There is a price to pay for getting rich, just as there is a price to pay for everything you attain in your life. Many chatter about being willing to pay the price, but few will actually do so. If you are serious about becoming a wealthy man or woman, you need to be prepared to pay the considerable price tag associated with that blissful state. It doesn’t come free.
So let’s talk honestly, frankly and openly about exactly what is involved if you are to make your fortune. You will not read what I am about to tell you in any ‘feel good’ book.
To make a lot of money, you’re going to have to give up many things. A proper family life, a decent social life, friends and many other things besides. Often you won’t even know what the price is when you start out. Nevertheless, you must resolve to pay it. This is the factor which stops most people from getting rich. They want it for nothing and are not willing to sacrifice anything at all to get it. This is a fantasy.
Most people sign up for a great many of these fantasies which they believe to be ‘the truth’ and this has a huge impact on their wealth-creating efforts. Often it even threatens survival.
Most people barely survive financially. Worse still, lacking an iron-grip control on even the basics of their lives, they mumble the incantations of success, expecting magical results. That is, results which do not exact a price or penalty.
In a society which seeks to crush individualism and make each one of us a worker in the state collective, how can an individual possibly be to blame for his own misfortune? He cannot. This would give the individual some personal power, and that cannot be right! No. It must be society, greedy capitalists, manipulative industry, bad luck, his upbringing, peer pressure, his race, lack of education, his age, lack of opportunity, or any one of a hundred other factors all of which are out of his control. In short, he is not to blame, according to modern thinking.
If you doubt this, read the following and see if it has a familiar ring:
“Yes, I admit it. I’m flat broke and I owe tens of thousands of dollars to other people which, to be honest, I don’t have a prayer of paying back. But it’s not my fault. I was fired from my job and thrown on the scrap heap at 40. Those greedy bosses call it downsizing – but I don’t notice any downsizing in their fat wallets. Twenty years I’ve worked there, and that’s all the thanks I get. I’m a heavy- motor electrical engineer, and there just aren’t that many jobs around for someone of my abilities. I’ve applied for a few but they always want younger men. I guess losing my job made me kinda depressed and my wife couldn’t take it. She wants a divorce and is taking me for every penny. I don’t have any savings, and the money I get from the state is a joke. Sure I’m broke, but as you can see it’s not my fault.”
Let me translate this litany of blame shifting.
“I am such a weak and feeble human being, that I have been unable to master one of the simplest and most basic skills of life; that is to spend less than I earn. My greed exceeds my means to pay for it, and so to fuel my desires, I must borrow from the surplus created by others. I have spent every penny of my own money, and squandered the surplus created by others which they entrusted to me on the promise that I would pay them back. I have broken that trust and they are unlikely to get their money. I am not a trustworthy human being, but it’s not my fault.”
“I know that the world is a dangerous and uncertain place, but for twenty years I decided to ignore that fact. Consequently I have zero savings, but it isn’t my fault. I needed all the stuff I bought, and a lot more besides. I did some training once, twenty years ago, and I fully expected that to last forty years.”
“The world owes me a living, and society should provide jobs for people with my abilities, regardless of whether they are needed or not. Bosses should provide jobs for workers regardless of profits. People need jobs, and it is the duty of bosses to provide them. I have no intention of retraining. I have made a half-hearted attempt to get another job, but because I’m so weak, I get quickly discouraged and so I have given up. Now I get free money from the state. This is nothing like enough for me to live on, and I think the state should give me a lot more free money.”
I know you do not hold the same attitudes as this man – you would not be reading this if you did!
So given the terrible poverty, both financial and spiritual of the majority of people, what can you do to raise yourself up into the top 2% (by Western standards)? How can you achieve this success?
It’s all about realizing that you cannot have it all, and that you must pay a big price (give up something) in order to attain wealth. You need to be crystal clear in your own mind that you are willing to pay the price, otherwise abandon all hopes right now of becoming rich.
It is vital that you apply full focus to this very important area if you are not to drift through life aimlessly.
So, it’s time for some hard truths. The first thing you have to know is that you can’t have it all.
Despite what those slick-suited seminar-gurus tell you, every decision you take in life has a shadow partner – the life you cannot now lead because you took that decision.
A few simple examples will prove the point.
You take a career decision to become a surgeon; but doing this precludes you from being a lawyer.
As a woman you decide to marry and have a family. The consequence is that your career is on hold for a minimum of five years and more like fifteen or twenty.
You decide to go to the movies; you cannot also spend the evening in a fine restaurant.
You decide to give up drinking; you cannot now go drinking with your pals.
You decide to start thinking for yourself; you lose most of your ‘friends.’
Every decision you take has consequences.
Every decision, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, sets your life on a slightly different course. This is why, as Jim Rohn says, “Everything matters.”
Even inaction has its consequences.
If you decide just to float down life’s stream, and the current sweeps you randomly into the left tributary, you cannot also enjoy the right tributary. If you sleep all day, you cannot also play your favorite sport on that day.
This tiny handful of examples should prove to you immediately that you cannot have it all. It is so obvious that it is hardly worth saying, and yet there are at least two top seminar gurus on the circuit at the moment who are claiming that you can. In fact, I’m fairly certain that I have seen a book and a tape series entitled “You CAN have it all.” Wrong! But far more importantly, every decision you take to improve your life, no matter how trivial, will have an associated cost – a price that you will have to pay in order to achieve that success.
Regards,
Jim Sheridan
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