The Ten Commandments Of Wealth Building
Discover the Ten Key Principles to Build True Wealth (Surprise! It's about a lot more than just making money)
Key Ideas
- How you can build wealth automatically with the least amount of effort.
- How “environments” and habits can literally pull you toward your wealth goals.
- 6 different types of leverage to build your wealth.
True wealth is about a lot more than just growing your net worth.
Yes, it's true that financial independence is all about money, but living a wealthy life isn't. This distinction is critical.
We've all seen rich people who are miserable, and poor people who are happy.
Research even shows the relationship between money and happiness is small.
Below are the key ten principles that will help you achieve true wealth — both financially and personally.
1st Wealth Building Principle: Get Deeply Motivated
Money is a shallow motivator — too shallow to drive you deep enough to achieve success.
The problem is financial wealth is an external goal with benefits limited to the world outside of you. Money buys things, but money doesn't buy happiness. It can build you a prettier prison, but it can't get you out of prison.
The inherent limits of external goals (fancy houses, cars, and big bank accounts) similarly limits how motivated you will be when pursuing them.
To succeed in building wealth, you want to be driven by internal goals deeper than just the external trappings of wealth.
You want a cause that will bring transformation to your life and drive you deep enough to overcome all the obstacles that stand between you and financial freedom.
Internally-driven goals that might focus your attention long enough to succeed include the following:
- Freedom: Break loose from the shackles of daily labor so that you have more time to grow, create, and live to your fullest potential.
- Charity: The more you have the more you can give. Charitable foundations created by wealthy families often provide the financial muscle to empower great social and environmental causes.
- Growth: When you have financial freedom, you also have more time to pursue personal freedom. The wealth in your external world becomes a mirror to the wealth in your internal world. The principles that lead to financial wealth can also lead to true wealth by affecting other areas of your life.
- Leadership: Grow your own wealth ethically and joyfully so that you can lead by example for friends and family to rise above the bonds of financial mediocrity and follow in your footsteps.
The reason deeper causes are essential is because building wealth isn't easy.
You will encounter many problems that must be overcome along your journey to financial freedom. You will pay a price to reach your goal.
To stay the course long enough to succeed, you must be motivated by a commitment that runs deeper than just the lifestyle that money can buy. This step-by-step course to financial freedom can help you find your “why” to propel you toward your goal.
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2nd Wealth Building Principle: Give More Value Than You Take
Adding value to the world by giving more than you receive makes everyone better off. That's how you build true wealth. You improve others lives by improving your own.
Sure, history is replete with people who have amassed financial empires by exploiting others or the environment, but taking value can never lead to happiness or fulfillment.
Exploitation may bring riches, but giving value brings happiness and fulfillment as well as riches — and that's true wealth.
By giving more value than you receive, success becomes a measure of how much you've given. The wealthier you become, the more you are giving to others.
It's a rewarding way to live.
“From what we get in life, we make a living. From what we give, we make a life.” – Arthur Ashe
3rd Wealth Building Principle: Live With 100% Integrity
Never do or say anything that wouldn't make your Mother and Father proud.
Don't cause harm, encroach on others property, violate moral law, or damage the environment. Don't lie, insult, or cheat in pursuit of financial wealth.
Heck, don't even stretch the truth. It just isn't worth it.
The rule is simple: if it doesn't feel right then it probably isn't. If you don't feel comfortable telling your spouse, children, and parents what you are doing, then you probably shouldn't do it.
Never choose expediency over integrity because no amount of financial wealth can replace a good night's sleep, a clear conscience, and a peaceful mind.
4th Wealth Building Principle: Be Courageous
Humans are social animals which makes us cautious to venture independently. Yet, wealth doesn't come from following the crowd. It results from doing what others won't so you can have what others never will.
It takes courage to be a self-starter and be self-responsible. It takes courage to walk new paths and develop new skills. It takes courage to stand out from the crowd. It takes courage to put out the extra effort when others don't.
In short, it takes courage to build wealth.
It may be true that the nail that stands up is the nail that gets hammered down, but it's equally true that the nail that never got driven is the nail that didn't fulfill its purpose.
Live with courage so you can live fully and experience true wealth.
5th Wealth Building Principle: Be Disciplined
Wealth is the cumulative result of many little things added together and compounded over a lifetime. That means your daily habits will make or break your success.
Saving, investing, reinvesting, and growing your financial and business intelligence are all essential wealth building habits that require persistent and consistent effort.
In other words, wealth building requires discipline.
