Here comes the second edition

11. You don’t become wealthy by how much you make, you become rich by how much you keep, by how much you save and invest.
Wealth is not in the accumulation but in the management. Money like a spirit, must be tied to a tree called investment otherwise, it slips away like water poured in a basket. Do not eat with your fingers. If you do, you will beg in your old age.
12. Always bear in mind that when wealth increases, expenses always increase to match it.
I have examined the spending habit of several people who increase their expenses when their pay increases. A friend of mine started with $350 in one bank. He used to buy a suit of $50 and shit of $10. Having worked for a reason period, his salary was increased to $720 by reason of promotion. He then changes his wears to $80 suit and shirts of $15. At the end of the month he has got no reasonable savings and there is no investment at all. Anyone who equals earning to expenses will live in poverty. He who earns to spend will have poverty awaiting him.
13. Don’t give or invest based on where you are, give or invest based on where you are going.
Your giving should be based on where you are going that is your dream and vision. Most people don’t understand the type of investment they should go into when they want to invest towards a business. If your goal is a short term goal, use short term investment and if it is long term goal, use a long term investment.
14. Note that until you are financially free, you are not completely free.
There are three major words that could bring financial freedom. They are: financial planning, intelligence and discipline. You are no financially free when you have $6500 in your account. You are financially free when you have got a good business that other people can invest in, property that can
Refill your purse and a good investment.
15. God does not give you what you ask; he gives you what you can manage.
If God gives us what we ask, then we will compound problems and frustration ourselves which will only lead to the grave. Thank God because he knows us better than we do ourselves.
16. Money doses not answer prayers. It answers only to giving and wise investment.
Do not pray for money. Pray for ideas because God gives ideas, success is how you make use of those ideas. Through your giving and wise investment with the advice of an expert in the field, your money adds and multiplies for you.
17. He who goes borrowing, goes sorrowing, why? Because borrowing is self slavery and imprisonment
In as much as borrowing could be good if managed wisely, we must be careful so that it won’t endanger our financial life. I have often recommended synergy in form of contribution by like minded individuals who wish to achieve goals in life.
18. Do not invest in unfamiliar waters.
We started stock trading with little knowledge and had to pay dearly for the losses we made. If you are not sure of the investment you wish to purchase, seek advice. Do not start either investment or business that you don’t have knowledge of. As an investor, I have dabbled into several investments for which I never understood their maturity period and I suffered cash crunch several times.
19. Always have it in mind that the best things in life are free. They cannot be bought with money. Examples, health, long life, integrity, happiness and peace
You cannot buy life. So money does not make you wealth. M.K.O Abiola said ‘’I count my riches based on the number of people I put smiles in their faces.
20. Believe in the power of compound interest p(I +R/100)n.
Always keep on reinvesting. It has been discovered that compounding or multiplying your investment by reinvesting the returns and capital as the 8th wonders of the word. Do not be hasty to eat return on your investment. Reinvest to multiply your increase.


