Research shows that income rises with happiness, but being too happy can be bad for you.

University of Illinois psychology professor Ed Diener is the author of numerous studies that show the relationships between happiness and money.

Money can’t buy happiness

Ed Diener’s various studies have shown that money can’t buy happiness, but happy people tend to make more money. His studies show that happiness is not the consequence of having more money – just the opposite is true – having more money is the consequence of being happy.

Too much happiness can be a bad thing

In his latest study professor Diener and his team studied the income levels of people who had previously rated their happiness with a score from 1 to 10.

The results were somewhat surprising.

The amount of money a person made grew with their happiness but not all the way to the top level. The 10s (happiest people) made significantly less money than people who rated their happiness with an 8 or 9. The people whose “happy levels” were a bit less than 10 were also more likely to attend college and save money!

Happy people are strivers

Diener’s conclusion was that people who are happy but understand that it is possible to be even more satisfied with their life are strivers (people who rated their happiness with 8 or 9). These people understand that whatever their current situation, it is possible to be better off.

This insight seems to make people tick. They know that there is something to strive for.

Don’t be too happy

The top happy people who rated their happiness level with a 10 were money wise a lot worse off than the people who rated their happiness with an 8 or 9.

The explanation to this is also quite logical.

Tremendously happy people are always happy – whatever happens. If you work in McDonalds and you are happy with it, why look for a better job? If you get fired but you are still happy, why look for a job at all?

Overly happy people make bad decisions

According to a study done in Duke University the people who rate their happiness level with the maximum grade tend to overestimate their lifespan by more than 20 years. They also found that extreme optimists can have problems with controlling their urges – but they are happy with it.

It was found that extreme optimists tended to overspend and accumulate debt. They were happy to take a loan, because they were mistakenly positive that they could pay it back.

This is a great illustration on what it takes to be successful.
Be sure to click on the picture for a larger view since it is a large one with a lot of detail!

Click for larger image

I love this picture because it manages to  dissect all the different personality traits a person needs to truly become successful. I wish I had it as a larger format – It would make a great motivational poster to hang on my wall!

Original image from FinancialHack.com

Here is a short video about the things that make us successful in life. The presenter Richard St. John made observations based on over 500 interviews with successful people.

8 things that make us successful

1. Passion

Do it for love not for the money. The money will always follow when you truly enjoy what you are doing.

2. Work

It’s all hard work. Nothing comes easily. But remember to have fun.

3. Good

Put yourself into something and get damn good at it.

Practice makes perfect.

4. Focus

Success is all about focusing yourself on one thing

5. Push

Push yourself. Physically, mentally. You have to push, push, push. When you are done pushing – push some more!

6. Serve

Serve others something of value – that’s how people really get rich.

7. Ideas

Have ideas and make them come true.

Listen, Observe, Be Curious, Ask Questions, Solve Problems, Make Connections – Ideas will follow.

8. Persist

Persistence is the number one reason that successful people are successful.

Here’s the video

Stay tuned to find new posts about the things that help us be successful! Sign up for our full feed RSS or subscribe via email

I have written the following story on several of my notebooks and on my calendar.

It is by far the best story about success that I have ever heard.

A young man wanted to know how to be successful

He was sent to a wiseman who made him promise to follow his instructions very carefully.

He agreed and the wiseman took him to a river.

The wiseman asked him to kneel down in the water and submerge his head.

Once under the water, the wiseman grabbed his head so he couldn’t come up for a breath. After the young man failed and fought for a minute, the wiseman released him, threw him up on the bank, and started walking away.

“You crazy old man!! How did THAT teach me how to be successful?!”

The wiseman turned and said:

“You will be successful if you want something as bad as you wanted that breath of air”

Do you want more folk stories like this? Sign up for our full feed RSS or sign up via email.

This is an overview page to a series of insights about money and how to get rich, that I have posted on FinancialJesus.com

It is important to know these rules for everyone interested in getting rich. The list is in reverse order – that way when I add a new insight it will appear on the top. Expect this list to grow over 100+ posts.

6. Understand your beliefs about money

Challenge yourself and the way you think and get rid of the money beliefs that are holding you back on achieving what you are truly capable of.

