Wealth Building for Beginners (Even if You Are Not Young Anymore)*

 2.- Welcome to My Path

 Let’s stop here, before we move through this thick wood, and think for a moment. What is it that you are looking for? Where do you want to go?

You say that you want to get rich. And as quickly as possible.

I say you are mistaken. But at this point, at the beginning of our journey, you can’t be expected to know that.

“If not getting rich, then what?” you want to know.

“You want to build wealth,” I say.

“What’s the difference?”

“There is a big difference,” I say. “It’s the difference between wanting and possessing, between anxiety and serenity, between having now and forever lacking.”

“Sounds like a lot of horseshit,” you reply.

“Follow me down this path and you’ll see,” I say with a wink and a smile.

“And why should I let you guide me?”

“It is my path. The one I cut. The one I know.”

Before I found my path

As a boy, I never had any goals or specific ambitions. I wanted only to be different from how I saw myself: weak, lonely, poor, and insignificant.

I dreamed – actually dreamed – of being rich and popular. I had a specific dream repeatedly for years. It took place in the parking lot “schoolyard” where we played during lunch break. All my classmates are there. A white limousine rides by slowly and stops. A chauffer jumps out, prances around the car, and opens the door. Little me, in white tails and brandishing a diamond-tipped walking stick, steps out. My classmates ooh and ah. I am loved.

I was earning money – or having a side hustle as they say now – ever since I could ride a bike.

I had the usual childhood jobs: delivering papers, cleaning neighbors’ kitchens, cutting grass, stocking groceries in the back of Al’s Deli, working in the Rockville Center Carwash, etc.

Before we graduated from high school, my friend Peter and I had a business painting the houses of the rich people that lived on Long Island’s north shore.

To pay for college and graduate school, I generally worked three jobs, including writing essays for my fellow students. (I offered them a guaranteed grade of B or better.)

Through it all, I never had a clear view of what I was doing. I had no money. I needed money. So I did whatever I could to make ends meet. Some weeks I made more money than I needed. When I did, I found a way to spend that money on something that pleased me for a few hours or, if I was smart, a few days.

I was walking but I wasn’t on a path.

I think I found my path in 1983.

The thing about having many goals…

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How to Become What You Want to Be

“If you want to be a writer, you have to write.”

I was 16 years old when my father said those kind-and-cruel words to me. I never forgot them.

The first time I can remember wanting to be a writer, I was 11 or 12 years old. I’d written a poem for Sister Mary Something at school. My rhyming quatrain (AABB) was titled, pretentiously, “How Do I Know the World Is Real?”

I was at the kitchen table when my father started reading it over my shoulder. I felt anxious. My father was a credentialed writer, an award-winning playwright, a Shakespearean scholar, and a teacher of literature, including poetry. I’d seen him, on Saturday mornings, hunched over student essays, muttering and occasionally reading out loud passages to my mother that sounded perfectly good to me but elicited derisive laughter from them.

My father understood the secret-to-me clues of good writing. I didn’t feel at all comfortable having my fragile young poem exposed to the awesome danger of his critical mind. So there I sat, hoping he would go away. But he didn’t. I felt his hand on my shoulder, gentle and warm. “You may have a talent for writing,” he said.

I wrote lots of poetry in the months that followed, and began to think of myself as a writer. I liked that feeling. But soon other interests – touch football, the Junior Police Club, girls – crowded themselves into my life. Gradually, I wrote less and less. I still yearned to be a writer and so I began to feel guilty about not writing.

To assuage my guilt, I promised myself that my other activities were “life experience,” and that I needed life experience to become the good writer I wanted to be. In developing this excuse for not writing, I was building a structure of self-deception that many people live inside when they abandon their dreams. From the outside, it looks like you are doing nothing. But from the inside, you know that you are in the process of becoming, which, you convince yourself, is the next best thing to being.
That was the shape of my delusion when my father said, “If you want to be a writer, you have to write. A writer is someone who writes.”

So many people live their lives failing to become what they want to be because they can’t find the time to get started. How many times have you heard someone say that, one day, they will do what they always wanted to do – travel the world or paint paintings or write a book? And when you hear sentiments like those, what do you feel? Happy because you are confident that one day they will accomplish their long-held goal? Or sort of sad for them because you are pretty sure they never will?

And what about you? What is it that you want to be but haven’t become? What goal or project or task do you keep talking about accomplishing yet never do?

When my father told me that “writers write,” he was saying two things:

  • I had lost the right to call myself a writer when I stopped writing.
  • I could regain the title the moment I started writing again.

If you spend a while ruminating on this, you may find it both disturbing and liberating.

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Know Thyself

By the time you are an adult you should understand your core, motivating desires and core moral values. It is impossible to live a fully conscious and rewarding life unless you know what they are and act in accordance with them. Tapping into your core desires releases a great deal of energy. Acting in accordance with your core values allows you to have an untroubled spirit.

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Balancing Act

Last week I gave you my formula for making a ton of money without compromising your values. But that doesn’t mean everything will be smooth and easy. You will still have lots of trouble giving time to your other priorities — to your health, to your family and friends, and to your hobbies.

My business life got much better in 1993 when I started to focus on long-term profitability and quality. But I wasn’t able to master my time and get all my other personal goals accomplished until I started writing about personal achievement. That forced me to rethink everything I was doing. And after several years of trying different time-management programs, I finally arrived at a system that allowed me to get everything done that I had neglected for the previous 30 years.

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