Alex Becker — 10 pillars of wealth book summary
Every morning, all over the world, people wake up so early that it’s still dark outside. They get in their generic, ugly sedans and drive through traffic that makes them want to gouge their eyes out. They sit down at neutral-colored desks and get told what to do for eight to ten hours a day. They make just enough money to pay their bills, but never enough to get everything they want. Then, they go back through the horrible traffic, watch mindless TV until they fall asleep, and do it all over again the next day . . . unless it’s the weekend, in which they finally have some time to do what they love to do.
Unless we are hit with true desperation, pain, anger, fear, sickness, or some other extreme circumstance, we will usually stay in our comfort zone until the day we die. That is why people stay in situations they aren’t happy with and why middle-class people generally stay in the middle class, but why you also see rags-to-riches stories quite often nowadays.
We are never taught how to learn a random skill and become proficient at it. This is a big reason why so many people fail at starting a business. They are not stupid, they just don’t know how to learn.
See, people rarely become successful if they are comfortable in their current situation, no matter how good or bad it is. However, if someone is in physical, mental, or emotional pain from their situation, they are much more likely to take action, take risks, and work towards seemingly crazy goals. It is this pain that drives people to succeed.
This is one of the reasons why I believe many people get rich. They get so freaking sick of their life situations that they have to go against what has been ground into their heads their entire lives. They cannot bear continuing life the way it is. Then, once they find out how to make money, they can’t bear not making more. Like I stated before, the richest people I know personally with net worths ranging from $50 to $600 million have all been bankrupt or homeless at one point. Extremes such as this compel us to ignore everything that we have been told our entire lives and force us to take drastic action to escape.
The belief that I could make more money if I worked hard at my business lingered in my head. All the success I had up to that point proved it. So, when I desired more money, I could not simply let myself believe that staying in my comfort zone was the right thing to do. I knew that staying in my comfort zone and not changing my daily actions would result in my income also not changing. Because of this, I soon started to resent the long, traffic-filled drive to work. Actually, I despised it. I will not cuss much in this book, but I fucking hate rush-hour traffic. Hence my use of the term “traffic fighters” to refer to people stuck in jobs and lifestyles that they hate.
Because of the pain I had in my life, I was inspired to take massive action. In fact, taking that amount of action was pretty easy because I saw no other option. Because of the action, I gained beliefs that pushed me again to go further.
In fact, if you are not already creating a successful business or changing your life in some drastic way, then you are most likely reading this book because you want some way to become wealthy without taking a single risk. Everyone does, and that’s part of the problem of which I am going to cure you. In fact, taking risks is one of the core beliefs you need to adopt.
Let me tell you right now: to become rich, you will have to take risks.
Let me repeat that in another way. You must take risks to be successful.
These must be smart and thought-out risks.Haven’t you ever heard of “high risk, high reward? That also equates to low risk, low reward, which is probably the world you’re living in right now.
In short, my friend, not only is getting rich slowly a high-risk plan for financial ruin, it also substantially lowers your quality of life until the day you die.
You need to understand one thing. Getting rich quickly is extremely low risk for one and only one reason. YOU CONTROL EVERYTHING.
Your mind, what you learn, how hard you work, and everything you do directly controls how much money you make.
You control your life. You can get better at anything. You are allowed to fail.
Money can buy just about anything, but the most important thing it can buy is freedom from financial stress. To this day, my lifestyle costs only a fortieth of my monthly income, and every month I put away enough money to last me for years. I have cool toys and go on fun adventures, but more importantly, I have zero financial stress in my life.
When you play the get-rich-slowly game, your choices are instantly limited. You take vacations when you are allowed to. You have to wake up at a certain time to go to work and do your job. You can’t just randomly take a week off and go on a road trip with your wife and kids. You do not control your choices; your boss and your job and your responsibilities control your choices.
