This is a great question about habits of successful people and families …
I read your post about energy savings and saw a comment from from someone named Melissa K. You had responded to a reader from overseas and shifted your language and units to their syntax, talking in square meters and degrees Celsius rather square feet and degrees Fahrenheit. She said, “You often talk about the knowledge that the affluent pass onto their children and this post is a great example. You pretty effortlessly switch dialects to fit your European audience. I recently was debating school English curricula and argued that we need an earlier emphasis on audience for kids.”
It seems obvious now that it is spelled out in front of me, which makes me want to ask. What other behaviors do you think differ from successful people and ordinary families? Not things like how a 401(k) works but behavioral patterns?
Leron P.
One of the big ones seems to be the ability to constantly be moving toward whatever it is they have purposed in their heart. You see this passed on to children of the successful more often than not, modeled after a lifetime of observing it. To be more specific about it:
- Clearly identifying what it is they want to achieve
- Taking specific, coordinated, planned, targeted action toward arriving at the end goal
- Spotting or creating opportunities that might not be apparent to help them get there more quickly
- Putting their own long-term interest ahead of their short-term wants, ego, or emotions
Successful people, to borrow a phrase, are like heat seeking missiles. It may sometimes seem like I am unfocused or going from thing to thing if you read the blog, but you cannot imagine the level of obsession I bring to a project when it gets my attention. There have been hints of it but I doubt many people realize how non-normative it is if they aren’t like that themselves or know someone who is. Almost everyone in my life who is successful in his or her field has some derivation on this theme (not all – there are a few who somehow woke up to find themselves in the executive suite but, generally, it’s true). Stumbling into success is possible but it seems to be the exception. Rather, most have been been perfecting, obsessing, and driving toward their particular end goal, in their particular field, and will put everything else aside to achieve it. If you haven’t seen the documentary film, Indie Game: The Movie, watch it. That’s what I mean. Martha Stewart was the same way with lifestyle improvement. Sam Walton was the same way with retail. Warren Buffett was the same way with investing. Tiger Woods was the same way with golf.
[mainbodyad]Even if you never become a household name, if you are obsessively focused on an area that offers high potential rewards, and you have the natural ability to leverage that focus (you’re not going to become the greatest basketball player of all time if you are 4’11” tall and have no hand-eye coordination), you can end up light years ahead of everyone else. A real estate investor in the middle of Iowa might very well amass an eight-figure property portfolio by the end of his or her lifetime simply because of 30, 40, 50+ years of studying values, waiting for opportunities, grabbing them when they manifest themselves, or crafting them out of thin air. He or she wakes up every day looking, searching, thinking up ways to collect more rents. Very few people do that. They wake up and just go on autopilot, getting closer to death without any real agenda. That’s fine if it makes you happy but it seems as if few people actively choose that life. Most appear to fall into it and don’t know how to escape. Successful people always make it a point to actively choose.
You can tell whether or not someone has this disposition almost immediately if you are in proximity to them. I’ll give you a real world example of someone who doesn’t to make the contrast starker. Earlier this morning, I came across a post on an online message board devoted to healthy living. The author of the post wrote about an experience that “horrified” her to the point “inside [she] just wanted to die.” Here is the story she left on one of the most popular public fitness forums in the world, in her own words:
This is a textbook example of how not to react or feel if you want to be successful in life. Should the man have approached her? Probably not. But were I the woman in this situation, my brain would have rapidly gone through a couple of checklists like this:
- Am I morbidly obese? Yes. Check.
- Do I want to lose weight? Yes. Check.
- Does this person seem genuinely helpful and concerned? Yes. Check.
If I take him up on his offer, what are the likely outcomes?
- I get closer to my goal in less time
- I look better, sooner than I otherwise would have, improving my social, athletic, and sexual capital; perhaps even financial capital given the studies showing more attractive people earn higher salaries and garner more promotions
- I remove the risk of early death and disease much more quickly, lowering my probability of a significantly negative outcome, saving me money down the line, and making life more enjoyable along the way
- I have access to someone more experienced in this area than I am, letting me extract their knowledge capital at no cost, benefiting from his past efforts. It’s the intellectual equivalent of collecting the dividends on someone else’s stock certificates.
