What is stopping you from building wealth?

• Follow

Being sane during intense situations. Having calm in a chaotic situation. Free calendar instead of scheduled meetings all day. This is what many of us mean when we talk about wealth or having a goal in life. But the question is, what is stopping you from building wealth?

Haven’t we always seen in movies, around us or an assumption that if you were a rich person, you would always be working 24/7, being in meetings all day or making every decision? This may be true for some, but when it comes to those who are wealth-driven, they would like control of their time in the end.

Long-term mindset

As Morgan Housel says, “Controlling your time and the ability to wake up and say, I can do whatever I want today” is the highest form of wealth. The one key thing I think is not having a long-term mindset. For being a long term person, you need to work towards it every day.

That means ignoring many of our instincts, like giving into buying hot stocks because everyone is talking about it or interrupting the power of compounding. Compounding is real whether in money or knowledge; if done consistently, it rewards us long-term.

When thinking about wealth, I live by these rules: — Spending less than what you earn. — Buying assets, not liabilities. — To not invest in things you don’t understand. — Having a long term mindset over a short term adrenaline rush. — Quit playing the status game. — Live a simple life.

Now, this looks very simple, but it’s often hard to follow and very human. Our biases come into play when we think about changing around things. And the most common one is ignorance. Say you will purchase a new laptop, so you spend the next 3-4 days researching, taking advice, understanding every feature and whatnot because you don’t want to worry about it for at least the next few years.

Now, when it comes to investing, you often hear a friend talking about a stock. You see, everyone is talking about the same stock everywhere(social media, news, etc.); you think this stock probably is an outlier as everyone is talking about it, so you give in and buy that stock through influence.

Why?

In our mind, the thoughts are, “Oh! This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, or “This person might know something that I am unaware of”. At times like this, the most sensible thing to do is be a silent observer and watch everything around from an outside view. A lot of what building wealth really is doing the same thing consistently. But we often give in because of the biases that we have.

(The writer is co-founder, WintWealth. Views expressed are personal)