Dr John Demartini breaks down 6 practical steps to building wealth and achieving financial freedom.
I’d love to share with you today some really amazing tips that I know can help you become wealthier. The tips that I found that are common to all the wealthy billionaires that I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with or interview. So I’d like to share with you those and I hope you have a pencil and paper, because if you do, you’re going to get some great ideas here.
The first thing is, that when I go around the world and I ask people, how many of you want to be financially dependent?
In thousand audiences, ten thousand audiences, people put their hands up and they all just assume they want to be wealthy, they want to be financially independent, they all rally around the idea. And then I ask them, how many of you are? And many of those hands go down, most of them. And then I ask them, so what’s the percentage of the people that become financially independent, very wealthy life, of the whole population? And I hear one, two, three, five percent of the audiences, it’s actually less than one percent. The majority of people don’t become wealthy.
They don’t have financial wealth at least, they have wealth in other areas of life, but not financial wealth. And so there’s a reason for that, most people have a fantasy about being financially independent, but what they do is they have desires for immediate gratification and consumerism and buying things that appreciate value, and they never save and invest and build their fortunes. So I’d like to talk about how to raise true wealth building up on your value list because your higher values will dictate your financial destiny.
The things you really value will determine what you act on when it comes to your money. You’re always going to spend money according to what you value most. If you don’t value really building financial independence and wealth, you’ll probably end up spending your money on consumerism like the majority of the people. So I’d like to share with you what I call the six steps to wealth, it can make a difference in your financial destiny and it will raise wealth building higher on your value list than you’ve ever had before. So get your pens and papers ready, because here we go.
The first step, the first key to building wealth is something that’s so common sense that most people overlook it and that is they have to have a desire to build a business directly or indirectly that serves vast numbers of people.
You won’t find any billionaire out there that hasn’t built a business to serve vast numbers of people, you won’t find it. You go to the head of Microsoft, Bill Gates, you go to Richard Branson or you go to Larry Ellison or you go to Warren Buffett or you go to any of the names that are billionaires, they’ve all built a business to serve vast numbers of people, great numbers of people. So if you don’t have a desire to have a work ethic, If you don’t have a desire to directly or indirectly serve people, you may be having a fantasy that you’re going to be financially independent somehow, but you have to directly or indirectly care about human beings. If you don’t have a desire to serve, I always say that when you can’t wait to get up in the morning and be of service to people, people can’t wait to get your service.
If you don’t have a desire to go out there and make a difference in the world and serve people and get up and do something amazing that can make a difference in their lives and serve some need, where’s the money going to come from? Oh, you might go off and gamble on some investments to try to do it but my objective is to help you realize that if you go and serve people, you deserve vast rewards. And the greater the numbers of services, the greater the numbers of rewards. And I find it, when I ask people how many of you use Microsoft Windows, they all put their hands up. How many of you have heard about Warren Buffett? They built a brand.
So the first thing is to write 200 benefits down of how building a business that serves vast numbers of people will serve your life, because when you have a big enough reason for doing it, you will. When the, “why”, is big enough, the, “how”, take care of themselves, but you have to have a reason for going out, building wealth. So write the reasons down and don’t write down, “oh, if I build that business, then I can buy that jet, I can travel those things, I can do this trip, I can spend my money and buy those clothes”, that’s consumerism.
You want the benefits of actually going in there and directly or indirectly building a business that serves people. If your heart’s not into that, it’s not going to happen, you have to have a real reason for doing that, and that doesn’t have to be directly you might hire somebody that does part of that, but you need to have your heart and soul into serving people, that’s important. So two hundred benefits of serving vast numbers of people directly or indirectly. And don’t stop until you do it, and you’ll probably stop at about thirty, and you go, “oh, I don’t know what to write”. That’s probably because you don’t have a big enough reason for doing it. But when you have big reasons to do things, you get big jobs done.
The second thing is write 200 benefits of refining that business and working on that business and maximizing the efficiency of that business so it maximizes profits.
And again, this can be directly or indirectly, but if you don’t have a reason for refining it, where’s your profits going to come from? So many people have an idea building a business but it takes prioritizing and delegating and making sure you’re doing the most important things. Numero uno, the people who learn the art of focusing on the highest priority things, the things that produce the most and serve the most people the most efficient way, they’re the ones that have the profits. So you have to work on the business, not just in the business. If you do, you’ll have more profit margins, and the second you have 200 benefits of doing that you will think of all kinds of ways in which you can do your business more effectively and when you do you’ll serve more people, which is a source of income.
The third step is 200 hundred benefits of saving an ever progressive portion of the profits.
