This article is a transcript from Episode 001 of The BeHuman Podcast. To listen to the audio, click here
Welcome to the first edition of the Be Human podcast and today we are going to look at the concept of money and abundance and how you can start creating more abundance and attracting and bringing more money into your life.
So, it’s a question that I probably get asked more than any other question: If you’re on a personal development journey, a journey of personal growth, how do you create more abundance in your life?
And it’s a very good question. I think the answer is not simple, because it depends where you are starting from. So, from the perspective of money and abundance I think the first thing we need to ask ourselves is where are on this journey – this journey along the career path in this world we live in.
So, in this world, in this capitalist world we live in there is barter, there is scarcity, there’s economics, where there are buyers and sellers. I think the first question we need to ask is whether you are aware that there are different levels of understanding or that there are different levels of complexity in terms of our highly valued criteria that we need to be aware of first in order to know where we fit on that journey. So, what I’ve done is that I’ve looked at different models and I have applied these different models to a modern age and looked at how these models fit in to people’s experiences of money.
What I’ve realized is that there are multiple levels to this journey and understanding these levels allows usvto understand what we need to do to conquer that level and to raise our value and start to bring more money and abundance into our lives.
THE PRAGMATIST
So, the first level that I want to talk about. – I’ve put labels on each of these levels – The first level I want to talk about today is the level of The Pragmatist.
So, who is The Pragmatist and what is the stereotypical experience of The Pragmatist?
Well, The Pragmatist is someone who must be pragmatic about money. Someone who has a fixed amount of money coming into their lives and they can’t change it. It’s limited by external influences at this moment in time. Now, it’s not to say that they can’t change that, but at this moment in time the amount of money coming into their life is fixed or absent.
So, examples of this would be; people who are students, or people who are unemployed or people who are on disability allowance or people who are going through illness and are
going through some sort of fixed payment or not getting any money. Or people who are retired and are depending on a fixed income for a retirement plan. So, in these cases they don’t really have the opportunities to increase the amount money coming into their lives. Therefore, they have to cut their cloth to measure. And in doing so they must be pragmatic about what they can spend money on and what they can afford.
The problem with this is that this creates a world of scarcity. Because there is never quite enough of anything to go around. So, the first thing that needs to be done to conquer this level of The Pragmatist is to conquer that feeling of scarcity and to overcome it. In doing so, we can move to a different level and we can create more value for ourselves and value for the people around us.
THE WORKER
This second level I want to talk about is the Level of the Worker. So, The Worker is someone who produces output. So effectively what you’re doing as a worker is swapping time for money, in exchange for productivity and output. So, you work for somebody else. They employ you to do the job and then they pay you a certain amount, per hour usually, or per unit of work, in order for you to deliver some sort of output.
The Worker has a great opportunity because as long as they keep working, they get paid more money. The Problem for the worker is that there are a fixed number of hours in a day, and a fixed number of days in a week, therefore you will eventually become limited by one of two things: either the number of hours in a week or you hit a ceiling in terms of what you are getting paid per hour, per day, per week or per year. So, there is always a glass ceiling on how much you can earn as a worker.
THE MANAGER
Now what’s interesting is the next level which is the level of The Manager. Now the manager has a different role because the manager doesn’t actually produce output. What the Manager does is leverage workers so the job of the Manager is make sure that the workers work to the best of their abilities and manages the output of those workers.
Now what’s really interesting from the perspective of The Manager is that their job is to make sure everything keeps the same. So, whenever surprising things happen, it is their job to try to bring things to back to the same way as they were before that event ever happened.
Whenever emergencies happen their job is to resolve these emergencies and bring things back to be the same way so that we can maintain output and productivity in the workplace.
The problem of course is that if you spend your time as a manager for any substantial length of time, then everything becomes sameness. You become fearful of change because change means risk, and risk means lack of productivity or lack of output, which affects your bottom line.
The other problem with being a manager of course is that you start a lose skills. You are no longer producing output. You are managing other people to produce output. The fact is that most people can manage themselves once they have a clear understanding of what they need to do and clear measurement criterion of what they need to do their job.
So, for all intents and purposes, what managers do is do is enforce sameness and consistency on the output of workers.
