Why Dumb Guys Get Rich While Smart Guys Stay Poor!

If you were to check the list of Fortune 500 company bosses, you
would find that more than half of them nèver attended university.
In fact, many of them nèver even finished High School. If you
look around in your òwn life circùmstances, you will find that
the smart and the "best" invariably do NOT get to the top,
despite all the myths to the contrary. They often end up working
for someone less smart and less talented than themselves, whose
chief talent is self-promotion and a street-savvy capacity for
self preservation.
 

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Why is this? Why do the dumb guys get rich and the smart guys
stay poor? (Note for the ladies: no sèxism intended here. For
"guy", read "gal" throughout this article).
 
There are a number of good reasons. The first is that the
intelligent deep thinking person often suffers from "paralysis
through analysis". They will analyze and analyze a particular
oppòrtunity, and doubtless find all sorts of reasons why it just
won't work. However, they will DO nothing! Graduates are bad
enough at this, but Ph.Ds are much worse (and I am one, so trust
me on this!) By contrast, the dumb guy just comes in and does it.
And succeeds! Why? Because he/she is too dumb to do anything
else. It nèver occurs to this person to sit around contemplating
his navel all day. They have little self-doubt (doubtless because
they haven't sat around reading Nietzsche and Kant all day), and
generally have a can-do mentality.
 
Most smart guys suffer from the syndrome of the over-talented.
This means that they are pretty good at learning most anything
they put their hand to. Hence, they can achieve proficiency at
most anything. However, persistence is another matter altogether.
You see, the smart guy is drowning in oppòrtunity. He doesn't
know which of the many paths to take. Once he takes one, he
changes direction as soon as the going gets tough (or worse, just
as soon as he gets bored!).
 
By contrast, there are some people who are only good at one thing
and can do nothing else. Through focusing relentlessly on this
ONE THING, they get astonishingly good at it. Bruce Springsteen
jokingly refers to this at times in his concerts when he says
that he couldn't play sports, he was no good at math, and he
couldn't get a girl. The only thing he was any good at was
playing guitar! And the rest is history. Another example of
single-mindedness is Michael Jackson. We all marvel at his
singing, dancing and songwriting ability at the age of 40+. But
really… give yourself a break! How good would YOU be at his age
if you had also started when you were only five years old, and
done nothing else all your life? I would hazard a guess that
you'd be pretty damn good!
 
Smart guys won't stoop too low. They won't touch things that are
beneath them. They think that once they have a degree
qualification, the world is theirs for the asking. If you have a
Law degree from Harvard, would you work in a restaurant, or start
a shoe shop? Yet, in the NY Times bestseller, "The Millionaire
Next Door", the authors revealed that the vast majority of
millionaires in America made their money in standard businesses
like restaurants, dry cleaners, shoe shops and so on. Yet, how
many university graduates will enter such professions? Most would
rather work for someone else in return for a higher than national
average salary, the right to wear fancy expensive clothes on the
job, and the faint promise of a company car somewhere down the
line (provided you don't get fired first).
 
Dumb guys by comparison will do whatever it takes to reach their
goal. If their goal is money, and they are single-minded about
it, they will just keep beating away at it until they finally
succeed. Well, I guess they're just too dumb to stop, aren't
they? There's no running home to cry to mummy. There's no Jungian
Analysis about how their childhood suffering and wicked parents
left them infallibly conditioned to remain poor all their lives.
Heck, they just keep going and going and going! They don't know
when to stop and one day… well, they end up richer and more
successful than you or me. In fact, we end up working for them!
Strange thing that, isn't it?
 
You know what? Smart guys think the world owes them a living.
Dumb guys don't. Smart guys whine something like "I've got this
degree in Fine Art, and I've self-published a book of poems,
etc., etc. But I just can't seem to get a break. I'm talented and
I'm being ignored. It's a closed shop. You've either got to know
someone, or have money. And me, I don't have either…". In my
first job in Investment Banking, I recall being told to spend a
couple of DAYS typing numbers into a computer like a secretary.
What was I thinking? "I'm a Physics PH.D! I shouldn't have to
be doing this!".
 
