Principles for Making Money

How do you get rich when you have nothing? Here are 10 rules of money that have made me a shitload of money and hopefully will make you a shitload of money too.

Starting with number one: You don't have to be smart to get rich. I used to believe that you had to be smart and you had to be like from an Ivy League school or of some like crazy background in order to get rich, and that is kind of how I viewed it for a long time until I had a really interesting experience. It was back in 2016 and I was trying to make money with my first business and I went to this Meetup event. I remember I was making like no money, so like I felt like I was like the odd man out there. I'm like, "I'm just trying to learn from everybody. Like, I don't have any ego in this. Like, whatever I can learn, I will learn."

I remember this guy went on stage. This is so mean, but like, kind of an idiot. And he got up on stage and he was like, "I haven't been able to break past like $400,000 a month." In that moment, my entire world shifted. I literally left the room and I called my dad and I was like, "Dad, I will never ever work a job again because I am smarter than that guy. There is no reason why I can't make the same money as him." And it was like the best thing that could have ever happened to me because what I realized is that making money is a game, and you have to know how to play that game. And it's not that he was smarter than me, and it's not even that he worked harder than me, but he understood the rules of the game a way that I didn't.

You don't need superior intelligence to win the game. Some of the richest people that I know are in fact not that smart at all. Getting rich, you don't have to be a genius. You need to work hard, be patient, and you need to have common sense. Probably the three most important things that you could do when it comes to making money. But when I first started making money, I couldn't even use proper grammar. And that's really what led me to realize, like, being rich is not about having a high IQ. It's about making smart choices and sticking with them long enough to watch them pan out.

You got to be a little dumb. You know what I've realized about smart people is that super, super smart people usually miss out on opportunities because they see too much of the risks. When you're really smart, you only see all the risks that could occur, and so you actually pass up a lot of opportunities. Not being intelligent is actually to your advantage when it comes to making money because you'll take opportunities that others won't. And so it's not about how smart you are, it is about how smart you work. So the question is, are you willing to work hard? Can you make sound decisions? Can you wait? If you can do those three things, I promise you, you can make money.

The next rule of money is that saving money will not make you money, but it will give you the security to take risks. When I first started making money with my company, Gym Launch, I was excited. I was making money, but it was overshadowed by the fact that I had debt and I had no savings. And so for me, the first thing I did when I made money is I paid off all my debt. The second thing I did, I put together what I call is like an "oh [ __ ] fund," which is like, if everything goes to [ __ ], I know that I have enough money to pay my bills, pay for my living, pay my expenses, and start from scratch if needed.

The moment that I took my money that I had made for my business and I put it into that fund, it was like it unlocked a new layer of creativity for me because then I said, "Okay, now everything that comes in, I can use to build because I know that I don't need to worry about my bills. I can take care of the business now." And so what I did with that money, I took $4 million and I put it into starting another company. And then I took the other money that was coming in and I put $3 million into starting a software company called Allen, which was a software that we used within the company. I do not think I would have been able to do any of those investments if I had felt like it was either the investment or me paying for my apartment.

Saving money, you're not going to save your way into becoming a [ __ ] billionaire. What I look at it as is, will this money give you the security and peace of mind so that you can focus all of your attention on to just making money? And what it did for me, it created a space for me to take risks. And making more money does require you to take risks, just like you start a business and you have to invest some amount of money, time, resources. If you want to keep growing a business, you're going to have to keep doing that. And what I recognized is that for me, I had to create that space for myself by making sure that I knew that no matter what, no matter what happened, I would be taken care of. So it's not about living below your means, it's about creating the means to take risks. So savings won't make you wealthy, but they will give you the security to step out and take opportunities that might.

The next rule of making money is that you make no money for a significant period of time, and then you make all of the money at once. The way that you get rich is you put in a [ __ ] ton of work without seeing the result of it. The first two years of me building my business, I didn't just not make money, I lost money. And then one day I made a [ __ ] ton of money. And people were like, "Wow, you got so lucky." But it's not that you get lucky. It's that it's called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is essentially people overestimate their ability to do something. If you didn't overestimate it, you wouldn't start doing it in the first place. You quickly realize that it's hard and you suck at it. But then if you stick with it, knowing that you [ __ ] suck and it is hard, eventually you get better. And then one day, you've stacked enough skills that you see the benefit or the reward for all the work you've put in.

