It took me over 15 years of hard work and set-backs to become a millionaire (albeit I was still in school and college for most of it). I’ve started my journey selling Pokemon cards on Ebay and now I’m moving millions in the world of tech and real estate. Through this journey I’ve discovered a pattern that I believe offers a fast track to becoming a millionaire or even more.

If I were to lose all my money tomorrow, I think I could be a millionaire again after 1–2 years following this principle. I think anyone can make it in 3–5 years. How? Read on! This article will help you gain a clearer picture of the path to wealth outlined in the 10x Wealth Principle.

There are three main principles to creating wealth:
1) Wealth is created through a combination of your labor force and capital.
2) To reach your financial objectives, you need to have a clear goal and break this goal into milestones in a nonlinear, logarithmic manner.
3) Over time, you need to supplement and replace labor with capital to make yourself scalable and to keep growing exponentially. And, while following this blueprint, you also need to stay flexible and adaptive as new technologies and techniques are always emerging.

How Wealth Creation Works

Wealth is created through the creation and capture of value. To do this, a combination of labor and capital can be used. Most people just use their labor to create value, i.e. working a job at be it McDonalds or Goldman Sachs, whereas the champions of capitalism mostly rely on vast amounts of capital to drive economic outcomes in their favor. If you want to create abnormally high levels of return, you need to combine entrepreneurial energy and labor. For example, real estate developers use their capital to buy land and then work on building properties on the site they have acquired. They use both capital and labor. Effectively combining these aspects, returns way above market levels, such as 100% plus per year, can be achieved.

How to Create your Roadmap for Wealth Creation

If you would break down the path to 1 million dollars into several milestones, what would be the first milestone to pick?

Most people would intuitively pick USD 100,000. This is because our brains are wired to think in a linear way and 1 million is such a big number. The secret here is that wealth is built exponentially through reinvesting capital and combining it with your labor force in a smart way.

Therefore, the first milestone should be something more attainable to where you are starting, such as USD 100, or 1000. These goals are something anyone can save up with 2–3 months, using purely labor. You can either cut back some cost or take an extra job. Another thing you can do is look for products with bad pictures and/or description on Ebay/Craigslist, buy them and sell them with better pictures and description.

For setting up the milestones on the road to your financial objective, it is best to start with a multiple of 10 because it makes the 10X method easier to conceptualise. Once you have reached your first milestone, you can just multiply it by ten to set your next goal.

So in a perfect world, the milestones would be USD 100, USD 1k, USD 10k, USD 100k, USD 1 million. Basically, you do a 10x after reaching each milestone. But you can also take other exponentially scaling milestones such as: USD 10k, USD 50k, USD 200k, USD 1 million, USD 10 million or similar. The latter roughly mirrors my own path to wealth. I had started out with online selling of trading cards and freelancing and later I have moved into tech, investing and real estate.

Supplementing Labor with Capital

It is not a coincidence that Warren Buffet states “The rich invest in time, the poor invest in money.” Labor, as a derivative of time, is scarce, and you should always optimise your return per hour. For example, I always drive with a taxi to be able to work while sitting in the car and I use a personal assistant or various apps to do grocery shopping, dry cleaning, laundry and even cooking for me to free up time. This helps me to increase my average productivity per hour.

More important than just freeing up time, you can increase your earnings per hour by supplementing labor with capital. It is the best way to increase your productivity, as both you and your capital are working for you. A good example for this is comparing an accountant making an hourly wage and a real estate developer working on his construction site (funded partially by his own capital). Another example would be hiring a Business Analyst who can help you to do more deals.

As your productivity and earnings increase, new opportunities will naturally emerge through refocus of accumulated capital and skilled labor towards higher value activities. This creates a spiral of exponential growth if you do it right. Taking a step back, having capital simply expands your opportunity universe, a concept we had touched upon earlier.

A larger opportunity universe offers you more and better opportunities to pick from. It is quite likely that there will be better opportunities in your opportunity universe given your new combination of capital and labor force/skills. This makes it important to sometimes pause and reevaluate. Many people don’t do this and keep following the same strategy for years or decades. Hence, their growth will stay on a linear trajectory and they miss out on bigger opportunities at their disposal. To keep growing exponentially, it is important to switch strategies after reaching each milestone. For example, I did a lot of freelance consulting before reaching a net worth of EUR 100k. If I had kept doing this, I would now have a couple 100k saved up. However, by moving into the game of investing, I now have much much more, staying on an exponential rather than linear curve.

The 10x Wealth Principle Blueprint

Here is a blueprint for any reader to start building personal wealth. This is not a to-do list, but is only one of many ways you can reach each new milestone on your path to becoming wealthy. Most importantly, this is not a ‘get rich quick scheme’ and you still need to work hard, do your research and ensure you do the due diligence at each stage as you will be risking your hard earned money to progress, and you want to ensure you minimise pitfalls on the way.

Blueprint

● Step 1: Cut costs with a ramen diet or take an additional part-time job, saving USD 1k

● Step 2: Buy items with poor pictures on Ebay/Craigslist, take better pictures, re-sell (Gary Vee Garage Sale), getting to USD 10k

● Step 3: Going from USD 10k to 100k is a bit less clear: It should be an entrepreneurial project that can be run on the side, low risk, cash-flow business (what Tim Ferriss describes as a Muse in the 4-Hour Work Week). Amazon, Shopify, running Social Media Agency are good opportunities in my opinion. If you have an in-demand skill, freelancing can also work. But it all requires hard work and research.

● Step 4: Going from 100k to 1 million through investments where you can unlock significant value through your work: Real estate with value-add / development potential or start-ups in your area of expertise (if you work in the industry). During step 4 you should build passive income and quit your job.

● Step 5: Going from 1 million to 10 million: Do larger deals, returns will likely be lower, but also effort will go down. Start hiring a team.

● Beyond 10 million: Create companies, private equity (direct or fund investments), private, off-market transactions.

A few words of caution: People often recommend creating wealth through public market investing. I don’t advise making this your core strategy, as most traders lose money and passive investing requires a very long time horizon. In my opinion, public markets are too efficient and it’s too hard to generate large alpha returns, which you would need to get wealthy fairly quickly.

Instead, I recommend focusing on more inefficient markets, with asymmetries you can explore, to generate large alpha returns by combining the synergies of your labor and capital. Chaos will be your ladder.

A final consideration is whether to invest your time and money into launching a start-up. The answer here is that it depends. As Warren Buffet says, there are only 10–20 opportunities you can realistically pursue in your lifetime. I would recommend against launching a start-up with the sole purpose to get rich. On a risk-adjusted basis, there are many better ways to achieve this as discussed above. I would recommend launching a start-up when you are truly passionate about the problem you are solving, or you have the strong desire to be an entrepreneur. After all, we should live life without regrets.

Conclusion

To conclude, wealth is created through a combination of labor and capital. It is important to have a clear goal with non-linear milestones, which greatly increases the likelihood to reach them. After reaching each milestone, your opportunity universe will likely have expanded and you will have new and better opportunities to reach your next milestone. Pursue them, to keep growing exponentially.

Following this milestone-based approach, only the sky’s the limit. But never forget to invest in your skills, keep working hard, and be careful when investing your capital.