A Review Of Alex Becker’s The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Book

Today’s post is a review of The 10 Pillars of Wealth by Alex Becker.  I was first introduced to Alex Becker from a YouTube.  He was promoting a friend who does well with Shopify.  The reason Becker resonates with me is he is genuine.

He curses.

I like that.

It shows he is not trying to be politically correct.  Which means he doesn’t care what everyone thinks.

Which means he is either very successful, or just a douche bag.

It turns out Alex Becker is very successful.

If you visit his website’s about page, (click here) you will see that he started out building an SEO business and scaled into a major software business.  He is considered a tech entrepreneur and investor.  Alex Becker wrote The 10 Pillars Of Wealth to set the record straight about online businesses and generating wealth in general.

In the introduction, Becker states “There is one belief that has been ground into the majority of our heads.  One belief that is so damaging it makes it virtually impossible for you to ever become rich and successful.  In fact, the first step to ever becoming successful is recognizing this belief and murdering it with a medieval battle-ax.”

So what is this belief Becker is talking about?

According to Alex Becker, “The belief that to become rich, something extraordinary, rare or lucky has to happen.  You have to cheat the system, trick people into giving you money, be a super genius with a loophole, be ‘lucky,’ or be a sleazebag to become a success.  Or at the very least, become a porn mogul!”

The rest of The 10 Pillars Of Wealth is about the beliefs multimillionaires have that others lack.  The beliefs that make the successful ultra wealthy, and those lacking the beliefs stuck in the rat race.  Becker refers to people in the rat race as “traffic fighters.”  By this he means those that are stuck in jobs and lifestyles they hate.

For the rest of this post will be a brief description of each of the 10 pillars of wealth.  Of course, no matter how deep I go on each pillar, I won’t be able to do for you what reading this book will do for you.  Because of this, I will just give an overview of each pillar.  You need to put the work in and read the book, then commit to the mindset.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar One: Rejecting Getting Rich Slow

Becker starts this pillar with a warning.  He states that if you are new to the idea that you can make as much money as you want, then he is probably going to piss you off.  He goes on to say that this is because everything everyone has ever taught you about becoming successful is completely wrong (unless you were taught by a self-made millionaire).

If you think about it, he is right.  Most of the people telling you how to be successful (parents, professors, co-workers, friends, family) live a middle class life at best.  There is nothing wrong with that, but our goal is to be wealthy, not average.

The premise of this pillar is that you can get rich slowly, following the advice of everyone around you, which is some form of get a good job and work your way up the corporate ladder.  However, it will take a lifetime to get anywhere.  Not to mention it is just not safe, because you are at the mercy of someone else.  You trade five days a week in order to get two days to yourself, if you’re lucky.

By being an entrepreneur you have the ability to get rich quickly.  Not only that, but it is actually lower risk than being a traffic fighter for the next 30-40 years because you have the ability to control everything.  What Becker doesn’t do is claim that it is easy to do this.  He flat-out tells you it is a steep learning curve, and you will most likely fail at first.  However, if you stick to it, you will eventually get good at it.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Two:  Separating Time From Money

Becker starts off this chapter by giving the example of Jordan Belfort in the movie, The Wolf Of Wall Street.  He notes that Belfort spent almost 90% of his time doing hard drugs, partying, and having sex with prostitutes.  Yet, he was able to generate tens of millions of dollars during this time (yes, he did so by scamming people, but that’s not the point here…stay focused).

Belfort did this by creating a SYSTEM that ran and generated wealth for him no matter what he was doing.  He first put in the time by creating a lethal sales pitch, then trained other brokers to act like Belfort on the phone.  By doing so he was able to leverage himself, and create a wealth machine in the process.  He separated his time from his income.

You have two choices.

Choice number one is increase the value of your time.  This is what many professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and accountants do.  The problem with this method is other people decide how much your time is worth.  What he means by this, is you will get to a point where people will decline to pay what you perceive your hourly worth to be because they will perceive it to be too expensive, no matter how good you are.  You will hit an income ceiling.

Choice number two is to completely separate your time from income.  You don’t want your income to be solely based on your time alone.

If you want to get rich quickly, you need to set up a business in which you can separate your time from your income.  You want to set up a machine that can work for you while you sleep, thus leveraging your time.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Three:  Accepting That You Must Be Better Than Everyone Else

This was a tough chapter to read.  The line that stuck out the most for me was “Building your business must be your number one priority in life for you to succeed.  If it’s not, that’s okay, but you have to accept the fact that it will be unlikely that you will become a multimillionaire.”

Damn.

Those are some harsh words.  But when you think about all the mega successful people, you realize that getting there was their number one priority.  They put that goal ahead of everything else.

So the question for me became just how successful do you want to be?

What am I willing to sacrifice today, to have an amazing life tomorrow?

Then I continued reading and came to the section of the chapter where Becker asks his questions:

1. Do you think you are great?
2. Do you advantages that others do not have?
3. If you were in a room with 99 other people, would you be the best, smartest, most capable, most competent person in the room?

Becker says, “If your answer is no, or even a hesitant yes, I am sorry but you are 100% screwed.

Oh shit.

That is a wake up call for me.  I have shining moments, but this belief is not 100% cemented into my being.  I need to work on that.

“The biggest thing holding people back is believing they are average or not good enough.”

I know this to be true, because I have experienced it myself.

The rest of the chapter is about overcoming the challenge of accepting you must be better than everyone else.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Four:  Knowing Every Little Thing Is 100% Your Fault

This is one of the hardest chapters to read, based on the story he opens with.

Fair warning, it is very dark.

And it drives home the point very clearly.

I am not going to write the example he uses, because I don’t want it to cloud your decision on whether or not you read this book.

