HARDEST WAY TO BECOME RICH

Step 1: Ignore Your Mother
Parents around the world typically encourage their kids to get educated so they can get a "good job," and perhaps become a doctor or lawyer, although neither tends to be a path to significant wealth. High-paying professions provide an excellent income stream, but two insidious forces undermine the professional's ability to create significant wealth: tax and spending.
Tax
It is difficult to become wealthy on the basis of a salary alone. Since income is taxed at the highest possible rate, you're left with not much more than 50 cents on the dollar.
Spending
The other problem with having a high income is that it creates a wealth effect that triggers spending. Thomas J. Stanley, the famous author of the research-driven classic The Millionaire Next Door, points out that some professionals--in particular lawyers--spend a large portion of their income to give the impression that they are successful, in part because they do not enjoy much social status from their job. In other words, when you earn $500,000 a year, you buy a Range Rover or send your kids to a fancy private school at least in part because you want people to think you are rich.
Step 2: Start Something
Most wealth in America is created through owning a business. Recently, Mass Mutual looked at the proportion of business owners that make up a number of wealth cohorts. They found that 17 percent of people with between $100,000 and $500,000 to invest were business owners.
Keep in mind there are about 8 million employer-based companies in the United States, meaning the incidence rate of business ownership (the natural rate at which you find business owners in the general population) is about 3 percent. Said another way, if you grabbed 100 people walking down the street, on average three of them would be business owners. On the other hand, if you took a random sample of 100 people with investable assets of between $100,000 and $500,000, 17 of them would be business owners, meaning you're more than five times more likely to find a business owner in the $100,000 to $500,000 wealth segment than you are to find an employee.
The trend becomes more pronounced the higher up the wealth ladder you go. If you look at wealthy investors with between $500,000 and $1,000,000 in investable assets, you'll see that the proportion of business owners in the segment goes up dramatically--to 27 percent.
The Very Rich
Among investors with between $1,000,000 and $10,000,000 in investable assets, the proportion of business owners jumps to 52 percent. Sixty-seven percent of investors with $10,000,000 to $50,000,000 sloshing around in their bank account are business owners, and 86 percent of investors with $50 million dollars or more in investable assets are business owners.
Simply put, if you meet someone who is very rich, it's highly likely they are (or were) a business owner.