This is what every person goes through when they are trying something new to make money, to build a business, whatever it might be. So for example, when I was starting my first business, I started and I was like, "This is going to be easy. I know what I'm doing." All this stuff. And then you realize, "Oh my God, I actually suck." But I didn't stop. "I can't lose if I don't stop, but I know I will lose if I stop." And then one day, two years in, when I'm thinking, "Nothing can get worse, and we're definitely going to go into bankruptcy," it all clicks. We went from zero to $7 million in six months, and from zero to $27 million in two and a half years. And that is called the Dunning-Kruger effect because during that period of time when I felt terrible, that is when I accumulated all the skills to make money that nobody and nothing can ever take from me. And if you are trying to make money, I want you to know that you can't skip that. You cannot skip the hard [ __ ] that it takes to get to the other side.

Learning never goes to waste. Skills only compound, but you have to stick it out long enough to watch them compound. And that's how you make money. It's not like you have to accumulate one skill to make money. You've got to accumulate 20. This is the nature of exponential growth. You work really hard and get very small results for a period of time, and then everything accelerates and it all happens all at once. Did you know that Howard Schultz didn't make any money from Starbucks for 17 years? He at one point had to borrow money from the guy who made the boxes for the shoes to pay payroll. Nobody wants to talk about the fact that it's actually hard. If you want to build something sustainable, the more money you want to make, the more periods of times that you're going to have to go through where you don't see the fruits of your labor. The reason a lot of people don't make a lot of money is because they don't know how to delay gratification. The reason I know that I will make a billion dollars is because I know that I can delay gratification. I can build something that will for sure make a billion dollars because I know how to wait. A lot of people want to make it now, and the reason that they won't make more money is because they're so fixated on making it sooner. But if you can get through that period of eating [ __ ], you will make more money than everyone else.

The next rule is that money always chases the best. When you're good, you chase money. When you're excellent, money chases you. I remember when I was first trying to make money as a personal trainer, I didn't know how to get clients. And I saw people that I was working with, and I just saw that they had unending clients. And I was like, "How is it that they have so many clients and I don't?" And I had a mentor at the time, and he said something to me that really stuck with me: "Focus on being the best and forget the rest." He was like, "Lila, focus on being the best trainer that exists." So I was like, "How can I build up evidence that I'm the best?" Because I was like, "I need to get these stories that I can use to show people that if you work with me, these are the results I produce." So I was like, "Okay, I'm going to sign up for a fitness competition." Because I think that if I want to be the best trainer, I have to show people. I didn't just lose weight, I then competed in a fitness competition. From doing those things and becoming so good, I couldn't even take on the amount of people that came to me.

When you do your best, people notice. And when people notice, money and success will find you. But it starts with being the best. It doesn't start with trying to accumulate money. It starts with trying to be excellent because money is attracted to value, and excellence in any field creates value that people are willing to pay a lot of money for. If you are a celebrity personal trainer that has gotten, let's just say, Kim Kardashian into tip-top shape, and you've shown a transformation where she's lost 30 lbs and gotten a six-pack and ripped, versus a personal trainer that works at the YMCA and doesn't have any testimonials from clients, which one provides more value? This one. Which one gets more money? This one. Because they have demonstrated excellence first. You have to become the best, then you have to make people aware that you're the best, and once you do that, money will come to you.

Like for me, I make a lot of money because I [ __ ] love business. And so money is a consequence of me liking business. And by consequence, I create a lot of value, which then creates me a lot of money. But I don't ever think about making the money first. I think about creating value in my business, and then the money comes. If you ask yourself how to be excellent, the money comes as a consequence of it. Find a game that you can be number one at. And I only know that I can be number one at something when I'm [ __ ] obsessed with it. And so ask yourself, like, what could I be number one on? And play that game, 'cause if you do that, the money will follow.

The next rule is that learn how to make money while you're awake before you try to make money while you sleep. When I first started my business, Gym Launch, I had a guy come to me and he was like, "Lila, I see that you're making money and like, that's amazing. He's like, "But you need to learn how to make money while you sleep." And I was like, "Make money while I sleep? That sounds [ __ ] great because I'm out there, I'm [ __ ] busting my ass every day. What's the secret?" So this guy's like, "Yeah, let me tell you about real estate." And actually, I have this little business where, you know, I will essentially buy this real estate for you, and then you're just going to get passive money that it generates each month from the renters." I was like, "Sure, let's do it."

