The Trick to Riches
Causing Wealth to Happen to You
When you daydream about being vastly rich, how do you see that money coming to you? Is it just mysteriously there, right in your hand, ready to spend and spend and spend? Or maybe the only way you can imagine getting riches is by winning the lottery?
More than 8,000 millionaires dot the fiscal map of the United States alone. And 90% of them started out with essentially nothing. They got theirs the old-fashioned way … they earned it all. Of course, many of the industries they rode to riches are not old-fashioned, but that’s a different matter.
Look at the richest man on the planet. It only took him about 15 years to rise to top spot on the wealth charts. After working 15 years in your chosen career, where are you?
A lot of people, like Bill Gates, have entered the industry of computers. A lot of them have started software companies. But one was so willing to unleash his mind and follow the possibilities he sensed, that he created a whole new way to dominate the world. Love him or hate him, you have to admit that Bill Gates has never wasted his time debating the limits of his Universe.
And he’s rich precisely because he has created value that other people want. Have other people created better value, better software or better operating systems? Probably, but they didn’t have the limitless thinking it takes to try and put their products into the hands of every person on the planet. Bill Gates did … in fact, that was his vision from the very beginning.
A Better Aim
If you want riches, you have a choice. You can either sit like a stump and wait for fate to plop down a wad of cash (or opportunity) into your waiting hands, or you can find out what people want and go out and provide it for them.
If you follow the former track and wait for good fortune to smile on you, I can only wish you good luck. You’ll need luck because the competition on that path is incredibly fierce. A LOT of people are just sitting and waiting. They’re not eager to offer value to others, so they basically want something for nothing. That’s a very large crowd you’re considering joining.
But if you follow the other path, which involves going out and finding ways to be valuable to other people, you’ll find fortune a little more ready to meet you halfway. Now, I’m talking about creating real value (value which other people want to receive), not pretend value (which you may want to force upon other people, even though they have no use for it).
Unwanted Verse
I once knew a university professor who wrote poetry. Reams of poetry. He was constantly mailing it out and getting it back, rejected. Virtually none of his pieces sold.
Now, I’m not here to debate the merits of any particular style of poetry, but I do know that he never took editorial comments seriously. He insisted that his poetry was “too subtle” for those silly publications. It’s more likely, however, that his verse simply was not the kind of material they wanted to receive.
That didn’t make him a bad poet, but it did make him a poor judge of the people he claimed to be trying to serve (his market). He wanted to force them to read what he wanted to write.
There’s a lesson in this. If you have strong convictions about the product or service you want to produce, that’s fine. But be aware that the people whom you’re expecting to pay you money may have equally strong convictions about what they want to spend their money on.
If your convictions harmonize with those of your market, you’ve got a winner and you’ll probably make truckloads of money.
If, on the other hand, your convictions clash with theirs, you’re going to go hungry a lot. After all, it’s those stubborn, dull-witted customers who have the money. If you want them to give it to you, you’ll have to re-examine your convictions.
And usually what passes for convictions is not really convictions at all — just rigid self image issues. Only that.
This means that if you’ve had problems attracting wealth in the past, it may be time for you to look more closely at your own beliefs about yourself. (Yes, even if you’re still calling these beliefs “convictions.”)
