The Easiest Time in History to Make Money: Revisited
Be grateful for when you were born
Today I have another vintage repost for the new subscribers. My following was much smaller when I originally wrote this article in 2023 so it’s possible that you missed it.
I think this article is particularly relevant today, when everyone is full of doom and gloom about the world and their prospects in it. Sometimes it’s good to shift your perspective and realize how lucky you were to have been born when you were born.
If you’ve been following me for a while then you know that I like to harp on the value of hard work (and berate people for not working hard enough).
The reason for this is simple: You can’t succeed if you’re lazy. What makes you think that you deserve to make money if you’re slacking off and a competitor isn’t?
But sometimes it’s useful to realize just how easy it is to make money in modern times. At the end of the day, the business that you’re running exists entirely on a screen.
You don’t have to do any real work.
At least not in the way that people used to not that long ago…
What people used to go through
If you were alive in a different era in history and you wanted to build up a business from nothing then there was no way around it: you had to work.
Really work.
Imagine that you were born in the 1800’s and wanted to start a business from scratch. What would you do?
The type of business that provided the most opportunity at the time was the oil industry. If you wanted to make it in the petroleum business then you’d have to spend months or even years away from your family, searching through remote, rugged, dangerous terrain for the rare “gusher” that would deliver you wealth and prosperity.
It was legitimately hard, backbreaking work. Most people who started never made it. They spent their entire life working in the most brutal conditions imaginable only to end up destitute.
I highly recommend reading the book The Prize if you want more details about how difficult it was to make it back in the day.
But that’s not the era you live in.