Wealth Creation Blog

The absolute first step in accumulating wealth is empowering yourself. Self-empowerment is necessary before you can begin to control the money that flows through your life and maximise the potential of it.

Living The Unempowered Life

Think of the unempowered life as the one that you have been living up until now, or up until the point where you took definite steps towards change and the focused pursuit of wealth. If you’ve been on this course for a while it is possible that you have already gained a level of financial empowerment in your life; if you are just starting out consider this read an essential first step and illumination.

In either case no doubt you can understand the importance of empowering yourself to live a better, freer, wealthier life. Either you are not yet empowered and you can feel the need, or you have gained a level of empowerment and glimpsed the possibilities that gaining control over money presents to you.

Financial Empowerment’s Double-Edged Sword

There are many small factors that contribute to personal financial empowerment, but there are two big ones that prevail:

1. Wealth Education
2. Personal control

Ultimately it will be your personal control (for lack of a better term—this isn’t just about discipline) that dictates your success in building wealth. For almost everyone, though, a quality wealth education is elemental in gaining that control. Whether formally through a course or informally through reading and study, the people who succeed and go on to build wealth all get educated before they succeed.

Empowering yourself is one of the greatest gifts you can give to yourself. Having power and knowing it is enlightening in and of itself. Give yourself that gift, and take time to enjoy your accomplishment—your power!

Are you empowered? How has that knowledge changed you? How would you describe the feeling of empowerment? I’m eager to hear…

Sean Rasmussen
Wealth Creation Blog
UniversalWealthCreation.com © 2004 - 2008

The last post, if you recall, discussed the fact that what you see in one wealth creation program or book, you are likely to see again elsewhere. The reason is that this is what works! It’s to be taken as proof, just as you would accept anything as accurate that you can back up with another source. This leads me to address another question that might come up.

If This Stuff Is Everywhere, Why Do I need A Financial Empowerment Program?

It’s true that over time you could collect the majority of the information that you will get from a good wealth creation program like Jamie McIntyre’s if you just read and researched on you own. Eventually, you could get there. After all, that is essentially what Jamie McIntyre did. But there are some very real reasons why it is to your strict advantage to undertake your new financial education by using a wealth-building program.

The Work Is Done For You

First off, financial empowerment programs have done the work of research for you. It takes years to learn everything you need to know by going it alone and studying all the experts. And truth be told, not all ‘experts’ you encounter are for real. But you can trust the expert advise, education, mindset, and strategy that you are taught through proven programs.

Learn From the Experience Of Others

Wealth creation programs have the advantage of allowing you to learn from the experience of others. See where people have come from, what they’ve accomplished, and what they’ve done with what they’ve had. Find out what’s worked for others to put it to work for you.

Meeting Of The Minds

Programs like the 21st Century Academy bring the best of the best together in one place. It’s like having a meeting of the minds with some of the most successful and wealthy people in the world, all in one spot.

Support And Guidance

Books can be inspirational and informative, but they are not very supportive. When you work with real people, either in person, through homestudy, or online, you have real, live, support available to you.

You could go it alone and pursue wealth creation on your own, but it would doubtless take you much longer, and you would lack the benefits that proven programs offer. I encourage you to save yourself time, money, and frustration, and let the successes and work of others work to your distinct advantage.

Sean Rasmussen
Wealth Creation Blog
UniversalWealthCreation.com © 2004 - 2008

Do you work to live or live to work? This is a question that came up on a blog the other day. Granted, it’s not the first time the question has been asked and unfortunately it won’t be the last, either. Until you learn how to take control of you financial future, this will always be a quandary you live with.

Cultural Implications Of the Work Ethic

The proportion of our lives that is devoted to work is in part cultural. In other words, some cultures dedicate more of their lives to work than others. Americans are famous for it, but increasingly Australians, British, and people from all countries are losing that focus and becoming entirely consumed by their work. It seems as though with globalization and the now global nature of always-on ecommerce that the cultures that used to have a pulse on what was really important in life are losing that perspective and falling slave to the paycheque. It seems that the harder we try to simplify our financial control and build wealth for a better life, the worse we do at it.

Can We Change The Way We Work?

So the question is, with more and more people living to work instead of working to live, can the cycle be broken? Or are we at risk of perpetuating a life focused on work for pay?

