Anybody can save; only a few can make money.
All you have to do, to save money, is to spend less than you get. And
any human being that is healthy and “compos mentis” can live on, say,
nine-tenths of what he is now living on and put by the other tenth.
There may be exceptions to this rule; we must grant that for the
severely accurate, but they are scarce as hen’s teeth. It is safe to say
that those who say they need every cent of what they make, and that it
is impossible to save anything at all, are victims of self-pity, weak
will, and bad management.
And saving money is about all that most of us can do. And that makes few
rich.
If I make ten dollars a week I can lay aside one dollar. If I make a
thousand dollars a week I may bank nine hundred and ninety dollars of it
(though I certainly would not). But in either case I wouldn’t get rich.
Rich people are not those who earn large salaries. They are those who
handle money, who make money earn money.
Of course, in this argument we exclude two classes—those who have money
given them, by inheritance or otherwise, and those who get money by
chance. These two classes merely step into money some one else has made.
But very few people get rich, for the simple reason that money-making
requires a certain order of genius. Money-makers are born. They have a
natural gift.
They are like poets, mechanicians, orators, artists, in that they are
endowed by their Creator with a peculiar capacity.
The money-makers are the real kings of modern life, because vulgarly we
measure all things, including human worth, by dollars.
If you make ten thousand dollars a year at your job it is only because
your employer is making more than that amount out of your services. He
is the player; you are the chessman. He is the general; you are the
private.
The best thing for us workers to do is to let money-making alone. Nine
times out of ten when we go into that game we are stung.
Wall Street is strewn with the corpses of lambs who thought they could
outwit the cunning old wolves that hunt there.
Many a shopkeeper has been ruined trying to get rich, not realizing that
he is not a money-maker, but a money-earner.
And many and many a widow has lost all her insurance money by imagining
that, being possessed of a tidy lump sum, she could increase it rapidly
by shrewd investment. She does not understand that in speculating in
real estate or buying stocks she is pitting her inexperience against
genius and trained ability.
Let the natural-born money-makers make money. Let us, you and me,
content ourselves with the only thing wherein we have a prospect of sure
success—that is, saving money.
Sometimes the money-making faculty is a racial heritage, as among the
Hebrews. Sometimes it runs in a family, and sometimes it appears
sporadically, and a money-making genius crops out in the most unexpected
place, just as a Lincoln, a Napoleon, or a Leonardo comes from a
commonplace environment.
The thing for us to remember is that getting rich is but one small way
in which human endeavor succeeds; that those who achieve riches are by
no means certainly happy, and that their power to acquire luxuries is
usually destructive to character.
And to remember also that the money-saver, if he be intelligent and if
he have common sense and philosophy, is practically assured of
contentment.