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21 Ways Rich People Think Differently
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/21-ways-rich-people-think-differently.html?page=1
By Mandi Woodruff | Business Insider – Tue, Sep 4, 2012 10:50 AM EDT
World’s richest woman Gina Rinehart is enduring a media firestorm over an article in which she takes the “jealous” middle class to task for “drinking, or smoking and socializing” rather than working to earn their own fortune.
What if she has a point?
Steve Siebold, author of “How Rich People Think,” spent nearly three decades interviewing millionaires around the world to find out what separates them from everyone else.
It had little to do with money itself, he told Business Insider. It was about their mentality.
“[The middle class] tells people to be happy with what they have,” he said. “And on the whole, most people are steeped in fear when it comes to money.”
Flickr / C. Pajunen1. Average people think MONEY is the root of all evil. Rich people believe POVERTY is the root of all evil.
“The average person has been brainwashed to believe rich people are lucky or dishonest,” Siebold writes.
That’s why there’s a certain shame that comes along with “getting rich” in lower-income communities.
“The world class knows that while having money doesn’t guarantee happiness, it does make your life easier and more enjoyable.”
2. Average people think selfishness is a vice. Rich people think selfishness is a virtue.
“The rich go out there and try to make themselves happy. They don’t try to pretend to save the world,” Siebold told Business Insider.
The problem is that middle class people see that as a negative––and it’s keeping them poor, he writes.
“If you’re not taking care of you, you’re not in a position to help anyone else. You can’t give what you don’t have.”
Getty Images3. Average people have a lottery mentality. Rich people have an action mentality.
“While the masses are waiting to pick the right numbers and praying for prosperity, the great ones are solving problems,” Siebold writes.
“The hero [middle class people] are waiting for may be God, government, their boss or their spouse. It’s the average person’s level of thinking that breeds this approach to life and living while the clock keeps ticking away.”
4. Average people think the road to riches is paved with formal education. Rich people believe in acquiring specific knowledge.
“Many world-class performers have little formal education, and have amassed their wealth through the acquisition and subsequent sale of specific knowledge,” he writes.
“Meanwhile, the masses are convinced that master’s degrees and doctorates are the way to wealth, mostly because they are trapped in the linear line of thought that holds them back from higher levels of consciousness…The wealthy aren’t interested in the means, only the end.”
I Love Lucy screencap5. Average people long for the good old days. Rich people dream of the future.
“Self-made millionaires get rich because they’re willing to bet on themselves and project their dreams, goals and ideas into an unknown future,” Siebold writes.
“People who believe their best days are behind them rarely get rich, and often struggle with unhappiness and depression.”
6. Average people see money through the eyes of emotion. Rich people think about money logically.
“An ordinarily smart, well-educated and otherwise successful person can be instantly transformed into a fear-based, scarcity driven thinker whose greatest financial aspiration is to retire comfortably,” he writes.
“The world class sees money for what it is and what it’s not, through the eyes of logic. The great ones know money is a critical tool that presents options and opportunities.”
7. Average people earn money doing things they don’t love. Rich people follow their passion.
“To the average person, it looks like the rich are working all the time,” Siebold says. “But one of the smartest strategies of the world class is doing what they love and finding a way to get paid for it.”
On the other hand, middle class take jobs they don’t enjoy “because they need the money and they’ve been trained in school and conditioned by society to live in a linear thinking world that equates earning money with physical or mental effort.”
8. Average people set low expectations so they’re never disappointed. Rich people are up for the challenge.
“Psychologists and other mental health experts often advise people to set low expectations for their life to ensure they are not disappointed,” Siebold writes.
“No one would ever strike it rich and live their dreams without huge expectations.”
BarackObamadotcom via YouTube9. Average people believe you have to DO something to get rich. Rich people believe you have to BE something to get rich.
“That’s why people like Donald Trump go from millionaire to nine billion dollars in debt and come back richer than ever,” he writes.
“While the masses are fixated on the doing and the immediate results of their actions, the great ones are learning and growing from every experience, whether it’s a success or a failure, knowing their true reward is becoming a human success machine that eventually produces outstanding results.”
10. Average people believe you need money to make money. Rich people use other people’s money.
Linear thought might tell people to make money in order to earn more, but Siebold says the rich aren’t afraid to fund their future from other people’s pockets.
“Rich people know not being solvent enough to personally afford something is not relevant. The real question is, ‘Is this worth buying, investing in, or pursuing?’” he writes.
11. Average people believe the markets are driven by logic and strategy. Rich people know they’re driven by emotion and greed.
Investing successfully in the stock market isn’t just about a fancy math formula.
“The rich know that the primary emotions that drive financial markets are fear and greed, and they factor this into all trades and trends they observe,” Siebold writes.
