Gates, Buffet, and Soros are billionaires because they apply superior money formulas. Even if some of them started off with lots of money, they are where they now find themselves as a direct result of the superior money formulas they've been applying.
You and I may not be in the same league, and may not be interested in playing in that league. You may argue that Mahatma Gandhi moved mountains while maintaining his vow of poverty... but one of his fund raisers once remarked that it takes a lot of money to keep Gandhi in poverty! Personally, I'm also not particularly interested in operating in the "big league," but I wouldn't mind having 10 - 100 million to play with!
If you don't have all the money you need and want, it's because you've been applying inferior money formulas. Your parents didn't pass any or much money-expertise on to you. You learned little or no money-expertise in school.
In contrast, the chances are that Gates, Buffet, and Soros learned important money skills early in life and also know how to further improve their money skills.
It's very important to realize that in many kinds of businesses there are people with superior money formulas who can generate from substantial to huge returns for their investors. This certainly applies to Gates, Buffet, and Soros. It also applies to the area of High-Yield Investment Programs (HYIPs) -- and I'm not talking about any crude "double-your-money-in-a-week" scams. Buffet ("High-Yield Capital Gain Program" operator) and Soros (HYIP operator) are not alone in their ability to generate substantial or huge returns trading domestic and international markets. There are other highly-successful sophisticated traders. Some use advanced computer systems that apply superior trading formulas. Some have "inside knowledge" and "special contacts" they utilize to improve their performance.
Unfortunately, most people never learn any superior money formulas. The reasons for this are not mysterious. Among the most useful responses I received about "How to Cross the Financial Success Divide" were from Richard Sauder. He suggested several alternative names for my planned course, including "Twenty Short Steps to Great Riches." He wrote:
"When I was 19 years old my father died from cancer. Near the end he fell into a semi-comatose, delirious state and kept muttering and shouting, "Dollar! Dollar! DOLLAR! Dollar! Dollar!" He repeated this word, and only this one word, hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. Shortly before he died he regained his ability to converse and explained that he was trying to tell my brothers and me that if he could "make a living," then so could we. Within a day or two after that he died. He left no money to my brothers and me. He also left us little or no practical advice on how to "make a living," beyond the cultural expectation of going to work for a corporation every day. In fact, a couple of weeks before he died, he gathered my brothers and me to his bedside to tell us that it seemed to him as if he should provide us some advice on life, but that he found he had none to give us. Within weeks he was gone, with his words still ringing in my ears.
My father was not a bad man -- on the contrary, he was a good man in many ways. However, he left his sons no financial inheritance and precious little practical financial advice.
Here are some of the important lessons I draw from this episode:
(1) You can only teach what you know; you can only pass on what you have.
(2) Many of the wealthiest families pass their wealth from generation to generation. Jewish people are well known for their bar-mitzvahs and bat-mitzvahs, where they initiate their children into adulthood. My understanding is that these ceremonies begin a years-long process where the entire adult lore is passed on to the upcoming generation, including the practical knowledge of how to get, increase and retain wealth. Somehow, those of us with children must accumulate and master a body of knowledge and wealth to pass on to our children, in both word and deed. We need to teach them and show them what we have learned, and pass on to them what we can, or what is appropriate, depending on the child's character, of course. My father and mother failed to do this with me. To be fair to them, they didn't know how to do it themselves, because their parents never did it with them. This pattern of ignorance and dysfunctionality stretches back and back and back.
(3)I once took a psychology course where the professor made a point of saying that humans learn 90% of their behaviors by modeling what they see other people do. This underscores why it is crucial for parents to master and embody a solid core of financial success principles [formulas], so their children absorb their practical lessons simply by being around and observing what the parents do, and how they handle their affairs. In this way, they will be primed for financial success, almost instinctively, just by being part of a successful, wealth-oriented household. They will naturally take up a successful, profitable outlook on personal finance, because they will see it modeled in action, from childhood on through adolescence and early adulthood. Ordinary life will be an apprenticeship in personal success.
(4)The final point I draw from my father's example to his sons is his emphasis on "making a living," i.e., on "making" money. I begin by observing that I think money essentially has a neutral valence. It has potential energy to indirectly do work, to represent value in a commercial exchange, etc. From my individual viewpoint, therefore, I do not think money has to be "made," only exchanged. From my individual standpoint, vast amounts of money already exist, therefore it does not need to be made (by me). Since it is obtained in exchange for something else, such as time, or value, or effort, or knowledge, money needs to be, shall I say, "attracted" into my immediate sphere of influence, where I can readily access it and make use of it. The emphasis might more profitably be on "attracting" money, rather than on "making" money. It is a simple point, but one that has extensive ramifications, nonetheless."