When you live life in a get-rich-slowly fashion, you: Are extremely likely to be put in financial hardship. Give up control of your financial future (a.k.a. risks you cannot control). Let 71 percent of your young life be monopolized by work. Lose any chance of obtaining your dream life. Live your entire life under financial stress. Can’t make your own choices because they are solely based around money and time.
On the other hand, when you live life in get-rich-quickly mode, you: Control your financial future (the opposite of bad risk). Spend your time doing what you want. Have a real chance of getting all (or at least most) of the luxuries you want.
Have a chance to escape financial stress. Can make your own choices because they are based around what makes you happy.
Being poor is only temporary when you control the outcome. These entrepreneurs are giving up a few years of semi-comfortable living while working on their businesses in order to spend the rest of their years in getting-rich-quickly paradise.
Major key to getting rich is removing time from the equation. What exactly does this look like for you? Let me explain.
There is only one thing you have a finite amount of in a day: time. Donald Trump has the same amount of time as a man living on the street. And no matter who you are, you have twenty-four hours every single day to eat, sleep, work, exercise, learn a new skill, spend time with your family, sit around in traffic, binge-watch on Netflix, worry, procrastinate, and work toward a goal. Because of this, there is a cap to the amount of work one person can do, and in effect, the amount of money that he or she will make. This leaves us with two choices.
CHOICE 1: INCREASE THE VALUE OF OUR TIME
Now, the problem with this mindset is that in order for your time to be worth an insane amount of money, you have to be AMAZING at what you do. And, even if you’re the best painter in your town or the best accountant in your state, other people decide what your time is worth
First, being amazing is hard and many times out of our control. To be the best at something, you have to be incredibly talented and smart. Most of us are not incredibly talented and have an average IQ. We are genetically disqualified at birth. Your chances of becoming famous or becoming so exceptional at something to the point that your time is worth as much as LeBron James’s time are slim at best.
On top of that, no matter what we do, we can never generate more time, so our personal income as a solo worker is not scalable, so we cannot grow it as much as we want to. If we still think that time equals money, getting rich quickly would be quite challenging. Luckily, we have another choice.
CHOICE 2: COMPLETELY SEPARATE TIME FROM INCOME
However, I doubt we would be talking about him right now if he didn’t expand his business and spread this knowledge past his own
Even with an amazing sales pitch, if Jordan Belfort had kept himself to a one-man business, he would not have become so wealthy. It’s as simple as that. This is because there are only so many phone calls he could make in a day and only so many clients he could manage by himself without help.
In fact, he was only making around $70,000 a month when he was working as a one-man unit. This quickly multiplied to millions a month when he changed his business model to include more people (or, more accurately, cloned himself hundreds of times by passing his sales pitch on to them). Because of this, when we want to get rich quickly, the first step is setting up a business in which we can separate our time from money. Instead of trying to increase the value of our time like many people do, we need to spend our time creating a machine like Jordan that generates income regardless of our time.
Instead of spending our time working, we should spend our time creating systems that do the work for us. This term is often referred to as passive income. Passive income is income that our machine generates once it is built and is completely separated from our time. In short, this means you will be generating money even if you’re blackout drunk at a rock concert. Pretty cool idea, right? Here’s an example.
In fact, if I sell one hundred units or one million units, the difference in my time is very little. This is what enables me to sell an unlimited amount of units and generate virtually an unlimited amount of income. If my business required me to deal with every single customer, there is no way I could obtain such a high level of wealth because my time is capped, so the amount of people I could help is capped, which means my income would be capped.
When you start your first business, the value of your time will be extremely low . . . unless you are a recognized expert in some field. As you make more money, the value for your time will probably go up due to your expertise in generating money.
Because of this, you need to find a process that works and then clone yourself as fast as possible so this process can be repeated time and time again, whether you’re personally involved or not (just like Jordan Belfort and I did).
If you think of potential business, you need to ask the following questions before you dive in: Can this business make money while I am not present? Can this moneymaking process be done by others or automated by machines? If this business becomes successful, could I train someone else to run it? Would it be possible to make the process of delivering on $100 in sales the same as delivering on $1 million in sales? Can I scale this business without having to increase my time involvement?
