Principles For Creating Wealth Today – Part 1| 3

Do you want to know the real key to creating cash flow today? Principles first, strategies second!

You’ll hear me say this time and time again. Strategies are useless unless you have the key to making them work. This is where principles come in. If you want to see results happen immediately, then tune in!

—

Listen to the podcast here

Principles For Creating Wealth Today – Part 1

We’re going to get into a great topic, especially after we went into the last topic about how to create more cashflow, how I’ve shown my average client to free up $33,000 a year, and what’s wrong with what’s being taught about financial advising. Especially if you’re an entrepreneur, that advice is perfectly destructive to your business. It hinders you. It does not help you. I’m excited to go deeper into this to show you what the real keys are to make more money and those cashflow secrets work for you. You can have more freedom, more prosperity, and greater ability to be able to produce more value in your business, add value to people’s lives, and be a blessing to other people.

This is going to be a great episode. It’s going to be two parts because it is such a big topic. Honestly, two parts may not be enough. I’m sure we’ll have to revisit this again because it’s not always about strategies. It’s all about who you’re being and how you show up. It’s about the person that you are and how you were able to create that wealth. That is the real key here. It’s about the journey, not about the destination. It’s about who you become in creating the wealth, not about how much money you’re able to accumulate, hoard, and save.

For those of you that maybe missed the last episode, be sure to go back and read that. There’s also a great eBook online on my website, www.MoneyRipples.com. I invite you to go there and check it out. There are also lots of great blogs and things of that nature that you will love. Let’s get started here. This is a big topic. This is a topic that changed my life. This is the same topic that got me to leave being a financial advisor and do more along the lines of what I was doing. Many of you had heard my story in that first episode, Who Is Chris Miles? Let me talk a little bit about what happened to me.

I worked as a financial advisor several years ago. I did that for four years. I learned a lot of good stuff. I learned about real-life situations and how people’s lives were. I realized that a lot of things are not feeling quite right. Maybe you’ve met with a financial advisor before, and you said, “This doesn’t feel quite right. I’m not sure why, but it doesn’t quite sit well with me.”

If you’ve ever felt way before, it’s for a good reason. It’s for the same reason I was having a hard time too. The hardest thing for me was that my pocketbook was tied to the education that I was giving. There are a lot of great well-meaning financial advisors out there that are trying to make a better difference in the world but unfortunately, what they’re teaching isn’t always what real life has shown us works.

I’ll give you an example. Many times we are taught it’s about accumulating, hoarding money, and saving over the long haul. What good does that do if, all of a sudden, you don’t make it to the long haul or something doesn’t quite work out financially, and your long haul becomes longer? The little myths like that are killers. They kill you financially.

I realized this I was looking at people’s financial situations, especially those that have been meeting with financial advisors for the previous several years. Many of them have been meeting with financial advisors since at least the 1980s and some earlier. As I looked at their accounts and I saw what was going on. Those people I inherited their accounts from other financial advisors.

I realized that one thing was common between all of these people. They weren’t even close to becoming financially free. In comparison to what they thought they should have, there was little money in there. It was a lot of over-promising and over-delivering. The reason being is that financial advising is based on strategies, not principles.

Strategy Versus Principle

The key thing you always need to remember is that principle is first, and strategy is second. A strategy and a principle are different. For example, a principle is something that never changes. It’s something that’s always going to be a constant. It’s like the rules of the universe, as some people would call them. It’s the rules of how money always works. It’s an always or never scenario.

A strategy can change with circumstances and time. For example, when someone says, “To pay off your debt as a principle.” That is not a principle. That is a strategy. When people are telling you to pay off your debt, that’s a strategy, not a principle. What if a situation arises where it makes you to the point where you say, “It’s better for me to save a little bit of money than to pay off this debt?” Who’s ever been in that situation before? I’m sure we all have. A big difference is that it’s a strategy, not a principle.

The principle within that about paying off debt, for example, is that many people will say to live within your means, which is true. I’ll even go deeper. The real principle there is that you’re always creating more value than you consume. When people consume more value than they create, they have negative cashflow, they go into debt, and that creates a problem. I agree from that standpoint. That’s a true principle.

