This Book is Behind Lock and Key in My Fireproof Safe...If I Lost Everything...I Could Get It Back with this Book Series...
Plus, a true story of a regular man who found the Midas Touch...
This picture is from a book from a series I have locked up in my fireproof safe.
I’m about to share a (mostly) true story about the author and early pioneer of the financial “toll position” concept.
(Mostly true because I am telling it from memory.)
Harvey Brody was fresh out of the army circa 1950.
He was determined to become personally and financially independent.
With the smell of the Army still oozing from his belongings, he didn’t feel like he had any “big dollar” skills.
He labeled himself a “penniless dreamer.”
What Harvey did have was a mechanical sense, creativity and pig-headed persistence.
One day he’d picked up an old typewriter for a couple of bucks.
He realized the typewriter needed a bit of TLC and some oil in the right places.
He disassembled it.
Oiled her up and VOILA, almost good as new.
He then sold the typewriter for $20.
($20 bought a lot more in the 1950s)
This is where most people would’ve pat themselves on the back and then carried on with life as usual and went to work in a factory.
Not Harvey.
He realized he could get his hands on all the broken typewriters he wanted.
(I call this supply “gravel.”)
Harvey placed ads in cheap newspapers that said, “I buy used typewriters in any condition for cash.”
He’d pay no more than $5 or so for them.
Often people would let him have the typewriter free if he’d just haul it away.
He couldn’t fix them all.
He didn’t have to because, with a little oil and some elbow grease, he could fix half of them up and sell them for 10 or 20 times what he paid.
He’d get them for free or a few bucks.
And sell them for $10, $20 or $40 nearly as fast as he could fix them.
(I call this “gold.”)
Harvey had discovered what I call his “Midas Touch”.
What is the “Midas Touch”?
Harvey figured out how to take “gravel”, which was abundant and cheap and turn it into something rare: “gold”.
In this case…
The gravel was old typewriters.
The gold was working typewriters which were priced far below new typewriters.
Harvey’s ability to turn gravel into gold is his “Midas Touch.”
Now Harvey was making far more than the average fella in the 1950’s AND he didn’t have to punch a clock, or have a boss to tell him when he could take a bathroom break or when he could go on vacation.
He wasn’t making a fortune, though and he had considerable BOG DOWN.
He could only fix so many typewriters.
He also could sell them as fast as he could fix them, but SUPPLY became a problem. (More on that in a sec.)
But Harvey’s life was about to go NUTZ ZONGO.
After disassembling fifty-eleven typewriters so he could get to the parts that needed to be oiled, which was super time-consuming…
He made a breakthrough.
He modified a small oil tube with a crude plastic spout that looked like a spindly “straw.”
This saved Harvey countless hours and chopped out a lot of bog down…
But it’s also where Harvey’s life started going nutz.
Harvey was now in control of what he’d later call a TOLL POSITION.
Harvey realized from car engines to rocket ships, hundreds of mechanical things needed to be oiled in hard-to-reach places.
He patented his Zoom Spout Oiler and then got hundreds of distributors to sell it for him.
The manufacturer made them.
Distributors sold them.
Young Harvey got a piece of every sale JUST because he held the patent and licensing.
He could go about his day with money coming in without bog down.
The Zoom Spout oiler still sells to THIS DAY!
Harvey went on to set up dozens and dozens more toll positions.
He especially liked chemical stuff because it was cheap (gravel) to produce and could be packaged up with the right “copy” to make it 10 or 10 times more valuable (gold).
The Zoom Spout Oiler was his 2nd Midas Touch.
Turning cheap chemicals into something useful.
He was one of the first on the “pepper spray” bandwagon from my research.
Do you know what his favorite toll position was, though?
INFORMATION! (Gravel)
No products to manufacture.
Cheap to ship. (No downloads back in his day.)
You can make them once and sell them again and again.
Super easy to ADD VALUE, license and turn into GOLD.
Harvey TOLL POSITIONED all kinds of info products from make-money stuff to martial art manuals.
He licensed many of his products, whether it was a chemical product where he licensed the formula to an info product where he got licensing rights to the Intellectual Property.
