Creating Wealth Has Never Been This Easy !!

If you are young and have dreams of becoming a billionaire, you are born at the right time.

For centuries if you wanted wealth and power you had to go out and grab it. You got together a band of soldiers which gradually became an army and you ventured out and conquered everything on the way. Some like Alexander and Genghis Khan or his descendants Babur and Kublai Khan went on to create huge empires and entered the pages of history. Thousands of others died  anonymously in in forests, deserts or drowned in rivers far away from where  they were born.

It began to change with the onslaught of industrialization.If you had the entrepreneurial skills,you started a new industry and set up a factory and sold on a global basis. You built up a fortune over a life time, and towards the end you had had a estate of hundreds of acres and built yourself a family mansion manned by hundreds of servants. This happened in England, Europe, the United States and other parts of the world.

Soon after that you had the development of the service industries, hotels, entertainment, advertisements and the like . With the exception of the bankers,  of the ilk of JP Morgan, and the real estate developers who built cities to cater to the rapid urbanization of the cities,   the wealth might not be of the same magnitude of the industrialists.

Starting the 1980's when information technology came to the forefront, it opened up the window of opportunity for people who used their brains to create the software which ran machines , provided entertainment and now help people communicate and stay in touch with each other. Providing the turbo jets for this effort were the venture capitalists who helped the scale up the efforts within a short period of time. Unlike the past when you relied on capital and bank borrowings, the venture capitalists injected large doses of capital to expand.

At the same time you saw the emergence of the high powered , well paid investment bankers and traders , who while still employed and playing with other people's money excelled in  the game of  heads I win , tails you loose. Similarly the  hedge funds and private equity fund managers played with the decks loaded in their favor made and continue to make  large fortunes within a relatively short period.

Which brings me to the conclusion of giving advice to the younger generation - if you are interested in making money quickly, develop the ability to sell your self. Once you are able to do that, it is easy to make money.Fortunately there are many  among the younger generation  who will not follow this advice and who  have  ambitions, to make the world a better place or pursue other careers which are less rewarding . We need them to have a well rounded civilization. Can you imagine a world full of just investment bankers and computer nerds ?