Just because Gina Rinehart, the world’s wealthiest woman, appears to be entirely heartless – criticising the poor for being lazy when she inherited plenty of money, suing her own kids – doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a point
Just because Gina Rinehart, the world’s wealthiest woman, appears to be entirely heartless – criticising the poor for being lazy when she inherited plenty of money, suing her own kids – doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a point.
Rinehart wrote: ‘If you’re jealous of those with more money, don’t just sit there and complain. Do something to make more money yourself – spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working.’
And she’s not wrong – about the complaining, anyway – albeit it was expressed in the, um, forthright manner of the Australian vernacular I heard a lot when I went to Sydney last year. Yes, she inherited $75 million – but she turned it into $30 billion, and she didn’t do it by complaining.
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Octavius Black, founder of The Mind Gym, which motivates and inspires employees to perform better with its mental work-outs, agrees with Rinehart: ‘Yes, I think she is largely right: the route to life-changing riches is to work hard. A level of intelligence helps. Of course, it helps if you’ve inherited $75 million.’
Complaining is easy. It doesn’t require any ambition, skills, intelligence, strategy or even sense. It can reveal resentment and self-pity. It is ignoble when it is an excuse for action.
And that’s Rinehart’s point. Jobs may not be easy to find, companies to build, fortunes to make, grow and sustain, but the complainant gets nowhere. You can expend an awful lot of bitterness complaining, but the bitterness never diminishes – there’s always more.
The only way to extinguish the bitterness is to make your own successes, and Rinehart, however aggressively, was suggesting just that.
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