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10/13/13 How To Make Trillions Of Dollars | Thought Catalog
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How To Make Trillions Of DollarsJan. 7, 2013
By David Cain
I'm David and my blog, Raptitude, is a street-level look at the human experience -- what makeshuman beings do what ...
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Before I get into it, I must say that I don’t recommend that you do this. I’m sharing this strategy forinformation purposes only, so that you can understand the playing field you’re working with, and can makebetter personal choices for how you make and manage your money.
I do encourage you to become a millionaire, if that’s something that interests you. If it’s billions you’reafter, I’m a bit suspicious but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Aspiring to trillions, though, is thedomain of the wicked alone and we won’t be able to be friends any more.
The big money isn’t in creating products, it’s in creating customers. A single, lifelong customer who liveshis life spending the way you want him to is worth six or seven figures. A single one. Creating millions ofthese is the only way to make trillions.
You can make millions by selling a great product to people who need it, but you make billions and trillionsby conditioning an entire nation of people to react to every inconvenience, every whim, and every passingdesire or fear by buying something.
It does take some capital to get it going. You won’t be able to manage it with 5-dollar-an-hour overseasvirtual assistants, but like I said I’d prefer if you didn’t strive to be a trillionaire, because it’s not so good forthe rest of us.
What it takes amounts to an engineered cultural shift. A small-time entrepreneur could never manage it, butif you’ve got some old money kicking around (and someone always does) then you’re in a position toinfluence or purchase broadcasters, politicians and trendsetting media figures, and you can sculpt a newnormal pretty quickly.
After the second world war, a few privileged Americans developed a brilliant formula for building anunimaginably huge economy:
[Our economy] demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the
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buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our egosatisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, isnow to be found in our consumptive patterns [...] We need things consumed, burned up, wornout, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink,dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensiveconsumption.
~American retail analyst Victor Lebow (hat tip to reader Anna for this)
This is very-high-level marketing, and it has formed most of the developed world around you.
Using the television as their primary tool, very-high-level marketers have managed to create a nation ofpeople who typically:
work almost all the timeabsorb several hours of advertising every night, in their own homesare tired and unhealthy and vaguely dissatisfied with their livesrespond to boredom, dissatisfaction, or anxiety only by buying and consuming thingshave disposable income but can’t find a more fulfilling line of work without losing their healthinsurancecreate health problems for themselves, which can be treated with drugs they can “ask their doctorabout”own far more items than they use, and believe they don’t have enoughare easily distracted from the unhealthy state of their lives and their culture by breaking news andcelebrity gossipperpetually convince themselves it is not the right time to make major lifestyle changeshappily buy stuff that breaks within a year, and which nobody knows how to fixhave learned, through the media’s culture of blame-mongering, that the key to solving public andprivate issues is to find the right people to hate
Not that it’s drastically different in the rest of the developed world. Trillionaires (or at least their employees)are working around the clock to pipe these habits into living rooms everywhere. Huge economy, hugepopulation, global influence.
Healthy people — who know how to deal with disappointment, who have given up on the idea of magicbullets, who don’t watch TV indiscriminately, who are fulfilled by things that don’t cost money — are poorconsumers, and so the very-high-level marketers have nurtured a culture which produces the exact opposite.
You are being encouraged, from virtually every angle, to become or remain unhealthy and unfulfilled,because then you will buy more. Not to make you paranoid, but that’s the primary purpose of the glowingrectangle in your living room — to encourage poor (but not quite failing) health, general complacency, andan unconscious reflex for parting with money.
This is not a rallying cry to go burn down your local Wal-Mart. The anti-capitalism schtick is for highschool kids.
I’m not even telling you to throw your TV out the window. But that’s definitely a move with a veryhigh ROI, if the thought interests you.
I don’t even recommend that you nurture hatred for The Man. In fact, it’s an understatement to say that that
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would be barking up the wrong tree. There’s nothing out there — no ideology, methodology, behavior,person or idea — that it is healthy to hate. The Man does what he does because he doesn’t know any better— he’s an addict himself, with poor life skills.
Your life skills can be made into superior ones, which will protect you from succumbing to destructive andself-destructive urges, such as (among many others) the urge to create a culture of ill health, fear andaddiction just so you can enjoy exclusive sensations like wearing 10,000-dollar underwear, or tradingcompanies like they’re baseball cards.
