Our habits tend to define who we are. If you make it a point to drive recklessly every day, nobody will be surprised when you eventually get into a traffic accident. This seems obvious to us. Yet the financial equivalent of this principle, tolerating bad monetary habits on a regular basis until you’re driven into poverty, seems less obvious. For the most part, the richest people in the world didn’t get to their position overnight. They didn’t stumble into money, and it wasn’t given to them as a gift. They accumulated it, and continue to maintain it, as a direct result of their daily habits and their underlying philosophies. These are seven things you’ll never catch the world’s richest people doing: 1. Playing the lottery. The lottery comes with a bold promise: a chance to win more money than you’d ever know what to do with. But the odds of winning are astronomically low, and logically, you have a far better chance of creating your own wealth than getting lucky and winning someone else’s. The world’s wealthiest people had no interest in taking chances; instead, they chose to forge their own paths, and as a result, they worked harder, and saw more tangible results. Plus, remember that instant wealth means nothing if you don’t know how to manage it–countless lottery winners found themselves bankrupt shortly after winning because they splurged or managed it poorly. 2. Hoping for better outcomes. There’s nothing inherently wrong with hope; it’s a positive emotion that leads us to more optimistic lives. But for the world’s richest people, hope isn’t nearly enough. Hope doesn’t solve problems. It doesn’t create opportunities. It doesn’t change anything. If you want to move past a certain chapter of your life, or achieve a certain outcome, you have to move beyond hoping and start taking action. Only through initiated, meaningful changes will you be able to make any difference. The next time you find yourself in a bad situation and hoping for something better, stop hoping and make a better situation for yourself.