However, it doesn’t always mean that the debt is the thing that we need to pay off right now. It’s always the way it has to be. You always have to pay off that debt right away. Those things are going to change the circumstances over time. Make that key distinction because many people will use those two synonymously. They will call things principles, but they’re strategies.

Someone says, “First principle or baby step number one is to save $1,000.” That’s a strategy, not a principle. The principle there would be to have those reserves in case of a rainy day. That is my opinion of that strategy. Even that baby step number one for Dave Ramsey would be a little bit different. It would have to be a higher number, and it could be case by case, depending on the person.

$1,000 probably wouldn’t be a good rule of thumb to use, especially nowadays where $1,000 are nothing. That’s a strategy. That could always change. I mentioned this because many people get caught up in this. If you realize that it is principle first, strategy second, you will start to realize, when I teach about cashflow strategies, why it’s important to make sure that we understand the principles behind it. We’re going to delve deep into these principles. You’ve got to learn these. You got to know them.

Creators Versus Consumers

I’m going to talk first and foremost about what I mentioned. There are creators, and there are consumers. One lives in abundance, and one lives in scarcity. Creators create or live in a world of abundance. They see things from an abundant perspective, while consumers see things from a scarce perspective. When I say consumers, this doesn’t mean people that go and buy things. I don’t mean it from that standpoint. Those usually will consume more value than they create, usually because that perspective is scarcity.

Creators will typically create more than they consume. Some of you already told me that you’d done this. Many of you do that. Maybe create a mental picture in your head. If you’re sitting at a desk or somewhere you can draw, I would recommend that you draw this because there are going to be two distinct differences here between these.

The first thing I’m going to have you draw is a bell curve. It could be a pendulum if you want to do it that way. I use the bell curve to show where all the money is and where it’s not. A bell curve is that thing that looks like a bell. If you look at the top of the bell, it starts out small and the sides. It comes up big in the middle and small on the sides again.

On the one extreme on the left-hand side, I put in spenders and gamblers. They’re on the far extreme on the left-hand side. On the right-hand side, I write in savers and hoarders, those who hoard money. These two extremes over here on the left and the right aren’t both in scarcity. Scarcity is typically a view where you believe there’s not enough. There’s a shortage. It’s usually driven by fear, greed, doubt, or worry.

Typically, in scarcity, things have value, not people. Also, in scarcity, you tend to look at things with the competition. Also on the side, I will write a little line down the middle of another part of the paper, scarcity on the left-hand side and abundance on the right because scarcity is driven by fear, greed, or impatience. A lot of times, the people in business get impatient with things, and they think that they’re being busy or productive, but in reality, they’re not being busy or productive. They’re being scarce. They’re running out of fear, more likely if they’re being impatient.

A lot of times, when you’re impatient with things, think about anything in real life. Whenever you’re impatient, you usually break it, don’t you? Patience is more of the abundance end, and impatient is on the scarce end. In scarcity, things do have value. People are typically looked at it as being competition for things. It’s very much of an either/or type of scenario. “Either I have this, or I have this. I can’t have my cake and eat it, too.” It’s typically in scarcity.

A lot of times, there is selfishness involved. It’s a lot of focusing on yourself, taking care of your own needs, and forgetting about other people around you. It’s usually about how to get value or take value rather than giving value. They also believe that in many cases, when it comes to money and becoming wealthy, maybe these people in scarcity will believe that dollars follow luck. They follow if somehow you exploit somebody, lie, cheat, or steal to get money.

In abundance, that’s the opposite. They believe that the dollars follow luck or exploitation. They believe in limits. They don’t believe that their life has resigned to a certain way. It’s the way it’s got to be. It’s a life of never enough. You can never have enough. It’s a victim mentality.

A lot of times, it’s even an entitled mentality. The entitlement mentality falls in this category. You feel like you’re a victim. There are the circumstances that allow you to not prosper. All of us at some point feel these emotions, don’t we? If you’re a human, you’ve experienced scarcity. It’s impossible not to. Even on a daily basis, at least for a little bit of time. That’s more in scarcity.

A lot of times, spenders and gamblers will do it for various reasons. It is out of fear. Impatience or greed is much the same, especially when you get to the gambler’s perspective. I’ve seen a lot of people gamble money away and think, “Go for it.” They roll the dice, and they wonder why they lost. It didn’t work for them.

