To help you with your intention, mark only two boxes on the following page as your intentions and read the book with the intentions in mind. Make sure that you achieve your intentions as you read this book, and look for the things that answer your questions about the topic. That’s how you can get the most out of this book.
To while away time
To judge the book and the writer
To expand your knowledge and opinion on the topic
To gain knowledge to apply in your life
For your entertainment
You are just bored
MY OBJECTIVES
Money – a step-by-step guide to achieving your financial goals
There are steps to be followed to find success. Just like in everything, there are principles to be followed; a way of doing things that brings forth success. This book outlines everything you need to do and follow to achieve your dreams and reveals to you all the steps involved. If you add one plus one you get two; the same applies to financial freedom. Every tool related to the creation of wealth is discussed in this book. There are steps to everything, and money is no different; there are ways and steps to follow to achieve financial success. I discuss almost every strategy applicable to achieving your financial goals. You will find out that it is the wrong way we go about getting money that hinders us from achieving our financial goals and living our dreams.
This is the strategy that rich people use, and this book explores how you must treat your money to find success. The book defines what is important you do first, next, last and continuously. It explains why the rich become richer and the poor became poorer, and we find out what the poor do wrong and what the rich are doing right. You will know how to manage money for your own benefit and to ultimately make your money work for you, not the other way around. We also look at the disadvantages of being an employee and the advantages of being self-employed. It is a step-by-step guide to wealth accumulation.
The most outstanding principles this book is based on are the creation of wealth, the psychological state that goes into the creation of wealth and finding success, and achieving our dreams through the discovering and understanding of our strengths. It covers the creation of value, the exchanging of values, independence, self-employment and the definition of money in its simplest form through its history.
What do I aim to achieve with this book?
The main aim of this book is to give people a more realistic way to achieve their dreams – unlike what’s out there right now. Most of the books out there emphasise dreams and imagining things. They talk about the universe giving you whatever you dream about, and so on, and they talk about the secret to success. There is no secret; you don’t have to imagine things or ask the universe for anything. You can’t fantasise driving your dream car and expect the universe will make your dreams come true. This book is based on facts, nothing miraculous, no magic, just facts, actions to take to achieve your dreams.
The MONEY book is based on the principal actions that need to be taken to achieve your dreams. I am not saying that the ideology around the books out there is all wrong but I feel most of them lack where it matters most, and that is to tell people exactly what is at play here, exactly what makes dreams come true, that the universe rewards ACTIONS not dreams, that there is a way of doing things that brings forth success, and that the main thing in achieving anything in life is by taking ACTIONS. You also need to know what steps you need to take, what guidance you need to follow and the right way of doing things to achieve the desired results.
Remember things don’t just come into your life; the car, the house and whatever you desire don’t just come jumping into your life – it requires one thing and one thing only, MONEY. You can have whatever you want right now if you have the money to pay for it. Everything you dream of having in your life already exists; if not, it can be made at your own instruction, if you have money to pay for it. All life’s desires are attainable when you have MONEY. This book explores MONEY, what it is, for us to get a deeper understanding on how it is created, because if you know and understand what money is, you would not have trouble making it, and you won’t be broke. Money is the key to all your material desires, the lifestyle you want to live, a gateway to your dream life.
This book explores MONEY and why some people have more than enough to live on while other people lack the most basic things needed to live. MONEY has become the centre of the world; everything we do is related to MONEY in one way or other. Some people even refer to it as the GOD of this world. Well, I don’t know about that but this book breaks it down and simplifies it. You will have a deeper understanding of it, and you will know exactly what you need to do to get it.
MONEY has become a motive for most of our activities. People do all kinds of things, even harm themselves just to get their hands on it. People kill each other for it and go to war for it, which has made people believe that it is the cause of all evil. It is amazing that we do all these extreme actions for a simple thing like money, which is just paper and coins. What makes this simple paper have so much power and control over many people is a result of the wrong perceptions we have developed about money. Money is nothing really, and you will understand what I mean when you are done reading this book.
The most powerful motive that gets people to do things even if they are not really enjoying it, and when they don’t want to, is the reward. We are driven by what we expect to get when we perform a task. No one wants to do anything if there is no reward to RECEIVE from performing the task. In most cases the reward is MONEY. It is the promise of the reward that drives us to take action. So most of the activities that people are doing are based on getting MONEY, and most of our actions are based on making a living. We spend most of our life making a living, trying to make MONEY.
