UPDATE: In the post below we state that Ivanka Trump graduated magna cum laude from the Wharton school. It appears there’s some question as to whether Ivanka received summa cum laude or magna cum laude. Some reports quote Ivanka as insisting she graduated summa cum laude. One must assume that whether in fact she graduated summa or magna, her Wharton records have been adjusted to show summa by now so we correct our assertion. Ivanka Trump graduated summa cum laude.

According to Ivanka she Ivanka Trump is an intelligent woman. She has to be. She graduated magna cum laude from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor of science in economics, and she did it all on her own merits with no strings pulled anywhere by anyone. Magna cum laude “with great honor” is a step up from just cum laude “with honor”, but lower than summa cum laude, “with highest honor”. [If you care, there are other distinctions of honor bestowed upon college grads; but none of it is really relevant to anything]. The point is, Ivanka Trump wasn’t Einstein or his female equivalent, but she was an academically superior student nonetheless, and her superior mind and inherited ambition are what have propelled her to the top of the corporate ladder; not her name and other intangible assets. So she insists.

Ivanka Trump, as you may or may not know, is the daughter of self-professed financial genius Donald Trump. And as you can see from the photo, academia is not the only area in which the 25-year old former fashion model, entrepreneur and current vice president of Real Estate Development and Acquisitions at the Trump Organization stands apart from the average person; but how much of Ivanka’s success is truly the result of her hard work and how much of it can be attributed to her being “Ivanka Trump”?

There are many women with equal ambition and equal intelligence who never manage to get very far climbing the corporate ladder. Even Ivanka Trump knows that ambition and brains alone won’t often get a woman very far if her goal is to reach the top of the corporate ladder. Women have come far from the days when they couldn’t vote and were considered only useful for keeping house and bearing children; but they still haven’t overcome every hurdle of discrimination.

Ivanka Trump is 25 years old. Most women 25-years old don’t hold positions as vice-president of anything at multi-million-dollar corporations. Most women 25-years old who look like Ivanka Trump don’t have it very easy getting people to take them seriously, to respect them for their ambition and their brain. Presumably, Ivanka doesn’t wear thin strapped halter dresses with low necklines that bare excessive cleavage to the office; but no doubt the people she works with see the sexy photos of her in the magazines and, how ever conservatively she might dress at the office, it no doubt still becomes more difficult for her male colleagues not be thinking more about her physical assets than her mental when dealing with her.

So how did Ivanka Trump manage to rise so high in the ranks at such a young age where other women, possibly some of her own colleagues, move up the ladder at a significantly slower rate, most never managing to get past a certain rung? Ivanka doesn’t like when people say her father pays her way through life for her. She likes to point out that she pays her own way. She’s a working woman who earns her keep; and that may all be well and good. But without the Trump name Ivanka Trump is unlikely to have reached such a height of success so young, even with a Wharton degree and having graduated magna cum laude, and being very ambitious. And she clearly knows herself that her name is her most valuable asset. She’s said as much, insisting she won’t take her husband’s last name when she marries, and will give her children her father’s last name instead of their father’s as is the tradition.

If you do a search on "making money ideas for poor people" you might stumble across an interesting blog "Making Money: Ideas" maintained by the "Double Dollar Network". The blog is hosted by blogspot and while it appears the posts are written by someone who might not be a native English speaker, if you can keep an open mind about the imperfect structure of some sentences and some grammatical errors here and there, the information in the blog is interesting, informative and thought-provoking.

One post in particular, Rich Dad’s Lessons: Be - Do - Have makes a very pertinent point about why some people succeed while others fail. As the writer puts it:

There are many people who want to HAVE wealth and there are few people who end up BEING really rich without having been rich since they were born and without having had a lot of good luck in their lives.

What is the difference between those people and the other ones? Knowledge? Yeah, partly. But only partly. The fundamental difference between those people and the other ones is who they are: their thinking way, their personality, the way how they control the emotions, their self-control.

I am acquainted with a number of struggling entrepreneurs; and one of the main traits we all seem to share is a tendency to go through extreme highs and lows with the highs resulting from sudden bursts of inspiration that hit us after we’ve been down in the dumps and sulking and being detrimentally negative about our likelihood of ever succeeding. One week you’ll find us working energetically, highly motivated, spirited and certain we’re on the right track and will make it to the top without doubt. The next week we’re contemplating suicide because we’re convinced we’re never going to succeed, and we’d rather be dead than have to live with the knowledge that we’ve failed.

It’s not hard to figure out why people who tend to experience this conflict where their emotions are inflated one minute and deflated the next, don’t usually end up with a success story to tell unless they get lucky. For the most part they are fighting a losing battle because they keep setting themselves back every time they go into a negative spell. They find they never seem to be any closer to completing a goal no matter how much work they’ve done. That’s because, for every positive, inspired day, there’s usually a negative, self-destructive week or two; and when they are in that negative, self-destructive mode, there is lasting damage done to their psyche. The next time they’re hit with a burst of inspiration, whether or not they are conscious of the presence of doubt, there are traces of doubt in their mind that they really have what it takes to make it; and traces of doubt are all that’s needed to begin to deflate that positive energy little by little and flatten them before long so that they’re right back in the funk zone ready to give up on their ambition if not on life itself.

Personality definitely plays a part in determining how far people go in life. You need to be fearless and not prone to sloth, embarrassment, anger, frustration and other energy deflating emotions. Almost any path that leads to the top, ones that requires you to actually climb from the bottom up, comes with obstacles you’ll have to surmount.

Negative people will seldom manage a successful journey on any path to wealth because negative people don’t become proactive when faced with problems. They don’t become motivated to tackle the problem. They become deflated. They complain. They sulk. They start talking about their bad luck and how everything is always going wrong, and there’s always something trying to thwart them, as if some force is set against them. They whine about being cursed and doomed. A negative personality is not a winning personality. Winners are motivated people. They go after what they want with determination. Determination is a positive word. You’re not truly determined if you entertain doubt because doubt is rooted in negativity, and since determination is rooted in positivity you can’t have doubt and be determined. If you have doubt you’re operating from a negative place and unless you have enough positive energy to offset the negative, your results will be negative no matter what you do. Winners don’t doubt themselves. They also leave nothing to fate and chance. They set a goal, they figure out the steps they need to take in order to achieve it and they go after it. Fickleness is also rooted in negativity. Winners aren’t fickle people when it comes to knowing what they want and going after it. They don’t change their mind about their ambition every two minutes. Negative people tend to be fickle. They are always seeking. They are never sure about anything they do. Winners are always sure about everything they do. They are secure in their choices and decisions. They are not passive and do not sit back, wait and hope; nor do they run from challenges or regard challenges as evidence that some force is against them. On the contrary, they enjoy proving that nothing can stop them. That’s why they win. Because they are ruled by the energy of "yes" where their opposites are ruled by the energy of "no".