I just started reading The Millionaire Mind by best-selling author Thomas J. Stanley, Ph.D. and was intrigued to learn, in just the first few pages, how important work-life balance is to many millionaires.
To be honest, I never thought that the words millionaires and balanced living would be in the same sentence.
The first paragraph of the book explains:
They live in lovely homes located in fine neighborhoods. Balance is their approach to life. They are financially independent, yet enjoy life – they are not “all work, no play” type of people. Most became millionaires in one generation. Neither their lifestyle nor their wealth was generated from being highly leveraged financially. They are not credit junkies. How did they accomplish this? How did they balance their need to become wealthy and economically productive with their need to enjoy life? They have the millionaire mind.
In The Millionaire Mind, Stanley tells how millionaires got there and how to become one of them. They key to becoming one is to think like one.
Stanley has been interviewing wealthy people for years. Early in his career, back in 1983, he was asked to interview 60 millionaires from Oklahoma. From those interviews he discovered that these millionaires…
…enjoyed life. They were not workaholics. They spent a lot of time with their families and friends, borrowed little money, and became wealthy, in most cases, before they were forty-five years old.
This surprised me. In my mind, I’ve often thought that most millionaires were workaholics who dedicated their whole lives to building their business and making money while their family suffered. Certainly, this happpens in some cases, but not as much as I had imagined, according to Stanley.
So now I have a question: do millionaires enjoy greater work-life balance because they are rich and can pay others to do all the stuff they don’t want to do or have the time for? Or, did they become millionaires because of their balanced approach to building a business and living their lives?
I’ll keep reading and will let you know what I find out! In the meantime, what do you think?
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