The belief is that if you work hard and save, over time you’ll earn your way to wealth and great riches, but that philosophy is all wrong.

While the standard definition of wealth refers to riches and material possessions, the term really has more value to it. Wealth is a lifestyle that cannot really be measured. It is a result of achieving your goals and living your dream – whether you have millions of dollars or not.

Maybe wealth to you means being able to spend more time with your family. Maybe it means living comfortably in a small town with a small fishing boat and not a worry in the world. Maybe wealth means having luxurious items and having a high powered corporate position. You define wealth, and nobody but you can identify whether or not you have achieved that status.

Assuming that wealth has a specific dollar value to you, the greatest myth in the world is that it takes hard work to make a lot of money. This is middle class thinking and is so far from the truth that I would venture to say that the opposite is actually true.

I’ve met numerous people in my life who are extremely rich and hardly lift a finger. Granted they may have had some upfront work that allowed them to produce their income without their intervention, but that doesn’t have to be the case.

Working hard is not a prerequisite to making money because:

1. You can outsource your entire life, including the job of outsourcing
2. You can build businesses that are completely automated
3. You can choose to be in a line of work that produces income, but does not require your time
4. Other people can make money faster for you then you can make yourself

By choosing to be in a business that makes you work hard in order to earn money is slavery. You are doing yourself a disservice and wasting the most valuable asset you own. Time.

Those who are truly wealthy have figured this out. By using the laws that allow you to produce income without your investment of time – or allowing you to focus on your strengths – gives you the freedom to live the life that you deserve. Identify your values, define what wealth means to you, and discover how to get their quickly while enjoying the gift of time.

The honest truth is that I stopped paying attention to the stock market and economy a while ago. I just keep doing what I’m doing and check my balances every few months or so. It would be impossible for me to not be aware of the current market conditions, but I try to tune it out as much as possible.

I’m a believer in that if you keep your head and follow your initial strategy, you’ll come out ahead. That’s the Warren Buffett way, right? Invest when things look bad. No matter how bad things get, at least you’re buying shares cheaper than you did in the past. The U.S. economy is resilient and things will be greater than they ever were, right?

Well, now I’m starting to ask when.

These are truly historic times. Through August 2008, the S&P 500′s annualized 10-year gain was just 4.7%, which means there wouldn’t have been much of a difference if you just put your cash under your mattress.

Remember the good old days when the DOW was above 14,000 and you could make a bad bet in the stock market? Just buy stocks or mutual funds and watch your net worth grow. Well, now we’re back where we were about July, 2006. If you invest since then, you’ve probably lost money.

That’s a tough thing to face after all the discipline and organization it took to save that money in the first place. And if you’re looking at your retirement fund, that can leave you with a lot of questions.

The bottom has been falsely predicted many times over the past year or so, and things just seem to keep getting worse. What’s next and how far will the stock market go? Nobody knows – the stock market is completely unpredictable.

But one thing for sure is that at some point things will get better. Just like a company, it’s tough to keep growing and growing year after year. At some point you’ve maxed out all your profits and reached your peak. That’s when things start to go sour and profits start to dip.

But the best companies take this opportunity to reinvent themselves and become stronger. As a result they lead into the future with better product and stronger income statements. The economy is exactly the same, and at some point things will bounce back.

When it does, those who had the ability and the guts to continue to follow their investment strategy will come out way ahead. Some day you may look back and wish you were in the market on days like today.

These are the days that people like Warren Buffett were born.

If you’re like me, you learn best by trying things out yourself. You can have someone show and tell you exactly what you need to do in order to accomplish a goal, but until you try it yourself very little is learned. By getting hands on, your mind is able able to internalize the process and put the pieces together.

Looking back at my life, some of the things I excelled most at were those things that required me to fail and fail again, until I eventually figured out the perfect equation. For instance, one of the first jobs I had right out of college was a high-pressure sales position. The objective was to sell to people completely cold. They had no warning that I was going to show up at their door, they had no obligation to talk to me, and they were in no way pre-qualified. Yet I had to make them buy from me.

I was given no training, no direction, just a job and a box of business cards. From there it was up to me to bring in some sales and earn a paycheck.This, as you can imagine, was not an easy task. But there were some very successful people on my team, which lead me to believe that it was possible.

So I set my expectations high and set out to make some money…

But I failed, and I failed a lot. Time after time I tried to make a sale, each time adjusting my pitch just a bit until I eventually got it right. After what was probably more than 10,000 attempts, I got it down to a science.

Before my prospect even opened their mouth I knew what they were going to say, I knew how I was going to respond, and I knew how they would react. I wasn’t selling, I was manipulating human behavior by becoming a master of persuasion.

By failing thousands of times in the past, I studied what didn’t work to allow me to come up with a a winning formula.

Eventually I became one of the company’s top earners, at which point I no longer felt challenged by the job and left to find something else to keep my interests.

The point is that success does not come on the first attempt. If it does, it’s probably luck and will not have sustainable results. Having the endurance to realize that failing is not actually failing at all, but coming one step closer to your goal is the key to success. Those who realize this and have the tenacity to keep trying will achieve incredible results.