The rich don’t work sixty hours per week. In fact, speak with most extraordinarily wealthy and successful people, and you find that they hardly work at all. Most think of their productive activities as a vocation or their raison d’etre. They’re not staying late in the office as a desperate strategy to “get ahead.” Their work is their joy, and it’s what they’d rather be doing than anything else. 

What Is A Wealthy Lifestyle? 

We all like to think that we know what having a wealthy lifestyle is, but unless you’re in that mindset, it’s almost impossible to understand on an emotional level. For somebody of average means, £50,000 is a lot of money and worth working hard to get. But for a wealthy person, it’s just not worth putting in the extra hours it would take to earn that amount of money: it’s barely adding to the pile. 

Working All The Time Makes You Poor In Some Ways

As soon as you enter the world of work, you realise that everything is a tradeoff. You could work on the weekend and get extra money, but you lose all the time you need to actually do the stuff you want to do, like go on holiday. Working has its advantages, but when it takes up the majority of your time, it has costs too. 

If you’re like most people and don’t work in a sustainable work culture, then there are other issues too. You can become burnt out, stressed, and wind up hating your life. Your work isn’t just something that costs you your time, but also your money and happiness too. How much would you pay to feel better for your life? In all probability, you’d be willing to fork over a lot. 

Get Paid For Doing Nothing

Two things generate income in a capitalist economy: labor and capital. You are a single individual who can work a maximum of 70 hours a week without seriously compromising on your health. Thus, there is only so much that you can earn by selling your labor. 

Capital earnings, however, can be nearly infinite. So long as you own the capital, you can benefit from a share in the profits that it generates. The reason that the rich barely do any work is that they understand this basic concept. You don’t get rich or stay rich by selling your time but by owning the capital of companies. Equity can be fabulously productive: way more so than your labor. 

The trick to becoming more like the rich and achieving that 20-hour work week that you want is to build up your capital. It’s really that simple. The more rights you have to the profits of firms, the faster you can escape the rat race. 

Getting wealthy means buying as large a share of the world’s top companies as you can. You don’t have to spend hours poring over company statements and balance sheets. Buying the index works just as well as going through an expensive mutual fund over the long term. Become a capital owner and stop selling your labour to the man.