Most Important Part of the Money System

We continue in The Money System That Never Fails with The Most Important Part of the Money System.

If you missed the first couple of parts you can view them here:

This system started with the book, The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason. This old classic can be found for free online in many places online such as this link here.

The first chapter is the most important but it all is worth reading and re-reading. It’s about paying yourself first, i.e. saving. The is probably the most important principle of money there is, period.

The principle is this: “A part of all I earn is mine to keep.”

This is counter to Parkinson’s Law, which originally meant “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. This applies to money as well, in that the more money we make, the more we typically spend. Most people these days are spending more than they’re making with the pervasive use of credit. And our governments certainly aren’t good role models either.

Instead of fighting the natural urge to spend, by paying yourself first, you’ll be saving despite Parkinson’s Law.

This is how most people handle money (and how I did for years):

Money System - Income minus Expenses

Typically, this doesn’t leave much left in savings, if anything. Once again, many people spend all that they make, thus there is nothing left on the right side of this equation. This is living paycheck to paycheck.

But this equation can be easily flipped, by utilizing this foundational principle that allows wealth to build.

Money System - Income minus Savings

We simply take the savings out of the income, off the top, and then spend what is left. It really is that simple.

“A part” – We’ll cover how much shortly.

“of all I earn” – From your income.

“is mine to keep” – Gets saved.

That also means, the other part, is what is left over for spending for both the necessities and the luxuries.

I knew of this principle long ago. But I made some errors in dealing with it. And I realized that, for most people, for it to actually work, there needs to be a few different types of savings. Then money must be saved in specific ways for you to benefit from this principle.

However important saving is, it is just one factor of many. While we can save our way to millions, it is by no means the most interesting aspect. It must be balanced, with the other areas of money too. Eventually, once your savings grows it will look like this:

Money System - Income minus Savings + Investments

That will be discussed more later. Notice that there are four different types of money here already referred to in the last section.

The Money System That Never Fails is now available in paperback and Kindle at Amazon.

Learning a New Skill

I’m currently learning a new skill, specifically practicing the piano.

Piano

For a long time, I’ve wished I had a musical skill, I just haven’t really pursued it before. This is my efforts to become a full-fledged renaissance man. Wikipedia states:

“When someone is called a ‘Renaissance man’ today, it is meant that, rather than simply having broad interests or superficial knowledge in several fields, the individual possesses a more profound knowledge and a proficiency, or even an expertise, in at least some of those fields. Some dictionaries use the term “Renaissance man” to describe someone with many interests or talents, while others give a meaning restricted to the Renaissance and more closely related to Renaissance ideals.”

As far as I’m concerned, some musical skill is necessary to achieve that ideal. After all, Leonardo da Vinci, the prototypical polymath, did have musical skill.

Besides I know myself, and I know that my auditory sense, and all that pertains to that, is the weakest of my senses. Learning music would be a helpful correction.

Recently, my grandparents-in-law offered me their old stand-up piano and I took them up on their offer. I’m not sure what the reason, but I felt that the piano was a suitable musical instrument for me.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the piano mover’s brought it over to my new home. The next day I got started.

As I did in working towards an artistic skill (specifically drawing), I went to the great teacher of today…Youtube.

Valhalla Drawing — My favorite drawing of one of my cats, Valhalla, after a couple months of practice.

I typed in something along the lines of “beginner’s piano lessons” and found what looked like a good starting place.

But then advertising got me! The pre-roll ad on this video, was an ad for an online piano course on Udemy.

I clicked over and liked what I saw. I shelled out the $29 for the 10-hour video course. After all, it had 4.7 stars with 9418 ratings, so the proof, in addition to the offer, was strong.

(I’ll keep in mind the targeting to the offer, as I plan to start doing Youtube advertising for my businesses soon!)

Although Youtube is a great place to start, there are downsides. Learning from my experience in drawing, Youtube got me going, but it wasn’t very structured. Some channels had a few tutorials in a series, but nothing was very long, nor detailed. I think part of what may have led me to ceasing practicing drawing as much was the lack of structure.

