BOCA’S STORY: AN UNEXPECTED LESSON
IN AUTOMATIC WEALTH
My jiujitsu instructor, Boca, taught me a new grappling technique. It
took most of an hour to learn—drilling over and over again. Boca
understands, as all good teachers do, the difference between compre-
hending a skill and possessing one. Until this technique becomes an
automatic, effortless response, it is useless. So even after I told him,
“I’ve got it,” he made me repeat the move . . . 10 times to the right
side, 10 times to the left side . . . back and forth and then in training.
I was dripping sweat, heart pounding, lungs heaving—mentally and
physically spent. Boca, on the other hand, looked like he’d been loung-
ing the whole hour—not a hair out of place. While I caught my breath,
Boca leaned back against a wall mat, smiling at me. “Hey, Michael,” he
said, “what is a good work for me to make a lot of money?”
“Like how much money?” I asked.
“Like you, my friend. I want to be rich, like you!”
Boca’s English isn’t perfect, but he gets his point across perfectly
well. He is 30 years old, he reminded me. He has only two or three
years left to fight professionally. “Now is my time to look around,” he
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said, cupping his hands around his eyes like binoculars, “to see what
there is for later on.”
Why Learning How to Build Wealth Is Like Learning Jiujitsu
I like Boca so much as a teacher and as a friend that I want to give him
the secret of getting rich in a single one-hour lesson. But I can’t. I can
explain a few concepts. I can even tell him, in an abbreviated way,
what I consider to be the most important things he must do. But an
hour’s worth of talk won’t make him wealthy, any more than a single
hour of jiujitsu with him will make me a black-belt grappler.
But what could I do? I told him a little bit about the six-step Auto-
matic Wealth program I had developed and mentioned that I would
give him a copy of the book I was writing—this book—as soon as it
was published. Meanwhile, I challenged him to think about wealth
building like jiujitsu.
“You are a great teacher,” I told him. “In a single hour, you can
teach me many things. You can teach me your best takedown tech-
nique, your favorite choke, the latest arm bar or footlock. You can do
all that and probably even tell me some of your top ‘secrets’ about
being successful at jiujitsu, too.”
“But for that I must charge you a lot of money.” (He was smiling.)
“Yes, you would. And you should. But if you gave me such a class,
and I paid you whatever you asked for it, would you then give me a
black belt?”
“Well, no, my friend. You get the black belt only when you can
do.”
“And to be able to do . . . to be able to defeat white belts and blue
belts and purple belts and even brown belts . . . what must I do?”
“You must practice, my friend. For that, you must practice.”
Becoming Wealthy Takes Time—but Not as Much Time as You Think
Boca had arrived at the point I was trying to make. Becoming wealthy
is not about discovering some secret or stumbling upon a pot of gold.
You won’t get rich by playing the lotto or even searching for that
thousand-to-one Internet stock. Becoming wealthy is a matter of
planning and practice, of setting specific goals and pursuing those goals
with specific actions. Changing into an automatic wealth builder is
about changing habits . . . and changing habits takes time.