It is MONEY that makes us wake up every day and go to work. We dream of having more than enough, to use for the things we want. Our dreams are based on having MONEY, to buy everything we desire in our lives. The MONEY book is about CREATING WEALTH, HOW TO BE SUCCESSFUL and LIVE THE LIFE OF YOUR DREAMS. We deeply want to achieve our dreams and aspirations because they help us grow and evolve. Try to imagine life without dreams; that would be a dull and boring life with no meaning. The book focuses on what we need to do to achieve our dreams; it is mostly based on ACTIONS to take to get what you want AND the understanding of ourselves, our being, which is vital to the CREATION OF WEALTH.
This is what I hope to achieve with this book; for people to understand all the above facts about MONEY and most importantly, for the advice to be applicable, so that people will be able to put ideas discussed in this book into action. That’s the MONEY book in a nutshell.
1.THE HISTORY OF MONEY IN BRIEF
Looking back
It is important for us to consider the history of money to understand it better. We must know what we are working with. Most of the answers about money are contained in its history, and just by exploring its history, you get the definition of money, how it came about and why it is still in use today. In this section of the book I will just give a brief background about money, to see the effects of its history on us today. Since we have lost track of what money really is, we will look at how you can use this knowledge to make good decisions about your money, to know how to create it and achieve your financial goals.
Looking back at the evolution of money, we see that the main reason for its creation was to enable trade between people. The main purpose of the origin of money is from the need for people to be able to share their values fairly. It is the exchange of values that necessitates the creation of money, a trading tool, which allows people to trade with as many people as they wish. From the Stone Age human beings had different values to share; they all had different capabilities, different talents that needed to be shared between themselves to enable survival and improvement of their quality of life. The whole civilisation we see today is enabled by those people who started exchanging values ages ago. The whole human existence is maintai
ned by the exchanging of values.
Now, we all know several modes of exchange were used prior to the creation of money, like gift trades, debt trades, barter, and so forth. As more human needs were met, the more other human needs arose, and the more the population grew the more needs humans acquired. There were more challenges that came with population growth, also more new values were created and needed to be traded, and more specialised skills were required to fulfil human needs. This was the dawn of civilisation and urbanisation, the dawn of specialised trades. Prior to this everyone would plant their foods – now there had to be people who specialised in crop farming year in and year out to be able to feed a growing nation.
A specialised and sustainable way of producing and meeting human needs needed to be developed and applied, which was the dawn of industrialisation. It starts with the growing population, which is always growing even today. This is one of the things that facilitates evolution – a new way of doing things has to be applied to sustain human life and comfort. A growing population made it difficult to keep the same trading methods; they had to change, to accommodate a wider community or market.
This led to the creation of monetary objects that could be commonly traded for the exchange of values (goods and services). The objects used were largely those that represented the highest value to that particular community, and so we see maize, rice, wheat, cows and horses being used widely for exchange. Things like cows were largely the symbol of wealth at that time. This is what value was measured by. This system was then replaced by precious metals when they were discovered – more and more people started seeing gold as a representative of wealth. As a result it became the medium of exchange.
Gold, as used above as one of the mediums for trading, was also replaced; like everything else, it had its pros and cons. More and more wealth was discovered, and because wealth itself is human values, it is represented by a growing population. The more population growth we have, the more wealth is discovered… people are wealth, if you didn’t know. So, just like everything else, gold was replaced as a medium of exchange. A new way comes along and highlights the difficulties of the old way; people replaced the use of metals as a common trade tool, and money as we know it today was created.
As cows and wheat failed to store value since they are perishables, and gold bars became hard to store and transport, coins and paper money were introduced. Today we see more and more money becoming electronic. This comes with the movement of wealth, from the discovery of precious metals to the technology age, taking into consideration that this evolving of money, which is really the evolving of human beings, takes a long time to happen. Money as we know it today is also changing into a more and more electronic form. You might have guessed right if you think paper and coin money will be a thing of the past in the near future.
The other way of looking at how money evolves is looking at how paper money was introduced, as receipts, representing the amount of gold the person has given to the storehouse to store for him. People were given receipts when they brought their gold or other valuables to the storehouse, with the receipt representing the amount of value the person had created and traded, which resulted in the amount of gold he received in exchange for his goods or services. That’s what money represents, VALUE.
It is your contribution to the community and the world, the value you give out to other people which results in you receiving a receipt, representing the value tendered, enabling you to use the receipt to get whatever value you require from the world in the future. When you look at your money as a receipt you receive for being of service to humankind, you establish a new understanding of money which is vital to the creation of it; you will know exactly what you need to do to get money; that is to create value useful to the next person, to contribute to the wellbeing of human beings.
