If I can summarize what I have learned from the previous years, it is the power to be able to generate income from multiple streams. This has helped me to break free from the governmental prison which they call these days a job. I had a job. A well-being job. But I did not feel happy. It was easy, comfortable, respectable but still, I felt that I lost myself there. Also, it was taking much of my time and I felt that I only live, I only feel alive during the weekend. That is crazy. It is like only living 2 days out of 7 each week. That is saying you are living only 29% of your life. That had me thinking. What am I doing? I was missing a lot. I love reading but was barely finishing a book in a month or two. That is where I decided to shift my mindset and focus on what I can control. That is when I decided to learn more about generating side income. High income beside my job. That is when I set my journey to learn high-income skills. And of course, I learned about them from the best-selling books that I love reading.
Most of my high-income skills I learned about from 5 of the best-selling books of all time. There are of course more books but these 5 I consider are the building blocks for your freedom journey. Your journey to success. Your end of time of the governmental prison. These 5 books alone, sold over 119 million copies in total over the years. They are fundamental and timeless. But before we discover these books, let us first define what do we mean by high-income skills.
What are High-Income Skills?
Well, we can say that high-income skills are basically skills that will allow you to generate high income but that is vague and a bit cliché. So I came up with my own definition. I define high-income skills as skills that will allow you to generate income both passive and active without needing to have a 9-5 job and the income should match your 9-5 previous job or more. So primarily there are two characteristics for these skills:
- Generate any type of income (both passive and active)
- Do not require fixed working hours
- Should match or exceed the income from a traditional 9-5 job
In case you didn’t have a job before, the income you generate should at least help you to live by on it in the beginning to pay rent and bills but if you master these skills you will really have no issue to scale. These skills will provide you with the building block to master any other skill or to pull any project. So let’s find these skills and what books can help you to achieve them.
Communication Skills
If I were to suggest one skill to master for generating high income, I would suggest communication. Communication is the Lion of the Skills Jungle. It is so important that it can alone lift you from your current situation to the next one. That is why when the great entrepreneur Grant Cardone was asked what he would do if he were to land in a new city with only 100 bucks in his pocket, he said he would go to the Gym. Yes, the Gym. I was shocked too, but his response was that he would go there to network and build his connections by communicating with the people there. Excellent Communication Skills will not only serve you in your entrepreneurial life but also in your personal life.
“Effective teamwork begins and ends with communication.“
Mike Krzyzewski
To master communication and to build the required skills, you need to know how to win friends and influence people and there is no better book to teach you that than “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. It is a timeless classic influential book full of wisdom. They teach you skills that are really needed to deal with others. For example, one of the important points the book makes is that criticism will do no good. It teaches us how to think in the reference frame of others. This is the book you need to master communication skills.
I would also add that “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey is a good book to add to the communication references. This book will also help us in the time management skill in the next section but is particularly important in the communication area as well, especially habits 4, 5, and 6. These habits teach us how to be interdependent. How to work and excel within groups. Habit 4 (Think Win-Win) is all about adopting a win-win mindset. Habit 5 (Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood) is about understanding others before trying to impose our understanding on them. Habit 6 is Synergy which is about understanding that the whole is more valuable than the parts alone put together. It says when we work together we far produce more than the sum of the work each one in the group can produce alone. It is an eye-opening concept but an important one to be able to thrive working with other people which you will definitely need when you start seeking high-income resources.
Here at Book Butter Club, we strive to provide practical steps from the best-selling books that you can use for free to put the knowledge into action. You can access these action steps for the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” from here.
Time Management
While many books out there talk about how to be more productive with all these techniques, I found this classic book written around a century ago is all you need to understand time management. This book is again “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey, especially Habit 2: Put First Things First. This habit alone can change your mind about how you really set your goal and if you are truly productive or not. It is so fundamental and that section alone can help you elevate your whole time management techniques. However, I do advise reading the whole book as these habits, as the author put it, work in harmony and they do fit in the engine of productivity.
What Habit 2 teaches us is that we need to be more aware of how we define our tasks. Any tasks that we do on a daily basis can be categorized into one of four Quadrants. These Quadrants are:
- Important and Urgent – Quadrant I
- Important and not urgent – Quadrant II
- Not important and urgent – Quadrant III
- Not important and not urgent – Quadrant IV
It is obvious that to be more effective, more productive, we need to avoid Quadrants III and IV. But what really opened my eyes is that I thought I was being productive while I was working on important and urgent tasks. They are important and also urgent which made me think I am more productive handling them than handling important tasks but not urgent. However, if you think about it, I was really reactive. Trying to catch up. I was driven by my schedule, not the other way around. In order to be more proactive, which is Habit 1 in the book, we need to plan correctly and so to reduce the urgent and important tasks as much as possible. We need to tackle them before they become urgent. We need to become proactive. If you managed to master this skill, you owned your time. You owned your schedule and your calendar.
“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.“
Stephen Covey
You can access the Action Steps for free here which you can use to put the knowledge of the book into action.
Understanding How Money Works
If you’re really into high-income skills, you should definitely learn more about money and personal finance. It is the essence of your financial freedom but honestly, I do believe this skill, not backed by good communication skills and time management techniques, would be less effective. However, backed by the first two skills, you will be on your way to break away from your governmental prison and earn your free ticket to freedom into the world of passionate work.
