Getting Rich (10) What you should do most is to improve your ability to make money off the field

Author: Xiaolai Li, Serial editor: Mr. Y

Introduction

After reading most of the articles in the "Getting Rich" series, I believe our audience have a clearer understanding of "what investment is".

In particular, a core concept should now have carved a new groove in the brains of many readers: in the world of investment, once you have established a regular investing strategy and selected a high-quality asset, there is really only one thing left to do, to continuously buy.

In the previous article about mentality building during the investment process, “actively ‘inaction’ - the strongest mentality construction in the investment process”, we repeatedly emphasized: simplicity is the most important principle. Not only should we keep things simple on both cognitive and operational level, but also, we should hold a firm belief in that "simplicity."

However, the human brain does not easily accept "inaction". Over millions of years of evolution, we have developed an instinctive tendency to do something. Although this tendency helped our ancestors adapt to complex and changing natural environments, it will lead people astray in the investment market.

Mr. Xiaolai Li clearly demonstrated with many data and facts that this impulse, that can't help but want to do something, almost always backfired in the market, turning something right into something wrong, and turning a good thing into a bad thing.

Many famous people in history were not immune when facing the market - even Isaac Newton, Winston Churchill, and a group of Nobel laureates stumbled badly in their investment, ending with huge losses.

The reality is this: for educated modern people, it is often more difficult to make the brain "think nothing" than to "think".

So, can we guide and utilize this mental inertia instead of suppressing it?

In this article, Xiaolai Li proposed a very effective approach:

Pull your attention away from the news of ups and downs in the market, and instead, focus it on the world "outside of investing", especially on improving your ability to make money off the field.

This approach has two major benefits: on one hand, it effectively prevents you from wasting precious time and energy on market volatility and informational noise.

On the other hand, the income earned by improving your earning ability can, in turn, feed back into your investments, allowing you to continuously buy more of the high-quality assets which are worth holding for the long term.

This article is an important supplement to the main line of "Getting Rich" series—besides “regular investing”, there is another path worth exploring: becoming an excellent salesperson.

Why Sales?

Because in almost any company, individuals in the sales department consistently have relatively higher incomes.

The reason behind this is: like investing, sales is, in essence, "time-multiplying" ways of making money. Investing is about making your money work for you 24/7 to continuously generate returns, while sales is about packaging and selling the time of others multiple times, thereby amplifying the value of time.

The common core of both is to maximize the time of making money, thereby achieving higher personal income.

As early as 2016, Xiaolai Li proposed his understanding of the essence of financial freedom in The Path to Financial Freedom (China’s bestselling financial book).

In 2024, he published The Truth About Wealth in China; he had further refined and systematically explained his unique perspective on the essence of wealth:

Based on his long-term practical experience and success in both investing and business, Xiaolai Li put forward a profound viewpoint:

• Time is the only ultimate means of production for humanity.

All wealth creation depends on the input of human time, and the business is, in essence, exchanges of human time. An employment relationship is the act of using money to buy someone else's time. And the so-called "financial freedom" means no longer selling your time only once to meet the necessities of life.

From this "time perspective," we can understand many wealth-related phenomena and mechanisms more thoroughly. As the primary means for an individual to obtain wealth, "earning money" can also be divided into three levels based on time-utilization efficiency.

• Level One: Selling your own time just once.

This is the most basic and slowest way to make money. Most employees fall into this category. Although the labor prices vary greatly between different jobs, the essence is still "trading time once for money".

• Level Two: Selling the same time of yourself many times.

This means selling the same portion of your time to multiple objects, selling it many times, and the amount of money earned in this way is often much more than the first level.

People at this level include internet influencers, authors, content creators, and IP holders, who achieve multiplied returns by leveraging copyrights, influence, or proprietary resources.

• Level Three: Packaging and selling the time of a group of people.

This is the highest level of making money. The most typical model is starting a business; this level also includes investment and sales. For example, investors share in the overall growth returns of a company or a business by holding its shares. Meanwhile, salespeople leverage a company's resources to sell products or services to a broader market, thereby obtaining multiplied returns.

In The Path to Financial Freedom, Xiaolai Li encouraged everyone to become a "shrewd trader of time". By continuously upgrading your personal business model and improving your time utilization, you can earn more money, earn it faster, and achieve true personal growth and financial freedom.

However, repeatedly selling the same portion of one's time is not an easy thing to do. Ultimately, only a minority of people can achieve this.

For most ordinary people, the main paths to achieving this kind of "time multiplication" are concentrated in two areas: running your own social media or publishing books. And successful entrepreneurs are as rare as a phoenix feather, because that requires a higher level of integration and synergy of many different abilities.

