I’m sure you’ve heard that those who get what they want don’t give up.
But do you change what you want if you hit a wall?
Middle-class millionaires don’t, according to the book by the same name by Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff. In fact, they have a steel-plated constitution for failure, reporting major career failures twice as often as those in the middle class.
(We’re going to assume that none of these decisions involved, say, Ponzi-style fraud and subsequent felony charges.)
‘K here comes the good stuff:
- Nearly 77 percent of the middle-class millionaires said they “tried again in the same field” after failing, and only 2 percent gave up.
- Flip that, and you get the middle-class response. More than half gave up after failing, while only 14 percent tried again in the same field.
- Consistent with their actions, only a little over one-third of the middle class surveyed thought it was important to learn from bad career decisions, while more than 72 percent of middle-class millionaires believed this.
In fact, the authors write, middle-class millionaires cite “learning from failure” as the key to success.
Which makes sense when you think about it, right? You can’t “know what you know what you know…” until you’ve done some inventory. Pardon the S.P. pun.
How much failure can you take? How long must you wait? The Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder says 10 years. Ten years to master the skills in your field.
There’s your “om” for the next time you think you are crazy and you should just give up. You aren’t, and you won’t.
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Tags: failure · give up · try again2 Comments
Thanks for your thoughts about The Middle-Class Millionaire, Sara. I’m glad you found it interesting.
Best of luck with your goals of financial independence!
Lewis Schiff
Co-Author, The Middle-Class Millionaire
[...] on the Barrelhead presents What it Takes to be a Millionaire Today: Learning From Failure. He says that people earning between $1 to $10 million dollars a year have twice as many career [...]