IS WEALTH REALLY MAN’S ABILITY TO THINK?
Much as wealth occupies a vital
place in the world and draws a lot of attention in the daily activities of man,
yet it appears to be a very elusive term. The rich, entrepreneurs, professionals,
middle class, financial experts, public servants, and even the poor, define
wealth differently. There’s not a generally accepted definition across the
world.
You can try this. When you’re in the
midst of people, ask each of them to define wealth. You’ll be surprised to hear
many different definitions perhaps equivalent to the number of the people there.
In his book, The Business of the 21st Century, Robert Kiyosaki
explains that, “Wealth is the ability to survive so many number of days
forward.” He sees wealth not in terms of dollars but in terms of time. How long
you can survive if you were not working again.
On the other hand, Austin Netzley
says “Wealth involves a bunch of things, including: money, happiness, time,
health, attitude, relationships, lifestyle, peace of mind, and any other thing
you desire for what you view as a successful life.”
However,
a popular definition that had been there for some time has been the definition
by Ayn Rand. He describes wealth as “the product
of man’s capacity to think."
To
go a little further than that and be more specific, I would define it this way:
Wealth is people’s ability to think up
what value to add to life and the corresponding action they take to deliver it
to the world.
So however you look at wealth,
whether from the standpoint of the ability to fully experience life, or the competence
to acquire more money, to the capacity to be happy, create cordial
relationships or even enjoy health, one thing that is very paramount is that our thinking plays a major part in our
creation of wealth.
That’s why Kiyosaki says that “The process of
making a lot of money is a mental process more than a physical process.”
Getting rich has a lot to
do with constantly enhancing and daily improving our mental capacity. Even result-oriented
and wealth-producing actions often originate
or spring from energized thoughts. It is in thoughts we arrive at creative ways
of doing business and innovative ways of investing. It is in thinking outside
the box we come by new actions to take to make higher levels of money.
There is no way we can arrive at smart business
strategies and cutting edge practices without getting there through smart
thinking that produces smart business ideas and methods.
Truth is that our
financial inequalities begin in the mind. Jacquetta Hawkes says that “It is
not income levels but differences in mental equipment that keep people apart…”
Our differentials in terms of thought content, thought discipline, thought
quality, thought consistency and thought potency are the reason we all have
different levels of income and wealth.
So if you
want more than average wealth, then think more than average thoughts in terms
of quality and usability of the value you want to add to life, as well as take
more than average actions in the delivery of the value. In the words of Albert Einstein “You cannot achieve a
new goal by applying the same level of thinking that got you where you are
today.” Interestingly, thought is the only thing over which you have absolute
control.
Knowledge evolves, ideas enlarge, concepts transform, meanings
deepen, and definitions improve, as long as man himself continues to study and
think. In this sense, the definition of wealth is gradually undergoing
improvement and extension from mere “product of man’s capacity to think” to specifics,
“what value to add to life” and further still to “taking corresponding action
to deliver the value thought out, to the world or the market place. In the future,
this meaning of wealth may continue to deepen and expand.
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