Why Poor People Stay Poor and Rich People Stay Rich [usually]

By Dominick Cooper, Director and Lead Creative Tutor of Launch Academy, Winner of the DaVinci Scholar Award, and University Guest Speaker

If one were to look at a graph of the wealth dispersion in the 1960s and in the year 2012, you would see that it hasn’t changed much.  Rich people are still rich and poor people are still poor. But why?

This is the “Gini Index” from 1960 – 2010 – a method used to measure inequality among family incomes.  For the most part, the percentage of rich people are still rich and the percentage of poor are still poor.

Any scientists worth their salt would notice a pattern here and ask, “Why doesn’t the wealth move?”  The answer lies in two, incredibly influential pillars.

Parents and Mentors

If you haven’t read the book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,”  you should.  I don’t agree with everything Kiyosaki says but, in the importance of having dependable, sensible adults in your life, I couldn’t agree more.  The book is centered around Kiyosaki having two father-figures in his life – a rich dad and a poor dad.  He explains the choice he had to make in whose advice to take in his book, but the two biggest take aways from the book is this:

1. We model the practices and behaviors of adults in our lives.

2.  We can choose which adults to model.

WOAH!

Talk about mind bombs all around.  Think of what your financial situation would look like if you modeled your habits after Donald Trump or Warren Buffett?  What would your clothing style look like if you simply copied Ryan Gosling (not that I do that or anything).

Just like modeling financially-suave people will increase your moolah, modeling academically-suave people will increase your learning!  Learning isn’t a crazy, unpredictable roller coaster.  It’s systematic, has a pattern, and can be learned.  Asians have had this down for awhile.

At Launch Academy, we do teach what characteristics make a good academic but simply watch the A kids in your class?  What do they do?  Do they eat breakfast? Then do that.  Do they do homework before anything else?  Than do that.  Do they cheat? Well, don’t do that.  But you get the point.

FOLLOW HABITS OF SUCCESS THAT YOU SEE IN SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE

If you’d like to know more about what these patterns of success are, don’t hesitate to contact us and we can set up a plan to take you from zero to hero in your academics.

Stay Smart.

Dominick

“I am concerned that too many people are focused too much on money and not on their greatest wealth, which is their education. If people are prepared to be flexible, keep an open mind and learn, they will grow richer and richer through the changes. If they think money will solve the problems, I am afraid those people will have a rough ride. Intelligence solves problems and produces money.

Money without financial intelligence is money soon gone.”

– Robert Kiyosaki