The Little Book of Common Sense Earning: A Personalized "Index-Fund" Approach to Business Income
A Tribute to John C. Bogle: Why the least dramatic approach to income still works—and over time, works better than anything else.
What Charlie Munger Saw Coming—and What Jack Bogle Quietly Proved.
In my last essay, I explored one of Charlie Munger’s most enduring insights:
“Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome.”
But what happens when the outcomes keep collapsing—even when the incentives seem aligned?
What if you’re not being irrational—just overcomplicated?
That’s where the late John C. Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, comes in.
Bogle didn’t just challenge the culture of stock-picking—he dismantled it. In The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, he reframed the entire game: Stop chasing outperformance. Start trusting a system that actually holds.
His method isn’t sexy.
It isn’t algorithmic.
It doesn’t depend on dashboards, dopamine, or digital theatrics.
But it works—because it’s structurally sound:
Just own the whole S&P 500 index.
Stop trying to outguess what you’re not built to control.
But Bogle actually wasn’t just writing about investing—he was modeling what long-game economic leadership actually looks like.
And when you apply that lens to your business income—whether personal or organizational—the parallels are immediate and undeniable.
Especially now, when too many thought leaders still treat income as a mindset issue instead of a design flaw.
But most income problems aren’t motivational. They’re architectural.
Most business breakdowns don’t stem from laziness—they stem from entropy: incentives misfiring inside models that were never designed to hold.
So what if we too could stop trying to “beat the market”—
and start becoming the system we trust?
What if the business strategy that’s best for your nervous system…
was also best for your bottom line?
What if doing what’s best for both your portfolio and your heart wasn’t a contradiction—but a sign you're finally building something real?
And what if we finally normalized the boring brilliance of integrity—
not as a performative virtue signal, but as a legitimate economic strategy?
There is a quiet power in structuring your business like an index fund:
not by copying the market, but by structurally aligning with the internal engine that compounds your full-spectrum value without requiring your constant performance.
Examples of business models that reflect this approach include:
A long-term client relationship with calm recurring revenue
A premium signature offer with viability under any market conditions
A curriculum that grows in value the more it’s taught—not the louder it’s launched
A low-drama, high-integrity sales process that doesn’t require manufactured urgency or trickery to convert
It’s not dramatic.
But it works.
And over time, it’s what keeps you in business for the long haul—
and it therefore outperforms almost everything else.
The rest of this essay borrows from key chapters and themes from Bogle’s popular text, something I regret not reading earlier in my life. But I’ve come to find his work offers more than financial wisdom. It offers a blueprint for ethical, stable, behaviorally aligned earning in an era that desperately needs it.
1. A Parable
You did the program.
You followed the script.
You got visible—some posts even went “viral.”
And maybe you’ve had a few real wins.
But now?
You’re exhausted.
You’re still not earning what you could.
And you’re starting to wonder if you’re really the problem.
What if you aren’t?
What if you were handed a performance economy when you actually needed a structural one?
What if you were told to “beat the market” when you should have been building a durable system?
What if you were “coached” to chase an unrealistic ROI when what you needed was behavioral integrity?
What if the problem wasn’t your mindset—but the misalignment between your model and your actual design?
As Bogle wrote after his parable about the Gotrocks Family:
“For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.”
The same is true in entrepreneurship.
The more we chase hype, urgency, and optimization for its own sake, the further we drift from what actually compounds. We stop trusting the quiet rhythms of congruence. We stop building structures that match who we really are.
We forget the cost of friction—until we’ve really burned out.
That’s how most entrepreneurs end up stuck. It’s not for a lack of skill nor for a lack of vision. It’s because their business is a patchwork of conflicting or misguided strategies—never designed to be held by them in the first place.
So they keep tweaking. Keep pivoting. Keep throwing in the kitchen sink.
Because movement feels like progress—even when it’s moving down the drain.
But what if you didn’t have to choose between being yourself and earning sustainably?
"What if the model best suited for your nervous system—and your heart—was also the one that held your income and your bottom line?"
What if it wasn’t a paradox—but a plan?
It won’t go viral.
It won’t get much dopamine.
And people who benefit from your over-performance won’t “like” it much.
But it will hold.
And over time, that’s the only thing that ever actually grows.
You may not get thousands of likes, but you’re far more likely to attract the client who pays thousands of dollars.
Not because you performed.
But because you finally stopped.
2. Rational Exuberance
Bogle wasn’t against growth. He disliked distortion. He saw how unbridled enthusiasm—when untethered from fundamentals—led not to expansion, but to entropy.
