Mel Abraham describes the "wealth flatline," the early stage where your earnings come from personal effort alone because your capital base is too small to compound. Most people quit here, seeing no progress, before wealth finally starts climbing on its own.
Now you ask yourself, why the gap between these 2? Here's why. Because your effort doesn't compound, but your money does. See, early on, almost every single dollar that you make in progress is coming from you— your sweat, your income, your discipline, your efforts, and the work that you do. See, your money hasn't grown up yet, and it can't pull its own weight because there isn't enough of it yet to pull anything, quite frankly. That long shallow part, this long part has a name. This is, the whole thing's called the wealth creation curve in my book. But this part, the flat part is called the wealth flatline. And I call it the wealth flatline for 2 reasons, because this is where people will flatline their growth and their wealth building because they lose patience, they lose discipline, and they say, I'm not getting anywhere. And they step off the line.
