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| Joachim De Posada |
By Joachim De Posada
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IMPULSE CONTROL: THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
SUCCESS AND FAILURE
I have just finished a speech at the NASA
Space Center in Port Canaveral for employees and executives. I was very pleased
to have so many intelligent, creative people with an open mind, eagerly listening
to any idea I could offer to make them more successful in their jobs and
personal lives. I have so much to learn from them also.
As in many of my speeches, I discussed a
very important principle that is very much required for anyone to succeed: Impulse control.
There is perhaps no psychological skill
more fundamental for human beings than resisting impulse. It is the root of all emotional self-control,
since all emotions, by their very nature lead to one or another impulse to act.
What is the meaning of the root word,
emotion? To move
The capacity to resist that impulse to act
recklessly, to quash the initial movement is perhaps one of the most important
factors involved in success.
A Stamford University psychologist, Walter
Mischel said “goal directed, self imposed delay of gratification is perhaps the
essence of emotional self regulation: the ability to deny impulse in the
service of a goal, whether it be building a business, solving an algebraic
equation, or pursuing the U.S.Open Tennis Championship”.
I was telling some of the members of my
audience how important it was for them to understand this principle. I told
them that I could be addressing tortilla salespeople in Mexico who are very
poor, newspaper salespeople in Caracas who are also very poor or flower
salespeople in Guayaquil who are definitely not known for their riches and the
message would be the same I was giving them.
There is no short cut. Everyone has to pay
the price and if you sacrifice now, you should be much better off in the
future. In financial terms, a good practice for you to immediately put into
practice is to save at least 10% of everything you make.
I could be speaking to the tortilla
salesperson in Mexico, not known for being rich, the newspaper salesperson selling
papers in the railroad in Caracas or the flower salesperson in Guayaquil,
Ecuador.
If you sell 10 tortillas in a day, you save
the proceeds of one tortilla. Same with newspapers, or flowers, you sell 10 you
save one. In 30 years, you will be very
well off, you will have money and you will live comfortably the rest of your
life.
They were stunned. In essence, what I said
is that even the poorest person, saving 10% of what they make, can become rich
sometime in their lives.
I told them there was no excuse whatsoever
for anyone to reach retirement age, and not have a nest egg that will carry you
through the rest of their lives.
I recounted one of the stories in my book “How to Survive Among
Piranhas” the story of Legson Kayira, a very, very poor man, who walked from his tribal village in
Nyasaland, north across the wilderness of East Africa to Cairo, where he
boarded a ship to America to get a college education. He left on foot with a
five day supply of food and no money. Two years later he arrived at Skagit
Valley College to start his college education.
He said: “I learned I was not, as most Africans
believed, the victim of my circumstances but the master of them”.
Let’s analyze what he said. He said that
you can become proactive and rise above your circumstances in order to achieve
whatever you want to achieve in life. Most people accept their circumstances
and never ever try to change them. That is the kiss of death.
There are a lot of people that have a
problem with impulse control. For example, if you run out of money before the
end of the week, you are not managing your money effectively. I sometimes ask
in my sessions “how can I tell if you have problems with impulse control? Well,
to begin with, when you see someone 100 pounds overweight, or smoking a
cigarette, you know he or she has a problem with impulse control.
But, financially how would you identify
someone with impulse control?
There is a definite answer. “We have to
look at their assets”.
. Those that are right now out of money
don’t have many valuable assets, who are living day to day, are always
struggling, have had a problem with impulse control for a long time and the
percentage of people in this situation unfortunately is very large.
There is some hope. First of all, pay off
all your debts. Stop paying interest for money owed. Then, start saving 10% of
everything you earn and in a few years you will see your savings grow and that
will motivate you to continue saving and very soon you will have a good chunk
of money saved up.
This is the marshmallow principle, which I
hold dear to my heart.
.
Some years ago, the President of a client
company was driving me to the airport, and he mentioned that what I said about
impulse control was one of the most important lessons he had learned in his
life. He proceeded to explain that when he was a young man he started working
for an energy company and he had a boss that he got along with very well.
The boss was an older fellow that had worked
35 years for the company. He had a company
car and a good salary. When he reached 65, by law, he had to leave the company.
(I think this is absurd since at 65 an executive has 10, 20, even 30 good years
ahead) This gentleman told me that he
was the one that had to accompany the boss to his house the last day of work. When they got to his home and he stepped out
of the car, he noticed the man was crying. He gave him the car keys and
confessed to him that he had no money to buy a new car. He was broke.
Imagine working 35 years for a company and
reaching your retirement age with no money, not even enough to buy a car.
That made such an impression on this
company president, at such a young age, that he swore that this would not
happen to him when he reached 65. He started
a savings program and has kept it to this day. This man is a rich man and he is
in his mid- fifties.
Yes, many of us, me included, have had
trouble with impulse control. It is our
psychological make up and sometimes the environment or our upbringing contributes
to our inability to control our impulses. But it is never too late for us to
start changing our behavior. I learned
my lesson a few years ago and I now have a good savings program.
What about you?
Can you afford to continue expending all
your resources so that when you get to 65 you are like 90% of all people in the
world, flat broke?
Those of you that are lucky enough to work
for companies that have high regard for their employees and offer a 401 k and
or a matching contribution program and financial advice and do not take
advantage of this situation, can’t be forgiven.
What a waste if you are not taking advantage of that program. It is
never too late to start saving.
Those of you that work for companies that
do not have those programs, take responsibility and start your own savings
program.
In our society, one of the richest in the
world, there is no excuse for anyone to reach the golden age plain broke. Hey,
if Legson made it, everyone can.
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