Become Your Own Business Guru

Having success with money is very much a result of your behaviors, rather than your intelligence. Behavior is a subject that even the very intelligent have great difficulty grasping. Someone very intelligent who has no control over their actions or emotions can often end up in financial ruin. By contrast, the average person with zero education in finance can end up successful and abundant if they possess a few key behavioral habits. Many people who are in search of money have lost sight of the importance of maintaining balance in their lives. All the money in the world will not make you happy if your life is an unbalanced disaster, so you must remember to seek happiness as well as wealth.

One of the most difficult skills in finance is the ability to stay positive and build good habits. Without a positive mindset and consistent action, we will constantly get in our own way because of greed and envy. A desire to be more successful than your peers can be healthy and motivating, but enviousness can drag you down to a lower frequency and inhibit your innovativeness. Essentially, happiness is results without expectations, so if your expectations are low and your actions are powerful then you will generate more happiness. If you keep raising your expectations, then you may stay motivated but you will never truly be happy no matter how much you manage to achieve. You’ll still feel just as unfulfilled as you did at your previous, less successful stages of life.

Many people do not believe that there is a difference between wealthy and rich, however this is not the case. Many errors have been made on the path to success because of a lack of knowledge in this key area. ‘Rich’ can just be defined as the display of someone’s current income, but wealth is an elusive concept. Someone driving the newest Ferrari is most certainly rich, but they are considered rich because they can afford to make the monthly payment on the car. Wealth is quite the opposite; wealth is what is saved and never spent. It is much more important to be wealthy than it is to be rich, but so many people are only worried about their outward appearance being a lavish representation of their economic situation. Many tend to focus on schools, vacations, and houses, never stopping to consider investments or retirement accounts. When looking at a very rich person, you see their expensive car and property, but you likely don’t see the expensive property they didn’t purchase when they couldn't afford it. While you can always tell when a person is rich, you cannot always tell when a person is wealthy, because their wealth sits inconspicuously in an asset or bank account. It is income that is never spent.

People who consider money a safety net for survival will never lose their wealth, but those who try to show off their riches at their own expense may soon find that they’re falling out of balance with money. Society sees money as a key to happiness, and many people believe that living and spending over their limits will make them more money or make them happy. The reality is that if you spend all of your time chasing money and none of your time seeking happiness, then you may eventually find that you never spent any time really living your life. Money is very powerful, but you yourself have to be more powerful. You have to acknowledge yourself and find balance by ignoring greed and focusing on your personal journey. Wealth is choosing that you will either forgo buying something, or wait until you can afford it more reasonably at a later point. Wealth is self-control, balance, and security. Don’t be quick to judge others, and focus on staying motivated and being content with your own milestones of success.

There is plenty of research available online which shows that there is no correlation between becoming richer and becoming more happy. Researchers often discover that wealthier people donate more impressive monetary amounts to charity, but proportionally they donate a smaller percentage of their income than people do in lower income brackets. Many people, either for religious or personal reasons, believe in the rule that 10% of their income should be given away charitably, no matter how uncomfortable this makes their own life. By contrast, it has been found that the top 50 richest Americans, all of whom are billionaires with seemingly infinite wealth, donate a very tiny percentage of their wealth to charity on a yearly basis. They may make significant donations, but they certainly do not adhere to a consistent rule for the sake of helping others. For example, Jeff Bezos was worth an unfathomable $160 billion in 2018, and donated approximately $131 million to charity the same year. $131 million is an awe-inspiring amount of money, which makes it easy to overlook the fact that he only truly donated 0.1% of his total fortune. It may seem insignificant when a person with $25,000 donates only a few thousand dollars, but in reality it is a much more significant sacrifice than when a multi-billionaire donates hundreds of millions of dollars. Everyone can make a difference in their own way.