What Makes Rich People Rich?
24 September 2006CNN has a very interesting series of articles on their web site by a journalist who went into extremely wealthy areas and just started wandering around knocking on people’s doors, asking them how they’d been able to get to that point in their lives. It’s in five parts: part one, part two, part three, part four, and part five. It’s an interesting series, and it basically involves people explaining what they did to make money and what they think they learned. The articles take the position that there is an actual difference between the people who have managed to succeed, and it points to some interesting psychological test results:
Carol Dweck, a psychologist and professor at Stanford University, studies the connections between people’s outlook and their willingness to take risks. “The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life,” she writes in her book “Mindset,” which was published earlier this year. Dweck identifies two types of people: those who have fixed mind-sets and those who have growth mind-sets.
People with fixed mind-sets believe that they were born with a certain amount of intelligence, and they strive to convince the world of their brilliance so that no one finds out they’re not actually geniuses.
Growth-mind-set people believe that intelligence, knowledge and skill need to be “cultivated” by trial and error. Failing at something, they believe, is the best way to ensure they’ll succeed at it the next time.
She pointed to this experiment:
She posed a series of trivia questions to a group of people with fixed mind-sets and another with growth mind-sets.
After each answer, one and a half seconds passed before the participants were told whether they were right or wrong, and, if they were wrong, another one and a half seconds lapsed before they were given the correct response. Their brains were monitored with electrodes the entire time.
Dweck found that the people with fixed mind-sets cared a lot about whether they were right or wrong but not at all about what the right answer was. The growth-mind-set participants stayed interested until the correct answer was given, showing an interest in learning new information rather than in simply validating their intelligence.
When the test was repeated right away, only the growth-mind-set group performed better.
I’m not sure if this is something about the people’s attitude or something innate that results in the attitude – it’s definitely got some relevance to the discussion earlier this week about the philosophy behind the Rich Dad, Poor Dad book. I went and found her book, called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. She believes that your mindset is something that you can change – that you can essentially turn yourself into someone with a “growth mindset” by changing the way you think about things. I’m not so sure that it’s that easy for people to change the way they look at the world, but the book looks pretty interesting.
Discuss this on the Free the Drones forums.
2 Responses to “What Makes Rich People Rich?”
September 24th, 2006 at 6:10 pm
Interesting- if you liked that you’d also like The Millionaire Mind which is a much larger and more detailed survey of Millionaires and their mindset, success factors etc. It was recommended to me by a mulit-millionaire friend- I refer to it often- in fact I did just this morning! LOL
October 16th, 2007 at 5:29 am
please give me money
thats how you get rich