The Hindu Business Line : 7 practices of the rich

Get passionate. Be tenacious. Think big. Leverage knowledge. Be thorough. Take action. Take risks. Know your audience. Learn to negotiate. Listen to your gut. Enjoy competition. Be your own best asset.

These are the 12 skills that Donald J. Trump lists as the success tips in the opening chapter of a book he has edited: ‘Wealth Building 101’ ( www.wiley.com ). First, what is passion? “Enthusiasm on a big scale,” explains Trump.

“If you don’t have passion, everything you do will fizzle, or at best, be mediocre. You simply have to love what you do to make it big. People with passion never give up because they never have a reason to give up, regardless of their circumstances. It’s an intangible momentum that can make you indomitable.”

Next question: “How do you get passion?” Size up your interests, he advises. “What do you love doing? Ask yourself, ‘Can I develop any of these interests into a viable source of income?’… Coming up with an idea is not enough – you’ve got to put your idea into action.”

Also, try the ‘seven practices of the rich’, which John R. Burley discusses in one of the chapters. Paying attention to your money is among the magic seven. “Many people have very little idea where all their money goes – all they know is that they don’t have enough,” rues Burley. He prescribes the following exercise, as antidote: “For the next 30 days, write down everything you spend… Just jot down the figures, and add them up at the end of the month. This will impose a certain amount of accountability on your personal financial practices.”

Worthy read you can knit into your wealth plan.

Numbing big numbers

Millions, billions, trillions… It is not uncommon to find people to whom all these big ‘-illion’ numbers sound like the same thing. Their ‘mental fuses’ perhaps blow ‘at anything above the size of a typical annual salary or the more everyday mortgage,’ write Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot in ‘The Tiger That Isn’t’ ( www.vivagroupindia.co m ).

‘One useful trick’ the authors suggest, for grappling with the bigness is to imagine those numbers as seconds: “A million seconds is about 11.5 days. A billion seconds is nearly 32 years.” The best way to see through a number is to share it out and make it properly our own, they counsel.

While numbers look pure and precise, they lose their precision in the real world, the authors note. “In maths they seem hard, pristine and bright, neatly defined around the edges. In life, we do better to think of something murkier and softer. It is the difference, in one sense, between diamonds and mushy peas… Too often counting becomes an exercise in suppressing life’s imprecision.”

The book has crisp chapters on risk and chance, averages and targets, measurement and data, comparison and causation.

Think twice about correlation, exhort Blastland and Dilnot. Human ability to see how one thing leads to another is prodigious and can be vital to survival, they concede. However, it can go badly wrong, they warn. “From doing it all the time, people acquire a headstrong tendency to see it everywhere, even where it isn’t.”

Correlation, the apparent link between two separate things, does not prove causation, they remind. “Just because two things seem to go together doesn’t mean one brings about the other.”

Vital stat education, dynamically presented.

Workable vision

You can become rich, assures L. Vellaiyappan in ‘Decide Your Wealth’ ( www.decideyourwealth.org). The first requisite, though, is to have a strong desire, he says. Life is complex not because of having desire, but because the desire itself is often vague, he explains. Vague desires are no good as motivators, so support your desire with ‘ ;direction, determination, reason or purpose of action’, he advises.

Make your vision workable by splitting it into small missions or goals, the author guides. “Write your goals, split into very many tasks, assignments, may be 50 or 100 or more possibilities… By splitting your goals in very many numbers, your success rate will increase with the achievement of many goals.”

More importantly, even if you suffer one or two failures in achieving some of the goals, you will not get disappointed, says Vellaiyappan. He cites Thirukural 594 to say that financial wealth will find its way to reach you, once you are determined to put your efforts and confidence without any compromise. “Aakkam atharvinaay chellum asaivila ookkam udaiyaan uzhai.”

Inspiring messages.

Assumption juggling
Famed economist Paul Samuelson once said that economists are opportunists. “On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday they can work on one kind of model, while on Tuesdays and Thursdays they can work on models with entirely different assumptions.”
With such ‘assumption juggling’ around, research projects can prove very dangerous, says Erik S. Reinert in ‘How Rich Countries Got Rich… and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor’ ( www.landmarkonthenet.com). “The assumptions used and conclusions drawn can all too quickly be derived from the exigencies of the project.” (A phenomenon that we observe in market analysis too?)
After a closer scrutiny, Reinert finds that orthodox economics is not unlike the curious taxonomy or classification system for animals that Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges created in an imaginary Chinese dictionary: “Animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.”
The only difference is that while you can easily see the arbitrariness of Borges’ humorous description, the flaws of economics, encircled by ‘bulwarks of mathematics’, are ‘not penetrable by the man on the street.’
A book that shines a torch on paradoxes.

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