How To Become Fabulously Wealthy With Nothing But The Clothes On Your Back
When I worked in Silicon Valley, I had a pretty nice life. Thanks to a lucrative position in one of Silicon Valley premier (and very famous) companies, I was making an absolute killing, which afforded me a nice apartment in a nice neighborhood of San Francisco, as well to go out to trendy (and expensive) restaurants and bars while driving around in an expensive sports car. And I still had money left over. Although I’ve build many businesses over the years, my life felt very comfortable, even if it meant I was “working for the man.”
Most of it was due to security and stability. San Francisco wasn’t a cheap place to live (it’s much more expensive now), so if I would’ve quit my job, I would’ve needed to do something big in order to have the same standard of living that my lucrative tech job afforded me to live. I wasn’t ready to give up such lifestyle for a road replete with doubt and struggle. Call it slavery or whatever you will, but it was a lifestyle that I needed to continue living. I simply didn’t know any other ways of being “free” and still living a very comfortable life.
It was only many years later that I realized how confused and misguided I was. Actually, no, let me rephrase myself. It’s not that I was confused and misguided. I was merely uninformed. I lacked the crucial perspective that I possess now.
What I didn’t understand before is that it’s much, much easier to create real wealth than I previously imagined. Wealth was actually everywhere — at least if you knew where to look.
A sojourn in India
I recently took a short trip to India after spending six months living in Southeast Asia (Indonesia and Thailand). While Southeast Asia is beautiful and exotic, it was when I exited Mumbai’s International Airport that I immediately felt as though I had just discovered a new and exciting planet. After visiting over 85 countries and seeing my share of the planet, I had resigned to the fact that my best travel days were behind me. But no, India felt like a truly special place. It reinvigorated my travel spirit.
One word that immediately came to mind while I was walking around Mumbai was “rich.” Everything about the country felt rich. Not rich in an economic or financial sense. But rich in a cultural sense. The culture is rich. The food is rich. The people are rich (in terms of mindset). Everyone was smiling and chatting. India was overflowing with richness.
But this article isn’t about India. Nor is it about traveling. I’m sure there are many of you reading this who hate India and have absolutely zero interest of going there. That’s fine. This article is about building wealth. When I was in India, I suddenly developed a burning desire to spend six months (or more) traveling around the country, something that had all but died after I decided to stop traveling around and just live in big cities.
That’s not all. Now only did I have a desire to travel, I also immediately realized that by embarking on this journey or mission, I will also create lots of wealth. And the way I will create this wealth will be chiefly by cultivating and exporting my experiences to the entire world.
There are unlimited ways of doing this. Maybe I would write about what I’m seeing, touching, smelling, hearing or tasting. Maybe I would supplement all that by making videos. Maybe I would interview people and share their knowledge with others. Maybe I would talk about the richness of India’s food. Or maybe I would take a completely different path and focus on India’s culture. After all, we’re talking about the world’s largest democracy, an enormous country, straddled right in the middle of Asia. All of this represents untapped wealth that can be easily mined and created.
As a permanent traveler, I view the world as a puzzle consisting of different lands and cultures, a puzzle that I’ve been cracking for over 10 years of wandering this planet. Solving this puzzle and creating experiences is my way of mining such wealth. This has allowed me to build a serious online presence, a formidable brand and attract millions of readers in the process. Not a day goes by when someone doesn’t email me and ask me out to lunch whenever I’m passing by their country.
Chances are you’re not like me. You don’t have to be a traveler. You just have to find something that you connect with. Something that fulfills you. Something that when you’re doing it, nothing else matters and you feel as though you’re doing one of the most rewarding things in the world. Something that you might not hesitate to do even if there wasn’t an immediate payoff involved. For me, it’s slow and meaningful travel. For you it could be something else.
The only formula that works
This is the only formula that truly works. It’s the only way to build real wealth. That’s because the easiest way to consistently fail and become miserable in life is to do the complete opposite. It’s to ignore what matters to you and do something that’s not linked to your interests or passions. It’s to do something because of some abstract goal like “want to be rich” or “want to make lots of money.”
People are full of self-hate. At least that’s the only way I can explain why they work at jobs they absolutely hate, jobs where they wouldn’t hesitate to kill their boss for exploiting them if they knew no one would find out. Why do they do it? Because they feel they have no other choice. They feel that just because they receive pieces of paper with dead presidents on them, it’s something they must do.
They’re also not very honest with themselves. They know they absolutely hate their jobs. They know they hate their boss. They know that they need to wake up at 6am and go to work and then pass out at their bed at 9pm — all so that they can make someone else richer than they were yesterday. They perfectly know all this. All the while they’re dreaming about a “different life,” a life of travel, of excitement, a life of living in Brazil, Russia or even India. They want one thing, but continue doing the complete opposite.
I continue to be baffled by such behavior. Because to me it doesn’t make any sense. There’s no justification for it whatsoever. That’s like dating a mediocre girl all while knowing that you deserve and would be much happier with someone sexier and more intelligent.
