I have come across some successful people in life, but who have ended up living miserably. I also have come across some poor people, but who have ended up living successfully? What is the logic behind this? Is there a formula of getting rich, of becoming successful?

My experience starts from my home village. Sometimes it may happen that you are in a certain area, a person passes by, and people start talking about that person, how successful he was, and that now he or she is just nobody, and none can even think whether he or she once was a successful person.

I still recall a certain man whom people used to say he had a lot of money, but to date he still dresses shabbily, and walks barefoot. I cannot recall having met and seen him dressed decently. Meeting him the first time, he looks like a mental person, but he is not.

Only that he has failed to translate his wealth into real life. A neighbour of mine is also a person of his own kind. He often walks barefoot, and dresses simply (puts on just a short-sleeved shirt, and a pair of shorts). But people who know him better say he owns several houses he is letting to tenants, and also has a few goods stores. He lives in a simple house, but may dress only decently when he goes to church on Sunday.

There is a ‘bodaboda’ person I know, who rumours have it that he was once a successful businessperson with several goods stores, but now he has none. At one time he decided to buy a motorcycle, which he uses to carry passengers, and with it he earns a living. He seems to be a reserved person, perhaps this tells something about his personal life. He seems to have a haunted look in his eyes.

There is another person I know. If he travelled and it was late, he would look for a hotel where he would sleep and pay $100 (bed and breakfast). But now he borrows money even when he wants to buy a recharge voucher if he wants to call a person.

At the beginning he looked well-off, and before he bought his own car, he would hire a taxi, wherever he wanted to go. When he was asked for money for a trip, he would pay it without any problem, and on top of that he would not ask for change, but he would simply say: “Thank you, kindly keep it as a gift from me.”

But he now lives a quite different life and whenever we meet, he says: “Life has no formular. Today, you can be this person, but tomorrow you may be a different person altogether.” He also says he has witnessed some people who used to be successful, but today they no longer count in the eyes of others.

There is also another person I know. When his sister would ask him for financial help, he would normally reply arrogantly because he knew he needed nothing from anybody. He used to tell her sister that the more she complained about her poverty the more she became poorer. But his sister’s husband’s dream of who he would be in the future was shuttered when unexpectedly received a letter of redundancy from a certain well-doing company.

He was a top manager who banked on the success of his company and since he was still young, he thought by the time he retires he would be somebody. But it just happened that one day without any future plan received a letter whose message of redundancy almost made him suffer a stroke.

From being successful, he is the one now asking for help from his sister who he used to despise because at that time he was a successful person, and was sure of more success than what happened to him.

One day he called her sister, and asked her to help him with Sh20,000 because his family was very hard up. When things started going wrong, he even tried to persuade his sister to give him her tittle deed so that he could use it to process a bank loan from a lending financial institution.

To cut the story short, today the person is poor, unlike the time when life was still treating him well. All the money he had is gone. He used to have several surveyed plots, over 200 goats, poultry, and so on, but even his house could be auctioned to repay his bank loan. But what makes even successful people poor, and in other situations poor people successful?

Wallace Wattles, the author of “The Science of Getting Rich” he published in 1910 says there is no magic for getting rich or being successful in life, but the first principle in “The Science of Getting Rich" is thought. He suggests that it is cyclical positive thinking that determines a person’s outcomes. He says a person’s repetitive positive mental attitude results in what the person seeks to achieve.

If I may put it in my own words, it is like saying that a person who decides to save some money little by little will in the future find that he or she has accumulated so much money for what he intends to do.

A person who always sees that what he gets is too little to save and uses it all, will also in the future find that he or she has nothing he or she has saved over the years. So, it is better to learn from the first person who developed a saving culture, and not from the second person who developed a spending culture. Each achieved what they desired: saving vs spending culture.

“The creative power within us makes us into the image of that to which we give our attention,” he says. Wattle stresses that behind a person’s clear vision of what he or she wants to do and achieve, there must be the purpose to realise it – that’s to bring it out into tangible expression.

“Live in the new house, mentally, until it takes form around you physically. In the mental realm, enter at once into full enjoyment of the things you want,” he says. He adds: “the poor do not need charity, they need inspiration.”