I have never met someone who doesn’t want have financial independence where they don’t have to worry about money for the rest of their lives. We may not all want to be billionaires, bu we certainly all want to be wealthy enough that we don’t have to worry about money. Many of us even want to be wealthier than we will need for our own personal and family needs so that we can give money away to help others in need.
I personally believe that anyone who is healthy and willing to work hard has been given the power to create wealth. The rest is up to our choice to pursue wealth creation and our ability to prepare ourselves to be able to accomplish that goal.Wealth creation starts with what I call the wealth creation mindset. This is a growth mindset that believes in the nobility of wealth creation and sees a noble purpose and calling to pursue the kind of value creation and addition to people’s lives that produces wealth.
Understanding the following principles will make it easier for you to become a wealth creator.
Spirit: The Spirit of Wealth Creation
Wealth creation starts with being (character)–with who we are at the level of our spirit (i.e. our heart/will). Just as we speak out of the abundance of our hearts, we create (wealth or anything else) out of the abundance of our hearts. Creation is the visual representation of an invisible inner creation or state. Who we are on the inside is expressed in our creation. Our inner invisible character is made visible through our creation. What we create is a reflection of who we are on the inside.
Before you become a millionaire on the outside, you must first become a millionaire on the inside. Before you create a million dollars on the outside, you must first create in on the inside.
One of the greatest hindrances to wealth creation for many of us is that we have been fed from childhood that money is bad, creating wealth is bad. As such, at the subconscious level, we believe that and so aren’t motivated to pursue wealth creation. Sometimes in churches and houses of worship, we are taught to see money as bad. We cannot create wealth if deep inside we think wealth is a bad thing, not something to be desired. That’s why it’s important to renew our hearts, to consume to material that helps us change those erroneous beliefs about wealth.
To be effective at wealth creation, you must be convinced at the depths of your heart and passionately believe that creating wealth is good, noble, and righteous.
The purpose of doing business is very important. Your main purpose must be to add value. It is okay to have a secondary purpose, to make money, which will allow you to continue to achieve your primary purpose of adding value to people. Because of these principles, when I use the phrase “make money” or “do business”, I actually like to mean add value. I think our general thinking in that area is a little off. I would like to hear people pay more emphasis on “adding value to people” and then paying just enough emphasis on making money.
Mind: The Wealth Creation Mindset
Anyone who will create wealth must develop a new mindset or new paradigm — the wealth creation mindset — a new way to think and talk about wealth creation. They must also have a growth mindset (not a fixed mindset) that perceives everything as possible for them and nothing as impossible. They must know from deep inside that if they don’t understand something at first, they can work hard, learn, and be able to do it excellently. That can-do spirit is crucial for wealth creation.
As mentioned above, many of us are unsuccessful at wealth creation because our wrong beliefs have created in us a wrong mindset or paradigm through which we see the world and approach well creation. We have to change all of that to make it easy for us to create wealth.
Body: You must prepare your body for wealth creation
This is where discipline, education, and training are crucial. To prepare yourself for wealth creation, you need to Know yourself and build on your core strengths and competencies. Each of us has passions, gifts, talents, a certain personality, and experiences. The easiest way to create wealth is to discover and build on our passions and strengths. You must develop your talents and gifts to allow you to use them to effectively create wealth. Like a boxer preparing for a serious fight, we must be willing to beat our bodies, strictly discipline them, and make them our slaves to do what we want–that is to achieve the success of wealth creation we envision.
Social: You must cultivate good social relationships
Relationships are crucial in wealth creation. No one can create wealth alone. John Maxwell says it this way, “one is too small a number to achieve greatness.” To create wealth, you have to build relationships. You have to grow your network and become connected.
Understand Money
- Money is a medium of exchange of VALUE. In the days of trade by barter, one person did something of value to another person who in turn did something of value to them. The right thing was an equal exchange of value in whatever was done. In time, that evolved through many intermediaries to the money we have today. When a person gives you their money, they are giving you a certain equivalence of value; they expect to receive an equivalent amount of value from you. Receiving a person’s money and giving no value or less value than their money is worth amounts to stealing value from them. So all business people (and anyone who makes money in whatever way) ought to seek to provide as much value as they can possibly give and still remain viable in business in exchange for the money that they get so that they end up giving those who come to buy from them greater value than they receive. A business should be a way to transform people’s lives, not to take money from them.
- Money is a means to an end, not the end. The end is VALUE added to people’s lives. A business should exist not to make money but to add value to people’s lives. Making money and staying profitable is how they remain viable to continue to add that value.
- Money is the reward for solving a problem. Money is the reward you get from solving a problem that enhances people’s quality of life, adds value to their lives to such a degree that they are happy to give you their hard-earned money to reward you for helping them. The greater the felt needs that are met by solving the problem, the greater the reward that people are willing to give you. So if a person doesn’t have money, the solution to that is to find a problem to solve that will be rewarded with money. If you solve a problem that is really affecting many people, they will reward you with money. If you focus on getting money from them, you will not focus on solving their problem and as such you will get no reward. At best, you will trick them with good ads and rob them of their value. Smart people actually do research not only to find a problem people have but also make sure they are willing to pay enough money to make it possible for the entrepreneur to build a business proving that value. It’s not every problem that people have that they are willing to pay to get rid of. They are willing to live with some problems.
- You don’t pursue money, you work hard to solve a problem that bothers people so much that they are willing to pay you money to solve it. To do that, you have to pursue excellence in value creation but not the perfectionism that will make it hard to get anything completed.
- It is good to make money when your motive is first to add value to a person’s life.   Life is about using our talents and gifts and passions to transform other lives. Those who do that well have a right to be rewarded for the value they add to others lives with money.
You must market and sell well
You must love and become good at marketing and sales. You cannot make money if you don’t sell something. You can own money in several ways: You can 1) Accept a donation or gift. 2) You can sell your skills (services) or products for it, 3) You can steal or extort people of it 4) You can do what Jesus Christ did in the Bible. Miracle. You can go catch a fish, open the mouth and viola, there is money! If you are employed anywhere (physician, nurse, manager, teacher, builder etc), you are selling something to make your money. The something you are selling is yourself. You sell yourself every day and that’s how you earn money. Other people who own businesses sell themselves and their products and services to clients to make money. Even money that you get via donations or gifts often come when you have something to “sell”, some value that you provide for the donor—this value may just be satisfaction for them that comes from their giving. I used to hate people who did business online thinking they were trying to sell something to me. While I still don’t like the overly aggressive sales people, I have come to understand that we all sell something if we have to earn money. The difference is just what we sell and how we sell it. For any business to succeed, you must be able to make a great product, sell it, and manage the money. You need three different people doing these three functions full time. However, the most important of them is sales. If you are going to create wealth, you have to learn to market and sell. You may not be the best and would still need a more competent person leading that role when you can afford it, but you have to be able to market and sell the product you make.
You must endure, adapt, and change
You will need to be consistent and persistent to successfully create wealth. Work hard, never retire. In addition to endurance, we must be able to adapt well to change. Have a character that is as solid as the rock but learn to embrace change and take advantage of change.