Without discipline, you risk falling prey to the number one wealth killer: procrastination. You must begin the right habits today without delay. It takes discipline to overcome procrastination by starting today and persisting tomorrow.
Another obstacle to disciplined, daily habits is “magical thinking.” This is the false belief that financial security will magically appear out of thin air without a specific plan or action causing it.
Wealth happens because you do what it takes to make it happen. The appearance of “instant wealth” actually stands on the foundation of years of disciplined, daily habits.
Luck comes to those who make their own breaks, and this course shows you how to do it.
6th Wealth Building Principle: Avoid Conspicuous Consumption
The illusory carrot for building wealth is the attraction of a “more, better, different” lifestyle.
This myth is perpetuated by brokerage ads filled with sailboats, European vacations, and perfectly manicured golf resorts. The problem is consumerism causes your limited resources to be directed toward lifestyle and away from building wealth.
They are competing demands for the same scarce resources – and only one can win the battle.
“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires, seek discipline and find your liberty.” – Frank Herbert
The reality is wealth is a form of delayed gratification. Wealth builders live modestly by spending less than they can afford (in money, time, and energy), so they can invest the difference for greater value in the future.
They understand happiness doesn't result from the material trappings of wealth, because that would only keep them from fulfilling the deeper cause that drives them to success.
Every day you make a choice between consumption today or wealth for tomorrow.
The only way to embrace delayed gratification as the most fulfilling alternative without any sense of sacrifice is to have a motivating cause deeper than your desire for lifestyle. If lifestyle is your cause, then consumption becomes the priority — making wealth eternally elusive.
7th Wealth Building Principle: Build Supportive Environments
If building wealth was easy, then more people would achieve it. Yet, few succeed in their pursuit of financial freedom even though anyone can put together a reasonable plan to become wealthy.
The difference is consistent, persistent, focused action. Life provides an endless stream of distractions to sidetrack your plans for wealth.
The solution is to create a support system that keeps you focused, on track, and literally draws you toward wealth.
Your family environment, relationships, work environment, financial habits, daily rituals, and more must be proactively designed to literally pull you toward wealth by supporting and reinforcing your plans.
You must structure your life to support a wealthy outcome. It's the path of least resistance.
Financial Mentor's coaching and educational products can help you re-design your life to achieve financial freedom. You can either direct your daily life to achieve your goals, or you can passively allow your days to be filled with alternatives.
You either get the results you choose, or you get the results that are given to you. Which path will you follow?
8th Wealth Building Principle: Apply Leverage To Build Wealth
Leverage is the essential success principle that builds wealth. You won't get wealthy by trading time for money, and you can't do it all yourself.
Building wealth requires you to work smarter rather than harder by applying the following principles of leverage:
- Financial Leverage: Other people's money so that you're not limited by your own pocketbook.
- Time Leverage: Other people's time so that you're not limited to 24 hours in a day.
- Systems and Technology Leverage: Other people's systems and technology so that you can get more done with less effort.
- Marketing Leverage: Other people's magazines, newsletters, radio shows, and databases so that you can communicate to millions with no more effort than is required to communicate one-on-one.
- Network Leverage: Other people's resources and connections so that you can expand beyond your own.
- Knowledge Leverage: Other people's talents, expertise, and experience so that you can utilize greater knowledge than you will ever possess.
Leverage allows you to build more wealth than you could ever achieve alone by utilizing resources that extend beyond your own. It allows you to grow wealth without being restricted by your personal limitations.
Leverage is the principle that separates those who successfully attain wealth from those who don't. It's just that simple.
If you aren't using leverage, then you're working harder than you should to earn less than you deserve — and that isn't going to make you wealthy.
9th Wealth Building Principle: Treat Your Wealth Like A Business (Because It Is)
You wouldn't build a business without a business plan. Why should building wealth be any different?
Design your wealth plan based on proven business principles that lead to success. These principles include competitive advantage, leverage, accurate record keeping, and accountability– just to name a few.
Run your money like a business, because that's exactly what it is: a personal financial management business.
Additionally, your personalized wealth building plan should take into account your unique skills, interests, and resources while incorporating the Ten Commandments to Wealth, successful investment principles, and much more.
When complete, your wealth plan will be tailor-fitted to your unique life situation, while honoring the proven success principles that no wealth plan is complete without.
Run your money like the business it is. Anything less will slow your journey to wealth.
10th Wealth Building Principle: Steward Your Wealth
“If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.” – Socrates
Wealth is your servant, and you are a servant to your wealth. Money is little more than a tool that comes with a responsibility to use it wisely.
