How to Become Rich? (11 Initial Steps) 5 comments

Isn’t that ironic that the vast majority of the human population don’t like rich people, but want to have a lot of money themselves? And even more, regardless of these wishes, they have never tried, nor will ever try to become rich! If wealth is so desirable, then why not to get it yourself? Despite this obvious logic, being financially free is only a dream for most people.

As you may or may not know, I’m a 19-year-old high school graduate, whose ultimate goal in life is to become rich. I must achieve it because I need to prove many people wrong and make up for many things I’ve lost. Every day I’m taking little steps towards my fortune, and that includes reading a lot of information on what it takes to become rich.

Using this knowledge and my own experiences, I was able to develop a pretty clear picture of what needs to be done to dramatically improve one’s financial situation and sooner or later become rich.

Of course, the fundamental thing most people seem to misunderstand is that the road to good life is hard. And by that, I mean very hard. Most people are incapable of working in such stressful conditions, making a lot of sacrifices, and they lose their motivation as soon as things go wrong.

In the world of rich people, there is no room for laziness, procrastination, expectations that others might do everything for you or at least tell you what to do, and so on. Entering this world requires many years of strict discipline. And even when you get there, it’s not the end. Staying there is almost as hard, just in a different way.

But despite not being there myself yet, I can guarantee you that it’s worth sacrifices, regardless of how difficult it is. Here is a brief list of the first 11 steps anyone who wants to be rich should take. I tried to write this article as a list and sort them from first to last, but in real life, you need to basically do all of them at once:

Listen to Your Heart

If you feel unhappy with your current financial situation, that’s not because you don’t have certain materialistic things, but because you don’t live the life you know you could be living. You feel like you’re better than this, and you don’t have what you deserve in general. If you feel this way, that’s because you didn’t do the right things to improve your life in the past.

Ask yourself if this feeling is terrible enough to leave your old life behind and build a new one from the ground up.

If the answer is “no,” you will probably attempt to forget it the next Friday night drinking in the club with friends. You will temporarily forget it, but eventually, it will come back. Just keep in mind that every time it comes back, it will be a little stronger.

Two years from now you will find that now it requires more drinks to suppress it. Eventually, in your fifties, you are going to wish for a chance to come back in time and tell your lazy self to change everything, but most likely it will be too late.

And if the answer is “yes,” rich people have exciting news for you – if you start acting immediately, ten years from now this feeling will be just a memory. And that brings us to the next step:

Understand What Money Means In Life and For You Personally

It’s impossible to work for something if you don’t have a clear understanding of why are you doing this.

First of all, we live in the materialistic world. If you are poor, you are irrelevant. You don’t have power and other people (especially richer than you) often see little to no purpose in interacting with you. The number of potential love partners for you is extremely limited. People with more money see you as inferior and less worthy. And you can’t prove them wrong by no means.

Otherwise, money creates controversy: If you have a lot of money, most people don’t care about your personality, mentality, looks, etc., everyone just automatically assumes that you are important, powerful and just plain superior. Everyone wants to have a rich friend and a love partner.

But many pathetic people also hate you because you make them hate themselves. They want to be in your place, but they know they’re too lazy to do that. Of course, they will never say anything to you because they fear you and you can do whatever you want.

I’m not saying that in an advanced society people should act this way, but our society is very far from advanced. It’s a primal instinct, and it’s perfectly logical for moderately intelligent colonial mammals. Since we can do nothing to improve reasoning of other people, we should improve ours instead.

Second of all, think how the quality of your life would change if you started making at least 10 times more money. Maybe you need a new car, house, or new furniture? Maybe you or your kid wants to go to college and you can’t afford it? Maybe you have a debt?

Anyone can think of thousands of ways to use money wisely and improve their lives. As we already established, it’s not going to happen overnight, maybe not the next year either, but ten years later it’s very probable, and It’s going to be worth it.

