My elder daughter sent me a clip of Grant Cardone recalling how 16 years ago his wife got him to play the game of “What would we do if we won the lottery?” It is worth watching: http://instagram.com/reel/DYZiSN5xC-2/?igsh=dDI3NWkOdnpxeGto
Grant says, “There’s more money on this planet than there is creativity to spend it.”
I thought about that and had the realisation that what he said is an understated simplification.
“How so?” I hear you ask.
Well the amount of money is not fixed, it is variable. Each country is supposed to issue roughly enough currency and credit to facilitate the exchange of the goods and services produced within the economy without causing persistent inflation or deflation. (Given the persistent inflation, they obviously fail miserably at it.) Which means if you increase your delivery of valuable final products, the government increases the amount of money in circulation.
So, for argument’s sake, if every person in a country on January 1 doubled their personal and collective production and the government commensurately increased the money supply, the result would be that everyone would double their income, there would be double the goods and services to buy with their increased income and there would be no inflation. Prosperity for all! So there is really no limit to wealth, there is only limited imagination and creativity.
When producing physical goods there are various factors that limit this potential expansion – the availability of factory floor space and raw materials, immediate logistical capacity, who retains the profit from increased production, the individual or his employer etc. – but the core simplicity is that in theory there is no limit to money that can me made. Just because you start earning a million dollars does not mean someone else stops earning a million dollars.
So don’t hold back on your own expansion or growth for fear of depriving someone else! It does not work that way!
And if you are interested in the economic principles behind this, here is a conversation I had with ChatGPT on the subject, refreshing my HSC understanding from 50 years ago: https://chatgpt.com/c/6a0c062e-84a4-83ec-bf0d-fddf894d417a
Now, how do you go about increasing your income?
1. Discover your Basic Purpose, your passion. Here’s a link to a blog post I wrote to help you do that: https://www.tomgrimshaw.com/tomsblog/?p=37862 Why? Because when you are working on your basic purpose, progress is closer to a hot knife through butter than it is to walking through molasses in the middle of winter! Motivation and self-discipline are higher, procrastination evaporates, you feel more like you are being paid to have fun rather than working.
2. Zig Ziglar famously said: “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”
Once you know your basic purpose, what your talents and personality characteristics are, ask yourself the questions,
“What do people want that is on my purpose line to deliver?”
“How can I best use my talents and personality to deliver that?”
“What skills or abilities will I need to acquire or boost in order to accomplish that?”
3. Delivering enough of what others want to get you what you want is most likely going to take some skills and abilities senior to those you currently exercise. So step three is to skill up! It may take some communication skills, some organising skills, learning some production techniques but for sure it is going to require you step outside your comfort zone to skill up. If you don’t know where to start, reach out to me for some direction.
4. Decide your future and plan out what is necessary to get you there. Here is a link to help you do that: https://www.scientologycourses.org/tools-for-life/targets/steps/administrative-scale.html
5. If you are working on your purpose line you will be doing something you love and you are good at. But there will still be tough days. So you need to have some ‘pick me ups’ that will help you over the troughs. A clear vision is great. A clean statement of what you are trying to do is motivating.
6. A list of wins and success you can look back on from time to time can be uplifting. I often encourage people to keep a little book called “My Wins and Successful Actions”. Every time you accomplish something worthwhile, document it. Every personal best, highest ever, career milestone, every time you helped someone do something great, write it in your book. Do that from the back of the book coming forward. From the front of the book, every time you have a good result, document the actions that contributed to it. Then, once a month, review it.
It is very easy to lose sight of or forget the little things that contribute to the big successes. You go away on holidays, come back and after a month you read through your successful actions and a couple of them jump off the page at you that you had inadvertently left out when you came back from holidays.
7. Realise that while 75-80% of us, or thereabouts, are constructive and trying to get along, that still leaves 20-25% who are destructively inclined. You are going to meet one of them from time to time. So don’t expect to win everyone to your cause. There is a course that gives you the basics on differentiating between those who would help from those who would harm you: https://www.scientologycourses.org/tools-for-life/suppression/progress.html Using the data in this course can act like armour to protect you against destructive personalities.