Episode #55 – When To Focus And How To Avoid Multiple Streams Of Distraction On Your Wealth Building Journey

 

Diversify, they said…  But what if you are just the beginning of your wealth-building journey?  Tune in for practical advice that meets your specific financial situation, wherever you are.

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When To Focus And How To Avoid Multiple Streams Of Distraction On Your Wealth Building Journey

I’m going to ask you guys a question. How many streams of income do you think the average millionaire has? Say it out loud to yourself. I’m curious as to what you guys think. Did you say seven? If you did, you were right. The average millionaire has seven streams of income. I have 16 and soon to be 17 as soon as my Bitcoin mining machines are up and running. I don’t think that’s necessarily anything you need or want to strive for.

That’s honestly too many to live a healthy and balanced life. Seven is absolutely plenty. Multiple streams of income are great, but you don’t want MSDs, which are Multiple Streams of Distraction. You want to avoid MSDs just like you would in college, avoid STDs. This show is all about when to stay focused and when to diversify. If you aren’t already wealthy, you probably should not diversify, especially with your active income. You may say to yourself, “This goes against a lot of the things that you talk about on your platform because you’re all about multiple streams of income.” Like everything in finance and investing, the answer always depends.

It depends on your unique situation. What I want to take you back to is when I first got started. As we dive into this episode, you are going to understand where I’m heading with this. When I say active income stream, it’s essentially what you are putting your time and effort into your focus. Where are you putting lots of hours into growing and developing? Diversification will not make you rich. Diversification helps protect the wealth you’ve already accumulated, but most of the time, it’s going to limit your return on investment.

Why is that? If you diversify from the beginning, you’re going to lengthen your timeline to reach financial independence because you’re going to be distracted from your core area of expertise and earning power. If you were to start off in a new business, which anything under five years is a new business, and grow that business, all of a sudden, you get this opportunity to do another business. You start something else at the same time.

Don’t Get Distracted

We all know that you could make money in that second business, but in all likelihood over the course of time, you’re actually going to make less money overall because the first primary business that you are growing and starting to get momentum in, you have less energy, focus, and attention. That one’s going to suffer. Even making money in the second business isn’t likely going to make up for the loss of money from the first. It’s far better to be laser-focused early on within the areas that give you the highest return on investment. For most entrepreneurs who usually look like this, 1) Invest in your own personal development, invest back into yourself, and increase your skills, knowledge, and overall earning power.

2) Invest back into your own cash flow-producing business. 3) Invest in income-producing assets with an asterisk. What’s the asterisk? The asterisk is always, “See footnote below.” Invest in income-producing assets that don’t distract you from growing your business. This is why I love syndication deals. I can get into big, safe, great deals with high returns on investment that don’t distract me at all. These deals are far less distracting than even stocks and crypto, which are very passive investments because I tend to look at those more than I really should. I hate to admit it. I tell you, guys. Don’t look at them. I can’t help myself. Sometimes, I get bored and just want to check and see what’s going on. It’s dumb.

I’m not going to sell them. I don’t even really care that much whether they go up or down in the short run. It’s not going to change my life at all. With syndication, the great thing is I can’t check the value. I don’t have any idea where they are in the whole process. I just put the funds in, sit back, and wait with confidence, knowing that I invested with the right team.

Here’s another way to say and explain it as far as diversification goes. When starting your wealth-building journey, don’t go wide. Go deep. This isn’t a that’s-what-she-said moment. Don’t go there. It’s not what I was doing. It was not intentional. I’m being serious. Stay focused. Wide means diversifying into many different things and essentially spreading yourself too thin. You’re going to have that multiple streams of distraction and vastly diminished returns.

When starting your wealth-building journey, don't go wide. Go deep. Click To Tweet

Going deep means you hyper-focus on one thing. Your wealth-building strategy should look like a funnel more upside down. The shaft is sticking up, and the funnel part of it is facing the ground. That’s that narrow-focused that you’re going to hyper-focus at the beginning. As you go and develop that first stream of primary income, you’re going to start to diversify that as you grow. I don’t think that you want more than one, maybe two, active income streams.

Important Resources

Only two if the one is a job that you have a set schedule with or the business you’re in is established, and it’s got some leadership and a team in place that can run things if you check out. It’s a bit more seasoned. If you’re an employee, it’s critical to get a side hustle business, especially if your goal is to retire young and free. If you have a business working with two active businesses at the same time, it’s very difficult. What does it look like to hyper-focus? Your three resources are laser-focused.