It is a sad Man indeed who cannot achieve a comfortable life without running hundreds of millions ofpeople into the ground to make it easier to get at what’s in their wallets. He can’t really back out of it nowanyway — he’s pot-committed, as they say.
So don’t hate The Man, it will only weaken and distract you from what you might accomplish if you don’tfollow his cues. Hate has a terrifically poor ROI, at least as far as quality of life goes. If you’ve got somerage you feel needs “investing,” take up a racquet sport. Direct your rage away from any people andanimals, and when your tantrum is over, turn your energy towards the cultivation of your life skills.
I’m not referring to situationally-specific life skills like changing tires, folding button-up shirts, or openingpublic washroom doors without touching the handle, though they are certainly useful.
Here I’m talking about the real fundamentals of being an empowered, self-directed human being.
Creativity. Curiosity. Resilience to distraction. Patience with others.
And to make these all possible: self-reliance – an unswerving willingness to take responsibility for your life,regardless of who had a hand in making it the way it is.
Cultivate these qualities in yourself and others, and when this way of life becomes more normal than gettingone’s lifestyle cues from discount-store flyers and CNN, the surefire trillionaire strategy won’t workanymore. For anyone.
Even from a seemingly unempowered starting point — a budget apartment in some forgettable corner of asociety that has been designed to make you sick and impotent — these traits will do more for you than any“Anti” stance you can think of. Hating the system is a favorite American pastime. It feels good, is difficultto stop once you start, and gets you precisely nowhere, not unlike eating Doritos.
This is not us against them, it’s us for us.
Though The Man is immature in many ways, he does have a lot of cash, and his strategies are going to be inyour face everywhere.
He designed your lifestyle, from the years you toil at a job that has nothing to do with your passions, to theFord advert you stare at while you’re peeing in a urinal at Applebee’s, to your DVD player that lasted onlythirty days longer than its warranty, to the well-trafficked path between your microwave and your couch.
The trillionaire-making strategies you encounter are so insidious because of how normal they’ve become.You’ll find them creeping into your life not only explicitly, in magazines and commercials, but implicitly, inthe way other people around you — even people you love — expect you to live.
You will have to be unusual. I hope you already are.
10/13/13 How To Make Trillions Of Dollars | Thought Catalog
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This piece was originally published at RAPTITUDE.
Tagged Advertising, consumerism, Life, Marketing, Self Help, Self-Improvement, The Man, Theory
David Cain
I’m David and my blog, Raptitude, is a street-level look at the human experience — what makes humanbeings do what …
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33 comments
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kenbarlo • 4 months ago
Terrific article! Thank you for the time and effort put into this. It was a very good read andvery thought provoking.
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AriadnasFantasy Embroidery • 9 months ago
Please read this article .... it's awesome!
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Your name • 9 months ago
Did I just read a crimethinc article? 1
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Anonymous • 9 months ago
Did I just read a crimethinc article?
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aaron nicholas • 9 months ago
great.
RobynJ • 9 months ago
My thoughts exactly. I see how this article is relevant to people in Australia who have losttheir retirement monies along with the GFC landslide in 2008 onwards, who invested in
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21 People On How Life HasChanged Since They WentFrom Ugly To Hot (FeaturingBefore And After Photos)
10/13/13 How To Make Trillions Of Dollars | Thought Catalog
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managed funds and now blame day traders for their losses. The matrix has them. Thethought of "I can do my own investing" has never occurred to them. It's amazing whatindividuals can achieve, even from the humblest of beginnings.
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Terrence Andrew Davis • 9 months ago
The world is perfectly just. God exists. Supposedly He has a plan. He controls things, butit's weird because I've seemingly done stuff. God says...have hoped in thy judgments.
119:44 So shall I keep thy law continually for ever and ever.
119:45 And I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts.
119:46 I will speak of thy testimonies also before kings, and will notbe ashamed.
119:47 And I will delight myself in thy commandments, which I haveloved.
119:48 My hands also will I lift up unto thy commandments, which Ihave loved; and I will meditate in thy statutes.
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Jay • 9 months ago
Great article. I wish I could write as well as you. Maybe that's something I'll take up...startingtomorrow of couse because the Cavs are playing the Hawks tonight in Quicken LoansArena. Fuck. Me.
