Wealthier than Sam Walton on US$300/month

It is a cliché to say that your average 21'st century Joe is wealthier than the 19'th century robber baron, due to all of the lavish comforts we now have, but it bears repeating everyday because it is true, and I will go one step further and say even our brothers and sisters who eke out a meager existence have it better off than even the fat cats of last decade. Sam Walton was one of the wealthiest Americans who ever lived, however, I don't envy anything about him and wouldn't wish his life on my worst enemy.

Here are three steps almost anybody in the world can take to be wealthier than Sam Walton and not have to earn a lot:

1. Live in a beautiful place

Funny thing about the planet is most places where you can earn money have bad weather or are in some other way flawed, and most beautiful places on the planet don't offer much business opportunity. Sam Walton spent his life in Arkansas, one of the bleakest, most hopeless, and miserable pits of human existence (outside of Omaha), where the weather is cold, everything is grey, ugly, flat, and bleak. You couldn't pay me a billion dollars to live there.

Living in a beautiful place is wealth, you can compare property prices in Hawaii to Minnesota for proof of this. If you live in a place which is green, colorful, and has nice weather, you are much better off than Sam Walton.

Here are some examples of places which are very beautiful (all much more beautiful than Hawaii) which anybody can afford to live in:

• Gondar, Ethiopia
• Manizales, Colombia
• Mt. Hagan, Papua New Guinea

Maybe Sam Walton used his wealth to visit beautiful places such as these during his life but only during a vacation, for a few weeks out of the year. You can go on a permanent vacation, so to speak, by moving to a beautiful place, and never have to put up with the bad weather which you pretend you like or find yourself bored again. You can look outside and see real life more beautiful than you can imagine, you don't need costly artificial climate control because the temperature is naturally perfect.

2. Embrace Technology

Like most rich folks, Sam Walton probably had a humongous shelf full of books, a library of CD's and movies, maybe a collection of manuscripts, first editions, and original pressings. Probably he had walls full of priceless art. Maybe he published a newsletter which his employees read. He had a huge personal network and could find out anything. He could place a phone call to Siberia and had so much money the bill was inconsequential.

The world is totally different now, and we are much better off for it. No longer are those things scare and hidden behind walls only accessible to the rich, they are free and total for everyone. Now you can put all of that into your pocket and with the internet you can now get anything for free, communicate with everyone for free. You can have your own platform and have your voice be heard, or be quiet and just consume. It's up to you. The internet has completed changed wealth, and has fundamentally democratized and equalized power across the human race.

The penetration of the cell phone has now reached more than 50% of the human population, now literally anybody living literally anywhere can communicate with anybody. Most people who live in rich countries do not understand how revolutionary the cell phone is, they view it just as a fancy version of the landline phone, if anything an annoyance, which causes too much noise at the worst possible times. Thing is, poor countries never had landline phones, because it is too expensive to run cable between every house in the world, but cell phone service is very cheap. The cell phone has fundamentally altered the course of human civilization, and has brought communication to the whole planet, not just rich people.

Now a person sitting at a computer anywhere, even in the furthest reaches of rural Africa or rural Asia, in a village which could never afford books before but now has a satellite dish, has access to more information, has more creative tools at his fingertips, has more of a platform to better himself and educate himself, and the ability to reach out to more people, than the most advanced technologists of a decade ago. Technology is the fundamental globalizing and democratizing force on the planet, the more technology we embrace, the further the barriers between rich and poor collapse, and the whole world gets uplifted together. Technology makes all of us richer, not as measured in dollars, but as measured in knowledge, capabilities, opportunities, and power.

3. Stop working so hard, and enjoy life

Sam Walton didn't really appear to have much of a life outside of Wal-Mart, his children, family, and church. You don't need Sam Walton's fortune to lead a much more exciting life than that. Also could you imagine the stresses of managing billions of dollars of wealth plus huge corporation. What a nightmare!!

Instead, try this: quit your job, live off of your savings, go off and have a great life. A few ideas: go skydiving, ride a motorbike through sub-Saharan Africa, climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, log on to YouTube and start a video blog, learn to sail, ride a dugout canoe through the Amazon (and create a film about it), go to the pub on the corner and meet people, move to Ethiopia and do some volunteer work. Leisure is wealth, if you do nothing but work, your money is meaningless.

-

Anyways, you can have most all of these things on US$300/month (which is far less than the US poverty line, and is median global earning wage), so I make the claim that practically everybody living today has the capability to have much more real wealth than Sam Walton.