The key is to always create businesses that are moving towards a time-free business. The questions above will allow you to do this.
What you need to realize is that as a business owner (in almost all cases), intelligently spending substantial chunks of your earnings to grow your business almost always increases your overall profit. It is far better to have a profit margin of 30 percent on a business that can be scaled to $10 million a year and sold for tens of millions of dollars than to have 100 percent of an unsellable business that is plateauing at $200,000 a year.
IT’S TIME TO TAKE BACK YOUR TIME
Time is the only thing you can never generate more of, and every human has the exact same amount of in a day. To become wealthy, you have to learn how to generate more time by hiring people (and/or building machines), using their time as your own, and using your time to grow the business. If you look at the most profitable businesses in the world, the owner’s time is usually so separated that he does not even have to be there.
If you don’t separate your time from your income, it will be nearly impossible for you to become as wealthy as you desire. Keep this in mind so you can keep your time.
Building your business must be your number-one priority in life for you to actually succeed. If it’s not your number-one priority, that’s okay. But you have to accept the fact that it is very unlikely that you will become a multimillionaire. Instead of making excuses all the time, just admit to yourself that family or comfort or being lazy or living a “normal” life are bigger priorities than becoming wealthy.
you will not succeed if you do not believe you will succeed. If you think you will win the race, you are likely to win it.
If you think there is no chance in hell that you will win the race, I can guarantee you that you will not win unless the other ninety-nine cars get struck by lightning at the same exact time.
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. Just by attempting this, you are going to have to accept the fact that you must not just be good, you must be incredible. If you think differently, then you are done before you even get started. If you are part of the 99 percent and never change your belief system, all this book will be is amusing, wishful toilet reading.
I know that I am extraordinarily good at what I do and that I’m better at making money than 99 percent of people in this world. I can think quicker, move faster, and bring better ideas to my market than almost any human being I’ve ever met.
The belief that you are great, and accepting the fact that you must be great, is the third pillar. In fact, if you only remember one pillar from this whole book, make sure it’s this one.
Every day, I turn on the TV and see average (or below average) people getting rich with average ideas. The only thing that separates them from other average people is the belief that they can do it. It happens all the time.
So, how do you get the result of incredible wealth? You create a business that is better than 99 percent of other businesses. And how do you create a great and successful business? The answer: You believe and accept the fact that you have to be great.
However, this is where the power of accepting the necessity of greatness comes in. When you are feeling this way, simply step back and tell yourself that you are going to have to become great. Accept the fact that you are going to have to work hard and become really fucking good at whatever niche you choose. Once you accept this, it becomes very clear what you need to do. All you have to do is whatever it takes to become great (yes, it’s that easy).
If you spend ten years trying to master making money, it’s almost impossible for you to not become an excellent businessperson.
Com is one of the most ambitious and driven people I know, but we can safely assume that Com did not have what it took (at the time) to overcome the obstacles that he faced. Com’s first eight businesses went bankrupt and caused him severe financial hardship. Because he understood and accepted the fact that he would have to become great to overcome his hurdles, he just kept moving forward.
The point is that Com was not great. In fact, in the real world, he was seen as a complete failure. But he kept working and learning and pushing year after year, failure after failure, because he accepted the difficulty of becoming great and kept ultimate faith in himself that he would become successful. It took him a while, but he got there despite all the disadvantages he dealt with.
Heck, most people don’t even need to reach failure to give up on their dreams.
He hit it eight times and still didn’t give up! This is how powerful this pillar is in a person’s life. Now, with just this pillar, you can become immensely rich, but blind faith in yourself without the other pillars to support you will almost always lead to losing your wealth. So, do not confuse taking blind risks with embracing this pillar. In order to truly become successful, you have to embrace this pillar with all your being while remembering the others. On top of this, when you combine this pillar with the others, you can become wealthy without taking blind risks, because you will understand how money works. Once you learn about money and business, these risks will actually become opportunities.
