You Don’t Make Money, You Take Money: A New View on Business
I always try to learn new things from everyone. This includes Andrew Tate, an internet infamous & highly controversial multimillionaire kickboxer, entrepreneur and influencer. And to be clear, I don’t agree with many of the bombastic things he says (I especially hate his admiration of Putin & Steven Segal: people who are pure awful & evil + he has some weird views on women). However, you can learn something from everyone and anyone even if you disagree with them. A broken clock is right twice in the day.
However, I do like his message about discipline, enjoying the grind & hard work, focusing on financial freedom and maybe the most important thing: focus on bettering yourself. Messages that young men these days really need.
He goes to say:
“You cannot make money, you can only take money from other people. You can only convince other people to give you money. The only way you can make money is if you are the Federal Reserve and you are not the Federal Reserve. Business is simple, it’s just other people’s money.
That’s all a business is, it’s getting other people to send you their money.”
There is so much nuance to this but it makes sense. And to be very clear, you aren’t stealing or robbing or taking the money at gunpoint or cheating them. You are “taking” the money because you offer better service or better product and are a better marketer than other people. And it is also a good way to think about money as a concept too.
Make no mistake, you will have competitors for this money. You have to out-perform and out-compete to get this money. But this is not a zero sum thing. There is just so much money to go around. And it’s abundant. You can have many winners.
In this view, money is a dynamic thing that flows. It’s your job to get in front of it. It’s your job to create, produce or add value to be in front of that flow of money. If you do that, you get to keep a small percentage of it. Do that on a large amount of money flow, do it consistently or do that for a long time and you are going to be massively rich.
This is what Investing is. Whether in startups, stocks or commodities, you are putting money into something ahead of the massive long term trend. This could be a big consumer trend, a big geopolitical change, anything that turns up the demand on the supply that you now control or have a stake in. In my working life example, it’s investing in a pre-seed stage tech startup that will grow to become a massive $100M usd a year revenue-making machine worth billions of dollars. Or its investing in Bitcoin at a dollar a bitcoin, which at this time in 2023 is worth $26,000 usd per Bitcoin. Still a pretty damn good return despite being off its high point.
That is why it’s important that you adjust your language and your thinking. Money is a live thing. You don’t make money, you take money. There are so many opportunities and so much money out there for grabs. It’s up to you to take action, add massive value and go get some!