The twenty-first century has brought new economic tumult and risks, but also new pathways toward gaining financial freedom. The problem is that most people are still sold on popular myths about wealth creation that prevent them from making the most of these opportunities for personal enrichment. The Business of the 21st Century sets the record straight, and explains surer, proven methods of building wealth than conventional employment. This book is for anyone who is climbing the ladder and tired of looking at the rear of the person just above him.

Your parents probably told you to study hard, get good grades, graduate from a good university, and hope you land a good job in a good company with good benefits. This was the conventional wisdom of the twentieth century, but it has lingered into the twenty-first—to our detriment.

Vanishing are the days of staying employed by the same company for 30, 40, or 50 years which supplies you with insurance and a comfortable pension. That kind of job security isn’t there anymore. The truth is that Corporate America is a dinosaur on the verge of extinction. Many thought that their 401(k)s were safe. How can these blue chip companies and mutual funds fail? Well, the crash of 2008 revealed that these financial safety nets are far more vulnerable than had been supposed. The government is also increasingly incapable of helping you. Social Security and Medicare are bloated and unsustainable relics.

In the twenty-first century, companies won’t save you. Neither will the government. You’ll have to secure your future yourself. This book is for people who are ready to get with the times and change their thinking from the outmoded Industrial Age model to the that of the Information Age; from twentieth-century thinking to twenty-first-century thinking. To get control of your future, you need to get control of income source. The best way to do this is to own your own business.

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We live in tumultuous times. Things are constantly in flux. There’s a great deal of uncertainty where there used to be security. Many people think that this is the worst time to start a company. The truth is that a recession is the perfect time to enter the market. When the economy starts slowing down, entrepreneurship usually starts taking off. People tend to become more creative and proactive about realizing alternative methods of generating income when things are uncertain.

What do Disney and Microsoft have in common, other than being wildly successful, multi-billion dollar companies? They both started during economic slumps. So did more than half of the startups that have become successful corporations.

To be clear, employment is not “bad.” It’s just that it’s limited as a way of generating income. The best way forward into this new century is the path of the entrepreneur. Maybe you don’t consider yourself very entrepreneurial. Maybe your disposition is risk-averse right now. Muhammad Yunus won a Nobel Prize in 2006 for his work in making microcredit available to entrepreneurs in developing countries. His conclusion on the matter of entrepreneurship is that all people are entrepreneurs, but most either never have the chance or give themselves the chance to find out.

People often measure their success by income or net worth. This is one indication, but more important than the quantity of income is the quality of income. The quality of the income will depend on its source. There are four possible sources of cash flow: employee (E quadrant), self-employed (S quadrant), business owner (B quadrant), and investor (I quadrant). Depending on which of the four quadrants cash flow comes from, the person’s lifestyle will be very different.

The employee works for someone else and is paid only when he works. The self-employed earns money through his own operations. The business owner, in this context, is defined as having over 500 employees. The investor uses money to generate even more money.

Most people live in the employee or self-employed quadrants. Those in the employee quadrant probably grew up with the typical cultural narrative about good grades and hard work as the best way to become wealthy. The self-employed usually begin as employees but desire greater freedom. They often think they have fired their bosses, but discover that they’ve only switched bosses.  They work for themselves, except everyone else is on their backs, too: the customers, employees, the government, and family. It’s often a thankless, stressful gig. Those who switch to the self-employed quadrant tend to find more shackles than self-determination.

The difference between the self-employed and business owner is the difference between working for your business and your business working for you. The investor quadrant allows for the greatest amount of wealth at the smallest expenditure of time and effort. The I quadrant is the one that takes significant time to develop, but, if done well, there is an inverse relationship between time spent building revenue streams and amount of revenue. In other words, developing revenue streams will eventually mean less effort for far more revenue.

How fast you’re climbing the ladder is far less important than the quadrant your ladder is in.

In which quadrant do you currently reside? The best indication of this is not your job description, but your mindset toward money. How do you think about finances? For people in the E quadrant, the driving value is security. They want good job security and good benefits that will protect them and their families. They are quick to fret and find something risky in any course of action.

As mentioned earlier, those in the self-employed, or those in the S quadrant, are motivated by a desire for independence. They want to call the shots. These are the small business owners with great management skills but undeveloped leadership skills. Moving from the S quadrant to the B (business owner) quadrant is a huge adjustment because no one functions well in the B quadrant without good leadership skills.

