In The Ten Pillars of Wealth, Mind-Sets of the World’s Richest People, 2016, Brown Books, Alex Becker, who is currently in his twenties but has already achieved millionaire status, shares ten beliefs, or "pillars" about wealth that if connected to appropriate action steps, will help generate income. Once the person becomes skillful, the income can be massive. Here is a quick summary of the ten pillars:
The First Pillar
Reject get rich slowly. Getting rich slowly today may actually have more risk than getting rich quickly because jobs are no longer guaranteed for any length of time. More jobs are being outsourced and moved overseas. But if you lower your living expenses by living in an inexpensive dwelling and work at least part-time to pay for your living expenses while you develop an online business that does not require a lot of your money in your spare time, you can actually fail in business several times before succeeding. If you follow this path, you will likely come out further ahead than you would have if you worked at a job. Once you have sufficient income from your own online business, you can quit your job.
The Second Pillar
Find a way to separate your time from your money. Instead of increasing the value of your time, create a system that allows you to make money whether you are working or not. Spend most of your time creating a system that creates money. Your first goal is to find a process that works. Then clone yourself so that the process continues to work without you. For example, create a website that manages client appointments, run ads that sell for you, etc. When you decide on a business model ask yourself these questions: (1) Can the business make money when you are not present? (2) Can this process be done by others or automated and done by machines? (3) If this business became successful, could I train someone else to run it? (4) Is it possible to make the process of delivering $100 the same as delivering one million in sales?
The Third Pillar
Accept that you must be better than everyone else. You must be confident of your skills to take chances and make money in the marketplace. Accept that if you lack necessary skills you need to build up those skills and become great. Repeated actions over time and incremental improvements in those actions can make anyone great.
The Fourth Pillar
Accept 100% responsibility for everything in your life. Once you accept full responsibility, you begin to think more pro-actively.
The Fifth Pillar
Adopt an abundance mindset to attract money. Money is repulsed by people with a scarcity mindset. If your actions do not drastically change, your outcomes cannot drastically change. Identify where you can increase your income and invest in those areas. Whenever you find yourself reverting back to a scarcity mindset, look for ways to expand. Abundance allows progress, whereas, scarcity impedes progress. Remember there is unlimited money in the world. You can take an unlimited amount of actions to go get it.
The Sixth Pillar
Forget what if, focus on what is. Constantly take shots. Identify the next task you need to do to move forward and do it. This might be cold calling businesses, emailing businesses, attending business network events. Place this into an action paragraph. For example, it might be that you need to get a client. To get a client, you might need to learn how to sell. Get practice selling by calling businesses, emailing businesses, and attending business network events.
The Seventh Pillar
Map out the actions you need to take to achieve your goals. Define your goal. Then map out a plan to get there. Don’t look at the success event, which could be someone being recognized as a best-selling author or selling a website for a million dollars or more. Instead, focus on finding out all the steps that led up to the successful event. Begin taking small steps to achieve your goals and keep going until you achieve success. Break down each of your major goals into actionable tasks you can begin working on and begin working on the first step immediately.
The Eighth Pillar
Focus on what gets you paid the most. Once you can, hire others to do lower-value tasks. By identifying the actions that get us paid and focusing most of our efforts on those actions, we can reduce the amount of time it takes to become profitable. For example, if you have an internet business, the most profitable task might be to focus on generating the number of leads that come into your pipeline. For example, if your goal is to earn ten thousand dollars a month, your goals might be to (1) read four marketing books, (2) work on ranking websites using search engine optimization (SEO), (3) learn Adwords and Facebook advertising, (4) create a business website, and (5) cold call and email potential clients. But of these tasks, the only one that will generate cash right away is contacting potential clients by phone and email and getting paid. But once the person is earning $10,000 per month with ten clients, the task that will generate the most money will be closing the deal on one-on-one meetings where she will earn $500 per hour if the meeting takes two hours. That means that the task of cold-calling and emailing customers should be outsourced to someone else.
The Ninth Pillar
People give money to people who understand people. Money is the exchange of power between people. Thus, we need to learn how to persuade other people to give us money. If you are trying to get rich, you are trying to gain control over other people to get their money. You must be able to lead people to earn money. You cannot become rich by yourself. You must figure out what your target audience wants and needs and learn how to convince them to hand over their cash in exchange for what you are selling. Spend some time each day learning about people. The way to earn the most money is to have the brand, the product, and packaging that people “feel” the most positive about buying. As a beginner in any business, you must become comfortable at two things: (1) selling and (2) being comfortable around people and leading them to do things. Regularly ask yourself if your product/service is the coolest one available for your target customer. No one has ever gotten rich without being paid by someone else first.
The Tenth Pillar
Find competitive friends and suitable mentors. Being in a community of like-minded people can trigger an obsession to work hard and achieve success.
The opportunities are out there. Plenty of people become wealthy each year, especially now with all the tools available to almost anyone. It is up to each of us to learn the skills and mindsets that will help us succeed in achieving our goals in the field(s) we select to pursue.
Rating: $$$$$ out of 5 if you seek to start an internet business for the first time, especially one that does SEO optimization for other businesses, this book will help you earn money if you work hard and follow the plan. Alex Becker also has videos available about SEO on YouTube. If this does not fit your plan, and your plan is to continue working at your present job without generating a second income, this book may be interesting, but it probably will not help you earn any more money.
Copyright @ 2016 Christine Esser
This book was purchased, not a gift.
