According to Steve Siebold, author of How Rich People Think, the difference between rich people and everyone else isn’t their education or their skills. After all, skills and knowledge are useless unless at some point we put them into practice to their full potential.
For Siebold, as for many other authors, the difference lies in the way people think. In his view, what holds most people back from succeeding and building wealth is their own thinking.
(See: The most striking differences between how the rich think and how everyone else does)
Now financial planner Douglas Obey, author of Money & The Human Condition, echoes this particular belief: ordinary people, he says, psychologically sabotage themselves when it comes to building their own wealth.
For Obey, the biggest psychological barrier he sees to building wealth is fear.
Fear of rejection, which stops us from creating opportunities; fear of failure, which stops us from drawing up strategies to reach our goals; and, illogical as it may sound, fear of success.
Fear of success?
According to Obey, this fear is more common than we imagine. Most people could achieve much more than they have and go further than they’ve gone, but fear of success keeps them from reaching their full potential. If we succeed, a precedent is set in our minds, and we expect that success to continue in the future, which creates more pressure than many people can bear.
As Obey puts it, we never become more than we believe we are, and we never get further than we believe we will.
And the truth is he’s right, because we can often achieve far more, but we settle, convincing ourselves that we don’t need more money. There’s nothing wrong with thinking that way, except that many people, faced with unforeseen circumstances, realise they should have earned more.
For example, some people have spent years comfortably settled in a job at a company. They’re perfectly happy repeating the saying that “the richest person is not the one who has the most, but the one who needs the least”. But when the company goes bust and they find themselves out on the street at 50 with little chance of finding a new job, they realise there was an unknown in their life equation they had never solved: unlikely, but possible.
Others see getting rich as something simply out of reach and impossible for most people unless we were born into a wealthy family. So why even bother trying?
These kinds of fears, whether fear of failure or fear of success, are very hard to identify. In fact, we often don’t realise how important it is to think big until we see life turn our professional and/or financial situation completely upside down.
See also: The young man who planned to retire rich at 27
Overcoming these psychological fears is what can make the difference between being ordinary and becoming rich.
That said, as we have shown more than once, if we want to build wealth gradually, we don’t necessarily have to take on as much risk as we think. In fact, by working, saving and investing you can accumulate wealth without having to start your own business.
Of course, as we always advise, try not to depend on a single source of income while you’re building those assets. Just as we need a minimum of diversification when investing our money, we need to diversify our sources of income so that if the main one disappears, at least the damage to our finances is limited.
In short, you can achieve far more than you have so far, but you will never achieve more than you believe you’re capable of.
See also: 10 ways the rich think differently from everyone else
Featured image: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
