What is the Problem?
Everyone around me growing up had the same answer to the same question.
The question was: how do you make it? And the answer, without fail, was work hard. Study hard. Put your head down. Good things come to those who work for it.
I believed it. No reason not to. The people saying it were the adults in the room, the teachers, everyone I had no reason to doubt. The motivational quotes on the walls of every classroom I sat in from primary school through high school.
So, I did what they said. I studied hard. I stayed disciplined. I chose a field, IT, that I thought would open doors, and I spent years getting good at it. Online tutorials late into the night. Hours practicing skills I thought would qualify me for something big.
And here is the honest part. It worked. Sort of. I became competent. I became employable. I made thousands just from freelancing gigs. I became the kind of person who could walk into an interview and ace it.
But I never once asked the question that mattered. I was working hard. Hard toward what, exactly?
That question sat unanswered for a long time. The system I was raised in had no space for that question. You work hard, you get a job. That is the answer. Full stop.
It took moving to China at 18, working several jobs, before I understood what was actually going on.
There are three ways people think about money and work. Regardless of cultural background, race, gender, religious background. Three belief systems. Most people never consciously choose one. They go along with the one that feels most natural to us and wonder years later why the results do not match the effort.
Here they are.
The You Only Live Once (YOLO) Mindset
I was here for most of my early adult life. I did not know it at the time. That is the thing about this one.
The YOLO mindset does not feel like a financial decision. It feels like enjoying your life. You only live once, so spend. Travel. Buy the thing. Do not overthink tomorrow when today is right in front of you.
And look, I am not here to tell you that enjoyment is wrong. Life should have some of it. But there is a difference between enjoying life and running on impulse with no direction.
Money comes in. Money goes out. To things that feel good in the moment and leave nothing behind. The clothes. The going out. The things that signal success rather than build it. And because there is no buffer, every unexpected event becomes a crisis. One hospital bill. One lost job. One broken phone. Suddenly you are starting from zero again.
What makes this belief system dangerous is that it borrows the language of freedom. You are living, it says. You are not like those stressed people counting coins and planning for some future that might never come. But the freedom is fake. You are not free. You are one salary away from broke, which means you cannot actually say no to anything. The job you hate. The situation that is draining you. You stay because you have no choice.
What about you? Be honest for a second. When money comes in, where does it go? If the answer is uncomfortable, that is useful information.
I was here, treating money like something that existed to be used rather than directed. I did not even know that was a choice I was making.
The Hard Work Mindset
This is the one that is hardest to argue against. And that is exactly why it catches the most people.
The hard work mindset goes like this. Go to school. Get qualified. Land a good job. Work hard, get promoted, save consistently, maybe put something into an index fund, and retire at 60 something.
It is not wrong. That is the honest thing to say. If you follow that plan with discipline, you will probably be okay. You will have a house. You will have some savings. You will probably have stability.
And here is the problem with that. Not that it fails completely. But that it has a very low ceiling and most people do not see it until they are deep in.
Your salary can only grow so fast. Promotions are rare and political. Your investment compounds slowly over decades. The whole thing depends on one variable staying stable: your job. The moment that disappears, and it can disappear overnight, the entire structure wobbles.
I chose to study IT for years on the belief that a high paying job was the path to wealth. I watched tutorials. I improved. I got good. And then I asked myself, after studying a lot of people who actually built real wealth, how many of them got there through a salary?
The answer was zero. Not a small number. Zero.
That does not mean having a job is stupid. A job can be a launchpad. It can fund your first move. But if the job is the plan, if climbing the ladder is the strategy, then you are building someone else’s business. Your effort produces their equity. You get a salary. They get the upside.
And something else. In the hard work mindset, you are a passenger. You have traded your time for money. And time is the one thing you cannot get back. You can make more money. You cannot make more hours.
What about you? If you are in a job right now, honest question. Is it a launchpad, or is it the destination? There is a real difference between the two. One of them leads somewhere. The other just keeps you occupied.
The Wealth Mindset
Nobody teaches this one in school. I have never seen it on a classroom wall. Most of the people who raised you do not have it. Which is why most people never find it.
The wealth mindset does not ask how much you can earn. It asks how much you can build.
The wealth equation looks like this: Net Profit multiplied by an Industry Multiplier, plus Asset Value, equals real wealth.
Let me break that down because it matters.
Wealth-minded people do not trade time for money. They build systems. Things that produce value whether they are working or not. They think in terms of ownership. What can I build that serves other people, has value that can grow, and compounds over time?
When I started sourcing products from China for clients, I was not just earning a fee per order. I was building supplier relationships. I was building a reputation. I was building something that had value beyond this month’s revenue. A business making consistent profit is not just income. It is an asset. Something that could be sold one day for a multiple of what it earns annually. Every month you build, you are creating two things at once: income today and equity for the future.
This is what people miss. They think about the monthly number. Wealth-minded people think about what the whole thing is worth.
Now. The most common response when I talk about this is: those people are special. They had connections. They had capital. They had something I do not have.
I have met a lot of them. I have watched them build. I can tell you plainly: they are not special. Some of them are not even particularly smart. What they have is a different question. While most people ask how do I get a better paying job, they ask what can I build that earns without me.
The question is accessible to anyone. Including you.
But not every business gets you there. That is the part worth saying clearly.
Not Every Business Is a Wealth-Building Business
Starting a business does not automatically put you in the wealth mindset column. Most small businesses are actually harder than jobs. You traded one boss for ten clients. You work more hours. You carry all the risk. And if you stop, everything stops.
That is not freedom. That is a harder job without HR.
A real wealth-building business can scale without you being present every day. It builds an asset that has value beyond this month’s revenue. It can serve more people without proportionally more of your personal time. And the market is large enough to grow into.
I ask myself those questions about every business I run. Car tracking. Clothing distribution. Sourcing. Each one has to hold up against those four points, or I am just buying myself a job with extra stress.
If you are building something right now, or thinking about starting, run it through those questions honestly. Not to discourage you. To help you build the right thing, or reshape what you already have into something better.
Every business has trade-offs. The goal is to pick the ones worth making.
So What Now?
Most people go their whole lives without realising they are running on a belief system they never consciously chose. They are working hard, maybe even building something, but the equation underneath is wrong and the results never quite match the effort.
The shift is not complicated. But it requires you to stop and actually ask: what am I optimising for? Income? Security? Or something that compounds and gives you back your time?
If you want to think this through properly, with someone who has actually built across all three columns and made the mistakes, book a free call at akomahspark.com/book
