“If I had money, I’d start a business. If I had money, I’d invest in… to make more money.” We’ve all had an “if only I had” at some point, and at that moment it held us back from getting what we wanted. Yet if we look at them closely, those “if only I hads” can become our greatest motivation.
Human beings naturally look for excuses for not reaching their goals or not fighting for them. Back to an old saying: “Those who want to succeed look for ways. Those who don’t look for excuses.” A wise person used to say that there is nothing more foolish in a human being than longing for something they have never had (he was obviously talking about money), because focusing on that longing makes you lose sight of the main goal. If what you’re after is financial freedom and earning more money, money is not the obstacle but the goal, and so it is our motivation.
If you had enough money to set up a business overnight, it would probably fail, and maybe that wouldn’t matter much to you, because you didn’t see it being born or fight to build it from the start. In fact, millionaires who leave great fortunes and corporations to their children often find that the heirs squander the fortune and run the companies into the ground, because they never had to sweat to build the empire their father left them.
This applies to business as much as to investing. As we’ve explained on several occasions, you can start a business without money (with a few exceptions). Many entrepreneurs even look for funding before they have a reasonably well-formed business idea.
Having funding from the outset would be great, but since you don’t, you’ll have to start your business with a minimal-cost strategy and win customers little by little. “Even if you can’t see the path clearly, start walking, and you’ll see that as you walk, the path becomes clearer and the means begin to arrive.”
When it comes to investing, it’s more of the same. I remember that when I started investing in the stock market, I didn’t have much money. Sometimes I had my money in a particular stock and it just wouldn’t move. Meanwhile, I watched other stocks start to bounce and deliver far better returns. Do you know what I used to say? “I’m missing out on those gains. If I had more money, I could diversify into more stocks.” But I didn’t have more money, so I simply had to “aim” a little better next time when choosing the stock I wanted to invest in, so I could build up my capital faster.
Not having enough money made me study the companies I was going to invest in much more thoroughly and improve my investment method. I’m not lying when I say that the biggest mistakes I’ve made in the stock market came precisely when I had plenty of capital. If I’d had little money, I don’t think I would have made them.
These days it’s much easier to invest without money, as we’ve explained, so money in itself is no excuse for not starting to invest (as long as you’re prepared and know what you’re doing). In the same way, it’s no excuse in business, and it shouldn’t be for anything in life.
It starts with “if only I had” and ends with “if only I were royalty, if only I lived in the United States, if only I’d been born into a rich family…”. But we are who we are and we are where we are. With that clear, let’s use what we have to achieve what we long for, and once we get it, we’ll know how to appreciate it and look after it. I’ll finish with a quote:
“Nothing in this life that is worth having comes without effort.” I don’t remember who said it, but as the years go by it makes more and more sense. For everything else, there will always be good excuses to offer.
Further reading
- 23 motivational quotes for entrepreneurs
- Entrepreneurs: chasing a dream
- Talent: are you born with it or is it made?
Featured image: Foggy footpath by N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
