The 7 secret keys to wealth - Key #6: Specialization.

Summary: This article is one out of seven that I wrote about wealth. The whole series contain a lot of free valuable information about key factors that can help you become wealthy. The rich do things in a different way. That difference is the one I want to explain here. Let’s scrutinize together these strategies that can make you more money and help you boost your income.

This article is one out of seven that I wrote about wealth. The whole series contain a lot of free valuable information about key factors that can help you become wealthy. The rich do things in a different way. That difference is the one I want to explain here. Let’s scrutinize together these strategies that can make you more money and help you boost your income. The whole series contain the following articles . . . 1. Add Value. 2. The Multiple Streams of Income. 3. Passive Income. 4. Residual Profits. 5. Leverage. 6. Specialization. 7. Compound Interest. We live in a highly specialized society. The idea behind this concept is that everyone do something specific and get very skilled at it. Most jobs require the ability to perform multitask work, but the job in general focus on a specific field. That’s one of the main ideas of capitalism. The industrial revolution further increased the need for specialization. In the past you could be a farmer, fisher, carpenter and many things at the same time. With the industrial revolution came a new era. Now you could be all those things for fun in your spare time but when it came to making money, specialized workers where highly valued. The point of specialization is that we can’t be experts on everything. As society grows it becomes more complex. Everyday new fields emerge. We can’t know it all and be good at everything. Furthermore, everyone is born with certain talents and skills that they can develop and put to service for others. Everyone feels more comfortable performing the tasks they like the most and are more knowledgeable about. Specialization is good for society and it increases the rate of production. The time spent learning is often unproductive, but once the skill have being learned, the worker can perform it really quickly. Imagine having to hunt or grow the food that you are going to eat, make your own cloth, make your own car, build your own house with your hands, cave a well yourself, bring the water to take a bath and drink every day into your house, make your own candles or light bulbs, etc, etc. Your life would be very complex and uncomfortable. You can not imagine how many troubles ancient people had to go through just to survive. Also it seems that the less advanced a civilization is, the more boring it is to live in it, what makes me think that the old world was very boring. Nowadays we complain about having to pay bills and do specialized work, but that’s the price we pay for the benefits of today’s society. Then, how all of this applies to you and your business? How can you make money with this knowledge? Ok, simple. If you get specialized knowledge, your chances of getting a high paying job increases. That’s something that I think everybody knows, but anyway . . . You do this by going to college and getting an education on a field that you like. Also, after years of experience on a particular job you get skilled at it. Now, what about your business. I mention in my other articles on this series that it is important and desirable to have multiple streams of passive income. Our nature seeks to have more and more of everything. If I can get not one but five, ten, fifteen streams of income it would be better right? More is better right? Not necessarily! It is important to have multiple streams of income so that if one or two fail for any reason you still have the others to back up unexpected money problems. Now, I have seen countless times how people jump from one opportunity to another and never settle down on anything. They start to do something and they see no results. They think it is too hard so they change. They start something else and it doesn’t work either so they change. They may have a whole bunch of ideas of what can be done, so they can’t stay quiet doing something specific. They are like jumping rabbits that move from one backyard to the next. They see the greener grass on the neighbor’s backyard, but once they arrive there they realize that it was another mirage on their sight. It is only when you realize that everything takes effort and that efforts are priceless that you start to make progress. To have multiple streams of income is the ultimate goal, but to do everything at the same time may not be the best way to achieve that goal. If you have too many irons on fire at once, you may not finish your undertakings. All the time spent on pursuing a goal is wasted if you don’t eventually achieve that goal. The idea is to have multiple streams of income but to set up one stream at a time. You may have a few or many businesses and receive multiple streams of passive income from those businesses. But some people do as the example bellow and they go nowhere. Instead of focusing on one business or field first and then expand their horizons, they want to try it all at once. They want to open several businesses or do several things. Nothing seems to work for them. They don’t notice that maybe the only reason nothing they try works is because they don’t put the required effort on anything particularly. They don’t have the patience required to wait until their efforts start producing results. An example of this could be a person that wants to be an Internet marketer. He just wants to make money on the Internet. So, he starts his business selling e-books. He builds his website within a couple of weeks and in three weeks he already have a pretty nice sales letter with the e-book and everything. Great! He worked hard during those weeks. Now he expects to receive the profits so he can retire or quit his job, but nothing happens and he gets frustrated. He starts to think about doing something else. This person joins an affiliate company and becomes an affiliate. While he is doing that and changing the content of his website, he realizes that something is wrong. Maybe he just ignored something about Internet marketing. He suddenly finds out that some effort