EP323 Can’t Make Money Working | Ken Courtright’s Today’s Growth | Growing Business Today

You can’t make money if you’re working. There is only a finite amount of time that any man or woman can labor. The average person goes to work about 125,000 hours in their whole lifetime. You live your life first. You learn, then you earn, then you invest. That middle segment of people’s lives while they’re earning is a little bit misunderstood in a lot of top down management. If you’re working, you’re physically working, and if you’re working, you cannot be thinking or investing. You can’t make money working because money is made and wealth is created from thinking and investing and putting things in motion. Learn how you can take your time, energy, and money and invest it by sowing seeds financially into people or other investments. Only then can you put things in motion that can return to you financial wealth of an exponential return.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Can’t Make Money Working

This is the podcast where my wife and I live life, go through different business experiences, and jot some notes down as we’re living life and make sure if we see the lights go on in someone’s eyes, we’d be sure to write that down in podcast on it. Kerri and I were in London meeting with a new JV marketing partner, onto Bucharest to our office and meeting with Marianne, the manager out there. I remember saying in our first coffee meeting with Marianne the phrase, “You can’t make money if you’re working.” I don’t know how it came up, but all of a sudden, I saw him squint and it was an immediate, “What do you mean? I don’t understand.” This was coming from a conversation where he had a question about one of his upper managers and it sparked a conversation.

I took out a back of a business card, wrote down podcast, Can’t Make Money if You’re Working. That, as the stage being set, I wanted to talk a little bit on making money, general wealth, some fundamental concepts, and I want to say it exactly the way I said it to Marianne in Bucharest, Romania. First thing that I said or did when I saw him squinting and shaking his head in a non-understanding fashion, I said, “Let me ask you something. How many hours in your lifetime do you think you have to work?” I can’t remember his answer, but the bottom line is I said, “There is only a finite amount of time that any man or woman can labor.” You live your life. First, you learn, then you earn, then you invest. That middle segment of people’s lives while they’re earning, in my opinion, is a little bit misunderstood and a lot of it is what I call top down management.

Your parents and your schooling. Basically the books you read and the people you listen to. You can’t make money if you’re working. That’s either from Rupert Murdoch or from Warren Buffet. It’s Buffet, but the point he’s trying to make is if you’re laboring, you’re laboring. If you’re working, you’re physically working and if you’re laboring or working, you cannot be thinking or investing. Money is made from thinking and investing. I want to take money out and I want to replace that with wealth because I want to take this in a very specific, definitive direction on the hope and the chance that my kids, grandkids, great grandkids someday hear this. I wrote this for them.

Money is made and wealth is created when somebody stops and thinks and then invests and puts things in motion. You can either invest in people or you can invest in investments, like stocks and bonds and mutual funds. The biggest investment, no question, is investing in people. It is not investing in the stock market. This is my opinion. This is Ken Courtright, wealth is created, and I’m speaking specifically to financial wealth, when somebody comes to the conscious or subconscious understanding that they have to remove their sacred cows, which are your time sucks. It could be Facebook, it could be watching television, it could be dating girls.

Most people have a sacred cow that distracts them from their goals and way more time than they care to think about, but if they take a pen and paper out and they mark down how much time they spend on it, they will realize, “I do have a sacred cow. It is sucking the time away from my life.” In the case of my wife and I in I think 2000, we took our television set and physically gave it away and we spent seven years without a TV in our house outside of our children having a small one to watch VHS tapes in their bedroom. We went seven years and focused. We removed all sacred cows and that gave us a lot more time for each other and much more time to invest in other people. Wealth; “financial”, wealth meaning financial wealth, to me, can be started with a clear definition of time.

The average adult has between 100,000 and 150,000 of working hours in their lifetime. The average person is going to work about 125,000 hours in their whole lifetime. Here’s the question. How did Mark Zuckerberg, last year or a year and a half ago roughly, in one single day make $4 billion? How did Jeff Bezos in twenty minutes make $6 billion? How is that possible? The average person is out there in some way, shape or form and to a degree, punching a clock, trading hours for dollars, working, using their degree, doing everything they were taught, and yet in the same time, the same calendar year in the same compassionate capitalistic society in America, quite frankly, worldwide, there are people generating enormous wealth.

Here’s the thing, wealth, and I mean financial wealth, can only happen when you invest in (trust), investing or trusting. When you take your time, your energy, and/or your money and you invest it, trust it by sowing seeds into other people or sowing seeds financially into other investments, only then can you put things in motion that can return to you financial wealth or an exponential return.

Have you ever heard of the path to tithing? As a Christian, I grew up in a household, read a certain book, and there is a passage in Malachi 3:8 that says something about, “Bring me your first fruits, your first 10%, and then I will basically press it down and provide you with an infinite amount more than you provide me.” It doesn’t matter. Every major religion has a form of tithing. It’s a sacrificial form of giving, showing respect, showing love and honor. Follow this. The path to tithing was started a few hundred years ago by some priests or pastors trying to get business people to break free of tithing a few bread crumbs and getting closer to that 10% tithe and some sharp man or woman had an idea.

“If you can’t stomach 10%, why don’t you start tithing a measly 1%? You’re not going to miss 1%,” was their concept. It’s like psychological concept that is now taught in some schools from an investing standpoint. From a religious standpoint, the path to tithing, which was a couple of hundred years old, process would wean up an adult from not tithing it all to tithing maybe 1for a year. Then they would get comfortable with that. Then the pastor would stretch them a little and in the next year, they would tithe with 2% and then a decade or so later, lo and behold, they’re only living on 90% of their income, tithing 10%. They feel better, everybody’s happy.

What I’m talking about when it comes to financial wealth is the same psychological process. If you aren’t exchanging your hours for dollars, you have a job. Whether you own the company or not, if it’s ten employees or less, it’s a job. If you don’t show up, your company doesn’t get paid and goes out of business quickly. You have to show up. Assuming you have that type of operation where you have to show up at least for periods of time or the thing will shut down or the income will stop. Here’s my thoughts. Could you take 1% of your time or 1% of your money and invest it either into other people or into some investment, like the stock market? I don’t think you’re going to miss it. If it’s 40 hours a week, that would be a whopping 40 minutes a week that you spend training somebody else to do a version of your job.

You could train a commission only sales rep, cost you nothing but time. You could train another manager, cost you nothing but time. Doesn’t cost you any money. Can you take 1% of your net income and maybe dollar-cost average that into Bitcoin or Litecoin or Etherium or Disney stock or Apple. Does it really matter? No, it doesn’t matter. Pick an index, doesn’t matter. Get into the concept of leveraging 1% of your income into something that can produce an exponential return greater than trading an hour for a dollar.

Let’s go back to Zuckerberg and Bezos. In one day, one person made $4 billion, one person made $6 billion. Why? Because they leveraged their time in the early parts of their company and they sowed seats of time casting their vision into other people, training their vision and their SOP, standard operating procedures, into other people because they knew that leveraging their time, investing their time, trusting their time into other people would create far greater financial wealth rewards then investing in the stock market and they had a dream. They had a vision. They wanted to get something done in.

The fastest way to do it was to train from within in the beginning and then over time, bring in other people that were already trained in compartments.  You cannot make money if you’re working and I want to change that to you cannot create financial wealth that lives long past you from just working. You eventually, at some point, have to go from the teenager to adult in your financial thinking and you’ve got to start looking to that next generation and investing time into other people or investing money into other platforms because that’s where financial wealth is created. You simply can’t make money if you’re working. Hope this makes some sense. Take care.