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kudy • 9 months ago
Awesomely articulated, thank you! 1
Sakari Lehtonen • 9 months ago
Thanks, This resonated within me. The more we give our energy to the Man, the more we areliving in the world he has created. The more we focus on empowering ourselves, the morewe can grow as human beings towards a different world.
I've found it best just to ignore all mass media, advertisements, TV and instead focus ondoing what inspires me. It is easy to _think_ that by opposing these forces will bring change.But fighting back will only drain our energy, best is to focus on what we LOVE in life, not whatwe hate. The more I focus on what I love, the more love comes towards me.
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10/13/13 How To Make Trillions Of Dollars | Thought Catalog
thoughtcatalog.com/2013/how-to-make-trillions-of-dollars/ 9/14
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Fear is the energy the Man wants to use to get us hooked as their slaves. Step away fromthe Fear, ignore it completely, and we will be free :)
Thanks for sharing this post.
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Ivan Milosavljević • 9 months ago
I enjoyed reading this. Although I live in, as some would probably say, third-world country,many of content in this article is still relevant here. For me, 2 years without TV and 1 intensiveyear in the gym brought enough change of lifestyle so I can recommend this to everyone, atleast to try, at least for a month.
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gbuisson • 9 months ago
My thoughts for years exactly!
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Ralph Martin • 9 months ago
Too long and overly pretentious. Your main foible is the pairing of a silly self-righteousnessand a middling, compromised position. Seriously, LoL
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Erik Johnson • 9 months ago
After the irony of the advertisements on the page, this article is great. I particularly enjoy theROI of hate. How true is it that we default to hating something, when in fact we should lead apath of self-reliance. I like, no wait I LOVE that statement.
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VictorStan • 9 months ago
Yes, and while you're at it, please click on any of the advertisements rubbed in your face atthe top of the page, thank you.
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tani P. • 9 months ago
This I dig. Mostly due to the awesome points the author makes, but also for the restrained,decidedly non-shrill tone.
6
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Albert Huron • 9 months ago
In going to buy a buffalo farm. 7
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10/13/13 How To Make Trillions Of Dollars | Thought Catalog
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Reply 7
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DebtDerp • 9 months ago
Wonderful and thought provoking. I need to cancel my cable subscription. 13
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Adam • 9 months ago
It's so obvious, and yet barely perceivable. Love this article. Share it! 1
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Krystaleblin • 9 months ago
Excellent article 1
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Jay • 9 months ago
Hmmm only governments seem to handle trillions. They are virtuous right?
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Hellius • 9 months ago Jay
Oh, because he was insinuating "The Man" was a set of private individuals, he mustthink the government is righteous, right? Get off it, for your own sake.
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earlgrey • 9 months ago
I smiled while reading the article and left with a thought that is provoked. Very smooth, andindeed, true. Nice job David!
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Filipino Ako • 9 months ago
Wow. Thus must be the most insightful article I've read on TCL hope it gets published in abigger scale. Everyone in the capitalist world should read this. It makes you think about howbad things have become without making you feel hateful. It just makes you feel like you wantto start creating a change in your life, and hopefully sparking a change in our society. Kudosmuch!!
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Karen • 9 months ago
Thank you. I needed this. 1
Lila • 9 months ago
Great read and a very insightful article, best wishes from Poland :)
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10/13/13 How To Make Trillions Of Dollars | Thought Catalog
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ReplyGreat read and a very insightful article, best wishes from Poland :)
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Marie222 • 9 months ago
Everyone in America should read this article. Thank you Mr. Cain! 1
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chris • 9 months ago
Thank you for this, it was a good wake up call. I'm changing today.
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Felicia-May Stevenson • 9 months ago
Great Article. I have been saying this about Apple for a while now. They keep releasing thesame product with incremental improvements, and their most loyal customers buy eachone, even though the one they have works perfectly fine!
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Dn • 9 months ago Felicia-May Stevenson
Felicia, you should re-read the article,...and take up a racquet sport. 3
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richbitch • 9 months ago
I want to be a trillionaire
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pmas • 9 months ago richbitch
There are currently zero individuals in the world with a net worth of even 100 billion, letalone 1 trillion
3
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Welovethiswebsite • 9 months ago pmas
Rothschilds.
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