Editor’s note: Lesson 4  introduces an idea that might sound cliché at first—but Mark approaches it in a very different way: The “Fake It ’til You Make It” Method.

I’m talking about intentionally stepping into the behaviors of the person you’re trying to become.

In this lesson, he explains why this method radically improves your chances of becoming wealthy—and why it works for any goal tied to behavior.

>>Watch Lesson 4 now<<

 

The Only Three Ways to Get Rich

By Mark Morgan Ford

Michael Moore’s documentary Capitalism: A Love Story is entertaining propaganda.

The movie’s central argument is that America is no longer the land of opportunity but a socially and economically stratified country where the rich get richer and the poor are victims of the rich.

According to Moore, the only chance average people have to better themselves is to vote in social democracy and let the government fix income and wealth inequality through redistribution programs.

I found the movie to be engaging and funny but fundamentally idiotic. The truth is that socialism (and make no mistake about it, socialism is what Moore is advocating) has never worked in large, diverse economies such as we have in the U.S.

It has worked, to some extent, in a few small, north European countries where 90% of the population works and values working and only 10% of the population is forever on the dole. But even these countries are having trouble recently as the ne’er-do-well population grows larger.

The fundamental flaw in socialism (or any system based on redistributing wealth) is that it penalizes financial productivity and rewards poverty. It can work perfectly well as long as there are lots more productive than unproductive individuals in the population. At some point, the wealth producers simply can’t afford to feed, clothe, house, and provide medical treatment for everyone.

What I’m saying is that Moore’s solution is not feasible. This begs the question: What about his criticism of the American economy? Is that wrong, as well?

Is it possible to begin with nothing and acquire wealth in America? Is it still possible today?

I’ve been studying that question for almost 20 years. And the answer is unequivocal: It is. It is still possible for ordinary, unconnected, wage-earning Americans to become wealthy. And I believe it can be done in seven years or less.

Further, most millionaires are self-made and own their own businesses. And 80% of them continue to work, generating streams of income, even though they don’t have to.

This validates what experience tells me: that it is still perfectly possible to become wealthy—even if you are broke or in debt right now.

(The movie is a wonderful irony when you think about it: Moore, the son of an autoworker from Flint, Michigan, grew up poor and became rich and now wants us to believe that it can’t be done.)

In fact, there are three ways to get wealthy in America:

1.	Slowly (in 30 to 40 years) by scrimping and saving
2.	Quickly (overnight) by gambling and getting lucky
3.	Surely (in seven years or less) by following DIYwealth Club programs.

How to Get Rich Slowly

The Millionaire Next Door, a best-selling book from 1996, surprised the reading public by revealing that the typical American millionaire doesn’t acquire his wealth by starting a successful business or becoming a doctor or inventing something. The greatest number of Americans, the data indicate, acquire their fortunes by scrimping and saving.

Just about anyone can get rich this way. You simply put a reasonable percentage of your income into a very ordinary investment program for 30 or 40 years, and voila! You are rich!

You can start with the (adjusted) median income in America—$51,939 in 2013. Then, let’s say you invest 10% of that income ($5,193) at a compounded return of 10.7% (the S&P 500 average return with dividends from 1962-2013, according to Pinnacle Data). Over 40 years, you’ll end up with $3,383,104.

This is due to the “miracle” of compound interest, but it is not in any serious way miraculous. It is a certainty based on long-proven historical averages and simple math.

But there is a hitch. You have to start relatively young.

If you start, for example, when you are 50, you will have only $216,961 accumulated by the time you are 65. If you start when you are 60, well. You get the picture.

Getting rich this way doesn’t require guts or brains. All you need is a commitment to work hard to make enough money to save every month… and the discipline to keep socking it away.

I recommend this method to anyone who is young enough to take advantage of time. It is the primary wealth-acquisition program that I recommend to college graduates in one of my books, Automatic Wealth for Grads and Anyone Else Just Starting Out.

