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Why You Need Multiple Streams Of Income

Most people focus on one source of income then scramble like a chicken with it’s head cut off when that’s taken away from them until they find another, and then the cycle is repeated until death. Few have sat back and thought “Does it have to be this way?” the answer is no and smart business men understand that relying on any one thing too much will be the death of you. Relying on one job even with a “good employer” or working for a “good company” still puts you at risk if you’re not doing everything possible to prepare for if they ever drop you for whatever reason.

The same holds true for those who run their own businesses. If you’ve invested everything into one thing then if that one thing goes down you go down with it. You have to have multiple things to rely on and help you. Let’s say your a farmer back at the dawn of the agricultural age. You had chickens, goats, cows, and five fields of grain. One year a bad drought kills all the grain but you’re alright because you eat some of the chickens. The next your land is overrun with wolves that kill off much of the livestock and eat all the chickens. But you’re good because you rebuilt the grains and even expanded to potatoes. You get the idea.

Now this doesn’t mean you should hop from place to place chasing after every shiny object you see. Rather it means that once you get one thing going you then work on the others. Once you get a nice cash flow from one place say your job that you go to Monday through Friday and get a salary from you then start doing something on the side. Maybe you write kindle books, maybe you do affiliate marketing, maybe you make YouTube videos that are supported by donations. Point is you’re doing something else so that should you lose your main job you won’t be going without food even if things get a little tight for awhile.

The Bucket, The Pipelines, & Your Wealth

Let’s say money is water and that pipelines are businesses and a leaky bucket is your life. Now let’s say that you have one medium sized pipeline that goes into your bucket. Your bucket like everyone else’s has leaks in it. Some have more leaks then others but we all have them. These are our expenses. Some learn to patch up the leaks as much as they can while others bust out new holes like their life depended on it. Now let’s say that the pipeline flowing in allows for enough water for the bucket to not go empty. It goes out just about as fast as it goes in but it’s still enough to make sure the bucket stays wet and never goes completely dry.

What you need to do then is build up more pipelines to flow into your bucket and then buildup the pipelines you already have making them bigger. You want water gushing in from all sides. You want your pipelines to look like Niagara Falls. You want there to be so much water gushing in that it starts to expand your bucket because it just can’t fit it all in. You do this through building more pipelines that lead to your bucket in case any one source dries up and then once you have a good number of pipelines building them up as much as they can be built up. This is something that should always be done. While the beginning is certainly the hardest there is never a time when you stop building pipelines or making existing ones bigger.

Drilling For Oil

In addition to building up multiple revenue sources you also have to understand that not all of them are going to give you what you want. However they don’t all have to. We’ll use publishing kindle books as an example. Let’s say for the sake of example you publish one hundred kindle books. Twenty of those books are probably going to make you eighty percent of your money. This is fine and here’s why. Despite all the market research and everything else that you can do you don’t know which twenty those will be and without writing one hundred would have never known. So you just keep producing making your own luck and the law of averages work in your favor.

It’s like drilling for oil. You don’t know what’s going to be completely dry and what’s going to gush like crazy. All you know is that you need to keep drilling. You need to keep taking action to see what’s going to give you what you want. It’s usually much different from what you thought it would be starting out. And you never would have made it if you stopped taking action. Who would’ve known that one hundredth hole was the one that would make us all millionaires. All you know is you have to keep drilling for oil until you hit. And then keep drilling until you hit again. You don’t know which one of your pipelines (streams of income) is going to gush water like a waterfall and which is going to dribble it in like a faucet that was recently turned off. The point is to just keep trying until you hit then repeating the cycle.

Summary

Alright so I jumped around a little here but there are two main points that I want you to takeaway from this. First off you can’t rely on one source of income and should be building multiple pipelines and then making those pipelines as big as possible. And secondly you don’t know which revenue streams or ideas are going to be the ones that bring you big money. Keep going, keep implementing, keep learning, and keep experimenting and you’ll get there. Often in surprising ways. Remember these principles for financial success.

If you have any questions you would like to see answered in a future post send them to me at charlessledge001 (at) gmail (dot) com. If you found value in this post then I would encourage you to share this site with someone who may need it as well as check out my books here. I appreciate it. You can follow me on Twitter here.

-Charles Sledge

Charles Sledge

4 Comments

  1. I agree. And 24 hours in a day, 9 hours for sleep, 9 five days a week for the mortgage paying job… Why that leaves 60 hours a week to figure out the other streams.
    Or you can just bitch and watch Netflix.

  2. This is something I’ve been working on in my spare time. I’m currently working on a book, thinking about a second book after the first one is done, humoring the idea of animal breeding down the road, and am working towards converting my 1/3 acre lot into a miniature homestead to reduce current expenses.
    Every edge you can give yourself adds up.

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