Getting rich quick is a scam, plain and simple. You’re either scamming someone else or you’re getting scammed, but there is no in between.

“10 easy steps to financial freedom”

“(Just buy my guide)”

“I made $127k this year and you can too”

“(Just buy my guide)”

Anyone who’s looked up anything business related has probably seen it before. The list goes on and on, comprised mostly of young men claiming they’ve made anywhere from $50,000 to $1,000,000 and beyond. The part I love the most about these posts and ads is that they always claim to have made the money in one month. If they’ve been so successful with sales alone, why do they insist on putting a pay wall between you and your dreams?

No matter what anyone tells you, you’ll never “Get Rich Quick”. Aside from winning the lottery, there is no legitimate way to get rich quickly. It’s a slow, daunting process full of errors and countless hours of research. You may spend years setting a project in motion before you see any return, if any. Becoming a successful, rich individual involves high risk action with no guarantee that you’ll find success. Ever.

You Were Sold A Dream

It’s a common business model to sell someone a belief rather than a tangible, or even effective, product. America has been a catalyst in the effort to sell ideas, claiming to offer people “The American Dream”. While we certainly have many luxuries as Americans, the American Dream is simply an effective way to establish an elite workforce. Telling people they’ll find great wealth and prosperity after working hard seems a little obvious, don’t you think?

Stop letting people fund their dreams by leeching off of yours. You have to sink if you want to learn how to swim. While research and knowledge are invaluable in bettering yourself or your business, so too is financial freedom and independence.

Dreaming Instead Of Doing

Be honest with yourself for a moment. It’s a lot easier to escape into the dream of sipping daiquiris on a beach than it is to actually work hard enough to get there, right? That’s what makes it so easy for people to sell you a course on motivational quotes and inspiring ideas. Until you actually get up and do something though, it’s never going to mean anything. The most successful people on the planet have spent hours, weeks, months, even years to achieve what they have. They didn’t spend their time hoping it would come true because they believed it would. Instead, they funneled their belief into energy and harnessed that energy into taking action.

You can tell yourself that making a single YouTube video is enough to go viral and get rich, but let’s face the facts. Virality is becoming less and less obtainable as more and more people strive to gain this status. You may have created the highest quality, highest value video in whichever niche you create content for. If you can’t get that video into the hands of the right people, it’s never going to make it anywhere. This means you now have to learn marketing strategies, human psychology, and perhaps even the psychological effects of color. Did I also mention all the time you’ll have to spend executing this knowledge after you actually learn how to do it?

Until you start taking action to chase your dreams, you’ll only ever let yourself down for “failing” something you never attempted.

Passive Income Isn’t Real

Maybe you aren’t the type to sit back and wait. Perhaps you did take some initiative and you actually starting working on bringing your dreams to fruition. That’s great! Now whatever you’ve done, do it again. Then do it again, and again, and some more after that. Whether you invest in stocks, produce videos, or engage in another obscure method to make money, there is no such thing as passive income. You’re always going to be trading hours for a dollar amount. Whether it’s a daily effort or it was done a year beforehand, you will always have to put forth a great amount of effort to see a great return on the work you do. Even someone like Warren Buffet had to, at a bare minimum, network for some of his streams of income. Whether it’s a simple meeting or full on conference, you have to invest in yourself to invest in a fortunate future. We need to stop believing in passive income, instead following the idea of passionate income.

Making The Most Of It

Have you ever heard the quote “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer”? That’s because a majority of wealthy people live like they’re poor. Jay-Z said it best on his single “The Story of OJ”.

Financial freedom my only hope [Forget] living rich and dying broke

Most of us get paid bi-weekly and, come payday, live way above our means. I know I’m certainly guilty of it. Even if you don’t have a wild dream to chase or something to prove, financial freedom starts with something simple: our habits.

Imagine you’re down to the last $4 in your bank account. You’re not sure what you’re going to do or how you’re going to eat. Are you going to spend that $4 on a single candy bar for one day or are you going to head over to the grocery store and pick up cheap vegetables and grains, possibly feeding yourself for a few days? If we always lived like we had nothing, we would probably see a much greater return on our monthly income. The problem is, we don’t like to be held accountable for our actions. It’s all just one big circle. We don’t want to do anything to change our habits so we continue to fall short of any dreams or goals we set, large or small.

If you truly want to get rich quick, you have to be willing to make changes to the way you act and adjust accordingly. Going to work isn’t enough anymore because there are so many ways to spend our money today. You have to be in an active conversation with yourself, analyzing data such as spending habits or number of Netflix episodes watched after work. If something doesn’t align with your ultimate goal, you have to be willing to change it.

At the end of the day, growing old and rich isn’t a pipe dream or a luxury lived by few. It’s a subtle change to the way we live over an extended period of time. The habits we engage with produce the outcome of our tomorrow. Learn to change yourself and you can learn to change the world around you. Only then will you be able to achieve financial freedom and the pursuance of whatever your heart desires.

Have a question you want answered or an opinion you’d like covered? Ask below in the comments and you just might get a response!

Don’t forget to follow my blog for instant updates on new content, free e-books, and more.