The Mindset of Wealth

Friedrich Schiller once said “The rich will keep getting rich, and the poor will get poorer.” I struggled with this statement for a while simply because I thought no one could say that for sure. I thought there were some poor people that were unprivileged. And if they had the privilege, they would be rich. I soon realized that the statement is a bit deeper than it sounds. First of all, poverty is a mindset, and being rich is a mindset. The choice is left for people to make, but the sad thing is that, people keep making the same mistake.

Reasons for disparity in wealth

One major reason for this is because, the rich and the poor don’t think alike. They also don’t have the same ideas about money. Another important to note is that they have major differences in their priorities. For example, time is more important to a rich man than to a poor man. A rich man would pay people to get things done to give him time for other things, while a poor man would rather do things himself hoping to save more money and get richer. Looking at that example, the rich man within the one hour he used to pay someone might have gotten a deal in several dollars or might have written a business plan that would deliver several dollars into his hands while the poor man would just have saved a few hundred dollars by working himself.

Mindset and attitudinal change

Now you can go ahead to say that if the poor starts thinking like the rich, they would be rich also. No, it doesn’t work that way. It takes a whole shift in one’s mind and perspective to switch sides. It will take the uprooting of certain thoughts and thinking patterns. Just like the saying “Rome was not built in a day,” a rich man was definitely not made in a day.