BY TJ Walker
You don’t need a lot of money to become a world-class guru in your niche these days. However, you do need money to support yourself while you are in the process of gaining enough expertise and marketing skills to get to the point where you can charge people enough money to make a living. For some people this process may take 30 days. For others, it might take 30 years.
Here are your options:
- Have a wonderful spouse who supports you 100% financially.
- Start your quest to gurudom while you are a young student and your parents are still supporting you.
- Have your parents support you even if you are an older adult.
- Inherit lots of money (this is a variation of the theme above)
- Make so much money in one career, say as a Wall Street derivatives trader, that you can retire at age 33 and begin a new career.
- Become your own patron by keeping your day job to support yourself and then using every waking moment of free time to develop your expertise.
Some of these options above may be pipe dreams for you, but I guarantee one of them is a workable for you. Make sure you know which one it is.
Everything else you need in order to become a guru is between your ears—your brain. If you are willing to spend thousands and thousands of hours learning a subject, then you can gain enough expertise to become a guru of sorts. Furthermore, if you are willing to use cheap or free technology, you can publish books, podcasts, CDs and DVDs.
The costs for the means of production for media products have plummeted during the last 20 years to practically zero. You no longer have the excuse that you can’t shoot a documentary because you don’t have $200,000 for film expenses.
Creating media products to share your message and insights to the world no longer takes huge amounts of money, but it does take time.
Creating media products that are genuinely interesting and captivating takes even more time.
Distributing your products doesn’t take much money, but it does take time.
Promoting your media products doesn’t take a lot of money but is does take time.
Publicizing your media products doesn’t take a lot of money but it takes perhaps the most time of all.
So when you are doing needs assessment trying to figure out if you have what it takes to start your guru business, the good news is that you don’t have to start off with a million dollars for printing presses, a radio station and a big office building. But you do need to factor in the two biggest expenses you will have.
#1. Your living expenses while you build your business. Your expenses as a 22 yr old living with friends in Bolder Colorado may be very different than a 47 year old with 5 kids, and a homemaker spouse living in New York City—only you know what you need to live.
And
#2. Your time expense. Time is ultimately the most valuable thing we as humans have on this planet. If you don’t have tens of thousands of hours to devote to your niche, you will be undercapitalized, even if you have a billion dollars in your bank account.