However, there are two activities that deserve special attention: sales and investing.

These two things also belong to the highest level of personal business models, but for the average person, the barrier to entry is much lower, and relatively easier to get started.

According to Xiaolai Li: "Sales is helping other people sell their time repeatedly many times".

Sales not only allows you to earn more money, but it also has huge "compound benefit" for your personal growth.

First and foremost, sales directly train a person's communication and expression skills. Xiaolai Li once said: " 'Speaking well' is the most useful skill in this era." In an era of explosive development of artificial intelligence, the ability for humans to communicate with each other has not become obsolete; on the contrary, it has become even more important. Many scientists and futurists predicted that the jobs least likely to be replaced by AI in the future would include those that require deep interaction with people.

Second, a sales career has another unique advantage: it is the profession where skills are most easily manifested and measured. Sales has clear performance indicators and goals. Such a feedback mechanism can drive you to continue to practice deliberately and iteratively, thereby greatly enhancing your personal abilities.

In fact, life is full of sales: finding a business partner is sales; finding an investor is sales; even finding a life partner is, in the end, a form of sales. No matter the scenario, whenever it involves "interacting with people," you are essentially selling yourself and building trust.

The article we are sharing comes from an in-depth explanation from Xiaolai Li, an experienced salesman and good salesman.

Even if you do not plan to work in sales-related jobs in the future, this article is still worth reading carefully, word for word.

Because the ability to sell is practically a "universal skill."

It's a "cheat code" for your life, an amplifier for all your other skills and talents.

Once you master the art of sales, you will achieve phenomenal growth in no matter your career, wealth, relationships, or in other areas of life.

Main texts

The Ability to Continuously Earn Money Outside of the Market

Author: Xiaolai Li, rewritten in English by John Gordon & Xiaolai Li

The core of regular investing is the ability of practitioners to make money outside of the market. Regular investors must be able to continuously invest over the long term, which means they need to have the ability to consistently earn money outside of the market over the long term. The money that they earn outside of the market must be able to cover all of their daily expenses and also expenses from any unexpected events. Above and beyond this, the more they can consistently earn over the long term the better. This is the part that is truly difficult. Regular investing itself is so easy that it can be summarized in just one word: buy.

Selling the same bit of time repeatedly is the most important upgrade of a person's personal business model, because it's the most basic way to effectively make money while you sleep. In an average lifespan of 78 years, a person only has 10.5 years of work time that they can sell. But if they can make money while they sleep (28.3 years), make use of their nine years of free time, and also use their time in such a way that they are selling it repeatedly, then they actually have income every second of every day. No matter whether they are riding in a car, getting dressed, or spending time with their children, they are always making money. Not only are they making money with at least three times the amount of time as a normal person, they are selling their time repeatedly, so the difference can be huge!

However, most people aren't able to complete this kind of upgrade, and it's true that there aren't many ways to achieve it. Aside from publishing books and teaching online, I haven't been able to find any other feasible methods for myself. Of course, in this Information Age, writing a popular software program is probably an even better way. All of these effective methods are extremely competitive, but that is to be expected given the potential payoff.

Actually, if you can't be the best, it's fine to try to come in second. So, is there an easier way?

The answer is: sales. Because, at its core...

Sales is buying other people's time and then selling it repeatedly.

This is the ultimate reason why people who work in sales often seem to have a higher income than those who work in other sectors. They aren't able to use their time to create a popular product, so they can't sell their time more than once, but they are able to repeatedly sell products created by others, and with the help of Internet tools they are able to ensure that the sales process continues even while they sleep.

As long as you observe carefully, you will come to the same conclusion:

No matter the company, salaries in the sales department are always high.

In addition to sales being important, there is another hidden reason for this: sales is the easiest work to quantify, so salespeople are the most likely to be paid based on performance.

A key similarity between sales and regular investing is that the choices of what to sell and what to invest in are both very important. What is the best thing to sell? It must be something that people need, and something that requires continuous communication to complete the sale. We can observe that the highest paid salespeople often sell things like real estate, cars, courses, or insurance. Why is this? First of all, it's because these are all things that people need. But even more importantly, these items require repeated communication in order to complete the sale.

In fact, everyone should focus on their ability to sell, because at the core of successful selling is one of life's most important skills: effective communication. Isn't every successful sale an example of effective communication? For a child, convincing their classmate to keep a secret from the teacher is a successful sale. For an adult, convincing someone to fall in love with them is a successful sale, and so is securing a promotion or a raise. The ability to sell is the ultimate skill.

