Douglas Kruger - How to Grow Rich: 50 Ways to Debunk Money Myths and Master Wealth

Have you ever noticed that in winter, when your fingertips freeze and your lips go numb, it is hard to believe you could ever be warm again? The sensation of cold is so all-encompassing, and takes up so much of your bandwidth, that the very idea of feeling warm seems almost inconceivable. Winter, you feel, will be eternal.

The same dynamic then applies in reverse: summer sets in, you swelter up a storm, and somehow you cant quite recall what it felt like to be chilled to the core. Heat and sweat and lethargy seem like the only plausible conditions between now and kingdom come.

It is like that when were sick as well. Shivering, we find it difficult to imagine that we might ever again feel whole that a return to normal is even possible. Yet when that merciful day arrives, and the last of the sodden tissues exit with the trash, we barely spare our recovery a second thought. Those terrible aches become a distant memory, if that. We feel completely different, and we also feel as though we have always felt this way .

That is how wealth works too.

During periods of poverty, it seems impossible to conceive of a world in which everything could simply be okay.

When you are struggling, there is nothing but the struggle, and the sensation of living through it is awful. Improvement sounds like a fantastical fairy tale peopled with pixies and faraway lands. It happens to others, not us.

Yet over the past couple of decades, over one billion people have made that change. They have left all that misery behind them, exiting the ranks of extreme poverty and finding their scenarios completely and utterly transformed.

Now in a financial spring, they can live in ways that would have appeared luxurious to even the super-wealthy among our ancestors just a few generations prior, and unthinkable to themselves a decade ago.

Things change. They change quickly and they change dramatically, even if we find that hard to imagine.

Poverty and struggle are like sickness and winter. When we are living through them, caught in their grip, they seem to pervade everything, leaking down into our bones, getting under even our most intimate thoughts about our place in the universe, and rendering us diminished and shivering. We honestly believe they will endure forever.

Yet they are not inevitable. They are not eternal. They are seasonal. They are solvable. They do change, and they are changing on a miraculous level globally, at a pace that only increases by the year.

This is a book about opposites and big changes.

We will discuss opposite ideas, opposite belief systems about money, work and wealth, and we will discuss their diametrically opposite outcomes. We will look at how quickly and completely things can change when rules are either introduced or removed. We will see that there is hope more hope than we might ever have imagined possible for us. And we will learn how to make the most of these changes, in the most practical of ways, in order to prosper.

You simply wont believe how different tomorrow can be.

Lets go back in time.

Do you recall your early years at school when the English teacher we shall call her Mrs Clarke corralled the class into completing certain phrases out loud? She would say, High, and the class would answer, High, higher, highest.

Then she would say, Happy, and with confidence increasing as they became familiar with the formula, everyone would chime, Happy, happier, happiest.

Then a demonic glint would enter Mrs Clarkes eyes. A self-satisfied malevolence. That should have been our first clue that trickery was afoot, but we were only 10 after all; we still believed babies came from too much kissing.

She would throw out the bait: Dead!

Without missing a beat, a roomful of self-assured pre-pubescents would joyfully chorus: Dead, deader, deadest!

This was usually followed by a moment of confused silence. Then the clever clogs at the front would wave her hands like a Sesame Street Muppet and holler, Nuh-uh! You cant say that! after which the wheels came off, anarchy descended, and the teacher would ultimately regain order and reveal the mechanics of her cunning deception.

You cannot, of course, be deader than dead.

Dead is dead. You are either dead or you are not dead, which is to say youre alive, even if only barely, such as might be the case after consuming bad sushi. What we have here is a twofold impossibility. Firstly, it is grammatically incorrect to say dead, deader, deadest. Secondly, it is logically unsound.

Today, though, we are going to wreak our vengeance on Mrs Clarke. We are going to indulge ourselves in a phrase that is grammatically incorrect yet logically sound. And so, class, if you will glance at the blackboard, here is our phrase for the day:

Wrong, wronger, wrongest.

We will use this phrase, which might have induced eye-twitching in our beloved Mrs Clarke, rather often. This is because many of the most common ideas surrounding work, wealth and money ideas that are faithfully bandied about as gospel in the media and touted as truth at water coolers the world over are not just wrong, but in some cases even wronger, if not the wrongest options possible.

Think of it in terms of direction. An idea that is merely wrong may faithfully aim at the mark yet miss by a small margin. An idea that is the wrongest is more like that kid who bursts off the starting line with gusto, running in the opposite direction to everyone else: Forrest Gump gunning for his own end zone. Its an idea that doesnt just fail, but achieves the opposite of its desired outcome.

The particular ideas that we will explore here range from the global to the personal. We will look at government beliefs that affect your wealth, and we will discuss what you believe as you check out this months bank balance. And then I will propose changes for the better in all cases.

The changes these ideas can make in your life are nothing less than gigantic. The damage that the bad ones can do is every bit as mon strous. Some demonstrably wrong ideas have been fiercely defended by academics and intellectuals, and then zealously parroted by the media, for over a hundred years, even though they consistently make people poorer. We know, because economists have tracked and measured them. We will ask some probing questions about why thought leaders con tinue to cling to failing advice. What is their incentive for persevering down a disproven path?

Other ideas have emerged victorious, proving their real-world value and their ability to make you, me and everybody around us prosperous. Again, we know they work, because economists have measured them. We will ask why they are not being taught with the kind of evangelical fervour they deserve. We will even get a little angry about that, and rightly so.

I want you to be aware of these opposite ideas and the changes they cause in your life. I want to equip you to see the good ones and arm you to defend yourself against the bad.

Some are obvious. They represent easy changes you can make immediately. Others are subtler, hidden within shady vales and beneath crooked words, and like snares in a forest, they can be difficult to see. They can take the form of mental blocks within our own belief systems, or of external forces in the form of bad politics, typically disguised as social kindness. Once you know how the traps are set, you will never again fall for them. Nor will your children.

There will be no sacred cows. We will take no prisoners among dodgy ideas, and we will not shy away from attacking poverty-inducing traditions. We want truth , not emotion.

The title of this book is a bold and simple proposition: How to grow rich. So how do you grow rich?