I’m a mentor on the Millionaire Money Mentor's forum and we were discussing a post by adimesaved that had some very interesting takes on millionaires. In fact there were 16 of them and four in particular caught my eye. These are all characteristics that Chris Hogan, formerly of the Ramsey clan, and Tom Corely, the uber famous author had identified:
1. Millionaires Seek Feedback and Have Mentors
2. Millionaires Persevere
3. Millionaires are Consistent
4. Millionaires are Conscientious
And while these all sound good on the surface there is something wrong with the list, at least when it comes to my own millionaire journey. Because they don’t describe me very well at all.
I agree that most millionaires I know, including the handful of nine figure and ten figure ones do share the first characteristic. They seek honest feedback and advice. They look for quality mentors because they realize they are not the smartest person in the room on every conceivable topic.
It is hard to argue with Number 4, because you cannot succeed unless you are conscientious about your work product. You have to have a high standard for quality in what you do and have to have pride in what you create. At least in the creations that matter the most.
Those two I agree with, I cannot think of any self made millionaires that cannot check the boxes on them. But it is Numbers 2 and 3 that give me pause. Millionaires persevere, or do they? It may be more semantics than reality but when I think back on my career, especially the early days when I was in head to head competition with many other engineers, the thing that separated me from my competition was not perseverance. It was my ability to leverage my natural lazy streak to find new solutions to old problems. I worked in a small engineering group alongside similarly trained engineers who were all about having a strong work ethic. They would pound away at problems with brute force. I didn’t. My intuition told me that the best path to resolve a problem was the easiest path. So instead of fixing the impossible I would back way up and find a solution that did not fix the problem but instead rendered it irrelevant.
My example is a little arcane, the world of chemical engineering doesn’t translate very well into other career domains, but let me try. Often the chemical processes we utilized at our oil and chemical complex couldn’t perform at peak efficiency because of contaminants in the feedstocks we were processing. Typically we, as troubleshooters and process optimizers, would be tasked with figuring out how to get the most product produced in spite of the contaminants. That was a losing game, the problem isn’t figuring out how to minimize the contaminants impact, it is too late to solve that. The real answer, the easy path is to back up and figure out how to eliminate the contaminants from the feedstocks so the process doesn’t have to deal with them at all.
And that is what I did. I found enough surplus process equipment sitting around unused, to cobble together a process that would remove all the contaminants from the feedstocks. With cleaner and purer feed stocks the process started making more premium products. That was thirty years ago and that process is still saving my former employer millions of dollars a year. It sounds like something Captain Obvious would point out, but it wasn’t at all clear to my co-workers. They were told to find a way to tolerate the contamination. So that is exactly what they did. They did what they were told. And it was a hard path because it had very limited potential upside. But they were persistent at doing what they were told, they persevered. However, they could not back up and look at the real problem with no restrictions. They could not conceive of a world where their bosses did not understand the problem. So no, persevering is the worst thing in the world if you are trying to solve the wrong problem.
I did not share the illusion that my bosses knew best. I knew that often the higher ups would poorly define the problem and I felt that where I could get the most recognition and provide the most value was by changing my job assignments to better ones. I did not persevere on the wrong path, I got off of the assigned arduous path and got on Easy Street where the real money was. And it did not take a great work ethic to produce when you are aiming at the right target. The less successful engineers had a Don Quixote mindset, and their solution to tilting at windmills was to find a bigger horse and to keep charging. Persevering, in my opinion, loses out to talent every time. The original post used the tortoise and the hare fable as support for perseverance, but really, has a turtle ever outrun a rabbit? Never going to happen.
The other characteristic I don’t relate to well was Number 3, millionaires are consistent. I am not so sure about that. You have to be conscientious, your important work product has to be consistently excellent, but you do not have to have consistent effort, in my opinion. I tended to work in flurries of accomplishment followed by periods where I did not get much done. And guess what? Nobody cared about my mundane daily activities, or at least they did not penalize me for mailing it in on unimportant work. That stuff did not matter to the bosses, they cared about those grand slam home runs that made big money for the shareholders.