should be made to advertise the products. He finds out when he notices that he don’t make any sales from affiliate marketing either. Then he thinks that selling e-books could still be more profitable than affiliate marketing. So, he changes the content of the website again and start marketing his product. After six weeks of starting the business, he is definitely frustrated. He expected by that time to be rich already. He notices that some people have visited his website and he has made a few sales and money but not enough. So, he thinks that this marketing thing doesn’t work. He turns to trading. He opens a trading account and start trading online. He keeps the marketing thing in sight, but now his time and attention is divided into two different ventures. He can’t make money trading. So, he changes again. He goes offline. He tries to make money by starting a very small retail store. Then he changes again after a few weeks. He realizes that he can make more money from online auctions than with the small retail store. He tries to sell on e-Bay and other online auctions. He keeps this pattern for three months. After three months he arrives to the conclusion that nothing works, everything is a big fraud and people are a whole bunch of liars. This is not the idea of setting up multiple streams of income. The idea is to start a business and find a way to make money from that business. Once it is generating profits, then diversify within a few areas of that same business. Once that is producing profits, then find a new business or field and keep going. Some people do the opposite of what I explain above. They spend two years, working, studying, investing, exerting efforts on a particular business or enterprise that is noticeably producing no results at all. They know that it doesn’t work but they are obstinate. They persevere on the method instead of the goal. They have being doing it for several months or years and it doesn’t make them any money at all, in fact it is a waste. It doesn’t matter for them. That’s what they like and they don’t change it. That’s the way they expect to make the money, exactly like that. They won’t even try anything that could be similar. It has to be like that, so they keep trying. Both thought processes described above tend to render ineffective results. The key is to keep it balanced. I use to give more attention to that which is already generating profits. This is the way I approach it. If I start on a field without much knowledge about it, I tend to try several things first to see which one generates some money and which one doesn’t. When I see that something is giving me positive results, I focus on developing that one specifically and keep the others away for a while. Let me explain. Let’s take the example of Internet marketing. When I started my online business I wanted to have as many streams of passive income as possible. I read a lot about it and I came up with a pretty nice list. I could sell e-books and software, be an affiliate, trade the financial markets, sell advertising space, make money from online auctions, sell digital art through my websites, sell web hosting and memberships, among others. I didn’t know where to start or what would be more profitable, so I tried as many of those fields above as possible without putting too much effort on anything, just to convince myself what worked better for me and what gave me the best results. At the beginning nothing seemed to work. So, I had to put some more effort on everything. It took me just a couple of weeks to know what was easier for me and what seemed to work better. Once I started to get small profits from a couple of the fields above I kept the others away for a while and focused on increasing those small profits. I didn’t completely forgot about the others, but I focused on those which where already being profitable for me. This saved me a ton of time and effort. So, the key is to diversify but to do it moderately. This is what specialization is about. Most highly specialized jobs still require that you perform multitask work but it also requires that you concentrate on a field. The way I see you can expand to other businesses and fields is by getting passive income. This way you won’t have to actively perform several different tasks at the same time. I don’t know if you understand what I mean here. If you want to be a carpenter and a mechanic and a chemical engineer and a fisher at the same time, it will be very hard for you to not become crazy that way. It is almost impossible to be very effective if you have to be a full time carpenter today and a full time chemical engineer tomorrow, etc. On the other hand you can write a few e-books and receive income from those e-books for several years. You can make a couple of affiliate marketing websites and diversify your online business that way. You can use part of the profits from your websites to trade online. Then you are still making money on the Internet. Now, you can also take some of the profits you make online and invest in rental properties. This is another field as you can see, but if most of your streams of income are passive, once you learn everything necessary to set up the businesses, they will produce profits almost entirely by themselves. This is the secret. This is what makes it possible. The way to do it is one step at a time. To focus and concentrate on making something profitable. Then expand to other areas similar to that same business or field. You create different streams of income from that same business. Then you move into other areas and businesses. You expand your horizons by creating more and more streams of income, but always one step at a time. Remember the three P’s (PPP) = Patience, Persistence and Perseverance, but at the same time persevere on the goal not on the method. Change the method if you need to, but as long as you find something profitable, focus on increasing those profits. The time you spend on ineffective ventures could be used to boost your income from profitable ones. The key is to keep it balanced. To find the balance between setting up ever increasing multiple streams of passive income and specializing on your field. This balance have made the difference several times for many people around the world. It can make the difference in your business life too.