What it Takes to be Rich

Money magazine has a fascinating article on what it takes to be rich. Let's take a look at it together.

Lesson 1: Make your own luck
Successful people create their own opportunities.

Jason, 66, had a 40-year career as a character actor in television and movies, and he could easily play the part of a soothsayer who lives deep in some medieval forest: He's small and good-natured, with a soft voice that suggests both wisdom and curiosity. (Incidentally, we're cheating a bit here; Jason lives and works a few blocks outside 90210 proper. But we're not holding that against him.)

Jason knows everybody in the business (he's married to Pamela Franklin, who once died on-screen in Brando's arms), but a decade ago he decided that he was ready to ease into a retirement gig.

He was in Eureka, Calif., of all places, when he had the revelation, filming Steven Spielberg's The Lost World: Jurassic Park, in which he played a dinosaur tracker. Jason had visited a bookstore and was examining his loot when Spielberg looked over his shoulder.

"Steven, I'm going to open a bookstore," Jason told the director. "I'm doing it."

Jason was comfortable, but he didn't want to lose money on a new undertaking.

Soon after opening Mystery Pier, he dedicated a corner to books that had been made into films - marrying the two things he was passionate about. He spread the word among that vast network he had built up, and business took off as Hollywood A-listers stopped in for first editions of books that they or their friends had made into movies.

Robin Williams, Jude Law and Bono became regulars. When I went in, Jason had everything from a full set of the Harry Potter books signed by J.K. Rowling ($40,000) to Humphrey Cobb's Paths of Glory inscribed by the star of the film version, Kirk Douglas ($6,500).

"It was really an inadvertent thing," Jason said of the profitable market niche he had stumbled on. After a moment, he added, "If I made a list of all the things in life I thought were coincidences and then looked back at them, I would see that they weren't coincidences at all."

BINGO! That is very important to understand. Things didn't just happen, Jason made them happen. He made good decisions. He had the ability to look at a situation and see it for what it was, either a good opportunity or bad opportunity. That is so very important, looking at a situation, seeing it for what it is and then making the proper decision.

Let's keep looking.

Have a growth mind-set
Lesson 2: Failing at something is the best way to ensure success at it the next time.

Carol Dweck, a psychologist and professor at Stanford University, studies the connections between people's outlook and their willingness to take risks. "The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life," she writes in her book "Mindset," which was published earlier this year. Dweck identifies two types of people: those who have fixed mind-sets and those who have growth mind-sets.

People with fixed mind-sets believe that they were born with a certain amount of intelligence, and they strive to convince the world of their brilliance so that no one finds out they're not actually geniuses.

Growth-mind-set people believe that intelligence, knowledge and skill need to be "cultivated" by trial and error. Failing at something, they believe, is the best way to ensure they'll succeed at it the next time.

Excellent! We meet people in the first category ALL THE TIME! The special ones are the ones in the second category. Those who are constantly growing, learning and becoming! It is also important to realize that it is okay to fail, just as long as you use it as a learning experience and keep on growing!

Never stop learning
Lesson 2, Corollary 1: Successful people are always on the look out for new experiences that they can later build on.

First I met Heidi Roizen, 48, a managing director at Mobius Venture Capital, a Silicon Valley firm with investments in the tech industry of around $2 billion. She's in the business of assessing risk, and I asked her if there are any lessons for the rest of us in the way she examines potential investments.

"Often when you mention risk, what people think of is the downside. Danger. That's not the entrepreneurial mind-set," she said. "The entrepreneurial mind-set is that risk is the heightened probability that there is a big range of possible outcomes."

Losing, she says, is no fun, but it's also essential to winning. When an investment doesn't work out as planned, Roizen analyzes her decision-making process to figure out what went wrong. She compares it to dissecting her performance after she delivers one of her frequent talks to Stanford M.B.A. students (building her network, as you've gathered by now).

"I usually spend a half hour telling my husband what went right or wrong," she said. "If I sit and think and talk out loud about what worked or didn't work, that becomes part of my psyche for how I figure out how to do the next lecture. I do the same thing in business."

Dweck, the psychologist who studies growth mind-sets, created an experiment to demonstrate how persistence and the pursuit of knowledge leads to success. She posed a series of trivia questions to a group of people with fixed mind-sets and another with growth mind-sets.

After each answer, one and a half seconds passed before the participants were told whether they were right or wrong, and, if they were wrong, another one and a half seconds lapsed before they were given the correct response. Their brains were monitored with electrodes the entire time.

Dweck found that the people with fixed mind-sets cared a lot about whether they were right or wrong but not at all about what the right answer was. The growth-mind-set participants stayed interested until the correct answer was given, showing an interest in learning new information rather than in simply validating their intelligence.

When the test was repeated right away, only the growth-mind-set group performed better.

Again, the focus is on growth and growing. Don't stop, keep going, realize that you can grow until the day that you die!

Their list goes on but these are the ones that we found to be very important. Each and every one of you has what it takes to be rich. We firmly believe this. It might take some time, you might make some mistakes at first, but that is okay. Keep striving, keep persevering, have a great attitude and put a smile on your face; your going to make it!

If your doing all this and still feel you need a little help, give us a call. Helping make people rich is one of the things we live for!