Note: This is an article for those who look for extraordinary wealth. If you prefer the comfort of a 9-5 job I do understand and this article is not applying to you.
If you want to make more money you can have a look at the article ‘How To Make More Money‘ where I wrote down a few principles on how to do that.
“I was poor and rich, and I prefer being rich.” ~Bill Gates
However, wealth is a whole other dimension. Whatever ‘Wealth’ means to you, when we talk about wealth we talk about financial freedom and impact. And in this dimension, wealth is all about choices and process. Writing down 5 steps is awfully inadequate.
Important Things To Know About ‘Wealth’
Getting wealthy, most of the time, is an event. About 80% of the wealthiest people in the world got wealthy in a short timeframe. So one thing we can tell is that ‘Getting rich quick’ exists. Though, many people confuse this with ‘Getting rich easy’. These people don’t realize that the ‘Getting Wealthy’-Event that they are witnessing is just the tip of an iceberg.
If I should teach somebody the principle of getting wealthy in two words, I’d say: ‘Impact Millions‘
True wealth comes by impacting lives with magnitude (fewer life-changing impacts) and / or with scale (smaller impacts for a lot of people).
With time being limited, you can only do that by building a system (e.g. a product, software, automated service…) that leverages your time and knowledge.
Building the knowledge and experience and building the system itself takes a lot of time. Many people forget, that the path to getting wealthy is a long one. The ‘Getting Wealthy’-Event is just the eruption of years and years of hard work. Study history and you’ll find that all the big names in history had about 10 ‘dark years’. This is the process behind the final success. People violating this pattern by getting rich quick without process aren’t actually keeping their wealth for very long (lottery winners for example).
So let’s break down the process of creating wealth.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. ” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
It’s all about choices. Wherever you are right now, your choices in the past led you there. If you don’t like your situation, make better choices. Many quotes about success talk about perseverance and commitment and while the idea is good, they are a bit misleading. Focusing on being persistent or committed would be like focusing on the ‘Getting Rich’-Event while neglecting the process. The process resulting in the event of being persistent is a long chain of choices.
Control Your Choices To Control Your Future
If you aren’t yet where you want to be, you always have the choice between the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. Everybody wants. But not everybody gets. Because not everybody’s willing to do the things required to get what you want. Not everybody wants to sacrifice today for a better tomorrow. Unfortunately, when it comes to wealth the reward oftentimes comes stacked at the end.
If you want extraordinary wealth, you cannot do what everyone is doing. You must resolve to work like noone does, to later live a life that only few can live. Wealthy people build upon knowledge and experience. Both is hard to attain. Although that’s not for me, I can fully understand people who build their life around the comfort of a 9-5 job. There are many ways to happiness. The funny thing about happiness is that is has nothing to do with being confident with what you have but everything with being confident with what you don’t have.
What You Need To Create Wealth
If you are not gifted with a special talent to be an actor, pro athlete or artist, there are a few things that you’ll find among all successful self-made millionaires.
1. Management
You need to know how to manage yourself and how to manage knowledge. Managing yourself also means to know yourself. What motivates you, what your message is and what your reason is. Then it helps to be able to manage and motivate people.
2. Marketing
You’ll notice that many millionaires have some kind of empathy. They know what is in demand. Not only can they create things but also bring them to the marketplace. Impacting millions implies that you have -to a certain extend- some kind of marketing expertise.
3. Strategy
After realizing that it’s all about your choices, successful people always have a strategy or vision. Don’t be discouraged, it also took them some time to find that strategy (see the dark ten years earlier).
“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” ~ Pablo Picasso
After all, wealth is a mix of many principles and concepts. If you really want to commit, we would say you must read the following two book. The first one, ‘The Millionaire Fastlane‘ is like the most comprehensive book I’ve ever read on the principles of wealth. If it didn’t already existed, I’d write a book which would have been very similar to it.
- Read The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime.
by MJ DeMarco
- Read Managing Oneself (Harvard Business Review Classics)
by Peter F. Drucker
- Learn about Marketing (yes, Internet Marketing is one of the best things to learn right now)
Share this article if you think a friend needs to read it!
Yorick Tran
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