I Made $15 Million While Being Paralyzed from the Neck down. Here's How:

When you can't move your body, one thing becomes crystal clear:

Thoughts are everything.

I can't walk, feed myself, or go to the bathroom without assistance. Nothing except my face moves, and even that is incredibly weak. Like…I would lose a fight with a toddler drunk on Benadryl.

But I've also made $15 million.

Without moving anything but my face.

This is my story, on the lessons I learned, and my advice for anyone who feels trapped in an impossible situation.

Part One: How Is This Even Possible?

Before we get into the business stuff, let’s talk about how my condition works and the gadgets that give me superpowers.

I don’t have a spinal injury. I was born with a disease that takes away your ability to move. It’s called Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA).

I can’t move my hands. Walk. Nothing. The only thing I can move is my face.

I DO have sensation all over my body. I can feel everything. Just can’t move.

I drive my wheelchair by blowing and sucking in on a straw. It’s called Sip n Puff.

I type on the computer with a microphone and speech dictation software called Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

I also have a special mouse I can operate entirely with my lips. It’s called the Tetramouse.

And otherwise, I have nurses that take care of me 24 hours a day. Insurance doesn’t pay for this. I have to pay out-of-pocket, and it’s super expensive. More on that later.

Put everything together, and I can operate a computer as well as anyone. Maybe better.

I spend nearly every waking hour in front of a computer screen. I run my business, manage investments, and talk with friends all over the world.

You shouldn’t feel sorry for me. My life is pretty awesome.

But it wasn’t always like this.

Years ago, I was dependent on the government to survive, trapped by laws that literally made it illegal for me to get a job, and was forced to live in poverty on less than $800 a month.

Yet I escaped.

And if you’re feeling trapped, I can help you escape too.

Part Two: Finding a Way out

The only insurance in the United States that pays for nurses is Medicaid.

It’s a government program. You have to be in poverty to get it.

And so at the age of 18, I found myself in a trap.

Without nurses, I would die. The cost was around $250,000 per year, and there was no way I could pay it myself.

It was Medicaid or death. Literally.

The problem is, Medicaid in my state had an income maximum of $800. If I made more than $800, they could take away all my nurses. This meant death.

So I lived on $800 a month. You might think that’s impossible, but it’s not. You rent a cheap room in a house with other people and eat mostly rice and whatever meat or vegetable is on sale.

This was my life. It sucked.

But I found a way out.

I figured out how to build assets that can be converted into money at will.

Take a social media following, for instance. If you have a bunch of followers, you can get sponsorships, launch your own products, or do consulting with your fans.

You convert one asset (followers) into another asset (money).

So instead of getting paid, I focused on accumulating other things that can be converted into money.?

Specifically, I focused on accumulating powerful friends. I treated them like assets that could be acquired, nurtured, and monetized.

I realize that makes me sound like a sociopath. But when you’re poor, you can’t afford to be self-righteous.

Here’s the honest to God truth about how I turned my friends into living, breathing money machines…

Part Three: Getting Wealthy without Making Any Money

How do you make powerful people want to be your friends? And better yet, how do you make them want to help you get rich?

It all starts with a simple but frequently misunderstood principle:

Skills.

I define them as abilities that allow you to solve problems. If someone has a broken car (problem), they bring it to a car mechanic who can fix it (skill).

If you have skills, people value you because you can solve their problems. If you have no skills, you are a useless human being who no one cares about.

Therefore, the beginning of wealth is skill acquisition.

I started with freelance writing. I’d always been a much better writer than most people, so I asked myself, “How can I use this talent to solve problems for other people?”

At the time, blogging was taking off. The more articles they published, the more website traffic they received, and this in turn resulted in more advertising revenue.

The problem was, it’s almost impossible for one person to publish a great article every day, much less five great articles per day like some websites were doing. So, bloggers were looking for “guest writers” to write articles. The more website traffic you could get them, the more valuable you were.

So I became an expert at writing articles that go viral. I obsessed over it for 12+ hours a day, studying the most popular articles and figuring out what made them work. I then practiced my craft for hours everyday, writing and rewriting articles until they were engineered to go viral.

The result? I became freakishly good at going viral. About half of the articles I wrote got over 100,000 visitors and about 10% of them got over 1 million visitors.

