There’s a great deal more to becoming rich than buying the
right investments and hoping for the best. The most important element in your
strategy to win the battle for investment survival is your own psychology.
You’ve heard that your attitude helps your health and your golf score; it’ll
also improve your earning power.
It’s not enough to liquidate your past financial mistakes.
It’s more important to liquidate counterproductive attitudes, approaches, and
methods of dealing with problems. The results that someone gets in life are an
indication of how sound his approach toward life is. A sound philosophy of life
gives good results. People with chaotic, unproductive, unhappy lives usually
don’t have anyone to blame but themselves. They rarely have a strategy for
living and thus have no foundation on which to build a strategy for investing….
Scrooge
McDuck had the right attitude.
One of the most formative stories I’ve ever read was an
Uncle Scrooge comic written in 1953 by Carl Barks at Walt Disney Studios.
It finds Scrooge McDuck at play in his binful of money,
diving and wallowing in it, doing what he likes best. As he leaves his bin to
go out for his daily routine, it turns out that his nephew, Donald Duck, has
decided to play a prank on him by putting a fake newspaper on the park bench
with the headline “Coins and Banknotes Now Worthless!…Congress Make Fish the
New Money of the Land.”
Scrooge sees it and is stunned. All his cash is worthless.
He plops against a tree thinking that he hasn’t even one little minnow with
which to buy a crust of bread. By the next frame of the comic book, however,
the courageous old duck has picked himself up and is ready to get back in the
race, saying, “Well, there’s no cause crying over bad luck. I’ll get a job and
start life all over again.”
Soon we find him down at the waterfront talking to a
fisherman. He offers to paint the man’s boat for a sackful of fish. Scrooge
earns his fish and takes them to a clothing store where business is bad. He
trades the fish for a raincoat. Back at the waterfront, he trades the raincoat
to another fisherman for two sacks of fish.
Since the fish are getting heavy to carry around, Scrooge
trades the two bags to a farmer for an old horse, then trades the horse
for ten sacks of fish.
By the end of the day, Scrooge has a mountain of fish: three
cubic acres’ worth. As much of the new money as he had of the old. He looks at
the cold, clammy fish and asks himself…how to count the new money? By the pound
or by the inch? How to keep it? And how to spend it before it goes bad?
Sorrowfully he realizes that fish isn’t as nice to play with
as his old money. Fish don’t feel good and they smell bad.
All of the sudden, he doesn’t want to be rich anymore. He
hires a trucking fleet to take the mountain of fish to Donald, who always
wanted to be rich. Donald’s house is buried under dead fish.
Donald’s joke backfired, but Scrooge proved his point: You can start from scratch if
you have the right attitude and come out ahead if you play your cards right.
Scrooge didn’t have a fish to his name when he had to start
over, a lot less than you’ll have if you liquidate all your unneeded
possessions. They’re costing you money, and tying you down. Transform the junk
you’ve accumulated into cash, which you can redeploy the way Scrooge McDuck
might.
The next step in your plan is to start earning to add to
your grubstake—that is, create more money. It was key to Scrooge’s second
fortune, and it’s key to yours.
But it’s necessary to have the skills necessary to provide
goods and services to others. Scrooge made his fish fortune by his skills at
business, but there are thousands of others.
Gaining Skills
One of the
most important parts of taking control of your life as a step to prospering in
the years to come is to educate yourself and gain skills. That means a lot more
than just logging eight years in high school and college. Going to college is
one thing, but learning to make money is something else. Most people
today appear to believe going to college is necessary for getting ahead. It’s
not. It may actually be a hindrance.
A lot of people seem to think that simply going to college
will bestow an education. In reality, all most people get is a diploma, which
is very different. Eric Hoffer, the San Francisco longshoreman who never
completed high school but has written such profound books as The
True Believer, is an outstanding example of the difference between
going to college and getting an education.
Practical, marketable skills are often better acquired in
trade schools, through self-teaching efforts, and through experience working
from the bottom up in a field. A lot of teachers who finished first in their
class couldn’t run a successful hot dog stand and are hardly in a position to
help their students learn survival skills.
It would be a tragic mistake to devote all your resources to
accumulating gold, hoarding commodities, devising clever tax schemes, and
speculating, to the neglect of much more basic intangibles. The government may
negate a lot of your efforts through its inflation, taxes, and regulations. And
even if you overcome them, market risk—a bad judgment, an unexpected
development, a failed brokerage house—can wipe you out. As can fraud, theft, a
fire, or a war.
And in the
environment coming up, all of those things and many others like them could be
greater dangers than they have been in the past. The only thing that’s
permanently secure is what you carry in your head: your attitude, your
knowledge, your skills.
Who knows what skills may be required in the years to come?
What you’re doing now, be it teaching school, practicing law, laying brick, or
selling insurance, may be in low demand. But preparing French cuisine, fixing
autos, keeping books, or offering financial counsel may be in high demand. Or
perhaps the other way around.
The single wisest thing you can do with your money is not
buy gold. It’s to take courses and acquire knowledge in other fields, as
unrelated to what you are now doing as possible. Anything related to science,
and in particularly, technology would seem especially suitable. Computer
science, medicine, mechanics, agriculture, and electronics are all going to
remain in demand.
In the TV series Star Trek, the supremely
knowledgeable Mr. Spock bailed the crew out as often as anyone. It’s hard to
imagine him unemployed, for that reason. More knowledge can only increase your understanding of
the way the world works now, and if it stops working the way it presently does,
you’ll be able to continue. It will then no longer be the end of the world if
you lose your present job.
And a
lot of people will.
Editor’s Note: Most people have no idea what
really happens when an economy collapses, let alone how to prepare…
