Monday, September 24, 2012

Impulse Control: The Difference Between Success and Failure

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.

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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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