I thought it would be interesting to share stories about people you know very well who have gotten rich. Instructive for those of us who aren’t necessarily poor but who aren’t yet hoyalang (rich people/person in Taiwanese).
I"ll go first.
Uncle D
Uncle D is 54, and has been a millionaire since his mid-40s. Born and raised on a family-owned farm that made just enough money to keep the family on the farm but poor as dirt, he finished a few years of community college and then started working as an electrical contractor in Phoenix, Arizona. Fast forward to age 37, he’d owned various real estate development and building companies but had never made it big. Anyone familiar with the growth trajectory of Phoenix knows that construction and real estate has been a boom and bust business for the past 30 years, but more boom than bust over the long term. Still, Uncle D never quite made it big time working on his own.
So, at 37, he went to work as a construction supervisor for a big commercial/residential builder in Phoenix, mainly because his last company hadn’t made it and he needed a job. His first paycheck, which he has framed, grossed him US$1,800 for the two weeks, in 1991. Uncle D started reading and meditating in the morning from 5am to 7am, hitting the office at 8am, and working until 6pm. No huge hours, but he started thinking deeply about how to manage people and business in an intuitive way. 17 years later, he’s the Executive VP and COO of that firm, which has prospered over the years. He paid cash for a $1 million home in a nice suburb eight or nine years ago. That home is now worth $2.5 million. He owns two planes, three custom Harleys, a BMW motorbike that cost more than most sedans, and he and Aunt P drive the latest luxury SUVs. He makes well over a million per year, lives fairly simply but not overly frugally, and continues to apply his theories of intuitive management (He calls it “allowing success”) to his work and to the work of others who he advises.
He told me that the best way to achieve success is to choose a job that you love and then learn how to do it as well as it can be done. He says that it doesn’t matter what you do. All you need is a deep desire to be excellent, a willingness to listen to your intuition, and a little bit of ambition, and you’ll eventually have as much as you want to have. He would say that people generally create their own success or failure, depending on what they believe and what they decide to do. He would also say that focusing on making money isn’t really the way to make lots of it.
I’ve got another Uncle who is also a hoyalang. If this thread gets some responses, I’ll post his story too.
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