- I add someone to my life that cares enough about others to break social protocol, risking backlash, meaning they are probably a decent person despite lacking tact
Final analysis? Score! This is amazing stroke of luck. Grab onto it. This is like a real world video game encounter giving me a chance to level up faster.
Instead, this woman felt “gutted” because the man who offered to help her said out loud what everyone else already knew: That she was morbidly obese. She let a wonderful opportunity pass, to her own detriment, because he made her feel uncomfortable despite his good intentions. She knows she’s fat. She is working on changing the fact she is fat because she doesn’t like it. Yet, she wants to delude herself, on some level, that everyone around her is ignorant of this fact by refusing to own it. If she did accept that everyone else is aware of it, she wouldn’t have been embarrassed any more than if he had pointed out her hair color, race, age, or nationality.
I, and most successful people I know, would have jumped up, given him a hug, said, “You know, I’ve already lost almost 18 pounds but this could accelerate my efforts. Your timing is perfect. Give me your contact information and let’s setup a time to meet and formulate a plan.” We’d have done the same if it were a business opportunity, a chance to learn some skill we wanted to learn, or any other beneficial offer.
Even more perverse, her reaction is to be discouraged and want to quit her weight loss journey. It’s very unusual for a person to isolate this sort of sub-optimability to one area of their psyche as mental constructs like this spill over into other areas and you very rarely see it in the children of the successful. It’s highly unlikely this poster, under her present mindset, will ever make it into the top 10% of income, ever do anything extraordinary with her life, or ever reach the top of her chosen field, even if she is just as smart or just as talented as those who are. She is her own worst enemy. Her weight, in this case, is merely a symptom of how she deals with things that cause her discomfort. It’s hard to get ahead in life if you act like this.
You Cannot Correct What You Will Not Acknowledge
You cannot correct what you will not acknowledge. Knowing something isn’t enough. You have to acknowledge it. Own it. Forget your pride, forget your ego, and do whatever it takes to improve yourself. Less successful people fall into this trap all the time. They won’t raise their hand during a lecture, asking a question, because they worry it will make them look dumb. Who cares? Sam Walton used to go to trade meetings and talk to everyone he could throughout the supply chain, extracting every bit of information because he owned the fact he knew nothing and was at a huge disadvantage to competitors. He was a learning machine. As a college student, Warren Buffett would take the train another city, pound on the doors of corporate headquarters, and spend the day asking questions of an executive to understand an industry upon which he didn’t, yet, have a grasp.
That is, successful people are willing to look stupid in the short-term to end up smarter in the long-term.
[mainbodyad]When you grow up in a household of successful people, this attitude gets subconsciously absorbed more often than not. Watch the grown children of successful people at college. If something goes wrong, they take action, often without parental involvement. They’re organizing study groups, talking to the professor after class, signing up for a tutor, or tracking down others who have taken the class before them to try and gain an advantage. You rarely see a self-identity crisis; “am I worth it?”, “am I stupid?”, “do I belong here?”. To them, the sub-par performance is nothing more than a problem to be fixed on the road to where they are inevitably going to end up – with a good job, a lucrative income, and maybe a vacation house for the summer. The children who grew up without having this inculcated in them end up hiding their failure, doubting they belong, and, in many cases, dropping out of school despite having nearly identical academic achievements. This is one of the challenges of upward mobility in the education (and, thus, income) system. On May 15, 2014, The New York Times magazine division published a fantastic essay about it, and what one Texas University is doing to try and solve it, that is worth reading.
Sometimes, acknowledging reality means accepting things that can’t change. I was reading an online account the other day of a scientist. He loves his son, but his son was simply not college material. His boy didn’t have the intellect and cognitive ability to make a career from his mind. The father was posting about how he had to fight with the counseling department at the high school – which refused to accept what was plainly obvious – to get his boy off a college path and focus on trade school, instead, where he could work with his hands, improve the world, and make a good living. Today, his son is doing well in his field, has no debt, makes twice the income his former classmates do despite them having a degree, and is working his way through community college, paying cash, so he’ll eventually have the piece of paper, anyway. The successful father saved his kid a decade of lost opportunity by acknowledging the facts and adapting his strategy to do the best possible with what was on the table. That’s your model. That’s how you want to teach your family to act.
