Building the Asset that Builds the Assets

The First Asset You Must Build for the Best Return on the Rest

We know that in order to increase our net worth, it’s important to build assets that give us positive returns. We may not think about it, but ultimately, we are our own greatest asset. The more we improve ourselves, the more we will be able to create other assets.

For instance, let’s say you are a writer that can only write about one book a year. That book is a valuable passive income-generating asset. What if you could improve your writing skills, and learn some new strategies that enabled you to write a book a month? You’ve just worked on building the asset that builds the assets!

When you invest in education and training you will get the greatest return because you’ve invested into yourself. I’ve read books that were worth billions in my bank account because they’ve changed the way I think, act and produce.
If you’ve reached a cap in your cashflow, business or anything else, you can only push past it by building yourself. Sometimes we’re beating our head against the wall trying to break through in some area of our lives by doing all the things you’re ‘supposed to do’, but there’s something in us that’s getting in the way! We need to work on our primary asset first – ourselves.

Stages of building

So, how do we build ourselves into a more valuable asset? We have to remember that even though our life is the building, we are the architect of that building. Architects draw up the plans and that is a necessary step, but it needs to go beyond a blueprint. A building doesn’t take shape until some ground has been broken, foundations laid, and structure is added.
A lot of people think reading, taking courses and training is building themselves, which isn’t necessarily wrong. It’s just that you haven’t dug ground yet, you’ve just drawn the blue print! You have to go beyond the planning to the work of digging and laying the foundation through application. You must take the potential you gain through knowledge acquired in books and other sources and put it to use, otherwise the building never gets even one brick laid.

Real learning – a cycle of mistakes

Whether you watch a child learning to walk, ride a bike, skate, or read, you’ll see a cycle of making mistakes, trying again, and then making more mistakes until things finally get smoother and they do it without thinking. The only way to build yourself is by putting the knowledge you’ve accumulated in your head into practice by experimenting, failing, moving forward, failing again, trying again, and repeating this process. It’s a cycle that must continue to repeat for the building to grow higher.

You can shorten the cycles

If you want to shorten the length of time it takes you to become proficient at something, you can, it just depends on how much action you take. The more you implement the knowledge – the more you will really learn from the mistakes you make. You can choose to fail once a day or once a year, it’s up to you.
If you repeat the cycle every day, every year, that means you’ll have a 365% faster improvement!
You can even take it one step further by failing at 2 or more things a day! That’s what I do, and why it’s so hard to compete with me! I’m weird – I get excited if I’m wrong! I trained myself to be wired differently so I look forward to each failure because I know it means more growth in me. It’s one step closer in the cycle of building my best asset!
Another way to shorten the cycle a bit is to work with someone who can coach you in the process, but you’ll still have to go through the cycle. Coaches can guide you through some landmines and train you on what to look out for, but inevitably you’ll still need to fail for yourself to really learn. Actually, much of a coach’s job is to bust your butt when you feel like giving up when you’re tired of failing!
Once you’ve mastered one area, if you want to succeed in a new area, you have to go through it all again! The principles are the same in every new endeavor – just rinse and repeat the cycle! Every new skill is like adding a room to the building – you’ve got to go past looking at the plans and get to work!

Keep building the asset that builds the assets! Keep going beyond filling your head with knowledge to taking action on it NOW! Go out there, get your hands dirty and make some mistakes!