By Steve Pavlina, Author of Personal Development for Smart People
The essence of successful income generation is value creation. If you want to earn income, you must provide something that matters enough to someone else that they’ll pay you for it. The act of providing value may be direct, such as selling a useful product or service, or it may be indirect, such as providing a free service and monetizing it via other means. But in either case the core activity is to create and deliver value to others.
The notion that you generate income by trading value is a simple concept, but it’s amazing how many people still don’t get it. Here are a couple examples of incorrect thinking about income generation that seem to trip up a lot of people:You may have done a great job of energetic house-cleaning, but if you want to generate income, that energy needs to flow into some form of value creation and delivery. No value, no money.It’s like you’re looking at a fire (a metaphor for your financial problems), and you’re running around scrubbing the fire hoses, polishing the nozzles, and setting up a reverse-osmosis filter for the water supply. Meanwhile the fire is continuing to burn, seemingly unimpressed by your elegant fire-suppression system.Turn on the freakin’ water! Stop cleansing, balancing, and saging your aura, and start directing your energy into the physical reality all around you. If you do this correctly, your physical body will move — a lot! You’ll be taking lots and lots of action. You are a part of this world, and it’s time to recognize that your physical body is the primary mechanism through which financial abundance will manifest. This is a key block you must still address. Like it or not, if you want a physical result like cash in the bank, you’ll have to use physical mechanisms like your voice and your body to get things done. Energetically there are a lot of different “manifestation frequencies” at play here. Some, like those that can cause amazing synchronicities, tend to work in subtle ways and can take a long time to weave their way through the physical plane. You’ll probably feel them working long before you see them working. However, here in the physical universe, the fastest and most direct manifestation frequency is plain old physical action.
Focusing on getting money instead of providing valueIf you’re too wrapped up in your own little world of me, me, me. Where’s the value? To provide vale, there must be some level of innovation or risk-taking involved. If hundreds of others are already doing a better job performing essentially the same service you’re trying to perform. Your service is comparatively useless. It just isn’t needed. You’re trying to milk a system instead of using that system to provide real substance. Recognize that if someone else created what you’ve created, you’d never patronize them.By focusing on trying to get money, you’re missing the point. The point is to provide value to others. This means serving people in a way they aren’t already being served, in a manner that aligns with your unique creative self-expression. Share what only you can share. Express what only you can express in the way that only you can express it.On some level you already sense where this focus will take you. In the long run, trying to get money is a business model from hell. It’s ironically more fun to fail at such an attempt than it is to succeed, and failure in this case is a lot healthier for your spirit.Try to look past your own needs and recognize there’s a pretty interesting world around you. Through your actions you can have an impact on it, for better or worse. Think about how you can provide something that people want or need in a way they aren’t already being served, something that will make a positive difference. Then act on it. The solution is to get out of your head and focus on creating something of value for other people. With a value-driven mindset, you’ll be properly centered on the very thoughts and actions that will produce a sustainable income stream.
