Don’t pay anyone for it. In a minute I’ll give it to you for free.

When you look at your paycheck, do you wish it had an extra zero? Most of us want to make more money. But do you know what it takes? Did you know that many of us are going about it the wrong way?

Let me step back in time and tell you a story…
It’s the 1980s…

Christine and I lived in a housing complex nicknamed “Hell’s Half-Acre.” I didn’t know it at the time, but I was going to make a whopping $4,000 dollars that year.

My rusty old 1980 Ford Grenada just blew a water pump in the parking lot and I had to borrow $20 bucks from a friend to buy a rebuilt.

I changed the pump outside, in the dark, while the temperature plunged near -20 F.

As I pulled away with fingers so numb I couldn’t feel the steering wheel, I saw a guy I had seen many times before. His office shared the parking lot. He was tall, dark, good looking, about my age. He wore tailored Italian suits, owned several different German cars, was frequently surrounded by beautiful women, and that night he left the parking lot in a black 700 series Beamer.

Years later, someone told me the man in the Beamer was Bahram Akradi.

But back then I was angry and I remember thinking…
“How the hell can he have so much while I’m sitting here drenched anti-freeze, frost bit, without a dollar to my name? Where’s the social justice in this shit?”

I don’t think that way today, and I work hard to rid myself of such irrational resentments.

Since then I’ve learned what justice is. True justice is to reap what you sow. And I was harvesting what I had sown and Bahram was harvesting what he had sown. I was still suffering from the delusion that economic rewards were granted by some authority who gave preference from an ivory tower. I still believed that there was some central distributor of wealth who hated me and this was a problem only he could fix.

But I wanted money, and I didn’t have any idea how to get it. I had no plan, and I was blaming everyone but myself.

Let me tell you a secret that I think Bahram knew about money that I didn’t.

You are already wealthy! You have more wealth inside you than you can imagine. You only need to learn how to tap it. That is why freedom and liberty are so important.

Money is an effect, not a cause. Most of us think money is the cause of effects, it isn’t. It is the exact opposite. Money is the effect of doing things a certain way, combining rational knowledge, with positive emotion, to create value for other people. You can be the cause which creates money, but it may require that you change your core habits. The bigger your cause, the more value you create. The bigger the idea, the greater the effect. For Bahram the cause of his money was his obsessive desire to reach an end, the end goal of helping as many people as possible become healthier and stronger.

Bahram was doing the right things to create wealth, I wasn’t.

The simple fact is…
To get more, we have to become more for other people.

Because of old habits, even today, it’s easy for me to forget this core truth.

Money is not an end. It is a means to an end.

Bahram’s end was helping to make other people’s (rear) ends a little smaller. :)

Now it’s your decision…
Are you tapping the wealth inside of yourself? How big is your cause? Is it worthy of your capabilities? Of your gifts and talents? Of who you really are?