A New Week

Last week's expeditions went very well. I was able to collect 93 leads for the week and send them off to my investor. Sadly, I still haven't heard anything back from him, which, along with a total lack of production, has made me lose all the faith I had in him. So I think I'm going to go back to the drawing boards and try to collect a bunch of new investors. Specifically, I'm going to target ones that deal exclusively or mainly in foreclosures, since they should be up to date with all the laws and capable of actually making deals happen. I figure, if I'm going to have the production like I had last week, I need to actually start capitalizing.

Today has been pretty depressing outside of potential business success. The stock market is taking a beating and there seems to be large amounts of talk about a recession. I've built my portfolio around some international stocks or at least ones that should benefit from international markets, but it seems that when the US isn't doing well, there is almost a gloom around the whole market.

The other thing I'm frustrated about is the lack of returns on my money. At this point I've built up a pretty solid stockpile of capital, but it's growing so slowly that it might as well be sitting forgotten in the bank. This, along with this book I'm reading, has me thinking about the "class system" that exists even today.

The Class System

Way back, there was a clear separation between nobility, middle class, and poor. The nobility were the lords of the land, who didn't do any of the work but rather played on people's fear of God and lack of education to get them to follow them without question, working their land and paying taxes to them for the privilege. The middle class would work through apprenticeships for years, slowly learning and practicing a skill, until they became a master themselves with their own business. Then, based on the type of work they did, their trade pretty much determining their income level and social standing. The poor, with little or no education, did the manual labor that was needed to supply the goods and food for society. I think that, while slightly different in form, the system still exists today.

The poor nowadays are those who are right at or around the poverty line. Maybe they don't have a college degree or maybe they just don't care about the quality of their work, but they sit at minimum wage or so, barely able to get by. The middle class are educated, usually with degrees, but end up working for companies, doing skilled labor but not having any real holdings in the assets that they are building. Content with their paycheck, they live through there days keeping up with the status quo and being entertained by sports and TV.

Todays nobility are the business owners. Those who, through whatever means, own the company they work at, or a large apartment or office building that generates revenue for them with little actual work needing to be done. They employ the poor and the middle class and keep them content with benefits and slow pay raises. Meanwhile, they're paying less tax and pulling in money just because they are willing to go outside the main society lines and do things differently.

Great, so now what?

So, the real question in all of this is, how do you cross the lines up the class system? I've struggled with this one for a while. I have I read numerous books, learned about many investment tools and had many conversations with various people of different social standing. There is only one way to do it.

People are a product of their habits and their environment. If you want to change where you are and who you are, you have to change who you spend your time with, what habits you foster and what thinking process you support. The three classes just think and do fundamentally different things. If you are always around people who think like you, you will continue to do things the way you do. If you have problems, you'll ask your close friends for help and they'll give you the solutions that will keep you where you started. The only way to break free is to change all of that.

It's not an easy path. Hard work and persistence are the habits of the rich and powerful. By the time they've reached a certain status that you are aware of who they are, they have already done the hardest parts. You see the end result, the wealth, the freedom, but all the extra effort and behind the scenes work that it took to get there is gone from view.

So don't be fooled. If you want to change, do it, be bold. Step outside the box, find those who want to help you and see you succeed, help them as they help you. For the rest, leave them behind and move on. You can't help them by lagging behind and trying to hold their hand. Be a beacon of success for them by being a success yourself.