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When I was young, my goals were not lofty. I didn’t want to be President of the United States or conquer the world. My dream was to become a college professor. To educate myself to reach my dream, I needed income. I could not get any money from my parents, and because we were a middle class family, it was hard to get college grants and loans.

To generate income, I started up an insurance agency. I figured that if I wrote enough policies, I could have continual income from premiums—at least enough to support me through .college. But as hard as I worked to get policies on the books, it was still hard to get paid. I was successful, but it just wasn’t enough.

So I made two moves that changed my life permanently. First, inspired by the book How I Took a Thousand Dollars and Made Five Million Investing in Real Estate by William Nickerson, I turned to real estate. I borrowed money to buy my first couple of properties.

Second, simply out of the need to buy groceries for my family, I latched onto a job driving a taxicab. Have you ever had one of those experiences that afterwards continues to change just about everything else you do? Driving a taxi was just such an experience for me.

In order for you to understand what this is all about, you need to come back with me to my first day driving a cab. The company I started driving for, Yellow Cab Company in Tacoma, Washington, had a mandatory rule that entailed spending a day training with a cab driver-trainer named Bill Marsh.

After being out with Bill for about 45 minutes—30 minutes at Denny’s getting him a cup of coffee—I realized that I could handle this cab driving business on my own. As I watched what he did, it dawned on me that to be a successful cab driver you only had to do one thing.

I asked Bill if he would take me back to the lobby to get my own taxi. He said I had to spend the whole “mandatory” day with him. “Look,” I said, “could you please just take me back?”

Back at the cab company I talked to the owner/partner. “Mrs. Potter?” I said, “My name is Wade Cook. I’m a brand new cab driver. You don’t know me, but is there any way I can just take a taxi out for the day?”

She replied, “Oh no, no. You have to spend the day with Bill Marsh.”

I persisted. I explained to her that I knew Tacoma really well and told her that if she didn’t like what I did by five or six o’clock that afternoon, she would never see me again. She listened and ended up giving me a little beat-up Dodge Dart for the day.

I took it out that first day and made $110—that was my net. The second day I came back with about $90 profits and the third day about $140.1 was off and running. I began making between $3,200 and $3,800 a month. I needed about $1,200 a month to live on. I was able to take the rest, holding some out for taxes, and apply it to buying and fixing up houses. With this money, I purchased nine rental houses my first year.

My point here is the lesson I learned in driving a taxi—to me the most significant and powerful financial lesson I have ever learned in my life. In fact, since then I’ve hobnobbed with some of the greatest financial minds in the country (doing radio, TV talk shows and seminars in 43 different states), and nothing I’ve learned from any of those men and women is more powerful than what I learned my first day driving a cab. The lesson is simply this—MONEY IS MADE IN THE METER DROP.

What does “the meter drop” mean? Every time you get into a taxi, the driver pushes the meter down (nowadays it’s a computerized button), and it costs you $1.50 to $2. Whether it is a $5 run or a $50 run, you still pay $1.50 every time you get in the cab.

Many cab drivers only take big runs. In Tacoma they positioned themselves in town to get the run to Sea-Tac Airport, a $30 to $35 fare. At the same time, I was beating the cab to death by going for all the small runs. I would take the $3, $6 and $8 runs. At the end of some busy days I would have up to forty, fifty or sixty runs. You see the difference? I was killing them. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my share of big runs too. Sometimes a little $6 run would turn into a $15 run because the person my passenger was going to visit wasn’t home. However, those extra meter drops really added up to a lot of cash.