preparation.
Public speaking is the best example. If you are nervous before the event, practice live demonstrations in front of other people thousands of times until you can barely speak. You’ll find that you’re no longer nervous because you’re prepared and don’t need some army ranger yelling at you to get “hyped”. The more you practice the more you are desensitized to the potential negative emotions.
99% of people fall victim to the motivation Ponzi scheme because they are never internally motivated. It means less competition for YOU.
3) No Social Media, No Television: Unless you’re using social media to make money, go ahead and shut it down. Joe and Sally from college, high school or your childhood do not matter anymore. It is not harsh. If you’re not where you want to be, why would you waste time following the actions of people that won’t help you get to your goal?
It doesn’t make sense.
Most people are hardwired to care about what their friends are up to. They even waste time following celebrities who make all their money because… people want to see what they are up to. By following the life of someone unrelated to you and someone who will never help you down the line, you’re wasting valuable time that you should spend on yourself.
To simplify this even more, social media should *not* be used to keep tabs on other people. It should be used to build up a brand and sell a product. Otherwise it was a colossal waste of time that would be better spent working for minimum wage.
For television, the point is quite simple. Every single hour spent on television is lost income while you watch someone else do their job/career. It makes no sense at all. If you run the math it becomes even sadder.
Average income in the USA is $50K, about $25/hour. The average person spends about 3 hours a *day* watching television. That is 21 hours a week.
Therefore? If this time was simply spent making money, it would lead to $27K in savings per year or a million dollars over ~36 years. The point? By simply working instead of watching TV you are practically guaranteed to be a millionaire even with no investment gains.
Before this section comes off as isolationist, lets clear up a point. Every single person bringing you up to your goals or helping you get there will remain in your phone forever. However. If they switch to becoming time sucks where they complain about life or drag you down in any way, they no longer deserve your time.
4) Find One Committed “Friend”: You don’t need more than one. Find a single person who wants to succeed as badly as you do and make sure you keep in contact for at maximum one time per month. That is only twelve times a year (you’re going to be too busy doing work).
If you can find a single person willing to give 80+ hours of effort per week to becoming successful, the chances that you both make it will be magnified. You’ll likely hit different hurdles and a one hour conversation once a month will help jump over those issues each time.
Importantly, you should choose different industries, this makes it impossible to compete down the line. In the long-run? Your questions will cease as the issues become too specific (a good thing).
5) Health Will Take a *Temporary* Hit: This will sound contradictory to the original statement that health is more important that wealth. That statement is still true.
The point of this bullet is that you have to find your own personal limits to work. Most people make the excuse of “needing” multiple things from specific sleep schedules to leisure time. If you’re young, you get the privilege of testing how far your body can go and once you actually break down (once) you’ll know exactly where the line is.
You’ll find that your body sends off specific queues when you’ve officially reached your limit and once you can recognize them, you’ll unlikely impact your health going forward. As a simple example, most will feel discombobulated when reaching their limits. They will misplace items, become disorganized immediately and make mistakes even with simple tasks such as pouring a cup of coffee.
To reiterate the emphasis around temporary health impact, once you know your body’s limits you won’t “push through” as it does not end in productive work and is a clear hit to your personal health.
6) Find Your Talents: Most people are talented in several different areas. The difficulty is finding out if you’ll be in the top 1-5% in the segment. Without breaking into the top 5% in your field it will be quite difficult to earn a large amount of money as income is not a standard curve (winner gets a much larger share of the spoils).
We’re keeping this bullet basic by summarizing talents in a single sentence: you have to be good enough to have *other* people tell you that you’re good. If you have enough potential, this will happen on its own. It does not matter if you’re interested in the item at all, if you want to succeed, becoming the best is much more important than simply doing a task that is “fun” for you.
To reiterate, as you try out different fields, you’ll only keep a list of items where *other people* tell you that you’re good.