When we speak in terms of the majority, it would appear that we are at risk of doing just that. And it’s really such a shame, because with the opportunities available to us for creating wealth and becoming financially free without missing out on life, we should be trending more and more towards that life of freedom. We can do it. We all can do it. But we do have to first take stock of our lives, and reset our financial programming. First, we need to commit ourselves to working only to support life, so that in time we can minimize the work, and maximize the living.

Sean Rasmussen
Wealth Creation Blog
UniversalWealthCreation.com © 2004 - 2008

Going back to the post regarding meeting the basic human needs, you’ll remember that we talked about how all people meet these needs. Although all people meet basic human needs in some way, we do not all do so constructively. Moreover, some of us will meet some needs positively and others negatively, and sometimes the one cancels out the other. Evaluating how you meet the most basic needs of life can take you onto a higher plane of living, allowing you to make the most of wealth creation and the most of life. This is one of the important and primary lessons Jamie McIntyre will teach you in the 21st Century Academy courses. I’ll overview this here, but to really maximize the advantages of this understanding, you’ve got to read Jamie McIntyre’s in-depth discussion.

Levels Of Fulfillment And Means Of Meeting Needs

People meet their needs in both positive and negative ways. Some use destructive vehicles to do so, and some use very positive means to their ends. Most often, the level of fulfillment you enjoy and your vehicle for need fulfillment relate directly to each other.

You may be meeting individual needs on low, moderate, or high levels. Specific needs may be met on different levels and in different ways; coordinately, the way you meet one need may be detrimental to how you meet another.

For example, you may meet your need for connection and love by entering into relationships; if your relationships are frequent, you may also meet your need for diversity in this way, but in so doing you are bringing down the level of fulfillment you feel from relationships as a builder of connectivity. In the end, neither need is fulfilled to any meaningful degree.

Some other ways needs are met, in either constructive or destructive ways could be:

• Substance/drug/alcohol use

• Food

• Sex

• Learning

• Reading

• Seminars/workshops

• Criticizing

• Spirituality

• Spending money

• Saving money

• Investing money

• Teaching leading

• Sympathy or self-pity

This list goes on and on and only gets more varied. Jamie McIntyre’s list in his writings and 21st Century Academy programs is far more comprehensive, and much better at illustrating the delicate balance between needs and fulfillment.

The key for you is to evaluate the ways you meet your basic needs, and strike a balance that works positively and constructively towards meeting all needs and growing as a successful, happy, financially stable person. Meeting basic needs is very much related to success in wealth creation, because the things you do that you think make you feel better may just be thwarting your best intentions and efforts.

Learn about balancing needs and fulfillment, and learn to meet needs constructively, enjoying the natural success that follows. This is the sort of education the 21st Century Academy gives you, the sort of really life-changing education that breeds financial success.

Sean Rasmussen
Wealth Creation Blog
UniversalWealthCreation.com © 2004 - 2008

One of the ways that you can fund your wealth creation program is by increasing your income. That’s a lot easier said than done, but if you are really getting what you are worth, it’s a heck of a lot easier than if you are working for short pay.

Are You Worth Your While?

Many people are not getting what they are worth. They know it, and their work shows it. It shows to the client, the customer, and to the boss. And it creates a never-ending cycle of negativity and suffering income. Let’s think about this. You take a job for whatever reason, at pay that you may or may not believe to be fair. For some, the money was never there and they knew it; for others, what seemed like a good deal in the beginning is going south, or stagnating to the point that the job is not worth the effort you’re putting in.

After a time, you feel devalued and so you devalue your work—why give away the goods? Why not just put in the effort that you are being compensated for?

Unfortunately, you create a situation for yourself that does you no good. You are not showing your boss your best effort, and your boss is not at all inclined to increase the earnings of someone just barely meeting their job requirements.

This may not exactly be the situation you are currently in, but you get the general idea. Maybe the problem is more like you not valuing yourself highly, and so you allow yourself to be taken advantage of financially.

Value-Added Services

Whatever is at the root of your problem, the situation can be remedied. This year, make a point of increasing your own value and worth, so that you can be bringing in the money you deserve, and subsequently funding your plan for creating wealth.

In future posts, we’ll talk more about the specific strategies for increasing your worth—either in your current position or in a new one. We’ll talk about some specific strategies for increasing your worth and reaping the financial rewards of your proven worth; and all of this with an eye toward creating the mindset of a successful creator of wealth so that you can enjoy that elusive financial freedom you’ve been striving for.

Sean Rasmussen
Wealth Creation Blog
UniversalWealthCreation.com © 2004 - 2008