Watch out for third edition.
Mark ibekwe

The 30 principles of wealth creation

1. Identify a need of the people living around you and solve that need. Then you will smile your way to the bank.
The need could be in form of rendering services. I found a need in most people particularly, the undergraduates that most of them don’t save and are totally oblivious of the investment and wealth creation laws. So I decided to fill in the need. Most people are always afraid of challenges involved in solving a need. If you must be wealthy, you must be ready to pay the price.
2. Live below your means, irrespective of whatever you earn.
Everybody wants some respect and there is the tendency to show a level of worth among peers or colleagues. Don’t forget this, if you try to impress your colleagues or friends with your little earnings thereby borrowing, you will live to pay dearly with financial struggles tomorrow. If you earn the least amount say $70 live below it. This calls for solid financial plan
And discipline.
3. be slow to spend. If you have to, then spend less and save more.
When I visit most undergraduates, I usually ask the question, how many of you spend $35 in a week. In most cases, there is the chorus answer of more than that. Now, how many of you save $35 in a week. Again, the answer choruses ‘’that is the problem’’. You must evaluate options before you spend. Many people are quick to spend but slow to save.
4. be quick to save and invest; invest more wisely.
Wealth creators are more concerned about investment than what to eat. Investment is just a seed, if you plant it early, then you will enjoy. But if you plant it late then your children or family will enjoy if for you. Many people want to raise $6500 before they begin investment. It is important to note that investment is just a culture. You build it gradually until you get the peak. It is seen in the light of a drop of water makes a mighty ocean.
5. Diversification of investments is the best strategy for wealth creation. Don’t put all your eggs in basket.
If you are not well educated about investment, you will make expensive mistake, when you have too much money concentrated in a particular line of investment, then your risk is high. It is true! Don’t have your eggs in one basket.
6. Always bear in mind that wealth dose not begin with cash; it begins with vision and information. It begins with ideas.
Money tends to flow towards people ways to produce valuable goods and services and who can invest it to create employment and opportunities that can benefit others. At the same time money flows away from those who use it poorly who spend it in non productive ways. If you have got an idea, it will attract cash.
7. Money is the reward for solving problems.
It is the reward for services rendered. So keep on delivering services and you will be rewarded. If you could think of a problem around the people in your area, and solve it, then it will provide you with cash. It could come in from of innovation, which is modifying what is already in existence. I mean doing something different and more attractive.
8. If you have a vision, the vision will attract provision.
I vividly remember the day when I conceived the idea to put all my creativity and initiative is online after gathering them. There was no money to publish it. I decide to the take the information to individuals who then contributed the money for the publication. The vision actually attracted the provision. What people are looking for in a person who has got a vision is just integrity, honesty and determination to pay the price. The money will be made available.
9. Lack of idea is lack of cash. Think out an idea and boom, you are on your way to the bank.
A man stood at a corner, rand a bell and began singing. While he was singing and dancing, a comedian came around and after a little fun, they solicited for cash and on-lookers gave them money. I was delivering lectures at my school when the CD idea came to me. I need the support of the school of the government. I had to bend that is, come low by providing envelops for the students to support the idea. I realized $400 after two months.
10. Money is a means; vision is the end; so use the means to achieve the end.
A man with a vision will always win so long he is determined to. The means will be higher if the end is greater.

Watch out for second edition.
Mark ibekwe

Technology = Leverage

Startups offer anyone a way to be in a situation with measurement and leverage. They allow measurement because they're small, and they offer leverage because they make money by inventing new technology.

What is technology? It's technique. It's the way we all do things. And when you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied by all the people who use it. It is the proverbial fishing rod, rather than the fish. That's the difference between a startup and a restaurant or a barber shop. You fry eggs or cut hair one customer at a time. Whereas if you solve a technical problem that a lot of people care about, you help everyone who uses your solution. That's leverage.

If you look at history, it seems that most people who got rich by creating wealth did it by developing new technology. You just can't fry eggs or cut hair fast enough. What made the Florentines rich in 1200 was the discovery of new techniques for making the high-tech product of the time, fine woven cloth. What made the Dutch rich in 1600 was the discovery of shipbuilding and navigation techniques that enabled them to dominate the seas of the Far East.

Fortunately there is a natural fit between smallness and solving hard problems. The leading edge of technology moves fast. Technology that's valuable today could be worthless in a couple years. Small companies are more at home in this world, because they don't have layers of bureaucracy to slow them down. Also, technical advances tend to come from unorthodox approaches, and small companies are less constrained by convention.

Big companies can develop technology. They just can't do it quickly. Their size makes them slow and prevents them from rewarding employees for the extraordinary effort required. So in practice big companies only get to develop technology in fields where large capital requirements prevent startups from competing with them, like microprocessors, power plants, or passenger aircraft. And even in those fields they depend heavily on startups for components and ideas.

It's obvious that biotech or software startups exist to solve hard technical problems, but I think it will also be found to be true in businesses that don't seem to be about technology. McDonald's, for example, grew big by designing a system, the McDonald's franchise, that could then be reproduced at will all over the face of the earth. A McDonald's franchise is controlled by rules so precise that it is practically a piece of software. Write once, run everywhere. Ditto for Wal-Mart. Sam Walton got rich not by being a retailer, but by designing a new kind of store.

Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way. At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him.

