To put it bluntly, whoever can create more, better and faster value will have more money.
Take Tesla for example. His ultimate goal is not to make electric cars. He wants to make a machine that can make electric cars. "The material goes in and the car comes out." This is a printing machine. Every time a car is produced, tens of thousands of dollars of profits enter the bank account.
The essence of business is exchange. Making cars is the same as making pancakes, but as we all know, this way of making money is very hard. Even Musk can't urinate for more than 3 minutes, and the rocket will explode as soon as he takes a vacation.
Both Britain and the United States made their fortunes by industry, but because they worked too hard, once their wealth accumulated to a certain extent, their descendants would choose other industries. As the founding father of the United States said, "I must learn politics and war, let my children learn mathematics and philosophy, as well as geography, natural history and so on, and then my grandson can learn painting, poetry, music, architecture, embroidery and porcelain art."
James dyson, a Dyson vacuum cleaner, said that Britain now despises doing industry, and thinks that industry is a "greasy rag" and "knocking", while the United States also moved its industry out of China in the last wave of globalization and made money by more decent finance and technology. Trump and Biden both want to move the factory back to the United States, but since ancient times, "from thrift to luxury, from luxury to thrift", who wants to be a screw in the factory? Who wants to pick up the "greasy rag" But what more comfortable and decent way to make money?
First, invest to make money.
Now Americans make money by investing, and 40% of ordinary people's assets are in financial products. The stock market is equivalent to the property market in China. Buffett has always been on the rich list by investing.
Let's look at his financial system: find a long snow slope and push the snowball down. This snow slope is the golden development period of the United States for more than 40 years and is the national wealth of the United States.
The secret of making money is that assets are linked to prices and liabilities are decoupled from prices.
The so-called link between assets and prices means that assets can rise with inflation. For example, the price of Coca-Cola keeps rising with the economic development, and it can even outperform inflation, thus ensuring that assets will not shrink.
Decoupling debt from price means that debt cannot rise with inflation. This is very difficult to do. Prices are rising, and the interest on money lent to you by others will naturally rise. But Buffett found his own way, that is, his insurance company. Today, the premium paid by the insured is equivalent to the money lent to Buffett, but the money has almost no interest and will not change with inflation. Even if you deposit it in the bank, you can get a net income.
This is Buffett's "open source and reduce expenditure" model-assets will increase with inflation, liabilities will never change, and profits will be as rich as an enemy under the blessing of time and national luck.
Second, make money by culture.
Soros is known as a financial crocodile, big enough to affect the fate of a country. 1September 1992, he judged that the Deutsche Mark would definitely not cut interest rates. In ten days, he earned 10 billion dollars, while Britain lost 3.8 billion dollars.
The judgment is based on the insight into history and culture: at that time, the German people would never allow inflation in Germany, because Hitler's rise won so much support because of inflation, and avoiding inflation was the ideology of Germany at that time.
Soros said that reading is to cultivate the ability to analyze what happened in one place and its influence on distant places. He prefers to be a philosopher.
Mondario is also this type of investor. He became famous for successfully predicting the 2008 financial crisis. He invested in many countries and established his own judgment system, which is a model of man-machine combination decision-making. He sent his children to study in China and kept close contact with senior officials in China. He is optimistic about the rise of China.
Third, make money by secret knowledge.
In the 1930s, Henry Bessemer, who lived in London, accidentally learned that gold powder used to decorate paintings was expensive, exceeding 5 pounds (about 453 grams) per pound. He bought a can and took it home for inspection. He found that these gold powders had no gold at all, and they were all made of copper. Using copper as material, after being made into extremely fine particles through a specific process, a visual impression similar to gold powder can be formed. These "gold powders" are widely used in European oil paintings, murals and architectural decoration, and their sales are very good. After all, few people are rich enough to decorate with real gold.
So why can "gold powder" made of copper sell at a high price? The reason is that this thing is not easy to make, and there are very few merchants who can produce this product, and they all come from a place in Nuremberg, Germany. People in other places simply don't know how to make it.
He found the production method through the craft book, but the steps were quite complicated, so he transformed an assembly line equipment with a steam engine and kept it secret for 40 years. The price is only 1/40 of the original product, but he still made a lot of money.
There are many such invisible champions in Germany. They don't apply for patents, they just make a fortune.
Fourth, make money by creativity.
1974, the US government renovated the Statue of Liberty. After the renovation, a lot of construction waste was left. The government invited tenders to solve the problem, but no one took over for a long time, because it was a thankless job, and it would be very troublesome if you accidentally got involved with environmental protection organizations. A Frenchman heard the news and made construction waste into a souvenir. In just three months, he earned 300 dollars, which is a golden idea.
Alan Perry is the owner of a jewelry store in W Town, North Carolina, USA. On Black Friday of 20 10, he launched a very creative activity: if you buy jewelry in our store within two weeks, on Christmas Day, as long as there is more than 3 inches of snow in Town A, 500 kilometers away from our store, you can keep the jewelry, and I will refund it in full. The news spread all of a sudden, and even residents of a town drove 500 kilometers to W Town to buy jewelry. Jewelry stores in Allen are all over the house, and their sales have soared.
Later, on Christmas Day, it snowed heavily in this small town of A, which rarely snowed, with a thickness of 6 inches! In front of the store in Allen, someone paid back the money, and he paid back more than 400,000 dollars. But what you may never expect is that Allen has bought "weather insurance" for his sales. If it snows in this place where it doesn't snow much, and it exceeds 3 inches, the insurance company will compensate Allen for the loss. This is creative marketing at textbook level.
In a movie starring Gong Li, a landlord who was overthrown and exiled shouted: I will come back again, I know how to make money!
Earning money is a kind of ability, which is related to the cognition of money, human nature and the operation of social machines, plus some luck and time. In addition, there are resource-based and power-based, which are often the same thing and have been transformed from ancient times to the present, but it is difficult to solve scarcity through innovation (for example, it is difficult to have two directors), and there are people who exchange time for resources, such as going to work.
All roads lead to Rome, and of course there are places with winding paths leading to secluded places. Thoreau, the author of Walden, built a small house in Walden after his brother died unexpectedly. He wants to live alone and only needs to maintain the necessary calories, so he only needs to work one day a week, so he walks by the lake, chats with people and thinks. Unexpectedly, nine years later he wrote Walden Lake.
See, life is so interesting. Although it is not easy to earn money, after a few years, most people will find that they can basically get what they once wanted. If they work normally and create value, time will give back.