“If you cannot treat your quest to get rich as a game, you will never be rich.” Felix Dennis
I know I am fortunate because I have a great profession and also have fun and a great passion for my trading. I enjoyed the following article by Robert Frank:
July 23, 2007, 10:37 am
Getting Rich By Doing What You Love
Last year, I interviewed an entrepreneur named Ed Bazinet. He had made millions by launching a company called Department 56, which produced miniature ceramic villages that people collected and put around their Christmas trees during the holidays.
Ed had worked 18-hour days for more than 20 years to make the company successful. When I asked him if it was all worth the money, he looked puzzled.
“It wasn’t for the money,” he said.
“Not for the money?” I asked. “But you gave your life to this company.”
“I know it’s hard for people to understand,” he told me. “But I’m not money motivated. For me it was all about the product line and having success with that product that was in high demand.” He added: “It was about doing what I loved doing.”
When Ed first told me this I was skeptical. Most people saw their jobs as jobs, after all. And if someone worked as hard as Ed had for 20 years, it had to be for the money. But as I met more rich people, most of them said their job wasn’t a job — it was their life and, often, their greatest joy. By doing what they loved doing, the money often followed. Or so they said.
In Nick Paumgarten’s vivid profile of billionaire Mort Zuckerman in the New Yorker last week, Mr. Zuckerman says that he’s “never worked a day in his life.” His success, he says, comes from doing what he loves doing — whether it’s building office towers, owning newspapers or participating in the professional shouting match known as the McLaughlin Group.
Louis Uchitelle’s New York Times piece last Sunday on the new Gilded Age quoted Citigroup tycoon Sandy Weill as saying “I worked because I loved what I was doing.” And hedge-funder Ken Griffin says: “The money is a byproduct of a passionate endeavor.”
Following your bliss and making a bundle isn’t just an American notion. In an article in Australia’s Sunday Mail, Queensland’s billionaires say that “if you love what you’re doing and do it well, it’s never hard work.”
Still, doing what you love isn’t necessarily the ticket to riches. A teacher or jazz musician could be doing what they love and never get rich. The key to getting rich — or at least one key — is to love a job or product that’s actually in high demand in our current economy.
And I’m a little weary of people who spend their whole day moving money around and doing deals and saying they do it out of “passion.” (Is anyone else sick of the word “passion” becoming so, well, passionless through its recent overuse?) Perhaps these are just passions I just don’t understand. But Ken Griffin, the “passionate” hedge fund manager makes a telling remark in the Times article. When he’s asked about raising taxes on the rich, Mr. Griffin says that if his taxes are raised, he would lose some of his incentive and ” I would not be working this hard”
So what is really motivating today’s rich? The passion or the money?
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