The short version of all of this is, if you want to give your kids some of the advantages of successful families, teach them to become heat seeking missiles themselves by:
- Owning their mistakes and shortcomings, acknowledging in objective terms where they are behind the curve
- Seeing those mistakes and shortcomings as temporary failings that are not indicative of where they will end up in the future nor an inextricable part of who they are provided they are willing to change the behavior that caused them, or accepting that which cannot be changed and adapting the strategy to maximize the best possible outcome within those confined parameters
- Taking advantage of any and every opportunity that offers a good trade-off, consistent with their moral values
- Sacrificing their ego, pride, and short-term wants for their long-term objectives
Life gets a lot easier, and a lot more fun, when you have this disposition.
Reader Comments (29)
Comments are presented chronologically, with replies indented beneath the comments to which they respond.
Adrian Burns
September 15, 2014
This was a good post like most of your writing and contained many good points but I sort of feel like a quality is mentioned. Often, you cite your "mental wiring" Joshua as being "different" and I believe it's true about some of the examples cited above.
I put this in the finding your passion, doing what you love school of thought that shows up in a lot of your writing.
A person can adopt the bullet points of your last paragraph but if they lack the interest/passion of retailing possessed by Sam Walton, investing possessed by you and Mr. Buffett and the like it seems very unlikely that you're going to see the behavior mentioned in the paragraph beginning with: "You cannot correct...".
It seems like before a person can follow this post, they're going to have to figure out whatever "they have purposed in their heart" (from your first sentence). I sort of feel like you addressed this anecdotally in the above by citing those around you who "have it", but for those who don't? I just can't see how you can make someone passionate about retailing, homemaking or investing even if you cite the success of Walton, Stewart and Buffett. I see it myself visiting this blog. Love your pieces on investing and personal finance; ignore your posts on cooking, Creed cologne and the like. That stuff doesn't interest me. It's not going to interest me.
And yet it interests you (otherwise you wouldn't write about it). Was that interest inherent in your "wiring"? Or, per your heat-seeking missile metaphor, is it something (like your "as an operator I can run pretty much ANY business" statement) where a successful person can guide themselves into any direction they feel will lead to their success?
Joshua Kennon
September 15, 2014
Replying to Adrian Burns
That is such a great point @disqus_tMFkhnYmZ0:disqus. I still have a similar question sitting on my "too hard" pile from a message I received last year, which I promised to answer someday. At this point, I don't know.
There are some people who stumbled upon their passion, despite not having it intrinsically. They somehow found themselves in banking, or insurance, or retail, or software and developed a real love of the product despite feeling nothing for it initially.
Others I know don't care about the thing itself, but a certain aspect of it. That is, they may not like real estate but they love getting a good bargain and striking deals, so real estate is just the means rather than the end for them to play the game they want to play. If there is a way to teach or instill passion, I think the secret rests somewhere in here. You may not care so much about selling vinyl siding or whatever it is, but if you transform it into a secret game - e.g., I'm going to make $500,000 in profits from selling this, like farming in a video game, them use it to acquire a small apartment building nobody knows about so it starts working for me - so that the game is your passion, winning, it's probably going to be a lot easier. If you look at psychology, you can get most primates excited by collecting tokens, symbols, even monkeys. Look at the sociology experiment with the Bottle Bank Arcade. Make recycling fun and everyone wants to recycle. By "game-ifying" your life, if you will, you can motivate a lot of behavior. You're compelled by enjoyment of the results and the challenge itself, the mechanism being sort of inconsequential.
For me, it's just an almost insatiable, compulsive curiosity about how things work and, once something gets in there, it's all I can think about to the point everything else melts into the background. Case in point: Last night, Aaron and I were running calculations for a certain type of real estate investment to gather research and found a property we loved up in Canada that would serve as a good rough outline. It took me hours but before I went to bed at 4 in the morning, I had digital reproductions of the blue prints on my home desk that were never supposed to be made public because I had to track them down to run the numbers on them. The building owner, architect, and construction company have no idea I'm sitting here with them (I'd never use them, obviously, since they aren't mine and are copyrighted. I attained them legally without doing anything even remotely questionable. They are nothing more than an academic tool for me to analyze the economics of comparable projects to try and run profitability scenarios if I wanted to do something roughly in the same vein in or around Kansas City.) For someone else, those hours would have been miserable work. For me, they were a thrill. You're right that I don't think you can make someone enjoy that sort of thing. You either do or you don't.
