A lot of people operate under the silly belief that you have to be extremely wealthy to be able to help people. While it is true that the people who produce astonishing wealth tend to have the habits that make charitable efforts the most effective, you don’t need to be rich to make a big difference. In fact, if you take on and model some of the habits that wealthy people tend to have, both your giving efforts and your earning efforts will receive a boost.
Thinking Ahead
When you think ahead, as Christine Gibbs does, you can plan for things that may happen instead of thinking only about what has happened and what is happening right now. While a lot of people don’t put a lot of thought into the future beyond preventing problems, with a little bit of positive foresight you can accomplish some great things.
What a lot of folks don’t realize about the wealthy is that this is one of their biggest advantageous traits over most other people. Instead of just focusing on today, focus on what your contributions can be doing tomorrow; even next year or several years down the line. With a long term goal, today’s efforts seem like time well spent.
Providing Value to Others
Some people believe in the zero sum mentality that comes out of scarcity. If you think scarcely, you’ll naturally believe that everything you give to someone else will hurt you in some way. Interestingly enough, the wealthiest members of almost every society in the world understand that when they give to others, they’re also helping themselves to gain more in life.
Providing value is the same as giving to others. When someone starts a business with the intention to serve others, that individual can make a fortune simply by providing value. When you give to others, you can experience the same emotional benefit, and possibly advance society as a whole. While there’s no guarantee that giving to a charity will make you or society richer, it almost never hurts.
Sticking it Out
One of the other major advantageous traits that wealthy people have is the above average ability to stick it out regardless of initial failures or problems that come up. Life is full of problems and no one has ever been able to escape all of them. This is a fact of the adult world. However, the more problems you can push through and overcome, the better you tend to do in life.
Maybe you aren’t making as much money as you’d like to make. Maybe you aren’t experiencing much fulfillment at work, and you feel like a zombie. But when you give to other people and keep making the effort, ultimately it pays off.
