I read this book on a rainy day. It was lent to me by a colleague working in the business division of the multinational company I was working for.
I noted down various lessons from the book. The first one is an advice to the writer from his father, “Never take anything for granted.” The author narrates a story of how two friends worked from 9 to 5 carrying buckets from one place to another. One friend started to invest his evening and weekend hours on building a pipe. He created the pipeline and the bucket job became obsolete.
According to the writer, “Your pipelines are your lifelines.” These pipelines happen to be business streams which should be diverse (short term or long term). These pipelines are open 24/7/365. They pay when we sleep. We must ask ourselves whether we are the bucket carriers or the pipeline builders. On that note, Hedges writes, we go to school to carry buckets. We work hard and earn the right to carry even bigger buckets. We move jobs from Bucket Company A to Bucket Company B. Then we pay for our kids to learn to carry these buckets. Plastic buckets, metal buckets, digital buckets, you name it! He quotes another writer on the fact that carrying buckets is not the same as creating wealth: “How do you become wealthy? Here, too, most people have it wrong. It is seldom luck or inheritance or advanced degrees or even intelligence that enables people to amass fortunes. Wealth is more the result of a lifestyle of hard work, perseverance, planning, and, most of all, self-discipline.”
It is important to leverage time, money and relationships. “Time is money”! It is far more important to leverage time since we aren’t born with the same amount of money, but we have the same amount of time. It is important to work smart for long hours as well! He gives the example of Ford who built one car to fit everyone’s needs. Ford remarked for model T:
“You can have any color you want as long as it’s black.”
Alfred Sloan at General Motors knew that customer is king and he remarked:
“A car for every purpose and purse.”
Sloan’s business acumen resulted in General Motors rising above Ford.