The simple concept of “leverage” has the power to get you more time, better fitness, career or business success, financial control and relationship satisfaction. Despite these benefits, however, most of us don’t utilize leverage as much as we should. Understanding how leverage works is the first step in expanding your opportunities, satisfaction and overall fulfillment.
Chances are if you are like most people, you rely on your daily, weekly and monthly jobs for the bulk of your income. You get a steady paycheck throughout the year, and you use that money for everything from living expenses to debt, to saving for an emergency. My question is that what will happen when that source of income disappears.
Living on a paycheck will not allow you to achieve your dreams in life. Priority often came from dream,some people dreamt of having good houses, others dreamt of happy healthy family, once full of life that will never take them to the hospital even now and then, some people priority in life is to travel, they like networking, socializing they need people who will truly add value to their lives, maybe in information technology which will help them whistle through life, but unfortunately their salary cannot take them home let alone out of this country.
As people dream of all these good things to start life, they are embarrassed by unemployment. You have gone to school, listen to the advice of your parents, you work hard at school to get a good certificate and upon graduation, you were embarrassed by unemployment. It took five years or more for a typical Nigeria graduate to get a job he/she desires even those that are employed are not well paid, some of them are doing jobs of drop outs. And the worse part of it is that there is no hope of a dependable pension.
My question is what steps have you taken to achieve your dreams. According to Robert Kiyosaki, a popular brilliant American, Robert became financial free in 1994 at the age of 47 years he designed a cash flow quadrants. He said people in the world earn their income from four different ways. In the quadrants, we have the employees, the self-employees, the big business owners and the big investors.
The employees are the people who typically wake up very early in the morning because they have to go to work, if they did not go to work, no work, no food, even if they did not want to work, their bosses will make them work. Their income was fixed without the consideration of their needs either by the union or by their bosses. So the employee has to work hard to see their daily bread,
As the majority of employees rushed to work for 35 meritorious years some of them retired into poverty. Many of them died on the queue waiting for their pension or gratuities. So employment is not designed to make you wealthy but to make you survive because you can only work as your strength can carry you as an individual.Your salary is the bribe they give you to forget your dreams.
You may not realize this, but if you are in a job today, your Employer is leveraging on you.
Your Employer is giving you a paycheck so that he can leverage on your time (Other People’s Time) and he can get more done with less of his own time.
Nothing wrong with that, most people have a job and the Society does need people to contribute in many different ways.
My point here is just to help you realize that “leverage” is indeed used every day, everywhere.
Now, as an Employee, more often than not, you don’t have any leverage. If you do, you have very little. You will need to be trading your own time day in and day out in exchange for a paycheck.
Even if you are a Manager and have a team you are supervising, chances are that you still need to be in the office or working for certain hours a month to maintain your salary.
TIME is the most valuable resource in the World. If you lose your Money, you can always make it back. But if you lose your TIME, you can never make it back.
Employee trade time and degree for money, like one of my friends who is a first class material from Harvard University, he had a Ph.D. from Oxford, he is a computer guru. He works for a firm that treasures his skill so much that they paid him 2million naira monthly, a car and a driver was allocated to him, he lives in high branded area with full-service apartment but he is not in control of his life, his boss is in control of his life once he meet up his target another target will be giving him.
The second quadrant is the self-employed, if you are Self-Employed – such as a Real Estate Agent, a Doctor that runs his own clinic alone, a Lawyer or Accountant that runs his own office or a Small Business Owner, you often have even less leverage than a regular Employee.
In most cases, you are the one handling every aspect of your business – defining business directions, business development, meeting with clients, handling logistics, delivering products, closing sales, marketing, and handling accounting just to name a few.
Chances are that you are working even longer hours than a regular Employee. Not only that, your income stops when you stop work and you don’t even have paid vacation days.
If you found that you are in this situation, you need to look for people that will work for you and you will able to leverage on them so that you can have more Freedom back in your life.
For instance, during the time of Gani Fawehimi, Gani is a lawyer, a SAN, he is well read and he had a passion for his work, because of these everybody wants Gani in court to solicit for them not Gani associate. It got to a time that Gani broke down he had to attend to medical check up abroad but his clients still want him in court and in subsequent years, you know what happened to Gani.
Let take an apprentice for example, a hairdresser who trained ten girls, when they graduated and have their freedom they will go down the street of their boss to open their own shops, they will text their own boss customers” Madam, I done open my own shop it no far from Madam shop, come I go do ham for you cheaper” as people are rushing to these young girls shop, Madam is getting older and weaker and she might not know the latest styles in town because of that people might not come to her shop.
The third quadrant is the big business owners, as a big business owner your money work for you, you might not necessarily be at the place of work but the cash will be flowing, for instance, an Igbo man who is selling rice in the market with 5 boys who he brought from the village. As they are helping him to attend to customers, he his leveraging on them to generate passive income he did not work for.
That is how the business owners operate, before you know it they become big business owners, like Mike adenuga, otedola etc, whenever you make a call with your Glo line, Adenuga is getting his money, does he know you? Did he need to know you before you buy Glo card, does he necessarily need to be at his place of work? Of course no, he is leveraging on his workers to generate passive income.
Look at Mark Zuckerberg the owner of Facebook, at age 31 he is among the ten richest people in the world, he only created a network. there are more than 50 millions active users of the Facebook book today. What do we do on Facebook, we post messages and pictures, as we are posting pictures and our friends are hailing us”ho! I dey feel your swag oo, you look takeaway” and as we are doing all these Mike is marking his money. The blue ship company is scrambling, falling on themselves to place an advert on Facebook because they knew that advert on Facebook is cheaper than on CNN.
The last quadrant is the big investors. The people in this category are not also working for money their money worked for them. The majority of investors get their money from paper assets or mutual funds, some of them own vast estates. They don’t go about collecting the rents they have professional estate agents who will go about collecting the rents for them, they just go play golf or sitting in the recreational center with their laptop to monitor their cash flow.
If you look at the four quadrants, you will see that majority of Nigerians, poor and middle class are on the employee and self-employee quadrant while the true richest Nigerian are on the big business owners and the big investors.
If you want to be successful in life and be financially free you must have a plan B to the current job you are doing. Living on a paycheck will never take you anywhere those who live on a paycheck will only be rich at the end of the month before the middle of the month they are broke again.
We are no more in an industrial age where your parents will tell you to go school, acquire a good degree and get a good job that will fetch you big money.
This is an information age where you need to understand that working for someone you trading your time and degree for money. You know what is killing you? It is your boss that is killing you, they don’t want you to be like them. They determine your time for you, they are in control of your life, no time to attend to your family, you work hard every day and they make most of the money.
If you want to move from the rash race of employee rate to the big business owners and the big investors, you must start thinking like the rich, you must understand the power of leveraging on the effort of order to generate passive income.
Just like the woman at the market who have ten sales girls and the ten sales girls can attend to ten customers at the same time unlike a man at the same market with a wheelbarrow, if he is attending to”oga” he cannot at the same time attend to”madam”, he had to attend to one customer at a time.
How much does he typically made a day may be five thousand Naira, but the woman can make up to two hundred thousand Naira a day how much does she pay those girls maybe five thousand Naira monthly, she is using leverage.
So , ladies and gentlemen it is high time we leveraged on the effort of others to generate passive income.
