WHY NOT STUDY THE MILLIONAIRES?

Several years ago I read a book called, “The Millionaire Mind,” by a Dr. Stanley J. Thomas. Dr. Thomas was a professor of marketing at Georgia State University in 1996 when “The Millionaire Mind,” was first published. Since then he has transitioned in to a researcher and writer on the the rich and how they got that way. He now has a total of seven books to his credit, and is probably the foremost, and definitely the best known expert on millionaires and how they got to be millionaires. Heck, he may be the ONLY expert on millionaires and how they got to be millionaires. He's certainly the only one that I've ever heard of.

I'll tell you a secret though, he ain't that original. At least not in how he obtained his knowledge. He employed the simple method of finding them and asking them, “How did you get rich?” And, while it may be effective, it's not something new. My father used to tell me to do that when I had a car that I couldn't diagnose as a teenager way back in stone ages of the 1980s. Granted Dr. Thomas used more scientific methodology than just asking them out right. He had them take surveys and studied them as some scientist study lab rats while they were filling out the study.  And, he did extensive interviews with many of them.  But, he did get them to voluntarily participate. Trust me, the rich are VERY difficult to force into anything.

Here's what blows me away though is that we tend to teach by emulation  nearly all other subjects, but not when it comes to money. Why is that I wonder? Actually I don't wonder, I don't even care why it is that we won't study money the same way we study other subjects, I just want to change it. I do think though the reason why has to do with the love/hate relationship we all have with money. We all want it, but we don't want anyone else to have it. So rather than study those with money we vilify them, and hold them in scorn. Heck we even attempt to tax them back to our level with a confiscatory 'progressive' tax system. But, if we'd just take the time to learn about them, and how they go to be rich we'd all benefit. First off we'd know that if we didn't get rich, or at least self sufficient that the fault was all ours. Which may be part of why we don't study them. Who wants to take responsibility for themselves after all? And, we'd learn how they did it so that we would have the choice to do it ourselves.

But, it's not just millionaires that Dr. Thomas studied. First he studied the demographic of millionaires, and found that some huge incorrect perceptions about the rich. First off he found that most of them are indeed first generation rich, and that their children are financially self sufficient. Which leads me to believe that studying them is not some hopeless study of life's lottery winners. It's a study of repeatable behavior. With that in mind I think that developing a curriculum based on his work and making it required learning in our schools is something we must start doing immediately.