America’s Billionaires and Their Traits

It’s about a month that Forbes published its annual list of America’s 400 wealthiest citizens (of these 371 are billionaires).

Like always (or as usual) Mr. Gates, Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder, is the richest American. How much money he has? – Well, lot of. $ 50 billion. 

Then comes the rest. One thing is common – they have billions. Altogether the net worth fell $300 billion to $1.27 trillion. 

How they could make so much money? What are the secrets behind their success? What are their special traits?  

Forbes studied these rich, wealthy and successful people to get their secrets.  

One interesting and important thing that came out of the study is ‘Math’. You are right, math is involved here. A good number of these rich people’s parents were good in mathematics. So are the children. They can break numbers, play with them, and at the end of the road make money out of it. So mathematics or deep interest in ‘numbers’ is a key factor here. 

Many of us dream to be a millionaire, but hardly can write correctly how many ‘zeors’ should we put after one (1). It’s 1,000,000. It’s just one million. One thousand millions make a billion. It’s 1,000,000,000. To count one million you will need six zeors after one, while for a billion nine zeros (only). But you can bet your friends or colleagues, and you will find most of them are making mistakes to count even one million. But ask whether they would like to be a millionaire, the answer will be ‘ya ya!!’  

ya ya yahoo!!. OK, the boss of Yahoo! Mr. Jerry Jang is a billionaire too 🙂 .

Some of the billionaires never finished their studies at all. Best example of all is, again, Mr. Gates. Other two ‘rich’ personalities who join the team are Mr. Steve Jobs of Apple and Michael Dell of Dell. They are just college ‘drop-outs’. 

On the contrary many of the listed billionaires had M.B.A.s from world’s top-ranking universities. That means they are good at crunching numbers too. One good thing with higher education is that, the higher you study better you analyze the situation. Ok, that can either happen even if you just ended in college. So never mind.  

Now, when you are good at maths, you can calculate your profits very well. This means America’s ‘richis’ are very realistic towards life’s goals and objectives. They are not the ‘philosopher’ type to guide you to the desolate place and to sit for meditation. Rather they would drive towards the mass people, because ‘profit’ is there. That’s a business brain. 

So the next big thing in their minds after being good at math is ‘profit’. 

Remember what President Herbert Hoover said: “Fishing is a discipline in the equality of men – for all men are equal before fish”. Ohhh MANN…ohh Mann. Look, Mr. President was a great fisherman. He was fishing in the Oval Office from 1929 to 1933. 

Well, Mr. Hoover was a politician and he knew ‘fishing’ or ‘how to fish(ing)’ very well. And obviously from his solemn statement we can guess that he applied his ‘fishing formulae’ on innocent fishes around him. While the fishes hooked in his fishing string, Mr. Hoover had the ‘smile’ on his face. 

Like Mr. President, these billionaires of course know this ‘fish’ factor very well. Just imagine how much percent of pc owners use Microsoft’s products (OS, Office, games etc.), and how much percent of internet users search in Google. Don’t forget Apple’s iPhone. That means, these Great Guys are fishing very happily as well. Humm….. 😉 .

Now come to the reality. Get back to yourself. If you are not rich and don’t know what to do, from where to start rather having plenty of complains against your luck and so on – then wait, don’t blame yourself so much. May be the solution is very easy. The Great Scientist Albert Einstein answered this very well. 

“Imagination is more important than knowledge”, said Einstein (but look, Mr. Einstein could come to this wonderful conclusion about the power of ‘imagination’ only because he had the ‘knowledge’ about it). However, this is one point to start.  

‘Imagination’. Rather than blaming your own self and grudging against your poor inheritance, better to start imagine a ‘bright future’ from today. It’s really not that important to be a billionaire, but it’s important to make some positive changes in life. Most of us don’t even need a million, just need a ‘simple, happy and healthy’ life. May be imagination can do some help there. 

One harsher thing still remains to overcome. That’s, every time we read about rich and successful people and celebrities, what we do is the ‘biggest mistake’ in our daily life. We just look at the sky, but never look down at our feet to see what’s there. Former U.S Foreign Minister George Schultz (of Reagan Era) has the right philosophy here. He always believes to start from what he has, what’s within his reach, and then make the best out of it, and move to the next level. That should be aspirants real-life approach. 

And at the same time get deep inside your mind what one of Rome’s greatest poets Virgil said: “They are able who think they are able”. So the truth lies in your belief too. All these rich men and women could think ‘they are able’ and that had happened exactly. This can happen with us as well. 

So, Good luck. Start a ‘New Day’ from here.