Your inspiring success story

Here are my ten rules of success.

1) Invest in yourself with education/exercise/diet/health
2) Work hard
3) Stay away from people that pull you down; stick with people that pull you up. Find good mentors and role models, and people that help you.
5) Write down your goals, all of them. Sort them by the ones you can achieve now.
6) No better time to start on those goals than today.
7) Realize your most significant obstacle in life is? Yourself*
8) Do what you enjoy most; it will allow you to embrace failure in that area and will enable you to believe in yourself; after all - if you want what you're doing - that will be self evidential in your work
9) Live with integrity: don't succumb to negative energies - be positive - share in your success and give back to those less fortunate.
10) Realize ultimate success for most people comes down to Love, Family, and Friends. NOT a Ferrari.

My father was a janitor.
My mom was mentally ill.
They were too stupid to even be on the dole, so I didn't even get government assistance growing up. I remember fracturing my neck, and my parents didn't even take me to the hospital. Yeah.

I was so poor; I often had to wear the same clothes every day and go without food. Lived in gangland, robbed, and beat up multiple times.

Guess what? I often look back at those hardships as blessings.

Due to that trial by fire, I have everything I want today.

As Navy Seals like to say - "Embrace the suck."
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*Some exceptions like if you're in North Korea/or a Uygur concentration camp, of course.

 

More sage advice. If I could go back in time and talk to 11 year old me, living in a storage room, I'd say the things @paulchua just wrote. Fortunately, God blessed me with a grandmother who was wise enough to say pretty much the same things and I just had to be smart enough to listen and believe her. Good luck in your journey...T

 

I'm just going to say this: I respect everyone in this thread who didn't say anything along the lines of "I outworked everyone else" as though poor people don't break their backs every day for meager pay.

Money is a game. The people who have large amounts of it, but aren't highly paid professionals (doctors, lawyers, executives) are usually entrepreneurial people and investors who think of money differently.

My best advice to anyone tired of being broke/poor: get out of the short term gratification cycle. Live as cheaply as you can and use every spare dollar you have not on sneakers or cars or jewelry but on your next venture. If you have tremendous skills or talent, use your money to go into business for yourself. If you're a talentless hack like myself, find people with tremendous skills and talent, then invest in THEM.

Just remember. It's not about who works the hardest. That is a mean spirited, solipsistic and self serving lie. It's about who works the smartest and plays the game to win.

 

Just retired after being a physician for 42 years Know my kids and grand children are protected and bought myself my first present.Not many Christmases left.

 

JJ - I am currently reading a book called “Loonshots”. Sounds like a perfect fit for you!

I am neither sage nor wealthy, but my one piece of advice is read read read.

 

I always aspired to be a big lotto winner. And became old and a miserable failure in my preferred vocation.

 

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BITCOIN!!!

 

Some excellent advice in this thread.

I like to present cases using some very basic maths to explain to anyone how they can own what they want.

I have taken some liberties and made some assumptions/simplifications to demonstrate the idea. Is this the cleverest way to spend money? No. Listen to the advice in the thread! However I do think that this explanation would have been quite useful to me when I was younger Let's also be honest, the way I enjoyed cars over time has changed as has my tolerance for what state a car was in as "acceptable"!

OK, so let's pick an arbitrary 70,000 price for a used car (currency doesn't matter so USD/GBP/EUR) maths is the same even if the price shifts a bit.

Let's say you need 25-45% downpayment. So 17,500 - 31,500. An average, for this example, of a 35% downpayment, so 24,500.

Over a year, in order to save up for the downpayment, you need to be able to put aside 24,500 / 12 = about 2,000 per month.
It may be quite high especially if you have a normal "starting" job/salary. But what if you break it down further? Say over 4 years? Now it becomes 500 per month. Much more achievable. Still, certainly not everyone can pull that off, so it could instead be 8 years and a saving needed of 250 per month etc.

That means that for an early 20s person saving 250 a month (about 60 a week) they could have a Ferrari in their late 20s. Just in time for a great credit history to have been developed, good driving history, a hint of driving maturity and hopefully lower insurance etc.

If you were to pick the correct model Ferrari which is at the bottom of its price curve (i.e. as cheap as it will ever get), the fact that its price will remain stable and it might even increase over time will actually give you some very interesting financing options. The monthly loan repayments do not need to be a straight repayment of the borrowed amount. In this example, you would need to borrow 70,000 - 24,500 = 45,500 for say 10 years. You do not necessarily need to repay 45,000 / 10 years / 12 months + interest. In some cases lenders on certain vehicles (like Ferraris at the correct price point) will allow a mix of interest only and a small portion of the principal to be paid back. So you can tell them for example I want to pay 400 a month and they may calculate a "balloon" repayment amount at the end of the loan. Of course as the loan comes close to the end, you can refinance the balloon etc.

There is also maintenance, insurance and parking etc of course. But the explanation above is just a basic concept to give food for thought.

 

My story is very similar to yours including the divorce. Fortunately i was able to recover from it

 

Tom, thank you for your kind words! Wishing you and your family a wonderful Holiday season.

Best.

 

So your dad was a janitor and your mom was mentally ill. And you are grand enough to call them stupid? I'm hoping "stupid" was merely a poor choice of words on your part. I was raised to respect people that got out of bed and went to work and did NOT go "on the dole", however humble that work may have been. It would appear that you've done okay despite your relatively spartan upbringing. Shame on you for disrespecting your parents in this public forum.