5. Most people are too lazy to be rich

Everyone can become rich but most people are too lazy. Becoming rich requires hard work and discipline. You might win the lottery but you should always work as if becoming rich is up to you. Statistically speaking – getting hit by lightning is more likely than winning the lottery

4. Share your goals

Sharing your goals with people you trust can be one of the most powerful ways to ensure that you get what you are out to achieve. Depending on your personality it can be a good idea to share your goals with positive or negative people.

3. Set goals

Setting and working relentlessly to achieve your goals is what separates the people who will become rich from the people who will stay poor. This post has some great tips on how to achieve what you want. For example people who write down their goals are in general 10 times wealthier than the people who don’t write down their goals.

2. What does being rich mean for you?

Being rich means different things for different people. Some people consider them rich when they can take care of themselves and their families. Some, when they have 1 million dollars. Defining the meaning of “I am rich” should be one of the first things everybody interested in becoming wealthy should do. After all, how will you know you have reached the destination when you don’t know what the destination is.

My personal definition of being rich is

“I am rich when I can do whatever I want to do whenever I want it!”

1. Anyone can make money

It is possible for everyone to make money. Money doesn’t care about the color of your skin or whether you are smart or stupid. Money has no feelings.

“If you think you can make money – you can. If you think you can’t – you can’t”

To get the latest insights about money and how to get rich as soon as they are available sign up to my full feed RSS or subscribe via email.

While being a door-to-door salesman I learned what could perhaps be the most valuable lesson in my entire life:

Control the controllables

Focus on what you can control

Only focus on the things you can directly influence. For us, selling books, it meant 3 things – hours, demos, attitude.

I could control how many hours of work I did. The more hours I worked the more people I could show my books to. The more people I showed them to, the more people bought them. Simple!

I could control the number of sales presentations I made every day. I knew that the amount of money I made was directly influenced by the number of sale presentations I made. In order to make more money I had to show my stuff do more people. To do that I could work longer hours or do shorter presentations. Shortening my presentation time just 1 minute meant that I could do 2 more demonstrations each day. Now keep in mind that I worked for 72 days – that means 144 more sales presentations and 15 to 20 more customers during a summer. That’s a difference of a few thousand dollars. So next time you waste a minute think about that!

The last thing I could directly control was my attitude. I could not control if people who opened the door would swear at me, call the cops on me, or try to shoot me (yes, it happens) – the only thing I could do, was to control the way I reacted to whatever happened to me. When someone gives you the F word and slams the door on you for the first time in your life, it’s easy to stay positive. When it happens 30 times in a row, its a a lot more difficult. When you knock on the door you can never know what happens next – maybe someone just lost their job or a loved one and because of that pours his entire frustration on you. You can’t control that. The only thing you can control is how you react to it when that actually happens. You can let it get your mood down or you can decide to be happy – whatever it takes. It’s difficult at first but soon enough you start to take things impersonally. „This guy wasn’t screaming at me – he was probably screaming because he had a lousy day at work”.
So, in selling you can really only control 3 things – the hours you work, the sales presentations you make and the attitude you have. You can’t control whether someone buys your product – you can only influence it with your demonstration. When you do a superb presentation there is a bigger chance that the prospect will buy, but there is always a chance that he doesn’t need what you are selling.

Same principles work in all fields of life

When Michael Johnson ran the 200 meter world record – 19.32 seconds – he could not control whether he would win the race or not. The only thing he could do was to run as fast as he could and hope that he is faster than his competitors.

When Barack Obama runs for president, he can not control whether or not people vote for him. He can only control the way he gives speeches, talks to people and appears to the public. By doing these things superbly he influences people to vote for him, but he never directly controls them. He can only control himself.

Why FinancialJesus.com will be successful

When I started this blog 10 days ago I thought about the same thing I just wrote about – the things that make ordinary people failures and successes – the things that we control. I would really want this blog to succeed, have a lot of readers and eventually become my main source of income, but these are not the things I can directly control – I can only influence them through my actions.

Instead, I came up with a promise I can directly control – I will write 3 posts every workday until September 1st 2008. This is something I can truly control and it is my belief that having a lot of content is the best thing I could do for this blog in the long run!

What to remember

Whatever you do, control the controllables and you will be successful. There is no point to complain about the things you can’t change. Instead – change the things you can!

PS! Thanks to Adam Primero for a great idea to give yourself promises instead of setting goals. It feels a lot more powerful!