What are those three resources? Time, energy, and money. The order in which I listed them is the order in which they’re valuable. Time is the most important resource to me because it’s the only one that can’t be replenished. I can never get more time. Once it’s spent, it is gone, never to return. Energy can be replenished, and not that easy to replenish sometimes. If you work yourself so hard that you’re just taxing out your body and your adrenals, your body crashes. This has happened to me several times over the last decades of business and work. It can take quite a bit of time to replenish that energy.

Energy isn’t as we often think we’re superheroes, we can work long hours, and we’ll just drink some extra caffeine to make up for it. That can only go for so long. Energy is replenishable, but sometimes it’s not that easy. The third resource is money. Money, to me, is the least valuable of these three resources because it’s so replenishable and infinite in nature, money being an idea, a level of resourcefulness inside of you. Money is the easiest of these three to come by. Some of you are thinking, “I don’t see that.” As you develop in your entrepreneurial and investing journey, you’re going to see how this plays out for you. Once you’ve built excess cashflow in your one main area of expertise, then we want to look at diversifying.

Stay Focused On Your Primary Business

Trust me. Diversification is great for protecting and growing assets, but it’s super tough to get much of those assets if you’re the jack of all trades and master of none. I had a texting conversation with Mark, a long-time associate and friend of mine. He’s very successful in business. He’s a leader. I respect his thoughts. I feel like he’s a thought leader. We got onto this subject of diversification because it came up on a leadership call that there were some people were building businesses in multiple areas. There were seasoned leaders that disagreed with that type of activity.

Diversification is great for protecting and growing assets, but it's hard to get much from those assets if you're the Jack of all trades and master of none. Click To Tweet

I reached out and said, “What do you think on this whole subject?” He said, “There are a couple of thoughts I have. Number one, the people most influenced by the business leaders are the very people who should not be doing multiple businesses if they want to grow their business. If they see their heroes publicly talking about their wonderful ways to make money outside of their own business, it can create doubt that real money can be made in their own business.” I’m reading what he said, and you may or may not agree with this, “Number two, I believe the young leaders nowadays are massively distracted with other ways to make money when their businesses aren’t stable. The very thing needed to make it stable is their leadership and focus, not by investing all their quick earned cash flow outside of it.”

He closes with this. “I’m so thankful my mentor didn’t distract me with all the ways he made money when I started. I believed all his money was made in his private business, so I focused exclusively on building my own private business. The reality is he never would’ve had access to real estate, stocks, or crypto, if not for the growth of his own business.” I agree with this 100%. I talk about this extensively on my platform and in my first several episodes, where I lay off the strategy that will help you build wealth. I talk about it in my seven-step video series, which you can opt-in for free on my website at MyIndestructibleWealth.com.

The challenge for me is I do a lot of episodes, and I want to put out a lot of incredible content for you guys. I put out a lot of different ideas on how to grow wealth. I know that whenever I’m putting out a show on a specific subject, it’s never going to probably appeal to everybody at all stages of where they’re at. For example, I put out a show about Bitcoin mining stocks, and I am sure about that one. However, I don’t think many of you jumped on that investment. For whatever reason, a lot of the Millennials are a lot more into crypto and don’t like the idea of stocks.

When To Diversify

Maybe they saw their parents lose a lot of money in 2008 and still have a bad taste in their mouths. Maybe your investments are already in, and your free cash was already in what you think is best, and going into certain stocks wasn’t the best idea for you. I don’t know. You could maybe not even have the money to do it. There could be so many different ways that not that many people jumped on that idea. Those top picks since I set this episode are up a lot. All six of them are up. The minimum is up 8%. The highest one is up 162%. Someone reading these ideas may get distracted from their primary private business and think doing multiple different things is the way to go.

That particular idea, however, is passive in nature. What I’m trying to put out mostly are ideas that you guys can do that are passive terms. They’ll take money, but they won’t take much time, energy, attention, and focus away from the primary way you’re growing your business and wealth. I want this episode to get you guys clear on this concept. When you start to diversify your investments, you need to consider and ask yourself a couple of questions. How much money do you want to make? That correlates to how much risk you are willing to take. It all comes down to this. Your investment buckets determine your returns. What do I mean by that? Here are some examples. If you want pure safety and reliability, you can put your money in the bank and get 0.01% interest.

