Of course those things are very important, and that's how we get a step up in life. But do you have a step stool, or a step up?

A step stool is a place where you simply remain complacent – you get to a point in life where you're earning good income, you're in a profession where you're providing for your family's lifestyle, and you feel like that’s good. How do you continue to gain traction? Well, you decide to work harder and become more efficient, and you add to your technical skills.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with that, but the real problem is being dependent on the income you earn. Until you separate yourself from the income you make, you’ll never truly be free. You have to make your money work as hard for you as you work for it. 

It's in my new book Own Your Freedom: Sustainable Wealth for a Volatile World. In that book, we talk about the evolution of a free person. We begin with the technical skills – the training that we all thought was going to take us to the promised land – and evolve from that point to business owner, to marketer, and finally to investor. Investor is the top of the chain.

Now, some people would say: “Well, I have to do that sequentially, in a linear fashion.

I need to go from one step to the next step.” No, you do not. You can leapfrog. You can't leapfrog all the way to the investor, but you can leap frog up that chain much more quickly. Too many people never even get to the investor stage, or they think they're investing money, but what they're really doing is gambling. 

I learned very early that it’s about acquiring assets that produce real, predictable income – cash flow. Cash flow is what it’s all about. It's not about accumulating a large sum of money. It's not about hitting a big bull run in the market or in crypto. That's all fine, and if you do that and make some good hits, great. But is that really sustainable?

I'll say right now, that's not sustainable. It's like gambling, and maybe you’ve gotten a few good hits, but what do you do with that capital? Or when you sell your business, what do you do with the capital and that equity? Where do you put it? Because unless you're working in that business or practice, how valuable is it? You've got to make that money work for you.

That's what I've done all my life. Starting back when I was in my early twenties, I learned from great mentors how to acquire the right assets in real estate and use those to compound the money working for me, the equity that I had working. Those assets created sustainable cash flow that set me free, so I could leave my practice while my daughter was so sick. I could leave it because I still had the cash flow. I didn’t have to go to work everyday!

Since that point in time many years ago, I’ve continued to be in that investor stage where I continue to compound the extra capital that comes off of those assets.

That's the key. If you've never learned how to do that, you're missing one of the huge inflection points in your life.

That's what we do in Freedom Founders. We teach our members not only how to do it, but we provide the opportunities to implement. We’ve curated the best of the best for investing their capital and putting their money to work.

That's the key to everything in life: You've got to leverage the opportunities. Don't just rely on yourself. That's where we start in life, but if you rely only on yourself, you're going to hit glass ceilings and you’ll never hit true freedom. 

You’ll wonder “What the heck happened? I spent all these years working, all this money went through my hands and through the practice, and I've got so little to show for it…not enough to retire and actually enjoy the fruits of my labor.” 

Take a look at the book on Amazon, Own Your Freedom, and I'd love to talk to you sometime about what we do in Freedom Founders.