In today’s world, the value you’ve created is stored in computers as your bank balance, for you to use whenever you require work done by other people. It is a system that makes sure that everyone contributes to the creation of values, that we all have done something of value, to be recipients of any value from other people in the future. The system is created by humans; it is a way to have a fair exchange of values. There are flaws to the system, just like everything else, but it is a better way of exchange that exists at the moment, and it evolves to help reduce the flaws, for it to be more and more efficient.
This is how money kept evolving; it changes with what people perceive to be valuable. People place value on things. The more people perceive something as being valuable, the more valuable it becomes to them, because if you have it in your possession, more and more people will want to trade with you. They will give up any value or money they have, to have what you have.
When you have something people value you get more people to do business with. People want to give their values to people who have values, it is that natural. This is the highest reason why the rich get richer – they get thousands of business deals presented to them, opportunities for them to make more money. The more value you can create, the more wealth you can acquire. The wealthier you get, the easier it gets to make money. Money starts following you around.
When people see what you have in your possession as valuable they want to trade whatever they have with you to also have the value you produce. This enables you to acquire more valuables from other people, which results in you being wealthy and improving your quality of life. The more valuable you are to the society you live in, the more likely you will become wealthy. The wealth of every nation exists in its people. Know this and get it clearly into your mind; it is your value to people that makes you wealthy. It is value that we are all after. Wealth itself is a combination of values from different people. Money is value; it starts with what people perceive as being important, valuable, and that is what money is.
Money is value. You must have noticed that I am not giving you details about the history of money, I am just touching on it, to help you come to the understanding of what money is and how money works. Knowing this will enable you to create it. You will be able to create wealth for yourself, by just making yourself valuable to the next person. Money is value; looking at its history you will see the evidence that money is nothing but the value people place on things. It is all within us, our judgement of things, if they fulfil human needs, our needs. People decide if something is worth anything or if it is worthless – this is driven by their basic needs, followed by their wants, which come right after their needs are met. Throughout this book, value is discussed; understand that money and value means the same thing.
Humans are behind its creation, as we see in its history, money is value; it is that much a part of us, what we perceive of value, what we see as valuable. Because nowadays, it involves a larger community, we trade with the rest of the world, which is a lot of people. The same value we place on things is no longer controllable to us – the economy moves up and down at will, it is unpredictable because it depends on a lot of people, all deciding what gains value, and what loses value. It is all perception; it is what people see to be valuable, what they see as wealth.
Given this, people tend to forget that it is still people who drive it. Value is now determined by the majority of people, it is uncontrollable, but it still depends on people’s perception. It is still what you perceive as value that matters the most. You must understand this so that you are not discouraged by the economist reports and the always bad news from the stock exchange. Know that it is driven by fear, it is just people placing value and removing value on things when they are threatened of possible loss, loss of value of certain commodities, currency, and so forth.
There are people who bid on the value of a currency; on the value of gold and markets. The stock exchange depends on a wide range of information involving a lot of people. Unless you are trading on the stock-market, it doesn’t affect you that much. The markets can be down and you could be making a lot of money. It affects big organisations that own a lot of stock in the mark
et, whereas individually, it is not something that must threaten you or make you forget that wealth is in the people. As long as you can create value for yourself and other people or creatively help people around you to create their value, you will be wealthy regardless of the economic standing. This is why other people achieve great financial success and others fail while trading in the same economic conditions.
Stock-market news involves a lot of people. The majority of what people perceive as valuable, which is mostly driven by fear. When they fear something will cause a loss in their investment, they withdraw their investment in it, which ends up with that particular thing losing value as more and more people withdraw their investment, their perceived value on it. The following day given different news, the same thing gains value. From this, you must understand that money is value, wealth is value, it just changes in form and shapes, from the value in your mind, as your talent or skills, to the goods or service you are able to create using the skills you possess, to your bank balance as stored value, that you can use anytime to exchange for any value that you lack.
What am I trying to say here? You must not be made to believe that there is lack in this world. Where there are people, there is wealth, money to be made. You just have to concentrate on creating value, being valuable to people. Money is managed by people, and the system that runs it is created by people. It does have flaws, as they do make mistakes; they make investment and financial decisions on predictions, hoping that they will have returns on their investment. When it fails, it affects a lot of people because of the existence of big organisations which a lot of people depend on. These people depend on the few people in leadership to make decisions on their behalf.
Money- Wealth Creation Guide Page 2
