The most successful people in any society are those who take the longest time period into consideration when making their day-to-day decisions. Dr. Edward Banfield of Harvard University in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s after studying many of the factors that were thought to contribute to individual financial success over the course of a person’s lifetime, he concluded that there was one primary factor that took precedence over all the others. He called it “time perspective” or “delayed gratification”
What Banfield found was that the higher a person rises in any society, the more they delayed gratification. People at the highest social and economic levels make decisions and sacrifices that may not pay off for many years, sometimes not even in their own lifetimes. They “plant trees under which they will never sit.”
An obvious example is the movie Avatar the most successful movie ever, producer James Cameron had written the movie 15 years earlier and waited for the technology to produce the movie to be created before producing the movie.
In another instance a group of children where asked if they wanted a bowl of ice cream now or wait an hour later and then given two bowls. Some agreed to take the ice cream at the moment the others said they will wait an hour later and then be given two bowls. An amazing result was that twenty years later, the least successful among those that waited an hour to receive two bowls of ice cream was twenty times more successful than the most successful among those who agreed to collect their ice cream on the spot.
People with long term perspectives are willing to pay the price of success for a long, long time before they achieve it. They think about the consequences of their choices and decisions in terms of what they might mean in five, ten, fifteen, and even twenty years from now.
People at the lowest levels of society have the shortest time perspectives. They focus primarily on immediate gratification and often engage in behaviors that are virtually guaranteed to lead to negative consequences in the long term. At the very bottom of the social ladder, you find hopeless alcoholics and drug addicts. These people think in terms of the next drink or the next fix. Their time perspective is often less than one hour.
Your ability to practice self-mastery, self-control, and self-denial, to sacrifice in the short term so you can enjoy greater rewards in the long term, is the starting point of developing a long time perspective. This attitude is essential to financial achievement of any kind.
