The biggest misconception poor people have about making money is believing they must constantly endure hardship.
David K. Shipler, Pulitzer Prize winner, mentioned a phenomenon in his book “The Working Poor”:
Car wash workers who clean dozens of vehicles daily have no car to drive themselves;
Bank tellers who handle stacks of cash have only $2.02 in their accounts;
Medical textbook editors working for ten years can’t match a dentist’s annual income…
In reality, many people work diligently overtime, believing that someday they’ll live a good life.
Yet often, the harder you work, the more confused you become; the more you suffer, the more困窘 you feel, unable to escape poverty’s curse.
Why is this?
Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller said: “Those who work all day have no time to make money.”
When you spend too much time enduring meaningless hardship, your time and energy for making money naturally decrease significantly.
The biggest misconception poor people have about making money is constantly enduring hardship.
01
Relying solely on hardship only earns you hard-earned money.
Recently, I heard a delivery worker’s story in Da Bing’s live stream.
He had been in this line of work for nine full years, traveling through wind and rain across every corner of the city.
Initially, with his determination to endure hardship, he secured many orders and could earn seven to eight thousand yuan per month.
Later, he discovered that his time and physical strength were limited.
No matter how hard he tried, he could only complete fifty to sixty orders per day at most.
After paying rent, living expenses, and his child’s tuition, he had little money left each month.
He couldn’t save money, couldn’t afford a house, and even hesitated when taking his family out for a meal.
Worse still, the high-intensity work schedule and constant running around severely depleted his health.
Though only in his early thirties, he began experiencing back pain and leg aches, losing sleep when the pain struck.
Over the years, exhausted, he countless times considered learning a skill and changing jobs.
But real-life pressure, like an invisible whip, urged him to keep running at full speed without daring to stop.
He couldn’t understand: despite giving his all and constantly staying busy, why couldn’t he escape poverty’s prison?
A netizen’s comment hit the nail on the head: “It’s not that you’re not working hard enough, but that you only know how to earn hard money.”
In life, some people believe making money depends on suffering and hardship, focusing single-mindedly on hard work.
Like oxen and horses, they stay up the latest, work the hardest overtime, wishing they could split one day into two.
But in fact, endless mechanical labor and low-value physical consumption represent the lowest return on investment.
Trapped in the toil of selling physical labor, you’ll only exhaust yourself in vain—neither starving nor living well.
A saying circulates among Jewish people: “Simply knowing to work non-stop is obviously not enough.”
Most of the time, so-called hardship merely uses behavioral diligence to mask mental laziness.
Once you become accustomed to earning hard money, you’ll crave short-term returns, have no time to consider the future, and continuously consume yourself in repetitive labor.
In the end, you exhaust your physical strength, wear away your time, and spend a lifetime unable to escape poverty’s quagmire.
02
People who truly make money never endure meaningless hardship.
Yu Minhong once said in a speech:
“Many people have two pursuits in life: being wealthy and being valuable. Wealthy people aren’t necessarily valuable, but valuable people will eventually become wealthy.”
People who can truly make money never settle for repetitive physical labor but find ways to make themselves more valuable.
Self-media author Wei Xiaowei shared a story.
Once, he took a flight home from another city and hailed a taxi at the airport.
He chatted with the driver and learned that the driver could finish work after completing just 10 rides per day.
He was surprised and asked: wouldn’t taking more rides earn more money?
The driver replied: “I specialize in airport runs. Other drivers earn three to five hundred yuan daily, but I can make 2,000 yuan.”
Wei Xiaowei’s curiosity was piqued, and he asked about the driver’s money-making secrets.
It turned out that when this driver first started, he was as diligent as other drivers, working over ten hours daily.
Every early morning, he’d drive around the city randomly, picking up passengers as he encountered them.
But most of the time, he either encountered traffic jams or couldn’t get rides, barely earning any money.
To change his situation, he stopped just driving around and began observing his surroundings while thinking strategically.
He discovered that every hotel had many guests going to the airport.
The airport was remote but distant, meaning high fares, and the route was usually smooth.
So he proactively befriended doormen at various hotels, asking them to provide customer leads in exchange for a commission.
Whenever there were airport rides, doormen would notify him in advance, ensuring he could pick up passengers first.
From then on, during rush hours when colleagues competed for office building rides, he specialized in airport runs to the suburbs.
After a month, while some colleagues earned a few thousand yuan and couldn’t even afford rent after deducting fuel costs and fleet fees, he worked smoothly, finished early, and easily earned twenty to thirty thousand yuan monthly.
