Читать книгу Think Bigger - Sonnenfeldt Michael W. - Страница 8

For the past few years, the average American savings rate has been about 5 percent, which lags far behind Europe’s 10 percent and Japan’s 40 percent. Still, it’s an improvement, considering that in 2005 Americans saved just 1.9 percent, a record low. Bear in mind that those statistics do not include stock holdings, so if Bill Gates, for example, holds most of his wealth in Microsoft stock, he could be deemed a low saver. But even taking stock holdings into account, it’s impossible to deny that Americans are comparatively poor savers. Twenty-four percent of us owe more money on our credit cards than we have in emergency savings. One-fifth of us don’t even have savings accounts, and more than a third of American adults have not begun saving for retirement.

Why can’t we show more self-control? For the past 40 years, an increasing number of behavioral economists have argued that most people do not act like the rational agents who populate economics textbooks. Instead of optimizing their personal and business goals, they do things that behavioral economist Dan Ariely describes as “predictably irrational.”3 Entrepreneurs, as you will see, have their own foibles, but excessive spending on ourselves is not one of them. This was brought home to me when I was in my twenties and working 80-hour weeks to grow my first business, while many of my peers in normal job situations were spending their evenings working on their social lives.

Most successful entrepreneurs either learn or are born with the capacity to delay gratification for critical periods in their lives. I’ve seen that capacity for self-control in many entrepreneurs who, even after their businesses became successful and even after they sold them for more than they could have imagined, continued to live simply and relatively modestly. It was this discipline that allowed them to plow their profits back into their businesses and maximize growth over the long term.

A lot of what we know about self-control comes from an ingenious experiment that the Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel created in 1968. Mischel wondered why a rational decision to delay his own gratification (vowing to pass on dessert in restaurants) so often lost its force in the face of a momentary temptation (the arrival of the pastry cart). To find out more, he used the Bing Nursery School at Stanford as a laboratory. Isolating each child in a room, he offered them a choice. They could receive one reward, such as a marshmallow, immediately, or they could wait 20 minutes (a lifetime for a four-year-old) and receive two rewards. Many couldn’t last a minute, but a few were extremely creative at finding ways to distract themselves for the full 20 minutes.4

Over the next 40 years, Mischel and his grad students followed the 550 kids who had participated in the “Marshmallow Test,” as the media nicknamed it, collecting information on their careers, marriages, and physical, financial, and mental health.5 “The findings surprised us at the start, and they still do,” wrote Mischel.6 Not only were the preschoolers who were able to wait longer more focused, confident, and self-controlled as adolescents (the period when kids are most inclined to be out of control), but they also scored 210 points higher on their SAT tests.7 To make sure that those results were not directed by the overall social environment of 1960s and 1970s California, the researchers replicated the experiments in different socioeconomic and geographic populations. The results were similar.8

What is particularly interesting is that the results seemed to correlate more with an individual’s innate personality than with their intelligence. Research conducted by Angela Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Positive Psychology also bears this out. A former seventh-grade teacher, Duckworth decided to pursue a PhD in psychology to understand why it was that so many of her best-performing students were not those with the highest IQs. She has found that a student’s self-control predicts report card grades better than measured intelligence. Outside the classroom, the Duckworth lab has shown that stronger self-control plays a role in lower levels of smoking, marijuana use, and binge drinking, and correlates with lifetime earnings, savings, and reported levels of life satisfaction.9

Is self-control a matter of genetic luck, or can it be taught? The latest research indicates that though we are all biologically prewired, nature is not as separable from nurture as was once presumed. While our natural dispositions tend to be more plastic in childhood, psychologists are learning that we can also change later in life by adopting more of an “I think I can” mindset. All of us will face momentary temptations that can distract us from our long-term goals. Mischel’s recent research shows that our capacity to deal with them depends on our ability to bring the distant consequences of our actions to the present to undermine the appeal of a given temptation.10 (For example: If I eat too much, I may become obese. If I smoke, I may get lung cancer.)

I would add: If I don’t focus on growing my business, it will fail. I think it’s time for psychologists to study the one segment of the American adult population that is full of maestros of self-control: successful entrepreneurs. When you ask successful entrepreneurs where their self-control comes from, they’re likely to answer with their own questions: How else do you start a business and keep it afloat? How else could we compete or succeed? How do you power through the tough times to get to the successful times?

One of the reasons that so many entrepreneurs who are successful right out of the gate lose steam is that they can’t resist the temptation to broadcast or just enjoy the fruits of their success. A seasoned entrepreneur himself, and a principal in a company that finances other businesses, George Heisel has witnessed this problem often:

A couple has saved $200,000 to $300,000 between them, and they start a business, a diner, say. They use their life savings to advertise, spending $100,000 the first year. The diner grows, and it starts generating $150,000 in cash flow. They want to show how successful their new diner is, so they buy a Mercedes or a new house. Then the mortgage or car payments start, and soon they’re no longer doing the same amount of advertising as last year, and they can’t grow their business. And that’s why they fail, because someone else with more cash to invest will open a diner nearby.11

Heisel resisted that temptation in 2001 when he started his own business, a medical supply company specializing in products for people with diabetes. For the first two years, he took no salary, plowing all his profits into advertising; as the business grew, he took only a small salary and made no distributions for seven years. He and his wife, a doctor, rented a house. It’s a common story among successful founders, many of who start their businesses with savings: They funneled their earnings back into the business while also squirreling away as much cash as possible for a rainy day.