Sometimes I get asked the question, “Does luck have anything to do with getting rich?”
Well sure it does…if you plan to make your money by winning the lottery or becoming a movie star. Then yes, luck has everything to do with it.
In general though, for the rest of us, luck is for suckers.
Luck is what rich people feel after they’ve been rich for a while. They feel so happy they have loads of money that they consider themselves lucky that they don’t have to live like everyone else anymore.
What they forget is that luck didn’t have anything to do with them getting rich. They didn’t sit at home waiting for someone to recognize they have a good idea. They didn’t get rich by going to prestigious schools and obtaining Masters Degrees and PhD’s. And they certainly didn’t get rich by working for someone else.
No one has ever gotten rich that way.
What the financial elite did that separated them from the pack is they took action.
It’s as simple as that.
It’s the easiest thing to do as well as the hardest. It’s the reason most people will never achieve their dreams of becoming wealthy.
But I realize you want to be different. You want to become one of the few that takes life by the balls and gets rich. What’s the process, you ask? Well, before action, there has to be some thought put into how to go about achieving said wealth. That’s the formula for success: thought + action = success.
Let’s examine this formula.
The first part of the equation is thought. This is the stage where you begin to formulate your product ideas and business model. There are two ways this could go.
One, you come up with an original product idea that you believe people will want to buy from you. Or two you take somebody else’s product and build off it, improving upon it to make it better so as to convince existing customers your version is the one to buy. Both are proven business models that have been proven over and over again.
I’ve had many people confess to me that they would love to start an online business like mine, but they just don’t have any product ideas. They aren’t creative people they say so they can’t come up with an original idea for a product.
Whenever this happens I always tell them the same thing. You don’t need to have an original idea to get rich. You don’t need to invent a product to find success. There are plenty of rich and successful people out there that have taken an existing product from the marketplace and improved upon it so that the market demands their version of the product.
A prime example of this is Bill Gates. I bet dear old Bill would have loved to have beat his arch rival Steve Jobs to the punch by coming up with the iPad first. The iPad is one of Apple’s signature product lines and it makes them hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year.
What many people seem to forget is that Bill Gates first introduced the tablet PC ten years earlier in 2000. And not to say Bill Gates isn’t successful in his own right, but it was clearly a failure for him.
Speaking of Bill Gates you would think he made all of his money off an original idea too. The fact is his graphic user interface was first created by Xerox. It wasn’t until Bill Gates came along that Windows changed the way we use computers forever. These are perfect examples of the second mouse getting the cheese.
Once you decide on a route to take for your business (original vs improvement) you’ve got to take action. The thinking and dreaming stage is where many businesses die. They don’t die because the idea isn’t good enough; no instead they die because the second part of the equation was never taken: ACTION.
Thinking is not enough. To complete the equation, you must also act. You must do something.
Most people get stuck in the first stage. When you stay too long in the first stage doubt, fear and discouragement enter and suck the life out of your idea.
You’ll worry that you don’t know enough to start your own business. This is a common complaint I hear from readers. I hear daily…I don’t know how to build a website…I don’t know how to set up a merchant account…I don’t know how to write sales copy…and on and on. This is doubt working its way in and beating your business to death before it ever got off the ground.
Whenever you try something new there is going to be a learning curve. You can’t expect to become a master overnight. Often times when looking at the mountain it’s easy to become discouraged and to begin to doubt yourself; though we can create smaller hills from that mountain. You do this by creating smaller goals to motivate you and create accomplishment points to be proud of.
You overcome fear, doubt and discouragement with action! Focus on one obstacle at a time. If you’re starting out you can focus this week on selecting and purchasing your appropriate domain name. After that you can spend the next two weeks focusing on setting up a blog. From there you keep moving onto bigger and bigger steps.
After each step you’ll begin to beat back the evil claws of fear and doubt and allow in pride and encouragement.
Remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor was it built with luck. It was built by people who had a dream and took action to make it happen.
Same goes for the iPad. The iPad took time to construct, but it never would have gotten off the ground if Steve Jobs had allowed fear of failure to infiltrate his mind. He saw something that people wanted, improved upon an existing product and was rewarded with untold riches and success. Luck had nothing to do with it either!
If you find yourself at home thinking, thinking, thinking all the time about wanting to be rich, but never doing anything about it then please do yourself and everyone else a favor and stop talking and thinking about maybe one day becoming wealthy. This is a delusion because you are not prepared to pay the price. The price is thought followed by action. So if you want to become wealthy, then start right now, today.
To your future and mine!
Mark Patricks
