This article is going to explore what I believe to be two of the most fundamental principles of building long term abundant financial wealth:

• Becoming aware of your biggest asset
• Investing time and energy into growing your biggest asset

These principles might seem like common sense to most people, however after reading this article you might be surprised as to just how little of this common sense people actually follow in their daily lives.

(1) Becoming aware of your biggest asset

What is your biggest asset today? Do you know?
Is it your house? Your car? Your stock portfolio? Is it your computer? Is it your comic book collection?
Most people who have ever applied for a loan or credit card in their lives have answered this question by stating their biggest asset as the house they own, the mutual fund or stock portfolio they’ve been building, or perhaps the car they own. After all, when a banker asks you what your assets are - real estate, investments and cash is what you show them.
Let me explain why this “accountant” point of view on your life’s assets is hazardous to your long term financial wealth.
One of the most important wealth building lessons I learned a long time ago was that the biggest asset we have is not our house, our car, our mutual funds or stock portfolio. Our biggest asset is the person staring at us in the mirror every morning as we brush our teeth.
It doesn’t matter how much your house, car, or stock portfolio is worth, there is absolutely no asset in the world worth more to you than yourself.
Not convinced?
Let’s take a look at this from a couple different points of view:

• Would you be more upset if someone stole your car, or if they stole your eye-sight?
• Would you rather declare bankruptcy or become paralyzed?
• How much would you sell your sense of touch, smell, sight and hearing for?

Most people would rather give up any financial asset they own than lose even part of the infinite amounts of ability their body and mind have to offer them.
Here’s another way to look at it.
Let’s suppose that your average earnings per year over the span of your average working career are $40,000/year and you work for 45 years (age 20 – 65 for example). That means that the person you look at in the mirror each morning is a money producing machine that will generate on average $40,000/year x 45 years = $1,800,000 over the span of your working career.
That’s one point eight MILLION dollars. The person you look at in the mirror is a MILLION dollar producing machine. Not bad eh? YOU, quantified as an asset to yourself, are actually worth infinitely more then that, but these are just a few silly examples that hopefully illustrate to you that YOU are your biggest asset, not your house, car or comic book collection.
Why should this way of looking at your assets matter to you?
It should matter to you because the best and fastest way to build long term wealth is to focus on growing your assets, and it makes sense that you should not overlook your biggest asset when doing that.
Long term, it is much wiser to invest time and energy increasing the value of your biggest asset (yourself) than it is to invest that same time and energy increasing the value of your smaller, less significant assets. Your other assets are important as well and you need to grow them too, but if you don’t take care of your biggest asset first, the others simply won’t matter long term.
How does becoming aware of my biggest asset make a difference in my life?
Becoming aware of the fact that YOU are your biggest asset should flip a mental switch in your mind and lead to a small, but very profound change in your life philosophy. I believe this switch must be flipped if you desire to build long term wealth in your life.
Imagine this. Imagine you own a home that you have decided to put on the market for sale. You meet with a realtor and he informs you that if you cleaned up the mess in the back-yard, invested a few thousand dollars to get the fence fixed, and a few thousand more on a fresh coat of paint you would be able to raise the asking price of the house by $20-25,000.
Unless you were in a rush to sell the house for some reason, it would be a no-brainer for you to take the time and to put in the investment of some time and perhaps $3,000-$5,000 in order to raise the value of your real estate asset by lets say $25,000.
In this exact same way would invest time and energy into increasing the value of your real estate asset, you must start to invest time and energy into increasing the value of your biggest asset – YOU.

(2) Investing time and energy into growing your biggest asset

Today, there are countless opportunities available for you to grow and increase the value of your biggest asset (yourself). Opportunities such as self development books, audio programs, courses, mentoring programs, video’s, seminars and conferences, websites, Internet Blogs, just to name a few.
Because we are such complex beings with so many different areas to our lives, there are many different ways for us to grow our biggest asset. We can grow and improve Physically (eating healthy, exercising regularly, training our bodies in different skills etc.), Mentally ( reading books, taking courses, listening to audio programs, going to seminars, learning from others etc.), or even Spiritually (meditating, studying spiritual scriptures / religions / practices, connecting with nature, expressing love etc.).
Regardless which of these areas you choose to invest your time and energy into growing first, I would like to share with you two very important distinctions that helped me in my life:

• Patience. Give yourself a minimum of a 5 to 10 year time frame to significantly increase the value of your biggest asset. This will not happen overnight. You need to prepare to invest in yourself long term. Although you will begin to see the results of your commitment almost immediately, the biggest results will begin presenting themselves typically after 5 to 10 years. Once you start to see the rewards of your new philosophy you will never stop growing the value of your biggest asset. It will simply become a way of life.
• Use Self Development books as the starting point to growing your biggest asset. Other opportunities will present themselves as you begin to build momentum, but books are still one of the absolute best resources available to us in our journey to grow our biggest asset.