Now, as of writing this, I’m 38 lessons into the course…of 362.

And I’m having a great time. I’m not good by any stretch of the imagination, but I can play a few simple songs. The other night I played a simple tune while my nieces danced around to it.

We’re often told about the 10,000 hour rule. If you want to become an expert in something it takes 10 years or 10,000 hours of practice to do so. But this is expert level. Even world-class in many fields.

What most people aren’t aware of is the 10 hour rule.

To get okay at something it takes about 10 hours.

There is a huge difference in those numbers. Think about it this way. Most people across the world have never played the piano. They’ve just never tried. So with just a tiny bit of practice, you would be capable of doing more than those that have never done any.

Actually I don’t even know if I’ve totaled 10 hours of practice yet! Probably close to that number. But I’ve already been playing for others.

I wrote about this in my book, Practicing Strength and Movement. Although that is about applying the skills of practice to strength and movement as the title says, so much of that material applies to any skill in general.

If you practice at practicing things, you can gain any skill much faster. That’s why I talk about practicing as a meta-skill. It can be applied to any individual thing you desire.

Habits are another meta-skill worth cultivating that I’ve written about before. (And have a draft of habits book sitting on my desktop too. Need to finish that up.)

What’s more is as I’m progressing, because the skill is being built quickly as with every lesson I learn something new, I’m having lots of fun.

I appreciate how quickly I can start to get into the flow of playing some simple chords and rhythms.

When I first started, I was writing it on my to-do list as something I wanted to get done. Now, I’ve quickly developed the habit. Further, because I enjoy it, it doesn’t take any motivation to do so. I’m finding myself playing a few times throughout the day, and the amount of time I practice increasing. It probably won’t be long til I’ve logged my first 100 hours of practice.

Maybe at that point, I’ll share some of my playing with you.

So many people get trapped into the thinking of “talent” or “old dogs can’t learn new tricks.” These are both damning mindsets that will keep you from experiencing new things or ever accomplishing anything worthwhile.

What new skill would you like to learn?

Money System that Never Fails – Money Offense and Defense

We continue from the Introduction to the Money System that Never Fails, with the next part on money offense and defense, and the four areas of wealth.

One of the pivotal books for me, that I read in that massive action period, was The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley. In it he talks about playing offense and defense with money. This was a big epiphany for me. I started to see that there were different areas of money. Offense could be likened to what you did to get money in the first place, i.e. producing an income. Defense was keeping the money and watching your expenses.

Offense and defense was a good starting point. But it became even more apparent when I added upon this idea and realized there were essentially four areas of wealth.

1. Income
2. Expenses
3. Saving
4. Investing

It seems so obvious now, but I didn’t see anyone specifically point this out. Understanding these four categories of money is the foundation to this system.

Finally, this explained why people can have huge incomes and still end up broke. Lots of sports stars and celebrities are great examples of this. The first area is great but all the other three are not. As soon as the big income goes away they’re left with nothing because they’re not truly wealthy. One strength, with three weaknesses does not equal long term success.

It even explains why some people living on meager wages can still end up with large amounts after many years. Income may not be great but the others are even more important. Still I wouldn’t necessarily call these people wealthy either.

It was another epiphany to me to realize that with just minimum wage, you could become a millionaire, just by saving and investing.

At $7.25/hour, 2080 hours worked in a year is $15,080. Saving 10% of this would be $1,508 per year. Invested into something that provided a 5% annual rate of return, it would take 72.37 years to meet this goal.

Yes, that is a long time. And I’m guessing you don’t have that long to wait. But I’m willing to bet if you’re reading this you make more than minimum wage. In California, the minimum wage is raising up to $15/hour soon. In a year this is $31,200. 10% of that is $3,120. Invested at the same 5% annual rate it takes 58.1 years.

This shows that it can be done, showing the importance of savings and investing, and the commonly touted magic of compound interest. But the trick is, if you also optimize your income, then save even more, and invest even better it can all be done far faster, and yield even bigger results.

