Ten Secrets, Five Principles, and Twenty Years of Getting Out of the Way
I first came across Anton Kreil's ten secrets to financial success years after I'd already made some of the biggest decisions of my life, which was slightly annoying because I could've done with the fucking instruction manual beforehand.
I'd left Britain, sold my flat, worked overseas, travelled around, built a company and started arranging my life around freedom rather than the normal British collection of mortgage, commute, pension and eventual escape at 67, or whatever age they'll have dragged it up to by the time you get there.
Then I listened to Kreil talking about his ten secrets and thought, fucking hell, I've been doing quite a lot of this.
Not because I'm some financial genius. I've made plenty of mistakes and I've lost money often enough to know I'm capable of being a complete tit when presented with a convincing spreadsheet.
What interested me was that his ten secrets weren't really about getting rich.
They were about not becoming trapped.
That's a much more interesting subject.
The first is respecting money while remaining indifferent towards it, and that's probably the one that makes the most sense to me. Money matters. I've never understood people pretending otherwise. Try telling the electricity company that you've transcended money and see how long the lights stay on.
But money is still a tool.
I don't want to spend my life earning the stuff and then become too frightened to use it. That's like spending thirty years building a swimming pool and refusing to get in because you don't want to disturb the water.
The second secret is about understanding assets and liabilities and questioning the obsession with owning everything. That one hits home because I owned a flat in South London before I left Britain in 2006.
Selling it was probably one of the worst financial decisions I've made if the only measurement is what London property did afterwards.
It was also one of the best decisions I've made with my life.
Both things can be true.
The flat would've become worth a lot more money. Keeping it would've also meant maintaining a connection to a life I'd decided I didn't want. I respected what the property was worth, took the money and used it to move.
I didn't marry the bricks.
The third secret is building and owning your own infrastructure. This one might as well have my company logo printed underneath it.
I built a GIS company in Seoul. It took years, a lot of work and a fair amount of wondering what the fuck I'd got myself into, but eventually the business became the machinery underneath my life.
That's what infrastructure means to me.
It isn't motivational bollocks about being your own boss while filming yourself beside a swimming pool. It's having something you control that produces income without requiring permission from somebody sitting three floors above you.
The fourth secret is travel and perspective.
I left Britain at 28 and I've spent more than twenty years overseas. Spain, Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, with plenty of other places along the way.
Travel didn't make me wise. I've met enough idiots with passports to know that doesn't happen.
What it did was show me that the way things are done where I grew up is just one version of how things can be done.
That's enormously useful.
A country is a bit like a family. When you're inside it, all the strange habits seem normal because everyone around you is doing the same thing. Then you spend a few years somewhere else and come back wondering why Uncle Britain is still sitting in the kitchen arguing with the toaster.
The fifth secret is understanding that risk is subjective.
That one could've been written across my forehead in 2006.
Leaving a job, selling a flat and moving overseas looked risky.
Staying looked worse.
I could see another thirty years of commuting, mortgages, bills and waiting for weekends coming towards me like a slow moving bus.
People confuse familiarity with safety.
They're not the same thing.
A permanent job can disappear. Property prices can fall. Governments can change rules. Pension ages can move. Companies can go bust. Sitting still doesn't remove risk, it just gives the risk a comfortable chair.
The sixth secret is alternative education.
Most of what has been useful to me in business didn't arrive through formal education. It came through work, travel, mistakes, people who knew more than me, clients, contracts and situations where getting something wrong cost actual money.
There's nothing like losing money for improving concentration.
You can sit through six hours of somebody explaining risk management and remember half of it. Lose twenty grand doing something stupid and the lesson gets tattooed directly onto your brain.
The seventh secret is valuing time.
At 48, this one has moved much further up the table for me.
When I was 28, I thought money was scarce and time was everywhere.
Now I know money is renewable.
Tuesday isn't.
That's changed how I think about almost everything. I still care about money, but I'm far less interested in squeezing every last pound out of every decision if doing so requires handing over large chunks of my life.
