"Make Money" First, Then Learn to "Make Money Make Money"

1 of my personal 3 biggest business mistakes

I heard a quote that hit me extremely hard last week.

It’s around the concept of “learn how to make money first, then learn how to make that money make you money”.

It takes a second to get your head around, but its something I see multiple people close to me struggle with and probably the biggest mistake I made in 2019.

This mistake is slightly different to the mistake of diversifying to early that I see a lot of people make (and I made), but it’s not quite the same as this is more of a “skill issue”.

A lot of business owners think about what they can do with their money (try to learn how to make that money work for them, aka “make money make money”) rather than work on the actual process of generating profit (making money) - that made them the f*cking profit in the first place! [Half ranting to myself].

You see this with a lot of people, who once they start earning good money in a job or a business, or even just have a large sum of money from an external source will try to jump straight to the “Im gonna be Warren Buffett now” phase… Forgetting he’s an operator first but more on that in a second.

When this happens, one of the first things people say is around the idea of; “what are you going to do with the money” or essentially “where are you going to invest it” — Which is just another way of saying “how are you going to make that money make you even more money….?”

Issue is there’s a skill gap.

People who haven’t learn the first skill of making money, cannot jump to the make-money-make-money skill. It’s like skipping a bunch of levels in a game, you are super under-levelled…. You might make it work for a while but at some point you might end up fighting a dragon with a stick.

People think you are either a good business owner/founder/start-up guy/worker/job person etc —> Known as an operator.

OR

You are a good investor/decision maker.

This OR is dangerous.

You need both throughout.

All the world’s best investors are insanely good operators as well, usually business operators BEFORE they became investors.

Same with any investment vehicle that scales - it scales as you build a business around it. Property/Trading - the people who make this work were switched on before…

Learning the skill of making money first - Out of thin air… Is far more powerful than trying to skip this stage and become a “investor” or a “silent partner” — If you haven’t done-the-thing you won’t be able to “make money make money” investing-in-the-thing.

This is the same reason why the slow-lane-salaried approach and saving-for-retirement angle is so broken, become the maths is literally broken.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m pretty “anti-job” in general, but that’s not for the reason that I think everyone should be an entrepreneur in some form or another, because I know a lot of people who should not, instead it’s more to do with the fact that everyone can just do more, or be more and working in a job you are trapped, the ceiling is so low.

You can’t make another 400% this year in a job, no one is going to give you a 400% raise, but what happens if your output or systems improved by 400%? Then you deserve one but in most cases the best you’ll get it a 10% raise and a pat on the back.

This is why commission sales does actually work, because you are paid on skills and output, not time.

Learning the skill-base for something deeply has so many more applications than simply getting a slightly better return on your money and unless you have the former skillset anyway, you’ll end up losing money in the long-run due to lack of real-world exposure to “the thing”.

There’s so many pockets of niches that hold £10/20/50k/month in earnings for someone who just spends another 300 hours adding one skillset to their already established arsenal, but instead people spend 1,000s of hours trying to play the make-money-make-money game and either end up winning and earning 5% more a year or losing both time and capital.

In short, just playing the wrong game.

You only need to learn the skill of making money once and you can have hundreds of applications of it thereafter, so why not actually learn that skill as early and as deep as possible? There’s no such thing as passive earnings anyway.