Can You be the Next Richest Man in The World?

Do you think you can be the next richest man in the world?


Just recently, according to Forbes.com, Bill Gates no longer seats on the throne of being the wealthiest man in the world.


"After 13 years on top, Bill Gates is no longer the richest man in the world. That honor now belongs to his friend and sometimes bridge partner Warren Buffett.


Riding the surging price of Berkshire Hathaway stock, Buffett has seen his fortune swell to an estimated $62 billion, up $10 billion from a year ago.


Gates is now worth $58 billion and is ranked third richest in the world. He is up $2 billion from a year ago, but would have been as rich--or richer--than Buffett, had Microsoft not made an unsolicited bid for Yahoo! at the beginning of February. Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helú now ranks as the world's second richest person with a net worth of $60 billion. " by Luisa Kroll.


Forbes also enumerates the 10 richest men in the world, you may check out this web link, http://www.forbes.com/2008/03/05/richest-people-billionaires-billionaires08-cx_lk_0305billie_land.html to know more about them. But here are their names as listed:

1. Warren Buffett
2. Carlos Slim Helu
3. William Gates III
4. Lakshmi Mittal
5. Mukesh Ambani
6. Anil Ambani
7. Ingvar Kamprad
8. KP Singh
9. Oleg Deripaska
10. Karl Albrecht


To "know who they are" is actually one thing as good as information gets, however, to know how they become billionaires is "what's practical." We may learn from the secrets of these great men, so to speak, in order to be successful ourselves. Let's have a glimpse of "know who" about the richest man.


Wikipedia tells us an encompassing story about Buffett, you may visit, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett:


“Warren Edward Buffett (born August 30, 1930, in Omaha, Nebraska) is an American investor, businessman and philanthropist. He is regarded as one of the world's greatest stock market investors, and is the largest shareholder and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.[3] With an estimated net worth of around US$62 billion,[4] he was ranked by Forbes as the richest person in the world as of February 11, 2008.[5]


Often called the "Oracle of Omaha,"[6] Buffett is noted for his adherence to the value investing philosophy and for his personal frugality despite his immense wealth.[7] His 2006 annual salary was about $100,000, which is small compared to senior executive remuneration in other comparable companies,[8] and when he spent $9.7 million of Berkshire's funds on a business jet in 1989, he jokingly named it "The Indefensible" because of his past criticisms of such purchases by other CEOs.[9] He lives in the same house in the central Dundee neighborhood of Omaha that he bought in 1958 for $31,500, today valued at around $700,000.[10]


Buffett is also a noted philanthropist. In 2006, he announced a plan to give away his fortune to charity, with 83% of it going to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.[11] In 2007, he was listed among Time's 100 Most Influential People in The World.[12] He also serves as a member of the board of trustees at Grinnell College.[13]”


It is interesting to know his historical time line on the same link. But what is important for a pragmatic mind to understand, is to find out the "know how" on how he become the richest man in the world. The more you know about his success and failures, the more you know about his secret for your practical means. So, do you think you can be the next richest man in the world? Then you'd better start doing this man's "know how."

What Works or What's Practical?

Do you want to be successful? Do you want to get rich? Do you want to be likable? Do you want to be famous? By successful, we mean, achieving the goals that we have set regardless short term or long term, be it material or immaterial.

Obtaining the plans that we have set for today, tomorrow, two years from now or even until the last day before we say goodbye to this beautiful existence we called life.

To be successful, it may help if we examine the little things that we do in our daily lives whether these will help us obtain or achieve our goal in the immediate future or in the long run. We may reflect on the belief-system that we may have acquired on where we based our actions upon.

The belief-system on what motivates us to decide on what we do from the daily circumstances that we face. It may help if we question the roots of our beliefs, the very basis, on how we judge our actions before we do them, our philosophy.

An article that I have read from wikipedia about pragmatism might shed light on what we consider as what works or what's practical in our life. In Philosophy, what works or what's practical maybe summed up, however not all, in the philosophy called "pragmatism." This is a very interesting school of thought that maybe used by any person who wanted to succeed in life.
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"Pragmatism is a philosophic school generally considered to have originated in the late nineteenth century with Charles Peirce, who first stated the pragmatic maxim.

