On the contrary, it is an excellent way to get rich (although only a small minority of employees do ever accumulate significant wealth), and I did include it. I see it as part of the fourth way:
Entertain or exploit some other personal skill or talent
As an employee, you use your personal skill or talent on behalf of another person or organisation, and that for me defines employment – and for that matter, contracting and consultancy too.
Why, though, do so few employees become wealthy compared with – say – entrepreneurs? It may have a little to do with earning levels, although many employees outearn their entrepreneurial peers.
I think, though, it is more to do with perceived security. The employee generally feels secure; after all, they are not taking the risks the entrepreneur does. If they turn up every day and do a good job, they feel they'll be pretty safe in terms of their future income stream. Few entrepreneurs will take this view. The ones who last know all about creating a financial cushion, about making provision for the potentially harder times ahead. They tend to better control and plan their spending because they have more at stake, and in the long term, that's where the wealth takes root and grows.
But there's no reason why an employee could not adopt similar habits, and from even modest employment build substantial wealth.
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When you invest money you have earned you make it work for you. Quite independent of your efforts to earn money, it beavers away making you more. It is as though suddenly you have acquired staff.
And when you control how much of your money you spend and channel additional money instead into investment, there's a further boost to your efforts, another staff member stepping up and making you richer.
There is often a belief that being careful about spending is a bad thing; we think of the miser, Scrooge, and the unpopular colleague who never buys a drink when it's his turn. But these are extreme cases and controlling spending and being fundamentally ungenerous are two very differenet things.
Spending is identified by the experts as the top factor in determining your lasting wealth. It seems that you annual income does little to influence your long term wealth, but how you spend your income, whatever its size, is a good predictor of wealth.
I have a relative who illustrates this perfectly. She arrrived in the UK in the mid 1960s with her new husband. Between them, they owned £5. Although well-educated by the standards of the country of their birth, they could only find menial work in the UK, never earning as much as the equivalent of minimum wage. My relative, now widowed and a pensioner, owns property and other investments worth well over a million.
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The more of these you do, the better your chance of establishing wealth. Very few of them are free from moral issues, but that's something you'll have to work through for yourself.
An interesting idea is to write an outline of your version of this book. What are the main chapter headings? Will you organise it chronologically from childhood to the present, or by topic? What will be the key points in each chapter?
The route from knowledge to wisdom passes through three stages:
You can then try to maintain an on-line record of what you do to get nearer to achieving the goals, what works, what doesn't, and encourage people to contribute their own ideas.
Constantly challenge yourself (and your goal buddy!) with questions like:
The best way I have found to tackle procrastination is to lie to myself. I first came across the technique in the writing of Mark Forster and it capitalises on the comparative ease with which we can fool our unconscious minds.
You need to say to yourself that you are not going to actually do the job you're putting off, but rather that you are just going to prepare to do it, or start it by taking some very trivial action, and then stopping.
Here are some examples:
The idea is all about creeating momentum. I often find that once I've finished the minor task, I just carry on into the major one. Even if I don't, I have genuinely accomplished something and made the job just a little bit smaller anyway.
Thought happens very quickly, much more quickly than speech, for instance. This is why the mind can wander when we're listening to someone speak; we can process information mentally far more quickly than the typical speed at which a person speaks. But this speed is at a cost. Often before we have fully explored an idea, we have moved on to something else. Worse, even a great idea can be quickly lost of we don't find some way of recording it before it is washed away in the tide of our relentlessly changing thought stream.
The answer is to force the thinking to slow down, to eternalise it. One way to do this is to 'think aloud'. People often say they do their best, clearest thinking when they are talking to someone else. Reducing the thought to the speed of speaking makes us think more deeply and with more care, even when we're talking quite quickly. This is surely one of the reasons why psychoanalysis and counselling are believed to be so worthwhile; when you externalise your thinking, you improve its quality.
I've looked at a number of ways of externalising your thinking in my blog, such as the brainstorm session for one, problem solving with a journal and writing daily goals. All three of these techniques work so well because they slow down and externalise the thought process, and the benefits of this are enormous.
Right now, as an exercise, grab a piece of paper or open a new text file or word processing document. Write at the top an open question you've been wondering about. It needs to be incapable of a yes or no answer. Words like "why" or "how" are good ways to start your question and what follows can be about your work, your relationships, goals or just about anything.
Once you've written the question, start writing some possible answers. Don't force it, and feel free to write around the subject and go off at tangents, but keep coming back to the question itself. I promise you will make real progress far greater than if you had simply continued to ponder the question in your head.
A learning log is simply a chronological record of what you learn. I set mine out as a table, with these headings:
My logs go back to 1996 and I review them regularly to make sure I continue to apply all the great things I've learned.