Choking The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg

Aesop’s Fables
The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg

A man and his wife had the good fortune to possess a goose which laid a golden egg every day. Lucky though they were, they soon began to think they were not getting rich fast enough, and, imagining the bird must be made of gold inside, they decided to kill it. Then, they thought, they could obtain the whole store of precious metal at once; however, upon cutting the goose open, they found its innards to be like that of any other goose.

(source: wikipedia.com, 2009)

Choking The Goose
Mistreating and Squandering Your Assets

In Aesop’s Fables, the man and his wife had an incredible asset: a goose that laid golden eggs. The goose produced wealth, and that wealth was represented by golden eggs. As the man and his wife were impatient and greedy, they thought it better to kill the goose rather than to let it produce in due season. And why did they do that? They wanted to enjoy the feeling of being wealthy. They wanted to impress those around them. They wanted to enjoy the wealth before it had been produced.

Does that happen today? It sure does. 

Many people have driven their assets into the ground or abusively used them to the point that they could no longer provide the benefit that they once did. Consider the businessman who took on too much risk only to lose years of profits paying back bad debts. Consider the college student with too much debt who will spend decades paying oppressive student loan payments. Consider the shopaholic who squanders her paychecks and funds her lifestyle by charging purchases on credit cards. What is wrong with these three examples? They’re choking the goose.

When you mistreat your assets or squander their production – aka “Choking The Goose” — you steal from your future. The overly ambitious businessman was too greedy to allow his current assets to pay him a profit so he took on additional debt and impatiently bought other businesses and invested in “opportunities” that turned out to be more than he could handle. The college student never thought that education should provide a return that was worth the investment, so they chose the school that they wanted to go to rather than the one that would have been cost-effective, and they misused their ability to take on debt. The shopaholic would be able to buy MORE things that she enjoyed over the long term if she did not pay so much interest. Again, the income and the ability to borrow, both of which are assets, were misused.

Rather than squander the wealth that your assets produce, learn how to build wealth. Wealth building, as explained in the book How to Build Wealth, is as simple as “spending less than you earn and investing the difference.” That difference is invested in assets that build wealth, as the book explains. Wealth building may be simple, but it is not necessarily easy. Fortunately, the book explains how to make wealth building easier and easier, and it shows the reader how to reinforce their success to stay motivated.

Are you a goose choker, or do you know how to build wealth? 

And Now Some Background…

In the book How to Build Wealth, the comment was made that some people want to “choke the goose and get the golden eggs now.” The author was mocking fellow authors who seem to suggest (often by omission) that wealth can be acquired without hard work, knowledge, savings, dedication, perseverance, time, and income. Many authors suggest “surrounding yourself with people who know more than you” and “using other people’s money” rather than explaining to the reader how to build wealth by increasing their ability to earn and decreasing their costs. Against the backdrop of the above description, it is easy to see, if you evaluate the world around you, that so many want to find the “easy” way to wealth. Well, there is not an easy way. In most cases, wealth is built slowly and methodically. In all cases, wealth is maintained in a methodical manner. What is this methodical manner? Simple: “Spend Less Than You Earn. Invest The Difference.”

Looking to the future, How to Build Wealth 2 will be called Choking The Goose: Wealth Building, The Old Fashioned Way.