MyBankruptLife.com

By Steve Pavlina

I found this article on twitter just yesterday and it amazes me every week how ignorant we can be. In this case, I was ignorant of Mr. Pavlina existence. I spend lots of time on sitting on my desk working on my sites, on the Web  and have read many self improvement and motivational books and articles.  But, I have never heard of this person.  Mr. Pavlina comes across as genuine as anyone could be.  This article made my day and gave me the little boost I needed yesterday.  If you want to know why having a job is insane, what to do to survive this hard economic times, and have a different outlook from what everyone else is doing.  I recommend you keep on reading.  I became an instant fan of Mr. Pavlina. His blog is full of awesome information you should not miss.  I will be reading it heavily.  A word of advise:  You may not like what you will read if you are the 9-5 typical corporate slave.  However, if you are ready to free yourself and look at new horizons, I invite you to read on.

“A recession is possibly the best time to launch a new business or to expand an existing one. It’s also a great time to get ahead in your career. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, so let me ’splain.

First, the media goes nuts during a recession. They turn a little bit of negativity into a mountain of pessimism. This makes a lot of people financially paranoid. People become socially conditioned to expect the worst.

If you buy into this social hysteria, you become a victim too.

But if you tune out such stupidity (not watching TV helps a lot) and maintain a grip on rational thought, you’ll see some amazing opportunities popping up everywhere you look.

During such times people get scared and start cutting back on expenses. They cut some of the fluff from their lives. They stop buying so much stuff they don’t need.

This causes some businesses to do poorly, especially businesses that don’t provide stuff we really need. We can live without new credit cards and gas-guzzling SUVs for a while. Those non-essentials can be put off.

We also become more sensitive to receiving genuine value. When we spend money, we want to make sure we’re getting a fair deal.

Consequently, businesses that provide genuine value can actually do better during a recession. More people will flock to those businesses in tough times, while the fluff businesses will become more and more paranoid.

In the USA there are a lot of fluff businesses. Many are based on the moocher mindset, trying to extract money without providing fair value in exchange. A lot of the dead or dying financial companies are like that. The American auto industry has been contracting as well, at least in part because they’ve been creating inferior products that people don’t really need. (Erin and I own a Honda, despite the fact that we could have gotten a significant discount on GM cars because two of my family members used to work for GM. We looked at some GM cars and quickly concluded they sucked. Other family members weren’t so lucky.)

A lot of people have been learning that job security doesn’t mean much these days. More than 500,000 Americans learned this lesson last month when they lost their “safe and secure” jobs.

The Stupid Approach to Making Money

Lately I’ve seen a lot of people, some of them friends, do some really dumb things in an attempt to earn more money. They buy into lame money-making programs, join and promote useless MLM schemes, and fall prey to scammers.

The common pattern is always the same — they’re focused on trying to make more money. They make it their top priority. They think about it constantly. But they keep getting sucked into trying to make money without providing any real value, and it’s unsustainable.

In the end this sort of thing eventually self-destructs. The only way to succeed with it in the long run is to find lots of suckers and basically rip them off in order to enrich yourself. Most people have a strong enough moral resistance to this sort of thing that they’ll sabotage themselves from going too far with it. This isn’t a path of long-term abundance. It’s a path of scarcity.

As a general rule, the people I know who are most focused on trying to make more money this year are doing worse, not better. In some cases they’re doing much worse. A few have lost or are in the process of losing their homes.

The exceptions are those that are able to sufficiently kill their conscience, so they can remove any incongruencies about ripping people off. But again, this is a pretty rare exception. Most people would rather deal with scarcity than knowingly rip people off to get ahead, so they just make the bare minimum to meet their needs and avoid getting ahead.

The Smart Approach to Making Money

There is a smarter approach, however.

Instead of focusing on trying to make more money, put your time and energy into CREATING and DELIVERING real value. Find a way to give people what they want and/or need.

Take note that the keywords here are CREATE and DELIVER.

Creating value means expressing your unique talents and skills in a way that can potentially benefit others.

Delivering value means ensuring that other people are actually receiving and benefiting from the value you’ve created.

If you don’t do both in some fashion, then it’s going to be hard for you to generate sustainable income, especially during a recession. I’ll explain why.

If you only create value but don’t deliver it, then your value isn’t being received by anyone. So how can you receive value (such as money) in return?

I see this problem a lot with creative types such as would-be artists, musicians, and writers. They may spend lots of time honing their craft, but if they don’t actually get that value into the hands of sufficient numbers of people, they struggle financially, and this hurts them creatively too. A goodly number of these people are currently seeing their homes in foreclosure now.