7) Learn Sales for Every Interaction: Even if you decide the path to making money off a business is not for you, the skills you learn by selling will give you the toolbox necessary to live a comfortable life. While there is a negative stigma around sales, it is far and away the best skill to learn if you were to choose only one. Forget about complex mathematics, forget about hard science, if you can sell, you can transfer that skill into the most important aspects of your life: earning money online, dating, making friends and interviewing.
In short, sales is the *most* transferrable skill you will ever learn. Every single second you spend improving your salesmanship will give you a 100x return.
8) Focus on Scale: You will likely need to trade time for money at a very early age in life (covered later in this book). However. All of your free time will be spent on a scalable business. A scalable business that is worth your time has two attributes: 1) recurring income and 2) a large addressable market.
In an ideal situation, while you’re learning a specific industry near-term you should find a niche market where you can be the expert. This will then open doors to other markets assuming you have chosen correctly.
As a basic example, if you begin designing clothing you can then move into jewelry/accessories as they are somewhat similar. If you’re good at both you could move into makeup and other ancillary markets to retail. Simplistically, every niche market falls into a major market and as you succeed in one niche, begin opening up peripheral vision to other sectors you can learn about and understand well. (Note: this may require a completely different brand)
As a basic terrible example? You’re looking at it. A book is a horrendous way to get rich because each sale is one time in nature. If one person reads your book they will not buy another copy for no reason. In addition, even if they buy a book for a friend… That friend does not need two books either. Eventually you saturate your market and there is no recurring income left! Books are not good ways to make money because they are NOT RECURRING REVENUE.
Since our readers are smarter than average… Now you 100% understand why magazines were sold on subscription basis. You had to renew every 12 months to create another sale for the company. Without new content the business model would die.
9) Stress is Okay, Worry from Real Problems is Not: The extreme Entrepreneurs and future billionaires will likely tell you to simply drop everything you’re doing and go “all in”. We take a bit of a different approach given everyone has different risk tolerance levels. We’ve found that worrying about paying your bills on time and struggling to get by usually results in too much stress that prevents your “creative juices” from flowing.
This is why we recommend a bar-bell approach that will be detailed later in this book. Where you build enough income to not worry on a daily basis (usually 10-20% above cost of living) then shift the remainder of your time to scaling a business and creating recurring income.
We have nothing against risk loving individuals and if you’re unphased by being evicted and going through turmoil to become exceptionally wealthy we wish you the best of luck on your journey.
Our simple line is you should feel immense stress, but not enough to cause you to worry. Real problems cause people to worry which then impedes results over the long-term.
10) No Time to Live Above Your Means: This is why frugality is not a good strategy to get rich. The only difference between the recommendations of frugality and the recommendations here is this: frugal people spend time *cutting cost*, future multi-millionaires spend time *creating income*.
If you’re serious about moving up, you’re not going to have time to spend thousands of dollars on fancy clothing, cars and bottle service (for now). When you’ve got enough money to never work again, you can spend as much as you like.
While clear bullet points are easy to remember the foundation, is simply this: we all have no one to blame but ourselves. This is why we emphasize the importance of no excuses. If someone “else” is dragging you down, you should have no qualms in deleting that person from your life forever. There is no reason to keep them even if “society tells you that you should”. You only get one chance at life and you deserve to pursue each activity… baggage free.
With the important introduction out of the way, below is a flow chart of the design and purpose of the book.
Finally, we’ll note that the name of the book is called “Efficiency” for a reason. There will be a lot of extreme ideas placed here to save time. Many will call them crazy. We call them helpful. We have to make the most out of every single day. Why the obsession with efficiency? We don’t have much time to succeed in life and the quality of life continues to decline once we hit middle age. There is no point in wasting our most precious resource: Time.
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Addendum: In summary, there is absolutely no competition for making it into the top 1%. If someone wants to be in the 1% all they have to do is follow the items above and it’s practically impossible to avoid becoming a millionaire and making mid 6 figures. The reality is competition really begins at the 1% level because you fight two major headaches: 1) psychologically difficult to work as you don’t need the money and 2) anyone still grinding it out when they do not have to is extremely difficult to beat. There is a “knee in the curve” and competition goes parabolic.
