How Rich Can You Get?

Do your eyes almost pop out of your head when you read about someone giving a million dollars to build a college library? When you realize that a million one-dollar bills piled one upon the other would make a stack higher than the Washington Monument, you begin to feel what a large amount that is. Or do you?

How can I get some of that? Well, it is a good question. How does a fellow go about getting rich? The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher said, "It is not what we take up, but what we give up that makes us rich." A fellow might by some chance become owner of one of the Great Lakes, but if he just let it lie there with a high fence around it, it most certainly wouldn't do him any good.

Once there was a twelve-year-old boy named George Reynolds who worked in a cotton mill in New England.
George dreamed of being somebody in the world someday, and so he went into the newspaper business—selling papers on the street corner. But George felt that he was on his way. Before he was twenty he was circulation manager of his paper. From there on he began to make more money than he could spend from an invention.

George died with twenty-five cents in his pocket. Churches, boys' clubs, girls' clubs that he had helped began to wonder where their help would come from after George died. But it came. It came from people that George Reynolds had once helped. George Reynolds was a lot richer than his actual dollars and cents which he had received because he gave it all away.

How rich can you get? How rich do you want to be? How much can you afford not to give away?