I am going to keep the description to this pillar short and just conclude with the most important fact Becker makes early on in the chapter: Here is the problem with blaming other people or factors for things that happen in your life…by doing so, you release responsibility and control over your life.  You are letting bad things happen to you are deciding they are not under your control.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Five:  Adopting An Abundance Mind-Set

Becker states that contrary to popular belief, people’s views of you are actually based on how you act rather than what you say in social situations.  He also states that how you act (your actions) determines your success in becoming wealthy.

Since actions are controlled by mindset and beliefs, your success in anything in life from dating to entrepreneurship is based on your mind-set and core beliefs.

Becker says it is hard to have abundance without abundance.

He explains this by saying it is hard to have a belief without the actions attached to it, so it is hard to have an abundance mind-set without having abundance.  However, you need to have an abundance mind-set in order to attract abundance.  So this is a catch 22.

The way to change this is to go back to the core and actually change our beliefs so we can trick our brains into thinking we have abundance right now.

The rest of this chapter goes into how to achieve that at your current point in life.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Six:  Forgetting “What If” and Focusing on “What Is”

This chapter starts with a made up story of two salespeople who took two different paths to becoming successful.  One worried about all the things that could go wrong, and how he wanted to make sure he performed his job perfectly.  He focused on the “what if,” also known as perfection paralysis  Before taking any action, he broke down every potential problem and worked out a solution.  The other salesperson just jumped in, made mistakes and learned to fix them along the way.  He focused on the “what is.”

Which one do you think was the more successful salesperson?

Planning for every potential problem that can arise before you take action will not help you succeed.  Becker talks about working with thousands of people trying to build an online business over the years who never move forward because they can’t get it perfect, so they quit out of frustration.

Instead, if you focus on problems when they happen (not before, and not after), you will have more time, energy, and mental space to see the situation for what it really is, versus what could potentially happen.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Seven:  Mapping Out Actions That Achieve Goals

“The richer a person (or company) is, the better they are at creating and following through on their goals.  More importantly, the better they are at mapping out how to reach these goals and understanding what these goals mean for their future.”

“On the flip side, if you look at someone with low-income, they usually have extremely short-term goals, small goals, that they don’t make much effort to achieve (or make excuses for), or large goals without any mapped out way to reach them.”

This chapter talks about how multimillionaires plan their goals, and how you can also.

First, start with your big goal.  At a bare minimum, you must have an income goal, as well as a defined way to get there.  Becker states that the easiest way to get there is to start at the absolute base of why people want to make money: lifestyle.

The rest of the chapter breaks down how to turn this big goal into five smaller goals, and then break each of these goals down into five even smaller action steps.

By going through this exercise, you can create your own roadmap to your wealth journey.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Eight:  Focusing Solely On What Gets You Paid

This chapter starts off with a far-fetched, yet incredibly simple example of why it is important to solely focus on what gets you paid.  I won’t explain the whole example, but the concept is you get paid $1000 for every mile you run a day, but you have a limited number of hours you can run each day.  So much goes into the preparation to be able to run, that you actually cost yourself money by focusing on these things.

The main point of the chapter is that you need to delegate as much of the things that don’t generate income and profits for you, or increase your current ROI.

“No matter who you are, you are only one person and can only learn so many skills and can only put in so many hours of work each day.”

“But once you are controlling the machine, you can push over a skyscraper.”

The machine Becker refers to is the leveraged business you are building.

The rest of the chapter focuses on a system you can use, no matter your income level, to identify your highest ROI actions while removing your lowest ROI actions.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Nine:  People Give Money To People That Get People

“Money is power over other people.  More so, it is the exchange of power between people.”

This entire pillar is about people, and understanding the relationship between people and money.

“The sole factor of how successful you are is how good you are at influencing and controlling other people’s decisions.  How you react, judge, and influence people is going to be the most important factor of your success.”

One of the biggest mistakes of those who are unsuccessful is that they try to make money without understanding people.

Wealth is the exchange of money that is the result of a trade of perceived value.

The rest of this pillar describes the art of learning to understand people, among other things such as the importance of learning how to sell.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Ten:  Finding Competitive Friends And Suitable Mentors

This was one of my favorite pillars as it gave me clarity as to why I excel in certain situations, even if I have no desire to do the task at hand.

It is the fact that if you surround yourself with competitive friends, a community of like-minded people with the same goal, it will trigger an obsession to work hard, succeed and compete.

For whatever reason, I love competition.

Becker goes on to say that humans are like pack animals and every single person wants recognition from their pack.  When we find a group we want to be in, we also start acting like them so we can blend in and feel like we are part of that group.

I have never much cared about what other people thought of me.

Now I realize that is not completely true.  I very much care what the people I care about think of me.

There is a big difference there.

Having the right people around you will help you grow and help you want to succeed, and even start to enjoy what you are doing.

The second part of this pillar talks about finding a suitable mentor.

You really can’t reach massive success on your own without personal mentors.

If you think of getting rich is like a minefield, only a mentor can get you through the minefield ten times faster and with one-tenth the effort.

The rest of this pillar goes into where to look for, and what to look for in a mentor.

Conclusion

Guess what?

There is still another pillar!  It is the “secret pillar” and you will need to read the book on your own to find out what it’s all about.

Yeah, I know.

You just spent a fair amount of time reading this 2600 word post and I am not even going to tell you what the last pillar is!

Well, no, I am not.  I know you want to know what it says and you need to read the book to find out.  Not because I want to be a jerk, but because just reading a review and not reading the actual book will be doing a disservice for yourself.

So do yourself a favor and buy The 10 Pillars Of Wealth HERE.