Find your strength and become rich

My belief has always been that if you have an ordinary brain, you should be an extraordinary millionaire. That is, it's not how big your brain is, it's how you use it!

It is possible to become incredibly rich, even if you have normal IQ, because of something wonderful called "leverage." There are different sorts of leverage, such as knowledge leverage, financial leverage, social leverage, sociological leverage (e.g. Youtube), international leverage, economic leverage, talent leverage, passion leverage (also called "loverage"!), etc.

However, and THIS IS WHERE MOST PEOPLE ARE COMPLETELY MISLED THROUGHOUT THEIR ENTIRE LIVES, there is no "job leverage." You cannot, I repeat, you CANNOT use your job as leverage in order to enrich yourself.

I realized this in June 2000 -- that's 7 years ago. So in a way, I'm 7 years ahead of people who are currently still "counting" on their job to help them realize financial freedom.

I'm not saying that holding a full-time job is bad. It is the financially responsible thing to do, since you have to pay bills. However, beyond paying the bills, you have to think about your own financial freedom, and to realize that, you've got to have an "exit strategy." This is a strategy that allows you to quit your job at a specific date, because you had the foresight to set up your affairs so that you could have several cashflows going which provides you with the income you need to sustain your favorite lifestyle. (See the mind map above. I can basically create any self-sustaining cashflow for the people identified on that map. Drop me a line if you want more info.)

So my point is that you cannot achieve financial freedom through your job, whether you're a receptionnist or executive. The business owners or shareholders, on the other hand, use the "job" concept and reality as a leverage to get rich. How? They use all sorts of leverage to increase the gap between your salary (which is an expense to business owners) and the revenues generated by the value that workers co-create in conjunction with capital and equipment. This gap is called "profit," and the rate at which this gap increases is what they call the "profit rate."

Take 15 minutes to carefully think about this, I guarantee it will be the most productive 15 minutes of your life!

Also think about why it's better to find "workers" as opposed to finding "work." Even better: find workers that you train and turn into worker-seekers. Network marketing leaders have fully understood this concept, and are getting rich as a result of this unique (but unnatural) insight.

Yes, there are exceptions. Some people CAN become rich via their jobs. They try to use their priviledged positions in a corporation to enrich themselves, but they do so ILLEGALLY, as we have seen in the Enron case.

There was also the case of the VP who moved from one car company to another, and brought with him the customer lists to his new employer! That's illegal, because all corporate information are proprietary and belong to the employer.

The only way to legally get rich (while having a fabulous time in the process) is to OWN something, and then to leverage that thing relentlessly, aggressively and savagely.

The first thing you should totally own, is your strength. I wrote previously about the Strengths Finder 2.0, a book by Tom Rath that will help you identify your top 5 strengths. Donald Trump said it, Robert Kiyosaki said it, Peter Drucker said it, Wayne Dyer said it (although he refers to strengths as a source of abundance within, when he wrote "Wealth is not something you acquire, but something you tune into").

All these multimillionaires are saying that you must build on what makes you unique, what you are naturally passionate about and pretty good at doing.

If you focus on anything else that is external to you, you WILL be cash-poor or time-poor for the rest of your life. By time-poor, I mean people who earn a high salary but are professionally doing something that they are not passionate about or cannot find meaning in. That is, their financial insecurity makes them completely miss their calling in life. Wayne Dyer refers to this sad state of affairs when he wrote "Don't die with your music still inside of you."

For financially insecure people, the high salary is just a "compensatory differential" given to them in exchange for the life that they are losing on the job. These people are indeed giving up a portion of their life for money received in return.

The bottom line is that every person must find her strength so as to build a career or business on it. To build a career or a business on something that is not uniquely "you" or that is not completely under your control would be pure economic foolishness.