It's Important to Feed Your Business, Not Your Insecurities

Some people pull money out of their business for watches and designer clothes, others reinvest it. I'm in the second camp: first you build the money machine.

“It’s important to feed your business, not your insecurities.”

I heard this line from Gary Vaynerchuk a while back. It captures my approach to life and work pretty accurately.

There’s a category of people who earn money inside their business and then spend it on expensive watches, a luxury car, designer clothes and every other attribute of a successful life.

For these people it’s very important that everyone around them knows they have money. And maintaining that public image is quite expensive:

People buy things they don’t actually need, in order to impress other people who don’t actually care that much.

And it all happens at the expense of the business, which ends up paying for and sponsoring its owner’s insecurities.

There’s another approach instead. It’s the opposite: you reinvest the lion’s share of your income back into your business — and then it grows and develops even faster.

I’m a supporter of the second option. If you take care of your clients and of your business, they will take very good care of you in return.

Right now my online school New Lifestyle grows every quarter. Every month hundreds of new people from different countries come to study with us. New people keep joining our team as well. Three months ago we rented a large 65 m² office studio, and now we all work in one place.

At the moment Nastya and I live in an ordinary 46 m² apartment with a decent renovation. I drove a 2014 Volkswagen Passat for five years, and only once my business started earning well did I upgrade the car. A more spacious apartment is next in line.

My approach is very simple. First you build the money machine, and then it helps you get the quality of life you want.

Do you notice people who pull money out of their business just to make an impression on someone?