🤑 Seven Rules to Live By for Making Money and Achieving Financial Freedom
Are you tired of all the get-rich-quick schemes out there? Do you want to learn how to make money and achieve financial freedom the right way? Look no further than these seven rules to live by. These principles have transformed my life and the lives of thousands of entrepreneurs that I have personally mentored in my online courses.
Rule 1: Making Money Takes Time
The first rule of making money, especially with a business, is that it's going to take some time. By time, I mean over a year at least. If you see any video or guru out there that tells you it's going to happen sooner, it's a lie. Not only that, but the income is definitely not going to be passive either, at least not in the beginning.
Take my online store as an example. We launched our handkerchief store in 2007 and we managed to make over 100k in profit in our first year. But what I rarely mention is that the bulk of that six figures actually came towards the end of the first year. In the beginning, it was crickets. We weren't making any sales and I started doubting whether starting a handkerchief store was even a good idea.
Stuff just takes time to develop and for you to learn. Now, if you follow some get-rich-quick dude that tells you that you're going to make money in 3 months, well then guess what? Three months will pass, you won't be making any money, and you'll give up. So, it's important to be mentally prepared to stick it out for at least a year, preferably three to five years.
Rule 2: It's All About Relationships
The second rule of making money is that it's all about the relationships. You cannot make money or build a successful business in a vacuum, and you must surround yourself with people who are as smart or smarter than you are.
For example, my online store over at bumblebeelinen.com almost never launched, and it only happened because a friend of mine started his own online store and offered to give me some help. Back in 2007, there was no Shopify, no Amazon, no Big Commerce, and I was terrified to get started because you had to implement everything yourself. There were just too many unknowns, and I was intimidated by the process.
But because my buddy introduced me to open-source software, I was able to get my online store up and running in a week. Early on in the life of my online store, we also had major quality control problems. The stuff that we were getting shipped from China often had a defect rate of over 30%. But then we visited our vendors face to face in China, and after meeting in person and getting to know each other better, our product quality miraculously improved, and today our suppliers are our friends and look out for our business.
Success in business is more about who you know, even more so than the product itself. So, get your butt out of your chair and start attending more live events. I met almost everyone I know in the business space by going to conferences, including my business partner Tony. By the way, if you ever want to hang out in person, come to my annual e-commerce conference, the Seller Summit.
Rule 3: Live Frugally and Accumulate Wealth
The next rule of making money is to live frugally and accumulate as much wealth as you can. You've probably heard me say this before, but I have a mantra that I live by: I optimize my life for sleeping better at night.
What does this mean exactly? It means that I purposely try to avoid excessive stress or anything that will cause me to lose sleep. I don't take excessive risks, I don't spend more than I earn, and I like to see a bank account full of money just in case of emergencies.
By spending much less than you earn, it effectively makes your runway from making money in business infinitely long. It allows you to make sound business decisions irrespective of the money. The other day, a subscriber emailed me to ask me why I don't start a million e-commerce businesses and just blow things up.
My reply was, "Why the hell would I want to do that? I already make way more than I can spend, and I have better things to do with my time."
Rule 4: Know Your Goals for the Money
The next rule of making money is that you have to decide ahead of time why you want more money in the first place. Most people want to make money in order to achieve financial freedom. They want to make enough to do whatever they want to do and to hang out with whoever they want to hang out with whenever they want.
So, back to the question of why don't I start a zillion e-commerce businesses or scale my existing ones? I intentionally do not try to grow my businesses as quickly as I can because I already have what I want and need. Plus, it really sucks to grow any business quickly, and it's crazy stressful as well.
The goal for all my businesses has been to spend more time with family and to pursue whatever projects that I want to pursue. And at this point in my life, more money would have diminishing returns on my happiness. Plus, I don't want to deal with any employees. I just want to silently collect money and make sure my kids grow up to be good citizens in this world.
Rule 5: Leverage Your Time, Expertise, or Existing Pot of Money
The next rule of making money is that you have to learn how to either leverage your time, expertise, or your existing pot of money to make you even more money.
For example, a subscriber once approached me and asked how I'm able to create so much content online. Even though I post a YouTube video, multiple blog posts, podcasts, and short-form videos every week, it all comes from the same exact source. A single blog post is converted into a YouTube video, a podcast, multiple short-form videos, and tweets.
