**Importance of earning more money**

Earning money is a very much interesting thing because you want to do it as fast as possible, but at the same time, you have to be careful because trying to earn money too fast creates problems. It’s a weird balance.

First, let’s start with the concept of risk.

The more risk you take, the more ability there is to earn money fast, so a person without money would think “then I should take as much risk as possible so I can get money the fastest, right?”

Well… it’s not that simple. Think about the lottery. That’s about the fastest you can go from $5 to a multi-millionaire. But there’s a great chance that you’ll just dump money into the lottery and never get much back. The risk to reward ratio is just too wonky to make it reliable.

The way compounding works, having too many setbacks can GREATLY impact your ability to earn money. If you are getting 10% a year on your money, you’re doubling your money every 7 years, and let’s assume one year you take a big risk and lose 50%, it doesn’t just take you 5 years to make it back… it takes you 7 years just to get back to where you started. So since you were playing catch up for 7 years just to get back to where you were, you missed out on doubling your money.

The point is, be careful about opportunities that are highly risky. Some are great, like starting a business or something, but be very careful about taking huge gambles that are too good to be true and where the results are completely out of your control. [source]

Secondly, let’s talk about the nature of business and success

This is more related to operating a business but can apply to other areas too.

Most people have this assumption that to be “successful” you have to focus on earning a lot of money… it just makes a certain amount of logical sense.

I’m not going to get into the more virtue-based philosophies that don’t define “success” as a monetary thing… let’s assume that “success” to you means making a lot of money.

To be successful, and make a lot of money, the key ISN’T to worry about how much money you’re making all the time. It helps to keep an eye on it and to make wise financial decisions, but the best way to make money is to solve problems for people in exchange for compensation.

If you focus too much on making the most profit, you’ll make decisions that are horrible for your customer… and people won’t want to pay you eventually. It can be VERY counter-intuitive… Most people in business have this huge pressure to make horrible decisions, and it’s very difficult to remember that solving a customer’s problem is what actually matters sometimes.

That’s probably why tons of businesses fail… they just assume it’s all about them and how much money they can make… but it really has absolutely nothing to do with that. It comes down to their ability to meet a need in the marketplace.

With that being said, there’s a balance there too. If you give everything away for free… you won’t have the capital to be able to afford to provide a world-class solution to whatever problem you’re solving. If you get too greedy no one will want to support what you’re doing in the long term.

Rich people have already figured out that you DON’T have to take crazy risks to become extremely wealthy, and you just simply don’t have to try to chase quick money because it’s too unreliable. So they just look for steady moderate returns that match their risk tolerance and it works like a charm.