What will truly make you rich. Spoiler: it’s not multiple income streams

Armando Romeo
Making of a Millionaire
10 min readJan 16, 2020

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I respect my audience enough to assume that you’re not reading this article looking for another get-rich-quick secret.

I assume instead that you want to understand how capitalism created 1,146,000 new millionaires in 2019 alone. Believe it or not, none of these were because someone added a “side hustle” or had “multiple income streams” or got a “pay bump.”

Being one of those 1,146,000 myself, I want to share a few thoughts that I hope will put you in the right mindset to build wealth if that’s one of your objectives for 2020.

This article is split into 2 parts:

  • Things that won’t make you rich
  • What truly makes you rich

But first: what is “rich” anyway?

People have different definitions of “rich” nowadays. For some “rich” is having $1M, and for others, it’s $100M. Consider that the owner of a mortgage-free 2-bedroom in Palo Alto has a net worth that would put them in the TOP 0.5% of Italian wealth holders. So “rich,” under a certain threshold, is pretty subjective.

Since I was an engineer well before becoming an entrepreneur, I like to quantify things. Banks will generally consider you a High Net Worth Individual (HNWI) if your net worth is $1M, a Very High Net Worth Individual if you have $5M, and an Ultra-High Net Worth Individual with $20–30M+.

These numbers are rising higher and higher every year because we are printing money faster than toilet paper and the value of the two are steadily converging. But for the sake of this article, a UHNWI can safely be considered rich pretty much anywhere in the world and by any measure.

Things that won’t make you rich

The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it — Jordan Belford

As controversial a personality as he can be, Jordan nailed it here. Motivation is a necessary condition to wealth building. But motivation alone is not sufficient if you don’t also have a…

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Global Entrepreneur | Investor | A successful exit in Cybersecurity | Helping founders grow their startup and exit.