2017 was a great year for making money. A strong economy, the crypto boom, and a few other factors made it incredibly lucrative.

Of course, as the old saying goes, “it’s not what you earn. It’s what you keep.”

I kept it all.

In this article, I’ll explain how.

1. Figure Out What You Actually Want

Materialism is fueled by self-hatred.

People feel insecure, so they buy a new car or a nice watch. Their inadequacies manifest themselves by showing off that they’ve “made it” through the purchase of consumer goods.

This isn’t a new phenomenon either. Almost one hundred years ago, Will Rogers observed:

Too many people spend money they earned… to buy things they don’t want… to impress people that they don’t like.

Don’t fall into this trap.

The next time you want to make an expensive purchase, ask yourself why you’re really buying it. Is it because you really want it, or are you just trying to show off?

When you answer honestly, it’s usually the latter.

I know people making $14 an hour with Louis Vuitton purses or entry-level Rolexes. They only person they’ve fooled is themselves.

Doing what you want is usually less expensive than having to play catch up

2. Create A New Passive Income Opportunity Every Day

Last spring I read a terrific article from the Wall Street Playboys (link here). In it, they explained how increasing your recurring passive income by just $1 per day results in an extra $133,225 for life.

I really liked this idea, and decided to do something similar.

For 2017, I made a goal to create an extra $0.50 in recurring passive income each day.

This is a very small goal, and easily doable.

$0.50 per day is:

• Selling one $12 product through Amazon Affiliates every afternoon (4% commission).
• Writing a $2.99 Kindle eBook which sells one copy every four days.
• Generating six $30 sales commissions per year.
• Putting sidebar ads on a semi-popular blog.
• And so on (you get the idea)…

At first this wasn’t much.

But then things snowballed.

By the end of the year, all those little activities added to $100+ a day. About the same as having a million-dollar index fund.

You don’t always need a big idea to make money. Sometimes something as simple as writing a sales letter a day, publishing an SEO friendly product review, or having your own merchandise is all you need.

This is a very short article. It was written on a scrap of paper, 38,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean.

However, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn something.

As someone who’s flies tens of thousands of miles each year, I thought it’d be fun to share three of my favorite travel tips.

These are all simple little things, but they improve your flight experience greatly.

Also, the third tip on this list has netted me thousands of dollars in free stuff.

Anyway, enjoy and I hope you learn something useful!

1. Workout Before Your Flight

Go to the gym and lift heavy weights the day before your trip.

Why?

Because international flights make great “rest days.”

Since you’re sitting on a plane for several hours, your body has plenty of time to recuperate.

Additionally, this is a great natural sleep aid. When you’re tired enough, you’ll always doze off on a flight. After doing 20-rep squats (that’s my favorite pre-travel workout), I always pass out within 10 minutes of takeoff.

2. Invest In A Pair Of Quality Earbuds

Airports, especially ones in Asia, are noisy as the dickens. I’m always amazed at the number of travelers shouting into their phones, playing games with the volume at full-blast, or listening to music through their iPad’s speakers.

It gets annoyingly loud.

To combat this, I recommend buying a pair of noise canceling headphones.

I use a pair of Symphonized NRG earbuds, and they’re amazing. Put them in, throw on a track of nothing but ambient sounds (I like this rainforest one), and relax in peace.

3. Read The In-Flight Magazine

I’ve never met anyone (besides my parents) who actually reads those in-flight magazines they have on every plane.

And that’s a shame.

Why?

Because most airlines run contests and giveaways in their magazines. If you take a picture or write a short essay, you can win free vacations to all sorts of cool places.

A few months back, I entered one of these contests (you had to write 25 words on why you liked the airline) and won an all-inclusive trip for two. That’s several thousand bucks worth of free stuff (airfare, hotels, etc), all from reading the in-flight magazine and doing a 5 minute writing assignment.

These contests are super simple and most people never enter. As a result, they’re easy to win.

Always check the in-flight magazine for giveaways. It’s a great way to score free vacations and other travel goodies.

In 2015, I got in an accident and sliced up my foot. The wound got infected, and I sent almost an entire month laying in bed, doing nothing. Since I could barely walk, exercise was completely out of the question. And with 60 days, I’d lost all my muscle mass.

