My Most Powerful Success Secret
Today I want to share with you the single, most powerful wealth-and-success-building secret I have ever learned.
It is a secret you can take advantage of immediately. Learn it today and by tomorrow you could be a distinctly more powerful person.
Apply it to your financial goals (and I’ll show you how at the end of this essay) and you will become wealthier every day. At first your wealth may increase by only fifty or a hundred dollars, but before long you will be getting richer by thousands or tens of thousands of dollars daily.
That last paragraph was meant to motivate you, but it’s 100 percent accurate. I know because I’ve been using this secret since 1983. That year I was dead broke. No, I was actually in debt – by more than $60,000.
But two weeks after “discovering” this secret I doubled my yearly income – from $35,000 to $75,000. About a year later I was a debt-free millionaire. Four years after that, at 39, I retired with a net worth in excess of $10 million. Since then I’ve worked only as a consultant -when and with whom I choose – and my wealth has grown each and every year. And it looks like it will keep growing at an accelerating pace, even though I’m giving away most of my income these days.
That’s comforting. But what is more comforting is the confidence I have that if all my money were taken away from me today, I’d automatically start generating wealth tomorrow. Once you know the secret of automatic wealth, you don’t have to worry about money. It’s not an issue. Because money itself, you know, is not wealth.
I’ve been very frank with you about my own financial situation because I want you to know that I’m not one of those guys who writes books and makes speeches about how other people made their money. I am always suspicious of “experts” who make their money teaching people things they have never really done themselves.
The secret I’m going to share with you today worked for me – a young guy who had no money, lots of financial problems, and zero understanding of wealth and how it works.
But it is not my secret. It’s the secret that fueled the fortunes of most of the greatest wealth builders of modern times. Virtually all of the great early twentieth century industrialists – from John Rockefeller to Andrew Carnegie – got wealthy by capitalizing on it. And it was behind the immense fortunes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett – to name just three of the world’s wealthiest people.
It’s also the secret behind Marlon Brando’s success as an actor. And Eric Clapton’s brilliance as a rock musician. And Damien Hurst’s becoming the wealthiest artist in the history of the world.
This is a secret that will truly transform you. It will give you power. It will give you knowledge. It will give you self-confidence. And it will make you rich.
I have explained this secret in bits and pieces in most of my books and in several of my essays for ETR. But until recently I never put all the pieces together. That’s why I’m so enthusiastic about what I’m about to tell you. For the first time ever, I’m going to present a new concept that I call my Special Theory of Automatic Wealth. (More on that in a second.)
Perhaps because I never fully understood it myself, most of the people who’ve read my ideas on wealth didn’t “get” it. To some of them, these ideas seemed abstract and difficult to comprehend. To others, they seemed obvious and trivial. I remember one person in particular saying, “Tell me something I don’t already know.”
But a smart few “got” it and used it to quickly enrich their lives. One of them is now a successful screenwriter. Another used it to become a bestselling author. Still another used it to become a world-champion martial artist. And at least a dozen have used it to become millionaires.
One reason many people will never “get” it is because they refuse to understand how wealth works. They believe wealth is something physical – money or gold or some other tangible asset that is stored somewhere behind thick steel doors and guarded by secret codes. They believe wealth is something other people have but they don’t. They think it’s fixed, limited, and hard to acquire.
Because these people – let’s call them the mentally impoverished – insist on clinging to their foolish perceptions, they can’t comprehend the truth about wealth when they hear it. And that’s why they will never get wealthy – or, if they do come into money, why they will let it go almost as fast as it was acquired.
But let’s not talk about the mentally impoverished. Let’s talk about you. Are you ready to learn what I’m about to share with you?
Are you ready to discover the Secret of Automatic Wealth?
If so, the world you’ve been waiting for is going to open up to you… and very quickly too!
You are about to learn the wealth-building equivalent of E=MC squared. Like Einstein’s famous equation, the Secret of Automatic Wealth is very simple – but to understand it you need to understand the meaning of each of its parts.
Here is the equation:
W = VO squared
W stands for wealth -automatic wealth.
V stands for value – true, sustained value.
O stands for opportunity – the very real chance to improve your situation.
Let’s start by defining wealth.
What is wealth?
It’s not money. Money is the most common way we measure wealth, but wealth itself is something different.
A rudimentary acquaintance with economics tells you that. Having a million dollars in the bank today might make you wealthy, but if the country’s currency were devalued by a significant percentage, you would no longer be wealthy.
For the same reason, wealth is not gold. Gold has properties that make its value more stable than currency, yet it is not wealth.
Wealth is neither money nor gold. Nor is it knowing important people or being highly intelligent or having ambition or thinking positive thoughts. If wealth were any of these things, lots of my mentally impoverished critics would be rich and happy, instead of poverty stricken and bitter.
So if wealth is none of those things, what is it?
The answer is value, accumulated value.
And what is accumulated value? It is something stored that you can use, whenever you want, to acquire things you want.
