Monday, April 04, 2011

Five Dangerous Lies About Money

Nothing hinders men from getting rich like their wrong beliefs about money. Therefore we must constantly screen our thoughts to eliminate such self-limiting beliefs.
Here are some of them:


1. YOU NEED MONEY TO START A GOOD BUSINESS


While it is true that money plays a vital role for start-up businesses, seeing it as an ultimate joker for business success is an unforgivable blunder. WHO is starting the business is more important than WHAT is required to start it.

For instance, when people invest in Dangote Cement shares, they are investing in the credibility of Alhaji Aliko Dangote not the business per se. Your entrepreneurial capacity is more important than the capital you need. With entrepreneurial skills you can start with what you have or attract enough money to build a great business of your own.


2. YOU NEED A GREAT IDEA TO MAKE MONEY.


There are hundreds of billionaires in the world today. And only a few of them are original inventors. The remarkable thing is that most of them were just men who took existing but ordinary ideas and built extraordinary businesses out of them.

You don’t need a perfect business idea to make money. How you run a business is more important than what industry or business idea you’re running. Most business ideas evolve into completely different ideas after a few years.

Therefore it would be useless to try to achieve perfection at the beginning or wait for perfection before you start. You will experience fast growth in business if you could just learn from your mistakes and respond to changes along the way.

3. THE HARDER YOU WORK, THE MORE MONEY YOU MAKE

I believe in strong work ethics. But the truth is that most of our success at Richseed is more as a result of smart work (with a little bit of hard work). There is an extent to which hard work can go. Smart work gives you an advantage called leverage. Leverage can be described as a process of looking for better ways of doing more things with fewer resources.

Working smarter is about doing more of mental work than menial work. It is about looking for legitimate ways to use other people’s time, energy and money to reach your goals.

One of the richest men in the world today, Warren Buffet has over 70 large companies. There is no way he could have run them profitably without the power of leverage. Leverage brings about unlimited results from your limited effort.


4. BEING SMART AT EVERYTHING WILL MAKE YOU RICH


Some of the dumbest people I have seen are rich people. Henry Ford once faced an array of questions from journalists who accused him of not being smart even though he was rich. He simply called forward a few persons in his organisation who answered all the questions perfectly. Wealth is not about being smart about many things. It’s about being smart in goal setting, entrepreneurship and management of people and other resources.

5. THE HEAVIER YOU SAVE, THE RICHER YOU BECOME

If your definition of saving is to store money away for several years in a bank account just to yield interest, then you are not ready to be rich. Inflation in most parts of the world today (including Nigeria) is growing faster than the interest rates any bank can afford to you.

My advice is to save on purpose and for contingencies; and then master the art of multiplying your money by identifying viable investments and investing in them on the long term.

Whatever you do, make sure that you don’t base your philosophy of money on common sense. Learn from investors and entrepreneurs around you who have built their wealth over the years through investments and business ownership. Soon you will be thinking and acting like them.