Someone like me can get excited about so many things that I can pretty much do well in most businesses (exceptions exist - I'm never going to make a fortune in the debt collecting business, for example, because I'd loathe it). If, say, I were suddenly the CEO of a railroad, I'd have an office decorated in Monopoly memorabilia and have old train stock certificates framed on the wall. I'd wake up every day and calculate tonnage costs and profits, mentally calculate my share of the dividends, and have to contain my outright glee for playing a real world version of the board game. It sounds stupid, it sounds juvenile, but I'd love it. I don't care. I'd be working 18+ hours a day because I wouldn't want to do anything else.
So ... all of this is a long-winded way of saying: I don't know, yet. It's one of those things I've been thinking about for awhile now, and I promised to answer, but I haven't settled it in my heart or mind.
Frankie
September 16, 2014
Replying to Joshua Kennon
Cal Newport talks a bit about becoming passionate about a subject that resonates with me. Basically, you get good at something and then you become passionate about it. You need small wins to get the snowball rolling, and then your skill ignites your passion for something that you have become good at.
http://calnewport.com/blog/2014/03/02/the-student-passion-problem/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+StudyHacks+%28Study+Hacks%29
The mindset is that if you aren't immediately good at something, then move on. It is very analogous to left brain vs right brain. Just mental bucketing people do to put themselves down, and lift themselves up in some cases (I am a capable right brain math guy vs I am a shitty communicator because I am not a left brainer).
http://www.thestraightaconspiracy.com/2013/10/the-truth-behind-left-brain-right-brain.html
innerscorecard
September 15, 2014
Replying to Adrian Burns
This is such a good question. I feel that if we as a society could find the answer to this, it would revolutionize not only the education system but possibly also the way parents rear children.
Adrian Burns
September 15, 2014
Thanks for the response, Joshua.
"Game-ifying" the experience is an interesting strategy/tactic that I hadn't really considered.
After posting, my thoughts went to Buffett's comments (re: Youtube video(s)) about winning the genetic lottery and how if he were born in another time, another race, another gender if he would have anywhere near the success that the Warren Buffett we know obtained. Then I thought about the parental influence: how Buffett was surrounded by investing and how you grew up in a household of entrepreneurs building their business and minus these influences would you two have the interest and the eventual successes that you did. But, I think, it's too easy to use that sort of thing as an excuse NOT to succeed.
"Game-ifying". I'm going to have to give this some thought. Per your last paragraph, It's something I haven't quite "settled it in my heart or mind", but I'd be interested in your future thoughts on the matter.
Thanks, again, for your time and writing. I really appreciate what you do.
joe pierson
September 15, 2014
Replying to Adrian Burns
"But, I think, it's too easy to use that sort of thing as an excuse NOT to succeed."
I agree with that BUT the challeges are vast, learning those successful traits takes years of dedication.
Adrian Burns
September 15, 2014
Replying to joe pierson
Oh, Joe, I don't disagree with the years of dedication. The nagging, hopefully, is something that can be dealt with (or at least minimized) by making it as game-like as possible (per Joshua's comments). And the "it's too easy to use that sort of thing as an excuse NOT to succeed" was sort of a mental "don't go there" on my part.
This post began by someone asking Joshua for the "secrets of the successful" if you will. I know from past reading (on this blog and others), how easy it is to start nitpicking the "successful" person by bringing up all the perceived advantages they may or may not have had and use it as an excuse NOT to succeed. I was just trying to preempt that sort of thinking on my part and others.
innerscorecard
September 15, 2014
Replying to Adrian Burns
Your last paragraph is so spot-on. I remember reading threads on countless online forums where people pooh-pooh Buffett by saying "oh, he was the son of a Congressman and grew up in privilege." If they had simply read The Snowball or done any real research they would have realized that the young Buffett was working in a grocery store, selling things door-to-door, picking up stub tickets at the race-track, and the like.
Joshua Kennon
September 15, 2014
Replying to Adrian Burns
No problem. Sorry about my original response disappearing but it's back now. The mystery that is Disqus required me to approve my own comment from the very account that had written it. I've given up trying to understand its Delphi-like ways.
