We polled readers for post topics. The same items came up over and over and over again: 1) money, 2) networking, 3) opportunities in the future and 4) how to maintain a healthy social life while doing all three. After large scale polling we’ve decided to create it with a completion date around July 2017 time frame. Here’s the introduction and how we think people should re-evaluate the rules they have been told to follow.
Introduction
Almost everyone who picks up this product is going to jump directly to the making money section of the book. Unfortunately? That will practically guarantee they will never make it.
Below is a list of 10 basic axioms to follow if youre serious about success.
1) Obligations Are Now Gone: If you are starting at ground zero, you have absolutely no obligation to anyone. This includes your best friends, your teachers and even your family if they are not going to help you succeed. Everyone encourages you to join the Peace Corps or worry about the children and other social matters that are now irrelevant to you. We will reiterate. All obligations for you to do anything are now gone.
It is important to note, this does not mean you will live a life without consequence, it means that you will no longer have an excuse of obligation to someone else. This means every action you make is going to directly impede or help your future success and the only person you get to blame is yourself.
To wrap up on the obligation piece, this is not cold hearted. It is much more cold hearted to donate your time and help 20 people when you could have donated several hundred thousand dollars (or even millions!) that will help thousands of people instead. If Warren Buffett never became the investor he is today, billions of dollars would go to waste. By signing a giving pledge, he will do more for society by himself than thousands of workers combined. In addition, he can pay for thousands of people to pursue their own dream of working for charities. Just remember, without his donations they wouldnt be able to work in the first place.
2) No More Third Party Pump Up Sessions: If you waste your time watching emotional videos about going out there and taking the bull by the horns we have no doubt nothing will be accomplished. These types of seminars, websites, videos, speeches etc. are all used to create a cult following. If you get 1,000+ cult followers who feel good from the event and one of them converts (law of large numbers) then more and more people will join the cult. It is an emotional Ponzi scheme.
Self-doubt is normal and it is something you will have to learn to deal with. If something pumps you up then youre being sold something on the back end. Stop consuming it. Reading about the struggles of someone else will not benefit you, if you need to read stories like this it means youre not taking your own life seriously.
When an outrageous success story can actually impact your life emotionally it means the creator of the content is converting your nervousness into positive energy. The sale is simply converting deep seeded insecurity into positive pump up energy to make you buy some product that wont actually get you anywhere.
Finally, to wrap up this point, when youre getting into higher risk situations the only thing that will help you perform better is preparation.
Public speaking is the best example. If you are nervous before the event, practice live demonstrations in front of other people thousands of times until you can barely speak. Youll find that youre no longer nervous because youre prepared and dont need some army ranger yelling at you to get hyped. The more you practice the more you are desensitized to the potential negative emotions.
99% of people fall victim to the motivation Ponzi scheme because they are never internally motivated. It means less competition for YOU.
3) No Social Media, No Television: Unless youre using social media to make money, go ahead and shut it down. Joe and Sally from college, high school or your childhood do not matter anymore. It is not harsh. If youre not where you want to be, why would you waste time following the actions of people that wont help you get to your goal?
It doesnt make sense.
Most people are hardwired to care about what their friends are up to. They even waste time following celebrities who make all their money because people want to see what they are up to. By following the life of someone unrelated to you and someone who will never help you down the line, youre wasting valuable time that you should spend on yourself.
To simplify this even more, social media should *not* be used to keep tabs on other people. It should be used to build up a brand and sell a product. Otherwise it was a colossal waste of time that would be better spent working for minimum wage.
For television, the point is quite simple. Every single hour spent on television is lost income while you watch someone else do their job/career. It makes no sense at all. If you run the math it becomes even sadder.
Average income in the USA is $50K, about $25/hour. The average person spends about 3 hours a *day* watching television. That is 21 hours a week.
Therefore? If this time was simply spent making money, it would lead to $27K in savings per year or a million dollars over ~36 years. The point? By simply working instead of watching TV you are practically guaranteed to be a millionaire even with no investment gains.
Before this section comes off as isolationist, lets clear up a point. Every single person bringing you up to your goals or helping you get there will remain in your phone forever. However. If they switch to becoming time sucks where they complain about life or drag you down in any way, they no longer deserve your time.
4) Find One Committed Friend: You dont need more than one. Find a single person who wants to succeed as badly as you do and make sure you keep in contact for at maximum one time per month. That is only twelve times a year (youre going to be too busy doing work).
If you can find a single person willing to give 80+ hours of effort per week to becoming successful, the chances that you both make it will be magnified. Youll likely hit different hurdles and a one hour conversation once a month will help jump over those issues each time.