Money is meant to be used. It's meant to flow and grow, not sit, accumulate, and stagnate. Click To Tweet

I’ve seen a lot of people with a spender mentality. They spend because they grew up with a parent that was a saver or even a hoarder. They were enjoying life because they were always told as kids, “You can never afford it.” How many of us have heard that growing up? “We can’t afford it. There’s not enough money. We can’t do this because of this, that, or the other.” A lot of the can’t, and the major word is “can’t.”

In scarcity, you tend to end things with periods or exclamation points and create questions about who we create more. It’s not so much from a place of no limits. You get stuck in this scarce perspective. Everything was money. I grew up hearing things like, “Money doesn’t grow on trees. What do you think I am, made of money? We can’t afford this. There’s not enough money. You need to save, and then someday you will be able to have what you want.” All those human experiences show me that you can never save enough to get what you want.

On the flip side, you would see things like, “Keep spending this money because you never know if it’s going to be around tomorrow. Spend it now. Hopefully, it works out, and maybe even gamble a little bit.” That’s a scarce perspective. Spenders and even gamblers will end up being in that perspective, as so savers and hoarders. You know that these things both repel money and wealth.

Savers and hoarders are not willing to spend the money. They want us to keep and hoard it. It’s funny because I get a lot of savers that will say, “I’m a spender.” How do you know that? They will respond, “I had to pay for bills I didn’t want to. I had to spend money on bills.” If you say you’re spending money on bills, that is not being a spender. If you feel guilty about spending money, you probably are a saver at heart. There are some spenders that will feel guilty, but not long enough to change anything.

If savers had a choice, they would not spend money at all. There’s a big difference. Hoarders want to gather and accumulate money. It’s always about accumulation. This is a financial adviser’s dream come true. They’re going to say, “You’re going to accumulate and grow. You’re never going to touch it. You’re only going to live off the interest.” If that, usually they tell you to live off less than the interest.

It’s always about never having enough. You can never save enough. You can never accumulate enough. Even when you do, you think that there’s some number that could make you financially free. You get to that number and don’t feel any freer. You feel still in bondage. You keep going. Many people that are attracted most to messages of financial advisors are typically taught out there is usually the saver or hoarder mentality.

Can you imagine what it would be like if we had a financial expert that was a spender or a gambler? What would that be like to listen to that person? It says, “There’s a great sale going on right now. Go for it. We’re going to have some fun. The real estate market is awesome. Go, blow it. Don’t learn anything about it. Go out and have fun.” It would be so much fun to see somebody who is a spender teaching about money. I wouldn’t listen to the thing they said like I don’t listen to the most hoarder type of mentalities in financial advice, but still, it would be entertaining, to say the least.

Usually, you see people that are “financial experts” as being savers or hoarders. They’re always pointing the finger of condemnation at you. They are always telling you that you can’t spend any money. You should be saving more. It’s your fault. It’s your responsibility. Granted, taking responsibility can be an emotion or a viewpoint of abundance, but it’s different the way they do it.

They’re more placing blame on you, which is more of a scarce perspective. They’re telling you it’s your fault, but you’ve been taking their advice for several decades and wondering why it still hasn’t worked. They’re going to blame you and say, “You haven’t saved enough. You’re spending too much.” Even though inflation is requiring you to do it, you might be living less of a lifestyle than before, but you’re still spending more money. That saver-hoarder mentality, you can never save enough, and it will arrest and conquer your soul. If you keep hoarding like that, it will not do you any good. That’s a scarce perspective.

Let’s get into the abundance perspective, the middle of that little bell curve. We have the spenders and gamblers on the one hand and savers and hoarders on the other. In the middle, where the bulk of the wealth is the steward. You can also coincide these being an investor. I’m not the investor as most people think, which are gamblers, but a steward or an investor. I like to say steward because it’s another S-word, spender, saver, and steward. It’s easy to remember, and also, it gives you a better mental picture, too.

Stewards take the spender and the best of the saver and put them into one person or one perspective. The one thing that spenders do well is that they spend money. They’re willing to use money, and money is meant to be used. Stewards understand that they have a responsibility to use money. That money is meant to be used, not to be accumulated, hoarded, or saved.

