I let my personal trainer, Jeff, borrow a copy of “Rich Dad Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki. A few weeks later during our workout session he blurts out, “You know what — I’m carrying buckets!”

“Huh?” I replied.

Jeff reminded me in the “Rich Dad” book Kiyosaki gives the example of someone carrying buckets to supply a town with a water and another person building a water pipe line to carry the water. It took longer for the pipeline to be built but once it was done – the money would continue to come in with or without him.

What are you doing?

Sadly most people are carrying buckets. They are getting paid based on the hours they work. Everybody has been taught to think the harder you work the more money you make.

Guess what? “Working harder” is totally and entirely subjective. What constitutes working hard to one person might be lounging on your butt to another.

So what if that’s completely wrong? What if it’s really the smarter the work, the more money you make? You’ve heard that expression before – but stick with me and I’ll explain what I think it really means…

As I was sitting here writing out this – we had a chimney repairman and a landscaper come out to the house. Out of my window I could see both of them doing their jobs. Let me tell you these guys work DAMN hard.  

Both of them get up very early in the morning and put in a full day’s work. The chimney repairman is dangerously perched at least 50 feet above the ground for most of the day. And our neighborhood landscaper is breaking his back carrying heavy bags of mulch all day in the blazing sun.

The point is these guys put in an honest day’s labor for honest day’s wage every day. They aren’t sleeping on the job or goofing off. They’re working their butts off – but that’s not enough!

Do you know the big secret neither one of these fellows (or most other people) ever figure out?

It’s so simple once you understand and it can have a profound effect on your wealth. Here it is…

Your income cannot be limited by the amount of hours you can put in. That’s it.

Each one of us are given 24 hours and it doesn’t matter if you are a chimney repairman, landscaper, CEO, homeless bum, or Internet mogul. We all have the same 24 hours to work with. Most people simply work -get paid, work – get paid, work – get paid. You put in 8 hours on the job – you get paid for 8 hours. You put in 40 hours a week – you get 40 hours in salary. That’s the way we’ve been taught to do it – and the sad truth is you’ll never get ahead doing what everyone else does. (Re-read that because that’s really a lesson in itself).

Personally – I believe in using leverage…

I prefer to work once and get paid over and over and over again. And there are lots of ways you can create recurring revenue for yourself. It could be via royalties from an invention, a song, or a book. It could be from network marketing. It could be from real estate. It could be dividends from investments. Or it could be from a multitude of other ways aside from the typical 9-to-5 grind.

The majority of my income day-in and day-out is a direct result of work I did 1, 2, 3…even 7+ years ago or more. I like that!

For instance, if you create an information product to sell (like a report, ebook, software, video, etc) you only have to do the work once of creating it and once to write the sales letter.

Then if you set up some automatic promotion avenues like an affiliate program or autoresponder messages – you can continue to get paid for that product indefinitely. One of biggest income streams is a product I created 7 years ago and still makes me a nice six-figure income each year.

Frankly, I couldn’t turn off my recurring revenue streams right now if I tried. That’s because much of what I’ve created has fed on itself. One product refers people to another. Our affiliate network (over 45,000) refer people to our sites. Some of our sites cross-promote our other sites, etc. etc.

When you keep working on activities that have recurring value you’ll create a momentum that’s tough to stop. But the truth is — it IS hard work in the beginning. Or at least what most people perceive as ‘hard work’. But it’s like a rocket taking off in which it burns most of its fuel on lift off.

You need to put in the hours and effort upfront and then you can ease off the throttle. But if you don’t put in the extra effort upfront you’ll never achieve lift off and get that momentum you need.

The more you think about doing the work once and being paid multiple times the more creative your mind will become. Ask yourself the right questions and you’ll get the right answers.

My thinking is squarely on how can I get the most leverage nd ongoing income from any activity? For instance, if I do a teleconference series (like web copy secrets) then I will sell the LIVE calls for “x” amount and then have the calls recorded to turn it into a product I can keep selling for “y” amount. Then going even further, I could take
excerpts from that product and use them as articles or free ebooks to be passed along to get additional business. Do you see how it works? Try to get paid over and over again for activities done once. Make that your mantra.

In fact, even this post, if I’m lucky, will become a recurring income producing activity. I wrote this material once and the publicity from it will hopefully get a few more people to my websites and into my marketing funnel.

Now of course, I’m not saying that every activity I do each day is highly leveraged because I still do some “dumb stuff” but I’m working on outsourcing as much as I can and focusing just on income producing activities (just like you should).

Before tackling a project or putting in your hours – ask yourself how you can create a recurring revenue stream for yourself with this activity.