This is just an extreme example, meant to show you the possibilities. Something to think about is how much money has passed through your hands over your lifetime so far? How much more do you think will happen over time?

If you want to look at other similar calculations you can use this online duration calculator.

Not understanding these four areas of wealth is probably the biggest setback in any money or wealth program or coaching because they are incomplete.

But what happens when you optimize all four areas? Magic!

Each area has some unique traits that best help it out, that are not in the other areas. Each area has specific habits you should do, which are not in the other areas. The good news is that you’re probably doing okay in some areas but just one or two of them falls short.

We all have our strengths and our weaknesses. In this case it is important to play to your strengths, but also to shore up your weaknesses too. The star ball player will be great off with that amazing income, if they make sure the other areas are taken care off.

Thus, when it comes to crafting your wealth plan you must include each of these areas. And each one will have goals and action steps for you to take. Let’s make sure you’re clear on what these four areas are:

1. Income

Money coming in. For a business, this is revenues. Personally, this may be an hourly rate, salary, royalties or whatever else. It also includes selling things, or services whether at a yard sale, on eBay, or wherever else.

2. Expenses

Money going out. Money is used as an exchange of value, so this is where you spend it on stuff. Of course, this occurs both in businesses and personally.

3. Savings

When you get income, it is turned into savings. Most people do this backwards, which is why they don’t have savings. More details on this in the next section. Also note that different types of savings are used for different purposes. Specifically, I consider savings when money is transferred from the income/expense account to a savings account for a specific purpose.

4. Investments

Money from income or savings can then be turned into investments. Active investments are those that generate more income. While you can invest in things like precious metals, these are stores of value, and don’t actually generate income, so these are passive. Understand this difference between active and passive investments.

All of these can be further broken down into more categories. But if you just get these four areas, and the differences of each, you’re ahead of where most people are at. A lot more on each of these to come next.

The Money System That Never Fails is now available in paperback and Kindle at Amazon.

Money System that Never Fails – Introduction

I’m working on a book that shares about money and finances. It shares my system that took me from a mountain of debt to being very comfortable and on projection for riches to come. The working title is “The Money System Than Never Fails” because it is just that. It is a systematic approach to money that anyone can adopt. Of course, I would highly recommend doing so.

None of these things are unique to me. Most of it I picked up from many sources. However, I started working on this system because I never saw anyone cover finances in a holistic manner like this.

Below is the introduction to this book. I might even be sharing the entire thing, over time, here on the blog. On that note, I’d love to hear your comments, if you want to see more of this…

“Wealth is not the man that has it, but the man who lives it.”
– Benjamin Franklin

When I was growing up, I saw how my parents handled money. We weren’t poor by any stretch, but I thought of us as in the lower middle class, while some friends’ parents of mine were in the upper middle class. I have no idea if that is financially accurate, I’m not sure if there are official positions for those spots, it’s just the way it seemed to me at the time.

While my friends’ parents owned nice houses, we rented, and were forced to move a couple times because changes in ownership. While my friends’ parents seemed to spend more just on little things here and there, such as family outings, I saw my mother and father fight about money.

In high school, I started to get interested in money. On a friend’s encouragement I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. This is turn led me to reading Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. I decided then that I would have a million dollars by the time I was 25. Seemed doable at the time.

I started putting some money into stocks. I felt like I was on top of my personal finances. I made money and I saved a lot of it. But this was just because I didn’t have many expenses. I didn’t even have a car until I was 20.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I start my business as a personal trainer, while still being employed.

Specifically, it was in going into business that I would begin my financial descent. While I did well personally, I knew nothing about business nor the changes in finances in there. Being a solopreneur, I rode the roller coaster of unstable income, and constantly reinvesting money back into my business, mostly in the form of more education. While this was good, I was doing it in an irresponsible way.

My debt started to grow. At its highest point, I was around $25,000 in credit card debt. Throughout this time, as you might imagine, I developed a strained relationship around money.

One of the first major turning points around money for me (of which I’ve identified three occasions) was pointed out by one of my coaches. He told me to say the phrase, “I Appreciate Money.” As soon as I said it, I could feel the sinking feeling in my chest, and I knew that it wasn’t true.

