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TOM@RICHHABITS.NET
In research popularized by Tom Corley’s Rich Habits work, a striking pattern kept showing up: roughly 79 percent of wealthy respondents to his Rich Habits Study said they were the primary cause of their financial condition.
Ninety percent of the respondents living in poverty, however, said the very opposite. The poor in my Rich Habits Study attributed wealth or poverty to fate. Many of the poor said they were not responsible for their financial circumstances. They pointed to the economy, employers, government, bad luck, parents, or “the system”.
Life is not fair. Illness, family collapse, discrimination, a bad local labor market, and inherited debt are real. Pretending they do not exist and cause short-term poverty is ignorance.
Pretending they explain long-term poverty, however, is also ignorance.
Wealthy people have a strong internal locus of control. They treat outcomes as something they can influence. They save a little when they can. They change jobs to earn more money. They learn a skill that pays a premium in the marketplace. They treat a setback as informational learning.
Poor people have a low or nonexistent internal locus of control. They blame external factors for their poverty. Blame is emotionally easy and financially catastrophic. If the problem is always elsewhere, there is no reason to try to improve, take risks, track spending, delay a purchase, ask for a raise, or attend community college at night to learn more and become better at what you do. Lottery tickets start to look rational. Credit cards start to look like a solution.
Victimhood becomes a script for justifying doing nothing to change your life circumstances.
The people who escape poverty are rarely the ones who waited for external forces to fix their lives. They are the ones who decided, while still poor, that fate was not the author of the next chapter of their lives.
Victimhood can rationalize a bad beginning, but, if you allow it to become a daily mode of thinking, your bad beginning will become a bad middle and a bad ending.
Tom Corley is an accountant, financial planner and author of “Rich Kids: How to Raise Our Children to Be Happy and Successful in Life”, “Effort-Less Wealth”, “Change Your Habits Change Your Life”, “Rich Habits Poor Habits”, “Rich Habits: The Routines Millionaires Use Daily to Build Wealth” and “Rich Habits Wealth Academy.”