The sad thing is that some of these people work very hard. But they spend too much time creating and not nearly enough time delivering. They watch people they consider hacks pull ahead of them. The hacks may not be as good on the creative side, but at least they’re getting their value into people’s hands, and on some level people are appreciating their work.

I went down that road myself. In the late 90s, I went bankrupt, even though I was working very long hours and creating a lot of potential value in the form of a computer game my company was developing. My problem was that I didn’t do a good job of getting that value delivered. I relied on publishers to do that, and for various reasons the game was never released. That resulted in years of wasted effort, aside from the valuable learning experience that is. So I know where this road leads because I traveled it.

On the other hand, if you only deliver value but don’t create it, then you’re delivering someone else’s value. This isn’t a terrible approach in the short run, but it’s a short-sighted long-term strategy if this is all you do. There’s nothing particularly special about delivering other people’s value. Anyone can do it. Anyone can sign up for affiliate programs or join an MLM program or become a reseller. If this is your primary means of generating income, your long-term outlook is weak. The better this works for you, the more it will draw competitors into your field. Eventually everyone will be working harder and harder for scraps. This happens all the time. This strategy can be especially weak during a recession, as more people turn to less expensive sources for the same value you deliver, squeezing your profit margins thinner and thinner.

Bloggers fall into this trap when they rehash other people’s content and don’t really have anything unique or compelling to say. A year later their niche is flooded with competitors doing the same thing. And hardly anyone is earning decent income from it.

The most viable long-term strategy is to create AND deliver value. You can mix and match other strategies with it, but this should be your primary method of income generation. If you get good at creating and delivering value, you can basically write your own ticket and enjoy lots of abundance.

A Choice of Mindset

I know a lot of people are dealing with financial challenges these days. Las Vegas is basically the foreclosure capital of the USA right now. I know people who’ve lost their homes. I see “bank owned” signs all over the place.

If you’re going through something like this right now, I totally empathize with you.

However, I have to point out that the pattern of what causes this is so clear, it’s getting a bit ridiculous to see it play out over and over again.

Generally speaking, people who CREATE and DELIVER value are doing just fine. In fact, I’d say most are doing better, not worse. Many of these people are seeing their incomes go up during this time.

People who don’t CREATE and DELIVER value are seeing their finances grow progressively worse. This leads many of them to panic, so they head even further away from creating and delivering value (such as by chasing lame money-making schemes), which only quickens the decline to insolvency.

I know it seems logical that if you’re seeing your finances decline, then you should focus single-mindedly on trying to make more money as quickly as possible. People fall into this trap all the time. I used to fall for it too. This is absolutely the wrong strategy though. I know that must sound counter-intuitive.

The correct strategy is that when you see your finances decline and you want to increase your income, then you need to focus on CREATING and DELIVERING more value. If you do that, then you’re doing the very thing that will generate a sustainable income increase.

What is money? Money is simply a medium for exchanging value. Money is what you receive in exchange for the value you create and deliver. If you can increase your outflow of value creation and delivery, you can increase your inflow of money received.

If, however, you try to increase the inflow of money without increasing the outflow of value, you’re trying to get something for nothing. This approach is untenable and will ultimately collapse. Please don’t waste your time on it.

I actually figured this out right around the time I was declaring bankruptcy. I was totally broke, yet I found a way to focus my energy on creating and delivering value instead of on trying to scrape together more money. Within about six months, I was back on my feet financially, and year after year my financial situation just kept getting better. I started on this path about 9 years ago, and I’ve maintained a nice positive cash flow every year since then.

I know that when you’re in a financial crunch situation, six months may seem like a long time. But it doesn’t matter if it takes you several months or several years to get in the habit of creating and delivering value. The time is going to pass anyway, and this habit will serve you well for life. Be patient and get started. It doesn’t matter what happens to the economy — if you keep creating and delivering value, you’ll do just fine.

A Record Year

Financially, 2008 was the best year ever for Erin and me. Erin had a six-figure year all on her own just from doing readings.

I expect that 2009 will be an even better year for us, regardless of what happens to the economy. How do I know? Because it’s another year we can create and deliver value, adding to what we’ve already created.

Why are we enjoying increases while others are experiencing decline?

First, it helps that we don’t have jobs. I haven’t been employed by someone in more than 16 years. Many people mistakenly assume that being jobless is the riskier route, but that’s nonsense. It’s much less risky to control your own means of creating and delivering value than to be a pawn of some larger entity. No matter how bad the economy gets, Erin and I can’t get fired or laid off. So our career paths enjoy much more stability.