Importantly, you should choose different industries, this makes it impossible to compete down the line. In the long-run? Your questions will cease as the issues become too specific (a good thing).
5) Health Will Take a *Temporary* Hit: This will sound contradictory to the original statement that health is more important that wealth. That statement is still true.
The point of this bullet is that you have to find your own personal limits to work. Most people make the excuse of needing multiple things from specific sleep schedules to leisure time. If youre young, you get the privilege of testing how far your body can go and once you actually break down (once) youll know exactly where the line is.
Youll find that your body sends off specific queues when youve officially reached your limit and once you can recognize them, youll unlikely impact your health going forward. As a simple example, most will feel discombobulated when reaching their limits. They will misplace items, become disorganized immediately and make mistakes even with simple tasks such as pouring a cup of coffee.
To reiterate the emphasis around temporary health impact, once you know your bodys limits you wont push through as it does not end in productive work and is a clear hit to your personal health.
6) Find Your Talents: Most people are talented in several different areas. The difficulty is finding out if youll be in the top 1-5% in the segment. Without breaking into the top 5% in your field it will be quite difficult to earn a large amount of money as income is not a standard curve (winner gets a much larger share of the spoils).
Were keeping this bullet basic by summarizing talents in a single sentence: you have to be good enough to have *other* people tell you that youre good. If you have enough potential, this will happen on its own. It does not matter if youre interested in the item at all, if you want to succeed, becoming the best is much more important than simply doing a task that is fun for you.
To reiterate, as you try out different fields, youll only keep a list of items where *other people* tell you that youre good.
7) Learn Sales for Every Interaction: Even if you decide the path to making money off a business is not for you, the skills you learn by selling will give you the toolbox necessary to live a comfortable life. While there is a negative stigma around sales, it is far and away the best skill to learn if you were to choose only one. Forget about complex mathematics, forget about hard science, if you can sell, you can transfer that skill into the most important aspects of your life: earning money online, dating, making friends and interviewing.
In short, sales is the *most* transferrable skill you will ever learn. Every single second you spend improving your salesmanship will give you a 100x return.
8) Focus on Scale: You will likely need to trade time for money at a very early age in life (covered later in this book). However. All of your free time will be spent on a scalable business. A scalable business that is worth your time has two attributes: 1) recurring income and 2) a large addressable market.
In an ideal situation, while youre learning a specific industry near-term you should find a niche market where you can be the expert. This will then open doors to other markets assuming you have chosen correctly.
As a basic example, if you begin designing clothing you can then move into jewelry/accessories as they are somewhat similar. If youre good at both you could move into makeup and other ancillary markets to retail. Simplistically, every niche market falls into a major market and as you succeed in one niche, begin opening up peripheral vision to other sectors you can learn about and understand well. (Note: this may require a completely different brand)
As a basic terrible example? Youre looking at it. A book is a horrendous way to get rich because each sale is one time in nature. If one person reads your book they will not buy another copy for no reason. In addition, even if they buy a book for a friend That friend does not need two books either. Eventually you saturate your market and there is no recurring income left! Books are not good ways to make money because they are NOT RECURRING REVENUE.
Since our readers are smarter than average Now you 100% understand why magazines were sold on subscription basis. You had to renew every 12 months to create another sale for the company. Without new content the business model would die.
9) Stress is Okay, Worry from Real Problems is Not: The extreme Entrepreneurs and future billionaires will likely tell you to simply drop everything youre doing and go all in. We take a bit of a different approach given everyone has different risk tolerance levels. Weve found that worrying about paying your bills on time and struggling to get by usually results in too much stress that prevents your creative juices from flowing.
This is why we recommend a bar-bell approach that will be detailed later in this book. Where you build enough income to not worry on a daily basis (usually 10-20% above cost of living) then shift the remainder of your time to scaling a business and creating recurring income.
We have nothing against risk loving individuals and if youre unphased by being evicted and going through turmoil to become exceptionally wealthy we wish you the best of luck on your journey.
Our simple line is you should feel immense stress, but not enough to cause you to worry. Real problems cause people to worry which then impedes results over the long-term.
10) No Time to Live Above Your Means: This is why frugality is not a good strategy to get rich. The only difference between the recommendations of frugality and the recommendations here is this: frugal people spend time *cutting cost*, future multi-millionaires spend time *creating income*.
If youre serious about moving up, youre not going to have time to spend thousands of dollars on fancy clothing, cars and bottle service (for now). When youve got enough money to never work again, you can spend as much as you like.