Here are a few reasons why I believe self-development books are the best starting point:

• Self development books provide great value and in almost all cases, you are getting the cream of the crop - the best of the best on the subject. Typical self-development authors spend hundreds or thousands of hours refining the techniques, strategies, opinions, systems and processes they are communicating and sharing with you in their books. For most of them, the books represent the answers and strategies they have spent a large portion of their lifetime searching for at a cost of thousands or possibly MILLIONS of dollars. In most cases, there is no need to re-invent the wheel. Learn about the wheel, what it does, how it works, and then learn how you can apply the wheel to make your life easier, but don’t re-invent the wheel if you don’t have to.
• Self development books are a low risk investment and carry a high reward to risk ratio. Before the invention of the printing press, books were not readily available to the mass public. Because of this, only royalty and the already wealthy had access to books and most people learned things only if they were taught first hand by a mentor, or if they figured things out for themselves the long way, via trial and error. Today, books are very readily available; however that is also why most people dismiss them so easily. Because books are so readily available at such a small investment price, people believe there can’t be too much value in them, otherwise why would they be so cheap? Nothing could be further from the truth.
• Contrary to what some people might think, successful and wealthy people do not hoard or keep the real secrets for themselves. In fact, quite the contrary is true. Wealthy people understand that the more they share with the world, the more wealth they build, so the most common problem you are going to actually encounter is not the fact that wealthy people are hiding something from you, the problem you are going to have to learn to overcome is them sharing TOO MUCH with you.
  There are a lot of things that wealthy people do in their lives which lead them to success. However, there is no real way for them to know exactly which of the things they did are specifically and exclusively responsible for making them successful and which things they did are specifically relevant to you, at this point in your life. That is not their job when writing self development books. Their job is to share with you their principles and philosophies related to the subject at hand and it is your job to properly understand, filter and apply the specific principles to your life (using a system for reading self development books such as the one I describe in my article “How to Read Self-Development Books”).
• There are very, very, very few self-development books that are so bad that they are not worth their purchase price. All self-development books are not created equal, some are much, much better then others and some authors will resonate with you much more then others, but in general from the hundreds of books that I’ve read, I don’t remember a single time when I felt that the book I purchased was not worth the price it sold for. In most cases even a “bad” book will have a few ‘gold nuggets’ in it worth at least a few hundred dollars in your life, and “good” books will be worth tens or hundreds of thousands to you, and “really good” books are priceless. Really good books can easily be worth millions of dollars to you throughout your life time.
• You can re-read books. You are never going to be ready for all the information in any given book/audio program/seminar all at once. Some parts of books will just not resonate with you yet, while other parts may totally make sense. Books allow you to re-read them in parts or in their entirety in a convenient format that’s always available to you as you progress in life.
• Books are one of the most inexpensive mediums. A typical book might only cost you $24.99, but a seminar which contains similar information might cost $2,499.99. Although there are advantages to seeing certain seminars live, I typically won’t go to see someone until I have read at least a few of their books to see if they are someone I would be wiling to invest in seeing live in person.
• Books can be personalized. You can highlight certain sentences, concepts, or ideas. You can write little notes in the margins. You can make the book yours. Nobody said you have to keep the book clean. High school is over. You OWN this book, so get the most out of it. Don’t be afraid to mark it up.
• Books are convenient to read. Live performances happen on the presenters schedule, not yours. However you can quite easily take a book everywhere with you. They don’t even need batteries or a plug in.
• Books are read in your own voice inside your head. You will find that your ego will be much more accepting to the information you are reading, hearing it natively in your own voice inside your head (while you read), as opposed to listening to an audio CD, or live, where your ego might be biased against the author’s tone of voice, accent, pitch, style or gender. Your ego is trained to be a lot more accepting of anything it hears in your voice, and a lot more skeptical of anything it hears in someone else’s voice. Take advantage of this to get your ego out of the way a bit more.
• If you don’t agree with a concept written in a book, that’s perfectly fine, but if you’re listening to an audio recording of an author who’s teaching concepts that make sense to you but their voice irritates you, then you might miss some great wisdom just because the person’s voice reminds you of someone you didn’t like back in elementary school. Most people like the sound of their own voice in their head. It’s what’s already there talking all the time anyways.