Once you know a few tools that can help to transform beliefs, then it is the finding of them that is the hard part. We did some work to clear that up. The following transformation in my financial life was nothing short of extraordinary.

Within a couple of months, I made more money than I ever had before in my business. I was able to pay off my debt completely. And I noticed that I always had cash in my wallet. I was never without money.

My relationship to money became far better than it was previously.

But like all things, that was just one turning point. An even bigger change was coming up on the horizon…

Although I got out of debt and started to develop some savings, I would find that I would run up the bill on my credit cards a bit. Then, in a fit of frustration, I would borrow from my savings (with the intention to pay that money back, since I wasn’t supposed to touch it) to get back to zero.

This probably happened four or five times over the next few years.

Although I “appreciated” money, I still seemed to struggle with it. I couldn’t get ahead. Finally, I got fed up with this pattern and resolved to break it once and for good.

Here, I took massive action. Over the course of a few weeks I read at least 30 books on the topic of money and finances, looking for whatever missing keys to money I was lacking. I can’t say there was any one book that solved the problem for me. But all together they did.

While there were certainly some changes in beliefs during that time, the biggest change was in how I saw different forms of money, and how they all fit together systematically.

It was during this period that I largely developed the system that you’re about to read about. It was then that I developed my Wealth Generation Plan. This included new shifts in mindset and establishing habits, that would get me out of that repetitive cycle I was in.

From that day forward, getting ahead with money was never an issue. Every week, every month my net worth grew.

And still I was not done learning. …

With that plan in place my financial foundation was now in place as well. Over the next years I continued to grow financially…at least personally.

What happened was that one of my businesses, Lost Empire Herbs, grew to the point over the next few years, where the finances were a bit beyond my current skillset. While I had always done the Legendary Strength financial books myself (my other business), because they were simple to do, here we handed them out to a bookkeeper.

I lost track of what was happening. What money was coming in. What money was going out. But armed with my plan, I realized this problem sooner rather than later. I had to upgrade my financial skills even more. I had to learn how to read a Profit and Loss Statement, as well as a Balance Sheet. I had to figure out cash flow, in an inventory heavy business. I had to understand good debt, and how it can be used to fuel growth.

In addition to these new things, what I realized is that I needed the same type of foundation that I had personally, going on in the business. While the numbers were bigger, and many more transactions took place, it really wasn’t all that different from what I did personally.

Looking back on my life I can see these three pivotal moments and the periods in between. It’s a series of plateaus’ and jumps or exponential growth points. Because of the system though, ever since that took place, the plateaus are not flat, but are trending upwards. You can see a graphical representation of this here. While simplified, this is overall quite accurate to my financial life.

I’m sure there will be a couple more jumps in my future. There are always new things to learn. However, I don’t expect these to be quite as impactful as these few moments in time. That’s because the system is the rock on which it all stands. It will get better over time, but that foundation is now firmly set.

The Money System That Never Fails is now available in paperback and Kindle at Amazon.

Asking for Writing Topics

When it comes to writing blog posts and email broadcasts, I write best reactively.

In a previous post, I talked about how to generate lots of writing ideas. That’s all well and good because I think those will be fun to write and interest people. And, in addition to coming up with ideas on my own, I find that some of my best stuff comes based off of another person’s question.

Question Mark

A few things can happen when I receive a question:

I might not think the question is broad enough to be interesting to more than the person asking about it. Or it is just a bad question (yes, they do exist). In this case I’ll answer individually or not. But these cases are actually in the minority.
I know the answer to the question and it is worth posting about. The question sends my mind off in a direction and the words just flow from my fingertips. The more you know a topic, the better you’ll be able to do this. This is wonderful because it may not be a topic I would have thought of myself. Still, if someone is asking it, probably lots of people are thinking the same things.
I don’t know the answer to the question, and it is still worth posting about. In these cases, if it holds my interest, I’ll have to do some more research to give it a good answer. These posts take more time, but I learn as I go along so it is often worth it.