I was going to recommend one book to learn these skills which is “The Richest Man in Babylon” by George Clason. I do believe it is essential to learn about money in the most entertaining way, through interesting and suspenseful parables. However, I have decided to include “Rich Dad Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki despite its controversial reputation for the mere point of asset and liability mindset which was not discussed in “The Richest Man in Babylon”. Robert Kiyosaki introduces his concept of asset and liability and simply put, he says anything that puts money in your pocket is an asset and anything that takes money from your pocket is a liability. So using his concept, your house which is defined as an asset in conventional accounting terms is considered a liability as long as you are paying bills and taxes on it.
“The Richest Man in Babylon” book discusses the importance of learning the saving skills and claims that everyone should at least save 10% of all their earnings. The author argues that as long as you can live on 100% of your income, you can do the same on 90% by paying yourself first. So at the beginning of each month take 10% and put it aside. The second point the author makes is that every penny you have should work for you. So you should learn how to invest and so your saving will work for you to make you a fortune. Another important principle the book discusses is the importance of consulting the right and trustworthy people in the investment venture. So you should not give your money to a gambler but to a businessman who knows what they are doing.
We have developed the Action Steps for “The Richest Man in Babylon” which you can access here. We haven’t yet developed the Action Steps for “Rich Dad Poor Dad”. So please let us know in the comment below if you would love to see that coming.
Controlling Your Habits
This brings us to how to develop these skills. How to cope with these changes. After all, these are powerful books full of wisdom and practical techniques. It might be easy to start applying these techniques, but is it easy to continue? Is it easy to be consistent? While change itself is not easy whether you are developing high-income skills or you want to learn a new video game. It all comes down to our habits. We are what we repeatedly do. Developing good habits is not quite easy. A lot of research has gone through this to understand how we as humans develop our own habits and stick with them. If you learn this skill, you will be on your way actually to achieve any goals as every goal can be broken down into simple tasks if done properly and with time they will lead you to your goal. Whether it is learning a new language, achieving your fitness goal, or mastering a new skill.
One of the greatest books on this topic is “Atomic Habits” written by James Clear. It is so practical and full of tips and steps backed up with scientific principles. It focuses on small changes, hence the name atomic, that can with time lead to big results. It is easy to start but be careful and follow the book tips to make it easy to continue and endure the new transformation in your life. The simple yet not that easy rule to follow here is that whatever you want to quit, bad habits, you need to make them difficult to start. If you want to reduce video games, box up your gears after each use so it becomes a burden to start playing the next time. These small things when done when you really don’t crave playing video games, after your current use, will relieve you from the burden of taking the decision of whether you should play or not the next time this craving kicks in.
“Every action you take is a vote for the person you wish to become.”
James Clear
As mentioned previously, we have developed a practical handbook (Action Steps) based on the concepts of the book “Atomic Habits” which is free to download and start using it immediately to put your knowledge into practice. You can download it from here.
My High-Income Skill Journey
I was working a full-time job and was earning a 6-figure annual salary. It was enough financially but felt like a prison. In 2020, I decided to focus on side hustles with the aim of eventually breaking away from the job world. I started multiple side hustles and learned along the way. I did not always win. I lost in some businesses of course, but I always refer to this as a learning experience. I never said I failed in a business because for me, I do not see it as a failure. I did not have this mentality before, at least not in the job world. In the prison language. There, they assume you have learned everything. So it is either you succeed or you fail. And because of this mentality, you proceed very slowly. You never risk it. The last thing you want when you are in a prison is to be labeled as a failure. This limits your opportunities if not diminishes them at all.
“The rich are those who play to win. The middle class plays not to lose.“
Robert Kiyosaki
In 2023, one of my businesses which is retail arbitrage on Amazon has generated $250K in revenue. This is just one of them. It was launched in 2021 and the first year I lost $6k.
Another business I launched in May 2023 was publishing kids’ workbooks on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. I did not generate a great income there but was happy to see that I sold over 750 copies out (80% comes only out of 3 books only) which is a great example of the Pareto rule where it says 80 percent of your results come only from 20 percent of your efforts which is validated in this example.
My point is to say that I have applied these skills in my life and I saw the results myself. That is why I wanted to share my experience and to provide my tips towards how to develop these high-income skills using the knowledge of timeless best-selling books.
Mastering high-income skills is a journey that requires dedication, the right mindset, and effective strategies. By leveraging the wisdom from timeless best-selling books and learning from personal experiences, you too can embark on this rewarding journey. Remember, the key is to start small, be consistent, and always be open to learning. Now, it’s your turn to take action. Start by picking up one of the recommended books, apply the knowledge, and see the transformation unfold in your life.
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References
| Title | Number of Sold Copies | Source |
|---|---|---|
| How to Win Friends and Influence People | People Over 30 million copies | source |
| The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People | People Over 40 million copies | source |
| The Richest Man in Babylon | People Over 2 million copies | source |
| Rich Dad Poor Dad | People Over 32 million copies | source |
| Atomic Habits | People Over 15 million copies | source |