What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we'd always take the harder one. Not just because it was more valuable, butbecause it was harder. We delighted in forcing bigger, slower competitors to follow us over difficult ground. Like guerillas, startups prefer the difficult terrain of the mountains, where the troops of the central government can't follow. I can remember times when we were just exhausted after wrestling all day with some horrible technical problem. And I'd be delighted, because something that was hard for us would be impossible for our competitors.

This is not just a good way to run a startup. It's what a startup is. Venture capitalists know about this and have a phrase for it:barriers to entry. If you go to a VC with a new idea and ask him to invest in it, one of the first things he'll ask is, how hard would this be for someone else to develop? That is, how much difficult ground have you put between yourself and potential pursuers? [7] And you had better have a convincing explanation of why your technology would be hard to duplicate. Otherwise as soon as some big company becomes aware of it, they'll make their own, and with their brand name, capital, and distribution clout, they'll take away your market overnight. You'd be like guerillas caught in the open field by regular army forces.

One way to put up barriers to entry is through patents. But patents may not provide much protection. Competitors commonly find ways to work around a patent. And if they can't, they may simply violate it and invite you to sue them. A big company is not afraid to be sued; it's an everyday thing for them. They'll make sure that suing them is expensive and takes a long time. Ever heard of Philo Farnsworth? He invented television. The reason you've never heard of him is that his company was not the one to make money from it.[8] The company that did was RCA, and Farnsworth's reward for his efforts was a decade of patent litigation.

Here, as so often, the best defense is a good offense. If you can develop technology that's simply too hard for competitors to duplicate, you don't need to rely on other defenses. Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice. [9]

What technology can do for you

Smallness = Measurement

If you can't measure the value of the work done by individual employees, you can get close. You can measure the value of the work done by small groups.

One level at which you can accurately measure the revenue generated by employees is at the level of the whole company. When the company is small, you are thereby fairly close to measuring the contributions of individual employees. A viable startup might only have ten employees, which puts you within a factor of ten of measuring individual effort.

Starting or joining a startup is thus as close as most people can get to saying to one's boss, I want to work ten times as hard, so please pay me ten times as much. There are two differences: you're not saying it to your boss, but directly to the customers (for whom your boss is only a proxy after all), and you're not doing it individually, but along with a small group of other ambitious people.

It will, ordinarily, be a group. Except in a few unusual kinds of work, like acting or writing books, you can't be a company of one person. And the people you work with had better be good, because it's their work that yours is going to be averaged with.

A big company is like a giant galley driven by a thousand rowers. Two things keep the speed of the galley down. One is that individual rowers don't see any result from working harder. The other is that, in a group of a thousand people, the average rower is likely to be pretty average.

If you took ten people at random out of the big galley and put them in a boat by themselves, they could probably go faster. They would have both carrot and stick to motivate them. An energetic rower would be encouraged by the thought that he could have a visible effect on the speed of the boat. And if someone was lazy, the others would be more likely to notice and complain.

But the real advantage of the ten-man boat shows when you take the ten best rowers out of the big galley and put them in a boat together. They will have all the extra motivation that comes from being in a small group. But more importantly, by selecting that small a group you can get the best rowers. Each one will be in the top 1%. It's a much better deal for them to average their work together with a small group of their peers than to average it with everyone.

That's the real point of startups. Ideally, you are getting together with a group of other people who also want to work a lot harder, and get paid a lot more, than they would in a big company. And because startups tend to get founded by self-selecting groups of ambitious people who already know one another (at least by reputation), the level of measurement is more precise than you get from smallness alone. A startup is not merely ten people, but ten people like you.

Steve Jobs once said that the success or failure of a startup depends on the first ten employees. I agree. If anything, it's more like the first five. Being small is not, in itself, what makes startups kick butt, but rather that small groups can be select. You don't want small in the sense of a village, but small in the sense of an all-star team.

The larger a group, the closer its average member will be to the average for the population as a whole. So all other things being equal, a very able person in a big company is probably getting a bad deal, because his performance is dragged down by the overall lower performance of the others. Of course, all other things often are not equal: the able person may not care about money, or may prefer the stability of a large company. But a very able person who does care about money will ordinarily do better to go off and work with a small group of peers.


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Working Harder

That averaging gets to be a problem. I think the single biggest problem afflicting large companies is the difficulty of assigning a value to each person's work. For the most part they punt. In a big company you get paid a fairly predictable salary for working fairly hard. You're expected not to be obviously incompetent or lazy, but you're not expected to devote your whole life to your work.