As for the gaming thing: Some people have tried to translate the gamification, as it is sometimes called, into a real world tool, which I think it promising. If you haven't, you might want to check out HabitRPG, which treats your task list and agenda like an old-school Final Fantasy game with Level Ups the more you accomplish. I think there are a lot of opportunities in personal fitness, personal finance, and even education to use it. There's a company called Badgeville that provides gamification behavioral platforms to huge corporations like Oracle and Samsung to influence productivity.
innerscorecard
September 15, 2014
Replying to Joshua Kennon
I think money itself is a decent gamification tool. Too bad it doesn't work for health (fitness, relationships).
Andrew Lynch
September 16, 2014
Replying to Joshua Kennon
There's a couple of good apps in terms of fitness: Fitocracy is a good one that gives you points and level-ups for completing exercise - and the harder the workout, the more points you get. You can also get badges for things like bench-pressing more than a certain amount, running a certain number of miles in a week, etc.
There's also a great app called Pact, where you can wager, say, $10 that you will go to the gym 3x that week - and each workout you miss costs you $10. If you manage to hit all your workouts, you receive a small payout (funded by the fines on all the people who missed a workout). It's fantastic.
Joshua Kennon
September 17, 2014
Replying to Andrew Lynch
Those sound great; thanks for letting me know! I'll look into them.
innerscorecard
September 15, 2014
This post hit very close to home for me.
For the first decades of my life, I was drifting along without a real purpose. It outwardly looked like I was successful, in terms of the degrees I was amassing, but in truth, I was pretty aimless. Then I hit some adversity and really hit rock bottom, as I had no base. I was mired in the exact kind of unproductive and self-centered identity crisis that you describe above.
Then I managed to do a few things right. I found a few blogs (including this one) that really made clear that my fate in life would be due to the choices I made. And I read The Snowball.
And most importantly, I chose the right spouse.
I'm definitely not the smartest person out there. I'm not even that diligent. But I do try to learn and improve each day. And my life and outlook looks very different today than it did 2 years ago.
Someone
September 16, 2014
Replying to innerscorecard
I'd love to hear what other blogs you found that were so helpful to you. Thanks for sharing your story.
innerscorecard
September 16, 2014
Replying to Someone
The chief ones I'd recommend are Early Retirement Extreme and Mr. Money Mustache. Those two, along with this blog, are all examples of people who chose financial independence (and the requisite emotional and intellectual independence required to achieve this in our society). The difference is that each has a very different approach that works for them. Some people might feel that there's cognitive dissonance in reading about ERE living in an RV or MMM riding his bike trailer many miles to Costco and then reading about Joshua buying Creed and the like, but I don't. I think they illustrate the importance of finding your own comfort level and pursuing what makes you happy regardless of how that compares to any other people.
Most crucially, these three blogs are examples of people who got independent apart from their blog. What I mean is that they aren't blogs selling information about how to sell information, for instance. They are "sustainable" examples in that way.
Someone
September 16, 2014
Replying to innerscorecard
I've read Early Retirement Extreme and MMM for a few years now. Excellent blogs, I agree. 🙂 Very inspirational, along with Kennon's blog.
I also find it interesting that there are many roads that lead to Financial Freedom, and perhaps every reader can pave his or her own road.
Do you have additional favorite blogs? I wouldn't mind adding more blogs to my reading list. 🙂
innerscorecard
September 15, 2014
Also:
Joshua, the one thing I really admire about this blog is that you are willing to say so much explicitly. Obviously, you're not the only one in the world with this mindset, but most people who do have it keep their cards close to their chest. Speaking only in terms of self-interest, that's probably the more expedient thing to do. If you have an advantage, you want to keep it to yourself. It's interesting to me that you're willing to share by spelling things out in such a detailed way (unlike the platitudes that most give, even if they themselves know much better).
Why do you think you're so willing to be candid (as well about what got you yourself to where you are - I think some people [i.e. mainstream media or blogosphere] could perceive this as arrogant, where I think me and most of the readers of this site conversely really appreciate it as detailing one successful path out of many, which few people do.
innerscorecard
September 15, 2014
To provide a counter-point to the "you have it or you don't" (and even Buffett's assertion that you either get value investing or you don't), I had no interest at all in investing until about 1.5-2 years ago. I even started reading The Intelligent Investor many years ago but couldn't finish due to lack of interest.
