The secrets of building exemplary careers

Wealth and prosperity go beyond being markers of economic security. They are conduits to fulfilment, tools to empower people and actualize individual and social missions. Yet, the youth today, bristling with exuberance find a valley between their aspirations to wealth and what they have. This transcends concerns of employment and employability, to a domain where imagination and efforts towards building wealth themselves become staggered. According to a survey by Groww, an online investment platform, 25.8 per cent of respondents aged 18-20 reduced their investments owing to the reduction in their income during the pandemic. A massive chunk of the remaining respondents felt that their appetite for risk had decreased due to the pandemic.

Wealth is first created in the mind. If we do not have the imagination to think wealth, we would not have the agency to realize it. Descartes' often-quoted "Cogito, ergo sum" or "I think, therefore I am" suitably encompasses how thought is a creative force. In the same vein, in her heavily celebrated book, The Secret, Rhonda Byrne calls every thought of ours a "real thing", a force which equals creation. When these thoughts are attached to powerful emotions, the creation is accelerated. The following passages elucidate this further with quotes from Bob Proctor and Lisa Nichols respectively,

"You will attract everything that you require. If it's money you need you will attract it. If it's people you need you'll attract it. You've got to pay attention to what you're attracted to, because as you hold images of what you want, you're going to be attracted to things and they're going to be attracted to you. But it literally moves into physical reality with and through you."

The difference is made with where these thoughts as force are channelized, as "When you focus on lack and scarcity and what you don't have, you fuss about it with your family, you discuss it with your friends, you tell your children that you don't have enough - "We don't have enough for that, we can't afford that" - then you'll never be able to afford it, because you begin to attract more of what you don't have. If you want abundance, if you want prosperity, then focus on abundance. Focus on prosperity."

These seemingly abstract articulations find validation in real life. For instance, in just five years, Grant of Millennial Money went from having $2.26 in his bank account to $1 million. On his blog, the 31-year-old self-made millionaire wrote how the single most important hack" he has used to build wealth has been building all of his money goals into his daily goals, and working towards imagining and creating a little more money everyday. This exemplifies the wealth mindset, a paradigmatic approach where wealth is repeatedly imagined and efforts are made to turn those reasonable imaginations into reality.

Two other interesting findings emerged from the previously mentioned Groww survey. First, a sizeable 26.6 per cent of the respondents felt that the pandemic had no impact on their investment decisions. Second, the survey highlighted that the lack of financial knowledge was the main reason for low investments. These are interesting observations because they demonstrate what works and what does not vis-á-vis wealth creation. The wealth mindset is undeterred by upheavals as massive as the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, to have a wealth mindset and an appetite for risk, knowledge and technical wherewithal are indispensable.

The youth are beacons of human resource potential and their efficacy is limited by the lack of a creative environment where they are unprepared for the world. To be unrestricted by adversity, you need to know the world better, to know how your investment is going to fetch returns and how resources can be accumulated. To this end, aspirational individuals must be committed to suitable academic regimes, alongside educating themselves everyday in the pragmatic scheme of things. Internships, apprenticeships, volunteering and just greater engagement with the ways in which money is made and value is created can fuel people to imagine wealth.

Once wealth has been imagined, we must wean ourselves off the limitations that chain us, such as beliefs that it is unimaginably difficult to acquire wealth. Once we operate from a place of reasonable positivity, the efforts we make are likely to fetch richer dividends. The next idea is to luxuriously conjure up the consequences of our actions, to let the desire for abundance and prosperity motivate us into pushing our limits. Finally, a critical evaluation of available opportunities to make money and willingness to do a wide diversity of things for the same makes for the most vibrant concoction to catapult us towards wealth.

For the youth, the aspiration to prosperity is an essential passage to well-being and empowerment and therefore, having the wealth mindset is an imperative. To be young and to have and create wealth is a dream that is worth dreaming and certainly attainable. Despite hurdles, detractors and difficult circumstances, the greater danger lies in setting our aim low and not believing in our infinite potentials. Everything will follow if we have what it takes to create wealth in our minds, to let our missions be extravagant and our efforts extraordinary. These alone form the surest foundation for exemplary careers and the unleashing of transformative potentials.

"Getting rich begins with the way you think and what you believe about making money," writes Steve Siebold in How Rich People Think. This finds exemplification and verification in the stories that surround us. For the youth, this is the most definite source of strength - to think without limitations, to work without cages and harvest the most bountiful rewards human effort can produce.

(The author is Chief Impact Officer at Recykal Foundation)