And Einstein once said something like, "Without some common Sense knowledge isn't very useful"
So, starting with these two things first, "The main key to wealth and to maintaining wealth is one good idea well managed".
People don't usually become that wealthy (but they often can be happy) just working by the hour at an hourly wage.
Wealth doesn't bring happiness necessarily but it does bring a kind of power into one's life. But, someone has to be mature enough to handle such power effectively or it just becomes an 18 year old young man with a car that does 200 to 300 mph. Pretty soon that young man is dead.
So often, it is helpful to be in one's 40s with a family before one is actually ready for wealth without either squandering it or it causing their demise. It is a very rare young person that understands all this unless they were groomed from childhood to be the "Family's caretaker of wealth".
So, often it takes about 3 generations of people to both obtain and to maintain and to increase their wealth. However, unfortunately often this 3rd generation of college educated people in the family often become sort of elitist and out of touch with just how hard the rest of the world has it and so doesn't really understand where it all came from and just how hard it was to get there in the first place.
So, there is often this paradoxical place regarding money and wealth where getting wealth is relatively easy and maintaining it becomes harder with each succeeding generation.
So, it is actually much more fun to become wealthy through a really good idea than it is to maintain that wealth multi-generationally.
People who become wealthy for the first time usually (but not always) have a bachelor's degree and likely a Master's degree too. However, the problem with getting degrees is it can dampen one's enthusiasm for life in some ways. So, also often people become wealthy that have some college and of course there are people who become wealthy with no college at all though this is becoming rarer and rarer because of the kinds of changes that have taken place all over earth during the last 50 years.
In order to get people to respect you with whatever your idea or innovation is you have to be able to communicate what you are trying to market, whether that is yourself (as an entertainer) or whether it is something you are manufacturing or whether it is a new type of software or technology that uses software or whatever it is that you are marketing around the world.
So, either you have to be an excellent communicator or you need to hire and excellent communicator to make this happen. So, yes, it is true you can be an inventor that can invent amazing things and innovations. However, then you have to get it patented so people cannot steal your idea and you make then nothing, and after you patent it you have to have people (yourself or others) that can communicate the value of that idea for worldwide or just country wide marketing.
Often Doctors and Lawyers become wealthy through innovation as well. But understanding that becoming an entrepreneur in your thinking is the key to becoming wealthy in all ways.
What is an entrepreneur? The easiest way to explain what an entrepreneur is is to say that an entrepreneur is the ultimate opportunist. An entrepreneur can ferret out what is useful in any given moment and can ferret out how people can be useful in this endeavor as they meet them.
An entrepreneur can see how things can exponentially snowball into something else entirely that could be very economically useful to many many people including themselves.
So, this is the type of person that often becomes very wealthy and takes many of their friends to become relatively wealthy as well. So, often staying friends with someone like this can be very economically beneficial over time.
But, I think that understanding that it is marketable ideas that tend to make one wealthy (at least in the United States and Europe) will take people a long way to becoming wealthy with or without college degrees ongoing. But first you need to be compassionate and wise with common sense in your actions towards yourself and others in order to be successful in a way that helps you, your family, your friends and everyone you meet along the way.
In this way people will be happy with your success in the most part and you won't make enemies that much that will work against you long term. If people are happy you are succeeding you have a better chance of staying happy and staying wealthy long term.
Here is a really amazing example of what can happen multi-generationally regarding extreme wealth. I often looked up at the house on the Mesa at the Beach that is relatively near the Santa Barbara Zoo. I heard the owner or owners never lived or visited there but maintained the home through many caregivers like gardeners, butlers and maids etc. Eventually, the lady passed on and here is her story:
'Empty Mansions,' About the Heiress Huguette Clark
New York Times - 6 days ago
Abundantly Wealthy, But Not Living It Up ... Ms. Clark was not dead at all, but she did not live in any of her immense ... Clark as a poor little rich girl with a bad case of arrested development. ... The authors invoke “To Kill a Mockingbird”: they call her “a modern-day 'Boo' Radley, shut up inside by choice, safe ...