We buy this rinkadink house. I was all excited. I was like, "This is it. Maybe instead of having like a real business, we're going to get into like real estate. We're going to be real estate investors." Oh man, was I [ __ ] wrong. We buy this house. This [ __ ] house was the bane of my [ __ ] existence. This house was more work than I could have ever imagined because they didn't tell me I'm going to have to manage tenants. I was liable for all these things that were happening with the home. I didn't know that property management companies could drop your account and then you had to be the one to manage the property. All things that I didn't know. That house took me almost a year to get rid of, and it cost me $20,000.

Just like building a business takes skills, so does picking the right opportunities to invest in. Investing itself is a skill. So if you want to make money while you sleep, that is a skill of its own that you also have to learn. And I can tell you, as somebody who has made not hundreds, but tens on tens of investments because like, I don't do tiny investments, I typically do sizable ones, that is a skill on its own. There are more transferable skills from learning how to actively make money into passively making money than there are passively into actively. Lots of people who know how to build a business and actively make money can learn eventually how to invest. And usually it goes in that order. Going from investing and only knowing how to invest into trying to actively make money, it's a harder transition to make. And so what I tried to do in that time is I tried to skip steps.

Activity, you know, investing versus actively making money, do you have more skills already that set you up for success? And for me, at that point in time, I had already more skills in learning how to actively make money than I did in how to invest. And most people are there. They've had a job, maybe they have like somewhat of a business, and then they say, "Okay, I want to go learn how to invest." Completely different skill. You would probably have a shorter time to value of like learning how to make money if you just said, "I'm going to learn how to actively make money in a more meaningful way." And so what I recognized, I was trying to skip steps in that situation because there's nothing passive about learning skills. You will learn active skills to make passive income. Even passive income requires skills. There's no way to make money or compound your money that doesn't require some level of skill. You can't have money work for you until you know how to work for money. If you want to learn how to make passive income, you first have to learn how to make active income.

Warren Buffett said this: "Before you can let money work for you, you have to put in the work yourself." Active learning and effort come first. Passive rewards come later. And that was said by the greatest investor of all time. Everybody that I know that has made it to the level where they are passively creating income and they're doing it in a really meaningful way, they have first [ __ ] killed it at actively making income. And what I realized for myself was, I am a decade into business, and I am just now learning and getting proficient at investing money. And if you invest money properly, it does make you money in your sleep. But nobody talks to you about how much effort goes into selecting deals, negotiating deals. It is also so active. You are actively learning how to do deals and negotiate, and then getting money later.

The next rule is that if money is the only goal, you will never have enough. When I sold my first company three years ago, I remember the moment where the big check hit my bank account. That has always been the goal, at least with my first company. It was like, "Make a ton of money." I remember in that moment, I felt nothing. I didn't even feel like super excited. If anything, I felt relief because I was done with the process, and the process had been painful. I didn't feel like, like a different person. I didn't feel like better. And what I realized is that if money is the goal, you just never have enough. Money is only a tool that you can use to then get other things.

Once I realized that, the next thought I had is, "What am I going to do with this money? What am I going to use it to build?" And that is why I started Acquisition.com, literally the day after I sold my business, because I said, "I can use this to create this next thing that I envision in my head." It wasn't like money itself made me happy. The only reason that that money now has meaning to me is because I was able to take it to invest in my next dream. And now I've been able to use that money to make my dream come to life, and that's meaningful to me, and that's a worthy goal. Money itself, it only is a means to an end. And so the question is, what's the end for you?

See, time is a tool that's used to make money. And so what precedes making money is learning how to manage time. Because if you cannot use your time to create money, then you won't have money. But most think it stops there, and that's it. It doesn't stop there because then now that you have money, the question is, how do you manage money? Money is a great servant, but is not a great master. Because as long as it's your master, you will never have enough of it. It is simply a tool that you use to reach your end goal. If you accumulate millions and millions and millions of dollars, and it just sits in your bank account, what's that money doing for your life? Does anything about your life change? Do you feel happier? Do you accomplish your dreams? If you don't use money to create something else, you might as well not have it because it will have no effect on your life. The only reason to make money is to do something with it. What are you going to build with the money you make? How are you going to use it to make your life and other people's lives better?

