Honesty is the best — and most profitable! — policy

Warren Buffett is not the only wealthy person who has proven decisively, in his life, that honesty and integrity leads to wealth. Oprah Winfrey is another such person. It’s great that their fame and worldwide reputation enable them to be clear examples of how human beings should behave.

In short, they prove that honesty is not only the best policy (“best” in a moral sense), but it’s also the most profitable policy.

How does all this apply to your situation as a professional who wants to share his knowledge, or even offer it for a fair price?

After all, you think of yourself as an honest person who acts with integrity at all times. In fact, I’m SURE that you are an honest person.

But if you are honest — like Oprah or Mr Buffett — then how come you are not as wealthy?

I know what you’re going to say: they have wealth creation systems that leverage their efforts and abilities, so that small actions on their part produce HUGE results. Oprah, for instance, has a media company (Harpo) that broadcasts her shows in hundreds of countries, and that’s not including her magazine and radio show.

Mr Buffett, for his part, uses the stock market and the legal capitalistic structure of the U.S. to allocate capital very brilliantly, hence producing huge returns for himself and his shareholders.

In your case, you might not be able to use such leverage systems.

However, here’s the good news. In fact, it’s GREAT NEWS.

But before I tell you what it is, I must say that there’s a catch: You have to be 100% honest with yourself, if you are to use this piece of great news profitably.

Okay, here’s the big insight: Your knowledge is worth millions of dollars. I’m serious! I’m not trying to excite your imagination. (I only do that when I’m dating a beautiful woman).

Before I go further, let’s start with a basic premise: When you multiply ANY number by zero, you get what? Zero.

So right now, you have to assume (feel free to verify this for yourself) that the market value of your explicit knowledge is zero. “Explicit” means the knowledge that you have which can be captured in the form of a document (digital or paper).

So even if you had 10,000 friends on Linkedin, you cannot make ANY money because your explicit knowledge has a market price of zero.

I know it’s tough on the ego when you are forced to admit that nobody is willing to pay you even $5.00 for a document that captures your knowledge. This is why I mentioned earlier that honesty is the foundation for any great career or business.

So what should you do? The obvious answer is that you should try to create a document that has a market value of at least $5.00 or even $1.00. That way, you can upload such a document on Payloadz and start offering it to your Linkedin connections.

Several people have already started doing precisely that. They write an ebook on “how to use Linkedin” and then sell the ebook to all Linkedin users.

You can also create an audio recording of an interview, and sell that audio file via Payloadz. For example, ask a friend to interview you on your area of expertise, then upload the resulting audio recording on Payloadz.

A reader might say, “Okay, Peter, that’s a good idea. But I’m kinda busy right now. I’ll try your idea in 6 months.”

And boom! That person just lost thousands of dollars, possibly tens of thousands of dollars.

Why? Because whatever he knows, somebody else in his profession or industry also knows it, and the other person is faster at implementation.

Sometimes, a person can be good at implementation, but the problem here might be that his ego is too strong for him to admit that there COULD be another way to generate revenues (other than a full-time, white-collar job).

For my part, I can only say that I’ve been studying “knowledge management” since 1998, and my main conclusion is that “knowledge is money.”

Indeed, if knowledge is power, then the person offering knowledge should be entitled to some money.

If you offer knowledge (via an ebook or seminar) and nobody wants to pay, then your knowledge has no value (not for those people, anyways). In that case, humility and honesty are needed to accept that fact. Also, discipline and determination are needed to develop a way to acquire good, marketable and sellable knowledge.

The bottom line is that knowledge is power, and that power can be used to create a second source of income for you. In some cases, the second income could surpass the income from your full-time job, in which case the only sensible thing to do is to quit your job in order to focus on the knowledge-based business.