My advice to graduates on how to gain wealth centers around the concept that you must own your business (or businesses) if you really want to make a large sum of money in your lifetime and that regrettably, school won’t teach you how to operate a business. As an alternative, high school, college and graduate school show people how to be wonderful employees and how to be brilliant followers to create wealth for the owners. The greatest way to learn how to fruitfully own and run a business is to be taught by an experienced mentor. But surely the insight to being a fruitful business owner can be acquired through the school of life lessons as well. It’s just faster to not have to learn all those valued lessons yourself. A smart person learns from their own errors, an intelligent person learns from the errors of others.

The finest book ever written on how to get rich is, “The Millionaire Mind” by Thomas J. Stanley. It’s a criterion for anyone looking to gain wealth. It shows the truth that the bulk of millionaires own their own businesses. Even surgeons, lawyers and other greatly educated experts characteristically don’t attain high levels of prosperity without owning and running their own practices.

Selecting what business to run is not easy. You want to select something that you will like (since you will be spending a lot of time doing it). But it also must to be very lucrative. A business that you love that makes no cash won’t aid you in gaining wealth. And if picking the correct business was simple, everybody would be wealthy so don’t think the decision will come easy. In fact, you may have to bomb a few times before you strike it big.

And acquiring wealth has its disadvantages too. You might not be able to hang out with friends as often, and you might be working a lot of hours when you start out. But the compromise is that in a rather short time period, you can have a remarkable sum of freedom that everybody you went to school with won’t have. The costs of becoming a prosperous business owner are worth it.

Simple but influential, that’s my advice to graduates on how to gain wealth.