You have to be romantic about the process, not the outcome. I want to build an amazing business. A consequence of that is that I make money. That money is useful in building an amazing business. And so money is like a hammer. It's only as useful as what you build with it. In building my business and accumulating all this money, I did not get happier having more money. I got happier through the process of who I became to create value that created money. If money is your end goal and money is why you do things, you will make less than everybody else because money is a very empty reason as to why to do things. And so ask yourself, "Why do I want the money? What do I want to do with it?" You should spend money on yourself because if you're constantly suffering trying to make other people's lives better, what's the point? On the other side, it's, "What do I want to build with the money? What do you want to have happen with the money that you accumulate?" And those are questions to ask yourself because once you get a certain amount of money, you'll stop if it's only about the money.

The next rule is that if you have no money, you should have no shame. Many people stay poor because they are too ashamed to do the work that it takes to become rich. I remember when I was a personal trainer and I went to college and then I got this internship. I had to be a hike guide twice a day. I remember there was this guy, and he was pretty out of shape, and he just wanted to go alone. I was the one to go with him to protect him on this hike. We're on this hike, and then he looks at me and he says, "You know what? I'm just really grateful that, you know, we have people like you in this world." And I was like, "People like me?" He's like, "Yeah, people that are willing to do the work that you're doing. Like, I could never do what you're doing." In that moment, I thought to myself, "Dude, I'm willing to do this [ __ ] work because one day I will be richer than you because I am willing to do this type of work."

What I realized, those who are willing to do the work, it's not sexy work, but it is work, and it will move you along, and it will make you money, and it will progress you. Those people will also expose themselves to more opportunities than anybody else. There's a very famous saying by Pericles: "Poverty is not a disgrace, but not striving to overcome it is." Don't be afraid to put in the [ __ ] work to do the odd jobs. If you're not rich, there is nothing beneath you when it comes to making money, and it comes to doing what you got to do or to create a stepping stone to the next thing. If you were born poor, that is not your fault. But now you are an adult who has a responsibility to work themselves out of it. And so whatever opportunities come your way, do not be ashamed to take them because in taking opportunities like the one I took, I was able to get a job anywhere else because I had the name of that resort on my resume. People who are willing to feel embarrassed, to feel like they're doing work beneath them, create so much more opportunity for themselves than those who aren't. And if you're not where you want to be, there's nothing below your pay rate. There's no shame in being broke, and there's no shame in doing grunt work, but there is shame in not trying to change your circumstances.

The next rule of making money is that counting other people's money won't make you more. Here's a question: Does counting someone else's reps in the gym make you more buff? No. So then why would counting somebody else's money make you more rich? Counting other people's money only steals more attention from you for making your own money. When you're in the process of wanting to make money, constantly worrying about how much money somebody else is making, it might be that you feel like you're going to be paying someone too much money. About four years ago, when we first started Acquisition.com, we had a deal come to us, and it was a really good deal. Everything fit. And as we're going through the deal process, in the beginning, I knew I was like, "I'm going to do deals where I get kind of the short end of the stick because we haven't done this before. We didn't have reputation doing it yet." And so I was okay with that, and I just didn't really think about it.

But I brought on a different executive, and that executive came on, and we were in the middle of a deal process with this company. My executive came to me and he said, "Lila, we can't do this deal like this. If we sell for the target that we have, he's going to make $500 million." And I was like, "Why is that bad?" He's like, "That's not fair. He's like, if, if we do an exit, he gets $500 million, and we put in all this work, and we've done all these things, and we only get X amount. Like, that's just not fair." I start thinking, "Damn, maybe I'm just settling." At the same time, I'm thinking, "Like, maybe there's something I'm missing here." But I looked on paper, and I was like, "Well, the deal aligns with all the targets that we have." Despite that, we said, you know what? This doesn't make sense for us. We're going to need this instead of this in order for this deal to get done. It ended up not working out. And I have watched that company over the last four years essentially 10x in value. They've been incredibly successful. They have an amazing brand and reputation, and they have gone on to be this like, very, very valuable company. And I really thought about it, and I was like, "Man, it was the wrong decision." Because if the deal works for you, why do you care how much the other person's going to make? It's a poor state of mind.