The cornerstone value for B quadrant residents is building wealth. The people who go from rags to riches typically have a compelling, all-consuming mission that they go after with everything they’ve got and want to bring as many people along for the ride as possible. They value a solid team of people and efficient operations. They might not be the smartest people in the room, but then it’s not uncommon for straight-A students to end up working for C students. Eventually, the machine runs well without constant involvement. The business owner can reap the same financial benefits while turning his or her hand to other things.

For those in the investor, or I quadrant, the chief goal is financial freedom. This is not just picking stocks and hoping they do well—that’s gambling. The investor wants his money to work for him instead of him working for money.

Changing quadrants is not a simple matter of changing jobs. It’s a shift in mindset, which makes it more comparable to changing religion or political party. If you want to be wealthy, you have to change your quadrant address.

Are you ready to take control of your future? To do this, it’s important to develop the builder as well as the building. If a bus driver is behind the wheel of a Ferrari instead of a racecar driver, there’s a fair chance that it could run off the track, or that it will not be utilized to its full potential. The myth that keeps people in the E quadrant is that working really hard will increase revenue streams. Obviously, effort is required to build wealth and achieve financial freedom, but if you work hard in the wrong ways, you might end up in rags instead of riches. The grand irony of the E quadrant is that the people here are seeking security, but it isn’t secure at all. People get fired all the time. In some ways, the more insistent on security you become, the tighter you pull the noose.

It’s good to move out of this quadrant. Operating in the B quadrant is how most of the super rich achieved great wealth, but seeking to own businesses carries its own drawbacks and risks. For one, it requires a great deal of capital to get a business up and running. On average, it takes about 5 million dollars. On top of that, there’s a great deal of uncertainty. About 90 percent of businesses fail within the first five years. The odds are better with franchises, but these still require a lot of capital upfront to buy the rights, and then pay corporate for training and advertising. Usually, there’s no profit for years. Two of three franchises survive, which means there still a decent chance things won’t pan out.

With all these complications, what is the best path forward? The author and Donald Trump teamed up several years ago to survey numerous businesses and evaluate their structures. The best businesses are the kind that can, eventually, run themselves; they can generate revenue without keeping the hand constantly to the plow. If you do air conditioning repair on yachts, you will only get paid insofar as you continue to make repairs. If you teach karate, you only get revenue insofar as you show up and teach. It’s like a motion-sensor faucet: There’s a stream of water as long as your hand is there, but the second it’s removed, the water stops flowing.

Network marketing is, hands down, the best up-and-coming approach for anyone looking for an ongoing income. It’s been around since the mid-twentieth century, but it was such a departure from the conventional wisdom about how to do business that it was met with skepticism. Even fifteen years ago, the major business and finance journals would never have published a piece on network marketing. Now, Fortune and other top journals are extolling its benefits, like consistent annual growth, low start-up costs and overhead, high ROI, and great potential for global expansion. Network marketing companies now make over 100 billion dollars every year.

So what exactly is network marketing? Network marketing is an approach that recognizes the power of relationships to achieve market penetration. Word-of-mouth is the most effective way to get the word out about a product. This is why companies spend so much money finding someone who sounds just like your mom or your friend for their commercials. Typically, network marketing companies will offer a commonly used product of competitive quality and price through their representatives. What makes network marketing a singular arrangement is that it provides a win-win opportunity for the independent representatives and the company: The company gets amazing exposure without having to pay mountains of money for advertising, and the independent representatives talking about the products generates potential of passive income streams for every relationship that they build. So the more connections built, the more streams of passive revenue. He teaches and trains those who are interested in joining his network, and he benefits from whatever sales they make.

Economists have found that network growth tends to be geometric rather than linear. If one person tells another about a product or service, that person tells three more people, the network grows in strength exponentially.

Many people would write the network marketing approach off as a pyramid scheme, but there is a huge difference. Pyramid schemes usually mean that the bottom feeders make very little and those at the apex make money off of them. Unlike many other business models, where those at the bottom of the pecking order will never make as much as people at the top, network marketing is inherently democratic. It rewards people according to their labor. If someone is introduced to a network, there’s still the potential for that person to make more money than someone who has been in the company far longer. It’s all about how diligent one is in cultivating networks. This is a far cry from the corporate world, where a cashier making 10 dollars per hour will never make as much money as the CEO, even if he worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And no matter how hard he works during his eight-hour shift, he will still only make 80 dollars.

Getting good at network marketing doesn’t require a business degree or even significant business experience. It doesn’t require perfectly-honed salesmanship, quitting your day job, taking out a second mortgage or being rich. What it does require is honesty, the right mindset, a commitment to growth, and building relationships.

These insights are just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of The Business of the 21st Century here. And since we get a commission on every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.