DO you make excuses for your negative character traits? Let’s see what they might cost you.
If you have watched Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street, you will remember Douglas’character Gordon Gekko’s most memorable line: “Greed is good!”
Gekko was wrong!
Greed is not good; there are times when it isn’t just bad. It can be downright evil. And based on extensive research, from the perspective of financial planning, greed can lead you to behave in ways that impoverish not enrich you! The choices we make all stem from our brain.
Therefore, I recommend we take a bit of time to learn something about the intricate structure of the God-given mammalian brain. I’m not sure how much you know about the various parts of the brain, but I believe you would be surprised to learn, as I was, that deep in the middle of the human brain is a section called the nucleus accumbens, which can sometimes be referred to as the (flipped around) accumbens nucleus!
Regardless of what we call it, that part of the brain is responsible for how we process the prospect of rewards.
As you know from observing your own life and from your knowledge of investing, the concept of rewards is central to the way we save, invest, speculate and gamble. In Jason Zweig’s book Your Money & Your Brain, he tells us that:
“Over millions of years of evolution, it was the thrill of anticipation that put our senses in a state of high awareness, bracing us to capture uncertain rewards. The anticipation circuitry in our brains, says Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon, acts as a ‘beacon of incentive’ that enables us to pursue longer-term rewards that can be earned only with patience and commitment.”
That portion of Zweig’s book drew my attention because a large part of my consulting work with clients involves informing and hopefully, instilling an appreciation for the human trait of delayed gratification when curbing short-term wants to attempt to gain a better chance at attaining superior long-term economic success.
In some cases, it is as simple as deciding against buying a pricey sports car today, which will stretch your budget for years to come, and choosing instead to invest that money in a tertiary education-targeted portfolio that will one day swing open wide mahogany doors to brighter life opportunities for your children!
DELAYED GRATIFICATION
None of us has enough money or enough time to buy and do everything we want to do in life. And that’s OK. Real life is about making choices that open some doors and close others. So when we choose to listen to our baser instincts, it is often because we are giving in to greed stemming from our capitulation to the siren call of immediate gratification. But when we choose, instead, to make noble near-term sacrifices that result in our turning our backs on IG in favour of DG (translation: rejecting immediate gratification and opting to embrace delayed gratification), our lives generally turn out better.
Those who make delayed gratification a way of life find it leads to better character development.
In Your Money & Your Brain’s third chapter (titled Greed), Zweig described an experiment on lab rats, which not surprisingly loved sweet things, at the University of Cambridge. It involved their brain’s anticipation circuitry.
The rodents were placed in chambers with two levers that could be pressed down with their paws. One lever released a single pellet of sugar the moment it was pressed. The other lever would release a much larger payoff of four sugar pellets... but only after a delay of between 10 and 60 seconds!
Zweig elaborates: “Rats with fully intact brains are highly impatient, but they will still choose the larger, later rewards up to half the time.”
Mull over those trapped rats and be thankful we humans aren’t (generally) experimented on in such fashion! Nonetheless, have you ever noticed how those who are more inclined to exhibit greed through short-term choices tend to be less successful than those who are able — and, frankly, often eager — to exercise patience and exhibit sacrificial kindness?
They tend to be more successful in ways that matter and are considered by their peers to be men and women of high character.
For us, such differences are often tied to a matter of choice, nurture and self-control. But that Cambridge study made a strong case for at least one form of intentionally altered “nature”; Zweig continues: “However, rats with damage to the nucleus accumbens in their brain suffer from... anticipation deficit disorder. Without a properly functioning nucleus accumbens, these rats become almost completely incapable of delaying gratification, and they choose the earlier but smaller prize more than 80 per cent of the time.”
In doing so, they acted impulsively, unwisely and greedily. By extension, the results of such studies tell me that those most willing or best able to exercise delayed gratification when managing their money end up living better, richer lives.
If you truly agree, aim to overcome any negative predispositions within you for greed. Proactively choose the character-building path of patience, namely the long, slow, boring route to riches through steady, strategic saving and investing, while eschewing speculating and gambling.
Rajen Devadason, CFP, is a Securities Commission-licensed financial planner, professional speaker and author. © 2017 Rajen Devadason
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