Master the MILLIONAIRE skill stack—be the top 1%.

IN THIS ISSUE 

9 min read

• 📚 Skill Stack

• 💸 3 Money-Making Skills to Learn

• 🔑 Key Takeaways

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SKILL STACK

It's often said that money doesn't solve all your problems, but it does solve all your money problems. Many of life's challenges can indeed be alleviated with financial resources. One of my favorite quotes highlights this idea:

Now, last week, we saw that becoming a millionaire is less about the possessions you acquire and more about the person you become and the capabilities you develop. Even if my money were to disappear, I would still possess the skills and abilities necessary to earn it back.

(If you haven’t seen last week’s newsletter, you can read it here)

Recall that the most valuable investments that you can make are in your skills. Your skills pay compounding dividends over the entirety of your life, and they can't be taken away from you.

So remember that the solution to fast-track your path to becoming a millionaire is to build a valuable skill stack—one that allows you to be the top 1% of people with that specific array of unique, complementary, and valuable skills.

SKILLS TO ADD → MONEY

The first money-making skill is communication. This is first on the list because regardless of what you're going to do to make your first million dollars, it's probably going to involve other people in some way, shape, or form. That can be partners, vendors, customers, employees, a boss, or others.

Your ability to communicate the ideas inside of your head in a persuasive manner that influences the behaviors of the people around you is one of the most valuable skills you can develop.

Now, there are hundreds of ways that humans communicate, but in particular, here are four aspects of communication to master if you want to become a millionaire:

1. body language

2. tonal quality

3. public speaking

4. writing

Now, if you want to be in the top 10 percent of communicators, in addition to mastering these micro-skills, you should also become proficient in persuasion and storytelling.

Remember, it does not matter how beautifully you deliver your message if it does not drive the person across from you to take action or to change their mind. This is where persuasion comes in, and one of the best resources to start you out on this journey is Robert Cialdini's classic book, "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion."

Then, learn how to tell a damn good story because, like it or not, humans do not communicate through facts and numbers and statistics. Whether you're trying to sell a product to a customer, sell an idea to your boss, or sell a vision to your employees, do it through the form of a story.

Alright, next on our list of money-making skills is finance and investing. One of the most interesting things I realized as I started spending more and more time around millionaires is just how open they are to talking about their personal finances.

And yet, there's this unspoken taboo around actually talking about finance with friends, family, and colleagues. Like, how uncomfortable would you be if you’ve just met someone, and the other person asks, "So, uh, what's your net worth? What kind of liquidity you're sitting on? What have you invested in?" Right? Like, these are awkward conversations for most people, and it's generally awkward because most of us, at one time or another, have felt embarrassed or even ashamed of the answers.

So, there are two books I recommend if you want to learn about the basic rules of personal finance. First is "I Will Teach You to Be Rich" by Ramit Sethi, and the second is an age-old classic called "The Richest Man in Babylon" by George Clason. Once you've learned the rules of the personal finance game, it's time to turn your attention to learning the strategy of investing.

Investing can be self-taught. To be honest, there are many right ways to investing. Investing comes in many forms, in one’s self, in real estate, in mutual funds, etc. To learn about the stock market, I'd start with Howard Marks's book, "The Most Important Thing".

Alright, so the next millionaire skill is actually something that's so deeply fundamental. That skill is called Leverage.

Alex Hermosi says,

So, If you want to build wealth and become a millionaire, you'd best take this to heart because most people are simply trading time for money.

This is a losing proposition because you only have so much time to trade, and I'm guessing you'd rather not exchange all your time for money because you'd probably enjoy having some time to actually use that money, right?

So, if you're tired of putting so much in and getting practically nothing out, then you have to become a student of Leverage. Real quickly, here are the three most important forms of Leverage when it comes to money-making:

First, there's labor leverage, which simply means you can get other people to do work for you, and now you get the benefit of their time, energy, and expertise, as well as your own.

For instance, Let’s say you have a window washing company. Lets say that, on average, you make around 15 to 20 dollars per window and another five dollars per screen. Which means to make a million dollars, we had to wash roughly 58,823 windows. Or another way of looking at it is that's around 200 houses per month. That would have been logistically impossible for just one person. But with a crew of 15, that meant each person only had to wash four houses per week. Suddenly, not such a tall order, really. And that's the power of labor leverage.

The next form of leverage is capital. Simply put, capital leverages finding ways for your money to make you more money. Think of each dollar like a worker whose only job is to go out and recruit more dollars. This is called investing, which is, again, a millionaire skill that you have to master.

The third form of leverage is media and technology, which I'm using at this very moment with this newsletter. See, if I wanted to, I could spread the message of this newsletter through one-on-one conversations, but that's tiring and is generally just a terrible use of my time. Instead, I can just write my ideas down and publish it, and now thousands of people can access the same content and requires no additional work on my end.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Build a valuable skill stack—one that allows you to be the top 1% of people with that specific array of unique, complementary, and valuable skills.

• Learn how to communicate

  • body language

  • tonal quality

  • public speaking

  • writing

  • persuasion

  • storytelling

• Learn finance and investing

• Learn how to use leverage

  • Labor leverage

  • Capital leverage

  • Media leverage

Topic 4

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