I make a bit over a million a year and have for about 10 years now. I live in San Francisco, have two kids in private school, and a stay at home wife.

The first thing that comes to mind is that I basically do what I want to do. We buy whatever groceries we want to, eat out whenever and wherever we want, buy whatever clothes, etc. I think the thing most people not making that kind of money don’t realize is that you carry your core values with you. Waste is waste, no matter how much money you have, and I hate waste. I grew up in a Chicago suburb without much money, and developed my attitudes about “wasting money” from that perspective.

My youngest child said something to me when she was a third grader that illustrates my point. She proclaimed after school one day that if she were rich, she would have a whole candy store in her house. I told her that she was rich. Our family is rich. We live in an amazing city and state, in a beautiful house, go to an incredible school, and eat incredible food whenever we want to. We are very rich! We could have a candy store’s worth of sugary treats in our house anytime we wanted, but we don’t, because that’s a bad idea. And bad ideas are bad ideas, regardless of wealth.

So that’s the philosophical part. No, of course all the “important things in life” can’t be solved with money, but yeah, everything else is a whole lot easier. I don’t worry about money the way I used to. I think I worry now about more important things, but who knows….maybe not…. Maybe if I was poor(ish) again I’d be more free to do other things – things that don’t risk losing a lot of money! And maybe that would be better.

You also have to remember that most people don’t just start making that kind of money right away. You sort of grow into it, and everything else grows along with it. Winning the lottery would be something else I’m sure, but that’s another question.

A final note: making money isn’t any harder than any other “hard things” you may have done. It’s just a different goal. I was a furniture maker before I started what I do now. I had made a lot of things in life, but never money, so I decided to try and make some of that. Turns out I can. It wasn’t easy per se, but it wasn’t any harder than any other long term goal I’ve had. It’s just that the goal was to make money.

Good luck.

EDIT (because people were asking what I do, and apologies for the anonymousness....):
I went from furniture making to options trading. The joke was that it was a totally natural transition because I was already good at counting in sixteenths. That was the late 90s when money was pouring from the sky in the options pits. You just had to know where to stand. I spun a financial services business out of that in 2001 and that's what I do now. It's a very narrow niche. An opportunity you'd really only know about if you were in the business already.

Options trading, or any kind of securities trading for that matter, is pretty purely a money making venture. You're not "making" something that you then sell for money. You're just making money. I was a bit of a numbers geek already, and decided to go for a straight-to-the-source method.