Matt Coddington

I was taking a quiz over at CNN called “Do you have what it takes to get rich?” The quiz is adorable, but is not really geared at giving you a magical answer to the question. The point of the quiz is to show you basic facts about making money in any industry. Facts that you know but probably tend to overlook in the hopes that you’ll strike it rich off of some spur of the moment amazing idea or a genius website. The truth is most people get rich through good old fashioned hard work.

Most of us have an image of entrepreneurs lodged in our heads: hyperactive, visionary, guts of steel. But those who study entrepreneurs say that’s an illusion. “Some have very boring personalities,” says Schramm. Part of the problem, says Kelly Shaver, professor of entrepreneurial studies at the College of Charleston, is that we tend to focus on superachieving outliers. (You could be one-53,000th as successful as Bill Gates and still be a millionaire.) And many books and magazine profiles about entrepreneurs look only at the ones who have already made a fortune. When asked to explain their success, Shaver says, people tend to think back and try to identify some brilliant thing they must have done - and maybe forget about the routine work, their many mistakes or their sheer luck.

That is just one of the nuggets of valuable information in this quiz. This is probably the best article I’ve ever read on CNN not only because it comes in the form of a sexy fabulous quiz but because it’s real, it’s concrete, it’s no fluff, and it actually tells you how to earn your wealth rather than sitting around waiting for it to happen.

Use your common sense. Don’t get lost in delusion. Hard work creates wealth.