Jeff Lerner's 3 Phases of Legacy

People ask me all the time; Jeff, how do I get started without money, I have some bad news, you have to get some money” Get a job, walk the neighbor’s dog, get some money.

This is an important concept to understand regardless of who you are and what you’re trying to do.

Jeff Lerner Quote: ”To build something meaningful and lead a life of pride and success, there are 3 phases to go through; income, growth, and wealth”

The first phase “Income” which is where 99% of people are. Even the people who have income wish to do things that require more than what they could afford so they get back to the ‘income’ phase thinking about how they could create more income. Simply put, the Income Phase is merely thinking about how to create surplus income. Most of us are leading lives that matches match our incomes or surpass them a little, so, we’re constantly exploring ways to increase our income.

The second phase “Growth” is about taking surplus income and reinvesting it to create more surplus. This results in the existing money being used as leverage to create more money.

The third phase “Wealth” is starting to diversify and reinvest some income to create stability and security. Unlike the “Growth” phase, in this phase we don’t use the surplus to create a surplus, we use it to create stability and security. For 95%-99% of people, it’s all about the “income” phase”.

Jeff Lerner Quote:” you need to figure out how to get your income to the place where it is 5 times what it costs you to live”

We call this the “awesome” life number and you need to keep in mind that if you need only 20% of what you make to live then you’ll probably be paying 40% of what you make as taxes. Thus, the remaining 40% will be considered as surplus you use and invest to create more income.

This might seem like a highly-aggressive approach to financial management. However, speaking from experience and all the life realities I’ve seen, if people don’t take such an aggressive approach in their mindsets around producing more income, then they wouldn’t have enough time.

We’re only going to live to be 80 or 90 years old. If you examine the rate of savings and inflation and the rate on the return on investment and savings through the years, there is not enough time unless you take an aggressive approach to raise your income to get to the phase of wealth.

Jeff Lerner Quote:” to answer the question “how do I get started with no money?” I say “you need to go get money; you need to go get a lot of money”

For most of the people that I talk to in this world regardless of their particular situation, the remedy is “you got to go get a lot more money” because it creates a lot of options.

Before we explore the means, methods, and skills that anyone can use anywhere to generate more income, there is a problem that I see very often and I want to call out.

In the modern era and with the domination of social media, we live in an era of ‘immediate gratification’ and there are many studies around this. The human being’s ability to delay gratification has been dramatically reduced in the modern digital era of social media. Moreover, it’s the single greatest predictor of success.

Jeff Lerner Quote:” our ability to delay gratification is the most predictive indicator of how successful we will be in the future”

You think about living in this modern era where social media is constantly showing us the wealth and accomplishments of people and what they have to say about it. It’s an image of what successful people have to say from the hilltop of their success to those little people who don’t have great success.

We’re constantly bombarded with this imagery of success and we never get imagery. The subconscious mind learns through pictures and that’s why picture-based social media platforms are so addictive. That’s why videos and pictures do much better than text; the subconscious mind is stimulated and even wired by imagery. So, we’re seeing all these images of success in the here and now and we’re rarely seeing images of the same people before they became successful.

If you Google “Oprah Winfrey” or you Google “Jeff Lerner” or any other successful person, you’re going to find images and images after they’ve become successful. It will be almost impossible, regardless of the successful person you pick, to find pictures of them before they became successful.

While it’s impossible to find successful people to follow before they become successful in the first place. I recommend that we learn and examine the process of successful people becoming successful. This is why I love books, biographies and autobiographies of successful people where you dig into what it took and what was their experience like before they became successful.

Jeff Lerner Quote:” you have to get obsessed with studying success before it looked like success instead of staring at success after it became obvious”

I think that the internet presents us with the second option making our consciousness skewed and we’ve become unable to do the long, gritty, painful work that it takes to become successful.

Let’s dig into what you can do to increase your earning potential.