“This knowledge of human nature and its overlapping impact on trading give them strategic advantage in building greater wealth through leverage.”
12. Average people live beyond their means. Rich people live below theirs.
“Here’s how to live below your means and tap into the secret wealthy people have used for centuries: Get rich so you can afford to,” he writes.
“The rich live below their means, not because they’re so savvy, but because they make so much money that they can afford to live like royalty while still having a king’s ransom socked away for the future.”
richkidsofinstagram.tumblr.com13. Average people teach their children how to survive. Rich people teach their kids to get rich.
Rich parents teach their kids from an early age about the world of “haves” and “have-nots,” Siebold says. Even he admits many people have argued that he’s supporting the idea of elitism.
He disagrees.
“[People] say parents are teaching their kids to look down on the masses because they’re poor. This isn’t true,” he writes. “What they’re teaching their kids is to see the world through the eyes of objective reality––the way society really is.”
If children understand wealth early on, they’ll be more likely to strive for it later in life.
14. Average people let money stress them out. Rich people find peace of mind in wealth.
The reason wealthy people earn more wealth is that they’re not afraid to admit that money can solve most problems, Siebold says.
“
[The middle class] sees money as a never-ending necessary evil that must be endured as part of life. The world class sees money as the great liberator, and with enough of it, they are able to purchase financial peace of mind.”
Kim Bhasin / Business Insider15. Average people would rather be entertained than educated. Rich people would rather be educated than entertained.
While the rich don’t put much stock in furthering wealth through formal education, they appreciate the power of learning long after college is over, Siebold says.
“Walk into a wealthy person’s home and one of the first things you’ll see is an extensive library of books they’ve used to educate themselves on how to become more successful,” he writes.
“The middle class reads novels, tabloids and entertainment magazines.”
16. Average people think rich people are snobs. Rich people just want to surround themselves with like-minded people.
The negative money mentality poisoning the middle class is what keeps the rich hanging out with the rich, he says.
“[Rich people] can’t afford the messages of doom and gloom,” he writes. “This is often misinterpreted by the masses as snobbery.
Labeling the world class as snobs is another way the middle class finds to feel better bout themselves and their chosen path of mediocrity.”
Flickr / Wei Tchou17. Average people focus on saving. Rich people focus on earning.
Siebold theorizes that the wealthy focus on what they’ll gain by taking risks, rather than how to save what they have.
“The masses are so focused on clipping coupons and living frugally they miss major opportunities,” he writes.
“Even in the midst of a cash flow crisis, the rich reject the nickle and dime thinking of the masses. They are the masters of focusing their mental energy where it belongs: on the big money.”
18. Average people play it safe with money. Rich people know when to take risks.
“Leverage is the watchword of the rich,” Siebold writes.
“Every investor loses money on occasion, but the world class knows no matter what happens, they will aways be able to earn more.”
Flickr / Ibrahim Iujaz19. Average people love to be comfortable. Rich people find comfort in uncertainty.
For the most part, it takes guts to take the risks necessary to make it as a millionaire––a challenge most middle class thinkers aren’t comfortable living with.
“Physical, psychological, and emotional comfort is the primary goal of the middle class mindset,” Siebold writes.
World class thinkers learn early on that becoming a millionaire isn’t easy and the need for comfort can be devastating. They learn to be comfortable while operating in a state of ongoing uncertainty.”
20. Average people never make the connection between money and health. Rich people know money can save your life.
While the middle class squabbles over the virtues of Obamacare and their company’s health plan, the super wealthy are enrolled in a super elite “boutique medical care” association, Siebold says.
“They pay a substantial yearly membership fee that guarantees them 24-hour access to a private physician who only serves a small group of members,” he writes.
“Some wealthy neighborhoods have implemented this strategy and even require the physician to live in the neighborhood.”
Getty Images21. Average people believe they must choose between a great family and being rich. Rich people know you can have it all.
The idea the wealth must come at the expense of family time is nothing but a “cop-out”, Siebold says.
“The masses have been brainwashed to believe it’s an either/or equation,” he writes. “The rich know you can have anything you want if you approach the challenge with a mindset rooted in love and abundance.”
From Steve Siebold, author of “How Rich People Think.”
Infinite Wins Q4 Cup For National Campaign Being Recognized For Outstanding Performance
We are so proud of our team here at Infinite. The company has been recognized as the nation’s most profitable, productive vendor for our client.
Throughout the last few months, the team at Infinite has been in negotiations to continue to evolve the relationship with our client. Due to these negotiations, we were able to outperform every other vendor in the nation.
We doubled in size in the last month and the new promotion to our executive team, Alex
Huynh, will allow us to take on an even larger client load. We expect to open an additional location in the next few months.
Great job team!