You don’t need to give up ambition to earn in a way that lasts. You just need to anchor it in the architecture of who you actually are. When your earning model matches your operating behavior, that’s not restraint—it’s intelligent compounding.
That’s what rational exuberance looks like in business: optimism grounded in infrastructure. Momentum that isn’t manufactured—but earned.
As Bogle wrote: “The expectations market is about speculation. The real market is about investing.” The former is rooted in what he called “short-term noise”—and his advice was to ignore it.
That distinction is everything. Entrepreneurs today face a similar expectations economy—fueled by flash, fear, and FOMO—that will always be more volatile than a system rooted in behavioral alignment. One model keeps you hustling to meet projections; the other keeps paying you steadily for your integrity.
What if we could learn to ignore the noise and focus on what we’re actually best at?
In a culture chasing distorted quantum leaps, integrity is often overlooked—because it’s not loud. But neither is a low-cost index fund. And that’s exactly why it wins. Not because it’s flashy—but because it’s structurally correct.
Rational exuberance is about remembering that growth is good—but only if the foundation can hold it. And for many, that might be the real quantum leap they need to take—but are afraid to.
3. Cast Your Lot with Business
In this chapter, Bogle starts off citing William of Occam, who wrote in the year 1320:
“When there are multiple solutions to a problem, choose the simplest one.”
In investing, that meant trusting the market—not the noise.
In business, it means trusting value creation—not vanity metrics, performance personas, or dopamine-based traction.
Stop trying to out-hype the hype machine. Start building systems that quietly—but consistently—pay you for being structurally congruent.
This is the modern Razor’s Edge: not about speed, but precision.
That’s also where standards come in.
Just as Bogle championed low-cost, long-term investing grounded in market fundamentals, a durable income model must be grounded in structural fundamentals—your own.
The Five Standards of Integrity in Business—originally written for a referral list essay, and outlined in the Munger piece—offer the same grounding function for entrepreneurs that index funds offer for investors: a steady system built on structural fundamentals, not volatility.
These are foundational to The Lucrativity System™—my proprietary diagnostic framework that realigns business income through structural congruence, behavioral alignment, and offer architecture built to hold under real-world conditions:
Structural Integrity: Can your system hold under pressure, or does it collapse without constant energy?
Behavioral Congruence: Are you being paid to be yourself, or to perform someone else’s template?
Delivery Accountability: Are clients actually gaining traction, or just feeling seen? Are you offering a healthy horse, or just a cart before the horse?
Referral Independence: Are you building trust—or simply stacking borrowed credibility?
Non-Exploitive Sales and Marketing: Are you selling and marketing what works—or just what sells through manipulation or distortion?
These standards aren’t trends.
They’re compounding truths.
And just like Bogle’s investing approach, they may seem too simple at first—until everything else breaks.
Bogle bet on the structure.
So should you.
Even if you’re already successful, this may be the “Razor’s Edge” your business is really missing—not to grow louder, but to keep growing cleaner, quieter, and more sustainably.
4. How Most Entrepreneurs Turn a Winner’s Game Into a Loser’s Game
They try to game the algorithm. They build offers based on someone else’s blueprint. They pour money into ads. They price for optics instead of fit—hoping to impress, not to align.
Like retail investors trying to time the market, they turn business into a rigged game of performance and luck—trading structural durability for temporary spikes, and sustainable income for superficial wins.
Hence Bogle warns in Chapter 4:
“The miracle of compounding returns is overwhelmed by the tyranny of compounding costs.”
But for entrepreneurs, the real compounding costs aren’t just financial. They’re structural and behavioral.
Per each standard:
They skip structural integrity, building offers that collapse without constant maintenance.
They abandon behavioral congruence, performing versions of themselves that burn them out.
They avoid delivery accountability, relying on emotional resonance instead of real results.
They chase referral clout instead of cultivating earned trust.
They market through distortion and sell through coercion—instead of with clarity and transparency.
This is how a winning game becomes a losing one: when the very structure that could have compounded your value starts extracting it instead.
The result? Burnout. Misfires. Incoherent income. A business that looks successful—but can’t hold under its own weight.
Instead of a steadily growing enterprise, it becomes a steadily declining performance.
As Bogle wrote of index investing: “The index fund is there to guarantee that you will earn your fair share of whatever returns our businesses earn.”
The Five Standards do the same—quietly protecting your earning potential by anchoring it in something that holds.
“Don’t Look for the Needle—Buy the Haystack”
Have you ever been asked if you wanted to turn your annual income into your monthly income?
Not if you can—but if you want to?
