How Successful People Create Money Automatically with Eben Pagan

Let's talk about how emergents creates money. Money is the result of setting up and doing a specific combination of the right things in the right order. Money is an emergent, just like the human is an emergent, and the ant colony is an emergent. It's not a simple cause-effect.
In one way or another any financially successful person will tell you money is not really the game, it's just a byproduct. To put it simply, money "results" when you create massive value for other people by taking away urgent pain or delivering massive pleasure, and then you set up the system so they give you money in return.
I say money results, what I really mean is money emerges when you create massive value. Value first, then money. I interviewed Joe Sugarman who created the BluBlocker Sunglass craze. He sold something like a billion dollars worth of product through mail order and on TV. In the interview I was asking about money and success and he said, "What you focus on in life expands. If you want to create more health focus on health and health will expand. Not with money because money isn't the real thing." Money is just a representative, it's just a symbol. The money doesn't actually have any intrinsic value anymore. There's no gold backing the money, the money is made out of paper, or it's numbers on a screen and we make up more any time we want. Money is created when you create value, when you focus on value.
If I have a bar of gold I'm going to be able to trade that for a lot of different things. I can trade it for food, I can trade it for a car, I can trade it for computers, and I can trade it for money. On the other hand, the intrinsic value of money, if you just have a bunch of pieces of paper, money can become very worthless very quickly. It's like the difference between an apple and the word apple. They're not the same. If you focus too much on the word apple you'll actually miss lunch. Next, the most important types of value to create for other people are taking away urgent pain or delivering massive pleasure. I'm not talking about promising instant results, some kind of scheme, or scam. I'm talking about really looking at a place where someone has a problem that they need solved or where they have a desire that they want fulfilled really, bad and then giving it to them.
A mistake that a lot of us make when we're trying to create money for ourselves is we do what we want to do or we do what we think that someone else should want rather than what they really want. Years ago I was reading Forbes Magazine, and the Forbes four hundred. There was a guy in there who built this billion dollar business from scratch by taking customer complaint calls for big Fortune 500 companies. He went to them and said, "You hate getting all your customer complaint calls. I'll take them for you, I'll do a great job handling them." This is a great example of taking away urgent pain and something that most people wouldn't have thought of in a million years.
A simple way to start practicing, is just to start asking people around you, business people, friends, family, just start asking them what's your biggest fear or frustration? Ask them, "What do you worry about? What's giving you anxiety right now? When you lay in bed at night and you can't go to sleep what are you thinking about?" This is a great clue to what you could start doing to create massive value for people. Finally, once you've figured out how to create massive value and you start doing it then set up the system so that the people that you're creating value for give you money in return. Notice that I did not say set up the system to get money and then go create the value. I said it's the other way around. Create massive value then set up the system to get the money.
Earl Nightingale is famous for having the first gold record, back in the days of vinyl, with a self-help or personal development program which was called The Strangest Secret. He also created a program called Lead the Field. I've listened to this program over and over. In Lead the Field he says, "If you have a wood stove and you want heat out of it you have to put wood inside of it, and then you have to light it, and then after it catches on fire and it burns for awhile you'll get some heat. You can't walk up to the stove and say give me heat and then I will put wood inside and then I will light it on fire."
That's not the way the process works. What you have to do, in your life, is go out into the world and put wood in the stove and light it on fire which, by the way, is creating value, and then, once you've figured out that formula and how to create value, you can come back and set up a system so that you get money in return. If you try to do it the other way you're probably never going to wind up with any money because you're not going to wind up having created any value because you're not going to know what works.