Even when I’d recovered enough to walk around, I was in no condition to lift weights.

So, during this time I decided to start doing body-weight exercises. I read an article saying that you could develop a good physique off of dips, push-ups, pull-ups and leg raises. So, I dusted off my old Power Tower started doing that routine every day.

At first I’d only manage to do one or two pull-ups, but eventually I began building up my stamina and doing longer workouts.

And within three months, I completely changed the way I looked.

(December 2015 To March 2016)

My point is that you can always follow a proven path to success. With 99% of activities, someone else has already blazed the trail. And all you need to do is retrace their steps.

Whether it’s fitness, business, or some other venture, there is an existing success blueprint for you use.

And these plans are cheap.

A $20 book gives you all the tools you need to achieve your goals.

Case in point, last year my mom decided to write a couple of articles and see if she could get them published in various magazines. She bought a copy of How to Write and Sell Simple Information for Fun and Profit, followed the book’s advice, and ended up selling an article to Reader’s Digest.

Personally, I’ve done well off publishing eBooks and sales letters. Both of which I learned about from books (The Millionaire Fastlane and Web Copy That Sells, respectively).

Virtually every skill (from accounting to zoology) has books and articles written about. And, there are tons of free resources online. Between the library, YouTube, and high-quality forums, there’s no excuse for not knowing something.

I live in Asia and have even met people who learned English by watching YouTube, just so they had better job opportunities.

If somebody who grew up under the shadow of war and squalor could master a foreign language on their own, there’s no reason you can’t learn a simple skill like business or sales.

Inaction: The Reason Most People Fail

Can you really make money selling houses? Or shorting stocks? Or betting on football games?

Yeah. Tens of thousands of people have been successful at all these.

Same goes for following those “cheesy” personal finance books.

I grew up in Iowa, and there are plenty of old farmers who retired as millionaires because they consistently put $10 or $20 a day into mutual funds or other long-term investments. And over 40 or 50 years, that money gradually added up into one huge sum.

So, if there are so many proven paths to wealth, why do most people never even follow one?

Simple, it has to do with action.

Learning is always easier than doing. You can sit online and discover 500 different ways to make money, all in a single afternoon. But actually trying one and following through with it takes effort. As a result, most people quit as soon as it’s time to actually do the work.

Realistic Time Costs For A Project

(Morning To-Do List)

Since we’ve covered what not to do, let’s look at how easy business actually is. Assuming that you’ll consistently do the work, and innovate, we’ll examine what happens if you start a side business and work at it for one hour every day.

How much impact could that one hour have on your life?

Let’s take a look, using a very basic situation and some simple math:

It takes 45 – 60 minutes for you to pen a blog post or sales letter. Write one a day and you’ll end up with a pretty good stream of passive income.

At one hour a day, even a complete rookie working in a done-to-death field (like bodybuilding or dating advice), would end up with 365 different articles. That’s more than enough to build up some decent site traffic.

Throw in a few affiliate links per post (Amazon, Click Bank, etc…), and you’re easily making an extra thousand bucks a month. $12,000 a year doesn’t sound like much, but it’s the same as earning 6% interest off a $200,000 mutual fund. Plus, you’re getting paid off an hour-a-day hobby.

Doing the work and putting in a consistent effort isn’t even that difficult. It doesn’t take herculean effort to come up with one article per day, or to write between 500 and 1,000 words each morning.

Stick with it for a full year, and watch as your daily effort builds up into a sizable stream of extra revenue.

It seems like every Internet guru has their own mastermind group. These are “communities of like-minded individuals” that you can pay money to join.

These groups promise a ton of benefits; like 1-on-1 coaching, putting you in touch with “industry power-players,” and giving you access to exclusive guest speaker events (with big-name stars like Micheal Jordan or Bill Clinton).

Sounds good, right?

Well, maybe. I wouldn’t call mastermind groups scams (though some certainly are), but I wouldn’t rush out and join one either.

Below are three reasons to avoid mastermind groups, as well as three cheaper (and more effective) alternatives to joining one of these organizations.