How to Get Rich Quickly

Acquiring wealth by scrimping and saving is a sure thing, but it does take a long, long time.

And even if we have the time, most of us don’t have the patience for it. All other things being equal, we’d like our wealth served to us on a silver platter… by tomorrow morning.

Getting rich quickly—the ultimate financial aphrodisiac. Is it possible?

The answer: yes, but only if you are very, very lucky.

We read and hear about it all the time. A chicken farmer in Idaho discovers a Rembrandt in his barn. A barber in New Jersey hits the state lotto. Your cousin’s best friend’s uncle hit the jackpot in a Las Vegas casino.

And the one I like best—your taxi driver’s last fare made a million bucks last month by investing $5,000 in a pink sheet stock, and he has the name of the company!

Those are the stories. Here are the facts:

Your odds of winning a typical state lottery are 14-million-to-1. Your odds of winning a million-dollar jackpot at a craps table are more than 2-million-to-1. Your odds of finding a Rembrandt in your garage are about 10-million-to-1 (I’m guessing). And your odds of turning $5,000 into $1 million quickly with stocks are just as slim.

These are long, long odds. And although I have no objection to gambling as a form of entertainment, I don’t gamble because I know there are many other ways of entertaining myself that are less addictive and less costly.

How to Get Rich Surely

I’d like to illustrate my idea on getting rich surely by telling you about my own experience with state lotteries. It so happens that I did once make more than a million dollars on the lottery, but I didn’t do it by buying a single ticket.

Here’s the story: In the 1980s, I was a junior partner in a publishing company that put out all sorts of magazines, books, and newsletters. One year, my partner had an idea. We would publish a magazine on state lotteries. We called it, I think, Lottery! It featured stories of lottery winners and essays by crazy professors with theories about how to reduce the odds.

It was, for several years, a great success. At one time we had 100,000 subscribers paying us $39 per year. You can do the math.

It didn’t happen overnight. It took several years and thousands of man-hours to make it work. It was the result of a good idea, lots of specific (in this case, publishing) experience, and lots of hard work. And perhaps a touch of luck.

This is how you get rich surely. You work hard and smart to earn good money, and you put a large percentage of that money aside to build a business, acquire property, and invest in smart and safe opportunities when they arrive.

You don’t sit around dreaming and throw what little money you have at some irresistible idea.

This is the way the great industrialists made their fortunes 100-plus years ago in America. And it is the way entrepreneurs and some professionals make their money today.

(It is also the way bankers and brokers and insurance agents used to make their money, too, before they were able to collude with the government and go into the business of getting rich by taking advantage of their customers.)

At the Wealth Builders Club, we don’t believe in gambling. We do believe in scrimping and saving, but only for the young. For the rest of us, our path is getting rich surely the old-fashioned way: by working harder than your peers, by saving more than your peers, and by investing that extra savings in businesses, real property, and safe investments… and sticking to it.

We’ve taught others how to do it. We know it works—even today, when we’re still suffering from the terrible national hangover that came from the 20-year-plus orgy of gambling on stocks and then real estate that got our country into so much debt.

There are two hitches to getting rich surely:

1.	You can’t do it overnight. It will take some number of years.
2.	It’s not a 100% sure thing, as it is with scrimping and saving.

How many years does it take to get rich by earning and investing?

Short answer: one to seven years.

I’ve seen some people do it in as little as a year—and some take as long as seven years. The average has been somewhere in between.

When I sat down to write Seven Years to Seven Figures, I wanted to figure out why, out of the many people who attempt to get rich by earning and investing, only a percentage succeed.

So I interviewed eight people who had developed multimillion-dollar wealth in one to seven years. I asked them exactly what they did. I looked for similarities. Ultimately, I was searching for a common denominator.

As it turned out, I came up with three things that they had in common.

They had all (remember this for later):

1.	Learned a financially valuable skill
2.	Started a business by finding an up-trending market niche to apply their financially valued skill to
3.	Spent considerably less than they made and saved the difference.

