Use Creativity to Double Your Way to a Million Dollars

A while back I came across a free report written by Stuart Goldsmith called “How to Double Your Way to a Million Dollars”.

The basic premise is this:

• You have to find a penny lying on the ground (yes, it has to be a “found” penny).
• You then find a way to turn that penny into two cents, probably by telling someone that you’re conducting an experiment and asking them to give you a penny, or by finding another penny on the ground.
• Then you take those two cents and find a way to double it and turn it into four cents.
• Next, you find a way to double the four cents and turn it into eight cents.
• You get the picture: you then take the eight cents and you double it to get sixteen cents, and so on.
• If you continue to do this–doubling the amount that you have at each step–, by the time you’ve done it 28 times you’ll have made a million dollars (go ahead and map it out on a piece of paper).  Although the numbers start out small at first, they grow exponentially so that by step 28 you’ll have over a million dollars.

At each step you have to put your creativity to the test in order to double the amount that you’re holding at that moment.  In addition, this method teaches you the power of breaking tasks down into small chunks and, since you don’t put in a cent of your own money, you’ll also be more willing to take risks.  The report is short and pretty much self-explanatory, do a Google search for it if you’d like to download it.

For the first few steps you’ll probably have to either ask people for the money or simply find more pennies, nickels, dimes, and so on lying on the ground.  You can also get over the initial hump by doing the following:

• Create a Squidoo Lens by clicking here.  Users who create lenses are called lensmasters, and squidoo gives 50% of its advertising revenue to lensmasters. In addition to getting a cut of the advertising profits from squidoo, you can monetize your lens by adding an Amazon module, an e-bay module, and so on. You can also add your own affiliate links to your squidoo lenses.
• Create a free blog on www.blogger.com and join the Amazon Associates Program and/or add Google Adsense.
• If you’re not a freelance writer you can find a couple of freelancing gigs to add some money to the pot (if you’re a freelance writer you can’t add money from your freelancing work to the pot because the idea is to find ways apart from your regular source of income to double your money).

Apply Creativity Techniques to Find Ways to Double Your Money

By the time you get to step 15 and have $80.00, you can really start applying creativity techniques to ask yourself: “How can I turn these $80.00 into $160.00″?  Three of the creativity techniques you can apply are the following:

• Choose a word at random–you can find a random word generator by clicking here and then use that word as a jumping off point to generate ideas on ways to double the money. Remember, the key to having high quality ideas is to have a high quantity of ideas.
• In my blog post “Three Incredibly Effective Creativity Techniques” I explained that RoleStorming and Superheroes are two variations of the brainstorming technique. Basically, you take on a different identity, it can be an invented persona or someone you know and generate ideas by taking on that person’s identity (for example, “What would Donald Trump do?”).  You can also pretend to be a fictional superheroe–such as Superman, Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk, Wonder Woman,  and so on–and use their ‘super’ characteristics to trigger ideas.
• Apply “the Idea Lottery”.

Use Emotional Freedom Techniques to Release Negative Beliefs About Money

Your goal at the end of this process is to have a million dollars. Often, people form the intent to achieve wealth, they set well-defined financial goals for themselves, and then they go about taking the necessary steps to reach those goals–in this case, doubling the amount you have step by step. However, they soon sabotage themselves in their attempts by the beliefs they hold in their subconscious about money.

If you set the goal of having a million dollars while holding the belief that you don’t deserve wealth, or that you’re not smart enough to be wealthy, or that having a lot of money isn’t spiritual, it’s very likely that you won’t allow yourself to make a million dollars. It’s like trying to cultivate a garden which is run over by weeds, or trying to keep a plant healthy when it’s infested with bugs. Some of the negative beliefs you may have about wealth are the following:

• If I’m financially successful, I won’t know how to handle the money.
• You have to be born with money to be wealthy.
• Money is the root of all evil.
• People won’t like me if I’m wealthy.
• My friends and family will reject me if I’m wealthy.
• If I’m rich, someone else will have to be poor.
• Spiritual people don’t care about money.
• You have to work too hard to be wealthy.
• In order to be wealthy you have to work all the time and sacrifice your health, your family, and your leisure activities.
• Financial success isn’t worth the price.
• You need money to make money.
• In order to be wealthy you have to lie, cheat, and steal.
• Wealthy people are selfish and shallow and don’t care about others.
• I’m a failure.
• I’ll never amount to anything.
• I’ll never be successful.
• I can’t get what I want.
• I’m never sure if I’m doing things in the right way.
• I’m not smart enough to be wealthy.
• I don’t deserve to be happy or successful.
• I need to be rescued.
• I’m not disciplined enough to be wealthy.

In my blog post “Four Ways to Achieve a Productive State of Mind” I discussed the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) and listed several free resources where you can learn how to apply this technique.  Use EFT in order to clear out any negative beliefs that you have about money so that your subconscious beliefs don’t get in the way of you achieving your goal of reaching the one million dollar target.

Conclusion

If you decide to try out this method make sure that you keep a journal where you record what you did to double your money at each step and how long it took you to do so.  The first 14 steps should go by fast (by the time you get to $80.00 you’ll have completed step 14), but then as the numbers get bigger it takes longer to get to the next step.  So, who’s game?

photo credit: tao_zhyn

Editor’s Note: Happy Halloween everyone!

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