After reading the two examples above, I hope that your thoughts on what it means to be “rich” have changed. It is painstakingly obvious that the business owner is in a much better position than the Neurosurgeon. Unlike the surgeon, she earns her money from multiple sources. Not only does she earn this money from multiple sources, but it comes from investments as opposed to clients. Her money works for her, and regardless of whether or not she does any physical work, she still gets paid. In fact, this woman gets paid while she sleeps.
The surgeon, on the other hand, doesn't get paid while he sleeps, he only gets paid when he shows up to work and puts in the hours which are necessary to earn his income. The surgeon is also under a lot of stress. When you are working on someone's brain, there are a lot of things which can go wrong, and there is no room for errors in this field. One mistake could do permanent damage to the patient, perhaps even killing him. If any surgeon, regardless of how skilled they are, or how many years they spend in school, makes this mistake, it would immediately mark the end of their career, and perhaps the end of their freedom.
This puts the surgeon under a tremendous amount of stress, a level of stress which the business owner will never experience. While the Neurosurgeon is unable to enjoy all the money he is earning, the woman who is a business owner gets to enjoy all of what she earns. She travels when she wants, and most important of all, she gets to spend time with her loved ones. In contrast, the surgeon has a yacht, but cannot enjoy it, and his failure to spend more time with his family has caused his relationship with his wife to fall apart.
As you begin to earn more money as a freelancer, you will often pay a stiff price, in terms of your time, mental exhaustion, and the time you get to spend with loved ones. For many successful freelancers, success in self employment is sometimes a Pyrrhic victory; while they succeed in terms of generating a high income, they often lose much of their time as a result, and because of this, they have little time to enjoy the many luxuries that their new income can afford, as well as getting to spend time with their loved ones.
It is for this reason that I do not consider most doctors, lawyers, dentists, computer programmers, or other highly paid self employed individuals to be rich. Not only does their money not work for them in most cases, they are also not rich in terms of their time. After all, wealth and riches can be measured in more than just monetary terms. As I said in previous chapters, time is your most valuable commodity, because once it’s gone, it’s gone. It is for this reason that properly managing your money is so crucial to your long term financial success. The problem with most self employed individuals is that, as their incomes increase, so does their cost of living. To obtain riches, this dynamic must be completely reversed.