Can you really get rich overnight?
Shoemoney published a short video today in response to hearing that question one too many times the last week. Jeremy looks a little tired and perhaps a bit annoyed in the video, but he makes a couple of very good points about making money that I wanted to pick up on here.
First the video.
See, doesn’t Jeremy look tired?
A little over a year ago Markus Frind seemingly burst on the scene by starting a thread on Webmasterworld about how he made a million dollars in AdSense over three months. It set off a debate about the possibility of getting rich with AdSense and to most people Markus was an overnight success. If you followed the story at all or checked on Markus’s posting history at Webmasterworld you can see that Markus spent a number of years working hard for that success.
A lot of work goes into being successful. While some people might get lucky and happen across the right idea at the right time, most people put in years of effort prior to the rest of us hearing about their success.
Opportunity is always right in front of you. The trick is in recognizing it and having prepared enough to be able to capitalize on it. Yes you can be an overnight success, but it takes years of preparation to be ready for that seemingly overnight success.
Jeremy also mentions markets being cyclical. Most things go in and out of fashion. If you can stay ahead of the curve and see which markets are coming back into fashion you can prepare for their arrival and make money fast. That money might not last long as fashions once again change, but the money you make in one market can be invested in the next.
Most people generally don’t become millionaires overnight. It just seems that way because the rest of us don’t see all the prep work that went into capitalizing on an opportunity or capturing a passing market. It takes work and effort to be successful. Now stop sending Jeremy emails asking for the secret formula.
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I wonder how old the average millionaire was when (s)he earned his/her first million? There are a lot who struck gold in their mid or late 20s, but not very many, maybe none creating serious wealth at 17. It’s not that younger people aren’t clever, it’s that they haven’t had the time to put into that prep work nobody thinks about.
That’s an interesting question and one I really can’t answer. I can speculate, though. I’d guess that most earned their millions a little later in life, though I’d also guess the age is coming down since the internet and since a million dollars isn’t quite what it used to be.
I remember a few years back when the internet bubble burst I had just started getting involved with working online. Boulder is a tech heavy city and was hit harder than many and jobs were few and far between. Some probably thought I was crazy to enter an industry that was so down at the time, but I always saw it as an industry that would obviously come back and that I could still somehow find work and prepare myself for when things picked up again.
I’d say we’re closer to the ood times now and hopefully the last few years of learning will help in making those millions this time around.
Ahh, how crushing. So making money is not going to be that easy? Too many people make wild claims that they can not support it. I believe that getting rich involves a lot of hard work, sleepless nights and good planning. But sometimes all of that is not enough and you need a little push of luck.
Sorry I had to break the news to you Khalid. I completely agree about the hard work involved. You almost never see the work someone puts into their business. You only see the end result. You also don’t see the years of struggle prior to success.
For most of us we only see the business after it has become a success and by all appearances that success came overnight. It’s almost never the case, though.
A little luck helps, but I think you can make your own luck, by being prepared. I’ll use Jeremy’s example about transformers from the video. How many years has it been since transformers were really popular? But if you could have seen their recent comeback you could have prepared and been ready to capitalize on their return. To outsiders you might seem lucky that transformers suddenly became hot again even though you’d seen it coming and had been preparing for it all along.
That’s where the cyclical nature of things comes into play. Many things will go in and out of the public conscious. Markets that may not seem lucrative today may well be lucrative tomorrow. If you can see that change coming before it happens and prepare for its arrival you can profit from it.