Who wants to be a millionaire? A lot of people. After all, that’s synonymous with being rich.

But these days, many wealth seekers say $1 million is no longer enough to be considered wealthy. With the rising cost of living, and the lengthy retirements many people must plan for, financial experts say the new benchmark for the rich is $5 million.....

Want to be rich? Of course you do.

Just remember this tip from billionaire H. Wayne Huizenga: ``No one ever drowned in their own sweat.''

The tale of how Huizenga, a college dropout, built companies such as Waste Management Inc. and Blockbuster Inc. is one of dozens of thumbnail sketches in ``All the Money in the World,'' a fat compendium published to mark the 25th anniversary of Forbes magazine's annual list of the 400 wealthiest people in the U.S.

To extract a narrative from a league table entails some contortion, and the strains are apparent though artfully masked here. Working in collaboration with Forbes and a team of writers and reporters, authors Peter W. Bernstein and Annalyn Swan have labored to create ``a collective profile'' of how the ultrarich amassed and sometimes squandered fortunes over a quarter century.....

If you think the timing is rotten for a book called ``The Middle-Class Millionaire,'' you may lack the drive to become one.

We're talking about Americans who worked hard and overcame adversity ranging from dot-com flameouts to political persecution to amass a net worth of $1 million to $10 million, as Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff show. A burst housing bubble is unlikely to keep this lot down.

Take Greg Hund, a former Wall Street account executive who worked from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., six or seven days a week to turn a Mail Boxes Etc. store on Manhattan's Upper West Side into a top revenue-producing franchise site for the chain.

Or Ping Fu, who was wrenched from her family during China's Cultural Revolution. She persevered and eventually co-founded software maker Geomagic Inc.

``The working rich are the hardworking rich,'' the authors say in this valuable if formulaic study.

The title is no oxymoron. Recent studies including Robert Frank's ``Richistan'' document how the newly rich often come from the middle class and retain its ethos. What sets ``The Middle- Class Millionaire'' apart is its focus on the lower reaches of Richistan.

Unlike the superrich, who are insulated from the hoi polloi, the working rich network like crazy and interact with a broad range of people. They exert more influence on society's ``aspirations, attitudes and spending habits,'' affecting the technology in our cars and the size of our suburban houses.....

Forget, for a moment, the blizzard of grim economic indicators and the suicides of billionaire Adolf Merckle and money manager Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet.

Go out instead and knock on some doors, as Ryan D’Agostino does in his new book, “Rich Like Them.” It might restore your hope.

This is an infectious account of one journalist’s quirky quest to unlock the secrets of American wealth by showing up, unannounced, at some 500 homes in affluent neighborhoods across the U.S. and asking, in essence, “How did you do it?”

He got some unexpected answers.

In a mansion in Lake Forest, Illinois, he met Frank Heurich, a man in a faded purple Northwestern University sweatshirt who made and leased shrimp-peeling machines. In a house along Long Island Sound, he talked to Arthur Tauck, who ran Tauck World Discovery, a niche travel company. He found more wisdom from a rare-book seller in Beverly Hills and a cabinet maker in Paradise Valley, Arizona, among many others.

D’Agostino began Project Door Knock as a series of articles for Money magazine. He got a list of the 100 richest zip codes in the land, from Atherton, California -- identified here as having the country’s wealthiest zip code -- to Westport, Connecticut. Then he caught redeye flights and pounded the streets of landscaped neighborhoods until he got blisters and plenty of strange looks.....

Paul McCartney found his. So did Warren Buffett, Meg Ryan, economist Paul Samuelson and photographer Gordon Parks, who directed the movie “Shaft.”

They all discovered what Ken Robinson calls their Element -- “the place where the things you love to do and the things that you are good at come together,” as he writes in “The Element.”

The equation for being in your element is simple: Talent + passion = success. Before you say “duh,” ask yourself this: Why do so many people squander their lives on jobs they hate?

Why do so many people squander their lives on jobs they hate?

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Earlier today, I wrote about Brett Wilder’s The Quiet Millionaire. It’s different than most personal finance books I’ve read. It’s targeted at those who are further along their financial journeys rather than at those just starting out. Still, there are bits and pieces in The Quiet Millionaire that are applicable to everyone.

I particularly liked Wilder’s list of the seven enemies to financial success (which is my phrase, not his). Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself thinking of this notion again and again. He writes:

If you want to become and stay the quiet millionaire, you must plan and manage your financial way of life…
You must be proactive in order to obtain the financial life you want.
By doing this, you will overcome the seven major obstacles to financial success.

Wilder is saying that we know there are certain common barriers to wealth. These obstacles arise for everyone. Because of this, it’s possible to plan in advance to cope with them. First, however, we have to be able to name these enemies so that we can prepare the proper weapons to fight them.

According to Wilder, the seven enemies of financial success are:

We all have are preconceptions about millionaires: they're tax evaders who just inherited their money from rich Aunt Flo, and they hang around the golf course all day with their snobby, elitist friends. So what's the average millionaire really like? Here are seven millionaire myths, and the real facts about the ones who seem to have it all.....


.....The Bottom Line
Maybe you see a pattern here: Today's millionaires are people who live within their means, budget and spend wisely, and focus on financial independence first. These are habits that take discipline, but ones we can all adopt to begin growing wealth. If these facts prove anything, it's that every one of us can strive to become a millionaire -- you can start by driving your old car with pride.