Friday, July 07, 2006

The Internet will make you very rich or very poor

There are no two ways about it: the Internet will either make you very rich, or very poor.

I mean "poor" in the relative sense. That is, as all the people around you -- friends, coworkers, family, etc. -- become richer by using and leveraging the Internet to CREATE new knowledge products and deliver it to customers all over the world, they will become richer. As a result and by comparison, you will become poorer (if you don't use the Web to create and deliver value to people).

In fact, the WWW can be more appropriately called the World Wide Wealth. Of course, this "wealth" is in its raw form, as information. Only a trained mind can turn this information into gold.

The question is, How can you turn your mind into a powerful engine that has Midas capability? How can you develop the rather rare ability to convert information (easily searchable via Google and a host of other specialized search engines) into valuable knowledge that people, anywhere in the world, will be willing to pay you for? (They can even pay you for your knowledge products while you sleep, via Payloadz for example).

Esther Dyson, founder and chairwoman of Edventure, once wrote that wealth will be created not through the SUPPLY of information, but through people who are mentally skilled enough to APPLY the information to real-world problems in order to create solutions.

But to create this kind of wealth, one must be:
  1. extremely curious and extremely eager to continually absorb new information and new knowledge
  2. extremely attentive to what other people need, in terms of learning and personal growth and professional development
Teaching is really one of the great (and not so hard) ways of creating value and becoming rich.

This is how Robert Kiyosaki, Anthony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Wayne Dyer, Robert Allen, etc. became multimillionaires.

In the same way that "opportunityisnowhere" can be read in two different ways (one is optimistic, the other one is pessimistic), you can view the Internet as just an information utility that will have no impact on your bank account.

Or you can view it as your ticket to financial freedom.