How to Actually Make Money
An actual no-BS guide to making money, suitable for everyone who’s willing to put in the work
In today’s society, it seems like the leading factor to most of our problems is money. Oh, I can’t take a break from work because I have a mortgage to pay and a family to feed.
So naturally, everyone’s goal is to figure out a way to sustain a greater income than the one they have right now. But most information out there isn’t actually on how to make money but is instead a way for the creators of the content to make money themselves.
For instance, Don’t you find it weird that most “money gurus” say the same things while trying to sell you their 100x value course on how to make money?
These people don’t actually make money from the things they promote, but rather by promoting it, because it is really easy to say “Buy my course and you will be rich in no time” rather than actually giving advice.
Quoting MJ DeMarco, author of The Millionaire Fastlane:
You can’t have extraordinary results by doing ordinary work
So if you came here for an easy solution to your money problems, kindly click off and go watch your beloved gurus. For those of you who stayed, here are actual ways to make money.
To be able to make money, Let’s cut to how money is generated in the first place.
To understand how to make money, we first need to know what value is.
Value, by definition, is how important something is to someone.
For instance, if you are an art enthusiast, then a piece of abstract art may be worth millions to you. In contrast, If you are someone who doesn’t fancy art and is instead interested in something else, the “abstract art” may be worthless to you.
With this in mind, we can now define money as the means of exchange according to the perceived value of an item or service.
Perceived value? What does that mean? Isn’t value absolute?
Going back to the art example, the abstract art’s actual value is only how much money someone is willing to pay for it.
To make it clearer, If the “abstract art” was made by a street vendor, How much money would you be willing to pay?
$5?$10?
Now what about if the same piece of art was made by Vincent Van Gogh?Suddenly, the price skyrockets because of the perceived value that A Van Gogh piece gives you.
Getting to the point, to make money, You need to generate perceived value. Now, there are countless ways to generate income, and I am kindly going to point out the cream of the crop for you, which are by far the best ways to earn income.
This brings us back to the quote from MJdeMarco, To make an out-of-the-ordinary amount of money you need to become out of the ordinary. So, every method that the gurus are saying like dropshipping, affiliate marketing, Amazon associates, and print-on-demand business doesn’t and will never work due to the value principle I discussed earlier.
Because dropshipping and all these are so easy to start and maintain, not requiring much effort, they create low barriers of entry, therefore minimizing the amount of perceived value.
So to actually make money, here are some paths you can take.
1. Skill Stacking
Skill-stacking is when someone learns a variety of skills that greatly synergize with each other.
Let’s take Jay-Z for example. Jay-Z had started as a musician. He then learned how to play beats, how to rap, and how to write lyrics. Afterward, he learned how to promote himself, create a label, and all the technical side of music.
Do you see where I’m going with this? If you can stack your skills on top of each other to create something significant, you are in for a hell of a ride.
Skill-stacking can take a variety of forms, but it is most effective when you can do many different aspects of things at a time. For instance, you might be a great leader and innovator while also knowing the fundamentals of design and marketing, which is exactly what Steve Jobs did to create Apple with Wozniak.
You see, skillstacking doesn’t mean that your skills are additive like 1+1+1, your skills, if having good synergy with others, can skyrocket your potential. But like all other things on this list, Skillstacking requires extreme patience and smart work, as well as taking countless years to perfect.
2. Solve A Problem
Every single successful business and invention is backed up by a problem that needs to be solved because people love making their lives easier.
This is by far the most reliable thing you can do to become rich and successful, though it also is one of the hardest things to pull off, due to its complexity and all the moving parts it has in it.
To summarize the main concept of solving a problem, you need to create a product, a service, or a digital resource that solves or helps solve the problem.
But to do that, a few things need to happen first. For the Business to be successful, you first need to have a contradictory Idea, which means that it goes against what most people think. You also need the idea to solve a big enough problem for enough people, as you will not make much money selling paper clips that only interest 1000 people.
And even if your product is successful, you need to make sure that your product is properly advertised and scaled, as you don’t want to end up like the other 95% of businesses, with the best way to do that being positive feedback loops.
For that to work, you need to have an extraordinary product that advertises itself. Again, this process is going to be excruciatingly long and painful, while it can also fail at any point, but is also the most rewarding way to make money at any point.
3. Do Real Estate
The third and final method of how to make money is Real Estate. This method is a personal favorite, as it is kind of easy to do, but takes a lot of time to build up and requires some capital.
Real estate Is pretty simple to set up and, while being kind of risky and trivial, the money you need to put it to start and the patience you need to have compensated for it.
In order to make money using real estate, you need to first have a really good credit score for the banks to lend to you. Afterward, you need to pay off your first property( the one you live in), preferably a duplex, while this would mean you will already have extra cash flow before starting to own rental properties.
After you’ve done all these, buy properties, rent them out for more than it costs you to maintain them, wait( a lot of time), rinse, and repeat until satisfied.
A riskier approach to making real estate money is buying properties for cheap, renovating them, and THEN renting them out, but this requires more invested capital, is riskier, and has a much higher reward, which is good if you already have a sustainable source of income.
I would also recommend using a holding company after you’re done with your real estate ordeal, as those take a split of the profit but manage your properties for you to maximize passiveness.
This is a method that might seem trivial at first, but is very time-consuming and will take the most amount of time of the 3, So I would recommend trying out the other ones while giving this one a shot.