In any organization a lot of what passes as work: meetings, reports, budgets, etc. does not really make the company any money. At a facility like ours what made money was anything that either cut costs or increased throughput or product quality. So if my idea of getting the contaminants out of the feedstocks without spending a lot of money worked, which it did, then my boss looked like a superstar because he got at least half the credit for it. And his boss looked like a champ because his facility was now the profit leader of the corporation. That one big hit of an idea, and the follow through to get it into production, was worth ten years of grinding away at budgets and reports.
I do not want to give the impression that one good idea made my career successful, I had dozens of similar ones over a long career, some even more profitable. So why did the other engineers so often miss the low hanging fruit I consistently found? They were intelligent, they were diligent, they persevered and they were consistent. They just were not as talented at reframing the project assignments. They had too much faith in their superiors’ abilities. And they liked the comfort that comes from doing exactly what they were told to do. I knew I was better at my job than anyone else in the company so I felt authorized by my own talent to change my job assignments at will. I will make one caveat. While it is imperative to alter a bad project assignment to a better one, you also have to do the original assignment. What I mean is I not only solved the contaminant problem by thinking out of the box, but I also presented a report that detailed how to minimize the effects of the contaminants, I fulfilled the original assignment as well as rendering it moot by solving the root problem.
That is critical because your bosses have egos too, and if you dismiss their instructions out of hand they are going to take that as an attack on their competency. I saw that first hand one time when my boss, myself and one of my engineers were on the company plane. My subordinate, a very bright and intuitive engineer, had realized my boss had passed down a flawed project assignment. He immediately reframed it into a better project and did an amazing job of coming up with a better outcome. But he completely neglected the original assignment, which he could have completed in a day or two. When he presented his bright new idea to my boss and brushed off the original assignment as being unnecessary, my boss blew a fuse. When he calmed down he looked at me and said that I would have never done that. I would have done the assigned work in addition to freelancing a plan B. It was a big life lesson and my former protege was better for it. In fact he is a senior VP now at a large corporation.
You are supposed to be better at solving problems than your boss because they have too many other things to do besides micromanaging you. But you have to have some tact about it. If you present the answer to the original assignment first you are showing respect and honoring their position in in the company. Then you can show them this other thing you came up with and ask what they think about it. If you have a good boss they’ll see it as a win-win solution that will make you both look good. That will make you indispensable to your boss and will motivate them to keep you happy. Rinse and repeat and you’ll be running the whole company in time.
So are millionaires mostly people who have mentors, persevere no matter what, consistently produce and are conscientious? Or can enough talent and creativity make up for lacking two out of four of those?
Can being an extremely fast and extremely lazy rabbit beat the consistent and persevering turtle? I don’t even think its a contest, personally.
Do you see yourself as mostly checking the boxes on millionaire characteristics or are there a few that do not fit at all, but have not seemed to slow you down?
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i see a lot of that kind of flawed thinking in problem solving at my present chemical conglomerate giant. the technical people i think worry about politics and things like building consensus on how to truly solve a problem or improve quality.
i remember i worked for a tiny company and solved something similar to your purification plan. we only had about 50 employees and the customer was dow chemical. i truly came up with an elegant solution that included going back to rethink the entire problem just like you did. when the dow team showed up at our little facility and the phd. mathematician/chemical engineer from their side started tossing around all kinds of brainstorming ideas i just let her talk for an hour or two. i had already done the work and found the solution and after a while i could not keep it in any longer. once i presented the my data it was just a matter of formalizing and putting a bow on the whole thing and going out for some beers together. i think that little company was about to reward me for this a couple of other good ones but i left for the proximity of the future mrs. smidlap.
anyhow, i don’t know which of these characteristics made us millionaires. we never made much money in our crappy careers but the perseverance served us in just showing up consistently. when some early investments were not so stellar i did not give up but learned and got better.
I’m not at all surprised you had a similar great idea, you are a smart guy. And the way you slid it into corporate consciousness was brilliant as well. Dow actually sent a PhD into our plant once pretending to be a truck driver to spy on a niche process my boss had patented. They wanted to do the same thing but did not want to license it. Here say of course, any Dow people, I’m just saying this “might” have happened. It was hilarious, we know truckers and this guy wasn’t one.
I believe you had a bit of fortune getting into a company where your skills, smarts, and abilities were appreciated. I know you were able to move up the ladder, but were other “great” employees ever blocked? Did you ever have any star employees that left the company, because they couldn’t move up? Did you ever have any friends that told you a story of something great they did at work but it wasn’t appreciated (at least with big promotions and money)?
