Your Mental Wealth

During an interview for the ABC “20/20” special, Juju Chang, the correspondent who narrated the segments, asked me if I thought the financial crisis that has touched each of us and the rest of the world would “change America”. She meant, would we save more? Would we do less risky things? Would we change how we use credit? Would we be less of a debtor nation? Would this teach us some very painful, hard won lessons?

I told her “I wish that I could say ‘absolutely’, but what I can say for sure is ‘probably not.’”

After all, research tells us that of all of the patients who go through heart by-pass surgery, and are told that in order to survive they need to make necessary life-style changes, only 10% of these people are actually adhering to these changes one year later. We are talking about a surgery that includes having their chest sawn open, ribs split, heart stopped, veins stripped from their legs, and then sewn back together. Almost every one of us would say “I’ll do anything so I don’t have to go through this again”, or “I will do anything to make this surgery work”. We would make resolutions to live our lives differently; to exercise more, lose weight, eat healthier. And then after this era of good intentions passes by, 90% of us will go right back to our old habits.

So if we are talking money, I would guess that we can figure that for 10% of us, the financial events of the last year or so will prompt changes in our financial behavior that will be permanent. But for 90% of us, our behaviors will revert back to the same ones we practiced before all of the financial events of the last year or so occurred.

As a nation, I believe we will witness the same phenomena. All we need to do is to look back at how our nation responded to the Great Depression of the 1930’s. If we are open to history’s lessons, there will be some changes as a result of the financial crisis of the last year or so. New regulations will be written. Perhaps even new laws passed. We’ve been down this path before.

Our country changed how it did financial business after the Great Depression of the 1930’s. But if one carefully studies what happened since those new 1930’s regulations and laws were written, designed to make sure that the terrible things that happened to our nation during the Great Depression would never happen again, they would find that just like water passing over a stone in a stream, the “new rules” were gradually “worn away”.

As a nation, the new rules and regulations that will be passed in the next few years will gradually go the way of the heart patient’s resolution to live differently. Permanent changes isn’t going to happen for most of us, our country, and our world, even with our very existence at stake.

I plan on being one of the 10%. It is going to take a greater consciousness. It is going to take some courage. It is going to take some learning. It is going to take some support. It is not going to be easy. I will have to live a different kind of life. I will have to develop a different relationship with my spending plan, with my credit cards, with my savings account. It is going to take nothing less than a fundamental change in my thinking. How about you?

Psychologist Fritz Perls once said “To ask someone to change is to ask them to do the hardest thing of a human being”.