Abundantly Wealthy, But Not Living It Up
‘Empty Mansions,’ About the Heiress Huguette Clark
By JANET MASLIN
Published: September 4, 2013
The story of how the book “Empty Mansions” came to be, in the words of
Bill Dedman, one of its two authors, begins with “an exercise in
American aspiration.” And when Mr. Dedman, a journalist, embarked on
that exercise, he could not have guessed how right that phrase would be.
In 2009 he and his wife were looking for a house outside New York City.
Just for fun, Mr. Dedman Googled real estate listings in the
astronomical range. He found a markdown in New Canaan, Conn., a house
that had gone from $35 million to $24 million and had one very unusual
feature, even more unusual than its room for drying draperies. The place
had been unoccupied since it was purchased. In 1951.
Patricia Wall/The New York Times
EMPTY MANSIONS
The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune
By Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr.
Illustrated. 456 pages. Ballantine Books. $28.
Mr. Dedman located the house and coaxed forth its caretaker. This man
had never met his employer of more than 20 years, Huguette Clark. But he
had a newspaper clipping about the sale at auction of a $23.5 million
Renoir painting that came from “the estate of Huguette Clark.” The
caretaker was puzzled. Had Ms. Clark been dead all these years he worked
for her?
Mr. Dedman had stumbled onto an amazing story of profligate wealth, one
so wild that “American aspiration” doesn’t begin to describe its
excesses. Ms. Clark was not dead at all, but she did not live in any of
her immense dwellings, which included an estate atop a mesa in Santa
Barbara, Calif., and three apartments, totaling more than 40 rooms, in a
grand Fifth Avenue building. At 103, and in need of not much more
medication than vitamin pills, she had long ago sequestered herself in a
hospital room and had not been to any of her homes in more than 20
years. “Empty Mansions” is the self-explanatory title of the Huguette
Clark story.
This book credits Paul Clark Newell Jr., a cousin to Ms. Clark, as its
co-author. Unlike many other Clark family members, he knew Huguette, who
died in 2011
at 104, well enough to receive occasional phone calls from her, though
she was too wily to give him her number. She was polite, lucid and even
chatty, all of which undermine the idea that she was a crazy recluse
living in miserable isolation. Far from it: her favorite
late-18th-century French fable described the benefits of living
unobtrusively as a cricket, rather than glamorously as a butterfly. She
seems simply to have preferred to live quietly in tightly controlled
surroundings, after spending her childhood and young adulthood as a
jewel-bedecked heiress to a vast copper fortune.
A more reckless and sensationalized book than “Empty Mansions” would try
to pigeonhole Ms. Clark as a poor little rich girl with a bad case of
arrested development. (She loved the Smurfs and the Flintstones. She
also took a serious interest in dolls, and commissioned the House of
Dior to create doll clothes.) A more lurid account would also salivate
over the conflicting claims to her estate. And authors less open-minded
than these would draw easy comparisons between Ms. Clark’s later years
and those of Howard Hughes. But she was a generous woman with many
long-distance friendships; she just liked to keep them that way. The
authors invoke “To Kill a Mockingbird”: they call her “a modern-day
‘Boo’ Radley, shut up inside by choice, safe from a world that can
hurt.”
The early parts of this book tell an outsized tale of rags-to-riches
prosperity, describing the ambition and ingenuity of W. A. Clark, the
copper-mine millionaire and politician whose biography has tended to get
lost in robber baron lore. But Clark was wealthy enough to be known as
the Copper King, and one of the less notable things he did was to help
create a railroad linking Salt Lake City with Los Angeles. He sold
residential lots at a spot in Nevada that could be useful for railroad
maintenance and refueling. The small town he created became Las Vegas.
Clark married twice and had children by both wives. Ms. Clark was the
younger of two daughters from his second marriage. By the time she was
born, in 1906, her father was in his 60s, had become a United States
senator from Montana despite a scandal involving his efforts to buy
votes, and remained a study in extravagance. The now-vanished Clark
homestead in New York City can be seen on the book’s cover, complete
with gaudy turret.
Ms. Clark had the credentials of a debutante, but that was not the life
she chose. She married briefly and mysteriously and wrote amorous
letters to a French confidant, but her primary interests were closer to
home. Devoted to her mother and sister (and greatly bereaved when she
lost them), she had an affinity for art as both painter and collector.
