Category: Wealth Tips

My elder daughter sent me a clip of Grant Cardone recalling how 16 years ago his wife got him to play the game of “What would we do if we won the lottery?” It is worth watching: http://instagram.com/reel/DYZiSN5xC-2/?igsh=dDI3NWkOdnpxeGto

Grant says, “There’s more money on this planet than there is creativity to spend it.”

I thought about that and had the realisation that what he said is an understated simplification.

“How so?” I hear you ask.

Well the amount of money is not fixed, it is variable. Each country is supposed to issue roughly enough currency and credit to facilitate the exchange of the goods and services produced within the economy without causing persistent inflation or deflation. (Given the persistent inflation, they obviously fail miserably at it.) Which means if you increase your delivery of valuable final products, the government increases the amount of money in circulation.

So, for argument’s sake, if every person in a country on January 1 doubled their personal and collective production and the government commensurately increased the money supply, the result would be that everyone would double their income, there would be double the goods and services to buy with their increased income and there would be no inflation. Prosperity for all! So there is really no limit to wealth, there is only limited imagination and creativity.

When producing physical goods there are various factors that limit this potential expansion – the availability of factory floor space and raw materials, immediate logistical capacity, who retains the profit from increased production, the individual or his employer etc. – but the core simplicity is that in theory there is no limit to money that can me made. Just because you start earning a million dollars does not mean someone else stops earning a million dollars.

So don’t hold back on your own expansion or growth for fear of depriving someone else! It does not work that way!

And if you are interested in the economic principles behind this, here is a conversation I had with ChatGPT on the subject, refreshing my HSC understanding from 50 years ago: https://chatgpt.com/c/6a0c062e-84a4-83ec-bf0d-fddf894d417a

Now, how do you go about increasing your income?

1. Discover your Basic Purpose, your passion. Here’s a link to a blog post I wrote to help you do that: https://www.tomgrimshaw.com/tomsblog/?p=37862 Why? Because when you are working on your basic purpose, progress is closer to a hot knife through butter than it is to walking through molasses in the middle of winter! Motivation and self-discipline are higher, procrastination evaporates, you feel more like you are being paid to have fun rather than working.

2. Zig Ziglar famously said: “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”
Once you know your basic purpose, what your talents and personality characteristics are, ask yourself the questions,
“What do people want that is on my purpose line to deliver?”
“How can I best use my talents and personality to deliver that?”
“What skills or abilities will I need to acquire or boost in order to accomplish that?”

3. Delivering enough of what others want to get you what you want is most likely going to take some skills and abilities senior to those you currently exercise. So step three is to skill up! It may take some communication skills, some organising skills, learning some production techniques but for sure it is going to require you step outside your comfort zone to skill up. If you don’t know where to start, reach out to me for some direction.

4. Decide your future and plan out what is necessary to get you there. Here is a link to help you do that: https://www.scientologycourses.org/tools-for-life/targets/steps/administrative-scale.html

5. If you are working on your purpose line you will be doing something you love and you are good at. But there will still be tough days. So you need to have some ‘pick me ups’ that will help you over the troughs. A clear vision is great. A clean statement of what you are trying to do is motivating.

6. A list of wins and success you can look back on from time to time can be uplifting. I often encourage people to keep a little book called “My Wins and Successful Actions”. Every time you accomplish something worthwhile, document it. Every personal best, highest ever, career milestone, every time you helped someone do something great, write it in your book. Do that from the back of the book coming forward. From the front of the book, every time you have a good result, document the actions that contributed to it. Then, once a month, review it.

It is very easy to lose sight of or forget the little things that contribute to the big successes. You go away on holidays, come back and after a month you read through your successful actions and a couple of them jump off the page at you that you had inadvertently left out when you came back from holidays.

7. Realise that while 75-80% of us, or thereabouts, are constructive and trying to get along, that still leaves 20-25% who are destructively inclined. You are going to meet one of them from time to time. So don’t expect to win everyone to your cause. There is a course that gives you the basics on differentiating between those who would help from those who would harm you: https://www.scientologycourses.org/tools-for-life/suppression/progress.html Using the data in this course can act like armour to protect you against destructive personalities.

(Tom: Yet another exmaple of how if something is too good to be true it probably is and if you trust the system to look after your interests, you are almost certain to be let down.)

A Boston financial analyst walked into the SEC with ironclad mathematical proof that Bernie Madoff was running the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. He did it five separate times over nine years. They ignored him every single time.

His name was Harry Markopolos.

In 1999, his boss at a small investment firm asked him to analyze Bernie Madoff’s fund. Madoff was a Wall Street legend — former NASDAQ chairman, smooth, connected, and delivering impossibly steady returns no matter what the market did. Up 10-12% every year like clockwork. Harry looked at the numbers for four hours and knew something was deeply wrong.

The returns were mathematically impossible. They looked like a perfect 45-degree line on a graph — something that only exists in textbooks, not real markets. Either Madoff was front-running trades illegally or it was a massive Ponzi scheme. There was no third option.

Harry showed his boss. They brought in colleagues. Everyone agreed: this was fraud. So in May 2000, Harry did what any responsible person would do. He walked into the SEC’s Boston office with an eight-page report full of clear math and told them exactly where to look.

They did nothing.

He submitted again in October 2001. More detail. More proof. Ignored.

In 2005 he sent his strongest report yet — twenty-one pages titled “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud.” Seventeen red flags. Two possible explanations. Both felonies. This time he sent it to SEC headquarters in Washington.

The SEC sent a couple of junior staffers to talk to Madoff. Madoff charmed them. Case closed.

Harry submitted again in 2007. Still ignored.

By 2008 he had delivered five detailed warnings over nine years. He was scared the whole time. He believed Madoff had ties to organized crime. He varied his route to work. He slept with a gun next to his bed.

Then the financial crisis hit. Investors started asking for their money back. Madoff had no real investments — just new money paying off old investors. The whole thing collapsed. On December 10, 2008, Madoff finally confessed to his sons. They called the FBI the next morning.

The SEC didn’t catch Bernie Madoff. His own family did.

The damage was staggering. $65 billion gone. Thousands of victims wiped out — retirees, charities, Holocaust survivors like Elie Wiesel who lost everything. At least two people connected to the fraud died by suicide.

In February 2009, Harry testified before Congress. He laid out exactly how the SEC had failed for nearly a decade. The agency later investigated itself and admitted they had received credible warnings as far back as 1992 but never acted.

If they had listened to Harry’s first report in 2000, Madoff might have been stopped at around $7 billion. By the time his sons turned him in, it was $65 billion.

Five reports. Nine years. Fifty-eight extra billion dollars stolen because regulators couldn’t be bothered to check the math.

Bernie Madoff died in prison in 2021. The SEC officials who ignored Harry Markopolos five times kept their jobs and pensions.

Some of the biggest disasters in history aren’t caused by evil geniuses. They’re caused by people who see the warning signs and simply choose not to look.