Posts Tagged Time Perspective
The Law of Time Perspective
Posted by davev in Start Thinking, Take Action on February 3, 2011
The most successful people in any society are those who take the longest time period into consideration when making their day-to-day decisions. This insight comes from the pioneering work on upward financial mobility in America conducted by Dr. Edward Banfield of Harvard University in the late 1950′s and early 1960′s. After studying many of the factors that were thought to contribute to individual financial success over the course of a person’s lifetime, he concluded that there was one primary factor that took precedence over all the others. He called it “time perspective.”
Plant Trees
What Banfield found was that the higher a person rises in any society, the longer the time perspective or time horizon of that person. People at the highest social and economic levels make decisions and sacrifices that may not pay off for many years, sometimes not even in their own lifetimes. They “plant trees under which they will never sit.”
Doctors
An obvious example of someone with a long time perspective is the man or women who spends ten or twelve years studying and interning to become a doctor. This person takes extraordinarily long time to lay down the foundation for a lifetime career. And partially because we know how long it takes to become a doctor, we hold doctors in the highest esteem of any professional group. We appreciate and admire the sacrifices that they have made in order to be able to practice a profession that is so important to so many of us. We recognize their long time perspectives.
Long Time Perspectives
People with long term perspectives are willing to pay the price of success for a long, long time before they achieve it. They think about the consequences of their choices and decisions in terms of what they might mean in five, ten, fifteen, and even twenty years from now.
Short Time Perspectives
People at the lowest levels of society have the shortest time perspectives. They focus primarily on immediate gratification and often engage in behaviors that are virtually guaranteed to lead to negative consequences in the long term. At the very bottom of the social ladder, you find hopeless alcoholics and drug addicts. These people think in terms of the next drink or the next fix. Their time perspective is often less than one hour.
Delayed Gratification is the Key to Financial Success
Your ability to practice self-mastery, self-control, and self-denial, to sacrifice in the short term so you can enjoy greater rewards in the long term, is the starting point of developing a long time perspective. This attitude is essential to financial achievement of any kind.
Action Exercise
Practice a long term perspective in every area of your life, especially in your financial life but also with your family and your health. Think of where you would ideally like to be in five years and begin today to take steps in that direction.
Think Like a Millionaire
Posted by davev in Start Thinking, Take Action on August 18, 2010
Attitude is Everything
The most important attitude for financial success is long-term thinking. Successful people think a long way into the future and they adjust their daily behaviors to assure they achieve their long-term goals. In a longitudinal study done at Harvard University in the 50s and 60s, they studied the reasons for upward socio-economic mobility. They were looking for factors that would predict whether or not an individual or family was going to move upward and be wealthier in the future than in the present.
They studied factors like education, intelligence, being born into the right family, or having the right connections. In every case, they found individuals who had been born with every blessing in life who did poorly. They also found individuals who had been born or come to this country with no advantages at all who had been extremely successful. What was the distinguishing factor?
They finally determined that there was only one key attitude that mattered. They called it “Time Perspective.” Time perspective refers to the amount of time that you take into consideration when planning your day to day activities and when making important decisions in your life.
Time Perspective
People with long-time perspective invariably move up economically in the course of their lifetimes. When you spend weeks, months and years developing your skills and ability and expanding your experience in order to be successful, you have long-time perspective. The average professional person has a time perspective of 10, 15 and 20 years.
Begin to see that everything that you are doing today is part of a long-time continuum, at the end of which you are going to be financially independent or financially unfortunate. People with short-time perspective think only about fun and pleasure in the short term. They have what economists call “The inability to delay gratification.” They have an irresistible tendency to spend every single penny they earn and everything that they can borrow.
When you develop long-time perspective, you develop the discipline to delay gratification and to save your money rather than spending it. The combination of long-time perspective and delayed gratification puts you onto the high road to financial independence.
Action Exercises
Now, here are two things you can do to develop the attitudes of financially successful people:
First, think long-term about your financial life. Decide exactly how much you want to be worth five years, ten years and twenty years from today. Write it down. Make a plan. Take action on your plan every single day.
Second, develop the ability to delay gratification. Instead of buying something on impulse, put off buying decisions for a day, a week or even a month. Decide in advance to “think it over” before you buy anything. This can change the way you spend money almost immediately.
Think Like a Millionaire
Posted by davev in Start Thinking on July 15, 2009
Attitude is Everything
The most important attitude for financial success is long-term thinking. Successful people think a long way into the future and they adjust their daily behaviors to assure they achieve their long-term goals. In a longitudinal study done at Harvard University in the 50s and 60s, they studied the reasons for upward socio-economic mobility. They were looking for factors that would predict whether or not an individual or family was going to move upward and be wealthier in the future than in the present.
They studied factors like education, intelligence, being born into the right family, or having the right connections. In every case, they found individuals who had been born with every blessing in life who did poorly. They also found individuals who had been born or come to this country with no advantages at all who had been extremely successful. What was the distinguishing factor?
They finally determined that there was only one key attitude that mattered. They called it “Time Perspective.” Time perspective refers to the amount of time that you take into consideration when planning your day to day activities and when making important decisions in your life.
Time Perspective
People with long-time perspective invariably move up economically in the course of their lifetimes. When you spend weeks, months and years developing your skills and ability and expanding your experience in order to be successful, you have long-time perspective. The average professional person has a time perspective of 10, 15 and 20 years.
Begin to see that everything that you are doing today is part of a long-time continuum, at the end of which you are going to be financially independent or financially unfortunate. People with short-time perspective think only about fun and pleasure in the short term. They have what economists call “The inability to delay gratification.” They have an irresistible tendency to spend every single penny they earn and everything that they can borrow.
When you develop long-time perspective, you develop the discipline to delay gratification and to save your money rather than spending it. The combination of long-time perspective and delayed gratification puts you onto the high road to financial independence.
Action Exercises
Now, here are two things you can do to develop the attitudes of financially successful people:
First, think long-term about your financial life. Decide exactly how much you want to be worth five years, ten years and twenty years from today. Write it down. Make a plan. Take action on your plan every single day.
Second, develop the ability to delay gratification. Instead of buying something on impulse, put off buying decisions for a day, a week or even a month. Decide in advance to “think it over” before you buy anything. This can change the way you spend money almost immediately.
