Chapter Eight: Getting Started
be careful what you learn, because your mind is so powerful that you
become what you put in your head. For example, if you study cooking,
you then tend to cook. If you don’t want to be a cook anymore, then
you need to study something else.
When it comes to money, the masses generally have one basic
formula they learned in school and it’s this: Work for money. The
predominant formula I see in the world is that every day millions of
people get up, go to work, earn money, pay bills, balance checkbooks,
buy some mutual funds, and go back to work. That is the basic
formula, or recipe.
If you’re tired of what you’re doing, or you’re not making enough,
it’s simply a case of changing the formula via which you make money.
Years ago, when I was 26, I took a weekend class called “How to
Buy Real Estate Foreclosures.” I learned a formula. The next trick was
to have the discipline to actually put into action what I had learned.
That is where most people stop. For three years, while working for
Xerox, I spent my spare time learning to master the art of buying
foreclosures. I’ve made several million dollars using that formula.
So after I mastered that formula, I went in search of other formulas.
For many of the classes, I did not directly use the information I learned,
but I always learned something new.
I have attended classes designed for derivative traders, commodity
option traders, and chaologists. I was way out of my league, being in a
room full of people with doctorates in nuclear physics and space science.
Yet, I learned a lot that made my stock and real estate investing more
meaningful and lucrative.
Most junior colleges and community colleges have classes on
financial planning and buying traditional investments. They are good
places to start, but I always search for a faster formula. That is why,
on a fairly regular basis, I make more in a day than many people will
make in their lifetime.
Another side note: In today’s fast-changing world, it’s not so much
what you know anymore that counts, because often what you know is
old. It is how fast you learn. That skill is priceless. It’s priceless in
finding faster formulas—recipes, if you will—for making dough.
Working hard for money is an old formula born in the day of cavemen.