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This One Thing Separates the Rich From the Poor

Brandon Turner
1 min read
This One Thing Separates the Rich From the Poor

Brandon Turner, co-host of the BiggerPockets Podcast, sat down with fix and flip investor Tarl Yarber to talk about the one thing that differentiates the rich from the poor. 

In life, when I see wealthy people, what I’ve always found is that wealthy people know how to make money because they recognize it as a skill.

People complain that there’s rich people and there’s poor people in the world. But it’s the same as complaining that somebody’s good at basketball. Yeah, they’re probably good if they’re out there shooting hoops every single day.

What Separates the Rich From the Poor?

If someone’s good at cooking, that’s not a magical thing. It’s not like someone’s born good at cooking.

Truly successful wealth-builders recognize wealth is a skill. They intentionally learn it.

Some people don’t think it’s a skill worth learning. They don’t think you should learn how to build wealth or how to be successful.

This might be because we were raised to think money’s bad or to not think about it all or that we shouldn’t be selfish. But really it’s a skill like any other.

Somebody asked me the other day why I’ve been financially successful. I just said, “Because I learned how to do it. I practiced. I practiced a lot, while people were practicing other things, like guitar.”

Related: Are You Choosing to be Poor?

Others were practicing photography. They’re probably really good at photography if they spent 12 years doing it or guitar if they spent 12 years doing it.

Tarl responded, “I would agree fully. That’s the same thing for us.”

He added that, if you took most people who are self-made—and stripped all their wealth from them and everything they had—they would probably end up right back where they are.

Even if they changed something or did something differently, they would still use their brain, and in a few years, they’d be right back where they are.

“Because it’s a skill that they have internally, that they’ve developed. They weren’t born with it as much as most people think,” Tarl concluded.

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Do you agree or disagree that wealth-building is a learned skill?

Weigh-in with a comment below. 

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.