By becoming engrossed in ongoing competitions, you’re necessarily taking time and emotional energy from something else: your business or education or some other productive activity.
One of the keys to economic success is focusing your cognitive and emotional energy towards valuable activities: managing and caring for your household finances, improving your business or career, or learning a new skill. As an example, prodigious accumulators of wealth (PAWs), those who are able to transform their income into wealth, consistently report spending more time planning and researching their investments than their underaccumulating peers, and spend less time worrying about issues related to retirement.
The 2018 election was difficult, if not impossible, to ignore. In our household, we received 4-6 flyers each day for the last several weeks, so even if we could ignore the rants in our social media feeds, we were still reminded the old fashioned way of the impending races. Undoubtedly all of us had candidates that we voted for win and lose. How do those who are economically successful manage the highs and lows of election results? In The Next Millionaire Next Door, we asked the sample in our latest study how long they spent thinking about election results when their candidates lose, certainly an appropriate topic given the wide array of races, winners, and losers last night. Three-fourths of millionaires spent little to no time thinking about their favorite candidate losing in a state or local race. In the case of national races, just under half (45%) spend little or no time thinking about the results and 25% spent hours thinking about their favorite candidate losing. If those results are accurate, millionaires have already begun setting their focus on other, more constructive tasks.
So, if your favorite candidate isn’t beaming today, and you’re feeling the disappointment of an election night loss, consider how much time millionaires spend thinking about that same disappointment, and move on to activities and a mindset that will allow you to reach worthwhile and lasting goals.