She also inherited her mother’s love of music and wherewithal to collect
rare instruments. A Stradivarius violin with a wood-carved image of
Joan of Arc was one of the prized possessions that made Ms. Clark, in
her later years, a target for predators. The best parts of the book
describe the unseemly efforts of trustees, hospital administrators, a
private nurse who collected millions from her patient, and an accountant
caught in an Internet sex sting to separate the heiress from her money.
The messy circumstances surrounding her estate may become much more
public, as a group of Clark descendants (from W. A. Clark’s first
marriage) prepare to challenge her will. (A settlement is possible, but
court proceedings have been scheduled for this month.) They are made
especially messy by Ms. Clark’s habit of bestowing extravagant gifts
without understanding that gift taxes were due. The book illustrates how
readily her largess, legal fees and tax debts reduced her fortune,
though she seems to have remained canny about those seeking to exploit
her.
The unsuccessful efforts of Beth Israel Medical Center to squeeze a
major contribution from its most peculiar long-term patient are
especially embarrassing. As the hospital’s president, Dr. Robert Newman,
wrote in a memo to his fund-raising staff: “Madame, as you know, is the
biggest bucks contributing potential we have ever had.” Dr. Newman also
used the phrase “super-mega gift” to describe what he was hoping for.
The whopping gift didn’t happen. So something else did. When Beth Israel
discovered that Ms. Clark’s bequest would be only $1 million, she was
moved to a room next to a janitor’s closet. The photo illustrations in
“Empty Mansions” show both the sweeping Central Park vista outside Ms.
Clark’s Fifth Avenue windows and the third-floor view of an
air-conditioning unit to which Beth Israel relegated her. The hospital
says it moved her only because her old room required renovation.
People can survive "normal" lives but often living it
up means drinking or drugs and unusual people who might be a threat to
you possibly. So, not living it up when one is rich is safer for many.
So, you will find thoughtful practical people not living it up who are
rich all over. Also, some of the richest people you would never know
because they don't tell anyone about it. Instead they hide their money
in their mattress or in savings bonds or other vehicles and just don't
tell anyone except maybe they send their nephews or nieces or kids 100
or 1000 dollars on their birthdays. Actually there are many more
"secretly wealthy people" than there are the flamboyant ones who "flame
out" spectacularly on TV everyday.
Also, I was right in another blog post. The huge estate on top of a mesa near the Zoo on the beach in Santa Barbara must have been owned by her.
Having multiple estates is not unusual around the world for wealthy people. So, often they hire house sitters, gardeners and even in some cases butlers and maids to stay at those locations full or part time around the world. It is quite common to have an apartment in New York, a home in Los Angeles or San Francisco or even a home or apartment full time in London or Paris for many people. However, most people like to travel between the ages of about 15 to 75, so if they have younger children often they aren't going to travel as much or as ill health or divorce strikes them they might not travel as much either. So, often many of these homes and apartments stay unoccupied for years at a time because of unforeseen family and individual health and mental health events of children being born, parents dying, spouses or lovers or children dying etc.
So, even though someone is very wealthy they are still affected by all the same things that everyone else is too. No one gets out of here alive in the end.
But, understanding that some people have lives that span the globe is interesting for a lot of people to think about and study about ongoing and makes their lives more interesting and enriched by so doing.
Also, I was right in another blog post. The huge estate on top of a mesa near the Zoo on the beach in Santa Barbara must have been owned by her.
Having multiple estates is not unusual around the world for wealthy people. So, often they hire house sitters, gardeners and even in some cases butlers and maids to stay at those locations full or part time around the world. It is quite common to have an apartment in New York, a home in Los Angeles or San Francisco or even a home or apartment full time in London or Paris for many people. However, most people like to travel between the ages of about 15 to 75, so if they have younger children often they aren't going to travel as much or as ill health or divorce strikes them they might not travel as much either. So, often many of these homes and apartments stay unoccupied for years at a time because of unforeseen family and individual health and mental health events of children being born, parents dying, spouses or lovers or children dying etc.
So, even though someone is very wealthy they are still affected by all the same things that everyone else is too. No one gets out of here alive in the end.
But, understanding that some people have lives that span the globe is interesting for a lot of people to think about and study about ongoing and makes their lives more interesting and enriched by so doing.
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