“If self-development books are so great, how come so few people read them?”
Statistically speaking, 95% of the population of North America will retire at or below the poverty line at age 65. This is after they’ve spent 45 years generating that $1.8 Million Dollars in their life I wrote about and have very little to show for it. If you expect to build wealth in your life, you will have to accept the fact that you MUST begin to do the things that 95% of the population is not willing and too lazy to do, such as reading books.
Unless your friends have already built long term wealth in their life, they are probably part of that 95%. If 95% of your friends don’t read books, this shouldn’t surprise you.
Secondly, most people believe that their problems in life are so unique and different that nobody else on earth has had them before so there is no way some author in some book somewhere could help them. This is probably one of the biggest hurdles for people who don’t read self-help books to overcome. Yes, you are a unique individual. Yes, your problems are personal. However, I can almost guarantee you that whatever problems you have in your life, someone else out there has already had them before and most probably overcame them and then wrote a book about it.
If you break your arm while riding a red bicycle down the stairs on a Thursday morning in the rain, you would still go to the hospital to get a cast put on by a doctor. It wouldn’t matter that the doctor has never treated a broken arm by someone who rode a bike down the stairs on a Thursday morning in the rain, would it? The circumstances around your life’s problems are probably very unique and you will have to personalize the solutions to yourself, but most of the problems that you will encounter in life have been experienced and overcame by others. Don’t let your ego’s need to feel unique and special stop you from finding a solution to your problems, and from helping you grow your biggest asset.
“I know someone (possibly yourself) who’s read a self development book, and it hasn’t made that much of a difference in their life.”
Reading one self development book doesn’t guarantee success, just like cleaning the dog poop out of your back-yard or painting the bathroom doesn’t guarantee you will sell your house for $25,000 more, but imagine what would happen to your real estate value if you spent 4-6 hours every week for 5 years improving it? Painting the rooms, adding a Jacuzzi tub, cleaning the back yard, starting a garden, adding a patio deck, etc.
It’s the same thing with reading self development books. It’s hard to see the value you get out of one book, but it’s easy to see the value you get out of reading a book every month or every week for a year or two or ten. I promise you will see a difference.
“I have tried to read self development books in the past, but I just can’t read them. I’m not the reading type, I never was. I don’t like books. I prefer to DO things or watch a movie on the subject. Isn’t there an easier way?”
I was never really the reading type myself either. I dreaded English class assignments to read books or write book reports. I would do anything to get out of having to read books in school. So why do I feel so strongly about books now?
I believe the reason most people find books difficult to read is simply because they fail to utilize a proper strategy for reading self-development books. Reading self development books is not the same as reading novels, or magazines. You wouldn’t pickup a dictionary and read it the same way you read a novel, would you? There is a strategy for using a dictionary properly and I believe there is a strategy for reading self development books. Check out my article on “How to Read Self-Development Books” for more info.
In summary, I believe that in order to build long term wealth you are going to need to invest time and money growing your biggest asset, which is yourself. I have found that one of the best ways to do this is to take advantage of and leverage the great amount of self-development books available in the marketplace to help you with this. Reading books will lead to many other ideas and ways you can improve yourself, but they are one of the best starting points for anyone who’s decided to grow their biggest asset.

Here’s some ideas to help you get started:

• To start, commit even as little as 1-2% of your monthly income towards a “self-development” budget which you can spend on purchasing some self-development books to help you to grow your biggest asset. Even if you don’t read them right away, making the purchase is the first step. You are MUCH more likely to read a book, if you own it. Most self-development material is timeless and won’t become obsolete for years, decades or even centuries, so it’s better to buy a book and have it sit on your shelf than not to buy it just because you don’t think you have time to read it right now. I would recommend eventually allocating 5-10% of your income towards developing yourself, but 1-2% is a good start.
• Stop thinking self-development is for geeks or mentally unstable and desperate people. Think of it as “I’m growing the value of my biggest asset.”
• Walk into a book store, get familiar with the self-development section for a few minutes and then pick out a few books that have titles that sound good to you, or have a cover that grabs your attention or something that just sounds like something you might consider reading one day. Allow your intuition to guide you to something. Then, from these, pick out the one or two books that you’ll want to purchase that day, or buy all of them if your budget permits.
  Remember, this is not going to be the last book you ever buy, so it’s ok if the choice you make is not the absolute best book ever written. If your intuition caused the book to grab your attention, there is probably some kind of gold nugget in there waiting for you to be discovered. Don’t be afraid to commit to a book. You can own more than one! Worse case scenario, if the book really doesn’t resonate with you, you can sell it, give it away, keep it on your shelf so you look smart with all the books you own, or use it to prop up your broken furniture. Chances are, however, that the book will be good.
• Make yourself aware of different book titles people are talking about. Make a list of books you’d like to eventually read if you see a book you like, or hear about a good book from a friend, TV program, radio show etc.
• Ask your friends if they’ve read any good self-development books lately. If all they read is novels, ask a different friend. You’d be surprised how many people read self-development books. They might not publicly announce it but if you ask them, they’ll usually tell you what they’ve read. People like to share.
• Make a commitment to get at least 1 or 2 books on self-development subjects of your choice and begin reading within the next 7 days. If you can’t afford to buy them, borrow them from a friend or visit your local library. Libraries are free. You pay for them with your taxes. Use them.
• Read my article on “How to Read Self-Development Books”. I’ve read hundreds of books and my system might work for you as well.
• Congratulate yourself if you’ve read this article all the way through. Even if you do nothing with this information today, your awareness has been changed. You will see an asset in the mirror tomorrow morning. Choose to grow it, and you will experience wealth in all areas of your life. It won’t happen overnight, but nothing worthwhile ever does.

Finally, if you found this article to be of value to you I would encourage you send me some feedback.�
-Paul

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