This is the shortest section. In a high-friction environment it may be the section that is hardest for some to do, yet this is the one that makes all the others work successfully together. Know that you can do it. This maintains the continuous learning that builds mastery in all six pillars.

One of the essential components to building wealth is that you never quit. Not now, not ever. There is one direction and that is forward into the future. You keep to your purpose, you keep moving, you keep striving, you keep searching, you keep learning, you keep taking action. You know in your heart that there is a path, and you will find it or create it. Just as it applies to life, it applies to the process of investment and building wealth. This is the meaning of the old street saying, “You’ve got to be in it to win it.”

• Article: Turtle Forth
• Interview: Deep Survival
• Poem: IF, Rudyard Kipling’s poem, recited by Sir Michael Caine
• Poem: Don’t Quit, by John Greenleaf Whitter

Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.

John Wooden

Amid the lows and highs of your building wealth journey, it is of vital importance to determine your principles—those that you will protect at many or at all costs. Never relinquish them. Marcus Aurelius teaches us that most events happening to us are outside of our circle of control. Within it, how you react to them matters: “To stand straight, not straightened.” Here are the eight principles that emerged as I learned to turtle:

Principles

• Maintaining a State of Amusement: We nurture beauty and humor to maintain coherence in a world with powerful political and economic systems, managed or blackmailed by psychopaths. Instead we invite the divine intelligence and the wisdom woven into the fabric of our world into our daily lives and work. We find staying in a state of amusement is invaluable to maintain the higher mind—the source of effective strategies and joy that powers the Building Wealth journey.
  
• Integrating All Aspects of Our Life: Our investments include our real and financial assets and our intentions, time, health, education, culture, and community. We share a love for all living beings and our beautiful planet. Wealth comes from life. Our living equity is the basis of creating financial equity, which nurtures and protects our living equity. These are two sides of the same coin.
  
• Acknowledging that Freedom Happens One Person at a Time: Each person is unique—our purpose, our circumstances, our talents, and our needs. This means each person must remove themselves from control and imagine and design their unique journey to building wealth.
  
• Embracing Personal Responsibility: The foundation of a free and inspired life is personal responsibility, which includes a commitment to building wealth at the individual, family, and community levels.
  
• Facing Reality: Facing reality includes facing the risks posed to personal and family wealth; this includes the risks presented by the push for central control and efforts to apply digital technology to compromise national and individual sovereignty as well as bodily integrity. Freedom rises as each one of us backs out of the control grid in a way that builds wealth.
  
• Developing Discipline: Adopting a building wealth approach means sacrificing the short-term convenience offered by systems designed to control us in exchange for the long-term benefits of freedom.
  
• Respecting the Law: This principle is based in a personal commitment to the rule of law. We attract allies who respect our human and property rights by respecting theirs. Also, we develop tactics to identify and effectively deal with those who do not respect the law or our rights and do not honor their words and contracts.
  
• Nourishing Our Love: Love is the source of our power. The love in our hearts for life and for each other fuels the never-ending story of building enduring, intergenerational wealth.

What are yours? The more confidence you have in your core principles, the easier it becomes to make a way as you build wealth.

Turtle forth!

“No carelessness in your actions. No confusion in your words. No imprecision in your thoughts. No retreating into your own soul, or trying to escape it. No overactivity.
They kill you, cut you with knives, shower you with curses. And that somehow cuts your mind off from clearness, and sanity, and self-control, and justice?
A man standing by a spring of clear, sweet water and cursing it.
While the fresh water keeps on bubbling up. He can shovel mud into it, or dung, and the stream will carry it away, wash itself clean, remain unstained.
To have that. Not a cistern but a perpetual spring.
How? By working to win your freedom. Hour by hour. Through patience, honesty, humility.“

Marcus Aurelius (Meditations – Book Eight; 51)

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