There's no point becoming rich at the exact moment you're too old or too knackered to enjoy any of it.
The eighth secret is ditching the smartphone.
I understand the point behind that one more every year. These things are useful, but they're also little electronic burglars that climb into your pocket and steal five minutes at a time.
Five minutes doesn't sound like much.
Neither does one termite.
Leave enough of the bastards alone and eventually the furniture disappears.
The ninth secret is ignoring mainstream media.
I wouldn't go as far as saying information doesn't matter. It does. But there's a difference between information and sitting in front of a machine designed to make me angry about seventeen things I can't control before breakfast.
I don't need that.
I've got work to do.
And the tenth is choosing role models that match the objective.
That sounds obvious until you look at who people actually listen to.
Half the internet seems to be taking financial advice from people whose business is selling financial advice to people on the internet.
It's a beautiful little circular economy.
I've always been more interested in people who've built something real. Businesses, investments, careers, lives. People where the evidence exists outside their mouth.
Those are the ten secrets, but Kreil later went back and explained that five broader principles sit underneath them, acceptance, self determination, freedom, risk IQ and hierarchy.
That's where it gets more interesting for me.
Acceptance doesn't mean lying down and accepting a shit deal. I take it to mean understanding the system I'm operating inside before deciding what I'm going to do about it.
I live in a world based around money, ownership, markets and exchange.
Fine.
I can spend forty years complaining about that or I can understand how the machinery works and stop putting my fingers in the fucking gears.
Self determination follows from that.
That's been the thread running through most of my adult life, although I never called it that. I wanted my decisions to belong to me.
Leaving Britain was self determination.
Building the company was self determination.
Choosing where I live is self determination.
Deciding how much I work, where my money goes and what risks I'm prepared to take are all versions of the same thing.
Then there's freedom.
This is probably the centre of the whole thing for me.
I don't mean freedom in the motivational poster sense, some bloke standing on a mountain with his arms in the air while somebody tries to sell me a seminar.
I mean ordinary freedom.
Where I wake up.
What I do with Tuesday afternoon.
Whether I can get on a plane.
Whether I can spend three months somewhere.
Whether I can tell somebody no.
That last one is worth a lot of money.
Risk IQ sits beside freedom because the more control I've got over my life, the better I can judge risk for myself.
I don't need somebody else telling me what safe looks like.
I've had safe.
Safe was a flat, a job and a commute in London.
It didn't feel very safe to me.
And then there's hierarchy, which I think comes back to understanding who is worth listening to.
Results matter.
If I want to know how to build a business, I'm interested in somebody who's built one. If I want to understand investing, I'm interested in somebody with a record of investing successfully. If I want to understand freedom, I'm interested in somebody who has some.
I'm not asking a bloke chained to a radiator for advice on locksmithing.
When I put the five principles together, acceptance, self determination, freedom, risk IQ and hierarchy, I can see how they sit underneath the ten secrets.
More strangely, I can see them sitting underneath the last twenty years of my own life.
I accepted that nobody was coming to redesign my life for me.
I left.
I travelled.
I built my own infrastructure.
I learned to think about risk on my terms.
I became more careful about whose opinions I valued.
I made money important without making it the point of everything.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, I bought back a lot of my time.
That's probably why Kreil's ideas stuck with me when I eventually found them. They didn't feel like somebody introducing me to a new religion.
They felt like somebody putting names on boxes I'd already been carrying around for years.
I'm still carrying some of them.
A few are heavier than others.
Anyway, one of those electronic burglars in my pocket has started vibrating because somebody in Seoul wants an answer to an email.
Apparently freedom still has office hours.
I'll answer the bastard.
One last thing. If you want to hear the ideas I've been banging on about from the man himself, the two Anton Kreil videos below are worth watching. The first covers his ten secrets to financial success, and the second gets underneath them and explains the five principles holding the whole thing together. They're a better use of a couple of hours than watching another bellend on YouTube explain how he became financially free by selling courses about becoming financially free.