The Secret Knowledge of Wealth

Very rarely is wealth accidental.

For even the thief makes a conscious effort to steal.

And successful stealing also requires planning, diligence, courage and timing.

Hence the basic ingredient of becoming rich is.

Desire.

The hunger to be something materially better than you are.

A hunger to progress geometrically.

In leaps and bounds.

A.24 hour clock ticking in your head.

A scent that follows you.

A tuning of the eyes and mind to recognise opportunities.

Most tiimes the first signs are noticeable even in childhood.

Like my friend.

A multi-millionaire.

Who said to me.

Yesterday.

"Jude, you know people see me today and say oh you are so rich. You are so lucky. You are so bla bla bla. I wish I can be like you. And I want to ask them, what have you done to deserve getting what I have got?"

Then he laughed and continued.

"A man who I give a million today who does not have the desire to be rich will spend it in a twinkle of an eye, because instead of his mind to tell him to grow the million into two or three or ten million, his mind will tell him to spend the million. And his eyes will only see things to buy and needs to meet instead of opportunities to invest."

He shook his head again, sighed and continued.

"Wealth is not the money you have but your state of consciousness. You can be poor and still be wealthy because your mind is attuned to the success and because it is sooner or latter you will be successful. It is the law of attraction. So a wealthy man in Rwanda who lost all in the genocide and fled to America as a refugee will sooner or later begin to flourish there because his mind is still his and that mind will see the opportunities there and act on it. He maybe not be as rich as he was before but he will have more than his fellow refugee who does not have the wealth consciousness. Where he has the mentality to create wealth, the other has the mentality to admire wealth."

Once again he went silent in contemplation then he said.

"For as early as I can remember my mom gave us pocket money. All four of us children. You got your brown envelope each month. My immediate older sister and my immediate younger sister will spend theirs on sweets and chocolates in days. But I kept my money and my youngest sister's money. I was the bank and my other sisters will come ask for a loan. I will borrow them with interest and once the next month came and we get our new envelopes, they will pay back. It got to a point where they were owing me so much that once we got our envelopes, all their pocket money became mine. So for them to get money for me I began to do trade by barter. They will iron my clothes for cash. Wash my plates. Give me their time belts for television watching since we had one television and my mom had allotted times per day when each child will watch their programme of choice. Sometimes I will buy ice cream at school for them as payment instead of the cash itself. Soon I realised that as we grew older, they and their friends loved reading novels and comics. So I used my savings and bought a lot of them and started a novel and comic rental at school and in the neighbourhood. Money flowed in as kids came to rent the latest novels and comics which I bought from the same store in town that my mom bought four comics a month for us. I paid my sisters to keep records for me and become my collectors. They knew who had what and who was due to return it. They will go straight to your house and cause a riot if you don't return it."

Then he laughed before he continued.

"I was a rich child with his own money and very loyal staff. Which of course were my sisters. When I was thirteen, there used to be a Malian man who had a convenience store at the end of the road in which we lived. He was a muslim and he also used to live in his shop. I noticed he used to close his shop when he was saying his prayers, during the friday Juma'at prayers and when he had to go to the market to buy more goods. So I went up to him and asked him if he was willing to teach me how to sell and if he was, after I returned from school and during weekends, I will stay in his shop while he was praying, going for Juma'at and going to the market and he will pay me. He looked at me totally shocked. Because he knew my mother and sisters. He knew we were a middle class family. So he couldn't understand why I was making the proposal. So he asked me, at your age what do you need money for? And I answered by saying that I need my own money to spend on things I wanted without having to ask my mother for money, also that I needed to save money to one day have my own store but most importantly I needed to learn how to trade in order know what to do when I have my store. He looked at me with a smile on his face and asked me if my mother knew what I wanted to do. I sais no. He said he can't be a part of it because he didn't want trouble with my mother. So I told him that I will sneak out to do it and my mother wouldn't mind as long as I get to do my homework and I earn money. And even if she does when I explain to her that working with you was also like going to school and that it will keep me away from playing with the bad boys in the area, she will be happy with what I was doing. It took him more than a week to agree but he finally did start teaching me and paying me for the time I manned the store. My mother never knew because my sisters and my older cousin who looked after us were on my payroll. If they talked, no more money for them and since my mom barely talked to the neighbours, there was no one to tell her. I worked for him for 3 years while still maintaining my book and comic rental agency. I had money but I wanted to get even more and since I had noticed that everyone I knew who had a car always visited the mechanic workshop at least once a month and spent money there, I decided that owning a workshop was a lucrative venture. So once I finished secondary school there in Congo Brazzaville, at the age of 16, while everybody was reading to go to university, I instead became an apprentice at a mechanic workshop. I learnt as though knowledge was food and I was starving. In one year I was an expert. Faster than any apprentice they ever had."