At the same time, they’re willing to be wise. They’re not going to going to blow money as spenders do. They’re willing to be wise like the savers are willing to do. These people who are wise stewards understand that money is meant to be used. It’s meant to flow, not stagnate and accumulate or blow in the sense of blowing money. It’s meant to flow and grow, not to sit, accumulate and stagnate.

Stewards come more from an abundance mentality. In scarcity, people will believe that things have value. In abundance, people have value. They understand that the real value doesn’t come from things. Things have no intrinsic value. That’s only value based on what people give it. People are the true source of value. They create real value. They are creators, not consumers. They’re looking more for ways to create and add value because they know that dollars don’t follow luck or exploitation, or even through lying, cheating, or stealing. They follow a formulaic way of creating value for other people. They know that everybody has a self-interest.

Self-interest is not selfishness. Selfishness is when you fail to realize the value that other people have to give you. When you start to look at things having value, you become selfish. When you start to realize that people have value and people aren’t the tool to give you money, those that are consumers like to use people in order to get more money. Those that are creators like to use money as a tool to provide more value for more people.

It’s always about how people have value and how to use that self-interest and understanding self-interests that we all want what’s best for ourselves. As you’ve heard people say for years, like Zig Ziglar and people like that, if you help enough people get what they want, you will get what you want. It’s about that self-interest. It’s about knowing that we all have self-interests.

You might even call it enlightened self-interest because some people have a hard time with the word “self.“ Self has to be there. We all want what’s best for ourselves. We all want to prosper and grow, not at the expense of others, but in the fact that we want to prosper and grow together. In self-interest, you realize that to get what you want, you need to help others get what they want. You have to add value to people’s lives.

The real secret to creating more money is about how you can create more value for more people. How can you keep having not just a strategy but the attitude of adding value to people’s lives? How can you truly add more value so that they’re able to grow and prosper, and as they grow and prosper, they want to reciprocate that value too? My business exists because I know that if I can help someone make at least an extra $15,000 to $20,000 a year in what they’re doing in some cases, even into tens or hundreds of thousands a year, better.

That’s a huge value add. I can sleep at night, knowing that I did a good job for somebody and, at the same time, their lives are prospering, too. The beauty of it is that people’s lives are enriched. They’re better because you’re in the world versus not being in the world. They need to have you. You being in people’s lives is a better thing.

In abundance, there’s self-interest, and you’re trying to help appease those people’s self-interest. It’s about creating and adding value, not taking value from people. It’s about having faith, not fear. It’s about patience, not impatience. It’s not about greed like we talked about in scarcity, but it’s more about self-interest. Understanding that it is about value, not greed. It’s about serving others.

There’s a life of no limits. You don’t look at things from the standpoint of limits. You’re looking at it from the standpoint of what’s possible, not what’s impossible. People will often be referred to as being idealists. Maybe they have more of a pollyannaish type of mentality. Some people even accuse people on abundance of being naive.

The idealist and those that are accused of being naive make the world go round. Many of you here reading this now realize that you might be a bit of an optimist. There’s a difference between being an optimist and being delusional. Oftentimes, there are people that are delusional. They are not living a life of scarcity. They try to be an optimist.

In reality, there’s no power behind their words and thoughts because they don’t believe them. They try to say those words and hope that it will change their mind, and it doesn’t. You can’t change words. It’s got to be something you believe through and through. It’s about being the hero, not the victim. It’s believing that you have full control of your own life and situation and that you have the ability to create prosperity. It’s not something that you’re consigned to. You’re not consigned to a life of poverty, misery, and scarcity, but you have the control, the ability to build and create value, and prosper in your life by helping others prosper, too. That is the beauty of abundance.

Scarcity Or Abundance?

The question is, which one is real, scarcity or abundance? Which one is the reality that we see? The reality is that both of these exist. We both struggle with both of these. We’ll go back and forth between scarcity and abundance. Not everybody is 100% scarcity. Not everybody is 100% in abundance. We will all have scarce thoughts, and we’ll all have abundant thoughts at different times.

The real question is, where do we choose to put our focus attention towards? Where are we choose to put that? That will determine what reality you see and what you end up getting. The people would always tell me that they couldn’t do it and that it is the way it is. Those people end up broke. They’re going to end up impoverished. Even if they have money, they will still feel broke for the rest of their lives. These were savers and hoarders.

