The Secret Of Wealth Accumulation

Written on November 13, 2007 by Tezza

Tuesday’s weekly guide to Personal Finance from 4EvaYoung.com

“Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry, all things easy. He that rises late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night, while laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.” - Benjamin Franklin

It is a difficult task to try and single out a common denominator of why some achieve great wealth in a lifetime while others spend a lifetime fruitlessly struggling to keep their heads above water. However, without a doubt a key ingredient to wealth accumulation when studying wealthy people is their steadfast attitude towards working hard. You might be thinking to yourself that you’ve heard it all before, lots of people work hard and maybe that person is you but you still don’t seem to get the results you are looking for.

The problem isn’t hard work, the problem is that your efforts aren’t being put productively towards wealth accumulation. Most people say they work hard but they are working hard at the wrong things and then wonder why they aren’t getting the results they were looking for. There is no surer way to long term wealth accumulation than hard work focused on results and here are some ideas to help make it a cornerstone of your wealth accumulation strategy.

1. You Have To Make Hard Work A Habit

“I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.” - Thomas Jefferson

It is always interesting to me when I hear people wanting to achieve something without being willing to put in the hard work. They expect something for nothing, or a sure fire formula without have to risk anything. Guest blogger Dough at Get Rich Slowly puts it this way: “Hard work is the habit first among equals. Achieving financial security is often the result of consistent diligence. We’ve all heard of individuals who found wealth through inheritance or the lottery, and these stories are the most memorable. What we rarely hear about, however, is the school teacher who works hard for 40 years and, along with some of the other habits below, manages to save $1 million or more on a salary that never exceeds $50,000 per year. Hard work enables us to appreciate all the more the financial security that it produces.”

2. Don’t Let Pride And Ego Take Hold

Your self image is to some extent determined by how much money you have, what you do for a living, what car your drive or home you own. So if you spend your life identified by your ego then you will also define your success or failure by external factors some of which may be out of your control. What happens when you lose your job and can’t afford to keep the house. Pride and arrogance can be devastating when it comes to wealth accumulation.

Studies have shown that males aged between 18-35 years of age and are educated tend to be the poorest performers when it comes to share trading. In fact if you fall into this category and work as an engineer or doctor as your day job then your chances of trading success fall even further. So why is it that intelligent, educated and high income earning individuals aren’t able to translate their success in their chosen field to something as rudimentary as trading.

The short answer is pride and ego. Operating from your ego means that you don’t work as hard to gain a sense of mastery in your new field. They mistakingly believe that their track record of success should naturally translate itself to a new activity without realizing that their current success was in itself largely the result of their own hard work and commitment.

Don’t expect success from one area of your life to automatically translate to another area. Those who achieve success in trading for example probably invested the same amount of effort, sweat and work as you did in your current chosen field so why would you think you could automatically do better then them without putting in just as much work to get to their level of expertise.

3. Hard Work Is Not A Dirty Word

Imagine if every first generation immigrant came to the land of abundant opportunity and said, well now that I’m here why should I have to work hard. Prosperous countries have been largely built on the backs of hard working immigrants. If you come from an immigrant family you will know how hard they worked and slaved away to have what they have today. Hard work is not a dirty word, but subsequent generations have come to embrace the notion they they expect the lifestyle they have gotten used to but aren’t willing to put in hardly the same amount of effort to keep it or maintain it.

Steve Pavlina vividly portrays the importance of embracing hard work, “When faced with the prospect of saying to yourself, “If I always avoid hard work, I’ll never in my life get to experience X, Y, or Z,” it’s a little easier to embrace the benefits of hard work. What will you miss out on? You’ll probably never run a marathon, marry the mate of your dreams, become a multi-millionaire, make a real difference in the world, etc. You’ll have to settle for only what going with the flow can provide, which is mediocrity. You’ll basically just take up space and die without really having mattered. The world will be pretty much the same had you never existed (chaos theory notwithstanding).

If you want to achieve some really big and interesting goals, you have to learn to fall in love with hard work. Hard work makes the difference. It’s what separates the children from the mature adults. You can keep living as a child and desperately hoping that life will always be easy, but then you’ll be stuck in a child-like world, working on other people’s goals instead of your own, waiting for opportunities to come to you instead of creating your own, and doing work that in the grand scheme of this world just isn’t important.”

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