My Career, Money, and Success Journey!

It's one thing to build your wealth slowly over the years by investing and becoming a millionaire by the time that you retire, but I have a feeling that many of you reading this are interested in building wealth sooner rather than later.

I, therefore, have decided to include a bit of my personal financial wisdom for you in this master-class training!

To be honest, my parents were never wealthy.

They weren't even considered middle class and so statistically speaking, I should not be where I am today in terms of how much money I'm making, the things that I now own, and the opportunities that I have now.

I'm saying all this to make a definitive point and the point is that if I can accomplish the things that I've been able to accomplish and will continue to accomplish, then every single person reading this now can do the exact same thing.

What I'm going to do, however, is give you the tools and the blueprint to build wealth fast, that I wish somebody gave to me years ago.

1. BECOME YOUR OWN BOSS.

When I first made the decision to venture into being my own boss instead of working and slaving myself for some boss or company who never truly recognizes and appreciates one's efforts, I first thought about saving to gather enough money that should cater for me for some time after I quit my current job in order for me to support my journey on the path of being my own boss.

Now before I go on, there are basically two schools of thought that I’ve found helpful and that are very important for you to take note of.

The first school of thought says, if you want to increase how much money you have leftover after your expenses, simply decrease your expenses or how much money you're spending and you will effectively increase how much you're able to then go on to save and grow.

While this is certainly true, I find that it's not always realistic.

Sometimes, you really just can't decrease your expenses. Personally, I did find out that it was really hard for me to come up with savings for me to quit my job at the time. At the end of the month, I usually don’t have a lot of money left over after my monthly expenses no matter how hard I tried.

Perhaps all of your expenses are necessities, things that you need to survive, or perhaps, you just really enjoy your bottle of beer plus the plate of catfish pepper soup as you hang out with your friends every weekend.

This really adds joy and happiness to your life!

You shouldn't have to give that up and while the first school of thought does have a little bit of truth sprinkled into it, it's not always realistic and therefore it's not my favorite school to live by.

The second school of thought says okay if your expenses are piling up each month and you don't have any money left over to save and invest, simply go and earn more money. If you increase how much money you earn and your expenses stay the same, then you'll have more money left over at the end of each month to save and invest.

This one makes sense to me and that's the school of thought that I personally prescribe to earn more money because earning more money is the most important component to building your wealth faster.

So how exactly do you earn more money?

If you go to Google and type in the query, “how exactly do I earn more money?” you will surely find real advice from real people, but I thought it would be far more helpful and more valuable if I instead, told you guys about my personal journey and what I did to get to where I'm at right now and where I plan on continuing to go and how you can apply these same exact principles in your life to earn significantly more money even if you're starting from zero as I did.

2. VISUALIZING MAKING MONEY.

The way I sort of visualize making money is simply by seeing it as a pyramid and there are levels to the pyramid too (from the lowest at the bottom to the highest at the top of the pyramid). The lowest level of making money is by working for someone else.

This is where the majority of people currently sit.

As you climb up the ladder though, it does get a little bit harder but your income increases as a result and so if you're somebody who's reading this right now and you're saying to yourself I want to be wealthy, then the goal for you is to climb this pyramid as quickly as you possibly can and I'm going to show you how I did it with my personal journey.

For me, it all began when I eventually realized how my last paying job as an employee simply wasn't enough to fund my ambitious journey to building wealth. I needed to make more money and so I quit my job with nothing else lined up except for a dream.

Now as debt kept piling up and bills piling up too, I knew that I had to figure out something else and fast. After a few rounds of jumping from one odd job to another, I finally decided to go back to a US Retailer company business that a friend and a mentor of mine once introduced me to in the past.

But you see, when I got introduced to this opportunity the first time, I was still a student in the university and so really wasn’t serious enough with the business at the time. I usually got distracted because so much was on my plate and so I never was stable to start making more than enough income from it (although, I made some little income at the time to justify for myself that this was a real and legitimate business for anyone to involve in).

I have since decided to jump back into this Retailer opportunity with a more focused attitude even if it means doing it part-time and as a side hustle. This actually brings me to my next point which is; that another legitimate way to earn more money is by taking up a side hustle or starting a side business.

3. TAKING UP A SIDE HUSTLE OR STARTING A SIDE BUSINESS.

The point of a side hustle is to bring in additional income on top of any regular income from your day job. If your current job is barely making ends meet, then a side hustle can be just the thing that you need to help give you the extra income to then go and invest more.

If you just go to Google, type in ‘’best side hustles’’ and click on any of the links that appear, you'll get a ton of ideas from various lists across several websites.

Now I know some of you are thinking ‘’but Tony, I don't have any skills that I can use to then go and make money as a side hustle’’

Two things,

First, there are a ton of side hustles that you can start that don't require any skill whatsoever, and secondly, perhaps you need to take some time to learn a new skill.