First of all, regardless of where you are and what you’re doing; if you’re making money then something is being sold. No business exists where people get paid and products and services are not being sold.

Whatever environment you’re in, I strongly recommend that you start by identifying where the money is generated in that business. Then, you need to try to volunteer, opt for opportunities and training, or somehow get exposure to and take part in the part of the business that generates the revenue everyone gets paid from. In every business there is what we can call “the revenue department”; it’s the part of the business where the money gets made. Then all the other departments ensure the business’ orders, personnel, customer support, legal…etc

Jeff Lerner Quote:” the closer you are to the center of revenue, the more likely you are to get paid more”

Coming closer to the center of revenue can be in volunteering more in the business or asking superiors where the center of revenue is. This will allow you to identify which skills to develop or use to get closer to the center of revenue and drive more income to the business.

Typically, those skills that will get you closer to the center of revenue are; sales, marketing, and finance. If you want to create more value and therefore receive more value from the work that you’re doing, you need to figure out how to help your business;

• Market; and this means to connect with more potential customers and create more demand for the product and/or service.

• Sell; convince more prospective customers to take the action and generate more revenue.

• Finance; create efficiency in the business that allows it to create more profit even if they’re not creating more sales.

If you’re moving in the direction of being closer to the center of revenue within the business that you’re working for, you will be generating more money for yourself. If you’re not, you’re likely going to be on the cadence of getting that typical 1% or 2% raise per year which doesn’t even keep up with inflation and constantly feeling behind.

Jeff Lerner Quote:” whether you’re employed or independent, you need to value the skills that you have and that you want to develop based on 3 criteria that determine how much the skill will pay you”

• How common is the skill?

There are 2 ways to make a skill uncommon; either pick a skill that is already fairly uncommon or become very good at a given skill that even if it is common, becomes rare. For example, sales is a common skill. However, highly competent and skillful salespeople are still rare.

This is all to say that the first part of how valuable a skill is lies in how common/rare it is.

• How Essential is the Skill for the Particular People Who Need it?

There is no skill that everyone will need but you need to find a skill that is very much needed by those who need it. As an example, knowing how to repair a heart valve; there aren’t many people that need heart valves repaired at any given time. However, for the people who need their heart valves repaired, it gets vital to find the right person to do it. While this is only an example, you could be in a business and estimate that sales is a highly common skill. At the same time, you can get more trained and specialized in a way that optimizes your sales capacities with the exact needs of the business you work for. For example, waiters are salespeople as they sell the dishes and menu items of their restaurants. In the same context, there are literally specific questions that a waiter can spend 5 seconds asking and they can result in them doubling their tips.

• How Much Value Capital Have You Created with that Skill?
  

After selecting a skill and exploring how rare and how essential it is to the people who need it, you need to explore how much value you created with the skill. Value is created by a skill through a combination of two elements; how good you are at the skill and how much you have done it. Thus, quality and experience.

To recapitulate, you need to find a skill that is rare, very important to the people who need it, and then you become excellent and proficient at it by doing it more and better.

Jeff Lerner Quote:” just become a better person”

It’s literally proven that by becoming more communicatively empathetic and developing emotional intelligence, soft skills, people skills, working on yourself physically and having better health and being more vibrant and energetic. It’s proven that these elements can help you attract more people, more opportunities, more money, and more good things in your life as you level yourself up on the personal, physical, and professional levels. This is why I always talk about the 3 P’s; Personal, Physical, and Professional.

Jeff Lerner Quote:” every day, you should make your 3 P’s deposits”

Every single day, you should be doing something to move forward in these 3 areas of life. If you do this consistently over time and you maintain a value-focus in the business where you focus on the right skills and move closer to the revenue center, that’s it. That’s the ultimate formula for maximizing your income and value in the world and starting to create a surplus that will stop you from searching for “how to start without money?”

My message to encourage you is that there is a lot that you can do in your life to get more money. The key to getting started without money is to get out of the place where you have no money.