I constantly meet entrepreneurs that are making $10,000 to $15,000 a month in profit. Yes, this is decent money, but they cannot figure out how to make more. The reason for this is because they simply refuse to evolve. They will ask how they can get a business like mine or someone else’s at my level. They are looking for some tactic or secret that will allow them to remain average but let them make money as if they were great. The true answer to this question is, “You have to be great to have a business like mine.” You need to put an extreme amount of time and investment into: Improving your brand. Improving your marketing. Improving your product. Improving every single thing you do.
Again, this mindset is not for a broke newcomer to business. This is for someone who already has some money but wants to make a lot of money. Your issue will almost always be sitting in your comfort zone and refusing to be the absolute best at what you do. If you simply sit down and admit to yourself that you need to be the best regardless of the investment or time involved, you will have a hard time staying in that comfort zone.
To be the best, you have to make investments and beat other business owners. This takes time, money, and doing things other business owners will not. Accept that fact and execute it no matter how uncomfortable it makes you. Then, becoming great will be inevitable.
The only major hindrance is that actions are controlled by beliefs. The belief that you are great will result in great actions. The belief that you are average will result in average actions.
This is an undeniable fact from which you cannot escape. This is why this pillar of wealth is so essential. There can be no great actions without great thoughts. Even if you have everything in the world going for you, without the proper actions you will never win the race of wealth.
KNOWING EVERY LITTLE THING IS 100% YOUR FAULT
In order to generate wealth, you have to control wealth. And in order to control it, you have to take as much control of it from other people and factors as you can. The more responsibility you accept, the more control you have over your business.
Let me repeat that again. In business, no matter whose “fault” it is, you will be the one who pays the price. The only way to prevent this is by always pointing the finger at yourself so you think about ways to take control away from other people or variables. So, think about it. Where do you want the responsibility for fault (a.k.a. control) to be? Do you want your employee, the economy, or whatever other random factor to ruin your future and also get the blame? Wouldn’t you rather accept responsibility for factors that are someone else’s fault and fix them before they ruin something you value?
The true fault lies with me. I have accepted the mindset that every single thing in my business is my responsibility
The cold, hard truth is that no person or factor cares if you become rich or not. They do not give two shits about your level of income, as long as they are receiving a paycheck from you every two weeks.
In fact, without this pillar/factor/belief, a man will always struggle with attracting women, and an entrepreneur will always struggle with making money. What is this pillar/factor/belief? The answer:
The belief in abundance.
Have you ever seen a guy who is amazing with women? The next time you are out, I encourage you to try to locate the few guys at the bar who are constantly talking to attractive women. More so, pay attention to the girls who are laughing and smiling right after a man approaches them. You will notice that these men do not seem nervous at all; they seem aloof, nonchalant, and confident. And most of the time, you will notice that they don’t seem to really care if the girl likes them or not. Don’t get me wrong, these men would prefer it if the girl they were interested in were also interested in them, but they are simply having fun.
So, how is one guy able to act confidently around women while another guy freezes up? It’s simple. The calm and nonchalant guy believes he has abundance. If the girl does not like him, he will find another girl. It’s not really a big deal at all. This thought process allows him to be himself and have fun.
The sad part is that all of this comes down to one simple belief: the nervous guy thinks that there is a finite amount of girls in the world, and the calm guy knows that there is an abundance of women in the world.
The same belief of abundance applies to money and how easily you can make it.
Money is repulsed by people with a scarcity mindset. People who think that making lots of money is confusing, out of their control, and/or nearly impossible because of their situations (a.k.a. excuses) will always have trouble making more of it . . . just like men who think that getting lots of girls to like them is confusing, out of their control, and/or nearly impossible because of their situations (a.k.a. excuses) will always have trouble getting girls.
The second part of this truth is that people who think in abundance will attract money like flies on shit. These are the people who think that the amount of money they can generate is endless and, if they work hard enough, easy to obtain. People like this might have ups and downs reaching wealth, but money will always find them.
