Lee Iacoccoa, started out as an industrial engineer, becoming the President and CEO of Chrysler Motors of the U.S.A. At the zenith of his career at Chrysler, he was one of the highest paid executives in the U.S.
Manny Pangilinan, as a salesman of an obscure company, did his rounds in the far-flung towns of Mindanao. With the allure of foreign employment, he landed in Hongkong as a contract worker from which, he had the golden opportunity of being given the task of building an investment firm from scratch. As the CEO of what was then the First Pacific, he was the highest paid executive in Asia.
These two men, albeit only very few in their genre, make a good case study for millions of employees who are struggling to make both ends meet, make meaningful progress in their careers. Both belong to the employee quadrant, yet very rich.
For the better part of my life, I was an employee. Even now, I still am, though I’m doing it now, not as a living, but to occupy my time (yet still get paid handsomely). I can cite examples of people who rose from the pack, more so of those who stayed with it. I and a boyhood friend started almost at the same time with a multi-national company. I started as a mechanical technician, he, a materials supervisor. Eighteen years later, I retired as a Process Engineering Manager for the Far East, he was still a materials supervisor. I was a nobody in mechanical engineering school. In fact I failed in my Differential Calculus once while he graduated magna cum laude in chemical engineering. How I got promoted three times in as many months while he stayed stagnant for 18 years reinforces the idea that people in the first quadrant can achieve relatively bountiful lives, financially and otherwise.
People like Iacocca, Pangilinan, Kiyosaki, etc., share one thing in common. They are perpetually dissatisfied with their present lots and would do all they possibly can to make them a little better, rise a little higher. They are the people who dreamt big dreams, transforming their dreams into plans. They don’t fit into the mold.
Employees, therefore, can and will get rich by having dreams, big dreams, and putting their dreams into plans; by not fitting into the mold. A fellow I worked with once commented that had he been bright, he would have passed the licensure exams for mechanical engineering. Robert Kiyosaski aptly differentiated dreams and plans. The guy, above, dreamt to be bright. I was not, but I wanted to become a licensed mechanical engineer. I became one while he kept on dreaming.
That’s why only very few of us, working people, rise above the crowd because only a very few commit their dreams into plans. The 80/20 of the Pareto principle, which I adhere to, is never wrong. Kiyosaki makes it even tighter by his 90/10. For him only 10 out of hundred will make it, with 90% of the highest salaries given to the 10% who did.
Is it so difficult for you to be among the 10 out of a hundred, and enjoy the 90% of the highest salaries?
The “Secret” by Rhonda Byrne is a best selling book about positive expectations. You cannot unless you expect to be; you never will unless you will yourself to be.
The first step therefore, in becoming rich in the first quadrant, is to want it so badly you are willing to change your life to get it. There is no other way.
