I’m gonna renovate my house, and it seems silly to pay for storage space to keep books that I would be unlikely to read again. But my emotional attachment also makes it hard for me to just recycle the book. Thankfully, I highlighted the things that caught my eye the first time I read this book. So, I resolutely spent pockets of time here and there typing all these insights on my phone. To be transferred to Obsidian.
Warning: Michael Masterson made his wealth from stocks and real estate, so if you despise these assets, you would do yourself good not to read my painstakingly typed notes.
Automatic Wealth (Michael Masterson)
- The true secret to wealth is building equity
- Be willing to focus the majority of your time and energy on doing what it takes to build real wealth
- $150k per year is all you really need to live a full, rich life
- You don’t have wealth. You simply have the obligations that come with having material things.
- I hope you won’t have become addicted to the idea of making the money pile grow.
- Things that generate extra cash now that you can use to generate automatic streams of income in the near future
- Having a personal net worth of 10 times the amount you need to live on is, by almost any definition, comfortable.
- Happiness comes when you are busy doing something you care about. When you are doing something you care about, happiness surprises you.
- And every financially valuable secret you learn today is more valuable than it would be if you learned it tomorrow - because of the value of compound knowledge
- Accelerate the learning process. Ready, Fire, Aim.
- Convert your core values to life goals.
- Getting to work earlier says something about being energetic, organised, and in control.
- Once a month, you’ll sit down for 2-3 hours to map out your goals for the next four weeks. Once a week, you’ll spend one hour establishing your goals for the next 7 days. And you’ll spend about 10-15 minutes each morning organising your day.
- The way to use the 80/20 rule is to scan the tasks on your to-do list and highlight the 20% that will make a giant difference in your life.
- Doing an important task right off the bat gives me an immediate sense of accomplishment that fills me with energy that fuels my work for the rest of the day.
- I do a quick, 5-min stretch every morning and another 10-min stretch sometime during the day.
- Streamline your email
- Attack similar tasks in blocks. Also block out some time for yourself. Full schedules without relaxation lead to burnout.
- Note the jobs you really enjoy doing and gain satisfaction from. Those are the ones you probably won’t want to give up. Then note the jobs that make the most of your abilities.
- Create momentum.
- By learning how to cast obstacles from your mind, by refusing to become mentally subservient to them, and by channeling spiritual power through your thoughts, you can rise above obstacles which ordinarily might defeat you.
- It is how you act, not what you think, that will determine your success. It is how you think, not what you do, that will determine your happiness.
- Your success depends not on your mood or your emotions but on your actions - what you actually do.
- The ideal personality can see reality for what it is, act according to what is best, and believe that things will turn out fine.
- Just practice the movements I teach you, and sooner or later, your body will know them, even if your mind is somewhere else.
- If you want to master a skill as quickly as possible, practice it slowly. The more you practice the right moves, the deeper the memory path. The trick is to make the correct paths as deep as possible and to make the incorrect paths shallow or nonexistent.
- Slow down…until you can practice the skill with perfect technique. Continue practicing perfectly and you will find that your speed will gradually increase without any effort on your part.
- Transform the way you work.
- In discussing business or money, they are relaxed but focused
- Do one thing extraordinarily well.
- Every time you buy a deprecating asset, you become poorer
- Most of the junk you buy becomes unused after a few months and doesn’t provide you with that much value anyway
- When you budget, you pay everyone else first
- Unexpected bills to pay, unanticipated sales to take advantage of
- Putting some predetermined percentage of your income into a savings account every month before you pay any of your bills
- First saving goal: Every year, I will save more than I saved last year
- Second saving goal: Every year, I will increase the amount I save in terms of a percentage of my income
- Do a personal balance sheet every month. Create a spreadsheet that lists all your assets and all your debits. Just going through the process will train your mind (and heart) to understand financial wealth as financial net worth. That you’ll do everything necessary to ensure that when you add up your assets every month, the bottom line will be larger than it was the month before.
- Expand your field of choice
- The freedom to spend your time as you see fit
- Make yourself a radically better worker. Find a way to radically increase your salary by making yourself radically more valuable at work.
- Make sure you are not a pioneer. The idea is to enter an active market with a better/cleverer/cheaper version of what others are selling
- If that’s the way your business works, when you help your boss move up by making him look good, the boss will do the same for you.
- Good employees earn good salaries because they are valued. But great employees earn amazing salaries because they are considered invaluable.
- Master a financially valued skill.
- By working above and beyond your work description, you get noticed. You also get good at what’s important. And as you become more of an expert in the work you want to do, it will start to show.
- Your knowledge compounds over time bs so can the opportunities toward which you apply it.
- Be able to earn a great deal more money in the future for the same amount of work you are doing now
- Understand how your job contributes to the process of creating profits
- Your goal is to have that invisible profile of the company gradually come into focus for you. It will.
