Ryan Daniel Moran says poor people confuse speculation with investing. They chase quick profits in crypto or penny stocks instead of building a business that serves customers, then putting a portion of that income into long-term investments that compound.
So I think most people dream about the lifestyle, right? It's like living on beaches or traveling or doing whatever, and they want it now. So they make this mistake, this mistake of thinking that they're investing when they're actually speculating. You see, there's a difference between making money, generating money, and then creating wealth. They're very, very different. And where most people will do is they try to generate their wealth in the same way that they make their money. Here's what I mean. A perfect example of this would be when people jumped into the cryptocurrency craze that happened in 2017. What they were betting on is that something that they could not predict. They were betting on something that they couldn't impact, something that they didn't even have a strategic set of knowledge over, that they couldn't control. They were betting on that going up in value so that they could sell it, make money. And then what are you going to do with that money? I don't know. Buy more cryptocurrency or travel the world. I don't even know. But the reason why that was a mistake was they were betting on the speculative upside of that investment. They were betting on someone else being dumber than they were. They were betting on something going up in value so that they could sell it at a later date with no underlying economics of why that would be the case. Now, that's not the way you make your money. The way you make your money is in your business. You do it by serving customers, by having an end user, by having an end purchaser, whether that is an advertiser, whether it is a customer, whether it is somebody who subscribes to your monthly thing. I don't know. The person who is the customer is who makes your money. And you make your wealth by taking a portion of that every month or every, every year, and you putting it into long term investments that you're not hoping goes up in value. You're hoping that it hedges against inflation and you're hoping that it compounds in the form of cash flow. You're hoping that that company continues to grow. So one of the mistakes I made recently, and by recently I mean about 18 months ago, was a friend of mine, gave me one of his stock picks. And I've been looking at it right here. It's a penny stock that I was like, oh, I'm gonna make money in this pen. What I was really hoping for was that if I bought the penny stock, it would go up in value so I could sell it to the Next sucker. But this company doesn't have a ton of customers. This company doesn't have some unique spin in the marketplace. You're betting on it going up in value. You're speculating, you're gambling. And that's the mistake that many poor people make, is they gamble instead of build and invest. Entrepreneurs make this mistake too. Entrepreneurs are great at making money in their business. They're usually pretty good at developing a product and putting it out into the world and having customers, sometimes even monthly paying customers. But they try to take that exact same mentality to set themselves up for life. So they try to make their money with their investments by flipping houses or buying penny stocks, or buying cryptocurrency. That mentality does not make you wealthy. That mentality is a swing and a miss and hope, hit a home run once in a while mentality. Rather than building the team, putting people on base so that you can win a long season, you make your money in your business and business comes from customers. And then you invest it into places that you're not going to touch for many, many years. And you invest it in a place that also has customers. So when you buy Apple stock and Apple pays you a 2% dividend, they do that because they have long term customers. It's because they have a advantage in the marketplace. When you speculate by trying to flip houses because the market's hot, or when you try to speculate by buying penny stocks, hoping that it's going to have a boom, it can be fun. It can actually be a lot of fun. Some people make it their game, where they're treating it like it is their business. There are people who professionally flip houses because it's their business. They have a strategic advantage going into that marketplace in the first place. They have a strategic advantage of the area, of the lenders, of what people are willing to buy. They have first access to deals. That's a business. That's how you generate money. But the minute you try to be an investor by using the same mentality of generating money, that's the mistake that poor people make. And even if you're wealthy by practicing that for long enough, you become just like them.
It.
