You don’t understand money: That’s why you will never have it

Luís Próspero
Making of a Millionaire
7 min readJun 30, 2020

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Perhaps after reading this you will understand how money actually works

Photo by Josh Appel, Unsplash

In the stoic world, it is believed that we do not need to indulge in materialistic happiness for it is not real, it should be appreciated if had, but never depended on because it will turn into a fake necessity and we won’t know how to live without them.

“Almost nothing material is needed for a happy life for he who has understood existence” — Marcus Aurelius

It’s crazy how we went from this philosophic stoic thinking to a capitalist world where the sole drive for career progression and character development is always with a future indulgence as an ulterior motive.

The way you think about money

Perhaps you are “an adult”. You have a job now. You have a mortgage to pay, bills to cover, and food to eat, right? You wake up at 7:30 am to go to a job you don’t love, but you think you have to keep going because money doesn’t grow on trees, right? Or maybe you are still a student. It’s not like you don’t have anything to worry about — if anything, you have even more pressure on yourself because you must choose a future for yourself and you don’t want to make the mistake most people make of choosing something they don’t love just because it makes more money. Now have a huge student debt to pay, you make little to no money and you feel like you are trapped.

You look at these guys on the top of the mountain and think to yourself — Man, I wish I was so lucky as they were. You think they are lucky, they cheated their way there, they were born there. You come to the harsh realization that the game is rigged.

But what if I told you that you’re wrong?

They’ve been feeding you lies

If you were born in poverty, you are far more likely to grow up believing you will keep having no money, or perhaps you went in the opposite direction and decided you would do anything you can to never go through that again. Either way, you are probably doing it wrong.

The fact that schools don’t teach much — anything, really — about money is a big problem, but there are things in life that we are just meant to figure out ourselves.

Contrary to what you might think, most billionaires didn’t cheat their way there neither did they inherit their billions. 55.8% of the world’s billionaires are self-made. That number changes to 63.1% in the US and 94.5% in China.

Let us look at examples, shall we?

Warren Buffet — 72.9 billion — Self-made billionaire

Howard Schultz — 3.5 billion — Born in poverty

Oprah Winfrey — 2.6 billion — Born in poverty

Jeff Bezos — 117.3 billion — Self-made billionaire

Elon Musk — 30 billion — Self-made billionaire

Sara Blakely — 1 billion — Self-made billionaire

What is it these people know that you don’t?

Your equation is all wrong.

You believe that money = salary from a job and the only thing you have to do to earn that money is: spend the most valuable thing there is in life — Time.

You work for 40h/week to make 20$ an hour and by that rate, it will take you nearly 24 years to get to 1.000.000 dollars. But remember, you can’t spend any of it throughout those 24 years, if you do, it will take you even more time to get there. Due to inflation, that “$1.000.000” would only be worth around $630.000 today. You’d have to earn $1.570.000 in 24 years to have that money be worth $1.000.000 today.

Sad, isn’t it? You spend 8 hours a day, 5 days per week for 50 weeks per year for God-know how many years to not even make that much money. You’ll trade your life for money and it won’t even be a substantial amount.

Now you ask yourself — What is it these “self-made billionaires” do to have such wealth at such young ages?

It’s not about how hard you work

You are only paid as much as your perceived value is. What determines your perceived value, you ask? Well, I could bore you with economics just like my professors did for 2 semesters about this topic, but to summarize, I’ll tell you this: You are unique and the more you work on your uniqueness, the more valuable you are.

Why do you think the cleaner that works all day long tiring himself on a daily basis earns substantially less than the accountant that’s sitting behind the desk all day? Because the market sees the cleaner as replaceable. Yes, the accountant is replaceable too, but he isn’t as easily replaced as the cleaner. Everyone can easily learn how to sweep the floors, but not everyone can learn accounting or finances.

It isn’t easy studying for years something like finances, law, management or medicine but when you’re done? Oh boy, you will earn so much more than if you hadn’t.

Even so, I just told you that we shouldn’t be working a 9 to 5 to earn as much money as we want. So, if you don’t work a 9 to 5, what do you do?

Solve a problem

If you look at the examples I gave you before, what do they all have in common besides the fact that they could buy your whole life and their banks wouldn’t notice? They all solved a problem.

Yes yes, I know what you’re thinking. Warren Buffet didn’t solve any problem but he put his money on businesses that did.

Jeff Bezos solved the inconvenience of going to the physical stores, now you can go shop without leaving you room with amazon. And I’m not even going to talk about twitch, audible, all the cloud servers they offer, etc, etc.

Elon Musk was a pioneer in electrical cars and now he is even digging holes through L.A. to solve traffic with his company “The Boring Company”. He even has SpaceX which he doesn’t use for profit, but it increases his perceived value exponentially.

You have to find your niche. When you understand something, you understand its market — Like Warren Buffet with banking — and only then can you find a problem that needs to be solved.

Do want an example of someone who isn’t a billionaire so you can understand what I mean by solving a problem a little better?

Do you know Sean Evans? The host of the show “Hot Ones”? The show exploded on Youtube because he noticed that interviews were bland, tiring and boring. He solved a problem with interviews and got rewarded.

Do you know Evan Williams? You don’t? He is the founder of Twitter and Medium. He saw a problem on the internet with how hard it really was to express yourself through Instagram quotes and Facebook status that no one reads. He was rewarded. Yes, he is a billionaire, but he is a good example because… well, he created Medium and that goes to show that not all good inventions have to be physical like cars, computers or kitchen utensils.

Invest or allocate your capital

I’m getting a bit technical here so you can understand what I’ve been trying to teach you and the differences between the two.

Investing is not the stock market or real estate. Yes, I said Buffet “invests” in companies, but that’s not the right term, though it is the most commonly used.

When you are investing you are using your money to either buy or create something that will generate money. You are creating/buying capital. Capital here goes for anything that can be used to create something else, either to provide a service (i.e. taxis) or to make a product (i.e. a table). In simpler words, investing is using money to buy something that will make something else.

Allocating capital is what we tend to call “investing”. You buy stocks, real estate, finance someone or something. You are taking your money and allocating/putting it somewhere that will make you money in the future.

Allocating capital is for people who want to get rich slowly, people that don’t want to take a lot of risks. Investing is for those who want to get rich fast, who are confident enough that their product or service is going to be successful, in other words, it’s for those with an idea.

You have to decide for yourself what you want to do with the money you earn. Yes, you still have to work to get that money, probably in a 9 to 5 job, but what else were you expecting? Money doesn’t grow on trees.

It’s not how you make that money that counts, it’s what you do with it. Do you go around splurging in Starbucks and Gucci or do you save up to fund your business? Don’t spend money that doesn’t need to be spent. Save up to start your business or allocate your money towards real estate, stocks, startups, something that will make you money without you having to work for it.

This simple mindset change will change the way you look at money, the rich and everything that involves capital.

If you don’t take anything else from what I wrote, take this simple phrase: It takes money to make money.

There isn’t a single self-made millionaire/billionaire that will tell you getting rich is easy, it isn’t. But before getting rich, you have to understand the dynamics of money, how to make money work for you instead of working for money.

This article is for informational purposes only, it should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Not all information will be accurate. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions

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I have a very long list of universities from which I've dropped out. I've learned a lot just by being thrown around by life.