Here's a simple fact the dumb guys know that the smart guys
usually don't. Success, and Wealth (IF you choose to measure
success that way), takes effort, persistence, determination,
large amounts of disappointment, and sheer guts. Crying to mummy
doesn't cut it. Giving up first time, saying "I tried it and it
doesn't work. It's a scam", won't do. As Napoleon Hill said, you
need "definiteness of purpose". This means you need to decide on
the one thing you really want and stick at it, come what may,
until you get it. Most people simply cannot do that. That is why
most people end up dissatisfied and unhappy, especially the smart
ones.
 
Smart guys don't even use 10% of what they've got, while dumb
guys give it all (after all, they don't have that much to give,
do they? So they may as well give it all they've got!). Smart
guys don't know how to market themselves. They think if they
build a better mousetrap, the world is duty-bound to beat a path
to their door. So they just sit there, swapping high-brow
intellectual witticisms, and wait. And wait. And wait…
 
Here's an interesting story. It seems that two highly brilliant
"professor" types invented this new type of psychological
analysis a few years ago. They called it NLP (Neuro-Linguistic
Programming) and, given that it could produce lasting behavior
change in people INSTANTLY, it was arguably the biggest thing
since Freud and Jung. Now the only problem was that these two
geniuses didn't know a jot about markèting the stupendous
discovery they had made to the general public.
 
Meanwhile, enter stage-right a tall guy - an excellent marketer – whose biggest deal up tò that point had been to get company
executives to walk across red-hòt coals chanting a self-help
mantra. This tall guy, who was not a deep thinker compared to the
two geniuses, had the nerve to think he could take up this NLP
thing and present it to the masses in huge seminars, with
scarcely a mention (if ever) of the two geniuses. What
ingratitude! And heck, before you could blink an eye, there was
the tall guy: meeting US presidents, coaching film stars and
world-class sports personalities, appearing on worldwide TV,
being a household name, and being financially worth OVER 500
MILLIòN dollars!
 
And what about the two geniuses who invented the roadshow? Oh,
they're still out there somewhere; unknown to the masses, poor
(certainly compared to the tall guy), fighting over the crumbs,
lamenting the unfairness of the world, and doubtless being fed
up about the whole thing. And to prove my point, you probably
know the name of the tall guy, don't you? And do you think he
deserves his huge success? You bet! But if I gave you a
million guesses to name the two geniuses (i.e. the CREATORS of
the whole game), would you be able to?!.....
 
Look. I've been pretty irreverent in this article, and I hope
you've seen the humorous side of it. And if anyone's allowed to
say these things, it's me. Why? Because, with a Ph.D in Nuclear
Physics, I guess I'm one of the "smart guys". I'm writing from
personal and bitter experience here. I've seen versions of
everything I've just described… in my own life. I'm telling it
like it is.
 
Anyway, who is really "smart" here? Is it the person with a lot
of degree certificates, who knows how to play that game well,
but is seemingly incapable of playing the game of life? Or is it
the person who, perhaps without any fancy education, knows
how to interact with the world in a way that optimizes the
results that he or she gets?
 
So please, take the point and get the lesson. Don't be too smart
for your òwn good. Don't be blind to oppòrtunity simply because
your eyes are too busy contemplating your degree certificate.
Don't be over-sensitive. Get out there. Success is a contact
sport. Take chances. Get beat up once in a while. Be willing to
LOSE (yes, LOSE - and forget what other people will say about it)
once in a while. Be prepared to be scammed once or twice too in
your pursuit to find out what actually works. Regard everything
as a learning experience, and keep on trying. And remember this:
between where you are now and where you want to be in life, there
are an unknown, but finite, number of mistakes to be made. So,
resolve to make those mistakes just as fast as you possibly can.
 
So… Let's shed the over-sensitive skin, get off your backside,
get a little "DUMB"... and … MAKE IT HAPPEN!
 

Copyright 2002, Asoka Selvarajah. All Rights Reserved.

Resources To Make It Happen!...

The Midas Method, By Stuart Goldsmith

The Inner Circle, By Stuart Goldsmith

The Golden Mailbox, by Ted Nicholas & Stuart Goldsmith

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