Three Reasons I Would NOT Join A Mastermind Group:

Before we get any further, I want to make one thing clear. The mastermind groups we’ll be discussing in this article are all ones you must pay to join.

If you and your friends want to start your own mastermind group and share ideas with one another, great. There’s no downside to doing so.

However, if you’re looking to pay membership dues to join a similar program, consider the following.

1. Ineffective Leadership

(Would You Take This “Expert’s” Advice?)

Most general success advice is common sense. “Give 110%,” “believe in yourself,” and so on.

As such, virtually anyone can become a motivational guru, life coach, or professional motivator. Come up with a few catchy platitudes your audience agrees with, buy ad space, create a nice video sales letter, and you’re off to the races.

Unfortunately, having a product doesn’t automatically mean you’ll make money.

Because of this, you see lots of grown men living in AirBnB rentals, and buried in credit card debt, pitching their “success secrets” to you.

These guys generally sell expensive mastermind groups with a $10,000 to $30,000 membership fee. All while marketing the program as an amazing and exclusive opportunity.

In reality, the only people you’ll be networking with are other schlumps dumb enough to buy into the program.

2. “A Community Of Like-Minded Individuals”

If everyone in your group is exactly like you, you won’t learn anything new.

Case in point, the majority of Internet Marketing forums and groups all rehash the exact same advice: Start a business teaching other people how to start a business.

This results in all the members trying to do the exact same thing, without ever even considering any alternative ideas.

It’s stupid.

Exposing yourself to diverse viewpoints is the only way you’ll ever generate new ideas.

We’ll talk about this more in a moment. But for now, just understand that doing the same things as everyone else creates a lot of needless competition. And it blinds you from spotting better options.

3. Over-Priced Guest Speakers

(Motivational Speaker Ticket Price)

Big-name gurus (like Tony Robbins) often offer an impressive guest-speaker line-up if you join their “inner-circle” mastermind groups or “summit seminars.”

You can get exclusive pep-talks from all sorts of A-list celebrities like Hugh Jackman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mark Cuban, etc…

It’s a cool concept, and sounds like a terrific bargain. For $700 you can see five or six well-know stars in person, and hear all their secrets to success.

Where could you get a better value?

Two places. The bookstore and YouTube.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Six Rules of Success” is the same whether you listen to it for free online, or pay a thousand bucks to hear it in person.

Likewise, most celebrities and successful people have written books.

A twelve dollar paperback will give you the exact same insights as a $500 seminar, while saving you quite a bit of money.

Three Alternative To Joining A Mastermind Group:

As you probably noticed, my three major grievances with the whole “mastermind group / success network” scene boiled down to two things: price and audience.

You’re paying huge sums to surround yourself with dorks, while listening to simple information and common sense advice.

Instead of wasting your money, consider investing in the following alternatives.

1. Take A College Class

Most community colleges offer continuing education classes. For a couple hundred bucks, you can take accredited courses on almost any subject.

You can enroll in classes on public speaking, web design, sales, SEO, art history, film editing, learning a new language, and so on. Plus, a lot of small-business owners take these courses. Making it easy to network with them.

2. Move To A Better Neighborhood

(A Trip To Your Corner Rolls-Royce Dealership Teaches You More About Sales Than Any Mastermind Summit)

The easiest way to “think like a millionaire” is to pack up and move to a neighborhood where everyone is rich.

When all your neighbors own a Lamborghini or Rolls-Royce, you quickly figure out which businesses actually make money.

Being around land developers, casino owners, and other successful people broadens your views on which ventures are profitable. It also teaches you a lot about selling high-ticket, expensive products.

Knowing how to market a $37,000 watch or $500 a night hotel suite puts you leagues ahead of any mastermind group that’s busy arguing over self-publishing $9 eBooks or $27 ClickBank courses.

3. Buy Your Way Into Success

Instead of paying to sit around pontificating with other “go-getters,” put your money towards something useful.

Rather than spending $1,200 to join a passive income forum, you can put that money into a mutual or index fund. Don’t spend $10,000 on “self-publishing university,” hire a ghost writer.

For the price of most high-ticket motivational and how-to products, you’re better off paying a professional to do your projects for you. This way you at least have something to show for all the money you spent.