Secondly, while others are tightening up and cutting costs, Erin and I focus our attention on creating and delivering more value to people. The way we go about this may seem a bit counter-intuitive at first glance.

For example, I wrote a lot about diet and health this year, such as by sharing my experiences with the raw food diet.

That may not appear to be a very sexy topic. Some people find it totally uninteresting and would prefer that I write about other things. My health articles never make it big on social bookmarking sites, so they don’t generally yield a major traffic boost either.

However, such articles can provide a lot of value to people who are interested in those topics. Many people have made significant lifestyle changes after reading those articles, improving their health and/or enjoying significant weight loss. For some people the benefits have been amazing.

So even though these articles might not seem too exciting at first glance, they make a difference in people’s lives. Obviously they don’t affect everyone equally, but that’s okay. They certainly do a lot of good. They deliver value.

Many bloggers post content with the intention of getting something, such as links, attention, or sales. I’ve done some of that too, but I generally avoid creating that style of content. Instead I remind myself to stay focused on creating and delivering value. I know that when I keep my focus on that side, the rest takes care of itself.

This is an example of such an article. I didn’t write this piece to get something from you. I don’t expect it will become a huge hit. I know that because of the length, many people won’t even bother to read it.

But I also know that for many of the people who take the time to read it, this article has the potential to create some subtle yet helpful shifts. It may give someone the extra insight needed to get moving in a new direction. Someone, somewhere will receive positive value from it.

That’s all I intend with this article. Just provide some kind of benefit to someone who could use a little encouragement in the right direction. It’s not that complicated. This sort of focus inspires me to share what I’ve learned openly and honestly, even if it runs contrary to the way most people think.

I know this approach sounds overly simplistic, but if you get this — if you really get it — then it’s really not that hard to generate plenty of income.

Turning Value Into Income

So how does one generate income from creating and delivering value? Can’t you run into a problem of creating and delivering lots of value and making no money from it?

As it turns out, making money is the easy part. If you can create and deliver value to people, the income opportunities will literally come to you. People will practically line up with ways for you to make money. I’m serious.

Here’s how this works.

If you get good at creating value, you can connect with other people who are good at delivering value. They deliver your value, such as by selling it, and they pay you a royalty, commission, or licensing fee.

For example, Hay House offered me a book deal last year, so I wrote a book called Personal Development for Smart People, and it was published in September. I received an advance for the book, and I’ll also receive ongoing royalties based on sales. I might even receive royalties from this book for the rest of my life, especially since the content is timeless. Also, writing a book has lead to other opportunities, such as paid speaking engagements. So in this case I created the value (the book), but others deliver it.

Now suppose you get good at delivering value. In this case you can generate income by plugging other people’s value into your delivery system. For example, my blog is great at delivering value. It’s a very efficient medium for that. But since I give my value away for free, it doesn’t generate income directly. However, I can generate plenty of income by promoting other people’s products that I like. Then I split the profits from sales with the publisher. I earn six figures a year just from doing that. The product publishers come to me. I get way more offers for this sort of thing than I can handle. It doesn’t require a lot of work to do this. Once you have a system for delivering value, you can plug other people’s value into it and generate lots of extra income.

If you have the means to create AND deliver strong value, you’ll have so many opportunities it will be totally ridiculous. First, you can plug the value you create into other people’s delivery systems, so you can earn ongoing royalties and such. This is easy residual income. I’m still getting checks every month for deals I entered years ago.

Secondly, you can plug other people’s creative value into your own delivery system. You pay them a royalty on the sales, or they pay you as an affiliate. Once again you generate ongoing residual income. As long as you’re selective about the products you promote, doing your best to ensure that they provide strong value, everyone is happy, and everyone wins.

Thirdly, you can plug your value into your own delivery system. Strangely, this is something I haven’t done yet with my blog, although I used to do it all the time with my computer games business. This is something I intend to explore in 2009. It simply means that I could create and sell my own products direct. Many other bloggers have already done this with great success, releasing e-books, audio programs, DVDs, etc. They create the value and sell it directly to their visitors.

A big chunk of the income I received in 2008 was from work I did in previous years. I could do no work for all of 2009 and just live off the residual income I know is coming. That’s a nice situation to be in. It’s no accident though. Years ago I decided that this is how I wanted to set up my financial life, and then I focused on creating and delivering value to make it work. There’s no reason you can’t use the same strategy. It isn’t trademarked. “

This is only half. Keep on reading….