Brian Tracy argues that long-term thinking predicts financial success more than your starting advantages. A Harvard study found that people who plan years ahead move up economically. Set specific net-worth goals for 5, 10, and 20 years out, then delay every purchase decision to kill impulse spending.
If one of your goals is to become a millionaire, as it was my goal for many years before I achieved it, you have to learn how to think the way a millionaire thinks. If you want to get the results, especially the financial results that a millionaire gets now. The most important attitude for financial success is called long term thinking. Successful people think a long way into the future and they adjust their daily behaviors to assure that they achieve their long term goals. In a longitudinal study covering about 50 years done at Harvard universities in the 50s and 60s, they studied the reasons for upward socioeconomic 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 and they called it time perspective. This, by the way, was one of the greatest breakthrough discoveries of my life. And I've never really quite recovered from it because it was so important. Time perspective refers to the amount of time that you take into consideration when planning your day to day activities and when when making important decisions in your life. People with long time perspective invariably move up economically in the course of their lifetimes. When you spend weeks and 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, 20 years. They're willing to invest years in university and master's degrees and doctorate degrees and then years of training as accountants or doctors or dentists in order to be able to make a wonderful living for the rest of their lives, they have long time perspective. This is a characteristic of people who move up rapidly socioeconomically and financially in life. So 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, thinking that the money will always be there and that life will last forever. When you develop long time perspective, you develop the discipline to delay gratification in the short term and to save your money rather than spending it. The combination of long time perspective and delayed gratification puts you on the high road to financial independence. 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 in five years, 10 years and 20 years from today. Write it down. Make a plan. Take action on your plan every single day. And the second thing that you can do to assure your success in the long term is to 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. Your ability to think long term about your life and to set 10 and 20 year goals for yourself and then come back to the present and make sure that everything you do today is consistent with where you want to be in the future is the hallmark of people who become millionaires in the course of their working lifetimes.
