Wealth building is a lot like planting a crop, or raising livestock, in the case of crops you hope it rains just at the right time, you hope there is heat and sunshine at the right times, you do your best to give it a good base to start from, and the end result or return is the bushels or pounds or bales to the acre it yields.
For livestock you constantly cull your herd to get a good line of genetics going, give it good quality food/water to develop with the return being your greatest amount of body weight gain in the shortest time period and most cost effective inputs possible for the most part. And also there is some risk involved in either one of these agriculture endeavors market prices, mother nature, disease etc.
Wealth building is a lot the same there is some education/research involved, there is some timing involved. And in some investments there is risk involved as well. There is however a difference in that there is a portion of building wealth that can be accomplished by good habits and good financial discipline without taking any risk. These habits and disciplines I will talk about in another post.
So let’s rewind almost a couple decades, and put me at the age of 20 and for some strange reason I get the urge to see what I can find out about investing, so the logical choice in my head said head to a bookstore. Off I go and find the business/investing of the book store and the book that catches my eye and also was on display on it’s own pedestal is this one How to make money in stocks the second edition. At the time I was working on pipeline construction making decent money and was repaying my student loan as I was just freshly out of college.
Upon finishing the book I found it interesting but was left with the idea that I needed large amounts of capital to invest before even bothering to get started in investing in stocks. And being all of 20 with the taste of fresh adult freedom that comes when once has within the last couple years graduated from high school and finished a college program I said to myself nah I have plenty of time to worry about that kind of stuff later.
At the time my higher priority interests or at least I thought they were anyway were stereo equipment, and hot rodding up my first vehicle I had got back in high school.
Needless to say the seed was planted but did I do anything to help it? Absolutely not why? Fear for one, uneducated for another and ultimately you can say the worst of all no burning desire to build wealth or get investing. This mindset would continue literally until 2011.
As for that seed it is pictured below.
Take care GFW