I’ve said this before, but I have a number of stories where I made a real financial impact with companies I worked for and it got me nowhere. A quick story. I went to work for Sprint back around ’95 in a QA department. We did production-like billing tests of the mainframe programs every time Sprint had a new “plan” (phone plan offering). The way this worked was the entire Production environment had to be duplicated and all data files renamed so programs could be tested without affecting production (editing JCL for those with mainframe tech backgrounds). When I got there, these DUMMIES in my department, about 10 people total, were MANUALLY editing these JCL files and renaming these files over and over and over again, day after day, month after month. It took WEEKS to do testing of a new plan. Within just a few weeks of being there I came up with the “genius” idea of using variables in the JCL and automating the duplicating of environments. What took weeks now could be deployed same day. Testing of new marketing plans could now happen within days, not weeks. This was not even what I was hired to do, but I came up with the idea anyway. The increased efficiency allowed Sprint to release marketing plans much more frequently, which increased sales/income by many millions. Do you think this got me anywhere? It literally got me nothing other than a pat on the back. No bonus. No promotion. I didn’t even get some kind of company-wide recognition.
This type stuff is why I gave up on corporate jobs and kept trying to build something on my own (which I eventually had success doing). I would have happily stayed working for companies if I could ever get any traction. I frequently ran into folks above me who were much dumber than me who were never going to get promoted. While I’m very happy and content with how my life turned out, I do get “professionally jealous” of those who were treated fairly in their careers. All that to say, I know I’m far from the only person this happened to. Have you never had any friends “complain” to you and tell you stories of not being professionally appreciated? Has it happened to any kids/relatives of yours?
Hobo, I’ll give you my opinion and hope it doesn’t rub you the wrong way. One thing I recommend to people is, do not take a job where the top people aren’t just like you. If you are a nurse the CEO should be a nurse as well as some of the VP’s and Directors. If you are a chemical engineer like me, oil and chemicals is where I limited my job search. Because the CEO of Exxon was a chemical engineer as were most of the big shots at the smaller corporation I went to. If you are a telecommunications expert go to Sprint, but if you are an IT guy go to IBM or SAP or someone else whose main decision makers have an IT background. I could have gotten a job at Texas Instruments or Hewlett Packard or IBM but it would have been a bad choice. Those companies are run by electrical engineers and computer science majors. You don’t get rewarded or respected in companies where you are seen as an ancillary service, even if it is an important one. I did a lot of coding in my early years and automated a lot of archaic manual processes. But I got rewarded because I was seen as an integral part of our core mission of producing products. Even though you were just as important as me at making bank, they likely would not let themselves see you that way. I may be off but I know that happened to some gifted guys I worked with. I encouraged them to leave and go to companies where their job was the central mission of the whole company, not a service function, and their careers took off. As to guys who deserved more than our company could give, I encouraged them to find more opportunity other places. I was the training ground for Valero’s best engineers and it gave me quite a network of friends later.
Not rubbed wrong at all. Your reply is quite keen and great advice. And some of the advice I hadn’t quite seen that way before. While I did work for an IBM type company at one point (ACS), I eventually had my main success by specializing on an SAP product.
I’ve often wondered how my life might have been different moving to Silicon Valley in my early 20’s. I’m pretty sure my hard work would have been rewarded much more. I for sure would have networked my way into greater wealth.
Side question: Any advice for someone graduating U of Ark/Walton College of Business this year in Supply Chain Management?
Thank you for your wisdom and insights as always.
I think I’d consider staying right there in Northwest Arkansas and working with WalMart, J.B.Hunt or one of the other companies who rely on supply chain logistics as a core business function, particularly WalMart’s internet retail business which is trying to rival Amazon. Maybe Tyson foods as well but traditionally they have been managed by chicken people more than supply chain. I’m calling Walton College of Business tomorrow to see about hiring them to do a labor workforce study for my volunteer industrial recruitment project, we’ve gotten funding it appears.
