What Millionaires Don’t Teach Us
Kabir Vega
HAVANA TIMES – Young Cubans have a strange habit of flicking through those tempting “How to be a millionaire” books when they are about to emigrate or have just set up a business.
Having lived all of their lives in Socialism’s low social class, their life ambitions quickly dwindle and they give up their reading.
Other more “secure” people store the authors’ lessons in their mind and they take them abroad, hoping for an opportunity to be able to apply them, until they realize (over time) that it isn’t that simple.
Sadly, nearly every book of this kind ignores or leave out the fundamental rules that govern society anywhere in the world. They are rather ways to trick yourself dressed up in arrogance, than pieces of advice you can put into action.
I might come across presumptuous or frustrated to my readers by criticizing widely-read books that summarize experiences and organized schools of thought. However, authors and promoters of these theories forget to mention certain basic fundamentals.
Anyone can become a millionaire, but not everyone.
Since the beginning of civilization, not everyone can be a winner at the same time. In order to be a winner, you have to defeat your neighbors, dealing with the suffering that you produce in them and being well-prepared to lose at any time.
We have free will, but we aren’t omnipotent.
If there is something that all of these books lie about, it’s when they say that everyone can define their lives in every aspect and detail. No matter how advanced technology might be and not worrying about how high a human being’s intellectual quotient can be, we are incapable of predicting or seeing the future, and we are very far from controlling everything: we continue to be tied by our fate.
We have virtues and defects because we are human, we can improve, but managing to bring about definitive change is an exceptional accomplishment.
Another philosophy that is trending right now is the belief that you can change your mind by reprogramming it, as if the mind were not where our feelings, emotions and loyalties dwell… which are what make up our identity.
Substantial behavioral change requires a privileged will or is the consequence of great suffering. Human beings have an endless capacity to learn and improve, but they needed millenniums to get where we are today. Anyone who boasts about being able to control their mind isn’t being honest.
I don’t mean to insult those who have found hope in reading and trying out millionaires’ way of thinking. These authors have experience to tell us what you can do with the power of money: great benefits and huge risks. I only call into question these methods that attempt to simplify reality and can lead to dangerous and failed obsessions which nobody takes responsibility for.