After I graduated from university, my first job was in sales. Actually, even though I've had many different jobs since then, in my view they all had sales at their core. For instance, being a teacher was a sales job, because if the students didn't like me, no matter how correct everything I told them was they still wouldn't pay attention. Writing and publishing books is a sales job, because if my titles don't attract readers they won't even give me a second look. As an angel investor, what is the difference between my money and the money of others? There is none, so why should an entrepreneur take my money and not somebody else's? Because I am better at sales.

What is the core of selling? Trust.

Please never think that sales is based on tricking people. People who think like this lack the ability to think long term. Short-term trust can perhaps be gained through trickery, but long-term trust must be built up slowly over time. Trust is valuable because it is so fragile. Just a little bit of carelessness can destroy it. Warren Buffett understands it this way:

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.

If a client is willing to buy a house, a car, a course, or insurance from you, in addition to the product being truly worth buying, it also depends on their trust in you. At its core, trust is much more important than the product being sold. Without trust, no sales will take place. But trust is so important that excellent salespeople will not be willing to sell bad products. They often ask themselves; would I buy this? Would I sell it to a member of my family? Would I sell it to an old friend? People who lack a long-term perspective find this hard to believe, and they may even think that this attitude is fake, but actually salespeople who have excellent performance over the long term take these questions very seriously, and they benefit enormously from this type of thinking.

Train your ability to sell. It's so important and can be extremely useful in every aspect of your life. Furthermore, everyone has the chance to train themself to be a good salesperson. The most important thing is that it's an upgrade of your personal business model.

Unfortunately, sales still isn't something that everyone is able to do well. So, taking another step back, is there anything else to do? Of course there is. You can improve your ability to cooperate. Since people rarely take this concept seriously, let's make up a new word to describe it: cooperability. Being good at cooperating with others is actually also a small upgrade to your personal business model. It's not an easy thing to do, because increasing your "cooperability" also requires strong communication skills, trust, and being really good at something.

Lots of people are very bad at cooperating. They get quite frustrated, but they always blame their lack of cooperability on the wrong thing: a strong personality, or a bad temper. That's all a mirage, because there is only one reason for poor cooperability: they are not able to do their part well enough. A strong personality or a bad temper is not the reason they can't cooperate well with others. If they were able to do their part well, then others would be willing to cooperate with them even if they had a bad temper. The other party would focus on doing their part in the cooperation well.

You must have a special skill that makes others want to cooperate with you. If you try to cooperate with someone but they are unwilling, the most probable reason isn't that they don't understand your value, it's that you don't have enough special skills to make them want to cooperate with you. It's sad that so many people don't discover that they have no skills until they're over thirty.

What's most important at this stage? The correct answer seems too obvious: honesty. People with no skills are all dishonest in many ways. They are dishonest to other people and only get by through various guises. They are dishonest with themselves, and their guises sometimes trick themselves. They treat the learning of knowledge in a dishonest way, and never fully believe in the utility of knowledge, so in their studies they always miss a lot of details and end up knowing nothing. All of this leads to the most serious defect, which is that, because they can't help but put all of their attention on the gains and losses and opportunities of the moment, it's impossible for them to have the ability to make macro-observations from a long-term perspective.

Another way to improve cooperability is by not complaining. The best people to cooperate with are those who never complain. The reason is simple: complaining is useless. People with poor cooperability complain about everything. They complain about the broader environment, they complain about the quality of their partners, they complain about luck, they complain that others aren't being fair, they complain that their family doesn't give enough support... Consciously or not, they are in the habit of using these complaints to cover up an obvious fact: they didn't do their part well enough. If someone is able to truly reject all complaining, then it will cause them to put all of their energy into doing their part, which naturally improves their cooperability.

Life is at its core a trading market. Every principle that works in trading markets also works on the stage of life.

When I look back on my choices from many years ago, the strategies I used to make my major choices were identical to the strategies for choosing investments that I have outlined in Parts One and Two of this book. First, I wanted to go to a place that was developing more rapidly, so I moved from a small border town to Beijing. Which sector was developing the fastest? To be frank, I didn't see clearly enough, because I chose education instead of tech. I had one choice left, and I chose New Oriental, at the time the fastest growing company in the education sector. Afterwards, I followed the steps in this chapter. I worked there for seven years, honestly doing my part and cooperating with others as best I could. I had a strong personality and a bad temper, but I improved my ability to sell, my ability to lecture, and my ability to write. By the time I left, I had upgraded my personal business model, and I was getting better and better at selling my time repeatedly. Once I'd grown my egg white to a large enough size, I started investing. I become a regular investor, and all of my success in the market has been due to one secret: I've been constantly working hard and honestly to make money outside of the market.

Note:

* The market here obviously refers to the investment market, not the market where various goods and services are traded as economists often say.

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