I think you would be closer to the mark if you replaced ‘millionaire’ with ‘careerist’
That’s an interesting take. Certainly I was a careerist. I mean I’m 66 years old and well over half of those I was in corporate life. Sounds scary to say that! And that certainly isn’t everybody’s ideal life, maybe very few see it that way, but for all but the last two years I was pretty happy with my life and I would not change it if I had a second chance.
Steve, Like you I’m pretty skeptical about formulas for success or the ‘5 things all successful people do’ . Most of the C-level folks I know didn’t follow a traditional path and almost none of the successful entrepreneurs I know did. I think we underrate lucky timing and fortuitous encounters in things like career success. We want to look back at our lives and believe that it was our brains, hard work, skill, genius, etc.. that made us successful. And all of that plays a role in ultimate success, I’m sure. But I know lots of super smart, hard-working people who never caught a break, never worked for the right boss, never really got a chance to break out. Looking back I realize was lucky more often than I was good. Of course that’s hard to admit—because it means we didn’t necessarily deserve the good life we’ve managed to create-that some of it was just dumb luck and being in the right place at the right time… I write this while wintering on the beach in Mexico having left my C-level job at 55–and I admit, I might have been pretty good, but I was also super fortunate in many ways that were out of my control…
Jack, you’ve got another rare quality that helped you succeed, humility. That is a big one because it is so linked to being easy to like. And being liked by others and trusted is such a major factor in success. Being successful without feeling entitled to success is hard to manage but you did it. I like to think I did too, to some extent, because I was always amazed by my success, I never felt I deserved to be in charge of the company, I mean I wasn’t anything special in my own mind, just supremely fortunate.
Churchill was said to have remarked about a cabinet minister from another party ; “A humble man, with much to be humble about.” 😎 I don’t know that any of my former colleagues would have described me as humble… my success was based on surrounding myself with the smartest and most interesting people I could draw to my team and then paying attention to what they had to say and encouraging dissent. “All of us are smarter than anyone of us..”
Jack, there’s a lot of wisdom in this comment. Certainly all of us want to ignore the role of luck, but the older I get and the more I see, the more I believe that right place/right time plays a central role in a lot of things–career, romantic relationships, etc.
Thanks Steve, great post.
Really resonated with the fact that you felt authorized by your own talent to change your job assignments at will.
I also do the same and know a lot of my success has been from redefining how things are done to either reduce effort/cost or increase output.
A lot of people just want a list of tasks they can methodically work through. Actually knowing why you’re doing something or being able to see the entire end to end process is definitely is brilliant skill.
Not saying there’s a right or wrong way, although does make you stand out which helps with progression.
Still a long way from millionaire status though, so still room for improvement!
Also haven’t come across that Millionaire Money Mentor before, interesting you’re a mentor.
The first point, that millionaires usually have mentors. I’ve found finding a mentor quite difficult. Possibly because I haven’t found anyone in a position/leading a lifestyle that I want to try and emulate.
Had a few in a career capacity which has helped with incremental improvements, although not outside work.
Definitely going to have a look into that mentor program! Guessing you’re an advocate!
Indeed I am John. https://millionairemoneymentors.com is the site for that. Sounds like you are on your way to that first million!
Whew, that list is super vague. I think it depends on who we’re comparing to. I mean, compared to someone who doesn’t have the perseverance to finish college or consistently get to work on time, sure that’s a great list. But I’m with you: perseverance and consistency aren’t sufficient. I’m lazy too, and I’m all about playing smarter, not harder. I know plenty of people who are fantastic worker bees who will put in crazy long hours on things that really don’t matter at all. I try to figure out what matters, focus hard on that, and then slack off on everything else. And it’s worked out pretty well!
Well said Mrs. FCB, I did hard work on things that mattered, almost in a frenzy of focus. But some of that other stuff that people spent so much time on was boring and useless. I think it works out well, if you have enough talent. And you definitely are loaded with talent.
This was brilliant, Steve!
I especially liked the part about 1) solving the problem your boss asked you to solve, and THEN 2) solving the real problem.
A great piece of insight about the politics of work–something I’m not so good at. I’ll be sure to remember that advice. This is the type of thing that would make you a great mentor–your mentees are lucky to have you!
Thanks Froogal! I do enjoy mentoring. Maybe because I feel like if someone like me, the shyest kid in the classroom, could succeed, that anyone can. I’ve always wanted to help others who didn’t see success inside themselves find it.