To get what you want, you need to help others get what they want. Adding value to people's lives is the real secret to creating more money. Click To Tweet

They might have lots of money but not be prosperous. They won’t be people that feel abundant or feel financially free. In fact, you can never, ever be financially free in scarcity. It’s impossible. There’s no way you can do it. The financial advice given out there is, “It’s impossible to create financial freedom.” There’s no way. Even when people say, “I paid off all my debt. I’m debt-free. I’m financially free,” they’re not.

In many cases, they are a little bit delusional. I hear some people will say, “I’ll wait in 15 years or 7 years, and I’ll pay off that mortgage. I feel so good that I’m financially free.” In reality, they don’t feel financially free. They think they’re on track. Trust me, I’ve had a lot of people say this. Once they get there, they say, “I don’t feel much better. I don’t have all those payments so I would feel good about that. Now, I feel like there’s something else wrong. I’m missing something. I can’t save enough.”

People will oftentimes do things financially out of fear. Are you paying off your loans and your debt out of fear or out of faith? Everybody that teaches you to pay off debt is teaching you how to do it out of fear. When I tell people to pay off debt, I tell them to do it out of respect. Respect it for what it is. That can be a tool for good or bad in your life. You do it more from faith and respect, not fear.

Are you looking when you’re saving money? Are you doing it as a scramble mad dash? Are you avoiding it and saying, “I hope that it will all work out.” Especially if you’re a business owner, you probably feel like, “What I got to do? I got to put money into my business, or do I have to save it? I noticed it to do that. I’m taking money out of business. I can make money there, but what should I do?”

The reality is, why not do both? I’m probably the only financial guy you will hear say, “Put a lot of that money into your business to invest, not into other products.” You’re making more money because of the cashflow coming from your business. That can be stored into those financial products if done from the right perspective and not locked up into some product that keeps you in there for 20, 30, to 40 years. It’s all about how to have more abundance and create that life.

I want to emphasize here as we start to dig deeper into this, how you truly start to talk more from abundance. You had to start thinking that way because you become more abundant. I’m not saying from having more money but becoming more abundant where it leads to more money. I’ll share some experiences next time, where that was the case with me.

It’s a different world. Your world will never be the same. You will start to realize that no matter where you are financially, you have hope rather than doubt or worry. You have this hope knowing that things will get better. I’ll tell you from that scarcity and abundance perspectives. The first thing I want you to do is become aware of which emotion is which, especially when you’re thinking about money, but even about everything in life.

Do you ever tell your family that you don’t have enough time? Do you ever overindulge yourself in eating? Do you ever say, “I wish I had more time to exercise, but I don’t?” In reality, you need to have that. In the next episode, we’ll talk about some real ways to foster that abundance mentality. Part of that is also helping your physical health, too, as well as your mental and spiritual wellbeing. Those have got to be there for the financial to follow.

You can look from that perspective. There are no limits. The possibilities are endless. It’s funny how the times when I have the greatest scarcity, the times where I feel the most defeated, and where I want to give up are usually right before the real blessing or benefit happens. There’s the story about three feet from gold. The miners stopped digging three feet of the richest gold vein in Colorado. That’s true. That can be the case.

Many times, we give up out of scarcity. Many people will quit out of fear and scarcity. It’s a different story of changing directions because you know that you’ve got a better path. You choose a better path. In abundance, people are all about choice. In scarcity, you feel like you’re trapped. You have no choices. I mentioned the either/or mentality. “It’s either this or that. I can’t have both.” You can have both. You can have a wonderful family and prosper financially. It’s not about being unhappy and rich or having no family, divorcing, and being riched. It’s not about that. You can have both, and there’s plenty of evidence of proof out there.

You start looking from the standpoint of abundance, not scarcity. First, identify which feeling is which. From there, start to look for evidence of how abundance has shown up. When you start to look for evidence, you will notice that it’s true. It is there. I’m here to tell you that the world is abundant and prosperous. You have every chance like anybody else to prosper. You have as much time and resources available to you to create that. I’m here to teach you how to truly create abundance, not only about cashflow but truly how to be a prosperous, abundant person to truly love their life. Go out and make it a prosperous and abundant day.

Important Links

• last episode
• Who Is Chris Miles – first episode
• eBook
• www.MoneyRipples.com
• Bankrate.com