- Have you made at least one suggestion this past month about improving the company’s marketing or sales strategies?
- Be sure your boss understands that your future success will make him look good
- Attract customers at a reasonable cost, and convert them into repeat buyers
- What is the most cost-effective way of attracting customers? & what is the best way to keep those customers buying?
- Express the features of your product in some way that will stimulate desire. You do that by converting features into benefits
- Understand the difference between benefits and deeper benefits
- They will be appealing to emotions that are closer to their customers’ core desires
- Hold their prospects’ hearts in their hands
- Your initial goal will be to net 110% of your current salary in your first full-time year
- Before you launch into your self-promotional campaign, create a grid of 500 boxes - 10 squares across and 50 squares down. Scratch out a box for every hour that you work on selling your freelance services. Make it a specific goal to get better at selling yourself each time you do it.
- Create an image or idea in the prospects’ minds and sooner or later they will come
- It will take you about 1000 hours to become a competent person in your field of expertise. You can reduce that time requirement by learning under the guidance of a pro.
- Specialists always make higher incomes because they have more rarefied skills. It may seem at first as if you are limiting yourself, but you’ll soon experience the benefits of narrowing your focus once you start feeling like a true expert
- But as you spend time thinking about it and working on it, you will come up with countless ideas that will help sharpen your vision and spur your personal progress
- Develop expertise by narrowing your scope. Identify several industries that interest you and learn as much as you can about them: how they create customers, how they develop products, how they maximise profits
- There is one exception to the “invest in what you know” rule: the “invest in who you know and trust” exemption
- Never invest more than you can afford to lose.
- A solid balance sheet, a history of earnings growth, and a P/E ratio that’s good by contemporary market standards
- When I look to invest in a new business (growth stocks), I want to see all 3 components in place: an efficient customer acquisition protocol/efficient marketing model, a high profit margin, and the potential for big, back-end profits
- By back-end sales, I mean more, better, and higher-priced products and services sold to the existing customer base. Selling more expensive products to existing customers should be relatively easy.
- As you learn more about your customers, continually redesign and improve your product so that it better fits their needs. Make a product soar due to incremental augmentation
- Create a great advertising campaign and expose it to your prime audience
- Employ a direct-marketing-driven marketing program
- Figure out what kind of return you expect from the advertising campaign and stick to it, even if the results are close
- If you don’t expend all your money, time and patience by pursuing a not-so-good or bad idea, you’ll have enough of each to come back with a winning promotion the second time around
- One way to divvy up your portfolio is this: 30% U.S. stocks, 30% foreign stocks, 10% high-quality corporate bonds, 10% high-yield bonds, 10% U.S. Treasury bonds (TIPS), 5% real estate stocks, and 5% gold & precious metals
- I prefer to invest only in top-quality bonds (because I’m looking for safety, not yield), and I always stay in my bonds till they mature. Staying passive means staying in for the long haul and reducing risk to an absolute minimum.
- Stick to 1 or 2 specific areas and be faithful to your system
- Bear markets always begin in good times and bull markets always in bad times.
- The old work bores them. They would much rather start something new and different, something that inspires them with romantic thoughts of fun, tranquility, excitement
- But the most important knowledge about customer acquisition, retention and product knowledge in every business I’ve ever been involved in has been difficult to decipher.
- Everything you do in your new company will have your imprint on it. It will reflect your idea of ingenuity, practicality, quality, and customer service. This factor alone should revive your spirits.
- Linking what you know about selling with what you know about your hobby
- And the initial cost - that pays for the intellectual product - can be amortised over the life of the product.
- If you develop expertise in a particular business and don’t stray too far from it, you’ll always feel confident that you can create a new business without taking a lot of risk.
- The purpose you aim for at any given time is a function of everything else that life has provided you with at that moment. As Viktor Frankl said, there is no best purpose in life, just as there is no best way to swing a tennis racket
- If you want to enjoy your job, start doing fewer things and do each of those things at a slower pace
- When you are working for a living, you may sometimes feel as if everybody but you is in charge of your life
- If you are smart, you will develop a side business now that is both emotionally fulfilling and financially rewarding, if you do that, you won’t have to start over with some new enterprise when it comes time to retire
- Some sort of low-key, home-based business application
- Make sure there is an active, ready market to sell to. That means plenty of other people doing more or less what you want to do. See what they are doing and find something you could do better.
- Force yourself into the here and now of your personal life, even if it feels artificial
- End each day by reviewing your task list and planning the next day’s tasks before you leave the office. You’ll activate your subconscious mind to sort out work problems, even while you are keeping the stress away by not actively focusing on them.
- Leave plenty of time to enjoy meals and relax, but make the trip a learning, growing adventure
- Spend an extra few hundred dollars to buy the best mattress, and you’ll have comfort at night that even Warren Buffett can’t top.
- Wear fewer things - but ensure everything you wear makes you feel rich and comfortable.