After discovering my passion in personal finance, it became my hobby to read personal finance book to gain additional knowledge and information that could help me in my financial freedom journey.
Aside from hundreds of personal finance blogs and videos online, reading ‘ebook‘ is one of the thing that changed me how I think about money.
I even have a digital library on my computer of all the personal finance related ebooks I have read and going to read.
Today, I will share 5 important self-help lessons I’ve learned after reading the book entitled The Richest man in Babylon. George S. Clason was the author of the this book and was first published in 1926. This is one of the ‘classic‘ yet the best personal finance book I’ve read so far.
This book is a gold-mine and can really help anyone take charge of their personal finances to the next level. The Richest man in Babylon book is series of parables and stories about people in Babylon (the richest city in the world about 4000 years ago) acquiring wealth and sharing it to other people around them.
Although the book is a classic and seems to be old, the concept and principles thought are still applicable today.
5 Self-help lessons from The Richest man in Babylon book
1. Learn from people who have been there
This is one of the great lesson The Richest man in Babylon book shared to its readers. You must seek wisdom and learn from people or person who have been in things you want to have in life.
Bansir a poor musician seek advise from his friend Arkad who happen to be the richest man in Babylon. Arkad who was also poor before shared what he learned in acquiring wealth.
Since Bansir is really eager to learn all the lessons of acquiring wealth, Arkad is happy to teach him.
This is true in any areas of our life. If we want to be rich, we should learn lessons from the people who are rich. Not just in personal finance but in any areas of our life.
Knowing what they’ve been through and how they get there can really provide us valuable lessons and information that can serve as our guidance in our journey. That’s why biography book of richest and greatest men in the world are so famous because of what lessons it offered to the readers.
We can really learn a lot by seeking information from people who have been in the same journey and situation we have. It can also save us a huge amount of time and effort finding ways to figure out on our own than asking people who have been there. Experience is the best teacher of life.
By seeking information from other people’s experience, we can identify things we need to work out and need to avoid. Let’s ask them and they will be more than happy to teach us.
Of course there are instances that this can’t be literally done but reading books about them, blogs about them, watching their videos and attending their seminars is one of the great way we can learn from people who are in the same situation we want to be with.
Let’s learn from them and take action.
2. Pay yourself first
The Richest man in Babylon book also discussed the importance of paying yourself first. This is one of the basic and fundamental step of acquiring wealth. We must pay our self first before anything else.
It is advised to separate at least 10% of your income before dedicating the rest of it to your expenses. The 10% that was set aside should only be use for investing or growing your money.
Of course this is assuming that you already build your emergency fund. No matter how small our salary or income is, we should have the discipline to pay our self first. No matter how much debt we have or how much bills we need to pay, paying our self first should be the priority we need to work.
This is not easy of course but we will get used to it once we have the discipline. It takes time but if we are determined and focus on our goal this will become easy in the long run.
3. Living below your means
Another lesson I learned from The Richest man in Babylon book is about living below our means. This is basically teaching us to spend wisely.
We should identify our “needs” vs “want” and make sure that we know the difference. Prioritizing want over the needs can really affect our budget and our financial goals.
After setting aside the 10% of our income, we should control the remaining 90% to our expenses. It’s not wise to buy ‘new gadgets‘ when we don’t have emergency fund.
If we want to be rich, we should focus on spending our money to the things that contribute value and success to our life. Leave your neighbor and other people following ‘the trends‘ just to gain popularity and buying things left and right even if they don’t need it.
Just live below your means and stay focus on your goals.
4. Take time
Success in life doesn’t happen over night. It’s the same with getting rich, it takes time. It could take a lot of time.
The Richest man in Babylon book shared stories of people who have been poor and slaves over long period of time almost losing their hope that they can reach their dream.
But with focus and determination they did it. They took action and applied all lessons they learned along the way.
And that’s what made the Babylon the richest city in the world in their era. We should not be in hurry in achieving our dreams. It takes a lot of time.
We just need to stay focused and take small step each day. One day we will realized that we’re already there and the success is in our hands.
5. Invest in yourself
This is one of the best self-help lesson I want to share to everyone that was also discussed on The Richest man in Babylon book.
Seeking information from the experts and taking time to learn skills can really be the best investment we could ever have. This can definitely make ourselves a better individual and achieve all our goals.
Investing in ourselves like getting a mentor, attending seminars, reading books like this, attending classes or training and many more are one of the great ways to increase our capacity to earn more money and be rich.
Not only that, it lowers the risk of all other investments we are venturing to since we are knowledgeable of what are them. Investing in ourselves first is the best investment we could ever have and surely will give us highest returns imaginable.
This is why my first article in this blog is The best investment that gives more than 1000% return.
The self-help lessons shared above somehow gave you realization that it starts within our self to have a better life. By learning and applying theses lessons in our lives, we are creating more chances of success in our goals and dreams.
There are a lot of lessons we can learn from the book The Richest man in Babylon not only these. I just picked these 5 self-help lessons for now to examine ourselves first.
Let’s all analyze ourselves to apply these lessons to improve our lives.
On the next article, I will share other lessons I learned from The Richest man in Babylon book and other ebooks I’ve read and will read.
Enjoy reading and sharing this for now.
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