THE ENTREPRENEUR
Now, the next level beyond The Manager is the level of the Entrepreneur. Now the Role of the Entrepreneur is a really interesting role because The Entrepreneur is almost like the opposite of the manager. Whereas the managers role is very much focused on sameness, on doing things the same in order to maintain output, the role of the entrepreneur is to be different.
They are the renegades. They need to change things. They need to do things differently. They want to improve things. They want to innovate and they want t make things better.
If a Manager chooses to evolve beyond the level of Manager and create their own business they may run into a problem. The problem is this: If person creates their own business and have lived the last four or five or ten or twenty years maintaining sameness, maintaining the same level same level of output then they probably have lost their creative streak. They have probably lost their ability to differentiate which probably means that they won’t make good entrepreneurs or innovators.
The impact of that is that they only way they can setup a new business is to duplicate the old business and use the exact same processes and procedures of the previous business. The problem with that is that since they didn’t create the procedures in the first place, they probably don’t know why the procedures exist and they don’t know why these procedures work and why they have been put in place. The job as a Manager is to execute on the processes, execute on the procedures but not create them in the first place.
So, a true Entrepreneur on the other hand has a very different outlook. They believe their job is to innovate and change and make things better. This is why Managers can quite often find it very difficult to work for themselves or work in small companies, because they are used to being told what to do from higher management, but they are not used to being their own boss.
A true Entrepreneur embraces change, embraces difference, embraces innovation, and really wants to create new products, new procedures and new ideas constantly all the time. Of course the challenge for the Entrepreneur is that the Entrepreneur is usually used to getting their own way, working by themselves. They are quite often a single, sole player or an Independent Player, and are usually used to getting their way, however if an Entrepreneur really wants to grow a business, they really need to make sure they have other people that they can delegate to and this can be a real challenge for an Entrepreneur to let go of control and trust other people to do a job as well as they believe they can do.
So, the challenge for an Entrepreneur is to delegate, let go of control and allow other people to deliver on the concepts, the innovation, and the ideas that they have.
Of course, this is where the advantage of understanding this Journey of Money is, because if an Entrepreneur recognises this, then they recognise that what they need to do is hire managers who are good at sameness, who are good at maintaining a process or a procedure and are good at making sure thing keep the same, so that they can allow things to scale well, in the process of growing the business.
THE BUSINESS OWNER
The next step of the Journey is what I call the Business Owner. So, a business owner is very, very different to an entrepreneur or a manager. Because the business owner understands that the key thing in the business is the Concepts around finding something valuable. So, they recognise the ability to innovate, they recognise a gap in the market place, and the recognise how to create value for people, but they also recognise that their value is mostly given in terms of Direction and opposed to Execution. So, their job really is to bring ( the innovators or ) the Entrepreneurs together and the Managers together, and create the vision for those people to execute on it. If the person understands how to do this well, and they don’t get caught up in the detail of execution, then what can happen is Owner can replicate that process over and over again. So, this is the process that you see with people like Richard Branson for example, who creates a model in his head of how to create value for an individual, understand the process and innovation that’s required, sees an opportunity in the market place, and knows how to recognise the innovators and the managers to allow them to execute on this vision, on this idea. So, therefore they can do the same thing over and over again where they create a vision, documenting that vision into a business plan, and actually hiring the right people to execute on that.
I’m not so sure if it’s true or not, but I have heard that Richard Branon sets up about 200 businesses every year, and of those 200 businesses he closes about 180 of them because they don’t work, and then of those 20 businesses that remain, that do survive, then he works out which of these he wants to invest more in, and in the process of doing so he figures out which one is going to be the next big hit. It’s only when these become stellar, big hits like Virgin Airlines, or Virgin Trains, or Virgin Atlantic do we actually get to hear about them, but in the meantime, there has been a build up for several years, before they actually get the success that we hear about.
THE VENTURE CAPITALIST
The next level of this journey is what I call the Venture Capitalist. The Venture Capitalist does not even come up with the ideas. What they are actually doing is finding the business owners, who have the ideas and who actually want to execute on these ideas, but these business owners don’t have the resources to get the business off the ground, to pay the managers, to pay the Entrepreneurs to pay the innovators, and so what they do is, the Venture Capitalists have already made their money, and they are investing their own capital on the value of someone else’s idea and somebody else ability to innovate and manage.