Understand the Importance of Starting a Business as Soon as Possible and Saving as Much Time as Possible

You need to start today. Not when you graduate high school or college, not the next Monday, not tomorrow, but today! This step is pretty straightforward, but a lot of people are still waiting. When it comes to getting rich, the beginning is always the hardest.

It’s very reasonable to pass the hardest stage as soon as possible. It also requires the most work. So start when you are young and able to cope with stress and sleep deprivation. Also, the first several attempts might fail, and the sooner you start, the more time you will have to find another way.

Generally, people tend to think that things are easier than they actually are and that they happen faster than they actually do in real life. If you are young, for example, 20, you probably want to have fun and carelessly enjoy life. Maybe you want to wait until 25 to start a business and have a good income at 30. That’s very wrong! You can never know what is going to happen.

If you start at 25, after five years you can have a steady and sufficient flow of income. But if you face some serious difficulties (highly possible), you might need another 5 years or even more! In this case, you will wish you started at 20 and saved those extra years.

Everyone should want to get big money as young as possible, while they can experience the full potential of rich life, not when they’re old and can barely move. In the latter case, you can even die before getting old and never fulfill your dreams. Trust me, when you become rich, you will wish for several more years to enjoy your money. So start today and thank yourself later!

Start Educating Yourself Today

The road to riches begins with education. And I don’t mean formal education by no means! One of the worst things a beginner can do is rely solely on formal education. In most cases it’s just a waste of your precious time, it’s just unnecessary. You will never use 99% of all those things in life, let alone in business.

Of course, you might need a job to get your initial capital. In this case, get that diploma, but while doing that, don’t forget to devote at least the same amount of time to reading what actually matters, and what one day will actually benefit you.

If you are a total newbie, probably the smartest thing you can do today, is start reading about different ways to make money. Choose something you genuinely like and enjoy doing.

Probably the most logical thing would be to choose something finance-related (like investing), or pretty much anything where a lot of money can be made (like entertainment). But remember that your satisfaction is the most important thing in business. People often find very unexpected ways to make huge money.

Choose wisely, don’t rush things, it usually takes several months to find something you truly enjoy. If you don’t find anything worth your attention, keep looking. Remember, your Ideal goal is to stick with this thing for life and become rich!

To do that, you will need to know every tiny detail about your chosen field. Of course, you can change your activities whenever you want, but then again, it takes time.

Take Full Responsibility for Your Life

When I was in school, all students just obediently did what they were told. They did something only when the teacher told them to. Isn’t that convenient?

When you get bad grades, you can always blame the teacher! Later in life, those people do what their boss tells them to and blame the government for low salaries. “No responsibility for me, I’m just doing what I’m told, and It’s not my fault that people with power are so bad and greedy!”

Wrong! You choose to let your parents, teachers, professors, bosses, and government officials control your life, so what do you expect? That those people will walk you through life, give you free money, and take care of you while you have fun? That will never happen. You are the one to blame here! Especially if you want to become rich, you must always be in control.

If you don’t find your classes useful – skip them, if you don’t want to go to college, and your parents trying to force you to – tell them that you have other plans and get a job instead, if you hate your boss – get another job, and if you want to become rich – start your own business. Do whatever you feel is necessary to achieve your goals. If you let people use you, they will use you to their own advantage, not yours!

Start Saving as Much as Possible and Understand The Importance of Small Numbers

No matter which path you are going to choose to build your wealth chances are that you will need some initial capital. I’m astonished by how much money people are wasting every month without realizing it! I’m almost sure that whoever reads this doesn’t buy the cheapest food possible.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not suggesting to buy cheap, processed, high-fat and high-sugar food. But what about grits, rice, fruits, and vegetables? If you want to eat meat, buy it raw and cook by yourself whenever you have a chance. Those little amounts add up very quickly and later it can be invested.

Do you really need the newest phone if your old one still works fine? Prices of these things drop drastically with time. A year from now you will be able to purchase an iPhone 7 for half the current price. Why do you need $3000 Ultra HD TV if rich people don’t have the time to watch TV anyway? I’m sure that a $300 alternative would do the job of collecting dust just fine.