You see, regardless of the profession, some people effortlessly earn wealth while others work hard their entire lives with nothing to show for it. The difference lies in different money-making approaches.
People who only know hardship never understand the laws governing how things work, nor do they think about efficiency-improving techniques.
Even if they toil laboriously their entire lives, they won’t gain wealth’s favor.
Psychology professor Kahneman said:
“Repetitive and prolonged endless busyness can be achieved by most people given the right conditions. What’s difficult is thinking. Without deep thinking, diligence becomes meaningless.”
People whom money willingly approaches are often not the most hardship-enduring, but those who work with their heads down while keeping their eyes on the road.
They don’t easily waste physical strength or randomly sell their time, but use their limited energy to improve themselves.
When someone stops enduring meaningless hardship and reduces useless efforts, making money actually becomes easier.
03
The higher your money-making level, the more wealth you attract.
Corporate trainer Liu Feng says people have two levels regarding wealth:
First level: desperately earning money, exchanging life energy for wealth;
Second level: attracting wealth, using methods or wisdom to draw wealth toward oneself.
The best way to make money is never blind hard work, but less suffering and more thinking.
Earn high-threshold, high-level money to escape the fate of being poor but busy and develop a money-attracting constitution.
1. Transform thinking, exchange brainpower for money
The Talmud contains an impressive story.
Jewish immigrant Henry Lehman moved to a certain area in America and ran a grocery business with his two brothers.
But local farmers only made money growing cotton, had low incomes and purchasing power, making it difficult to sell goods in Lehman’s store.
However, Lehman didn’t focus on people’s pocket money but turned his attention to cotton.
He encouraged people to exchange cotton for daily necessities, then sold the exchanged cotton.
This way, everyone was willing to shop in the store, and the Lehman brothers’ business grew increasingly successful.
Soon, they became well-known wealthy merchants locally.
Writer Liu Run said: “Thinking is the only opportunity for anyone to make a comeback without barriers.”
Getting rich doesn’t depend on burning life but requires mobilizing your brain to see deeper and think further than others.
Learn to think from others’ perspectives, jump out of existing frameworks, and analyze problems comprehensively from multiple angles.
When you can solve various troubles systematically, you’ll naturally gain wealth that others can’t earn.
2. Understand leverage, make money through resources
Entrepreneur Robert Kiyosaki once asked a struggling young man: “If given a gold mine you could only work for 3 days, what would you do?”
The young man replied he’d rather not sleep to dig as much gold as possible in those 3 days.
Kiyosaki shook his head: “If I were you, I’d share the gold mine with more people.
Using their strength, even if I only took a 10% commission, the commission would far exceed what I could earn mining alone.”
Having navigated the business world for years, Kiyosaki had long understood a truth: no matter how capable one person is, what they can accomplish is limited.
Moreover, making money has never been a zero-sum game but mutually beneficial cooperation.
People who truly know how to make money understand complementary advantages and leverage others’ strength to accumulate their own wealth.
Stepping on all available resources and climbing up step by step is the greatest shortcut to making money.
3. Learn to invest, use capital to generate money
Stock god Warren Buffett saved his first sum of money at age 17.
Instead of spending it on entertainment, he bought a used pinball machine for $25.
He placed the pinball machine in a barbershop for customer use through profit-sharing and hired partner Dan for daily maintenance.
After one week, excluding wages and commissions, he netted $25.
He continued using earned money to buy more pinball machines, placing them in other barbershops using the same method.
This way, he placed pinball machines in seven or eight barbershops in town, earning nearly $200 weekly.
Later, when Buffett engaged in stock investment, he would reinvest annual stock dividend income back into stocks for greater returns.
Through money-generating-money methods, his assets grew exponentially, eventually accumulating to $84.5 billion.
This reminds me of an online saying: “The rich sell assets, the poor sell time.”
Most people, upon earning money, only focus on enjoyment—fine dining, luxury brands, travel everywhere…
They treat money as a consumable for satisfying desires, unable to accumulate initial capital or control their lives.
But people who can earn big money turn money into a tool for self-improvement, spending every penny on more valuable things.
Persist in saving, invest rationally, understand money-generating-money—your wealth will accumulate like a snowball.
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Investor Naval once pointed out a harsh truth: the world’s most laborious work is often the cheapest.
Because blindly enduring hardship is actually the lowest-level way of making money, with no barriers and little growth potential.
Even if you rise early and sleep late, working desperately, you can only maintain survival without achieving a turnaround.
Better to save time and energy to observe trends, cultivate skills, and improve cognition.
When you stop enduring meaningless hardship and only do things that make you valuable, money will eventually flow toward you continuously.