Recently, my wife and I purchased a DTF printer, which allows us to print any design on all of our products that we sell in our online store. And just last week, I listed our first custom products in our shop and got our first set of orders. Offering any personalized product with custom text is always an extremely tedious process. Someone has to grab the personalization from the website and manually create a graphical image to be printed.
But because my superpower is automation, I wrote a script that takes the design from the website from all the orders for the day, automatically does the personalization, and lays out all the designs in Photoshop at the push of a button. So, a computer does all the heavy lifting. We just have to be living in an amazing age of AI right now, and if you haven't already, I highly recommend that you learn more about AI and how to use it to amplify your work. You need to automate and systematize as much of your work as possible.
Rule 6: Perseverance and Tolerance for Pain
The next rule will probably be very encouraging for most of you watching this video, and it's important. Success in business is more about perseverance and tolerance for pain than anything else. If you can literally outlast your competition, then you will be successful 100% of the time.
When I first started my blog over at mywifequitherjob.com back in 2009, I was not the most successful blogger by any measure. Every day, I'd read success stories from other bloggers who were killing it online, and I constantly felt like I was doing something wrong. But instead of paying attention to my competitors, I just put my head down and told myself that I was going to write one blog post per week for the rest of my life.
Today, I look at some of the early blogs that I used to compare myself to, and they are no longer around. Meanwhile, my slow and steady pace has allowed me to become a successful blogger for over 14 years now, and it generates me over $1 million in profit every single year. It's all about persistence and your ability to not give up. Everyone learns on the job, and you shouldn't expect to know everything when you first start.
Rule 7: Your Day Job Will Probably Never Lead to Financial Freedom
The final rule of making money is that your day job will probably never lead to financial freedom, at least not the type that you were seeking. Back when I worked a traditional 9-to-5, I actually loved my job, and I made multiple six figures as an engineering director. We could afford to go on vacations, and I could buy whatever gadget that I wanted to buy.
But the problem was that I had to be at the office all day long, which kept me away from my family. I've also lived through three separate downturns now where I saw my friends and colleagues lose their jobs overnight. I remember back during the dot-com bust, one of my friends had to pull her daughter out of private school because she got laid off and couldn't afford it anymore.
A steady paycheck is only steady until it is not. Meanwhile, a business that you own and run will always provide you with more freedom. Some people advise that you should focus all of your efforts towards a single business and blow it up. Others will advise you to amass multiple streams of income.
But for me, as I mentioned before, I always optimize for sleeping at night, and I prefer to diversify. If one of my streams goes down, at least I have others to make up for it. Now that you know my money rules, watch this video here to learn more about the multiple streams of income that net me millions.
🎉 Highlights
- Making money takes time, and it's important to be mentally prepared to stick it out for at least a year, preferably three to five years.
- Success in business is more about who you know, even more so than the product itself. Attend more live events and surround yourself with people who are as smart or smarter than you are.
- Live frugally and accumulate as much wealth as you can. Spend much less than you earn, and it effectively makes your runway from making money in business infinitely long.
- Learn how to leverage your time, expertise, or your existing pot of money to make you even more money. Automate and systematize as much of your work as possible.
- Success in business is more about perseverance and tolerance for pain than anything else. If you can literally outlast your competition, then you will be successful 100% of the time.
- Your day job will probably never lead to financial freedom, at least not the type that you were seeking. A business that you own and run will always provide you with more freedom.
❓ FAQ
Q: How long does it take to make money with a business?
A: It's going to take some time, at least over a year. If you see any video or guru out there that tells you it's going to happen sooner, it's a lie.
Q: What's the most important rule of making money?
A: The most important rule is to learn how to either leverage your time, expertise, or your existing pot of money to make you even more money.
Q: Can you make money with a day job?
A: A steady paycheck is only steady until it is not. Meanwhile, a business that you own and run will always provide you with more freedom.
🌐 Resources
- Bumblebee Linens: https://www.bumblebeelinens.com/
- My Wife Quit Her Job: https://mywifequitherjob.com/
- The Seller Summit: https://sellersummit.com/