He smiled. A proud one. Then he continued.

"But I had my plans, I was watching the people who came in. I realised our biggest clients were the Catholic Church in Brazzaville. Once my two year apprenticeship was over, I went there and told them that I could be their resident mechanic. Ready to fix their cars on site at a cheaper cost. The drivers knew me from the workshop and vouched for the quality of my work. Straight the church signed me up. And like that flat tire, engine problem. It was me. Panel beating I knew where to take it too. Soon church members started asking for my services and other workshops began offering me a cut to bring cars for bodywork and other specialised services. I bought motorcycles and hired really good mechanics and began sending them out to clients as the work was too much for only me to handle. By 20 I opened my state of the art workshop in Brazzaville where the who is who in the city brought any model of cars for fixing and servicing and when they couldn't I sent them a mobile mechanic. At this time my book and comic rental was booming as I had also opened a store in town and had a cousin of mine in Paris send me books and comics. The other store from where i used to stock was floundering as they only sold while I sold and rented. Everyone came to mine. Soon it became the biggest bookshop in the city. I was working hard on both the mechanic workshop and the bookstore. Day and night. And by 22 I was a millionaire. By 27, I was hiring a lot of my friends and ex-classmates that had gone to university. At that time I had branched into estate development, commodities, farming, hoteling, manufacturing and transportation both long distance haulage and maritime. At 35, my investments were around the continent. All through I have kept a close circle of management staff. My three sisters. All of them taking time to go to school. Earning their MBAs. And coming back to the business."

Then he went very silent as he thought before he sighed and said.

"Yet some people call me lucky because to them I am either too young to be this rich or too uneducated to be this successful. They look at me now and think that all I am happened overnight. I just laugh at them and wish I could tell them what I told my sisters a long time ago when I opted to go to the mechanic workshop instead of university - vision is not taught, you are born with it, what you learn is the technicalities of what you want to do, but first you have to know what you want to do and why you want to do it, it is after that you choose where you will learn how you want to do it. I want to create wealth. I want to employ hundreds of people. I want to trade both goods and technical skills. University will teach me how to be employed by people, the workshop will teach me how to employ people. University will never teach me hard work, street smarts, perseverance, risk-taking, marketing, pricing, undercutting the competition and how to deal with success and grow a business, I will learn that in the trades. So that when I build what I want to build, I can now employ university graduates to come and learn the business of life while paying them as that Malian man paif me to learn trade."

He kept quiet again and grinned before he said.

"Jude, some are born to lead and create, some are born to follow and consume. Success comes when you know which one of them you are and you do what it takes to be the best you you can be. Failure is when the one that was born to lead and create accepts the schooling and mindset conditioning that was designed for the one that was born to follow and consume. It is the path you choose that gets you to the destination you desire. There is no bird that chooses to trek long distances when it knows it can fly. The wealthy person is like that bird, no matter how much the chicken envies him, the chicken cannot fly, the same chicken whose forebears were once birds who could fly and were taught by some school not to fly. The same chickens that can now teach the bird that his wings were not created to fly and if he listens to them and accepts their teaching, he will lose his desire to fly and become just like the chicken. But what stops the bird from becoming the chicken is his ability to hold on to the truth of what he is the hunger to arrive at his chosen destination and the all so natural desire to fly. I am a bird, if chickens have decided to gossip about me in admiration, envy and jealousy instead of coming to me to learn about the horizons I have crossed and the new vistas I have seen, what can I do but shake my head in pity?"

Then he laughed and said.

"I know I have rambled. But you can make sense of what I have said right? After all that is what they teach you all in university and give you a degree for making sense out of nonsense, until you come to us to re-educate you and teach how to truly survive in the world.."

Johannesburg

Jude Idada

March 8, 2019