The Four Obstacles to Earning and Investing
Your Way to Wealth

I was excited. I thought that I had discovered a formula that would transform the readers of that book into multimillionaires. I imagined getting hundreds or even thousands of letters from people, thanking me for pointing the way.

I did get some nice letters—but they were in the dozens or hundreds, not in the thousands.

What about all of the other people who had read the book? I had given them the formula. Why hadn’t they used it to make themselves rich?

There was only one way to find out. I had to ask them.

That, as it happened, was easier said than done. It’s tough to ask a person who has read your advice, “Why didn’t it work for you?”

But I did ask—although it was embarrassing for them and for me too. And what I discovered is that those people who hadn’t gotten rich had never actually implemented all three parts of the formula.

Some of them were stymied from the get-go. Some got started but then got distracted. And some made good progress but were ultimately frustrated.

But in speaking to them, a pattern emerged. The explanations that I got fell into one of the three following categories:

1.	I’ve been preoccupied with other things—a full-time job that isn’t getting me rich, a family that needs my time, fences to mend, taxes to pay, etc. But I’m going to start fresh this year.
2.	I’m ready to start, but I haven’t found my niche yet. I like the idea of natural health, but I’m also into photography and cooking. Which one do you think would be best?
3.	I’ve tried various programs, but they haven’t worked for me. I took a copywriting course, but I couldn’t get any clients. Then I took a real estate course, and the market collapsed. Then I got into Internet publishing, but I think that the market now is too competitive.

An Inside Perspective

 I’ll let you in on a little industry dirt. Many of the gurus who ply their trade selling wealth-building opportunities have no respect for the very people who are paying for their fancy cars and mansions. They call these people “wannabes.” “If people did what we told them,” they say, “we’d be out of business!”

 

I am not naive. I recognize it is impossible to create a wealth-building program that will have a 100% success ratio. Like programs that teach foreign languages or guitar playing, even the best wealth-building program will not be able to ensure that all of the people who buy it will use it and succeed.

 

But I still think that my No. 1 job as a teacher of wealth-building skills is to create the highest possible level of success among my protégés.

 

That’s why I spend so much time talking to people at conferences and corresponding with my readers—trying to figure out what is blocking them. If I can determine the major obstacles to success, maybe I can teach my readers how to overcome them. That would make their success so much easier.

You might see these as excuses. (He who is good at excuses is seldom good at anything else, the old maxim says.) But I don’t think they were. Many of these people were truly busy with other things. Many were confused about the best businesses for them to get into. And many who put their wealth-building plans into action found themselves blocked in some way, became frustrated, and gave up.

And there is one more obstacle that I’m sure all of them faced, though no one mentioned to me. It is something that anyone who has attempted to become wealthy—or has succeeded at it—knows very well.

I’m talking about fear, of course. The fear of failure. The fear of looking foolish in front of your family, friends, or colleagues. The fear of discovering something about yourself that you don’t want to know.

There must be 100 books and 10,000 articles written about the fear of failure—but from the sample I’ve read, 90% of them are dead wrong. Fear is, indeed, an obstacle. But the solution to fear cannot be found in mantras and visualizations and self-talk. The only sure way to defeat fear is through success.

The intelligent person should fear failure when he ventures into a new business. After all, some 80% of new businesses fail. But if he understands exactly how successful businesses are built, his fear will be less. And if he further understands some of the most fundamental secrets of wealth building, his fear will be small enough to overcome.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the four major obstacles to success.

For now, you just need to be aware of these four major obstacles and start preparing yourself to overcome them. In the weeks and months ahead, I’m going to start you down the path to earning and investing your way to wealth. And along the way, I will give you all the tools necessary to overcome these common obstacles.

Go here now to view Lesson 4.

All the best,

Mark

P.S. You already know you don’t want to wait 40 years.

And you already know you don’t want to rely on luck.

So that leaves one path.

There is nothing flashy about it. But it works.

Watch Lesson 4 carefully and decide whether you are ready to commit to the only method that makes sense.