Have you ever wondered why some of the smartest people you know still seem to struggle with money while others that have, let's just say, less intelligence, are financially thriving? Now, mind you, if you've ever felt frustrated or confused about why being smart hasn't led to financial freedom or the financial freedom that you desire, then this episode's for you. I'm going to uncover why intelligence alone doesn't equal wealth. And more importantly, show you the time tested principles that do.
Oh, this one's going to be a fun one. Have you ever wondered why some of the smartest people you know still struggle financially? It's, you know, it's often assumed that high IQ or being smart will automatically translate to wealth and financial freedom. And the reality is, nope, it's very, very different. So in this video, in this, in this session, I'm going to break it down for you. Why is intelligence alone not the guarantee of
financial success and what truly drives wealth? And by the end, you'll understand that wealth creation is far more than iq, okay. And much more about habits and behaviors. All right, so here's the thing. The biggest misconception is to assume that, hey, if you're smart, you have money, you will have money, you will have wealth. But wealth isn't the thing that comes into play because smarts do not translate into it. Being smart or having a high IQ doesn't create the skills, the
habits and the behaviors to create wealth. This is something that I think we need to realize is that just because I know something about a topic doesn't mean that I know something about another topic. If I am smart in health and medical or physical fitness, that kind of thing doesn't mean that I'm automatically going to be wealthy or good with money. Because money management, wealth creation, wealth building, it's a skill set,
it's a knowledge base. Now, the beautiful thing is it's not complicated as much as people think it's complicated. It's actually really, really simple handful of principles. Follow them, follow them. It's a recipe. Follow them properly and you end up at the right result. But we need to be
willing to learn those things. In fact, if you look at a study that was an Ohio State University study that said while a higher IQ or intelligence allowed people to earn more on average, it didn't translate into wealth accumulation. It didn't predict wealth accumulation. And so what happens is that, yeah, because you have more smarts, you might have talents and skills in other areas, you may earn more money, but that doesn't mean that you're building
wealth. I looked at someone's budget. This guy is brilliant. He's a neurosurgeon. He makes over a million dollars a year. Over a million bucks a year. When I looked at his budget every month, he had less than $500 left, less than $500 left, and only had $40,000 in a savings account. Y'all making a lot of money because he's highly intelligent, highly skilled, very smart, but no wealth. It does not translate. Wealth is a different game. Wealth is a very different game.
It is about what you do with the money and how you build it. In fact, it's less about how much you make. There is a study of 10,000 millionaires. 79% of them were first generation millionaires. First generation. That meant that they didn't win it, they didn't inherit it, wasn't gifted to them. They created it in their lifetime. Almost 80%. Eight out of 10, that's good odds. 31% of them never made much more than $100,000. So it wasn't because they had huge incomes
and all that. If it's not about the income, what's it about? It's about what they did with the income. They understood behaviors, they understood the skills, they understood the habits, and they had the emotional intelligence to make consistent decisions over time to drive their wealth. So smarts may help us with problem solving, they may help us with understanding, but they do not automatically translate to wealth. And so I think we need to look at it through a different set of eyes.
So let's just look at this. When we look at the studies, there's research that shows at 88%, almost 90% of individuals are committed to daily habits like saving, investing and planning. So those that are doing that, those are the ones that have the highest propensity for wealth creation. They prioritize consistent financial behaviors over intellectual. And when you automate it like we tell you to do so, you take the friction out. It's actually easier because you're not having to
pull the levers, twist the dials and push the buttons. It's automatically happening in the background. It's about consistently doing the little things over time that will get you to a place where you build wealth. Warren Buffett, who is arguably the most successful investor, he's a genius investor, but he credits his success more to his habits and his patience and his long term investing and emotional discipline. Rather than being smart, he said, I'm just a country bumpkin, but I
have patience, I have discipline. I look through the long term. I don't let my emotions get away and I follow the processes that I know work. That's what we need to do. So that's point number one is that. Point number two is this. I think that there is some level of delayed gratification, gratification and discipline that's required. Now, if you've heard me before talk about this, I do not believe in the ultra restrictive deprivation kind of way of building
wealth. I just don't think that you can sustain it. I don't think that you can stay on that train for very long. If I am constantly starving myself and depriving myself of elements of joy, it's not possible to stay that way. And so there is some delayed gratification, there is a fair amount of discipline, but along the way, I
want you to still have joy. So that means that when we build your plan, when you build your plan, when you start to plan out, your cash resource plan and your money machine master plan, when you do that, you have to, as a line item, have in there the things that actually bring you joy. The problem is with some people that have ultra high IQs and smarts, they think they can outsmart the system. They think that they can shortcut it, fast track it. And the reality is that wealth isn't done
fast. Wealth is done slow over time. You know, there's a, the famous Stanford marshmallow experience with Experiment with the children where, you know, you put one there and say, just hang on and you'll get more later and everything. And I think that it's true in building wealth. So the question isn't to just put everything off for the future. The question is to be deliberate and intentional with what you're spending today, investing today, so you can have a good today
and a phenomenal future. Okay, make the commitment. This is your action step here. Make the commitment to make savings and investing for the long term a priority. Follow the wealth priority letter. Follow a process that's proven over time. Stop looking for get rich quick schemes and ways to do it. The promises that are out there on the Internet and TikTok and all that. Crazy enough? No, Forget it. All right. That leads me to point number three. Emotional intelligence and decision making
are huge. Daniel Goleman's findings in emotional intelligence. He says, I think they come into play here. He says, it's about understanding and managing your emotions and especially when it comes to money. Here's what I know. When your emotions get involved in financial decisions or money decisions, those decisions are never good. Very rarely are they good. When your emotional intellect goes. Emotions go up, your financial intellect goes down. It's what happened to me in the
Ponzi scheme. This guy who ran the Ponzi scheme knew how to stroke my emotions, the dreams, the aspiration, the consequences, the possibility, all that. So I was making emotional decisions to invest, which got me to disregard my rules, which got me to disregard my. My criteria, to disregard the voice in my head. And I made a bad decision. I wiped out one third of everything I own now. My rules, my criteria, which I have in the book and all my trainings,
they're dogmatic. And I might leave money on the table, but I have peace of mind. All right, so we want to make sure that we are not making emotionally charged decisions when it comes to money investing or anything like that. We want to look at it from a rational standpoint. We want to be calculated, we want to be analyzed, and we want to understand it. We never, ever, ever invest in something we don't understand. And so this becomes really important. That leads me to. To this
next piece, and that is this. You may have intelligence, but if you have the wrong mindset, you'll go astray. This is where I have seen some friends of mine who are highly intelligent, I mean, like off the scale, IQs lose money. And the reason they lost money was because their intelligence made them. Their iq, their smarts, their ability to do things and think fast on their feet made them overconfident. And that overconfidence is dangerous when it comes to money. And when we do that, we make
a decision because we think I'm infallible. And this is why I remember, I remember years and years ago that my son was going with his friends to Las Vegas and he was going to go to the crap table and they were going to teach him how to play craps. And I said to him, I said, I hope you lose on the first go round.