Suddenly, every website in the world wanted me to write for them. Not just wanted… they practically begged. They started offering me thousands of dollars per article.

Which I couldn’t accept, of course. Because Medicaid limited me to $800 per month.

So I asked for introductions to powerful people instead.

I literally went on Facebook and Twitter and paid attention to who these popular bloggers were friends with and picked out who I wanted introductions to. I then offered to write content for those people in exchange for more introductions.

Within a few months, I was one of the best connected people in the blogosphere. Billionaires, best-selling authors, social media influencers – I knew everyone.

And then I cashed in.?

I moved to Mexico where nursing costs were only about $60,000 per year, not $250,000, and I canceled my Medicaid insurance. I then announced a new company where I would consult on people’s content for $500 an hour, and I got all my powerful friends to endorse it and send me clients.

Within 24 hours, I had hundreds of clients reach out to me. I went from making nothing to $500 an hour, and I had a six-month waiting list of people who wanted to talk with me.

You might think this was the end of the story. I escaped the poverty trap and lived happily ever after, right?

Sort of. Yes, I solved my money problem, but at this point, I had a different problem:

Time.

My income was constrained by how many hours I worked. Sure, I was making $500 an hour, but I was still trading time for money. If I stopped working, I stopped earning.

And that worried me. My body was still deteriorating every year, growing weaker and weaker, putting me in more and more pain. I didn’t know how long I could continue.

That’s when I realized I wasn’t really free. I just traded one trap for another. It was a better trap for sure, but if I really wanted to be free, I needed to earn passive income.

Part Five: Freedom through Passive Income

Let’s be clear about the definition of passive income:

Investing time or money today to earn money for years into the future without doing extra work.

In other words, it’s not about doing nothing and getting rich. You still have to work hard.

The difference is, you’re not paid just once. You are paid over and over again for the hard work you did months or even years ago.

Your 401(k) is a great example of passive income. Money gets pulled out of your paycheck and invested in the stock market, which almost always goes up.

The problem? Most people don’t invest in their 401(k) or anything else.

Because you’re broke and need money now.

I get it. I’ve been there.

But once I started making $500 an hour, I was no longer in that position.

My expenses in Mexico were only like $6000 a month to live like a king. I was making $40,000 per month, sometimes more.

I started investing the profits, but I realized it was going to take a long time for the stock market to replace my income. Years.

If I wanted true freedom, I needed a source of income that didn’t depend on me.

So I invested the thing I had the least of: time.

I worked 40 hours a week with consulting clients and then another 40 hours a week building an online course that taught other people how to become a guest writer on huge blogs.

Remember, that’s how I started. I had a huge amount of proof and endorsements. I was also the world’s #1 expert on that tiny little topic.

So I spent several months creating a self-study course on exactly how I did it. For $200, people could buy the course and go through it at their own pace. It was completely passive income.

The first month I put it on sale, I made about $30,000. It then stabilized to make about $20,000 per month…

And it stayed there for the next 10 years.

In exchange for several months of work, I made over $200,000 per year for that course for a decade.

That’s when I realized online courses are one of the best sources of passive income.

I made more of them, and eventually my company was pulling in over $1 million per year in course sales. Not all of it was profit. I hired a team of people to run everything, so nothing depended on me.

Several times, I had health issues and couldn’t work for months. It didn’t matter. I made money whether I worked or not.

That’s when I stopped being afraid.

I realized that I truly had escaped poverty. With so much money coming in automatically every month, there was no possible way I could end up back on Medicaid, fighting to survive.

I was free. Really free.

And I still am. Right now I’m writing this by speaking into my microphone, overlooking the mountains of Monterrey Mexico.

I have nurses, a private chef, chauffeur, an entire household staff to take care of me.

I’m living a life beyond my wildest dreams.

And so can you, if you commit yourself.

I wrote this just to prove it’s possible.?

I’ve also given you the steps.

I don’t want anything in return. Except perhaps for you to share this, so it can help more people.

We are all capable of so much more than we think.

You can escape any trap.

You can achieve any dream.

It all starts with believing it’s possible.

And take it from a man who can’t move anything but his face…

Anything – and I really do mean ANYTHING – is possible.

I’m living proof.

Believe.

Believe.

Believe.