This guy has the exact same mind-set as the entrepreneurs you see on TV who failed twenty times yet became millionaires on their twenty-first try.
In wealth, you only need to “get laid” once.
This is the exact same thing as being an educated abundance mind-set entrepreneur. Every entrepreneur I know believes that they can make unlimited money and knows that money is limitless. They also understand how money works and essentially what money likes in a man. My goal is to get you to this point by the end of this book. The point of this chapter is that once you understand all there is to know about money, an abundance mind-set will push you to take the risks needed to make a lot of money. I have friends who can almost always predict the stock market, yet they still work behind a desk. Imagine if they took a risk by quitting their jobs and investing in the stock market? They’d have more money than they knew what to do with. But the simple lack of abundance mind-set is what holds them back.
HOW TO ACHIEVE ABUNDANCE AS A NEWCOMER OF WEALTH
Traffic fighters focus on hoarding every penny that they make so they can spend it later. Smart entrepreneurs focus on spending every dollar they need to so that they can make ten dollars off of each dollar in the future.
Over the past several years, I have worked directly and indirectly with literally thousands of people who are trying to build an online business. Whether I met these people through direct coaching or via large-group coaching on online education platforms, I have always seen an obvious trend. The people who take reckless action are usually the ones who succeed. The people who think too much while trying to get everything perfect on the first try are usually the ones who never succeed. Why? They never move forward because they cannot get it perfect, and eventually quit out of frustration
Perfection paralysis is when you are so focused or worried about getting things right that you never make a move (just like Ben). I want you to imagine a hockey player who is trying to master shooting the puck. He could read every book, watch every video, and join the local hockey club. However, in order for him to make any progress, he has to shoot the damn puck. There are 1,001 things that could go wrong once he shoots, but the only real problem he has at the moment is that he hasn’t even taken a shot (taken a chance, tried, attempted, etc.). Once he takes a shot, problems will naturally spring up. And when a problem appears, he will have a chance to learn from it and correct it. Then, when more problems arise, he will fix those too. Focusing on problems that haven’t happened will increase your stress and possibly even deter you from reaching your goal at all. How many times have you thought of a business but never even started because you thought of all the problems that could arise? “What if we go bankrupt?” “What if no one buys my software?” “What if some celebrity buys my training product and complains about it all over the Internet?”
Most people think that true education and skill are taught by action. While this is true, the best way to learn is not just by taking action, but by making mistakes.
You can read a book on coding, but you won’t become an expert until you actually start writing code. More so, you won’t learn the most important lessons of coding until your first application explodes in your face.
In short, action will almost always lead to mistakes. But, without taking action, you’ll never reach success. Therefore, there is very little chance of reaching success without making mistakes. The biggest lesson I am trying to pound into your heads is that the sooner you make your mistakes, the sooner you will hit your success. When you start any business in which you are not experienced, there is going to be a period of time where it just flat-out sucks.
You have to understand that, as humans, we are much more motivated by avoiding pain than we are by achieving gain. As I mentioned earlier in this book, if your current situation is tolerable, then you probably aren’t going to have a strong motivation to get out of it. This is why many people want to be rich but never become rich because of their what-ifs.
Because these investments were his goals and the thought of not reaching his goals was far more painful than losing it all. In order to push ourselves forward, we have to think the same way.
The only way you are going to get past the fear of failure is if you have a greater fear of not succeeding.
You have to have something that you simply cannot accept living without. If you don’t, it is going to be very hard to move forward. Once you have this list of pains, you need to refer to it often and repeat your goals to yourself as much as possible. You have to stop yourself from becoming comfortable, or you will eventually become so comfortable that you’re completely stuck.
Constructing a plan, an action plan, is actually quite easy. All you have to do is write out every step it will take for you to reach your goal. But before you can write out these action steps, there is one more thing you need to understand: you must define your goal first. You must know exactly what your goal entails and what it means for your entire life. Anyone can say, “I want this” or, “I want to become that,” but very few people can define what their goal truly means in terms of exactly what they want, what it looks like, and what it.
