By Babajide Komolafe
There is a strong desire among youths to be wealthy and famous. While this desire is natural, it makes young people easily attracted to get-rich-quick schemes, scams and criminal ventures.
A lot of brilliant, enterprising young people have lost careers, money, relationships while some even end up in prison because at some point, they were consumed with the desire to be wealthy or to ‘blow.’
The purpose of this edition is to help young people avoid this fate because youth and wealth is a rare exception and not the norm.
There are two major ways to be wealthy. You inherit it or you build it.
It takes time to build wealth in a clean and legitimate way. It is like becoming a full grown adult, you may need 20 years upward to build wealth in a legitimate way. That is why it is rare to see someone below 30 years that has wealth that is not inherited. Most people that have legitimate wealth not inherited are usually above 40 years.
Consider the evidence from the list of 100 Billionaires published by Forbes Magazine. According to Forbes, “Roughly half the people on the planet are aged 30 or younger. Just 21 of them are billionaires.
“Nearly three-quarters of the world’s billionaires are between the ages of 50 and 79 years. Just 12% are under 50. The rarest of all are those who manage to achieve billionaire status by the age of 30; this year, there are just 21 of those flush youngsters on the Forbes list. Unsurprisingly, all but two of them inherited their wealth.
“Then there are the only two self-made billionaires on the list. Australia’s Ed Craven (29) and the United States’ Alexandr Wang (28).”
Two important facts that need to be reemphasised from this article.
The total world population is about 8.2 billion, and youths (people below 30 years old) account for 4.1 billion youths. And only 21 people are billionaires.
This shows that the ratio of young billionaires to the total world population is 21: 8,200,000,000, which means out of every 391 million people on earth, there is only one young billionaire.
The ratio of young billionaires to the total population of young people is 21:4,100,000,000, which means out of 195 million young people, there is only one billionaire.
And the ratio of self made young billionaires to total world population and total youth population is 2:8,200,000,000 (one of every 4.1 billion people) 2:4,100,000,000 (one out of every 2.1 billion young people).
This shows that ‘young and wealthy’ is a rare phenomenon. Every young person must recognise this fact so that they will not lose their future negative tendencies of the desire to be wealthy. (To be continued)