Harvey’s resourcefulness and ingenuity have forever influenced me.
I don’t know for sure, but I’m pretty sure he influenced folks like Jay Abraham.
So, while I think the “toll position” is a super useful idea…
I think…
… a toll position comes AFTER figuring out your Midas Touch.
The first step in becoming financially and personally independent is figuring out how to take something abundant and common and make it rare and valuable.
It must become MUCH, much MORE VALUABLE TOO!
I used to get old beater cars on consignment from dealerships; then, I’d detail them and drive them to an auction.
If I sold them for more than what the dealership wanted, I’d make a few hundred or a thousand bucks or so.
It worked, kinda.
I got paid more than just detailing a car.
The problem was there wasn’t enough MARGIN.
I was turning gravel into prettier gravel, but it wasn’t “gold.” So, it didn’t pay well for the work and time I had to put into it.
I had bog down disease baby!
This is the same issue I see with many info products, coaching and such today.
These good folks struggle.
They are turning “electrons” into products they can get paid for…
But their “prahdukt” is not gold because it’s not RARE.
There are 1001 courses on running Facebook ads or “How to be a Youtuber“ “Crypto” etc…
Those courses are abundant and a dime a dozen.
Shiny gravel doesn’t sell as fast or for as much as GOLD!
It takes someone with the Midas Touch to come and work their magic.
Do you know what comes before the Midas Touch?
Midas EYES. Or Money Goggles.
Magic tricks aren’t really that hard to pull off.
You must know what the RIGHT CONDITIONS are.
Once somebody shows you…
You can’t UNSEE IT!
Allow me to demonstrate:
Can you join all 9 dots by drawing no more than 4 straight lines?
If you’ve seen this puzzle before, I bet you know EXACTLY how to do it!
Even if it took you hours the first time or you couldn’t do it before, once you figured it out or were shown…You can never forget it!
If you haven’t seen it…
Try to figure it out for a few minutes.
Then look at the answer below.
(WARNING: You will never be able to UNSEE the answer:-0)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:9_Dots_Blue_Solved_Arrow.png
Now, this is all fun and games when it comes to a puzzle.
But to loosely quote Harvey Brody, “Until you get at least one toll position working for you, you’ll be trading time for dollars until you’re elderly.”
Now, on our next Sinner get-together over Zoom…
I am going to lay out a simple toll position…
Where we take a common course, ebook, video or any intellectual property really…
Which is likely as COMMON as dirt.
Apply the Midas Touch to it, making it FAR RARER, MORE VALUABLE and in great demand.
If I put 10,000 people into a room, I am pretty sure only one or two could SEE the magic trick, let alone apply the Midas Touch.
Once I show it to you, like the 9-dot puzzle, you won’t be able to UNSEE it.
It’s worked for me. Every. Single. Time.
It’s worked for a few folks I’ve shown it to…every single time.
It’s not hard to understand.
It’s just hard to see at first.
After our next Zoom together...
It’s my goal to make you one of the few folks on the planet who sees this “gravel to gold” toll position.
Once you see it…
You can look for the right situations and apply your Midas Touch.
Life gets super fun when you can create tremendous (and sometimes life-changing) value for other people because YOU can see something they can’t.
Folks with the Midas Touch don’t need a lot of “sales skills”.
Just like Harvey didn’t need to be a great salesperson.
In 1957 a brand-new IBM electric typewriter sold new for $420. (I looked it up!)
That was a heap of cash in 1957.
But Harvey could pick them up free or for a couple of bucks…refurbish them almost as good as new and sell them for $40 or $50.
$420 New? Or $40 good as new?
NO BRAINER decision when you only make a few bucks an hour!
His biggest problem wasn’t selling them.
His refurbished typewriters at 1/10th the price sold like hotcakes.
His biggest problem was finding enough broken ones he could fix.
With what I’m showing you next week…
It’s very much the same.
We are offering something for 1/10th the cost (or better) of what they are currently paying without our Midas Touch.
BUT…
We won’t run out of gravel…ever.
We also get to be real heroes!
I hope you can make it!
It won’t be the same without ya.