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Peering Into the Minds of Millionaires
The truth might set you free from the rat race
When I first read The Millionaire Mind by Dr. Thomas J. Stanley in the early 1990s, I was building a business as an investment advisor serving wealthy families. My clients were relatively normal people who worked hard, saved, invested, and counted on me to help them plan for college educations, retirement, and special investments.
Beyond the lessons I learned helping hundreds of families for over a decade, I learned from people like Thomas Stanley, who took a different, more academic approach. Dr. Stanley was a college professor and researcher.
He didn’t just guess what made people wealthy. He studied them.
Stanley took an academic approach to studying wealth
For over 30 years, Stanley surveyed and interviewed thousands of millionaires. He collected the data, crunched the numbers, and looked for patterns.
What he found flipped the script. Most wealthy people didn’t look the way we expected. They weren’t flashy. They weren’t famous. They didn’t inherit their money. They were teachers, small business owners, engineers, and farmers. They lived in modest homes, drove regular cars, and made smart, simple choices over time.