But then suddenly things changed, and I am constantly trying to improve my knowledge of accounting, finance and investing. Things that I would fall asleep reading in college are literally my nightly entertainment now.
So maybe life can also change people for the better by changing their needs, wants, and desires. But maybe I'm a special case. For instance, my MBTI has actually changed substantially over the year.
Kapitalust
November 27, 2015
Replying to innerscorecard
I took an accounting course in high school because I thought it was something I was going to enjoy and instantly hated it the first class. I skipped the rest of the classes after the first month and passed the course by the skin of my teeth - like literally a percentage away from failing.
Fast forward 10+ years and I absolutely love the thing I hated all those years ago. I get the same thrill and excitement learning about how all the financial statements balance and connect as someone who gets their thrills gambling. It's intoxicating.
Maybe it's dependent on context and goals. I didn't have the same goals as a 15 year old as I do now. My biggest priorities at age 15 was to skateboard as much as possible. Accounting was not to be found anywhere on my hierarchy of interests and importance.
Angie
September 16, 2014
I have also noticed that assertiveness and success are highly correlated. I would even wager that most succesful people are hustlers. What do you think of my opinion, Joshua ?
Frederick
September 16, 2014
Replying to Angie
Good answer Joshua, it's so true that successful people have the energy and willpower to accomplish difficult tasks, while lesser people shrink at the thought. I think it's why Charlie Munger is so impressed with people like Wang Chaungfu and Elon Musk who tackle projects others see as impossible.
Nirav Desai
September 16, 2014
Such a good post. I help people save and invest for their future, and I tell them that half of my job is protecting them from themselves.
But is this something that can be taught, or is it a natural by-product of curiosity/intelligence?
Genevieve
September 16, 2014
I feel your example of the overweight woman was the wrong one to give. Whether a woman is skinny or fat, someone will always have something to say about how she looks. Is this something to be discussed in public? In my opinion, no.
Instead, I feel like the advice I would give her would be to about how to set aside what others say and actively pursue the right path for you.
Joshua Kennon
September 16, 2014
Replying to Genevieve
Welcome to the site =) Thank you for taking the time to write and share your thoughts.
In many cases, I would agree with you when you say:
However, this case is not one of those times because she posted it to one of the most popular fitness forums in the world with millions of active users, which ended up resulting in a lively debate that was already 11 pages long at the time this post was written (and has grown since). If she weren't comfortable making it public, she wouldn't have put it on the Internet for the entire world to see, let alone on such a popular discussion board, actively engaging in a conversation about it with others, some of whom are telling her that her behavior and emotional response were not ideal if she wants to be successful.
Why should such a public comment, made in such a public way, be exempt from criticism? Are we expected to only comment on it if we lie to her and tell her that her reaction was perfectly acceptable?
Is it moral to avoid pointing out bad thinking simply to avoid hurting someone's feelings, especially if doing so has the potential to stop others from acting so sub-optimally?
I think those questions aren't rhetorical and each of us needs to answer them for ourselves. I firmly believe that when someone writes something in the public sphere, fully intending it to have public distribution, directly quoting them at length with no modifications to their text before addressing the writing itself is in no way inappropriate.
Kat
September 17, 2014
Replying to Joshua Kennon
The problem with this woman posting it online is -- as with many people who post on that site -- I don't think she was actually looking for feedback or opinions. She was looking for validation of her emotions and maybe a little venting.
Joshua Kennon
September 17, 2014
Replying to Kat
Let's say that you are right (you very well could be).
This is off-topic from the post itself (which deals with how successful people tend to view opportunities, which most everyone can plainly see would not be how this woman reacted), but it presents an interesting ethical question.
Namely, "Once she opened the door to public comment, even if she did it solely for the sake of confirmation bias, is it a good thing, or even moral, to lie to her by telling her that the reaction she felt was healthy, good, and acceptable when she is clearly seeking to delude herself?"
Isn't patting her on her head, lying to her about her real concern, and demonizing the (seemingly) well-intentioned person who tried to help her (even if he never should have approached her in the first place) a sign of profound disrespect? It essentially says to her, "You don't matter. You aren't worthy of my actual opinion or of being treated like an adult. I would rather coddle you, soothe you, lie to you, in order to give you the temporary illusion of happiness rather than permanent, real happiness, which might require some difficult changes."
