I recently completed a TAFE course in Maritime Operations because I enjoy boating and boaty things. I set my life and business up to pursue this personal interest and do this course.

It took about 10 seconds for a 23-year-old in the small class of seven to Google my name. He said in front of everyone, ‘Hey Glen, are you rich?’ To that, I replied, ‘No, I prefer wealthy’. Laughs ensued.

I share this story because I really think we need to position ourselves and our lives to become wealthy by working smart and slowly building wealth.

An organisation in the United States, the National Endowment for Financial Education, found that 70 per cent of lottery winners go bankrupt within five years of winning.

Not only do they lose their money, they go bankrupt. This means they have liabilities or bills they can no longer meet or pay.

Business Insider wrote about some lottery winners and what was one of the first things they did with their money:

• John & Linda Kutley (US$28.9m) spent $200,000 to create a spray water park. These are like the open spaces in public parks where kids can run around and have a bit of fun with water.

• Bob Erb (US$25m) donated $1 million to an annual event to champion the cause of legalising marijuana.

• Jonathan Varges (US$35m) created Wrestlicious, a women’s wrestling promotion (it’s unknown how much it cost him). Wrestlicious TakeDown lasted one season.

• Vivian Nicholson (~=US$4m) went shopping! Vivian won lotto in the UK in the 1960s and dedicated her life to buying nice clothes and an endless shopping spree. It did end, though, because by 2016 she had no money left.

While we don’t know if all of these people ran out of money, we know one thing: the odds are not in your favour. The reason is when you don’t earn money, you don’t respect it.

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If you win the lottery tomorrow and spend the money on something that wasn’t in your plans today, it can be a slippery slope.

Most people who win the lottery do one thing: they act rich. The type of rich we see in movies and on Instagram. This is not reality.

Being ‘rich’ really shouldn’t be the goal of anyone who is serious about building a life not limited by money.

That sounds counterintuitive, but when you look at it, those lottery winners are limited by money: the money they won, the money they didn’t earn.

They are limited by a lack of systems and structure in their lives. They are limited by a lack of planning and vision for their lives. They are limited by a desire to spend and not to build and maintain wealth.