What do Rich People Have in Common?

Read this True Story.

Roy H. Williams once said in his Monday Morning Memo:

Okay then, besides having a lot of money, what do rich people have in common?

No, it's not intelligence or education. Look around. The world is littered with unrewarded geniuses and every store has at least one clerk with a master's degree or a doctorate.

No, it's not conservatism, courage, luck or wealthy families.

And no, it's not even passion, instinct, timing or greed.

Consider the following:

A large group of 4-year old children are led into a room, one at a time. The room is equipped with a

two-way mirror. Each child is seated and given a marshmallow. “You can eat the marshmallow right now if you want. But if you wait until I come back to eat your marshmallow, I’ll give you a second marshmallow to go with it.” The giver of marshmallows then leaves the child alone in the room.

Is there anything we could learn from such a test? Could it tell us anything important about a child’s future?

One third of the children ate the marshmallow immediately.
One third held out for a short time, then ate the marshmallow.
One third waited 15 to 20 minutes until the giver of marshmallows returned with the promised, second marshmallow.

Small indicators are valuable to a savvy consultant, just as they were valuable to Walter Mischel, a scientist at Stanford 40 years ago.

Fourteen years later, at the age of eighteen, each of the original 216 children was located. Those who didn’t eat the marshmallow scored an average of 210 points higher on the SAT (610 verbal and 652 math versus 524 verbal and 528 math.)

At age 40, the group that didn’t eat their marshmallows had more successful marriages, higher incomes, greater career satisfaction and better health than the marshmallow eaters.

The 4 year-old who eats the marshmallow is oriented toward the present.
The 4 year-old who waits is oriented toward the future.

Yes, we can learn big things from small indicators.

Are you be oriented toward the future?
Or are you trapped in the present?

The single characteristic that rich people tend to have in common is an unusually long time horizon.

In other words, rich people get rich because they think further ahead than the rest of us. As a matter of fact, research indicates that the length of your time horizon is the one characteristic that most accurately predicts where you will land in the socioeconomic strata.

Ask him how he chooses investment properties and George Stakis, the renowned multimillionaire real estate magnate, will tell you, "There's one question that I ask myself when looking at a property, even if I plan to own it for only a few hours... 'Is this a property that I would want to own 20 years from today?' If the answer is 'no,' then I don't buy it."

Wealthy people routinely plant seeds that won't bear fruit for months or even years. But counter to what you may be thinking, wealthy people don't share this characteristic "because they're rich and can afford to think ahead." They become wealthy because they have this characteristic.

It's an established fact that a person who can't set aside a few dollars each month from a salary of twenty thousand a year will find it equally impossible to set aside a few dollars from a salary of two hundred thousand a year.

The average American thinks ahead exactly one paycheck. We know what must be paid with the one that's coming and we have a plan for what to pay with the next. Needless to say, this is not a plan for building wealth. This is a plan for being average.

How far have you been thinking ahead? (It's never too late to change.)

Try our quick quiz or go back to our Academy to start thinking rich today.