At what point does Mokita become complicity in self-destruction?
This question is relevant in so many areas of life, not just when talking about the risk of heart attack, stroke, and diabetes. This same situation arises when dealing with other dangerous practices, including, but not limited to:
Drug use
Overspending or debt utilization
Compulsive gambling
Hedonism and unsafe sexual practices
Irrational risk-taking
Unsound portfolio allocation practices
Why is this topic - personal health - treated any differently than the others when the brain chemistry behind it is nearly identical, or similar, in most cases? When it kills exponentially more people than alcohol, guns, and drugs do combined? What makes it so special that it is somehow sacred to the point it can't be broached when talking about the different mindsets between successful and non-successful people when presented with an opportunity?
Why is this topic so sacrosanct that it is considered taboo to respond truthfully to a person posting on a personal fitness forum? That is indicative of some very odd cultural values unique to certain demographics within the United States that I think are fascinating. Imagine if this exact same post had been written on a South Korean fitness forum!
joe pierson
September 16, 2014
From my perspective, passion to succeed comes from some personal experience, usually in childhood, that drives them. That makes them wake up everyday at 5AM to "make the donuts" as they say.
Maybe they were bullied as a kid, maybe their parents abused them, maybe they grew up being an outsider, maybe a tragic event happen when they were a teen, it is usually something that says "I'll get even". Once you have that, the rest is somewhat easy, pick any trade or job, doesn't matter. You will find a way to succeed. You have too. There isn't any other options.
Connelly Barnes
September 22, 2014
I'll echo what innerscorecard said, and mention that I had no interest also in investing until several years ago.
I think what has made me successful thus far in my career is just obsessively trying to improve at things that are fun most of the time. I remember when I was 8 years old I was obsessively programming and trying to improve at it, to make video games. Since the task is fun it gives positive feedback and you keep improving.
The major bane of my development is procrastination or delaying action. I think that's actually one reason I ended up in academia, because one can multiplex lots of different activities through one's daily life, and still in aggregate get some things done, even if it's a big disorganized ADD mess at the micro level. Probably if I were more focused I would be in industry building some specific technology.
For investing I feel the interesting part is getting insights. You see all these numbers and they make no sense, and then eventually you understand a business and they make sense. Luckily the process of vacuuming up vast amounts of information to eventually get insights is compatible with a very ADD personality.
If I were able to overcome my distractibility and just keep focusing on a single goal I'd probably be even more successful.
Tall Muse
November 29, 2015
I'm really interested in this topic of family lessons on financial success, and am considering following this blog... But I am really turned off by the judgy treatment of overweight people. Perhaps consider whether this blog is 'financial thoughts for skinny people only', or if you could have a kinder approach that would not turn off the 67% of all Americans who are overweight... But still people of worth, who care about savvy money management.
From your example, you think that a woman who is on a nutritious, so far modestly successful path to weight loss should take the advice of some yahoo whose sole credentials are: 1) socially inappropriate emotional insensitivity, 2) chutzpah, and 3) claiming to work out. Hunh.
There is no end to terrible advice from self proclaimed "experts" - for some reason the ones on weight and child rearing feel empowered to be nosy. I have found that effective coaches must be both knowledgeable and emotionally attuned. And sought out!
You also assume that her posting on a website about her natural emotional reaction to being publicly shamed by a stranger is somehow a sign that 1) she will quit her weight loss path, and 2) that she is a failure as a person and (bizarrely!) as a businesswoman. Hunh.
May I suggest an emotional blind-spot that is hindering both logic and empathy? Because that's harsh, and illogical. We all know highly successful people who are overweight, even obese (famous people include Hitchcock, Churchill, Oprah - I can name many more from my various workplaces). Struggling in one area of life does not make one worthless, stupid, or lazy. Yikes.
She was likely posting to work through her feelings (many of us women process verbally), and to seek out the support and encouragement to keep going. I am assuming by your assumptions that you process thoughts and emotions differently, and perhaps do not need external support, so you assumed the worst.
I have no idea how you finished this article - you lost me.
P.s. If you would like an example of communication by an effective, empathetic, strongly science-based weight reduction program, check out Precision Nutrition. They actually help people - like me - in part because they are kind/non-judgmental, and they understand the role of emotion.