| Wealth Secrets | 2002-05-08 17:06 16 comments |
 by Flemming FunchI've noticed that most people who appear to have monetary success are not at all sharing how it happened. People who have an abundance of money are usually extremely vague when you question them on how that came about. You know, I'd like most everybody to be successful and abundant and confortable in their lives. So, I figure, if we just shared widely the most workable methods of arriving there, we could all just use those methods. Unfortunately I don't think it works that way when we're talking about money. Most people who are very financially comfortable can't give you a formula you can follow. Either because they don't know, or because they arrived there by some coincidence or one-shot opportunity that can't be duplicated, or they arrived there through some shady transactions that they would rather not share. I think it is mostly because our money is based on the lie that it represents the production of something valuable over time. Where really what it represents is the aquisition of a profit, i.e. getting more out of something than you put into it. Ideally, getting something for nothing. The best way of making a lot of money would be to have somebody else forced to pay you for nothing, repeatedly. But we usually prefer to pretend that money follows those who're doing good things, or who have the right energy, or who are hardworking and noble people, or who at least have a workable plan. And there's something to that, but I think it is mostly a pretense. At best, you gather money because you're good at gathering money, not because you do good things. I feel somewhat comfortable speaking about this because I myself have been very up and down, several times, and right now I'm up, but I still didn't manage to find much of a formula to how I'd be financially successful. OK, I work hard and try to do the best I can, and if I don't have anybody with money to do it for, I'll promote myself until I get some work. But that doesn't always work. OK, I've always survived. I've never actually physically starved or been homeless, although I've been very close to both, and I have never been rich either. But I've been a year behind in my rent, I've gone backrupt, had my house foreclosed, etc., and I've also at times earned very good money. And none of it seemed to be much in sync with whether I actually did good work or not. I was working equally hard, or rather harder, when I was un-susccessful. And at times when I've looked around at the people I know who are financially abundant, it rarely is an ongoing manifestation of the value of their hard work. It very often is a one-shot kind of thing. Like, one person is doing well and doesn't have to work, because she has a trust fund. I.e. she was married to a successful businessman who left her with investments that'll keep her comfortable the rest of her life. That's great, but I can't emulate that. One friend of mine is a professional investor. That is, he insists that he never works, and he mostly spends his time going to events or going on vacation, and looking for things to put money in. All I could get out of him is that he had some metal-plating business many years ago, which he sold, and then he invested the money, and he just kept doing that. Stocks, real-estate, etc. One friend is rich and has a mansion and a Rolls-Royce and a yacht and owns a bunch of companies. His family was wealthy and pretty much set him up that way. Great and inspiring guy whom it is always fun to hang out with. But none of it really rubs off. When I've tried to hook him into any tangible projects involving money it hasn't quite worked out. Whenever I've managed to look a little into the history of people I know who seem to be able to live a life of leisure, I've mostly either met complete vagueness, or I've found a one-shot thing that somehow lasted for a long time. Royalties from something one did 20 years ago, or a settlement in a law suit, or an inheritance or something. There was an employee in my department a number of years back, at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Russia. When she heard the news on the radio she grabbed the phone and called her investment broker, and bought a bunch of future options for selling grains. A couple of days later that made her $40,000. More than her normal yearly salary. You know, Russia was a big grain producer, and the prices would go up because a lot of their crop now couldn't be sold. What can I learn from that? Oh, certainly to be aware and to look for opportunities and to act on them. A good business person will do that, and that isn't all luck of course. So, good lesson there. But my point is that most financial affluence hasn't come from just doing valuable work over the years. It has come from people grabbing one-shot opportunities, which they then reap the benefits from later. Looking at my own history, there was a period of 5 years or so, many years ago, when I was most successful financially. It was all based on one 5 minute meeting. I had done a little extra job in my spare time for an upstart company affiliated with the company I worked for. They had paid me my normal over-time pay, I think $12/hour or so. I thought it was too little, and that I ought to be paid more like a real computer consultant. I asked for $40/hour, and said I would quit the project if they didn't pay me. The president negotiated me down to $30. We both thought we were only talking about a limited project of a few weeks, of maybe 10 hours per week or something. But the project mushroomed, and pretty soon I was designing the computer system for a rapidly growing insurance company, and its whole survival was hinging around that computer system. We never changed our deal, or even talked about it ever again, but I was pretty much working 80 hour weeks for years, and just handed in my invoice for close to $10,000 every month, and they just paid it. Oh, it was certainly worth it for them, and I worked hard for it, and it was quickly a $50 million/year company. But it was a lot of money in those days, and I was paid as much as the president of the company. And what I was paid was not based on how valuable it was. If they felt they had a choice about it, they'd paid me less than half. But we made a deal, at one point in time, and that stuck. I was doing work for a company funded by a fellow who makes $600,000 per month. What does he do for that? Nothing much, but he was in the right place at the right time when a certain vitamin multi-level marketing scheme started up, and he has thousands of people under him selling vitamins for him. And he's good at standing up in front of a crowd of people and telling them how successful he is, and inspiring them to go and work hard on being like him. I'm searching for more sustainable formulas for success. Do they exist? Is life fair, or is it all a matter of luck and ripping other people off when you have the chance? I hope not. |