If you sat down for a week and fully committed yourself to learn a new skill, you would be really surprised with how much you could actually accomplish within that week and that's how I learned how to build websites for example.

I just fully immerse myself for a solid week to learn all of the basics of how to build a website and the basics were enough to help me get started with making money building websites.

You don't have to be a master at anything to get started making money with it. If you just understand the basics of how it works, you can start making money with it almost immediately.

Another important point to take note of here is that a huge part of earning more money is forcing yourself out of your comfort zone.

Could I have kept my job making peanuts as a salary?

Sure, I could have done that, but I didn't because I knew that in order for me to bring my income to that next level, I was going to have to step out of the boat that I was safely currently on and start the fire to burn that boat and swim to shore.

And so I did just that.

If I didn't take that risk back then, I would have never gone back to my US RETAILER Business with the much-required vigor and energy.

If I never started my US RETAILER Business, then I would have never started my Affiliate Marketing Business, Digital Marketing Business, Freelancing Business, Information Marketing Business, and above all, my Empowerment Movement, because I wouldn't have had the knowledge and confidence to go about the operations of these businesses.

And if I lacked the knowledge and confidence to go about the operations of these businesses, then I would not have the opportunities that I have today.

So can you kind of start to see what's happening here?

If you ever want to increase your income and how much you're earning, you will have to make sacrifices.

When I first started out on my journey of becoming my own boss, I had no idea what I was doing and what I was getting myself into, but I’ve now learned that if you never take that step to go and start that business or that side hustle or whatever it is you want to embark on, you're not going to make progress and you will never earn as much income as you hoped to make one day.

4. INVESTING IS A CRITICAL PART OF BUILDING YOUR WEALTH TOO.

Investing is still a critical part of building your wealth because even when you get to a point where you're earning a six-figure or seven-figure salary, you will want to be able to continue growing that money even larger because here's the thing;

In order to keep the streams of revenue flowing effectively from the money that I'm making from digital marketing, from my freelancing business, my Information Marketing Business, or any of the other business ventures that I have going on, I have to put in hours of work – the whole time needed.

Yes, and it’s no funny business!

There are some components to it that are more passive than others but to keep that machine oiled and running I have to be willing to trade in my hours and this is why investing is so important.

When you invest your money in the stock market or in real estate or into crypto or whatever, your money works for you. The best part is that money won't get sick, money won't ask for a day off or holidays, and money won't complain that you're overworking it.

The final part that I want to talk about is learning

5. LEARNING IS THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM!

Now one of the primary reasons that I've been able to increase my income as fast as I have, is because I am quite literally learning something new every single day.

Learning is different for everybody though.

Some people prefer to read a book or listen to a podcast before jumping into that thing that they want to do. On the other hand, some people and including myself in this group, take a ‘’jump first and prepare the parachute second approach’’.

In other words, I'm not going to spend too much time trying to learn all of the small small details about something before actually starting it.

Take for instance, when I first got started in digital marketing, I didn't even know what marketing was and the deeper down the rabbit hole I got, the more excited and more kind of obsessed I became with this industry.

Shortly after setting up my business with the US Retailer company, I quickly realized that I needed to get people to find out about my new business. So I started to learn within the US Retailer company’s resources platform, about things like how to sell stuff online and offline, the need for a website, key code tracking, and the need for analytics. I discovered how SEO or search engine optimization can be used to get people to actually find your business or website.

Once I realized just how powerful all this good stuff was, I wanted more. So I started looking into social media as a way to get even more traffic, more attention, and more eyeballs on my affiliate business opportunities.

This led to running ads, which led to email marketing, which led to other kinds of different content marketing strategies like blogging, copywriting, video marketing, and later moving into WhatsApp marketing and it just continued to grow and evolve from there.

The thing is, with so many different areas of marketing there is no one that's better than any others, they're simply the ones that you're going to find most interesting, and the more interesting you find it or the more passionate you become about it, the better you're going to do.

Above all, you must realize that the time and the energy that you invest in learning is going to pay off massively in the future. This is the reason that today more than a decade after I first got started in affiliate marketing, I still study every single day, I read books, I listen to podcasts, I take courses, I go to seminars, I attend conferences, I hire coaches and mentors, etc.

Therefore, if you wait until you're an expert at anything, you will never start that thing off the ground. Learning is important but the way that I personally approach it is to learn the basics of the thing that you want to start and then start.

As you're going along your journey, you'll run into obstacles that will require you to learn something new. Whatever that thing is, learn it and then keep pressing on.

Building wealth is not about being an expert. It's about your willingness to persevere and constantly improve your craft to provide value for as many people as possible.

I hope that you will really become intentional with this master-class training and gradually build up a career in digital marketing from here onwards.

Take care