The secret of success is..... (31)

--- buy when everyone is selling and sell when everyone is buying

In a world where people interact, there is no such thing as a guaranteed succees. No opportunity can safely reach your shores just because you want it. there are always the third parties that get in the way.

A good opportunity which really depends very little on personal ability is the "luck" of knowing the right people at the right time......like a cabinet minister, who helps you to take a government tender at a higher tender price, for an inferior product, from which one makes millions profit. That is opportunity.
The choice that precedes that is. Should one go for such opportunities or not?

the art of success is being successful that all there is to it

Really! What then of mine-workers and so many hundreds of millions in unheathy sweatshops around the world supplying your comfy lifestyle from computers to food to god knows what...

Elley, what you say is highly reminiscent of 19th century protestanism, the religion of colonialism - or even the arbeit macht frei of more recent times.

Think again

I respectfully disagree......most of the wealthy people I have met have been extremely hard-working too......if you go independent and work for yourself, most people will find that they'll work a whole lot harder than they ever did as an employee.....

This is what I think, if we're talking "money success":

People have a kind of relationship with money.
It can sort of like you and it stays around and increases, whether you see opportunities, work hard, are clever, innovative' expansive or whatever or not.
Or it can not like you and it doesn't matter how hard you work, sometimes it doesn't come easily and it doesn't stay long.
Or you can be like me and have an on again off again, up and down kind of relationship with it.
I am fine to let it come and go and I feel inside me it will always be this way with me and money.
(Moon in Venus - nevermind - Cuspy may understand )

And this is why I think it:

My mum worked her backside off all her life, seemed to save my dad's butt all the time with the money she saved up little by little for rainy days.
My dad seemed to be a total disaster with money and money decisions.
He also worked hard, of course, but everything he did turned out to be a disaster.
As a teenager I thought he was just a disaster when it came to money.
We never ever had any left over, we were always in debt and at one point our stuff was being repossessed, got the picture...?
Then Mum died.
And it was weird.
Dad was totally shattered.
And never really recovered.
He was about 65 at the time.
And his luck with money changed.
He suddenly had too much to even qualify for a pension.
It started to flow in easily. Still does.
It was like she was carrying the bad luck with money.

Ask him now, and he will tell you, he'd want the bad luck back tenfold if she herself could come back to bring it.

What a sweet-sad story!!!.....really touching....somehow...

If you don't have someone to share it with, money means very little......how much fun is it going on a 5-star cruise on yer own??....huh?