The late Bob Proctor popularized the idea in You Were Born Rich, and many in his lineage still echo it today. Some coaching funnels dangle it like a hypnotic dream: all you need is mindset, momentum, and marketing magic. You just have to want it badly enough.
Sometimes, I’ll ask this same income question to clients or classes. And it’s often met with silence.
But here’s the truth no one tells you:
Most people do want it.
They just haven’t been given the right structure to hold it.
And for many, it’s about having the right permission structure to even say they want it out loud—especially when the people around them are more comfortable with their self-sacrifice than their self-trust.
Because scaling income isn’t about desire.
It’s about architecture.
And if your internal engine and external structure aren’t aligned, then the faster you try to grow, the faster your business will behave like fireworks—explosive on the rise, but then it blows up and burns out in seconds.
Meanwhile, the people you were trying to please?
Still not pleased.
That’s why Bogle’s “Buy the haystack” principle applies so cleanly.
But it’s also why he cautioned:
“The stars produced in the mutual fund field are rarely stars; all too often they are comets.”
The same goes for too many coaches, funnels, and businesses built on hype.
But let’s not burn the whole field down, either.
If you want to turn your annual income into a monthly one, you don’t need to hustle harder or manifest better.
You need a different vehicle—one with a durable chassis.
A structure that lets your value compound without depending on visibility spikes, burnout cycles, or external approval.
Because the truth is: this kind of income jump is possible.
But not if you’re trying to run a Ferrari engine in a salvaged Ford Escort.
Here’s how you build it—the Lucrative way:
Design offers that rely on alignment—not performance.
Price for integrity, not for optics or applause.
Market with clarity, not emotional manipulation.
Sell with behavioral congruence, not pressure or persuasion.
Deliver results, not just resonance or hype.
In short:
Stop looking for the needle.
Build the haystack.
That’s precisely what the Five Standards of Integrity in Business were built to deliver.
They’re not a gimmick.
They’re not a funnel.
They’re the structural foundation that lets your income rise sustainably—
because the system was built to reflect you.
Because yes—your monthly income can become your old annual income.
But only if your business model holds as much as your ambition.
Integrity isn’t a delay tactic.
It’s the multiplier.
And when my Lucrativity System™ helps you calibrate your marketing and sales approach to how you’re actually wired, your results don’t just improve—they compound.
So let everyone else chase magic.
As Bogle warned about those who exceed the norms:
“The first shall be last.”
Or at best, “return to average or below.”
You, on the other hand, will be the one quietly proving you were “born rich.”
You will build wealth methodically. Structurally. Sustainably. And for the long haul.
No hype. No hacks.
Just structure that compounds—like it did for Bogle.
What Should I Do Now?
Now it’s your turn:
If you haven’t yet read my previous piece on how Charlie Munger’s thought leadership shaped my approach, make time for it. It sets the lens for everything that follows.
If you did read it—and it resonated—but you feel stuck in implementation, this is your next step.
If Bogle’s wisdom speaks to you, but you never thought to apply it to how you architect your own business income—this is your moment.
Start by asking:
Is my current income structure aligned with how I actually operate?
Are my actual behavioral strengths being utilized and recognized?
Am I compounding congruence, or chasing validation?
What system am I really betting on—mine, or someone else’s?
Let Munger give you the lens.
Let Bogle show you the rhythm.
Let me and my Lucrativity System™ help you build the infrastructure.
Because when incentives align with behavior—
and structure supports the person, not just the performance—
the outcome isn’t a gamble.
It’s inevitable.
“The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.
Stick to the good plan.” — John C. Bogle
PS - If you are a wealth manager or another financial services professional:
If you’d like to further explore how my work can help your clients, please visit this special landing page. You’re also welcome to send me a message to talk further.
And if this piece resonated and you’re ready to align your own income with the structure that fits you—here are a couple of powerful places to start:
A 1:1 Diagnostic Session—Your Next Lucrative Move:
This is a precise, personalized way to spot exactly where your earning misfires are happening—and why. In 90 minutes, we’ll map out your current architecture, surface key misalignments, and identify your most structurally sound next move.
Interested in a Long-Term Private Recalibration and Support System?
Lucrative Elite 1:1 is my exclusive signature high-level coaching partnership for structurally intelligent entrepreneurs and founders ready to rewire their income around who they actually are.
No guesswork. No scripts and formulas. Just radical clarity, behavioral alignment, and revenue you can believe in.
For more info about the Five Standards for Integrity in Business and some insights into how you can make sure you’re applying them, please visit my website:
Thanks for reading—and for being part of a new economy built on structural integrity. Please share this with anyone who would appreciate it or would benefit from learning more about my work.