Why poor people buy recipes, successful people buy time.
“Buy the new formula for getting everything you want!” – Random Guru
The formulas are pretty much all available and are mostly free at this point. Getting rich is easy – save some money, put it in the stock market, and repeat for 60 years, and you’re probably rich. Getting rich isn’t the problem, the problem is doing it in a timely fashion. Want to lose weight? Cut your calories a bit, do some cardio, don’t get garbage food, and you’ll eventually lose weight. But will it take you 5 years or 5 months is the question.
The formula isn’t what’s needed. What’s needed are ways to speed the results of that formula.
When people think a new formula is the secret, it also causes shiny object syndrome. Shiny objects are basically new formulas – “Don’t try to sell on Shopify, instead try to do retail arbitrage!” But if you’re on the same path, know that path works, then it’s about speeding up the results on that path more than finding a new path.
Finding a new path may be the best idea, but it’s more likely that finding a way to speed up the path you’re on is a better idea.
Successful people look for ways to shave time off of things. If you’re thinking, “Oh, I can do that myself – everything online is free and I can just learn it myself.” That may take 6 months for you to do that, but maybe a better idea is to pay for someone to distill that 6 months of learning down to 6 weeks. Or perhaps you could build out that new diet plan yourself and it takes you 6 hours but someone else could do it for you and it takes you 0 hours in that case.
Successful people are buying time and unsuccessful people want to do all the trial and error themselves, not learn from anyone else, and try to do it all on their own.
It’s no coincidence that a lot of mega successful people have people that do their taxes, manage their money by telling them what stocks to buy, etc. Poor people dump their blue chip stocks, then chase crypto, then NFTs, then meme stocks, etc. They don’t stick with the same thing long enough to continue on that path and speed that path up by paying for advisors or training to help them know what to do better / faster.
“Get rich quick” schemes talk about new secret processes. “Get rich faster” ideas talk about well known processes, but mostly focus on how to reduce mistakes, trial and error, research required, and so on to speed up the process that’s already well known and trusted.
Perhaps you can start thinking about shaving time off the path you’re on as opposed to jumping to a new path entirely.
Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between get rich quick vs get rich faster, but it usually can be distinguished from seeing if they’re talking about a new process altogether (ie stocks vs crypto), vs speed of process (ie you learning how to build a house from a book on your own vs a faster way of simply becoming an apprentice with a builder).
What things should you stop trying to do on your own and instead have someone else do it to help you speed up your progress with things?