Oftentimes, you can use money to get what you want. But there are many things that money can’t buy. For example, money can’t be used to buy the love of your spouse or children. (If you try you will be very disappointed.) Money can’t be used to buy you a dancing or singing trophy if you can’t sing or dance. Money can’t be used to acquire the respect of your peers.
But you can have those things if you have accumulated enough of a different type of asset – knowledge, skill, trust, respect, and gratitude to name a few. And when you use those stored assets in combination (knowledge and money and skill and trust)… then you can move mountains.
Are you with me?
Now let’s get to the penultimate element of the equation. Opportunity.
Every time we do something in life we have an opportunity to improve our situation. Every time you read a book. Every time you have a conversation. Every time you plan your day. Every time you eat a meal.
Each and every situation you find yourself in is an opportunity to acquire something of value.
You are reading this right now. This is an opportunity. It is an opportunity to learn something extremely valuable – something that will bring you automatic wealth. You have free will. You can choose to take advantage of this opportunity or let it slip by. But it is a genuine opportunity.
Every time you have a conversation you can accumulate value. In some cases, that value might be money. The conversation might be an opportunity to negotiate a higher fee or a higher percentage of profit. In other cases, it might be an opportunity to accumulate some other store of value. You might acquire some useful piece of knowledge. You might learn a skill. You might earn the other person’s trust or admiration. All of these things are values – values you can store and use, to your advantage, later on.
My special theory of automatic wealth is this: Your true wealth is equal to the number of times you have an opportunity to accumulate value from a situation times the value you get from that situation, squared.
In other words, your true wealth consists of all the value you accumulate from your day-to-day encounters. The more value you accumulate, the wealthier you become. If, like most people, you do not even recognize the opportunities you have, you cannot possibly become wealthy. And if you recognize the opportunities but cannot take advantage of them, you will also stay poor.
But if you realize that every single situation in your life is an opportunity to acquire some value – to leave that situation with more than you had when you entered into it – then you can become wealthy very quickly.
The reason wealth will come quickly to you can be explained by the last element of the equation: squared. That represents the compounding effect of all accumulated value. For a full explanation of the way it works, check out a book I wrote on the subject called Automatic Wealth.
Meanwhile, as I said, you can put this secret – the most important secret I ever learned about wealth – into action today by recognizing that every situation you get yourself into will be an opportunity to waste or accumulate value.
Promise yourself, right now, that you will do this: You will begin to acquire a consciousness of automatic wealth.
Start by making this personal commitment to yourself:
* From now on, I will employ my conscious mind to see every situation I am in as an opportunity.
* From now on, I will look closely at every situation to discover what sort of value I can take from it.
* From now on, I will leave each experience with something more than I brought into it – more money or more knowledge or more skill or more trust or more respect.
There is much more I want to tell you about my special theory of automatic wealth, but this is enough for one day.
In the near future, I will explain exactly how I have taken advantage of this secret in every area of my life. I will show you, too, how men and women who are much wealthier than I am have used it to advance their careers. And, most important, I will show you very precisely how you can use this theory to make each and every experience you have an opportunity to become richer.
My ultimate goal is to show you how to reach the level where you experience automatic wealth.
I’m not going to give away this guide to automatic wealth for free. If I did that, it would be wasted because most of the people who received it would not see it as an opportunity to gain something of great value.
So it won’t be free, but it won’t be expensive either. One thing is for sure – it will be limited. This is not going out to everybody in the universe. It is just too valuable. So if you want to learn more about how to put this secret to work in your life, sign up for our special hotlist and we will let you know how to get all the details. You can sign up here.
One final note: You may have noticed that today’s issue of ETR is less cluttered. This is a direct result of the discovery of automatic wealth.
Instead of bombarding you with half a dozen ideas about wealth, health, and wisdom every day we are going to present one great idea – which will always qualify as one great opportunity to acquire something of great value. And then, at the end of each day’s opportunity, we are going to give you something you can do – a next step – to take advantage of the secret or strategy you just learned.
In fact, that is what just happened: In reading this article you had an opportunity to acquire something of great value – the most powerful wealth-building secret I have ever learned. And the last thing I want to you to do is leave this essay thinking, “I’ll get to that later.”
That’s why I am offering you the opportunity to sign up for our special hotlist. Signing up will give you access to more information on how to access my next installment on automatic wealth. Details about this opportunity to grow your wealth will come to you automatically. You won’t need to pay a single penny to get on the list.
We have made it as easy as we possibly can for you to acquire more life-changing secrets.
Don’t let this opportunity pass you by. Sign up for our hotlist here.
[Ed. Note: Mark Morgan Ford was the creator of Early To Rise. In 2011, Mark retired from ETR and now writes the Palm Beach Letter. His advice, in our opinion, continues to get better and better with every essay, particularly in the controversial ones we have shared today. We encourage you to read everything you can that has been written by Mark.]