With the amount of money I have in the bank, it’s crazy for my checking accounts for all my various businesses. If you add it all up, it’s quite a substantial amount. I get a few cents. It’s crazy. I’m not advocating for this. Money will crush cash and bank accounts. If you want boring, predictable 3% to 5% returns, you want to buy bonds or, my preferences, high cash value, whole life insurance. If you want 6% to 8% boring, methodical returns, you buy the total stock market, which is index funds. If you want 10%, maybe buy cashflow-producing real estate. If you want to go for a 10% to 20% return and sometimes greater than that, buy well-researched individual stocks and future trend-setting sectors. There’s more risk to doing that strategy. No doubt.

If you want 20% to 30%, buy self-storage syndication. The downside to that is you need to be an accredited investor to get in on that. If you want to take a stab at some real outsize gains where 100% returns are better, you buy crypto. You just got to be prepared for a lot of volatility and a roller coaster ride of a lifetime. When you buy crypto, you’re taking on quite a bit more risk. This is why I always say be cautious with the percentage of how much you’re investing into asset classes like this that are super volatile and risky but can give you big outsized gains. In my personal portfolio, I have all of these. Make sure that when you buy these types of things, you’re prepared to stay in the game for a minimum of five years. My typical hold time is a decade.

When you buy crypto, be prepared for a lot of volatility. Click To Tweet

Resolve to hold your ground even when your emotions tell you to sell. Here’s the thing, most people are wrong about diversification. Most people are financial advisors who are, and I know that they’re well-meaning, Wall Street pundits that are pitching what they make money off of. Diversifying between different stocks is not diversifying. It’s one asset class. I follow a guy named Jeremy on Instagram. He has a huge following. It was 320,000 followers the last time I checked. He puts out some great content and stays super hyper-focused on one message, which is index funds. He routinely posts about his $3 million account that he has an index fund. One would be led to believe that he made his money by investing in index funds over the last few years when this is not the case.

His money was made in his own private tech business, which he sold for a few million, then took those funds and invested it all into index funds. He uses that large index fund account balance as a sales tool to sell index fund course. I bought the course because I wanted to learn more about index funds. Not because I’m personally that interested in doing that strategy, but I want to expand my knowledge base, have a full understanding, and know what is great to recommend to my audience, which index fund is not at all, how we build as wealth.

I agree that it’s a simple, straightforward strategy and a great way to invest passively without taking much, if any, time, energy, or distraction. It’s not the way the wealth was grown. It would take about 40 years with that approach to build an account that size unless you have a super high-paying job where you’re making over $500,000 per year, maybe upwards of that multiple six figures. Even then, you have to live a very tight lifestyle and catch those stocks in a real multi-year bull market, which has been the case. I don’t think that that’s going to last, as history has shown time and time again. Here’s what real diversification is, investment into several asset classes.

Think about the ones I just talked about, real estate, crypto, private equity, stocks, and commodities, for example. Typically, asset classes do not move up and down at the same time. When the stock market crashes, other assets like gold go up. Now, there’s a huge bull market on Wall Street. Things are looking bright except for bull markets, which we’re in, that simply cannot last forever. When the stock market drops, and it’s going to drop at some point when this money madness is over, while your stocks are struggling, your tenants still need a place to live.

 

Your rent checks keep chugging along, or your tenants aren’t paying because of something like COVID, but your crypto just exploded. These are all things that happened to me. Am I glad I was diversified? Yes. It protected the wealth I had built and the income I had built from all my private businesses. It helped grow my wealth by large amounts, but it wasn’t something I did right away when starting out. To bring it all together, to recap, I want you guys to hyper-focus your thoughts, energy, and money on building your own private business. If you’re an employee, get better and more efficient at your job. Increase your earning power in your job. Start a side hustle if you’re motivated, and it makes sense for you to do it if you find something that you’re excited about and passionate about.

Find things you can invest into your excess money that are going to create multiple additional streams of income but without distraction. If you have questions on this, follow me on Instagram. Reach out. You can always ask me questions. I don’t think there’s been a question yet that I haven’t answered. Direct message me. You can email me at [email protected] with any questions that you have. I’ll use those questions probably to create additional content and episodes. I welcome any and all questions. Any of your thoughts, I’d love for you to share. Here we go.

 

 

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