 

If you're a student then you're already doing the first important thing - getting a good education.

I am not at all entrepreneurial - so my route was via A) doing well at school, allowing me to B) go to university, allowing me to C) get a good job. Then I did what is perhaps the single most important step to building wealth from early adulthood - start a PENSION FUND. I did this at age 22, and largely because of that I am now (at age 55) financially comfortable and debt-free. Along the way, I took out a second mortgage on my house to buy my first Ferrari at age 37. If you choose carefully, you should later be able to sell the car for about as much (or perhaps more) than you paid for it. All the time you're building valuable experience and knowledge of how money works. Good luck !!

 

I disagree with this. Higher education has changed and there are way too many young people being steered into 4 years of learning useless things or being the victim of agenda laden indoctrination. I used to be impressed when parents would tell me of their kid getting into some universities.. Now I worry if it will make this kid a worse person and less successful.

I have a University Degree from a top university, but respect the Trade schools so much. Did you know the average salary for a plumber is 67K? In California a young person can start off at 25K easy and be propelled into management in as little as 2 years and start making 6 figures.

Also, I know tons of millionaire "plumbers". Yes, they now own the firms, but the takeaway is that I doubt most young people will just remain an entry level contractor if they don't want too.

There is a time and place for a University degree, but I can't tell you how many young douchebags I know with college degrees that have negative net work and are living with roommates or their parents.

 

The sink just called the bathtub white.

The circular mental trajectory of complaining about schools pushing an agenda while you yourself push your agenda by making that complaint in a thread about something completely different.

Congratulations, you hit exactly what you were aiming at...

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I’m glad most people in this thread took it seriously and this didn’t turn into the most cliché “I wanna be funny and say I’m an adult film actor” thread.

To OP: from what I’ve seen at car meets and what the wife has told me (used to work at a Ferrari dealer), a plurality if not majority of Ferrari owners own a business, a small fraction are successful professionals, some inherited their wealth. They achieved their goals through various combinations of hard work and mostly pure luck. We all like to think we work harder than everyone else but I know people working two minimum wage jobs raising kids as a single parent that can barely afford a used Toyota. To that effect, I disagree with what one of the above posters said, saying hard work means more than intelligence. I like to think of the two as multiplicative, and you absolutely need both - working hard is a must to become successful but you need to be smart enough to know which direction to work towards and how to make the most of your time.

These traits are only guidelines and by no means a guarantee for success. I’d dare to say most owners on here arrived at their success through a lot of luck, and whatever they did is not repeatable if they were in your shoes.

 

This is pretty accurate. As a single investment banker with a very modest lifestyle, I could afford a few nice toys. Once I got married and got a Bay Area mortgage, that changed. Wanting to spend time with my family then also meant giving up banking and the grueling hours and extensive travel - and that income. I am a big believer in education, as it was my education that enabled me to get the banking job in the first place. I could buy a Ferrari every 4 years for what I pay in school tuition, but those are the sacrifices I have chosen to make for my family. Similar to the sentiments expressed by @plastique999, while I do sometimes think about the exotics I could own, my wife and daughter will always be what matters most.

 

There is no house, car, mansion, yacht, jet or dollar figure that would make me give up my little girl.

But. BEFORE I had a kid, I wouldn't have thought so.

The two things I've experienced in life that change everyone one way or another: military service and parenthood.

 

AMAZING Story! Well done to you! Thank you for sharing.

 

Great advise from personal experiences.

I've always found that if you spend less than you make, live a simple life, work through your difficulties, you can get to where you want to go.

And if you make a bad investment (I did and it cost me a 275GTB when they were relatively affordable, yea right), get out of it before it goest to zero.

 

Simply phenomenal advice. So many things I agree with there - so many things I've realised myself as I've gone through life recently. The points about making memories and being generous are so often missed in our society these days. It's just one big headlong rush to put more zeroes on a bank account without actually taking the time to really live your life and realise that there are some things that are far more important and rewarding than money. I hope everyone sees your post - it's inspiring. Thank you.

 

Thanks, my friend,

The truth is, even with my pity party sob story, I still won the lottery in life by being born in the First World. (ONLY 15% of people in the world)

I made sure to take a few trips to India or rural China; I always bring my kids and have them walk around billions of people mired in slums (like REAL slums) to remind them of that.

Makes our section 8 housing look like paradise.

 

Geez. I think the poster was actually complimenting his parents. He was sarcastically saying too stupid to take handouts. I will bet that he meant that his parents were so honorable, that they refused to take welfare and government handouts because this did not cross their minds. Like many of the "smart" people that know how to game the system.

 

If that was indeed the intent and your interpretation of his post is correct, which I hope is the case, my apologies to Mr. Chua.

 

Hmm, nothing new of course but my little experience.
Be curious, pragmatic, courageous and perseverant:
Identify where you are good at and, important, something you like doing, you will do it better than thoses who will do it for money only. Do not confuse what you like and what do people need however, be a bit opportunist, so work hard and be perseverant.

Of course be a good person etc... but it is another story imho...
Bests,
P.

 

A lot of people advise on finding something you love and working towards that. I think that being willing to do things you don't love helps people become successful and eventually buying Ferraris. I didn't "love" putting away money, working multiple,jobs when I was younger, taking certain jobs so I could us it to put the experience on my resume, etc.