by Vince Smith

Created on: February 24, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

There are three things that make capitalism possible: knowledge, greed and power.

Knowledge - You must know how to capitalize on a vacuum in a certain market, to take advantage of favorable situations, and how to find knowledge not commonly known by the general public in order to make a killing before everybody else figures it out and starts doing it.

Greed - You must have a lust for the material and the ability to find sources of financing and income to invest in your efforts, whether they be from your own money or someone else's.

Power - You must have the power and ability to do the things necessary to profit from your ideas.

Anybody who says they can't win in a capitalist society has already stopped trying and given up. You have to always be looking for an edge, a piece of knowledge or technology that's going to give you the upper hand and turn a big profit before your competition starts doing it. Will you be the innovator or the imitator? Will you create opportunities or just ride other people's coattails?

Let me cite a couple of examples to show you what I mean. If you became a seller on Ebay several years ago when it was young and nothing more than a website, you were a pioneer who saw a golden opportunity and ran with it. Still more of a pioneer were the creators of Ebay, who are wealthy beyond belief as are the creators of Yahoo, Google and other internet giants. If you started selling on Ebay a year ago and are now just starting to build a decent income off of it, you're an imitator who came in too late. You need to be looking for the next Ebay, the next Google, the next Myspace or the next Youtube and getting in on the ground floor.

That's how people go from being obscure to being Bill Gates. The true key to winning the capitalism game is to create something that doesn't exist, such as the internet or cellphones or Blackberries or whatever the next big thing is and mass marketing it. Mass marketing is one of the keys to true financial success. One of the other keys to huge success is multiplication. Anybody can open a restaurant or a party store... some even expand to several locations locally. However, true wealth comes when you expand to thousands of locations worldwide like McDonalds, Pizza Hut and Starbucks. If one restaurant makes you 30-50k a year, how much would 5000 locations make you? Originally, Subway was only one restaurant but their goal was to be everywhere and now they are. This applies to all stores and businesses, not just restaurants.

There are chain stores in every mall in America and beyond that have hundreds of locations and turn a huge profit every year because they multiplied their number of locations. This also applies to real estate - the more properties you own and rent out, the richer you get. Apartment buildings, houses, condos, even strip malls that you rent out to proprietors are gold mines.

I know this is a bit of a rant and a little off the subject, but the point is that capitalism works as long as you know how to use it. The people who complain about it are the ones who don't. If they knew how to do it and did it, they would have nothing to complain about because they'd be financially secure for the rest of their lives.

Anybody can do it, it just takes a good idea and some passion to get other people (and other people's money) involved in it to make it happen, and the fortitude to keep going no matter how many people tell you it's not going to work or how many obstacles you run into along the way. If you really want to, nothing can stand in your way.

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