Although this happens more often than not with a question, it can also happen with comments. Those too can send me off in writing. Maybe to fill in more details. Maybe because I disagree with what was said. Maybe it just sends me off on a tangent.

You can see plenty of examples of these on my other sites. Some good recent examples include:

Just recently I did this in regards to topics for filming Youtube videos. It works much the same there.

On this note, what are your questions? I want to do the same thing here at LoganChristopher.com based on what YOU want to read about. Ask me anything that doesn’t have to do with health and fitness. (I may answer those things, but it will be at the other websites.) Questions on business. Questions on money. Questions on productivity. Questions on writing. Questions about how to be an awesome human being. Whatever you want to know, ask away…

Along with this I always like to put this disclaimer. There are no guarantees that I’ll answer your question. And it probably won’t be individually but instead here in a future post. But if it fits in the categories 2 or 3 above, there is a good chance I will answer it. Please post your questions below…

Predictable Success

I read lots of books. When that happens you often come across books that leave you thinking “I wish I had read that earlier.” Or even a stronger feeling of “WHY WAS I NOT TOLD ABOUT THIS SOONER?!?”

Predictable Success by Les McKeown was such a book for me. (If that name looks familiar, I mentioned him in the previous post, talking about his second book.)

A big thank you to Michael Danner, CMO of DrAxe.com, for mentioning this book while speaking on stage at Ezra Firestone’s Blue Ribbon Mastermind.

In this book, Les describes the life-cycle of any business, and their movement through seven stages.

Businesses must move through these stages in order, except that they can go backwards too, and most businesses don’t make their way through all seven.

The Seven Stages as outlined in Predictable Success

I’ll briefly describe each one of these stages here:

Early Struggle – The start-up phase where the business seeks to make sales and cash. To go from idea to proof of concept in the marketplace. Many businesses never get past this point.

Fun – Like the name implies this stage is a lot of fun. You’re making sales. You’re meeting the demands of the market place. There’s a flurry of activity and the business can pivot on a dime. Often just a few people are involved.

White Water – The business grows to the point where it begins to get chaotic. More people, more operations. It becomes a battle of constantly fighting fires. This is where systems must come in.

Predictable Success – The best stage to be at. As the title implies it is both successful and you can predict it will continue to be. Not based off of people working 20 hour days, but by different people properly and predictably fulfilling their roles. This means the business sets goals, and hits them. Of course, there are still fires to put out, but things run smoothly based on systems and processes, while the business continues to grow.

Treadmill – Here, the business becomes over reliant on those same processes and loses that entrepreneurial spark. In fact, for many businesses this is the stage when the founders leave and the environment becomes much more corporate.

The Big Rut – This is a continuation of the above, except at this stage it has gone on too long, so that the business cannot recover, not by itself.

Death Rattle – There is usually a brief flurry of activity before the end. Perhaps the business is acquired, or tries to be so. Perhaps there is an attempt at restructuring or bankruptcy. Many just fade away.

How Do My Businesses Stack Up?

The reason I loved this book so much is that I can see in my career how I’ve moved through some of these earlier stages.

Lost Empire Herbs is the best example.

It’s startup involved being an outgrowth of Legendary Strength. A new website, finding a couple suppliers, and then selling some herbs from the kitchen table. It couldn’t have started on less of a shoestring. It went on like this for almost two years before we hit our stride.

The fun stage can really be marked as when we got our first office, officially formed a new LLC for the business. Shortly after this we got our first employees. It seemed like sales were growing by at least 20% each month, sometimes more.

Unfortunately, the Fun didn’t last too long. A few office moves, some changes in management and we landed in Whitewater. I’m very intimate with this stage because we’ve been living it the past few years now.

(The feeling of “Why was I not told about this sooner?!?” is because if I had this as a roadmap I believe we could have gotten to the next stage much faster.)

Legendary Strength itself has never moved past the Fun stage. The typical internet business based on cash flow and lifestyle actually aims only to get to this stage and stay here. It is purposefully kept simple to be a so-called lifestyle business. Nowadays I see this and aim to keep it that way. Previously, I didn’t know the difference.

