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The journey to sustainable and enduring riches or wealth goes through what I call the 3 M’s. Everybody who has ever or who will ever acquire and sustain riches must go through this 3 M’s. The 3 M’s are: Making Money, Multiplying/Managing Money and Maintaining Money. I will expatiate on this.
MAKING MONEY: The first “M” is making money. No matter what you are doing at the moment to get some cash, you are making money. Yep. This includes your pocket money if you are a student or dependent. This also includes alms you get from friends, relatives or strangers if you are a beggar… begging on the street or calling that uncle or that friend.
Most Nigerians are hardworking folks who get up before dawn and work their butt off trying to make a living. And that is exactly what most of us still in this first “M” do; we make a living but not a life. The quantity of money you make depends on your knowledge, skill set, the type of work you do and how hard you work.
The sad truth is that making money will never make you rich. It is okay to begin by working hard, very hard but you must learn to work smart if you want to be rich. It is okay to begin by working for money, but if you ever want to crack the rich code you must learn how to deploy money to work for you. This takes us to the next “M”.
MULTIPLYING/MANAGING MONEY: This is where brains takes over from muscles and brute force. This is where commonsense is mixed with acquired financial intelligence and mentorship. Only few understands how this stage works. The rest of the masses die struggling in the first stage blaming the government, their parents, their village witches and their God.
Multiplying money begins with taking responsibility for your financial future, acquiring financial intelligence and getting mentorship. You need to learn what to do with the money you are making for it to multiply. Always ask the money you have what you can do with it for it to go bring its brothers and sisters to you. Don’t just work hard and spend your money on things you don’t need to impress people who don’t even give a damn about you. Learn to accumulate assets and not liabilities.
The simple definition of asset and liability is this: anything which brings more money to you is an asset and anything which doesn’t bring money to you is a liability. So the path to wealth and poverty is very clear. The poor make money and buy liabilities while the rich make money and buy assets. Liabilities are luxury toys and show off accessories. They are not bad per se but if they are more than your assets, then you are using your hard earned money to buy long term poverty.
MAINTAINING MONEY: This is when wealth is transferred from one generation to another. This hardly happens in Nigeria. Men and women who worked very hard, learnt how to multiply and manage money, pass on and leave their wealth to their children who squander the wealth in no time. Check around and tell me: do you know of any rich person who died and the children multiplied the wealth beyond what they inherited? And I’m talking of multi-millionaires and billionaires not those folks who left 1 house and 2 cars. God bless those folks but the truth is they died struggling in the first “M”.
In other climes where the 3 M’s of getting rich has become a culture, we see business empires that has profitably been maintained for up to 100 years. Infact I read somewhere that there is a family in Japan that has run the same hotel for 1300 years or 46 generations! You don’t see such wealth maintenance around here. Remember MKO Abiola? Where is his wealth now? I’m not saying his family is broke but it is obvious even to a casual observer who knew the multi billionaire that his heirs didn’t do much in the way of increasing what their Papa left them.
Wealth transference is a culture that most Nigerians are yet to understand. Making money is an instinctive thing. We have the instinct to survive, and so we work hard. Look around, everybody is working hard. We grew up seeing our parents wake up every morning to go to a place called ‘work”. We were nurtured and schooled so that we can wake up in the morning and go to a place called ‘work”. And that is what most of us are doing.
But multiplying money is about value reorientation, building and understanding systems. These values and systems are not taught in our regular schools and after school, society is not even patient with most of us to take the risks, do the trial and error and get the mentorship required to acquire the values and understanding of the systems necessary to multiply wealth. You are ‘ordered’ to get a job immediately. You see a young graduate trying to build a company from scratch or run an NGO and everybody is asking him “What are doing? Go find yourself a job!”
So when an individual who finally understood the values and systems of multiplying money dies, he passed his wealth to family members who don’t understand the system. All the heirs can see are physical machines of making money, in the midst of this plenty the instinct for survival that drives all of us to work is no longer there, they will just sit down and begin to ‘chop’. In no time the wealth will vanish.
The art and science of multiplying money is encoded in values, principles and systems that must be learned. You can’t transfer these principles in a Will; it is something you teach your kids when you are alive. The sad thing is that most people who learnt how to multiply money happen upon these principles. Some of them operate these principles without even knowing they are doing so. Some of them who even have these principles can’t impart them on their children because their parents didn’t teach them too.
Others who have learnt the principles of wealth multiplication deny their children this valuable knowledge by being over protective. The kids are raised to just spend the money, they are raised to be spenders and when their Papa die, they just spend his wealth to the ground. How sad.
To acquire the wealth of your dreams, you must begin the journey of making money, multiplying money and teach your kids and heirs how to maintain and manage money. Read books. Attend seminars and trainings. Get mentorship and practice what you learn.
[I will be speaking to officers and men of the Federal Road Safety Commission, Abuja Sector Command next week on “The 3 M’s Of Getting Rich”.]For those of us interested in starting or building a business in Real Estate there is a Real Estate Masters Class and Networking Lunch coming up soon. Register here for this class. Only those who register through this link will receive further information on how to make payment and attend the event. Click the link http://www.eventbrite.com/e/real-estate-masters-class-tickets-18814387339
First Baba Isa (FBI) writes from Abuja
07037162029
@firstbabaisa
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