Wealth is everywhere, but you must also be willing to mine it. When I lived in Copenhagen, Denmark, I spent my evenings training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu at a pretty cool school run by a young Danish guy with curly blonde hair. I actually discovered his school via a blog (aptly called BJJ Globetrotter), where he was chronicling his round-the-world adventures.
Here’s a perfect example of someone taking his passion (Brazilian Jiu Jitsu), combining it with another passion (traveling), and then exporting this experience for the entire world to see. Tons of great value and wealth created from seemingly nothing. Over the course of his travels, the site exploded in readership. After he returned to Copenhagen, he slightly altered the mission of the project and continued working on it. Many of his current business endeavors are either directly or indirectly to the wealth he created while traveling around the world.
An important caveat
Before you get all excited and decide that it’s something you want to do as well, you must first become aware of several caveats. First of all, whatever you decide to do must be something that you’re absolutely curious and passionate about. This is absolutely not negotiable.
If I told you that you can make a ton of money building a travel blog, but you absolutely hate traveling and don’t even have a passport, then guess what? Not going to work. Not only are you not going to make any money, but you will become very miserable in the process. Traveling is something that I think about 24/7, so if that’s not you, you better go and do something else.
Or maybe you decide to build a brand around the intersection of programming, technology and strategy — a very nice area with lots of traffic and monetizing potential — but you think technology is for introverted nerds who can’t get laid, and you’re an extroverted guy who feels more comfortable in a packed bar than discussing the merits of using Ruby on Rails vs. Django.
That’s also not going to work. You can’t do something just because you’ve heard someone else is making a killing with it. You can’t directly copy someone else’s success. Because that guy who’s writing about programming and technology, whose blog is getting 30,000 visitors on a slow day, probably knows a hell of a lot more than you’ll ever know in your lifetime — he’s probably living and breathing this stuff. And you just can’t compete with guys like that. Do something else.
Avoiding the race to the bottom
All of this points to another factor that no one ever talks about. For you to become wealthy — wealthier than you’d ever dreamed possible — your life must be meaningful. If you’re unhappy with how things are going, if you hate your life, your girlfriend (or the fact that you can’t attract women), your boss, your job; if you curse the world every time you wake up at 6 in the morning and start getting ready to work; if your life is full of despair, you won’t succeed.
That’s because you’re not being honest with yourself and therefore not living an honest life. And if you’re not honest with yourself, then everything else falls apart. This is something you must fix first. Once you realign your life to what you’re meant to be doing, only then can you start mining wealth from it. Being honest with yourself and what you want is the foundation on which everything else gets built.
While I’ve met many people with soulless 9–5 who cursed everything in life, I’ve also met guys who aren’t doing 9–5, but still hate what they’re doing. For example, I’ve met tons of guys who slave day in and day out working on some crappy Internet marketing ebooks. Others are thinking of building drop-shipping stores that will sell furniture.
But most of them hate all these projects with a deep passion. They don’t tell their friends and family about it. Because they know that deep inside that the “products” they’re working on will add zero value to other people’s lives. They’re just going for the “marketing” aspect and ignoring the actual, tangible and lasting value.
They know that they’re already gazillion ebooks similar to the 30-page one that they’re busy writing. They also know they won’t make much money, but to them, every penny counts. They’re desperate. The guy who’s planning on selling furniture via his drop-shipping store really couldn’t care less about furniture. But he heard someone out there making a killing selling furniture, so that’s why he’s doing it.
There’s a complete lack of honesty and self-awareness. It’s also a good example of “race to the bottom” scenario where someone is creating cheap and crappy “products” for some monetary gain, products that you couldn’t give two shits about, products that you’re too embarrassed to tell your friends and family, products that will inevitably make very little money because they won’t improve the lives of many people. It’s no surprise that many of these guys are living in some third-world country because they could never afford to live somewhere nicer and more expensive.
Think about it. Did Bill Gates co-found Microsoft because he wanted to become a billionaire? No, he co-founded Microsoft because he wanted to change the world by making personal computers accessible and affordable to every consumer. He wanted to create a brand new market. It also didn’t hurt that was a geek and an excellent programmer who actually enjoyed working with computers.
Did Sergey Brin and Larry Page co-found Google because they wanted to be rich and drive nice cars? No, they were both computer scientists who discovered a noble way to index and rank all the data on the Internet. Thanks to them, Internet became much more accessible to the masses, and they naturally become extremely wealth in the process.
That’s how you build wealth. Wealth is a byproduct of putting yourself — you’re entire 100% — precisely where you feel you’ll be able to add lots of value. True wealth is bigger than the sum of its parts. Creating wealth is about molding your unique experience, knowledge, mindset, purpose, value and combining all that into something unique and interesting.
Moreover, you don’t have to aim to be the next Bill Gates or Sergey Brin; indeed, there are different levels of wealth. Going on a six-month trip through India and exporting this knowledge through your unique perspective is a form of wealth building. For you to succeed, it has to be the real you, you know the one who’s having the time of his life and wouldn’t be doing anything else.
And when considered from this — all or nothing, do or die, “This is life!”, “I wouldn’t want to do anything else right now” — mindset, creating and harnessing wealth is the natural outcome.
This article originally appeared on my blog.
