I suppose at some point you’ve asked yourself: why don’t I have any money even though I work so hard? So let’s look at some reasons given by someone who knows quite a bit about the subject.
If we take Jordan Belfort as an example of a successful man, many people will stay on the surface and say that Belfort is nothing more than a con man, a “wolf”, a nickname he was given on Wall Street because of his ferocity and ambition.
But the truth is that Jordan Belfort’s story is much bigger than that. And it’s worth remembering that what the Wolf of Wall Street did, and was arrested for, is something that is still done legally on the stock market today.
The real Wolf himself admits that ambition is good but greed is fatal, and he fell into greed. For a young man earning almost 50 million dollars a year, that success blinded him and led him into a life full of excess, drugs, alcohol…
Managing success is harder than achieving it. Today, in his talks, Belfort describes all these mistakes and presents himself as an example of what not to do, but also of what you should do.
We are talking about someone who knew from a very young age that he wanted financial freedom and wealth, someone who didn’t want to settle for what most people settle for (even if they complain about it), and who knew it was in his hands whether he led a mediocre life or the life he had imagined.
At 16, Belfort was earning 600 dollars a day selling ice cream on the beach, and at 21 he had his first “big” business idea, starting with one truck. Within a few months he had 21 trucks in the city and was already a millionaire. But he himself says he made every mistake it was possible to make in business, so he went from millionaire businessman to bankruptcy in just two years.
At 23 that first company went under, and that was when he decided to go to Wall Street, a place that was made for him, because that was where the money was and where he could satisfy all his needs by using his greatest talent: the ability to persuade and sell.
Despite the scandal Belfort was at the centre of on Wall Street, brokers today still use the sales arguments the Wolf used to win over his clients.
Why you’re poor and not successful, according to Jordan Belfort
Here are the reasons, as Jordan Belfort himself gives them, which we have taken from one of his talks.
1. You can’t control your emotional states
You can be the most talented person in the world at a particular skill, even the best at your job, the best businessman in the world, the best athlete or singer. But if you lack motivation or your emotional state is a mess, you can’t do anything. Because they handle their emotions badly, many singers end up throwing their career and their life away on drugs.
A lot of things happen to us these days: we may go through failures, we may suffer from fears, and many people tell themselves stories explaining why they can’t get what they would like to get, when in reality it’s those comforting stories they tell themselves that keep them from having what they want.
These are the states that give strength to a business:
Certainty, confidence, clarity, courage and conviction, ambition and passion.
The states that drag a business down are:
Feeling overwhelmed, uncertainty and fear.
First, you have to be honest. Everything starts with honesty and seeing things as they are, without stories, knowing why we don’t really have what we want, which is usually down to our decisions or our lack of decisions.
Second, we need to see things as better than they are (as we would like them to be) and draw up a plan to get there.
Imagine your life is a map with a starting point and a destination you want to reach: your goal, your objective, your success or your fortune.
To get to where you want to go and draw a line to it, you need to be very clear about where your starting point is.
2. Powerless goals
The next reason people don’t have money or success isn’t that they set very big goals and fail. It’s that they set very small goals and reach them.
In other words, our surroundings make us want to achieve the same things the people around us have, which are sometimes very mediocre goals, as mediocre as “working at whatever I can find”. The day they get a job doing “whatever”, many people feel happy at having found work that helps them get by. For Belfort, that is where the daily struggle of the ordinary and the mediocre begins.
You should always be chasing new goals, and you should set those goals a little above your comfort zone.
If the goals you set don’t make you jump out of bed eager and fully motivated to reach them, you’re probably chasing the wrong goals.
3. They buy into the message of The Secret
Many people think the book The Secret holds the secret, or the strategy, for success.
You get home, dim the lights, close the curtains, sit at the table and visualise a cheque for 100,000 euros with your name on it. Picture it, that big cheque… it has your name on it. Make it bigger in your mind, make it real. That way, the universe will bring it to you. Just think about it and want it badly. Do you want it badly enough yet? Because what the universe is going to bring you is crap (as Belfort puts it).
If you want to achieve something, thinking about it or wishing for it isn’t enough. You have to act. Nothing is achieved without effort. If you visualise that cheque and then go out there and pursue your goal energetically, that cheque may come with an extra zero or two.
4. Limiting beliefs about life and money
Beliefs about life
Poor people believe they are “creatures” of circumstance, while rich people are creators.
Creatures of circumstance believe that life is something that happens to them.
They play the blame game
They start blaming everything and everyone for not having what they want to have. They blame the government, the economy, their boss, their parents and so on. In other words, they believe they are victims of circumstance.
