How I Will Be Rich

I was talking to my dad the other day about our company and the way things were going over the last few years. With the economy the way it is, we’ve had some rough patches. Somewhere in the conversation he brought up a poem that he had heard that really struck a chord with me. The poem is about a person writing the autobiography of their life in five short chapters. I couldn’t remember the entire thing so I scoured the internet, looking for the poem. I wanted to make sure that if I repeated it, it was accurate.

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters
by Portia Nelson

I
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost … I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes me forever to find a way out.

II
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place
but, it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

III
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in … it’s a habit.
my eyes are open
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

IV
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

V
I walk down another street.

This poem holds a very valuable lesson.
This can be pretty much a metaphor for almost anything you do in life. You make a mistake once and you feel really bad, you make the same mistake again and just can’t understand it. At some point you must come to the realization that you need to take another path to avoid the same mistakes.

Take investing for example.
I made a huge mistake in the stock market when I was first getting in to it. I dabbled in penny stocks a little. I invested a lot of money in a stock that traded for less than one dollar per share based on a tip in a message board. Based on the theme of this post, it’s not hard to imagine what happened next. The company went bankrupt. Penny stocks are like gambling in a casino. I had to make my money back. I invested in a different penny stock, thinking that I could make all my money back and more. How could I be so stupid and make the same mistake twice? I learned from it and have never as much as looked at a quote for a penny stock since.

This advice holds true in almost anything in life.
The people in this world that are the most successful have gotten there by making many mistakes. The only way that you can really learn that some paths shouldn’t be taken is by traveling them yourself and experiencing it first hand.

I am really interested in hearing other’s interpretations of the poem. I’d also love to hear stories of people making the same mistakes repeatedly but eventually finding their way around it.

Photo Credit: Helga’s Lobster Stew

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