You may be rich, but are you wealthy?

Many of us struggle because we are unable to differentiate between riches and wealth, we acquire liabilities in the belief that they are assets, we put our money into schemes and claim that we are investing, we participate in savings groups yet we call them investment groups, we read and hear opinions and take them as advice.

You may be rich, but are you wealthy?

Africa is richer than you think

“At the highest level, Africa is similar to any other private investment – investors must take on risk to pursue an addressable market opportunity. What makes Africa unique is that incremental dollars invested into Africa will begin to unlock a previously inaccessible market of equal or greater size than Africa today,” says The Africa Group, emphasising that potential returns could be extraordinary. more

How to Be Productive: Stop Working

Industrial companies put a lot of effort into “asset integrity” — which really just means protecting critical plants and machinery from damage and wear and tear. At companies like BP, it’s clearly more of an aspiration than a reality, but anyone trained in a manufacturing environment learns that asset integrity is a top priority. But what about service industries — companies where the only assets are the brains of the people who work there? Shouldn’t they worry about asset integrity, too? Astonishingly, most of them don’t. Instead, financial services, consulting, the law and even the medical profession perpetuate working hours where all-nighters are heroic, driving with jet lag is the norm and anyone who actually has lunch risks becoming lunch.

But, they argue, we’re in the midst of an economic downturn, the worst recession in our lifetimes. Shouldn’t we all be working as hard as we can? Who has the luxury of time? What do you mean weekends aren’t for working?

Well, for the last 100 years, every productivity study in every industry has come to the same conclusion: after about 40 hours in a week, the quality of your work starts to degrade. You make mistakes. That’s why working 60 hours may not save you time or money: you’ll spend too much of that time fixing the mistakes you shouldn’t have made in the meantime. That’s why software companies that limit work to 35 hours a week need to employ fewer QA engineers: there isn’t as much mess to clean up.

In a knowledge economy, where thinking and creativity are the raw materials from which products and profit flow, brains are assets. They need to be cherished, nurtured and protected, not abused.

Leaders need to take seriously a century’s evidence that 1) overwork doesn’t make us productive, it makes us stupid, 2) looking away from a problem is often the best way to solve it, and 3) burnout is what happens when people are asked to work in ways that obliterate all other parts of their lives.

Also: we need to hammer the last nail into the coffin of multi-tasking. No, you can’t safely drive and hold conference calls, nor can you text while driving. And checking emails while in meetings means you may as well not be there. What modern businesses need isn’t distracted Blackberry addicts but human beings who haven’t forgotten the gifts of focus, concentration and mindfulness.

When the cognitive scientist Dan Simons looked at the vast mountain of evidence that demonstrates the futility of multitasking, he was inevitably asked whether there were anything we could do to enlarge the capacity of our minds. The answer was an emphatic “no.” There are hard limits to what our brains will do, and no amount of Baby Mozarts or Brain Trainers will alter that. Practice, Simons says, will improve specific skills but not general abilities. Doing Sudoko will make you better at Sudoko; it won’t raise your GMAT scores.

Is there anything that truly enhances cognition? Yes, says Simons:exercise.

Experiments by his colleague Arthur Kramer showed that walking for a few hours a week led to large improvements on cognitive tasks. Stretching and toning exercises had no cognitive benefits, but aerobic exercise, which increases blood flow to the brain, did.

Seniors who walked for just 45 minutes a day for three days a week showed better preservation of their brains in MRI scans. Exercise, Simons concludes, improves cognition broadly by increasing the fitness of your brain.

Care about asset integrity? Get out of the office and go for a walk. And make sure the people who work for you do, too.

“Filthy Stinking Rich” — A Moral Lesson

Here’s a quick exercise for you.

Finish this phrase: “Rich people are______________.”

How did you complete this phrase? Are your answers mostly positive or negative? Did you think of words like successful, accomplished, and disciplined? Or did you come up negative words like greedy, snotty, or ruthless?

Whether you admire or despise the wealthy, how you feel about money and the people who have it will determine–more than the knowledge in your head or the situation you grew up under–whether you will be financially successful or not.

You cannot be wealthy if you feel wealth is bad. If you have negative associations with money you will repel it rather than attract it.

This concept is nothing new, but the ramifications are huge.

I hope you want to become wealthy. More than that, I hope you want to be filthy stinking rich.

I’ll tell you why in a moment.

But first realize that if you’ve been telling yourself “I’d like to have enough to live on and do what I want, but I don’t need more than that” then you’re missing the point.

The point of becoming wealthy isn’t so that you can gorge yourself on expensive things, live fat and happy, and tell the rest of the world to go to hell.

If you’ve seen “Batman Begins” you’d seen how Bruce Wayne’s father, Dr. Thomas Wayne, had left Wayne Enterprises in the hands of “more interested” individuals so that he could volunteer at the hospital. I’m sure he, speaking as if he were a real person, touched the lives of hundreds of people through his simple service.

But more than just the services he provided I’m sure that, because of the billions of dollars he had from business, he was able to provide needed medical equipment to the hospital, allow people to get surgeries that they couldn’t afford, and a lot of good was done because he had the resources to back up his volunteer work. Good people can do so much more good in the world if they have money.

Somewhere along the line many people developed the idea that being poor is holy, and that if you live in poverty amongst the poor you can do the greatest good.

I think that’s ridiculous.

I think scratching to make a living keeps people from serving others, and living paycheck to paycheck is so time consuming that it keeps people from reaching their full potential. If you can barely help yourself, it’s going to be hard to really help someone else.

“Playing little” doesn’t do anything to help the world. If that’s your game, you’re going to need a whole lot more ambition than that to make it in the real estate investing business. Only those who want to do big things with their lives are going to have the drive and vision to make it in real estate.

Get it in your head that you are going to be very wealthy, because it’s the wealthy that have the time and resources to really make a difference in the world.

Even Mother Theresa, sworn to poverty, could not have accomplished a fraction of what she did without the financial backing of wealthy donors. She raised millions in her lifetime, and hard-working individuals had to earn enough money to take care of themselves first and then earn more money so they could give it away.

That is why I hope you want to be wealthy.

By the way, why do people use the term “filthy stinking rich?” Answer: Jealousy.
-Jarom Adair
Real Estate Investing for Beginners