This is a very interesting question because it brings up many related issues concerning wealth. The systems in place to “create wealth” that are pedaled to us are usually in the form of investments: buying real estate, buying stocks, etc. However, these investments are extremely volatile, as we’ve seen in recent years. The idea that you can buy a piece of land or put a portion of your check into a fund relies on the premise that the value of these investments are always going to rise, when in reality, the value of things fluctuate. Still, the powers that be keep trying to make the premise of rising values true, and you end up with situations like what happens on Wall Street, where it isn’t enough that a company is making a profit, or even a good profit: a company has to make more profit than it did last year, or else it’s a loser. With so much pressure to increase profits year after year, companies institute cost-cutting measures which eliminate jobs, cheapen the quality of their product and cause problems in tangential companies, like suppliers, manufacturers and/or distributors. Stockholders get a better return on their investments, but the consumers and other people along the chain are the losers. On top of all that, putting this kind of pressure on the economy to always increase profits causes the whole system to go through periods of meltdown like the one we’ve just recently experienced. I’m not an economist, but can profits continue to grow year after year, forever? Doesn’t it have to slow down or stop at some point?
And this brings us back to the question: how do you create wealth? Or more specifically, how do you create wealth in a more stable way than we are taught to do it? If you’re talented, you can make money from your talent, like music, writing, etc. But you have to be very good and no talent industry is easy to break into. You could make money with a good idea, but it requires a lot of hard work to develop the idea and find a way to market it. You could do something more traditional, like open a business: plumbing, grocery store, computer repair, manicures, etc. These won’t make you extremely wealthy, but you can do quite well. My cousin is a barber and he does extremely well. You could also try to enter a lucrative profession: be a dentist, anesthesiologist, lawyer, doctor, accountant. These might not make you a millionaire, but you’ll have the potential to do very well and be very comfortable. All of the above, in my opinion, are ways to make yourself valuable or to create value, instead of relying on others to artificially inflate value to make numbers on the stock ticker look good. Being an originator of value is a more stable and predictable way of creating wealth.
The bottom line is you can be lucky or you can work hard. Not many have the first, so you have to make do with the second.
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