Congratulations To The Newest Member of Our Executive Team
We are very excited to have promoted Alex Huynh to Assistant Management today!! We were overwhelmed by all of the wonderful things the team had to say about his hard work, dedication, and how much he genuinely cares for people. We are very proud and can’t wait to see him perform at a higher level.
A New Year’s Resolution for Business Success: Build a Better Leadership System
By Dr. Ray Benedetto and Tom Walter
What are you going to do to make your company better in 2013? Shooting for financial targets is hardly enough. Chasing financial goals is futile if the company lacks the human talent necessary to achieve such goals. In brief, making any company better depends on how leaders retain and leverage their human assets as a distinctive competitive advantage.
Our research has shown how entangled companies sustain distinctive competitive advantages in various industries by building unique and enviable cultures that stimulate creative thinking, constantly generate new ideas, motivate high performance, and consistently delight customers. Leaders of high-performing companies view their business as a system that requires the synchronizing of key subsystems. Great leaders know that the future success of any enterprise rests on the strength of their leadership subsystem, which includes the current and future direction of the enterprise and their leadership pipeline—how tomorrow’s leaders are being developed today.
The leadership pipeline is a lot more than merely planning for leadership succession. The pipeline is a set of integrated steps that begins with having the right people on board, extends to daily reinforcement of right behaviors, and manifests itself in discretionary thinking and exceptional performance. If you want to do better in 2013 and beyond, assessing your leadership subsystem is a good place to start. The following questions spanning eight key areas can help you begin:
Core values. Does the company have a set of explicit core values? Was staff from all levels of the company involved in creating these values? Are the values easy to understand? Does the set of core values, taken together, convey the spirit of the company? Are the values conspicuously displayed throughout work areas to remind employees about the values the company holds most dear?
Code of conduct. Have employees created a code of conduct that exemplifies how core values appear in daily behaviors? Do employees hold themselves and others mutually accountable for right behaviors? Does the performance evaluation and management system recognize and reward employees for exemplifying core values?
Organizational Purpose. Does the vision for the company’s future inspire suppliers and key partners as well as employees? Does the company mission clearly state daily commitments in serving the stakeholders? When employees meet formally to conduct company business, do they review and reinforce the organizational purpose (values, vision, and mission)?
Leadership Philosophy. Does each employee understand the difference between leadership and management? Is every employee viewed as a leader who has influence upon others? Does each employee have a defined circle of influence through which he or she can affect change?
Trust and Caring. Is each employee trusted to act as a responsible adult? Have the company shed a 20th century command-and-control management approach for a 21st century trust-and-track leadership approach? Does each and every leader work on building relationships based on trusting and caring for others? Does the performance evaluation and management system recognize and reward leaders for relationship building? Are leaders who fail to meet this standard assessed, counseled, and coached to develop these skills? Are leaders who fail to respond to positive development efforts relieved from duties and encouraged to find employment elsewhere?
Learning and Growth. Are employees at all levels taught how to read company financial reports and to assess functional performance related to cost and expense management and revenue generation? Does each employee understand how his or her daily performance contributes to company goals and objectives? Does each employee have an individual development plan that identifies three strengths to be leveraged as well as three improvement areas for the next performance year?
Transparency. Are employees receiving all the necessary daily and weekly information from which to make decisions? Do employees receive routine, comprehensive reports of company operations they can use to improve service to their internal customers? Are employees engaged in decision-making at the lowest levels related to cost and expense management as well as revenue generation, if appropriate?
Accountability. Is each employee held accountable for meeting objectives? Does each employee provide a formal accounting of performance, such as weekly huddles (The Great Game of Business -1992 – by Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham, New York: Currency-Doubleday)? Responsibility without accountability results in less than optimal performance!
Although answers to some of the above questions may not be easy, they provide a starting point for improving the leadership system within any company. The eight areas above serve as a framework through which leaders can work during the course of a year. Some areas are sequential, such as the code of conduct following establishment of core values, while others can run concurrently, such as learning and growth along with transparency. The keys to success are doing honest assessments, confronting the brutal facts, and pursuing solutions for each response that lacks a definitive “Yes!”
Dr. Ray Benedetto, DM, is a retired USAF Colonel. He founded a consulting firm that helps leaders build high-performing, character-based cultures in addition to his teaching leadership and strategic planning for the University of Phoenix Chicago Campus MBA program. Tom Walter is a serial entrepreneur and nationally recognized speaker on entrepreneurship, leadership and business culture. They are the co-authors of It’s My Company Too! How Entangled Companies Move Beyond Employee Engagement For Remarkable Results. For more information, please visit, http://www.ItsMyCompanyToo.com.
