Be careful who you idolize
I used to hero-worship the rich. Kind of. I always wanted to have enough money that it never got tight, month to month, let's say. And I always kind of assumed that rich folks had some secret sauce, some inside knowledge that landed them where they were. That illusion was shattered for me in one crystallizing moment for me last fall.
Disillusionment
In 2015 and 2016, I attended a conference for high net-worth investors. The intended audience was people with serious money, millionaires and up. There is no doubt in my mind that I was both the youngest and lowest net worth person in attendance. It was a lot of fun, I went to learn everything I could about how rich people got and stayed rich. My biggest takeaway was how little of an edge most of the people there had on me. Sure a lot of them seemingly inherited big bucks, and their high net worth opened a lot of doors and opportunities for them. But for a group consisting of mostly above average intelligence people, many of them were shockingly dumb. On balance, the presenters were good, but the conference attendees were just not impressive.
I had gone in expecting everyone there to know a lot that I didn't, and some people certainly did. But it became clear that some people there might not know anything that I didn't. The caliber of the questions in some of the Q&A sessions with the speakers was downright embarrassing.
It was evident that some of them were just people parroting things they'd heard in an attempt to impress others. One guy just kept saying "Bitcoin", maybe hoping no one would realize he didn't know what he was talking about, or that someone would tell him how it worked.
Back in 2015, one of the presenters and I engaged in a disagreement because he thought the biggest risk of the then-developing flood of middle easterners into Europe was that a disgruntled migrant scientist would detonate a nuke in one of the European cities. He was certain that this was the real danger and dwarfed the more "street-level" clash of cultures that I was arguing would be very destabilizing for Europe. So far, one of us is right.
I met another guy, someone I knew by reputation, out for drinks one night. I guess I was hoping to gain his confidence and really learn something one-on-one. Well, I did learn something, but I was not expecting that something to be a detailed description of what I'd consider some pretty heavy personal baggage. That they were comfortable to share all this with me was nice, but the takeaway was that the person I knew from afar was not the man himself.
My moment of clarity
The conclusion I eventually arrived at was that at best, most of the people there were VERY good at one thing: making and keeping money. Outside of that, it was a complete crap-shoot. Only some of the people I engaged with seemed to know anything worth learning, even regarding money. Fewer still had anything else engaging or interesting to offer. There was a minority of rock-stars, and bunches of other people following them around like lemmings, hanging onto every word they uttered.
By the way, if you have the same kind of complex that I did about wealthy people, I encourage you to go if you can make the free time and money. You'll get some value in the education regarding money and investing for sure. But more importantly, you'll see for yourself how very human "the other half" is.
Be your own driver
So as you continue or begin to build your wealth, keep these things in mind. Ponder them from time to time:
- You're not at the disadvantage you might think you are. A lot of rich people are just old. They've had some time to get there. Some are particularly gifted, but there's no secret that they have and you don't that's preventing you from financial success.
- Mo' money, mo' problems - It's true that excess wealth brings with it its own set of new and unique problems. But it's also true that for people who have problems that they haven't sorted out, money not only doesn't solve them, it exacerbates them. Consider the behavior of certain professional athletes, or the fact that 70% of lottery winners go bankrupt. Excess money removes the barriers to our indulgences. Make sure to work on self-control and self knowledge as you work on wealth. Bonus: both of those will help you in building wealth anyway.
“But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires." - from "the money speech" in Atlas Shrugged.
Original post: http://www.trillionairesclub.net/rich-folks-dont-figured/
View more like this at: http://www.trillionairesclub.net