So why is it that so few of these people ever reach their goals? It’s because they know nothing about the details or how to achieve them. All they see is the “success event.” The success event is the moment they’ve made it and have tons of money, thus earning the “good life.” But that’s as specific as they will get. They think, “I’ll have so much money, and I won’t have to work at this crappy job anymore.” That’s it. However, if you ask them any details about that moment or how they could get there, they are clueless. “How much money will you be making? What will you be known for? How long will it take? Who 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?” It’s all one giant question mark.
What you must realize is that the big event is a result of many smaller actions coming together. Those actions are built upon hundreds of daily micro-actions
For example, a man selling his software company for $100 million is not the result of him selling his business. It is the result of him coming up with the idea, spending six months coding the software, hiring the right staff, buying the right advertising, and dozens of other small things. In order to get to the main event, it’s important to identify the event you want (your goal) but even more so to identify the hundreds of little things, because those are what actually make up the event.
I want you to be able to do the exact same thing. In order to become rich, you are going to need a way to get there. So now let’s go over defining and mapping out your goals.
If running is what gets us paid, then running is solely what we focus on.
We do not do anything except run unless it helps us with running faster/more/better and can’t be outsourced like the example above. Everything that can be delegated — such as cooking our food and cleaning our clothes — must be delegated. This is the single easiest way to make as much money as quickly as possible.
What you need to take away from this story is that by identifying the actions that get the highest ROI and solely focusing on them, we can get paid faster and increase our income.
To be as wealthy as you want to be, you must focus on what gets you paid and delegate the rest.
Over the course of whatever the hell you decide to do, people are going to decide whether you are successful or not. The sole factor of how successful you are is how good you are at influencing and controlling other people’s decisions. While you are influencing and controlling other people’s decisions, you will constantly have other people attempting to control your decisions as well. How you react, judge, and influence people is going to be the most important factor of your success.
You must realize that a person who is wealthy is a person who understands people.
This is the power of understanding people and how to push them to do what you want.
You must realize that reaching your goals without being able to control people is impossible.
You cannot become rich by yourself, and at the end of it, other people will have more to do with your wealth than you do.
This is extremely hard to explain, but the biggest lesson I can teach you is that you must start thinking about people and their feelings as the biggest picture. You must think of how you present yourself to them and the emotions that are generated when they think about your brand.
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. If you put that much time and effort into making money, you would have no problem getting rich. In fact, you’d have no problem getting anything you want in life. Unfortunately, this level of obsession is very hard to trigger
Being in a community of like-minded people with the same goal will trigger an obsession to work hard, succeed, and compete (in a friendly way, usually).
by playing WoW and being surrounded by people that play WoW, you will quickly become competitive and feel the need to keep up. This effect cannot only change a person, it can become absolutely addictive and cause the WoW twenty-hour-a-day work effect that I spoke about earlier. As you can guess, this doesn’t happen only in WoW; you will see similar things happen in sports, business, etc. Wealthy people understand this and forcefully take advantage of it. Now, think of all the people you talk to on a regular basis. How many of them own their own businesses? How many are successful? How many are millionaires? How many are multimillionaires?
If you spend time with people who are making a million dollars a year or are working towards becoming rich, you are going to develop a strong urge to do the same. You are going to want to be part of their conversations and be their equal. They are competitive in their niches, so you’ll want to be competitive in your niche. This would be like walking into a room in WoW and finding that everyone is at level 70. In order to be relevant or even noticed, you have to level up. In addition, once you are surrounded by a certain type of person, not only will you become motivated and start to enjoy what they do, you will also naturally grow with them.
It all comes down to this: Make the decision. Make the decision . . . and make the decision. I cannot emphasize this enough. Adopting the mind-sets in this book can make you millions of dollars, but they are useless without the simple decision to actually become rich.