5 Traits of Leaders Who Are Ready for Social Good
http://www.forbes.com/sites/meghanbiro/2012/12/09/5-traits-of-leaders-who-are-ready-for-social-good/
Meghan M. Biro, Contributor
‘Tis the season to do good. You might not believe it if you’ve just come from the Mall, but the spirit of good is out there. Perhaps unexpectedly, good deeds and real social change are coming from business leaders who understand that success carries with it the opportunity to exercise social responsibility without the burden of government mandate.
The path to becoming a socially-responsible leader is not as difficult as one might think. It’s a logical extension of the passionate leader’s journey. Not all leaders take it, of course; I could find no real good numbers as I researched this post but my instinct tells me less than 50 percent of successful business leaders go on to contribute to social good in a meaningful way. I’m hoping these numbers continue to increase.
Todd Warren, my fellow Forbes contributor, educator and thought-leader on startup culture, has proposed an awesome post about five attributes of entrepreneurial leaders: vision and dissatisfaction with the present, knowing and taking advantage of one’s unfair advantages, ability to recruit people to extend your vision, flexibility and ability to learn and adapt, and persistence and execution. These attributes are, in my view, the basic requirements for a socially-responsible leader – but wait, there’s more. Warren’s five attributes may make a good entrepreneur but they don’t go far enough to explain why some business success stories – for example Bill Gates – go beyond business success to become social activists and philanthropists. For every Bill Gates there are 20 or 30 Carl Ichans, Mark Cubans, even – and I am a fanboi – Steve Jobs, who achieved enormous personal success and wealth but have not contributed back significantly to society. So how does a business leader transcend personal success and extend his or her skills to the realm of the do-gooder?
I’d argue there are an additional five traits necessary to be a socially-responsible leader:
1) Heightened situational awareness. It’s one thing to be focused on being aware of the business landscape by staying open to ideas to extend and perfect your vision. It’s a different skill to be aware of the world around you. In the movie Scrooged, Bill Murray is completely unaware of his assistant’s life challenges until the ghosts visit him; once his awareness is engaged and the focus expanded from his wants and needs to encompass those of others, he is transformed into a socially-responsible, charitable soul. To become socially responsible, leaders must look beyond themselves to see what motivates, or holds back, those around him. Then he or she can see the need in others – in the world – and turn the intense focus of the entrepreneur to solving larger social problems.
2) Emotional intelligence. Yes, this is one of my favorite themes, for a reason. Until a leader opens
his or her heart and mind to others, turns what is undoubtedly prodigious intelligence and focus outward to understand the challenges of others, there can be no authentic social leadership. If you see an emotionally limited leader doing good works, look for a smart tax advisor standing in the wings.
3) Empathy. This isn’t the same as emotional intelligence. I know lots of emotionally intelligent people who are more cerebral than they are empathetic. They can understand why people behave a certain way, and adapt, but at some level it does not reach them. Empathetic people are open to the world of hurt that exists on the periphery of the world of things; they know not only why people have needs, but also why it is important to meet those needs.
4) Media savvy. This might not seem like an attribute but it is. Look at Bill Gates then look at Steve Ballmer. ‘Nuff said. The media savvy leader has an advantage when he turns his attention to social good. Bono, no stranger to the media or financial success, has done tremendous good because he knows how to work the media to advance his cause. And some media, notably HuffPo and Mashable, are making it much easier for socially-aware leaders to do good. HuffPo’s HuffPost Education Section is a media hub for all things relevant to the country’s failing education system. The brain child of Brian Sirgutz, SVP of Social Impact at The Huffington Post/AOL, HuffPo’s Education Section came about after the media channel’s executive leadership watched the movie Waiting for Superman. It’s a content channel devoted to charting what’s wrong – and what could make it right – in our education system. It may not meet your criteria for doing good, but when you’re a media channel, access is your gift and your gold. Then there’s Mashable’s Social Good content channel. The editors of Mashable, led by Meghan Peters, Community Manager for Mashable, scan the Interwebs for news and evidence of individuals, leaders and organizations dedicating resources to social good. Sometimes all it takes is a light shining on a good act, or a horror, to alert society (and leaders) to the opportunity for social good. PS: My #TChat World of Work Community will be featuring both the talented Meghan and talented Brian this week as we celebrate via social media channels.
5) Selflessness. This is the tough one. Some entrepreneurs and successful (wealthy, not merely well-off) people are not acquainted with selflessness. They do things because their personal calculus tells them there’s a benefit. Maybe it’s the unreconstructed Catholic in me but by my reckoning, you haven’t done a social good if you expect to deduct it on your taxes. You do a social good when you have no expectation of repayment of any kind – we’re not buying indulgences here.
Non-profit, for-profit, individual or business leader – we can all learn a lesson during the festival of light, the season of charity and goodness. Open your hearts and minds before you open your wallets. Charity doesn’t count if you don’t understand the motivation.