For daily tips and advice about how doing the right things will eventually lead to success sign up to our full feed RSS or subscribe via email.

This is INSIGHT 4 from a set of rules about how to get rich

Don’t brag about what you haven’t done yet

After you have defined what does being rich mean and how rich you want to be I bet you feel like bragging – “I will have 2 million dollars by 2013″.

Sure it feels good to say something like this but for other people it sounds the same as saying “One day I’ll be rich and famous”.

I have a few friends who like to talk a lot about the things they will start doing. It’s nice to know what your friends are doing but when the same person comes out with a way to get rich for the 10th time in a month I can’t help but say to myself “Yeah, sure you’ll do it”. Don’t be the “Yeah, sure” guy.

Share your goals (but not too much)

Sharing your goals with friends is a good thing as long as you don’t take it over the limit. It’s easy to “deny” the promises that you have made to yourself but sharing goals with friends help to keep you accountable. If you know that you are going to meet the friend to whom you talked about opening your own business you can be sure that he will ask you how it’s going with that. Doesn’t it feel bad to tell him that you haven’t done anything to get started? I know it does!

Choose who you share your goals with

Share your goals with positive people. If you see others approving your idea it will give you extra strength to make it come true. Negative people on the other hand – they’re a bunch of whiners

Letting a negative friend in your goals can be a bad thing. Negative people have a tendency to find reasons why you can’t do something instead of finding reasons why you should do it. Depending on the negative person and yourself – it can have a bad effect on achieving your goals

Find a skeptic

I know what I just said about negative people, but I want you to forget about it for a minute

The following paragraph is only true for a special kind of people and you have to read it to find out if you’re one of them.

Here is what you need to do:

1. Find a negative person
2. Tell him what you are going to do
3. He will say you can’t do it
4. Do it anyway – prove him wrong!

I have been a door-to-door salesman(selling educational books) in the US for two summers and have talked to more than 5000 thousand families about education. Working 6 days a week and 13.5 hours a day is the most difficult thing I have ever done.

One thing I found out is that when the going gets tough the things you thought that will motivate you rarely do. That is why the Southwestern Company I worked for suggested us to find a skeptic – someone who will not believe in you. Thinking about the fact that when you don’t achieve your goals your skeptic can say “I told you so” can be a gift from heaven that keeps you going. Bare in mind that this might or might not work – everyone is different.

For more advice on achieving your wildest dreams come back tomorrow! You can sign up to my full feed RSS or subscribe via email.

What’s your goal? Share it in the comments!

This is RULE 3 from a set of rules about how to get rich.

After defining the meaning of being rich, it is important to set some goals. How is it that you are to become rich? When will you be rich? These are some of the questions that having goals will answer.

Setting Goals

Setting goals is not as difficult as it can sound. After all, we do it all the time without even realizing.
Driving to work in the morning is a good example of setting and achieving goals.

In this case the goal can be “Being at work at 8 o’clock“. In order to achieve that goal you have to have an estimate on what time should you start going and what road you are going to take. This goal also hints about what you are going to do after its achieved – work!

It’s exactly the same with getting rich. You need to know when you are there – the definition of being rich and the date you are going to achieve it. An action plan similar to the road to work, on how you are going to make it, and what will you do when you get there!

A goal should be simple

A goal should not be something that’s difficult to understand. A simple goal could be “I will have 5 million dollars on my 41st birthday”.

Setting goals for friends, family and strangers is easy but unfortunately for a goal to work it has to be set by yourself. It can take days to come up with a goal like the one above.

Things to remember

A goal should have a date associated to it. Anyone can say that they will be rich and famous one day but that’s just a dream. The difference between dreams and goals is that goals have dates associated with them.

A good goal is measurable. That way you will know how much separates you from achieving it.

Write your goal down. That way can’t back off. In 1953, researchers made a survey on Yale’s graduating seniors about writing their goals down. Only 3% had written down their goals, 14% of graduates had goals but they had not written them down and 83% had no specific personal or business goals.

10 years later they made a second study among the same people. Here’s what came out:

• The 14% who had goals but didn’t write them down were earning on average twice as much as the 83% who had no goals at all.
• The 3% percent who had written down their goals were making 10 times more than the other 97% put together.

For daily tips and advice about setting and achieving goals sign up to my full feed RSS or subscribe via email.