Thus, with Lost Empire I was completely unprepared for the new things I had to learn with a “real business.” Thankfully, I’m good at learning, and beyond books, have lots of smart people that have done these sorts of things to learn from.

And we had a lot to learn. Here were a few of the activities of the past couple years:

Bookkeeping and how good finances work.
How to systematize and SOP the business.
Hiring and onboarding employees.
HR stuff such as insurance, payroll, firing, etc.
How to run more complex operations
Standardizing things so that it’s not all different
Good project management
And plenty more

I feel like right now we are just emerging from White Water into Predictable Success. It’s a good feeling. In fact, I feel so strongly about it that it has become Lost Empire’s theme for Q4 that just began.

Before I read this book, I was engaged in many of the things needed to do so. But it would have been nice to know about whitewater before I even got in it. Oh well, at least I’ll know this for next time…

The Visionary View

Recently, I bought my first home. Before that was months of being in the market to buy a house. My wife and I each had our own list of criteria.

There were things that were non-negotiable. For me, these included things like:

The location. We only wanted to live in certain areas.
The land. It needed to have some space and be close to nature.
A big garage for a gym.
A space for an office, with enough separation from the rest of the house.
The price. We had a ceiling in what we could get as far as a mortgage loan.

We looked at a lot of houses. Probably physically went to 30 or 40 over the span of a few months. (It was a crazy time that I’m very happy to be done with!)

One thing that we ended up with, that was not on either of our lists, was an amazing view.

Visionary View 1 — This sunrise was from the first morning staying at my new place.

I love this expansive view because it is visionary. That’s an interesting word that I’ve been thinking about lately.

In business, they often talk about visionary leaders. Some of the prototypical ones of these are guys like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk.

The definitions of visionary:

1. (especially of a person) thinking about or planning the future with imagination or wisdom.

2. relating to or able to see visions in a dream or trance, or as a supernatural apparition.

I like both of these definitions.

And so, when I saw this view that I knew that living at this house, with the visionary view, would help me to become even more visionary.

How could it not?

Indeed, a friend of mine said the same thing to me.

And right around the time of waiting through escrow on the hous I was reading through Les McKeown’s book, The Synergist. (I’ll be talking about his earlier book in a future post.)

In it he discusses four different operational styles. The Visionary. The Operator. The Processor. And the Synergist.

Guess which type was highest for me? Visionary.

You can take a test to see how you stack up right here. (It’s free, though you have to signup with email address at the end to get your results.)

I had all my partners and employees take the test, and have also recommended it to other business owners in a couple mastermind groups I take part in.

In business, as well as everywhere else, it is important to know yourself.

It is also important to know where you want to go. In the future, I plan to be even more visionary. And it is great to have an amazing environment to support doing that.

Thinking, being imaginative, coming up with ideas, meditating while sitting out there overlooking the view.

We’re all products of our environment far more than many people realize. Plenty of studies showing how small environmental cues will shift habits, behaviors, even what we think.

That’s why it is very important to setup your environments for what you want.

The Secret to Winning

“The secret to winning the game is staying in the game long enough to win the game.”
-Dr. Glenn Livingston

I came across this quote somewhere the other day, and liked it so much I had to write it down.

I liked it so much because it is so true.

With life, and achieving anything in it, you need to take a long term perspective. A year…years…a decade…multiple decades.

Something I’ve heard, and know to be true from personal experience, is that humans tend to overestimate what they can accomplish in a year, but underestimate what they can do in three years.

(A lot of people tend to set yearly goals, but how many set three year goals? I wonder if that has anything to do with it.)

The fact is that most people quit too early. And in some cases too early may be after three or five years!

I’ve seen this happen in my fitness life. I was weak starting out. It pissed me off to see people that didn’t workout able to do things I had to bust my ass for six months to accomplish. But I continued working out. They didn’t.

