Every so often, someone younger, usually a few years out of college and genuinely interested in private investing, asks me how to get started.
They’ve done the research. They understand cash flow. They’re bought into our investment philosophy.
But with investment minimums in the $50K-$100K range, saving that kind of capital would take years at their current income.
So I give them the most direct answer I have: you need to make more money.
They look at me like I have three eyes.
And while I get that, I think it’s worth exploring that almost reflexive reaction. Because it reveals an incorrect assumption almost everyone carries: that income is a fixed number, not something you can change on purpose.
You don’t typically get rich by investing
Though to be clear, the traditional “Dave Ramsey” path works. Live below your means, save aggressively, invest consistently for 30 years, and you'll likely hit a seven-figure portfolio by 65. The math checks out.
But that path delivers a “millionaire” who’s spending down a nest egg and hoping the numbers hold – not someone who's free at 45 with investment cash flow covering their expenses.
The people I see reach financial freedom fastest aren’t the ones with the best returns…they’re the ones who solved the income problem first.
They built businesses that produce cash flow, or they’re in high-earning careers and haven’t let lifestyle creep eat their margin. They deploy real capital into cash-flowing deals, year after year – something only possible when income isn’t the bottleneck.
For someone earning $75K, a syndication with a $50K minimum might as well be on another planet.
It takes work to learn a new skill
If you were learning to play an instrument, you’d expect a learning curve.
You'd practice. You'd get better through deliberate effort over months and years. No one sits down at a piano for the first time and wonders why they can’t play Chopin.
Making money works the same way – but almost nobody approaches it like that.
The default is what I’d call a career mindset: work hard within the system, wait for recognition, follow the path that's been laid out. Maybe you get a 3% raise. Maybe you get promoted on a schedule someone else set.
The pace is dictated by the system, not by you.
But a skill mindset asks a different question: “What am I missing that would change my earning trajectory?” That shifts income from something that happens to you into something you actively build.
Not by grinding harder at what you’re already doing – but by aggressively working to learn new skills that actually move the needle on income.
The real cost of a career mindset
The career mindset feels safe because its cost is invisible. You pay it in income you never earned and investments you never made.
But you notice it 10, 15, 20 years later, when someone who started at the same desk as you is now pulling high-six or seven figures, putting several hundred thousand into investments every year…while you’re still trying to save your way to a $50K minimum.
The gap didn’t open because they got lucky. It opened because at some point, they treated earning as a skill.
They learned to sell. They learned to negotiate. They learned to run a P&L, or build a book of business, or manage a team of people who made the company money.
The earnings you didn’t make in your 30s don’t reappear in your 50s – you don’t get to claw them back. That’s the real cost.
Advice that sounds dismissive (but isn’t)
The person who looked at me like I had three eyes wasn’t wrong to be skeptical. “Make more money” sounds dismissive if you believe your income is largely out of your control – like telling someone to be taller.
But income isn’t fixed. It’s a variable. And treating it like a skill to be learned (something you can practice, improve, and get meaningfully better at) changes the entire equation.
Not overnight, and probably not easily. But it’s the same way any skill develops: with time, intention, and the willingness to be bad at it before you’re good.
Especially if you’re younger: the distance between where you are and where you want to be is a learning curve that’s measured in effort, not time. And once you see it that way, the path gets a lot shorter and feels way more attainable.