It came to fruition in the early twentieth-century philosophies of William James and John Dewey. Most of the thinkers who describe themselves as pragmatists consider practical consequences or real effects to be vital components of both meaning and truth.

Other important aspects of pragmatism include anti-Cartesianism, radical empiricism, instrumentalism, anti-realism, verificationism, conceptual relativity, a denial of the fact-value distinction, a high regard for science, and fallibilism.

Pragmatism began enjoying renewed attention from the 1950s on, because of a new school of philosophers who put forth a revised pragmatism that criticized the logical positivism that had dominated philosophy in the United States and Britain since the 1930s, notably in the work of analytic philosophers like W. V. O. Quine and
Wilfrid Sellars.

Their naturalized epistemology was further developed and widely publicized by Richard Rorty, whose later work grew closer to continental philosophy and is often considered relativistic.

Contemporary pragmatism is still divided between those thinkers who work strictly within the analytic tradition, and a more relativistic strand in the wake of Rorty and lastly neoclassical pragmatists like Susan Haack who stay closer to the work of Peirce, James and Dewey.

Origins

Charles Peirce: the American polymath who started it all.

As a philosophical movement, pragmatism originated in the United States in the late 1800s. The thought and works of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James (both members of The Metaphysical Club) as well as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead figured most prominently in its overall direction. The term pragmatism was first used in print by James, who credited

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Shortcuts: press Ctrl with: B = Bold, I = Italic, P = Publish, D = Draft morePeirce with coining the term during the early 1870s. Prompted by James' use of the term and its attribution to him, Peirce began writing and lecturing on pragmatism to make clear his own interpretation.

Peirce eventually coined the new name pragmaticism to mark what he regarded as the original idea, for clarity's sake and possibly (but not certainly) because he disagreed with James (cf. Menand 2001 on the former interpretation; below on the latter). He claimed that the term was so ugly, nobody would be tempted to steal it (Haack 1998).

James and Peirce were inspired by several earlier thinkers, notably Alexander Bain, who examined the crucial links among belief, conduct, and disposition by saying that a belief is a proposition on which a person is prepared to act. Earlier thinkers that inspired the pragmatists include Francis Bacon who coined the phrase "knowledge is power", David Hume for his naturalistic account of knowledge and action, Thomas Reid for his direct realism, Immanuel Kant for his idealism and from whom Peirce derives the name "pragmatism", Georg Hegel for his introduction of temporality into philosophy (Pinkard in Misak 2007), and J.S. Mill for his nominalism and empiricism.

Contemporary echoes and ties

In the twentieth century, the movements of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy have similarities with pragmatism. Like pragmatism, logical positivism provides a verification criterion of meaning that is supposed to rid us of nonsense metaphysics.

However, logical positivism doesn't stress action like pragmatism does. Furthermore, the pragmatists rarely used their maxim of meaning to rule out all metaphysics as nonsense. Usually, pragmatism was put forth to correct metaphysical doctrines or to construct empirically verifiable ones rather than to provide a wholesale rejection.

Ordinary language philosophy is closer to pragmatism than other philosophy of language because of its nominalist character and because it takes the broader functioning of language in an environment as its focus instead of investigating abstract relations between language and world.
Pragmatism has ties to process philosophy.

Much of their work developed in dialogue with process philosophers like Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, who aren't usually considered pragmatists because they differ so much on other points. (Douglas Browning et al. 1998; Rescher, SEP)

Behaviorism and functionalism in psychology and sociology also have ties to pragmatism, which is not surprising considering that James and Dewey were both scholars of psychology and that Mead became a sociologist.

Utilitarianism has some significant parallels to Pragmatism and John Stuart Mill espoused similar values."

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In a nutshell, the philosophy that gives us an alternative of what works or what's practical maybe called the pragmatic philosophy or pragmatism. By considering this alternative view on how we evaluate our actions before we do them, might help us obtain our goals, however simple or complex, whether immediate or long term. Now, what works for you is going to be the application of what you have understood.