While clear bullet points are easy to remember the foundation, is simply this: we all have no one to blame but ourselves. This is why we emphasize the importance of no excuses. If someone else is dragging you down, you should have no qualms in deleting that person from your life forever. There is no reason to keep them even if society tells you that you should. You only get one chance at life and you deserve to pursue each activity baggage free.
With the important introduction out of the way, below is a flow chart of the design and purpose of the book.
Finally, well note that the name of the book is called Efficiency for a reason. There will be a lot of extreme ideas placed here to save time. Many will call them crazy. We call them helpful. We have to make the most out of every single day. Why the obsession with efficiency? We dont have much time to succeed in life and the quality of life continues to decline once we hit middle age. There is no point in wasting our most precious resource: Time.
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Addendum: In summary, there is absolutely no competition for making it into the top 1%. If someone wants to be in the 1% all they have to do is follow the items above and it’s practically impossible to avoid becoming a millionaire and making mid 6 figures. The reality is competition really begins at the 1% level because you fight two major headaches: 1) psychologically difficult to work as you don’t need the money and 2) anyone still grinding it out when they do not have to is extremely difficult to beat. There is a “knee in the curve” and competition goes parabolic.
What intrigues me(following the information contained in the book) is the price point.
In consideration of the principles that WSP follows, your target audience, and heuristic evaluation; I anticipate(and somewhat hope) this product will likely be priced higher than the generic 9.99- 29.99 “get rich quick” category.
Looking forward to the book.
Zim
I will buy this book.
“The same items came up over and over and over again: 1) money, 2) networking, 3) opportunities in the future and 4) how to maintain a healthy social life while doing all three.”
The social life part is by far the trickiest, especially for those who are late to the game and didn’t start out the WSP way early. A lot of us who grew up with loser friends that are not aspiring to be anything in life or weren’t smart enough to get a bid for a quality fraternity in college (ones that have high GPAs on average and place a lot of guys in higher quality jobs), we are practically starting from zero as we start to feel that disconnect.
Ever since reading WSP on the regular, I’ve felt a strong disconnect from a lot of my friends. Many of them are getting engaged and married in their mid 20s, they look down on casually hooking up with girls because “that is what you were supposed to do in college, grow up!”, and they have the belief that life ends after the age of 25. I am happy to be cut off from them but I also find the next step of actually making new and quality friends difficult.
Guess I’ve let the hard to make friends after college (which countless people and sources tell me, almost seems to be a general consensus) get to me but I am finding the social life part tough. Here I am hoping that a WSP school of thought holds, that views of making friends as you get older is another thing the average person is wrong about. It would be amazing to befriend alpha males outside of the work and business environment and hang out with them, do not want to make friends at work.
Shit’s getting lonely over here!
Was in the same boat when I woke up a few years ago.
The hardest thing is to maintain presence of mind when you’re in “deep waters” so to speak.
As your value rises, you’ll attract people who wouldn’t have looked twice at your loser self.
An underrated move is to frequent high-value environments (upper-end service businesses, gym, etc). Winners recognize one another, and are more than happy to spend time with like-minded people.
I will buy it
Interested
Extremely interested. I find your advice applicable to my world already so I’m interested in even more.
No questions asked, we are all looking forward to it.
Extremely interested. WSP played a big part in me becoming an entrepreneur. Can’t wait to read the book.
Thanks for everything you share man. My future children (including the adopted ones) will sure hear a lot about you.
I’m very interested. I’m looking forward to it.
Interested, would buy.
Will buy your book regardless of the price and the content because this may be one of my first real opportunity to repay you for everything. Thanks!
(I’m also taking notes of the internet marketing skills involved in launching this book. Hehe)
Let me know when the pre-orders open up.
+1
Interested in reading.
Some very good points here. Especially about time waste with TV and social media, while one could be making income.
Would be nice to read such book.
“In summary, there is absolutely no competition for making it into the top 1%.”
The average person is scared to:
– Ask that girl/guy out because they might feel bad for two minutes if they get denied
– Quit the job they hate because a tiny amount of uncertainty is apparently worse than destroying their life for 40 years
– Be different in any way from their peers because an alcoholic unemployed idiot might judge them
I recently tried to help a normal person get out of the wage slave system. Helped him with his website and went over what he needed to do in the next month when we’d meet again to talk about next steps. That fucker didn’t make it two weeks before he crawled back to another shit job he hates.
Another normal person I know keeps asking me to help him start a business. He doesn’t do jack shit at work, but instead of creating a side business on some one else’s dime he just reads stupid shit on the internet. Day after day, year after year. Oh, and his day job is sales so he has connections to thousands of high worth individuals and THE most relevant skill set. The pussy of success is sitting on his face and he still can’t figure it out.
