I threw out a tweet over the weekend titled “reasons people don’t get wealthy,” and I listed nine reasons and asked folks to add their 10th, 11th and 12th.

[ Click to Tweet (can edit before sending): https://ctt.ac/ck49t ]

I didn’t put any thought into the order of the list, since I wrote it in a stream of consciousness style, but I made sure to include factors that people don’t have any control over, such as, what time and the country they were born in because, obviously, if you were born in North Korea today or were Irish (like my ancestors) at the turn of the 19th century, you probably had zero to little chance of changing your station in life.



Right now I’m very interested in bringing up the topic of wealth, success and achievement in America because a vocal minority of youngsters (I’m old now!) are embracing socialism while advocating for the banning the billionaires.



I get their frustration with their Boomer and Gen-X parents and, obviously, they have many valid points — even if I disagree with their anti-capitalism stance (this will be another blog post).



This embracing of socialism, of course, is leading the crazy right to trigger their individual-freedom loving Americans, in order to deride that generation for wanting to be part of the socialist-communist system found in China, Russia, and Venezuela, as opposed to the Nordic Model (whether that’s actually socialist is debatable).



Putting that aside, I think young people should still aspire to get wealthy — which is different than rich — and be proud of that. Wealthy is a loaded word, and while some careless folks would define it as dollars, the truth is that wealth encompasses so much more, including options, health, happiness and the pursuit of one’s vision of what the world should be.



Striving to be wealthy, by society’s or one’s personal definition, is what we should all be doing in this life. We should strive to create abundance through innovative products and services, be that creating Khan Academy or Uber/Airbnb or even a lifestyle business. Entrepreneurship has created the greatest gains in our standard of living to date, even if it’s hard to grasp the wild polarization of wealth in society. I don’t see capitalism’s lock on the best operating system for society changing any time soon — the most driven humans drive humanity forward, it’s that simple.



Conversely, if we pursue free services and money we will drive more power into the hands of a larger and larger incompetent government, and I think we know where that will end up — and it won’t be great for anyone.



The socialism vs. capitalism debate is just getting started and I’m looking forward to debating it passionately and intelligently with y’all. Comments are open.



My original list is below:



Reasons people don’t get wealthy (a partial list):



1. A lack of skills

2. Lack of taking risks

3. Not building a network

4. Poor work ethic

5. Not reading books

6. Giving up after getting beat down

7. Fear

8. Being born at the wrong time

9. Being born in the wrong country



… and some great responses from Twitter.

