The Mind of Investing Most investors and entrepreneurs understand that success in investing is greatly controlled, influenced, and achieved through the beliefs, attitudes, and mindset of the individuals that achieve it.
There are many powerful books, CDs, DVDs, and seminars with many famous individuals teaching and addressing the mindset of an individual in order to successfully invest. This is also true of other professions, sportspeople, actors, politicians, etc., in fact, anybody who truly makes a success of their careers and lives. There are also many others who discredit this form of education, who attribute success purely on hard work, others providing the helping hand, or even worse—luck!
At Whitney UK, we do not believe in luck, we believe in education, hard work, more education, facts—not opinion, more education, positive beliefs, more education, taking action, and you guessed it, more education. There is nothing wrong with reading more about a subject, feeding your mind with different approaches, and feeding your mind again. We all need to refresh topics, to reassess an area since the second time that we review a topic we may be in a different position and as such need to address the situation from a different angle. It is interesting when we question the advanced students, how many have read Real Estate Mentor, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Cashflow Quadrant, or Think and Grow Rich, just to name a few popular books. They all understand the need to feed the mind, to surround themselves with positive ideas, to learn from successful people, and to take this education and use it for their benefit.
We will therefore over the next few editions look at certain beliefs and provide the understanding of others so that you can perhaps gain some form of nugget that can be used or edited for your own benefit.
To begin with, we would like you to understand "emotion" when dealing with anything financial and to understand that this can be controlled and often needs to be reversed. In the Cashflow Quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter, they describe that most people suffer financially because their emotions are in control of their thoughts. What determines the differences in what we do and what we have in life is primarily how we handle those emotions.
For example, the emotion of fear can often cause some of us to be hesitant or negative and reluctant to take action even though the facts show the deal to be good. Likewise, often others reverse this and take action on an opinion, rather than assessing the facts, because the emotion of greed takes over.
Looking at fear though, most individuals are conditioned to look at this emotion when dealing with money as a consequence when the fear of losing money comes up; most people's minds automatically start to think in a certain way. We have addressed some of these thoughts below but have also provided the alternative. It is therefore up to you to begin looking at the alternative and to educate and condition your own mind to look at finance in this way.
People see money and they think:
"Security" rather than "freedom"
"Avoid risk" rather than "earn to manage risk"
"Play it safe" rather than "play it smart"
"I cannot afford it" rather than "how can I afford it"
"It's too expensive" rather than "what is it worth"
"What will my friends think" rather than "what do I think"
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