And the people that aren’t sidelined by fear get sabotaged in other ways. Women, kids, debt, drugs, hobbies, etc. This is the time of year when guys have to find that SLEEPER PICK for their fantasy team so they can win $250 and BRAGGING RIGHTS from their friends. So they grind their lives away on ESPN.
I’d hazard a guess that most successful people out there are pretty ordinary (not outstanding/gifted). They were simply the ones that overcame outdated biological impulses (fear, laziness) and spent time on things that actually matter (read: not fantasy football).
I am interested and will definitely purchase the book. The value of this website is tremendous and it is for free. I am extremely grateful and you guys do a great job.
No time to read, skimmed though.
Will be great.
Will pay top $.
It’s a great idea. This website delivers well reasoned, tangible and actionable advice. There is a relatively small -yet significant- group of people that are dedicated to improving their lives and desire emotion-free viewpoints on how best to do this.
The lack of cliches or platitudes is actually what draws me as a reader. Every time I’m on this site I know that I’m getting information I can leverage to make improvements in my own life. If this website (and this introduction) are any indication of the quality of the book, I’ll buy a copy for myself and a few extra copies to give to friends as well.
Cheers
Please make the book!
I have gained incredible value from your posts. Definitely buying the book!
WSP reader for 1.5 years and inside out I’m a different person. Read the recommended books, counting the right days, and know how to build a castle in the jungle.
http://wallstreetplayboys.com/a-castle-in-the-jungle/
Kicked out of my undergrad (eventually finished) & dropped out of grad school. Been here before.
Learned something new with each *failed* career. Been here before.
Spent the last two weeks with a black eye. Been here before.
Haven’t had TV in years. Time with retards are becoming few and far between. These guys show what can be done in 18 months. Of course we’ll read the book.
They’re right, people spend money on convenience and *feels*.
Military duty for 8 months, permits the schedule to learn the skill sets needed to build online biz e.g. web design/copy/marketing.
A lot can happen in 18 months.
Interested.
Such a great introduction, hope I can buy the book soon!
Gold.
Please write the book.
I just got the biggest hard on reading this stuff. More please. I want more.
Would definitely buy your book! Love all the articles on this site.
Would pay whatever for a book + recommend to anyone looking to succeed. Do it.
Link to preorder page?
I will buy the book for sure
Looks awesome.
Definitely interested regardless of price.
Will buy
Looking forward to it!
Hurry up and take my money! When do you anticipate the book will be published?
might as well price it at $1,000. win-win. I’ll use whatever is inside to turn that $1,000 into $100,000.
Finally an opportunity to give back to you guys! Without a doubt the most concise, actionable information on the Internet.
Amazing!
Will buy, no question.
It would be incredible to read a book from you guys. Like a blueprint on how to lead a successful life!!
Long-time lurker and first time poster here. Just want to say I would definitely purchase this book
Adding fuel to an already burning fire here.
Will buy with the force of a thousand suns.
Thank you.
Avoid the military and any form of ‘service’. You’re selling yourself into slavery for pennies, and in the end, even if you do something that sounds like it might have some application to any of the above, it doesn’t.
I’m eight years into a career that sounds cool, with some deep expertise in subjects that do not exist outside of government, and the dead soul to match. Congress has used my salary as a political football, and since the government knows that I and people like me, really can only shop ourselves to one customer, they pay as little as they can.
“Something something the country, something something important work, something something change the world” is a bullshit sales pitch, and if you’re young and hard-charging, stay the fuck away from it.
Oh and my resume says ‘did some vague sounding bullshit for some no-name contracting company’ for eight years and a bunch of stories that sound cool to the kinds of idiots you don’t want to be around, and creepy to anyone worth a damn.
I’m definitely in.
Looking forward to it! Amazon + Hard Cover = Collection
I would read the shit out of this and make sure it affects my daily schedule.
The concept of collecting all of your previous theories on living into one compiled text is definitely interesting.
10/10 will buy, can’t wait.
I have a small collection of books on my desk that I come back to because they’re excellent, cover to cover.
I have read many non-fiction books that are poorly written—maybe a handful of good pages and the rest is all filler.
Not a doubt in mind mind this book will be in the former category. Can’t wait to buy it. If you don’t do a paperback, I’ll print it out myself because I know this is something I’ll want to keep handy.
Much thanks for the blog, it has given me a fresh perspective of the world which I hope to adopt.
Just wondering if the book will be for sale on websites like Amazon, or will it be an extension of the free content provided on this blog?