Four Factors You Can Apply Now To Achieve Practically Anything.
The hard truth which you can embrace is that you can achieve anything but not everything. To achieve anything you desire, four key factors are required, this ingredients are not a stand-alone, they must be combined with each other to accomplish anything you desire. One factor in the equation is a constant and must be used at all times to facilitate any of the other outcomes you desire to achieve. The four factors are money, knowledge, time and action. Let’s now delve into these resources one by one.
- Action
This is the only constant variable in this equation. To achieve anything you will require a large dose of action. Massive action is what is required to move the needle towards your goal. Action is what separate’s those who accomplish their objectives from those who don’t. Taking action is a choice in itself like Greg Mckeown said in his book essentialism ‘…..A choice is an action. It’s not just something we have but something we do.’ To achieve anything worthwhile you will have to consistently take action towards the predetermined goal.
Taking action always requires a tradeoff between what is really essential to your target from the many non-essential things. To strengthen your strategic position you will need to increase action on your predetermined goals – those that are genuinely vital, the vital few, and eliminate the trivial many.
- Knowledge
Knowledge simply means discerning what is right and good from what is wrong and bad. This knowledge can either be acquired or borrowed. Either way an investment in this knowledge pays the greatest dividend. This knowledge requires you to engage in continuously learning – (sharpening the ax) and you should be prepared to pivot and adapt to new realities, it’s not static but fluid in nature. You can acquire this kind of knowledge when you combine the resource of time and money. If you want knowledge in any field of human endeavor, all you need is time to seek it and money to buy it, keeping the action factor constant. In order words you require massive amount of action together with time and money to get knowledge.
Today’s wealth lies between your ears. What you don’t know may be killing you; ignorance is every man’s mountain they say. No wonder businesses and individuals who invest heavily in knowledge are the best performers.
- Time
Many people say time is money, but I think time is more than money, spend time and it’s gone forever, spend money and you can acquire it again. The end game of financial independence is to have time, to do the things you truelly love. Time is limited to man’s existence here on earth, therefore the efficient use of time is what separates the rich from the poor. While the poor spend time on low achieving goals the rich engage in high achieving endeavours. They rich are inherently conscious of their time and where it is spent. The poor simply have not learnt to make their time valuable. The rich continue to increase the value in their time, continuously seeking ways to stretch their talents and resources into wealth zones.
If you want to have more time spent doing the things you love. Then combine your knowledge and money to get time, while keeping the action factor constant. Your perturbation can create riches for others, in this state of action with the right combination of knowledge and money, you can free up time, paying other professional or workers to do the job, while you concentrate on the things you are most good at. This realization is what has led to the building of teams and corporation. You can achieve more working with others than you can on your own. One of the easiest way to get anything done is to get someone else do it for you, freeing up valuable time to do the things you love is freedom. Leverage, delegation, team building are some of the tools used by the rich to buy time for themselves
- Money
Money is a piece of thrash paper right? Well money is what you make it to mean. Money is amoral; it’s neither good nor bad. Money in the hands of a kind person money will usher goodness, while the same money in the hands of a terrorist becomes a tool for violence, evil and wickedness. But the general characterization of money is that money is a medium of exchange- its transactionary in nature, it’s also a store of value – digital as a piece of information on someone’s computer e.g. bank ledgers. however what everyone agrees is that money gives us options to do and be what we want to be. It amplifies our goodness or badness depending on who handles it. It is in our control to charge them to the purpose we desire. It is our servant. The rich see money as a game and play it with the intention on winning. They know that money is like a soldier that goes out and get more prisoners; you should protect and guide your money so it can go out to capture more money and not be killed in the process. That’s why you need to invest in assets based on sound risk assessment, that’s why you insure your assets against unforeseen events, that’s why you must invest heavily in financial education. The difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich allow their money work harder than they could physically do, Earning passive in the process. They choose to delay gratification in the moment in order to enjoy passive income later.
He who desires money should combine his knowledge and time to acquire money, keeping massive action as a constant.
Bottom Line
Just as you have factors of productions e.g. entrepreneurship, land, capital, labour, for creating a good or service, you also have factors of material possession like time, knowledge, money and action. Any one of the factors of material possession can be acquired by mixing any two of the factors while keeping action constant i.e. you can achieve whatever materially possible by taking massive action while mixing any two of the three factors of time, money and knowledge
You want more time, mix money and knowledge to get time. You want money, combine knowledge and time to acquire money. You want knowledge; mix the ingredients of money and time to possess knowledge.
While you keep taking massive action in all tree situations.