Now don't get me wrong... the learning curve around money is huge and full of snakes!!! It's dangerous and energy-sucking. But we owe it to ourselves, to our children and families, and to the people we know, and even to the very planet that sustains us, to learn a new way to deal with this! Doing the same thing over and over and over is going to keep leading to the same result. We people alive today in the 21st century need some guts, courage and resilience to bust through our fears over this and get on with living in a more beautiful and sustainable way.
From my tirade there in the last paragraph, you can probably tell that my next journey into the land of finances was quite a bit more risky than the first, so let me tell you about it!
In reality timeline it's 1999. Even though I had a small residual income, and was able to get a self-employed job any time I wanted, I realized I was still stuck in the poverty-pool as deeply as everyone else. I decided to blast my paradigm again by trying to make a million dollars. And thus I set out to learn how that is done.
My higher financial education now escalated through books, tapes and talking with people who know how to make money. My best teacher was Robert Kiosacki of the Rich Dad, Poor Dad books. His books were about evolving our conditioning around money through understanding cash flow. I understood it right away.
Here's Robert's cash flow quadrants:
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Employee
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Business Owner
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Self Employed
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Investor
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On the left side of the quadrant is where most of us live. We go to school when we are young to learn how to be good employees. The biggest thing about being an employee is that when you stop putting in the hours, the paycheck stops. It doesn't matter if you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The day you are fired your paycheck stops.
At the bottom of the left side of the quadrant is the Self Employed person. Most of us who try to break out of being employees go here, because our vision does not take us any further. The self employed person can make a lot of money, but when they stop working, the paycheck stops. This is the same for the granola muffin gal out in the woods spinning wool and knitting a sweater and for the six-figure income health practitioner with his own office. Everything depends on those billable hours!
In order to really break into financial freedom of any kind we need to bust out of the left quadrant into the right side.
At the bottom of the right side is the Investor. There is no way to get there just by wanting to. The Investor has to have money to invest. If you are an investor you won't be reading this little handout anyway, so I won't waste time for the rest of us by explaining that if you have a lot of money you should buy low and sell high.
So this leaves all the rest of us Joe's with only one avenue for reaching our potential: business owner.
