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While researching a story about lifestyle and physical factors that might determine who among us is the most likely to end up rich, I was startled to learn -- while ploughing through scholarly studies -- that the answers are much as we've always feared: Tall, good-looking, slender, sociable blondes actually make more money than the rest of us -- especially if they have Princeton diplomas.
For that story, I also interviewed some experts who offered fascinating insights into the matter of wealth. Gary Rivlin, award-winning author of the new book Broke, USA, doesn't question the fact that having a college degree (from anywhere) increases our chances of making more money than people without college degrees. But Rivlin met some exceptions to that rule.
In Broke, USA, "I write about Fesum Ogbazion, who was born with nothing," Rivlin told me. "Ogbazion has made tens of millions of dollars franchising a business he calls Instant Tax Service-storefront tax prep stores that cater to people so desperate for quick cash they'll pay a steep premium to get a tax refund inside of 24 hours rather than waiting the two or three weeks it takes the IRS to send out a check. Consumer advocates detest these instant tax mills, which they see as gouging the working poor.
"Yet in a way Ogbazion talks directly to your statistics when I asked him about his most outspoken critics -- two women working for national consumer advocacy groups. Ogbazion wasn't defensive about what he did, in no small part because he wasn't from a wealthy background.
"This is the way I ended the chapter where Ogbazion takes his star turn: 'Ogbazion didn't know the names Wu and Fox before I sat down in his office but he wants to argue with them.
"'Sometimes when I hear people like that putting the industry down, it really bugs me,' he says. 'It's not like me or any of these franchisees would be the people who would climb through the ladder at a Big Four firm even if we were to become CPAs. You go with the hand that you're dealt and you make the best of it.' Looking out the window of his 14th-floor office, he asked, 'What else was I supposed to do?'"
When Rivlin says Ogbazion was born with nothing, he really means born with nothing -- in Eritrea, a desperately poor and politically fractious African country, where the family suffered imprisonment and violence for being Protestant.
Other rich people introduced in Broke, USA are not extensively educated -- but they demonstrated the kind of can-do determination emphasized by another expert I interviewed, self-made millionaire Jim Britt.
Britt also grew up poor, but learned from his father how to spot opportunities wherever possible.
"I learned to have a work ethic when I was very little. I began picking cotton when I was four and did that until I was fourteen and learned to play pool."
He never finished high school, but at nineteen -- while working on a factory's assembly line -- Britt bought his first home. It's been all uphill since then.
"When I walk into a room, I look around and think, 'Someone made a million dollars by inventing this kind of light switch and someone else made a million dollars by manufacturing this kind of rug,'" says Britt, the author of Do This. Get Rich!
Britt has interviewed hundreds of his fellow millionaires, and says they share certain psychological qualities.
"It comes down to the difference between having the desire to make the change that would help you get wealthy and actually making that change. Most people tend to go static on their desires. They get all pumped up at first, but then they sink back into a comfort zone, so nothing happens. They don't want to confront the pain and effort it would take to make the idea materialize and then make that money."
In other words, they get stuck -- as exemplified in my own book, Stuck: Why We Can't (Or Won't) Move on.
"Successful people make decisions to do things before we even figure out how we'll do those things. We just make the commitment and stick with it. That's why we're willing to do things that other people aren't willing to do.
"Getting rich isn't a matter of being lucky. It's a matter of putting yourself in the kind of position where luck shows up."