It turns out, though, that there are economies of scale in how much of your life you devote to your work. In the right kind of business, someone who really devoted himself to work could generate ten or even a hundred times as much wealth as an average employee. A programmer, for example, instead of chugging along maintaining and updating an existing piece of software, could write a whole new piece of software, and with it create a new source of revenue.

Companies are not set up to reward people who want to do this. You can't go to your boss and say, I'd like to start working ten times as hard, so will you please pay me ten times as much? For one thing, the official fiction is that you are already working as hard as you can. But a more serious problem is that the company has no way of measuring the value of your work.

Salesmen are an exception. It's easy to measure how much revenue they generate, and they're usually paid a percentage of it. If a salesman wants to work harder, he can just start doing it, and he will automatically get paid proportionally more.

There is one other job besides sales where big companies can hire first-rate people: in the top management jobs. And for the same reason: their performance can be measured. The top managers are held responsible for the performance of the entire company. Because an ordinary employee's performance can't usually be measured, he is not expected to do more than put in a solid effort. Whereas top management, like salespeople, have to actually come up with the numbers. The CEO of a company that tanks cannot plead that he put in a solid effort. If the company does badly, he's done badly.

A company that could pay all its employees so straightforwardly would be enormously successful. Many employees would work harder if they could get paid for it. More importantly, such a company would attract people who wanted to work especially hard. It would crush its competitors.

Unfortunately, companies can't pay everyone like salesmen. Salesmen work alone. Most employees' work is tangled together. Suppose a company makes some kind of consumer gadget. The engineers build a reliable gadget with all kinds of new features; the industrial designers design a beautiful case for it; and then the marketing people convince everyone that it's something they've got to have. How do you know how much of the gadget's sales are due to each group's efforts? Or, for that matter, how much is due to the creators of past gadgets that gave the company a reputation for quality? There's no way to untangle all their contributions. Even if you could read the minds of the consumers, you'd find these factors were all blurred together.

If you want to go faster, it's a problem to have your work tangled together with a large number of other people's. In a large group, your performance is not separately measurable-- and the rest of the group slows you down.

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Money Is Not Wealth

If you want to create wealth, it will help to understand what it is. Wealth is not the same thing as money. [3] Wealth is as old as human history. Far older, in fact; ants have wealth. Money is a comparatively recent invention.

Wealth is the fundamental thing. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn't need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn't matter how much money you had.

Wealth is what you want, not money. But if wealth is the important thing, why does everyone talk about making money? It is a kind of shorthand: money is a way of moving wealth, and in practice they are usually interchangeable. But they are not the same thing, and unless you plan to get rich by counterfeiting, talking about making money can make it harder to understand how to make money.

Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things you need, you can't make for yourself. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone else.

How do you get the person who grows the potatoes to give you some? By giving him something he wants in return. But you can't get very far by trading things directly with the people who need them. If you make violins, and none of the local farmers wants one, how will you eat?

The solution societies find, as they get more specialized, is to make the trade into a two-step process. Instead of trading violins directly for potatoes, you trade violins for, say, silver, which you can then trade again for anything else you need. The intermediate stuff-- the medium of exchange-- can be anything that's rare and portable. Historically metals have been the most common, but recently we've been using a medium of exchange, called the dollar, that doesn't physically exist. It works as a medium of exchange, however, because its rarity is guaranteed by the U.S. Government.

The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work. The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really means. People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage-- just a shorthand-- for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want. [4]


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How to make wealth.

If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup. That's been a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years. The word "startup" dates from the 1960s, but what happens in one is very similar to the venture-backed trading voyages of the Middle Ages.

Startups usually involve technology, so much so that the phrase "high-tech startup" is almost redundant. A startup is a small company that takes on a hard technical problem.

Lots of people get rich knowing nothing more than that. You don't have to know physics to be a good pitcher. But I think it could give you an edge to understand the underlying principles. Why do startups have to be small? Will a startup inevitably stop being a startup as it grows larger? And why do they so often work on developing new technology? Why are there so many startups selling new drugs or computer software, and none selling corn oil or laundry detergent?

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mark ibekwe