People who don't have money are constantly focused on how much everyone else has. And what I didn't realize is that that person that was that bug in my ear, I actually have a net worth that is quite literally a million times more than that person's. Of course, I'm not counting other people's money because that is not how wealthy people think because they know that focusing on someone else's pockets does not fill their own. And they also know that there's a lot of benefits to people around you and other people having a lot of money, and that it's not some scarce resource that you need to have more of than every single person around you. If you're trying to make more money and if you want to become wealthy, stop looking at other people's money. If you are scrolling social media and there are people who piss you off because they make more money than you, unfollow them. And if every deal you make, you feel like you always need to have the upper hand and you need to be making more money than this other person, you will not have the best deals because the best deals are when each person feels like they got the better end of the deal. Nobody that I know that is truly wealthy does that. They're happy when other people make a lot of money. What I do see is that when people are less wealthy, they spend all this time negotiating with other people. That doesn't make you more money. It just makes other people less. And then eventually, it makes you less because you could have been spending all that time and energy into just making more money. The grass is greener where you water it, not where you watch it.

The next rule is that you don't need to change your beliefs to make more money, but you do have to change your behavior. I used to think that the reason I didn't make enough money was because I didn't have positive beliefs about it. And I see a lot of people buying into this, which is like, you think that your poor beliefs prevent you from accumulating wealth. When the reality is that it's actually your poor behavior. When I first was thinking I need to make more money, I heard all these people talking about like, "You have to manifest the money and you've got to see it before you get it." I read this book, I remember, and I'm not going to say what book it was because I'm talking [ __ ]. The book specifically said, "I need to act as though money is in abundance and I need to act as if I'm already rich in order to get more money." And so I was like, "Well, I guess rich people give away money." And so I started donating money. And so I remember I was leaving the grocery store, and I had just bought my food, and I walk out, and I see this homeless guy, and he's like, "Could you spare like any food?" I was like, "Yes," and I gave him all my groceries.

Few days went by, week went by. I'm giving away my groceries to hobos, I'm donating money, and I was like, "Nothing's changing." Like, you know, these books are saying that if I, if I believe and I act like somebody is rich, like this money is going to come to me. And then I met my now husband, and I started talking to him about how I was trying to make more money. And he was like, "Well, what are you doing?" And I was like, "Well, I took a job where I'm making less money, and so now I'm reading this book about how to make more money, how to attract it into my life." I remember he said this line to me that just like really stuck: "Money doesn't discriminate who puts in the work to make it." And I remember he said, like, "You don't have to believe certain beliefs to make more money. He's like, "You just got to [ __ ] work."

And then I really like stepped back and I was like, "What am I doing? What if I didn't try and change the way I think and I just change what I'm doing every day?" And that was when I realized, "I should need put in the [ __ ] work if I really want to make more money." What do I need to do? And I was like, "I need to take some [ __ ] risks because I am in a place now where the opportunity that I am in is one that is very limited in terms of its upside potential of making money." And so that is when I was like, "I need to take a risk in terms of starting a business." And that is what really propelled me into saying like, "[ __ ] all of this trying to manifest the money in my mind. I'm going to try and go make money with my hands."

The road to success, you get there by working hard. You don't get there with intention. You get there by doing it. And one of the key pieces in making more money is going from staying in your head to getting busy with your hands. And a lot of people never make that switch. They think by reading all these books and all this [ __ ] out there that for some reason your brain and your feelings are preventing you from making money. I promise you that if you go out there and you do the same things as a person who made a million dollars, you will make a million dollars, even if you don't believe you're worthy of it. And that's what took me seeing it to understand it. I didn't believe in myself, and I didn't believe that it was possible for me to make that kind of money. I didn't believe it was possible for me to make hundreds of millions of dollars. Never believed it once. Never thought it was possible ahead of time. And here I am. I just took action like somebody who could. That's it. That is why this rule is so important because you can't manifest your way to a million bucks. You have to go [ __ ] work for it. Money usually comes to the people who are too busy working to look for it. Go change your actions, and your thoughts and beliefs will follow. You don't need to read more books. You don't need to change your mindset. You need to take action.

