Excerpts from the book "Your Life, Your legacy" by Roger Hamilton.

Excerpts from the book "Your Life, Your legacy" by Roger Hamilton.

This book is not about making money, as many of us lose the money we make. This book is about creating wealth. If you have not created wealth, any excess cash you have becomes a terribly temporary condition.

We call this the wealth paradox: The more money you have, the more opportunities you have to lose it. The Wealth Paradox separates the temporary nature of money from the permanent nature of wealth. Whatever money you have, it will eventually fall - or rise - back to your level of wealth.

Wealth is not how much money you have. Wealth is what you’re left with when you lose all your money.

To use a metaphor, wealth is like a garden. The most inspiring, lovingly nurtured garden gives the most pleasure and attracts the most butterflies. Wealth Creators don’t build nets to catch butterflies. They grow an inspiring garden. Wealth is permanent, like the garden, while money is temporary, like the butterflies.

Many people have become experts at sales, marketing, management and customer service. Yet they still struggle to make money. They are trying to chase butterflies with a net.

Successful Wealth Creators don’t worry about building a net. They grow a garden. By focusing on creating an inspiring garden, you are growing something permanent around you. As time goes by, the effort required to manage the garden falls as the number of butterflies rises. If anyone takes your butterflies, there will be more the next day. Every successful Wealth Creator is focused entirely on building their wealth foundation rather than their moneymaking activities. They build a reputation, a powerful network, a knowledge base, a resource base and a track record.

Each Wealth Creator has stopped chasing opportunities and chosen to build a wealth foundation around their specific passions and talents.

The garden is the first step. Here is the second. You can water your garden with a bucket, or you can water it with a permanent river.

Great Wealth Creators have achieved their wealth not by making money but by creating flow. They have learnt how to redirect some of this money flow through themselves and their enterprises. Wealth then, is largely about good plumbing. There are rules to this plumbing, and the structure of Wealth Dynamics is based on these rules.

Flow is about more than cash flow. It is about life flow. Each of us creates our greatest wealth when we are in our own personal flow. Those of us who build a river around this flow attract all the resources, people and opportunities. There are different paths to running a river, and we each have a natural path of least resistance. Until you follow your natural path, life feels like a struggle and you will find little attraction. Many of us are
operating at a fraction of our true potential. Focus on your natural
path and life soon changes from hard-to-get to easy-to-give. In a river, flow assumes exit as well as entry. Giving more opens the way to receiving more.

Each of us has a game that is most suited to our own natural habits and talents. So how do we find out which game to play?

Wealth Dynamics takes the entire world of confusing, contradictory and convoluted information on wealth creation and puts it into a coherent and comprehensive system. It gives each of us clarity on our personal path of least resistance to wealth creation: what our strategy should be, who we need in our team, how we should apply ourselves, when we should take action and - more importantly -when we should not.

The key to wealth is luck. Luck is the phenomena that Swiss Psychiatrist, Carl Jung, termed synchronicity. Luck is intimately related to flow. As your flow grows,
your luck grows. As your luck grows, your flow grows.  Wealth Creators know how to grow their own luck.

Great entrepreneurs do not create success. They create the conditions for success to occur. Wealth Creators are luck creators. Once you begin following your path, luck happens as a result of the flow you grow. The foundation of luck is built on four conditions: Location, Understanding, Connections, Knowledge. Luck starts with choosing to be at the right place, right time. Luck comes from playing the game, not watching it. Connections, by the way, are not the same as a network. Which is why, the sooner you choose your game, and play it, the sooner your luck begins to flow.

At critical moments, it is our instincts that count most. It is not intellectual learning that creates mastery, but physical learning from practice. It is financial fitness (by mastering the game) not financial literacy (by mastering the rules) that defines our success. As Warren Buffett said, « If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians. »

When you play the same game again and again, you begin to anticipate and master the critical moments, which re-occur in different forms. You begin to look forward to increasing the number of critical moments and to testing your mastery. When we are not following our path, it feels like hard work. Not only do we miss critical moments, they seem few and far between. That’s the clue that tells you to change path. If it feels like hard work, you’re already doing the wrong thing.

Successful Wealth Creators separate failures that can sink them from failures that steer them. Great entrepreneurs maximize the failures that steer them and avoid the failures that can sink them.

