Know the Rules

When you know the rules, you know how to win the game, and it changes everything.

It’s a beautiful day in Manhattan. The sky is bright, and it’s cold. Walking around with an extraordinary successful entrepreneur, looking at some of the largest developments being built in our history. I ask, “what is the best way to get started developing properties.”

“Know the zoning, know it cold, know everything there is to know about it. There are so many opportunities most will overlook. If you know the rules, you can maximize your ways to win. You’ll know exactly what you can do when most people don’t know what’s possible. Did you know that the New England patriots review the rules for the game every year, just to find an advantage in the rules that they can use to win? Those rules about the new tax laws you shared with me, those are game changers, look how much of a difference it makes.”

The realization hit me like a ton of bricks.

Although I’ve always gained an unfair advantage when I knew the rules to any game, specifically in business, ranging from; tax rules, lending rules, credit rules, ad network rules, adword rules, email inboxing rules, etc etc, I never really thought about how big it is, to understand the game.

If you study the rules, to any game, you can have an unfair advantage. Tim Ferris in his book 4-hour work week talks about, how he won fighting championships. He wasn’t a great “fighter”, he learned a rule that if you just push an opponent out of the ring, you’d win. He became the best at pushing people out of the right. Maybe not to find to watch, but he won the championship, all by understanding the rules to the game.

When my credit score got hit for having a $5 charge be 30 and then 60 day late. It pissed me off, and I vowed to learn everything about it. Once I understood the exact credit scoring rules, I was able to reverse engineer exactly how it worked and have 800+ scores. A good thing to have when you’re using your credit a lot like me. I learned that they wanted to see a lot of lines, being used, with high limits, but low balances, consistently was the key. So I setup 10+ credit cards, charging them myself using one of our business merchant accounts $1+ dollars a month, putting them on auto-payment, and paperless statements. I let that grow and now my score is amazing, and when I apply for new line of credit, it barely affects my average credit history length, all because I knew the rules and I played them to my advantage.

We use rules in our email marketing business. We understand the rules required to deliver emails to Gmail and Yahoo. Once we learn the rules for what they want, we can deliver it.

There are so many tax savings, that which I won’t even go into this point. But understanding some tax rules can save you so much money, and not all CPAs even know them.

Learning the rules may be boring, but if you know the rules, it’s game changing, and you find out so many more ways to win.