There's a quote that I always remember by Tony Robbins: "Stay in your head, you're dead." Nothing good comes from staying in our heads. Get out of your mind and get into life and start taking action like somebody who could make money. And it wasn't until I got out of this cycle of staying in my head and trying to change my beliefs in order to take action that I realized that that was actually what was keeping me stuck. Thinking that I needed to change my beliefs was preventing me from making money.

The last point is that the amount of money you make is directly correlated with the difficulty of the problem that you solve. So Elon Musk was actually the first person I ever heard say this. It was a quote to the degree of, "If you want to make more money, provide more value by solving harder problems." The mission of Tesla is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy because we see what happens if we don't have sustainable energy. And Elon is extremely passionate about that. The mission of SpaceX is to make life multiplanetary. All of the missions of every company that Elon Musk has, all solve a very big problem. And by consequence of that, he makes a lot of money.

And so how does that translate to you? I'll give you an example. I knew a guy, and he had a software company, and that software company did well. And it was a software company that basically did SMS chat. And so it facilitated a chat between a prospect and a company that wanted to acquire that prospect. And it just wasn't like growing like somebody would want it to. And to me, I'm looking at it, I'm like, "Well, it's a good tool. At the same time, there's like 30 other tools that solve that problem." He wants to do a deal with me because we were one of the biggest customers of this platform. And so when he comes out there, he actually presents me with something completely out of nowhere. He says, "I've actually started a different company. I just wanted to bring it to you because I started this new protein bar." And I was like, "Oh, a protein bar? Very interesting." And I'm thinking to myself, "This is probably going to fail because there's so many protein bars out there."

Little did I know, I took one bite of that protein bar and I was like, "[ __ ] I never want to eat another protein bar again." It didn't taste like a protein bar, and it didn't have whey protein in it. And I was like, "Holy [ __ ], this is going to blow up." Why? The problem that it was solving is a problem that no other protein bars in the market had solved, which is that all of them gave you a stomach ache, tasted like [ __ ], and had a lot of calories. His was the lowest calorie I'd ever seen, didn't taste like protein, didn't give me a stomach ache. This company, the tech company that he had, actually ended up just floating along, and then he sold it off for like a couple million dollars. This company blew the [ __ ] up and gave him a multi-nine-figure payday because he solved a harder problem.

You are directly paid in proportion to the difficulty of the problem that you solve. I was a personal trainer, and the most that I maxed out at was making six figures a year. And that's because I taught people how to eat right and exercise. So I'm helping them solve the problem, but I'm not like fully solving it. If you take it a next step further, let's look at something like OIC. How much more money does the creator of OIC make than personal trainer Lila? You just give somebody a medicine, and then they aren't hungry, and therefore they lose weight. It's the same problem, but we're removing the amount of pain they have to incur to have it solved. That is why somebody who creates OIC is going to make more money than somebody who creates a workout program. The amount of pain someone has to endure to get the solution. Again, value is created when you create a better solution or you remove more pain from the solution. And so in this instance, why, what I realized was like, "Oh my gosh, I might have solved the problem, but they have to incur so much pain in order for it to be solved. It's not that valuable."

A lot of people stay stuck making less money because what they don't recognize is that they're solving either problems that don't create a lot of value, or they're solving problems no differently than somebody else. Time over time again, my personal wealth has gone up in accordance with the difficulty of problems that I am able to solve. First, I started one-on-one teaching people how to lose weight. I went from doing that to selling customers into gyms for gym owners. And then I went from that to teaching gym owners how to get customers. And then I went from that to teaching gym owners how to build sellable gyms. And then I went from that to teaching business owners how to build sellable businesses. Then I went from that to teaching CEOs and founders how to build eight or nine-figure enterprises. And each time, what you notice is that I solved a harder problem. And each time I took a jump in solving a more complex problem or providing more value, I made exponentially more money. And it's just been solving harder problems or providing more value than anybody else by removing more pain from the solution.

I also wouldn't have been able to solve the really big problem if I hadn't first solved the very small problem at the beginning. You can't expect that day one, you're going to go from like zero to a billionaire. It's just so rare that that happens because the skills that you accumulate in solving the small problem allow you to stack those skills to then eventually solve the bigger problem. If you solve harder problems, you make more money, but you can't skip steps. The only reason I can make the money I make now is because I have put a decade of eating [ __ ] in and just time over time skill stacking, solving harder and harder problems. Wealth comes from solving problems that others are either unwilling or unable to solve for themselves.