Thought for the Day

Seeking substantial wealth is almost always a fool's game.  The statistics show that very few people ever succeed.  Most of them should never have made the attempt in the first place.  They aren't suited to it, and if that sounds defeatist, then consider the fact that the search will take up a great deal of your waking life for many, many years.

You cannot get rich without "wasting" that time.  Not unless you were born lucky-so lucky that luck has squatted on your shoulder virtually from birth.  You would not need to get rich, then.  You would already be rich, in one way or another.

Time is finite.  Which is a fancy way of saying that you only have so much of it-then it will run out  When you are young, time seems to stretch into the distance for so far that surely it will always be on your side?  When the young catch the old unawares, they may sometimes glimpse a look of naked envy, which is then instantly disguised.  And the old have reason to be envious.  Truly, truly, they do.   Ask me what I will give you if you could wave a magic wand and give me my youth back.  The answer would be everything I will ever own.  

If you are young and reading this then I ask you to remember just this:  you are richer than anyone older than you, and far richer than those who are much older.  What you choose to do with the time that stretches out before you is entirely a matter for you.  But do not say you started the journey poor.  If you are young, you are infinitely richer that I can ever be again.

Money is never owned.  It is only in your custody for a while.  Time is always running on, and the young have more of it in their pocket than the richest man or woman alive.  That is not sentimentality speaking.  That is sober fact.

And yet you wish to waste your youth in the getting of money?  Really?  Think hard, my young cub, think hard and think long before you embark on such a quest.  The time spent attempting to acquire wealth will mount up and cannot be reclaimed, whether you succeed or whether you fail.

Even if you should succeed in becoming rich, unlikely as that is, what will you have achieved?  Independence of a kind?  The luxury to choose what you wish to do with the rest of your life?  Happiness?  No, no and no.  You will not achieve any of these things.  Now when you have too much money.  Wealth makes many demands and by the time you have acquired it, you will be prey to certain habits.  You will fear to lose it and must spend a great deal more time to defend it.  No one is 'independent' of the human race.  'No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.'  

No luxury of choices for rich little you.  You will be too busy keeping the sea from washing away the sand you have spent so long collecting at such terrible cost to your health and your sanity and your relationships with others.  It is always thus.  There is no escape.  You believe (I know you do) that it will be different for you.  But it won't be.  It never is.

Happiness?  Do not make me laugh.  The rich are NOT happy.  I have yet to meet a single really rich happy man or woman-and I have met many rich people.  The demands from others to share their wealth become so tiresome, and so insistent, they nearly always decide they must insulate themselves.  Insulation breeds paranoia and arrogance.  And loneliness.  And rage that you have only so many years left to enjoy rolling in the sand you have piled up.  

The only people the self-made rich can trust are those who knew them before they became wealthy.  For many newly rich people, the world becomes a smaller, less generous and darker place.  It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?  Ridiculous and gloomy.

But then, you are to consider that I have been very poor and I am now very rich.  I am an optimist by nature.  And I have the ability to write poetry and create the forest I am busy planting.  Am I happy?  No.  Or, at least, only occasionally, when I am walking in the woods alone, or deeply ensconced in composing a difficult piece of verse, or sitting quietly with old friends over a bottle of wine.  Or feeding a stray cat.  

I could do all those things without wealth.  So why do I not give it all away?  

Because I worked too hard for it.  Because I am tainted by it.  Because I am afraid to.  All those reasons and more.  Perhaps, if I am lucky enough to become old, I will accumulate something else: the courage to give it all away before I die.  That would be a good thing I think. (When I die, it is all going to a charity called 'The Forest of Dennis'.  You see, even I do a good thing with my money, my ego insists that I name it for myself.  Not a good sign.)

Giving money away when you are dead takes no guts.  No courage.  But to divest yourself of hundreds of millions of dollars, or the greater part of your fortune, before your death?  That would be something to be proud of, don't you think?  It even makes logical sense.

For what is left afterwards but a few tears by the graveside and years of bickering and waste over a complex will?  (The wills of the rich are always complex.)  Bitter years, where lawyers count the number of fairies they believe you once thought danced upon the head of a pin-years in which they enrich themselves at your descendant's expense.  A fine legacy, to be sure.

But you must make your own choice.  I have said my piece and I meant every word of it.  This small part of my book was composed in my mind years ago.  It was easy to write.  I knew all of it before my fingers touched the keyboard.  It has troubled me for years and I thank you for allowing me to share it. -Felix Dennis-How to Get Rich

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