People are drawn to the idea that it’s possible to get rich quickly, especially kids. It’s a basic mammalian instinct: we want to get the most resources for the least expenditure of energy possible.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of get-rich-quick schemes don’t work, and our grand plans end up falling through. There are some good reasons for this.
Getting Rich Quick Means Being In The Right Place At The Right Time
News reporting on successful people has a tendency to bias our perspectives on how to generate wealth. The news only reports on the small cadre of individuals who made a fortune overnight, giving us the impression that building wealth is something that can happen in a matter of months. What we don’t see, however, are the millions of people who didn’t get rich quick and are working in regular businesses for regular incomes.
Pixabay
Often, the people who get super rich, like Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg, did so because they were in the right place at the right time. Larry Page was perfectly positioned in the late 1990s to launch his search engine, Google. He had the right skills, and technology had just reached the stage where internet search was possible. The same goes for Zuckerberg: he just happened to have the right skills at the right time to implement his social media technology. These were freak events, but they’re the ones we hear about all the time in the press.
Success Takes A Long Time
There’s a joke floating around that says it take 15 years to be an overnight success. And even some of the biggest names in the business community agree with this. Many of them, including Twitter CEO, say that they had overnight success – it just took them a decade of work beforehand.
This makes a lot of sense. To build anything substantial takes a lot of time and dedication. Nothing that was complex or truly useful to other people was built over a weekend – especially in the modern world. Instead, new products and services require a long ramp up and even then they may not be accepted by the market.
Success Is Never Risk-Free
Success often means going into debt or taking on unsecured personal loans to finance a business venture. In other words, there’s an element of risk involved. The more risk, the fewer people who are likely to want to undertake the project. This is one of the reasons why we see so many people setting up their own accounting businesses (because the risks are relatively small) compared to people creating their own space companies (because the risks are much larger).
Get-rich-quick schemes like to pretend that they are risk-free: a sure bet to make money. But if they claim this, then it almost certainly isn’t true. Entrepreneurs are constantly looking for the lowest risk enterprises to sink their money into. The chances that somebody else has found one of those opportunities and wants to share it with you is next to nothing.
