I appreciate the responses. I still am having trouble wrapping my head around it.
The way I understand it is that, you must invest into this currency for it to have any real worth for you. And effectively, your fiat investment, is your proof of work. Then, your proof of stake takes over and you are rewarded for that stake through forging. However, if you can't invest, and have 4 NXT like me, than the estimation timer for forging a block is 70000+ days!! I'll be dead by that time, and probably my children as well...lol. The NXT wiki spells it out best, "The amount of coin you can earn is dependent upon the number of coins you hold, the total number of coins "active" on the network, and the transaction fees included in blocks on the blockchain."
Think of it like this. You want to mine some BTC, do you power up your 386 and wonder why you aren't mining BTC? No, you go out and buy some $5k rig beast to mine BTC in a pool. Nxt is like that, but instead of buying depreciating electronic equipment, you spend a couple $k on appreciating Nxt and then you can forge. When everything is up and running, the block rewards will significant.