And he said, what? Why would you say that? And why I said that was not because I wanted him to lose money, but because I knew that if he won, the level of overconfidence, to go in bigger would pull him in if he wasn't careful. And. And by losing on the first hand or the first run, he would have the opportunity to reflect and to be more, let's just say, discerning as he did that. So overconfidence can destroy us on the path to financial freedom, because it's
dangerous in doing that. Now there's the other side of it, of not overconfidence is that you have these smarts and this intellect. So you want to analyze it every ounce. You want to have every possibility. So now instead of making a decision out of overconfidence, you don't make a
decision out of paralysis. And this is another reason why a lot of smart people, high IQ people don't necessarily build wealth because they're spending all their time analyzing, they don't want the risk and they, so they're unable to make a decisive decision. And actually listen, there is no such thing as zero risk when it comes to investing and building wealth. You're going to take risk. The thing is, is
that it needs to be calculated risk. You need to rest on proven strategies, proven processes and proven frameworks that have withstood the test of time. But spending all our time analyzing but not making a decision doesn't get us there. We're on the sidelines or we're in the stands observing everyone else, but you're not participating. You have to be on the field and the game of wealth building to win the game, to even be playing the game. So look, I have analyzed things a lot of times and I
have sat on the silence. I've decided not to do things, but I've also won big. I've also lost big. The question is that in the loss did you learn something and that now if you follow my rules, the loss, it's going to piss you off. Like am I going to lose money? Yes, I'm going to lose money because I'm invested. There's risk, I mean, but in the long term I will go up. The markets always recover and the markets, you know, 8 out of 10 years
goes go up. If I follow the rules more, I will have more wins than I have losses and the losses will be smaller. Yes, it'll piss me off. Yes, I'll be in a bad mood. Yes, I might eat bad food for a day, but it isn't going to destroy me financially. And that's where you start to look at and say I'm going to analyze it to a point where I answer all the key questions and then I'm going to make a decisive decision. I'm
either in or I'm out. And I know my exit points and I know my alternatives before I get in the game. And that's it. So that's, that's where I think it starts to get in, in the way. The other side of that is then to realize that when we're talking about investing, it is about a long term game. It's not short. I'm not trying to catch the quick upswing in the next 30 days. That's trading.
I'm talking about long term investing. And when you look at the long term picture, like I said, the market goes up 8 out of 10 years. So as long as I'm looking long term, the probability of my success goes up every year that I hold on. Okay, So I think that that's, that's where you start to, to build into this
and realize that it's not about smarts. Because the actuality is that high IQ and high smarts can get in the way because you have overconfidence, you have overanalyzation, you have, you have smarts in an area that don't have anything to do with wealth creation and wealth building. And wealth is about habits, decisions and behaviors more so than it is about money or even smarts. And the level of smarts you need to build wealth isn't some crazy high 160 and above
IQ. They're simple processes, simple frameworks, and simple systems that you can follow that will build wealth over time. They've been proven. Other people have written about it. I've written about it. You follow those and you will win. That's the way. That's the way the game goes. So that's why people that are smart with high IQs don't necessarily translate to wealth. All right? And that's why I don't care what your IQ is. I don't care what your age,
stage, or your circumstances in life are. I care that I help you get in the game to be on the road to financial freedom, that I start to equip you with the tools, the tactics, the knowledge to take control of your financial destiny. Financial freedom is your birthright. It's time to go claim it. It's simple, but it may not be easy. But just because it's not easy doesn't make it impossible. I'm here with you every step of the way. And if I
can help you, please let me know. Make sure that you're subscribed. Make sure that you're on this journey with me. And you know what? Be on this journey with a friend. Get them to subscribe and go through this stuff together. All right? All right. As I always say, until I get a chance to see you on the road to financial freedom or out there, while I'm speaking, always, always strive to live a life that outlives you. I hope that
you found this of value. I hope that you'll put this in play, and I hope that you'll realize it doesn't matter what your smarts are, it matters what your behaviors are on your path. Financial Freedom. See you in the next one. Thank you for listening to the Affluent
Entrepreneurship with me, your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financial liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join me in the Affluent Entrepreneur Facebook group now by going to melabraham.com group and I'll see you there.