Smart v/s Wealthy

Blog Summary

The discussion in this blog contrasts the values of intelligence versus wealth in achieving success. It argues that while wealth can provide resources, smart strategies and decisions often yield more sustainable success. The author critiques the overemphasis on financial gain and highlights examples where cleverness leads to better outcomes. The narrative calls for a broader definition of success that includes intellectual and ethical dimensions.

Blog Content

While you may think that being smart, motivated, and talented would logically make you wealthy, unfortunately, this is often not the case.

Smart and talented people often have a flair for the unusual, complicated, or different. They don’t like to follow the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid), which is required to make money.

So, being smart or talented isn’t going to help you unless you can use those smarts to figure out a way to simplify those tasks that will make you money. This isn’t easy, because it goes against everything that you have ever done and is counter to how you were taught to think. However, it is necessary for a business to succeed and why smarts and talent alone don’t predict entrepreneurial success and hence wealth creation.

Too much to lose… and, with the most to lose, a wide range of other options available, and the penchant for more intricate, complex endeavors, don’t be surprised when the person “Most Likely to Succeed” from high school ends up in corporate America and one of the more average students finds success in his or her own business.

So what are the basics to know to make real money?

1. Don’t get a salary. A salary will never make you money.
2. Don’t try to save money by not buying stuff you need. That’s a myth. The best way to save money is to make more.
3. Empower quality people by introducing them to each other. Introduce them and stay out of the way. This is real networking. Not fake networking where people hand business cards to strangers.
4. When you have wealth, never invest more than 5% of your wealth in any one idea.
5. Don’t enter regulated businesses or the ones with lots of competition. Enter a business with a monopoly. This means high profits, high perks, great education.
6. Be around people who love you and whom you love. Eliminate people who bring you down.
7. Look everywhere for what is hidden. The people who understand the wealth creation process hide the money very carefully. The people who don’t know have TV shows about it.
8. Lose the bad habit of engaging in zero sum competitions with other smart people. Many smart people tend to flock to fields which are already saturated with other smart people. Only a limited number of people can become a top investment banker, law partner, Fortune 500 CEO or humanities professor. Yet smart people let themselves be funneled into these fields and relentlessly compete with each other for limited slots. They all but ignore other areas where they could be even more successful, and that are less overrun by super-smart people. Instead of thinking outside the box, smart people often think well within a box, a very competitive box that has been set up by other people and institutions to further someone else’s interests at the expense of the smart person.

Now that you know, go create the wealth you deserve … and maybe then I can start calling you “real smart”.