Stop going to restaurants, cafes and, etc. Their markups are ridiculous! $4 for a coffee? Seriously!? Assuming you buy this nonsense every morning before work, that’s more than $1000 a year!

Stop partying for Christ sake! Have you ever seen Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Warren Buffet getting wasted with friends and dancing all night? Me neither. By doing this, you’re just wasting your time and money at the same time! If your goal is to become as rich as you can, why you should do that? Because it’s fun? If you think that’s the valid answer, you didn’t deserve to be rich.

Set Realistic Short and Long Term Goals (Financial and Non-Financial)

If you want to have $100 million in 5 years, that’s probably not going to happen. But in 50 years, why not? If you have a similar goal, it may sound very overwhelming and scary. Fifty years might look like a lot of time, and many things can happen in the meantime. You can earn much more money or die altogether. That’s why you should start immediately and break the main goal into many small goals.

If you just now started reading about making money, your next realistic goal can be to save 10%, 20% or even 50% of this month’s income and devote at least 3 hours every day for your research.

That might look like not that much, but if you make $2000 a month and save 20%, that’s $4800 a year. More than two months of labor! Three hours a day is nearly 550 hours or nearly seventy 9 to 5 work days in just 6 months! You will almost certainly be able to find something worth your attention over this time. Now you see what I mean about those small numbers?

Don’t Let Your Friends Influence Your Dreams and Take Advice From the Right People

If you suddenly change your life fundamentally, people around you will notice that something is wrong. If you tell them about your new goals, they will laugh at you and call you crazy. My advice would be to hide it from them.

Make up various excuses why you can’t go to parties, watch TV, why you suddenly started reading, buying cheaper and healthier food, why you don’t want to go to restaurants, buy the latest phone and so on.

And if you decide to actually tell them that you do this because you want to save money, invest it, start your own business and someday become rich, you will be misunderstood. Prepare for their countless attempts to “open your eyes,” “bring you back to reality,” and “bring back your true self.”

If you refute their absurdity with logic, you will most likely lose friends. If you decided to change your life, it would be smart to find new friends anyway, but if you like old ones too much, just keep your new goals a secret.

Remember, you are choosing a very difficult road. Going here requires leaving your old life, habits, opinions and most likely friends behind. Don’t worry you will meet much better people along the way.

Just google some success stories. Successful people will inspire you and show you the real “reality,” not the one that your friends are talking about. Maybe you actually personally know a self-made millionaire? If so, try to talk to this person. Ask whether it was hard or easy for them, how long it took, and what they had to sacrifice to achieve success.

Remember this world is full of opportunities, lazy people just don’t want to acknowledge it. If you use those opportunities, it just proves how lazy they are and makes them look bad as a comparison. That’s why they are subliminally (in many cases even deliberately) trying to stop you. Do not listen to them!

Begin to Create Streams of Passive Income

As soon as you start doing this, you start directly building your future wealth. Passive income is the income you receive with little to no effort to maintain the money making process when the initial work has been done.

Active income is when you basically sell your time and efforts. There is almost no way for a person to get rich exclusively from active income. Ideally, you want all your income to be passive.

Passive income is superior to active in every way:

• Passive income usually cannot be lost unlike a job (active income), and you will never be incapable of getting it once you’ve done the initial job.
• You don’t have to work the same number of hours at the same pay rate.
• You have much more free time.
• You can spend this time looking for more ways to earn money (or just doing what you enjoy).
• Passive income usually has a huge potential to increase over time.

There are many ways to earn passive income. Some ways require capital to start, maintain and grow. You can use your own funds, investor money, or you can borrow large sums of money to fund the purchase of assets. When you have your capital, you can, for example, purchase a rental property, or buy some stable and expensive stocks, bonds, etc.

Other passive income sources don’t require an initial capital. (If you’re reading this article, these would probably be more suitable for you.) You can earn from advertisements on your own website (get 2 free websites here), you can get royalties from books, patents, trademarks, songs, etc.