The second thing they do is justify
They constantly explain why people don’t help them and why they don’t have money, and they end up justifying themselves by saying that, when all is said and done, money isn’t that important anyway.
See also: The secret of success (an analogy)
And the worst of all: they complain
What is true is that whatever you concentrate on grows bigger, and whatever you focus on becomes more important. So by complaining, all you achieve is focusing on everything that’s wrong, without looking for solutions to improve your situation.
Beliefs about money
Poor people think money doesn’t matter. The rich value money. They know it does matter.
We live in a world where money is necessary and important. Now, is money the most important thing? Of course not.
But money helps you do many things: you can let your parents retire, you can help other people, you can devote yourself to creating new things without pressure, you can travel if that’s what you enjoy, and it can certainly give you freedom.
As we always say, money may not be related to happiness, but a lack of money can certainly make you very unhappy.
See also: The 4 most striking differences between how the rich and the poor think
5. They choose bad mentors or idols
Greed is not good. Ambition is, and so is passion, but when you become greedy you lose your ethics in order to make as much money as possible, no matter who you hurt along the way.
As we wrote some time ago, you have to be careful about the mentors you choose and the books you read.
On the one hand, if you learn from a mentor who makes you believe that crossing ethical lines for your own benefit is fine, that’s a bad lesson. On the other, if your business idol is Pablo Escobar, you’ll probably do worse than if your idol is Warren Buffett.
Learn from people who have achieved what you want to achieve and who have principles and values.
6. They are controlled by fear
Some people try to ignore fear. Others won’t admit they are afraid and make the usual remark that they aren’t afraid of anything. But they haven’t left that job they don’t like, or gone out there to pursue what they would like to do.
In the end they make excuses to explain why they don’t pursue their goals and wind up justifying themselves in all sorts of ways.
This kind of emotional state keeps you away from success
We have to recognise and identify our fears. Then we have to act in spite of fear and not let it paralyse us.
7. They try to reach success with something spectacular
Most people believe that to be successful you have to become the next Steve Jobs and invent something truly new that nobody has thought of yet. That is a big mistake: it’s better to “copy” and improve a system that already has a market than to have a business idea so innovative that a market has to be created for it.
The best way is to do it with something that has already been tested, something we already know works, something that has already been invented. And from there, improve it or add value to it.
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel.
8. They are terrible at business
Although you can become wealthy working for someone else, the truth is that it’s hard to achieve freedom that way. Freedom in every sense can only be achieved by having your own business (working for yourself and not for someone else). In fact, it is the path successful people choose.
See also: Which investments pay best on the road to financial freedom?
And there is only one way to learn about business. When it comes to business, a degree in business administration doesn’t cut it. As Warren Buffett used to say, a single day in charge of a company is worth more than five years of studying business. So we have to try our hand at business and learn on the field.
This is probably one of the points that most divides the rich from the middle class and the poor. The rich take on the risks of the business world, accept the possibility of failure and accept the likelihood of going bust and ending up ruined. But they also accept that running their business, and their success, depend on them alone.
9. They feel uncomfortable with the words persuasion and sales
We are all salespeople. Either you are selling and persuading, or you are failing in life. And we don’t just mean products, but also intangibles such as ideas or concepts, your working hours, your job, your salary and so on.
Going back to the previous point, many people fail in business because they don’t know how to sell. Belfort himself says that if he needed money to start a new company today, he would have absolutely no trouble persuading people to back him and invest in his company.
Sales are the subject most people have never mastered. And note that we’re not talking about being a smooth talker: people still think good salespeople are the ones with the gift of the gab, when in fact we now know it’s quite the opposite.
10. They enslave their lives for a salary
“He was so busy working that he forgot to make money.”
I’m not going to make the mistake some super-motivators make, which is to criticise people who work as employees or criticise them for working for someone else. If one day you want to build a company, you’ll need employees who, for whatever reason, have chosen the security of a stable job, or chosen to pursue a dream with you and help you in exchange for a salary.
That said, it’s also true that some people have hard jobs and miserable wages. Their work is monotonous, they get no recognition of any kind and no chance of promotion, and they have been tired of it for years. To me, that is enslaving your life to a job, because many of these people have a talent or skill they could use for themselves and earn more money on their own.
But they lack the courage to get rid of those mental barriers and those fears.
If at some point you want to change this, you can do it gradually, part-time, while you are still earning an income from your job.
To me, the main mistake, and a very serious one today, is depending on a single source of income, because if that source disappears it’s like being handed a ticket to poverty. You need to create more sources of income.
See also: Money and career advice from the world’s most successful people
Featured image: Vinoth Chandar, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
