For Professional Investors, What Is Money?

Money isn't a tool for consumption; it's a tool for production.

In other words, no matter how much you earn, you'll ultimately put it back into the market to keep working, to keep compounding.

Only wage earners are truly making money. Business owners and investors aren't really "making money" in that sense.

Look back at your wealth curve, and you'll see that what you earn in a year now is the sum of what you earned during the early years of your journey.

It's because your base has grown. It's because you've scaled up. You might have spent years earning that first $1 million because you started from zero. For instance, if you started with $10,000, you actually had to grow it 100 times over. But if you're managing $100 million, making $1 million only requires a 1% return.

What if you skipped the journey from $10,000 to $1 million to $10 million?

Would adding leverage right away, borrowing to start with $100 million, save you ten years of detours? No. You'd just lose it all quickly. It's like saying KFC or McDonald's don't care whether a few more or fewer stores open in a region today given their current scale.

But in the beginning, opening that first store meant everything.

Because most of your model, most of the factors behind your success, are established when you open that first store. By the time you have 1,000 locations, looking back, worrying about whether you made $200 more or $200 less on any single day of that first store's operation is pointless.

Because that really didn't matter. What actually had value was everything you discovered while running that first store.

That's the most useful part—that's the core secret behind why all your subsequent wealth could snowball like it did.