It seems that the most popular and the surest way to generate passive income is to work at a primary job and use actively earned money to buy assets that generate passive income. The downside of this method is that it sometimes can take decades to become truly rich.

Understand That You Need to Work More Than Others to Achieve More Than Others

No matter how cliche it sounds and how self-explanatory it is, but a lot of people doesn’t seem to get it. To receive large amounts of passive income in the future, you need to do equally large initial work.

The problem is that this work is not nearly as easy as 9 to 5 job. During the first few years, you may need to work 10, 12, 15 or even more hours a day. Today the competition in business is huge, and it’s increasing as you read this.

You would probably want to combine your current job with the creation of passive income. In this case, when your colleagues will be going home to watch TV, be with family, have fun with friends or whatever, you will be going home to work again.

But after a few years, if you work hard enough, you will be able to quit your job, while they will be still enslaved! Is that not worth the effort?

Believe In Yourself, Stay Motivated and Know That Sooner or Later You Will Succeed

As we already discussed, there are very high chances that things are not always going to turn out the way you intended. It’s very easy to give up during these moments.

Everyone around you will tell you: “Did I not say that nine out of ten businesses fail?” “I told you that there is no way for people like us to become rich!” “Just give up already you lunatic!” etc.

Your self-esteem and confidence will suffer. You will begin to question your capabilities and whether it’s worth the effort. If you believe those people even a little bit, forget about financial independence and freedom.

I’ve read a lot of success stories. Trust me, all successful and rich people are telling the same things – in the beginning, it looks hopeless, it feels like you just wasting your time, nothing is working as expected, and your situation has no way out. It can be very overwhelming and stressful. But if you keep trying, believe that one day you will have it no matter what, work hard enough, and sacrifice enough, eventually, your current dreams will become reality.

It’s nothing more than just common sense when you think about it: What would you do if you have lost your keys? If you didn’t find it under the sofa, you would go look in all the other places. You wouldn’t just give up, would you?

Keys are probably very important for you, and it would be very inconvenient to lose them. You would definitely miss your favorite TV show just to put your best efforts and find them as soon as possible, right?

Can you imagine how much inconvenience being poor creates and how convenient is to be rich!? So just go and find something you love and what can potentially make you rich, then do that until you get sick of it, and then do even more.

There is no easy way to get a lot of money. You have to be patient and just simply work as much as you can. Look for that promising thing that you like, as if your whole life depends on it, because it clearly does.

The Bottom Line

Eventually, it all comes down to sacrifices that you are willing or unwilling to make today (not someday or tomorrow). It demands huge mental (in some cases physical) effort.

In the beginning, you must give up all things other people call fun. That includes partying, going out, free time, tasty food, nice clothes, TV, and many many more ordinary things. The majority of people are unwilling to pay this price. They choose to “have fun” today and be poor the rest of their lives.

If you want to become rich, you should focus on your future rather than the present. Every time you feel frustrated because you have to make a sacrifice, just imagine what will happen 10 – 50 years from now because of it.

If you choose to give up partying, later you will be able to have a million dollar wedding, if you choose a bus over a car, later you will be able to buy a Ferrari or even a private jet, if you choose to live in the cheapest possible one bedroom apartment, someday you will be able to have at least 10 bedrooms, $500 shoes you didn’t buy today can one day turn into $50 000 diamond-encrusted shoes and so on.

Your time is the most valuable asset you have. Don’t let anyone buy your life for several dollars an hour because that’s just humiliating!

And the most importantly, don’t do this to yourself by carelessly wasting time in an attempt to have fun, relax, rest or whatever poor people do. You’ll be capable of much more when the work will be done. And by that, I mean after becoming rich.

Make the most of your time today and enjoy well-deserved luxury tomorrow. All the “fun” things you choose not to do today, and all the efforts you put in your business instead, will come back in a form of future profits. Then you will make up for all those things you missed out while working. People who wasted their lives and lost their hope a long time ago, will watch you and hate themselves.

Thank you for reading.

Share with friends who might find it interesting 🙂

-Grey