Getting wealthy and staying wealthy are two different games that reward completely different skills. Getting rich often requires optimism, risk-taking, and confidence — the willingness to bet on something not yet guaranteed. Staying rich requires almost the opposite: caution, humility, and awareness that what worked once may not work again. Many people who build wealth in one period of life lose it because they continue playing the building game after they have already won. They keep making concentrated bets, taking risks appropriate for growing but dangerous for protecting, assuming the strategy that got them here will keep them here.