The rich man is a fool who dies without arranging his affairs to assure that his wealth does good during his lifetime and after his passing.
Through your legacy of wealth, you have the opportunity to bless yourself and your family's life now and in the future. And you can go beyond that by expanding the circle to include the lives of all who follow you.
As a successful wealth builder, you'll be in the unique position to organize charities that can do great social good. The fact that you can't take it with you means wealth is a gift to be given.
Always understand that wealth isn't something you possess, but a flow which has found a temporary parking place under your stewardship.
Eventually this stewardship will move to others as all things must pass (including you). The wealth builder's solemn responsibility is to use this temporarily gifted power wisely so that it creates maximum benefit for all those who are touched by what you created in your lifetime.
In Summary…
There are ten key wealth building principles that lead to true wealth, not just monetary wealth. The objective is not just to become rich, but to build a balanced, fulfilling, wealthy life.
These ten key principles will help keep you on track:
- Build Wealth For A Deep Cause: Money alone is too shallow a goal to motivate you to overcome all the obstacles that stand between you and wealth. When you find a deeper goal like freedom, growth, creativity, or charity, then you'll have the internal motivation to persist and succeed.
- Give More Value Than You Take: When you give value then your financial success becomes a measure of how much you have given to the world. It's a satisfying way to live.
- Live with 100% Integrity: Integrity is non-negotiable because no amount of money can replace a good night's sleep, a clear conscience, and a peaceful mind.
- Be Courageous: Wealth results from doing what others won't so you can have what others never will.
- Be Disciplined: Life will conspire to distract you from achieving your goal. Only the disciplined will stay the course with consistent enough action to get results.
- Avoid Conspicuous Consumption: Nobody ever spent their way to financial freedom. Every day you make a choice between consumption today or wealth for tomorrow.
- Build Supportive Environments: The path of least resistance to wealth is paved by supportive environments that literally pull you toward the goal.
- Apply Leverage: Leverage is what separates those who achieve wealth from those who don't. You can't reach the goal by trading time for money, and you can't do it all yourself. You need leverage.
- Treat Your Wealth Like A Business: As a wealth builder, you're in the personal financial management business and must manage your net worth just like an executive manages a successful business.
- Steward Your Wealth: Money is little more than a tool that comes with the responsibility to use it wisely. It's not something you possess, but something that passes through you and must be given back.
After all, isn't life too short to settle for anything less?
“Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.” – H.L. Mencken
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“Wealth is not something you possess, but it is a flow which has found a temporary parking place under your stewardship.” How true! What better motivation to become wealthy than to endow the next generation with a legacy of doing good works?!
Absolutely love anything like this
Great Article
nice post
nice post, thanks for sharing
Effective, practical and a true eye opener. Thank you Todd
Really good, solid advice!
As a business mentor I was drawn to read your blog to see what similarities there are between being a business mentor and a financial mentor. Many is the answer!
I really enjoyed your post and will be relaying much of what you say to my clients, many of which hope to get rich quick and think that wealth will bring them lifelong happiness!
Awesome list. Couldn’t agree more.
Great article. For the “Avoid Conspicuous Consumption,” I’d call that “Don’t Try To Buy Status” in society. People buy the fancy cars to try to impress. But real wealth is something totally different, in many ways the opposite of financing a fancy car you can’t really afford.
Very inspirational article to read. Thank you so much Todd for helping financial illiterate person like me and others like me world over.
Really a informative article, almost all are life learning lessons, thinking to adopt at least few of them for now to build wealth.
Some good rules there – confident I uphold 7 of them, need to do some work on the others.
Thanks Todd, Your 10 commandments was a very interesting read, but not being a business person, and i don’t do investments, still we all need principles, like you say one as to be disciplined, in every thing one do’s their whole life through. But i shall be 81 this year , and the biggest fault 90% of the worlds population make is, they make promises they can’t keep, this is upsetting for most people, but most people have long memories.
These 10 commandments will be a game changer for me. Thanks
You’re welcome. I’m glad you found them helpful!
Thank you for this list. I need to dig deeper into #8. If all other principals are taken care of, this is where the real magic happens.
The belief that people should work extra hard if they want to become wealthy is a myth as you have demonstrated in your post. People should learn that they need the help of others and technology to accomplish their goals in life.
What a great article!
Thanks Todd
Thank you, Amani!
From nothing, wealth I am coming for you. I am humbled and most of all, I am learning