I look back ten years and I’m amazed at all I’ve done. Holy shit! I am actually quite strong and do some amazing things. When did that happen? There was no magical flip of the switch, just consistency over a long time frame.

I have made just about every mistake you could possibly make when it comes to business. I cringe to think about some of what occurred in my early days…or even just last year. But the one mistake I did not make, the one that made all the difference, was that I kept going.

I’ve stayed in the business game almost a decade now, and it’s really starting to pay off.

It’s kind of aggravating thinking “Why did it take so long?” Well, I had a whole lot to learn over that time.

As long as you keep going, and you learn along the way, in the end you will be successful.

As coaching legend Vince Lombardi once stated after a loss, “We didn’t lose the game; we just ran out of time.”

In sports you have a finite time to win. While the time may vary, that’s part of the rules in pretty much every single sport there is.

In life, there is also a time limit…but this is far, far, far longer than any sport.

The more you can wrap your head around being persistent, being patient, and thinking for the long-term, the better off you’ll be no matter the endeavor.

How to Triple Your Learning Speed

We are in the information age. At the reach of your fingertips is worldwide access to information on any topic you desire. This is a time unlike any other in history.

And this can be both a benefit and a curse.

With so much information, it is easy to fall into overwhelm. Or get paralyzed, never taking any action, because you stay in research mode. But this potential dark side of information access is manageable, though not the topic of this report.

3D How to Triple Your Learning Speed

Assuming you can manage that well, that leaves the upside even brighter. We can reap the benefits of having so much available. And when you add in the methods covered in these pages they’ll help you to accelerate your learning even more.

It is through massive learning that I have built my business, become strong and healthy, and developed a wide range of skills. Learning is the foundation on which on my success is built. And if you’d like to be successful, whatever that means to you, you’ll need to learn some things along the way.

As the saying goes, “School is never out for the pro.” Let’s just hope that your schooling didn’t beat the love of learning out of you. The process can be fun, rewarding, and as you’ll come to find, it can be done a lot more efficiently than what the average person does.

Even when you cut away the un-essentials, you may realize you still have a full plate with all that you’d like to learn and act upon.

This special report is about accelerating the rate at which that information enters your mind. The good news is that with some skills, some patience and some cool technologies you can do this with books, audios and videos; all the main means by which people learn.

So begins the introduction to this quick special report. If you’d like all the details, including the many technologies that allow this to happen, signup on the sidebar to the right or down below.

How to Generate Lots of Writing Ideas

In my previous post, I mentioned a long list of topics that I plan to write about here.

But a topic does not necessarily help you to write a blog post (or whatever else you’re writing). A topic is great for a book, but even then you’ll have to narrow it down in order to come up with a structure.

Topics need to be narrowed down. So as I set out today to write the second blog post here I had to come up with more specific ideas.

I’m a huge proponent of Trello. I use it for managing projects and my various teams…but I also use it for managing myself. A Trello board makes a great place to capture ideas.

I created a new board called LC Ideas, and I dropped that laundry list of topics into one column titled Topics.

Then I created a second column for Ideas.

Trello Writing Ideas List

Some people think that coming up with ideas is hard. I beg to differ. Anyone that can’t come up with ideas, just hasn’t practiced it enough. In fact, ideas are easy. Ideas don’t stop coming. And I don’t think you need to be particular creative in order for that to be true, just practiced.

An idea I heard about from James Altucher is to think of ten ideas about some topic, and do this as an exercise each day. Usually the first five or six ideas are easy, but you need to stretch for the final few.

It’s a really good exercise. I could go down each of my topics in turn and generate ten specific post ideas for each one.

But I didn’t do that here…at least not yet.

Just looking at the list, I started to come up with specific ideas.

Now, to be honest some of the things came up could be topics in and of themselves, or at least a multi-part series of posts. Still, some were very specific posts in my ind.

On my 12th idea I happened on this one, i.e. what became this post. Why not share exactly what I’m doing? And so I did.

Here’s the great thing about Trello. I’ll be continuing to use this board for some time now. Any time a great idea pops into my head about something to write here, I’ll save it in this spot.