Either way, my goal isn’t to make tons of money…just to be happy. I applaud your business sense and acumen, and see that you’ve become successful, and I sincerely hope it’s because you’re doing something you enjoy. A life spent making money at a job you don’t love could well be a life wasted.

It’s not about having one single “million dollar idea” that may or may not succeed, it’s about having a bunch of good ideas, testing them all (which on the web, is cheap or free to do), having some ideas that succeed and having a whole lot of patience. Within each of my businesses, I have ideas that both succeed and fail daily but as I gain experience, I instinctively know what’s more likely to succeed. Entrepreneurs are die-hard optimists – you must test, fail, test, fail and ultimately you will succeed if your ideas are good.

High incomes are often made from multiple sources and built over time. Hoping to find one good idea that makes it big and solves all your woes is most likely to be found in a lottery ticket only.

To build a high income in a business, you have to create multiple revenue streams and it helps to diversify and have more than one business. Across my four main businesses, I have 12 distinct and significant revenue sources that are not interlinked and are not dependent on one another, meaning not one single idea or money maker.

Anyway, I guess the point of my original post here is that celebs keep working because as you earn more money, your lifestyle adjusts and you want it to continue, and/or the celeb likes the fame (stokes their ego) and/or they enjoy what they do too much to stop.

But still, the topic was ‘why do celebs keep working’? Tiger Woods PLAYS golf. Not WORKS golf. And while he did work hard at it, I’m sure, when he was young and unknown now that he’s famous and the money is rolling in for something he enjoys doing and only has to do a few hours every couple of months, there really is no incentive to stop. Would he play golf if he quit the professional scene? Sure. So why not get paid for it?
Same for Oprah. She probably did work hard in the beginning. But now that she’s made it and has to do so much less now that she’s got a team…why quit?
As you say, she’s doing the most enjoyable part of the job, and getting billions for it.

As for Tiger Woods, actors, and Oprah, not working, that’s BS. I assure you that at one point they worked much harder and smarter than you to get to where they are now. People like you make it sound bad when someone like Oprah gets to where she is and has a team of people (which she assembled) doing most of the heavy lifting while she does the enjoyable part of the work.

Forget movie stars – what about Carly Fiorina, the HP CEO that was forced out of HP? She rec’d a severance of $21 million (freakin) dollars. Her annual salary at HP was a meager $1.4m — but look at what she rec’d by being “fired” or having “quit”.

Mo

I agree with your points, especially 1 and 3. It is a natural need for those people get continuous exposure and attention. It is also horrible to be doing nothing. If I didn’t need to work for money, I’d rather go skiing and riding my bike. Anyhow, I guess I would work with something because work gives me goals and challenges which again give some kind of satisfaction.