« Business opportunities are like buses, there's always another one coming. »- Richard Branson.

As with failure, opportunities also come in two forms : Outbound opportunities are the ones that we come up with ourselves like a new idea, a new business concept, a venture to try. Many of us think this is where our wealth lies which is why we never get started. Inbound opportunities are the ones that get passed to us by others.

Our success in life has more to do with what we say no to than what we say yes to.

Our greatest asset is our time. When we try to split our time between two games, we cannot master either to the same degree as someone just focused on one.

Once you are on the right path, the most essential quality to possess is neither intelligence nor talent, but perseverance. It’s not a coincidence that all the World’s wealthiest entrepreneurs continue to work long after they need to. They don’t see it as work, so there’s nothing to retire from. Why does Bill Gates keep going to work every day? « I have the most fun job in the world, and love coming to work each day because there are always new challenges, new opportunities, and new things to learn. If you enjoy your job this much, you will never burn out. » Perseverance comes from passion and purpose. When you play your natural game, you won’t quit. You’ll be too busy having fun playing. Sustained attraction occurs when those with the resources to support you know that you won’t quit.

Momentum is group flow. In his book « The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership », John Maxwell got it right when he wrote « Momentum is really a leader’s best friend. Sometimes it’s the only difference between winning and losing. » When I asked Maxwell what distinguishes a manager from a leader, he replied: « A manager solves problems. A leader creates momentum. When you have momentum, the problems soon solve themselves. » The wealth of every great entrepreneur comes quickly when their personal flow resonates with the flow of the market.

Wealth creation is based on an equation of value and leverage. One determines the gradient of the river and increases the speed of flow; the other determines the width of the river and increases the volume of flow.

Why is it that we all know of some businesses that seem to be run so well - with great management, nice systems, happy customers - and yet they still lose money? Why is it that we also know of businesses that seem to have one issue after another, yet more customers and more money keep flowing through the door at a dizzying rate?

Every successful Wealth Creator has kept focus on playing their game: focusing on creating value, and then leveraging. This is what creates the money flow. This is the Wealth Equation. Wealth creation is not about making money. It is about creating flow. The Wealth Equation explains the plumbing: WEALTH = VALUE x LEVERAGE.

While value creation is a prerequisite to money flow, there are two opposite polarities to value creation: innovation and timing. These are related to the two opposite thinking dynamics: intuitive thinking and sensory thinking. Intuitive thinking creates value through innovation. Innovation means creating something new of value Y something bigger, faster, cheaper, smaller, smarter, better. Wealth Creators such as Steve Jobs, Ray Kroc, Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey create their value through innovation. Their innovation has been focused on creating new products, new systems, new businesses or a unique brand. Sensory thinkers do not need to create anything new because they have an innate sense of timing. Why create anything if you know when to buy low and sell high? Warren Buffett, George Soros and Rupert Murdoch are all individuals who are known for seeking out patterns and opportunities that others miss. Whereas intuitive thinkers always feel the need to push forward, sensory thinkers know that sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing. They create value through the other opposite of value creation: timing. Sensory thinking creates value through timing. Some people believe that creativity and timing can be taught. There is no doubt that you can work at improving both, but if it is not your natural frequency to begin with, in the heat of the moment you will fall back on your old habits. Ensuring you find value before you leverage and then being careful to leverage that value is essential.

In the same way that there are two opposites of value there are also two opposites of leverage: multiply and magnify, which are related to the two opposite action dynamics: introvert and extrovert.

Every great river is surrounded by tributaries. When a new source of value or a new form of leverage is found, it soon becomes clear that the wealthy do not become wealthy by making others poor. They become wealthy by making others wealthy. This is possible because one person^s value becomes another person’s leverage.

Our greatest excuse for not taking action today is that we believe we don’t have what it takes to make it tomorrow.

What has been stopping you from taking the same bold actions that wealth creators have taken. It usually comes down to one of three reasons: not enough money, not enough knowledge or not enough support. These all come down to the same thing: The illusion of limited resource. Without exception, none of them started with money, knowledge or support. But they did start with their time. The wealthy got wealthy not by investing their money, but by investing their time. The sooner we value our time, the sooner we begin to invest it wisely.

« When you can’t get a job, you start your own business. » - Walt Disney