My financial epiphany

My financial epiphany

I have spent the last two years learning about cryptocurrency and in order to understand it I also had to study the global banking system. I have read many books on the various wealth building strategies promoted by various authors and people described as financial experts. But I think the totality of my two years can distilled down to one simple idea, which is best explained in this story.

I have been conventional.

I was raised to follow conventional wisdom. I was educated in conventional schools, took all the conventional courses, prepared for the convention of a “job” and had the conventional 2 kids, a house and a mortgage.

I was indistinguishable from the majority of my peers. I was “normal” and blended in well with the crowd. And that was my problem.

Let me explain.

I was also unable to afford private school or college without working overtime and borrowing money. I often marveled at those who were more affluent them myself, and wondered how they did it. I assumed that their job just paid better, their mortgage rate was better, their private schools cheaper.

But I really didn’t know how rich people got rich, what made them different. I had a set of assumptions and platitudes about the rich, like they were born rich, they inherited it, they got lucky, or it took money to make money.

I like most people never met or talked to a rich person, until later in life. It was only after befriending someone wealthy and reading several books that I had an epiphany. I was not rich because I was doing the same things with my education, job, family and finances that every other person who was not rich was doing.

I think I should repeat that statement, for effect.

I was doing the same things every other non-rich person was doing.

A statement which infers that the rich are doing something’s that I wasn’t doing. In America we often refer to the top 1% of income earners in our country as “the one percenters” and they got to be in the top one percent of income earners by doing things the other 99% aren’t doing.

It was an epiphany which struck me like a punch or a bright light in a dark room...

...and suddenly I felt like I had been fumbling in the darkness and someone had turned on the light switch and I could see.

So ask yourself, if you continue to do the things that poor or middle class people do, will it make you rich?

Or do you need to start doing the things, which the rich people do?

It sounds like a trick question, and it is, because you have to be ready to stop following the crowd and blending in, and start standing out as someone who does things everyone else isn’t doing, because that’s what the successful people are doing. These thoughts and actions are not always comfortable, but it appears that they are profitable.

My final thought would be that while money isn’t everything and your life shouldn’t revolve around it’s accumulation, having it makes your life so different.

In some ways it gives you the freedom to truly have a choice how to live your life, the way you want to live it.

Knowledge is power, power creates wealth and wealth provides you freedom.
Free yourself.

✍🏼 by Shortsegments.

Picture Credit

Picture originally from www.png.com Royalty Free graphics, but modified by @shortsegments.

Title: My financial epiphany.