Because if you’re not saving it, you’re not building the crystal that starts the seed reaction, you have to start to save your money because people who say their money and build up a liquid cushion, stabilize their business, they have higher quality clients, they have less volatilities in their business, they attract more opportunities, more ideas, more associations in their business, and because of it they’re more confident to go and sell their business. So if you got ten dollars saved, you hang out with 10ers, if you have a thousand saved, you hang out with 1000ers, if you got a million saved, you hang out with millionaires, if you got a billion saved, you hang out with billionaires. Saving your money and building up liquidity is the first step to building wealth. And I always say, save before you invest, before you speculate. But by saving and building up liquidity, you’ll stabilize the business, and if you have a desire to serve, you have desire to make it more efficient and your desire to save you’re on your way, because if you never save your money you’ll be working your whole life for money. If you save your money, it’ll start working for you. One is a slave, one’s a master.
The next one is two hundred benefits of now progressively investing in ever greater degrees of return and reward in life. You want to earn the right to risk, you want to learn how to invest and study investing. If you really value something, you’ll study it, If you really don’t value it, I had a gentleman just today come up to me and he says, “I want to be financially well off”. I said, “how many books have you read on that topic?” He said, ”I never read a book”. I said, “you don’t really want that, you want the lifestyle, the fantasies that people have”.
And fantasies will create your nightmares, you have to care about wealth building enough to study it and to learn it, to master it. Warren Buffett before he was 11 years old had already read all the books in the Nebraska Library on wealth building. Imagine how dedicated he was, no wonder he’s wealthy as he is. So study it. When you really, really, really value something, you’ll study and will learn about it. If you’re single or married acting single and you basically meet somebody out there and you go, “oh, they’re attractive”, you want to get to know them. Well it comes to wealth too, the one who values money most is the one that gets it. Money circulates through the economy from those who value it least to those who value it most.
So if you really, really value it, you’ll study it, you’ll learn about it and you’ll learn about investing and you’ll do it in stair step manner. You’ll earn the right to risk, to reward yourself incrementally and not take too many risks that you end up blowing your money and gambling it away. Because I always say immediate gratification cost you your wealth, but long term, methodical, strategic vision builds wealth. So the next is two hundred benefits now of accumulating a fortune. Because what you have a desire to go build it, you need to have a motive for building it more. Because if you just sit there and want to get to your comfort zone and have financial independence, that’s not really where it’s at. Most people that get there, they’re going to think, “oh, there’s more to life than that”. I was financially independent many years ago, there’s way more than just having enough money to not have to work, because you really want to be able to get up and dedicate your life to service anyway.
I would rather be able to go so much financially independent and don’t have to work, but I go to work because I love to work, I love to serve people. That’s the difference. So you want to accumulate it, so that way you have the power to do things in the world, have an influence in the world. The people have the money and the people have the gold and are the ones that set the golden rules and get things done. And what’s valuable is when you accumulate your money, you attract even more money, it’s like a magnet comes to you. More people want to take you to lunch and more people want to buy this, your brand gets bigger and they value building wealth. Because when you value you, the world values you, when you invest in you and you save and you accumulate, the world does that around you. Amazing things start to happen, magnetism, synchronicities, opportunities just synchronize to your life the moment you build this wealth. And the last is two hundred benefits of actually creating a financial cause that creates a legacy.
Because once you’ve accumulated your wealth, you’re going to do something in the world, you’re going to make a difference in the world. So you have to pick the one that you want to make the difference in the most. Find out what it is, in my own life it’s the Demartini prize and the Demartini Foundation, because I basically want to do just like the Nobel Prize and create a prize for the most extraordinary people doing the most extraordinary things and invest in that. But you got to find what means something to you, whatever that is something it really touches your heart strings and pulls you into action and you’ll do something more with your wealth. Because if you don’t have a big enough cause, the bigger your cause, the greater your wealth potential. You’ve got to have a big cause in your life and the greater your life, the more inspiring and more meaningful it is.
So remember those six steps, two hundred benefits of each one and they will rise up on your value list and whatever is highest on your value, get done. You’re inspired spontaneously from within to live by your highest values but you always got to have motivation when things aren’t. So if you raise these two hundred benefits on each of these items, these six items, these twelve hundred things you write will be the biggest change in your financial destiny you’ll ever come across. You will find yourself now having a big enough reason for doing it, and as I said earlier, when you got a big enough reason for doing it, you do it. So those six steps to wealth will help you become the next billionaire. And why not? Why not take on the challenge of having the millionaire mindset and do something extraordinary with your life? I know that I started doing that many years ago and I’m blessed to do, I get to go places and meet amazing people, do extraordinary things today because I learned the art of building wealth.
Dr John Demartini
