How to Get Rich Using the Four Cs

Table of Contents

Most people acquire money in a way that takes the most time for the least amount.

Their only way to make money is to trade their time for money. You have a cap on how many hours you can work each day. If you have an hourly rate, it doesn’t matter how hard you work because you get paid the same amount regardless.

Even highly paid professionals like dentists, doctors, and lawyers are trapped because they have a ceiling on their earnings (even if that ceiling is higher than most).

You can make the same amount of money or more in the long run without spending a decade in school or working 80 hours per week.

You can get rich more quickly with less effort if you learn how to use leverage.

Leverage means you get more output than what you put in. A lot more.

Quick example:

You can spend 20 hours a week building an e-commerce store that sells products on autopilot. There’s theoretically no cap on your earnings because your products can sell 24/7. Even though you still have to work for the money, you can earn higher multiples for the time you spend working.

I mainly focus on opportunities where I have leverage. I want to be able to use one of the four C’s to get rich.

The four C’s are the levers you can pull to gain leverage and make boatloads of cash (in the long run, of course).

Content: build a brand that earns cold hard cash

Content helps create copies of yourself all over the internet that can promote your products for you.

I have different products for sale:

Books
Online Courses
Products I do affiliate marketing for

I link these products in different areas of my websites, blog posts, YouTube video description boxes, show notes on podcasts—you name it. I also have links in the automated messages that I send to my email list subscribers.

With content, you can reach a bunch of people simultaneously. Instead of spending an hour working for a specific rate, I could spend an hour shooting a YouTube video or writing a blog post that has the potential for hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people to be exposed to my content.

A handful of them will want to take the relationship further and sign up for my email list. A portion of those will buy my products. If you get the back end right and have something good for sale, your content becomes a marketing system that attracts people to be a part of your audience and buy from you.

There are so many different forms of content you can choose from:

Blogging
Long-form video
Short form video
Newsletters
Text-based social media (Twitter, LinkedIn)
Video-based social media (TikTok, Instagram Reels)
Image-based social media (Instagram)

Choose the form of content that makes the most sense and use it to promote whatever it is you have to offer. Even if you don’t have anything to offer, start sharing your thoughts online to build an audience. Talk about whatever interests you. Talk about problems you’ve solved in your life. Curate information from people who inspire you.

Creating content and building a personal brand makes it easier to sell and promote something once you do make it. Look at celebrities like Kylie Jenner and Rihanna, who were able to start billion-dollar companies because they had a huge audience.

Personal branding and content creation are here to stay. Get in the game or fall behind.

Related:

"5 Skills You Need To Be a Successful Content Creator" blog post

Collaboration: leverage other people’s time

Collaboration either means working with someone or having someone work for you.

Getting other people to help you with your business saves you time, which allows you to spend more time coming up with ways to make money.

I recently revamped my online course, including designing a new sales page. Instead of learning how to create a page from scratch, which would have taken me forever to learn, I just hired an experienced contractor to do it for me.

I’ve also done joint ventures with other creators. Instead of only building up an audience from scratch, I collaborate with people with similar audiences to mine and share content/products with them.

Work smarter, not harder.

I have a particular set of skills I’ve developed that help me make money. Spending most of my time on those skills makes the most sense. If something else needs to be done but would take too much of my valuable time to do, I just hire it out or delegate it to someone.

Some say you’re not an actual business owner until you can remove yourself from the business altogether. If the business can’t operate without you, then you have a job where you’re your own boss.

A fully staffed business where you spend most of your time looking at it from a bird’s-eye view gives you the chance to think strategically and make decisions at a high level. This can help you earn more.

Even better, hiring smart people you can trust to make high-level decisions on your behalf can help you build a crazy profitable business.

The pinnacle is understanding how to assemble businesses without having to operate them at all. If you become an expert, you can land on a solid idea, hire the right people, sit back, and let the cash roll in.

Code: the army of 0’s and 1’s that sell on your behalf

Some of the most valuable companies in the world are tech companies.

They utilize the power of code.

Code leads to companies like Facebook that have more users than the population of dozens of countries. Code can help you create systems that work and learn independently, like algorithms.

If you know how to program, the world is yours.

Think back to the examples above, though. If you want to utilize the power of code, you don’t have to know how to code yourself. You can create a software company by hiring people who know how to code.

See how powerful the concept of leverage can be when you start to think about it deeply?

Say you run a service business and figure out that a new software can fix your customer’s problems. You can hire someone to create that software, adding another revenue stream to your business.

Most software as a service (SaaS) companies charge a monthly fee, so you can increase the lifetime value of your clients by getting them to sign-up for the software.

Capital: the gasoline for the fire

Capital is the fuel you can throw on pretty much any fire.

The obvious example is putting money into investments that grow on their own without additional effort.

But there are many ways you can spend money now to get rich in the long run.

Some of these examples will overlap with the other four C’s, but that’s the point. All of these leveraging methods are intertwined. If you have cash, though, you have the most opportunity to gain leverage as quickly as possible by pouring into areas like the ones I’m about to mention.

Spend money on skills: I’ve borrowed my current mantra from Alex Hormozi: “Invest in yourself until you can’t possibly spend money to learn more skills.” Investing in books, online courses, and coaching helps you develop skills that make it easier to leverage your time.
Advertising: Alex, who coined this mantra, took his skills and used them to learn how to make $36 for every $1 he spent on advertisements for his service. If you can figure out how to make ads profitable, it’s a license to print money.
Branding: You can spend money to improve the quality of your products, the design for the marketing you use, the materials, etc. This will help you increase your profits by providing a better product.
Service work: If you want to spend more time focusing on your business, you can hire people to do your personal tasks that need to be done but you’d prefer not to do yourself. Things like cleaning your home, laundry, cooking, lawn care, and more. Again, if you know your time is valuable for making money, it might make sense to hire out these tasks since it will cost you money to do them. If the service rate is lower than your “hourly rate,” it makes sense to hire out.
A personal assistant: If you’re a solopreneur, the next logical step in your business might be taking on a personal assistant before you hire a full staff. I’ve used personal assistants for specific projects like book launches. It took a load off having someone in my corner to help with tasks like reaching out to influencers to promote my books.
Content: You can hire people to create content for your business and increase your exposure online. You can find many reputable content creators on freelance websites and social media.
Buy an entire business: I’m looking into acquiring small niche blogs myself. Some people opt to buy cash-flowing brick-and-mortar businesses like laundromats. If a well-oiled cash machine is available for sale, it might make sense to buy it.

The possibilities are endless. Once you have a large amount of capital, your only job is to retain that capital and grow it. You can get rich and set yourself up for life.

How to get rich

The four C’s are a twist on the advice by Naval Ravikant.

Here’s what he had to say about how to get rich (without getting lucky):

Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

—Naval Ravikant

If you learn how to build and sell, you can create assets you can leverage. The more assets you can leverage, the more time and capital you can use to make even more assets you can leverage.

You can do this in a loop over and over again. This is how people get filthy rich. This is how you can get rich.

Once you earn enough money, you can retire forever. Another from Naval: