How to be Mindful While Investing – 8 Lessons from King Solomon
Too often, you meet people with investing ideas and offers that sound too good, and lucrative to be true. Well, more often, they are. Every year, thousands of people lose millions in bad investments and scams.
Of course, if you engage in any activity, you are bound to invariably make a bad decision. Investing is no different. When it comes to making investment decisions, people sometimes let their emotions take over for common sense.
It is true, that while we usually rely on our knowledge and experience to point us in the right direction, in the world of investing, it doesn’t work that way.
Throughout history, there have been richer men. Men who made their wealth from making sound decisions. One such individual is King Solomon – the best investor the world has ever known.
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He supposedly made his riches through commerce, trading, gifts he received, tribute money paid to him, and taxation. His gold earnings alone, which raked in 25 tons a year, in present-day figures, would amount to a ton of gold valued at 64.3 million dollars, using $2,000/oz.
All his assets combined, by some estimates, converted using present-day currency values, equals a whopping $2.1 Trillion – a figure nobody else has attained.
Another ruler who is widely regarded as one of the wealthiest people to ever live was Mansa Musa, the tenth Mansa, or conqueror, of the Mali Empire who reigned from 1312 to 1337.
He is wealth is largely attributed to the amount of gold that Mali produced during his reign. At the peak of the Mali Empire, Mansa Musa had a net worth that was worth the same as the modern equivalent of $400 billion.
His wealth is notable from writings alluding to his pilgrimage to Mecca between 1324 and 1325. The journey spanned 2,700 miles with a procession of 60,000 men and slaves carrying gold, bags, and dressed in silk.
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Along his way, Musa gave gold to the many impoverished citizens he met and traded gold in various cities, in addition to building mosques along the route.
His generosity was counterproductive, as the massive influx of gold in cities like Cairo and Medina caused a significant devaluation of the metal and Musa tried to rectify the problem on his journey home by borrowing gold from money lenders in these cities at high-interest rates.
This time in history is significant as it marks the only time the entire gold industry and pricing were controlled by one man.
Musa invested most of his wealth in education and building projects. He built mosques and universities all across the Mali Empire with his project being the great mosque of Timbuktu, the Djinguereber Mosque. Today, the mosque is a world heritage site.
Drawing from these two examples, one can conclude that both King Solomon and Mansa Musa I made wise investments and knew exactly where to put their money. They both knew that wealth actually comes from wisdom, and they were right. Using wisdom as a foundation to build your wealth, allows you to gain an understanding of how to continue the need to grow your wealth.
Eventually, you will reach a level of knowledge that will reward you with true prosperity, and you will enjoy the benefits and rewards of budgeting, money management, saving, and basic investing.
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That said, here are the lessons we can learn from these two rulers, particularly King Solomon. You may have heard some of these tips, but others are not taught in any business school.
- Seek Financial Wisdom
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