Health.
Wealth.
Relationships.
These three facets of life cover just about everything there is in a man’s life, not everything, but close to it. Get your bases covered with these and you’ll have it made…for the most part. I’ve written a lot about each of these. Plenty of men have, and plenty have offered good advice. However I feel too many focus on the wrong area. While of these I’d say health is the most important, the fact of the matter is, wealth is the most important to focus on.
But why?
Wealth unlocks the key to the others. Here’s what I mean by this. Get your money right and it’s just a matter of time, research, and setting your life up in the right way to get the health that you want, assuming you have no serious underlying conditions and are under fifty years of age. Likewise relationships are easy when you have the time to invest or pursue them. And when you have money you can afford nice clothes, time at the gym, and time socializing at different events, whatever those may be.
Wealth makes the others work so much better. Of course health helps with both and relationships can help with both. But to me I think the wisest investment of your time is focusing on wealth at the start. Eventually you’ll branch out and balance things out more but if you’re money isn’t right then it’s going to be very hard getting anything else right.
Most say to start a business and become an entrepreneur. I’ve said this and for the most part I stand by this.
But there’s a big catch that many seem to forget.
Today I want to go deeper into this subject of wealth and entrepreneurship and peel back some things that you maybe haven’t considered or haven’t been revealed to you yet.
The Path To Entrepreneurship
So many make entrepreneurship sound so easy. Just start a company, market it a bit, and boom passive income for life. Obviously we know it’s harder than that but we can still be misled by false teachings. First off I think most entrepreneurs fail to account for how much having capital at the start helps. Not only does it help, it’s everything when you’re starting out. I know many stories of entrepreneurs who did the whole sleep in their car, not eat certain days, etc. etc. and talk about how they found success.
But they found success because they were able to find capital to spend to invest in marketing. Marketing so they could make mistakes, so that they could learn and retry again. Learning more and more each time as well as getting closer and closer to their goals each time. Most forget just how important that early investment of capital is.
It’s everything.
You need to fail and you need to market, so you can fail and learn from it. No one hits it out of the park their first time at bat. And when it costs a decent amount to bat each time, you better have some deep pockets.
It takes money to make money. If you’re living in a crappy apartment, with parent’s, or government housing and want to get out. Here’s some advice.
Don’t become an entrepreneur.
At least not yet. Nor should you work some dead end job to eventually become an entrepreneur. I mean sure, you can do this and experience success with it. I just don’t think it’s the wisest option. Instead, go into sales.
Find a commission sales jobs and do that. Because you’ll soon be making more than any “real” job you could get. And then when you have a high level of income, making your entrepreneurial dreams come true is a whole hell of a lot easier. Like running in shorts vs running with a 100 pound weight tied to your back.
Don’t worry about passive income if you don’t have income at all.
I coach a lot of people, especially with money matters, and this comes up again and again. Focus on income first, decent income. Then worry about throwing that into entrepreneurship. Because here’s the thing. When you start a business, it’s a liability. It’s going to eat up both your money and your time. And you need both to throw to it. One day it’ll pay it back…hopefully.
But at the start its going to suck money up and shred it to bits with little to show for it. You’ll have to spend on marketing to build awareness of what you have and see what the market responds too. Something easier said than done. Which means you’ll have multiple marketing campaigns that don’t earn you squat.
And you’ll have to be okay with that.
And you’ll have to have more money to reinvest until you get it right. Working at the 9-5 place might not get you very much. You may be batting once every 6 months instead of every other week.
And that makes a huge difference.
Dollars For Time First…
Then worry about building passive income and things of that nature. Don’t worry about having multiple income streams, investments, having your own business, or things of that nature until you have gotten a decent income level. There’s nothing wrong with trading dollars for time, especially at the start. You need to do it. And when you can maximize the dollar for time trade you can then look at investing money in passive income that’ll separate your dollars from your time.
But you’re not going to do that very efficiently until you’re making decent money. What’s decent money? That depends on too many factors to go through here. It’ll depend on what lifestyle you live and more importantly where you live. But like I said that’s a bit much for our discussion here.
If you want more in depth and specific advice on this matter then sign up for my coaching above. I enjoy working with everyone looking to better themselves.
Thanks for reading.
-Charles Sledge