Why rich people don’t hang out with this kind of person

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According to some new research, there is one type of person rich people tend to avoid…

Read more: Can money really buy happiness? It depends… 

Thomas C. Corley spent five years researching rich people’s habits (those who made $160,000 in annual gross income and had $3.2 million in net liquid assets), and discovered some fascinating insights.

As reported by Business Insider, Mr. Corley says in his book Change Your Habits, Change Your Life, that rich people tend to avoid people who are pessimistic, instead focusing on relationships with people who are ‘goal-oriented, optimistic, enthusiastic, and who have an overall positive mental outlook.’

In his research, Mr. Corley found that 86% of rich people habitually sought out other success-minded people, and ‘made a point to limit their exposure to toxic, negative people.’ The famous quote by well-known businessman Jim Rohn holds a lot of truth: ‘You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with,’ and as it shows from the research, successful people are acutely aware of this.  

‘Long-term success is only possible when you have a positive mental outlook,’ said Corley. 

Think and Grow Rich, the famous business book by Napolean Hill also backs up these findings. Mr. Hill stated in his book in 1937, ‘there is no hope of success for the person who repels people through a negative personality.’ 

After studying 500 self-made millionaires, Hill discovered that most people want to do business with a positive person, not a negative one — hence the reason the millionaires he studied had a positive outlook. In other words, it pays to be positive! 

Read more: What makes workers happiest? It’s not more money!

Negativity changes the structure of your brain

There is no doubt that all of us will experience hardship at some point in our lives; this is the nature of life. But it’s what we choose to do with it that counts. 

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As Clark has said in the past, ‘The only thing that’s the end of the world…is the end of the world.’ To say it differently, don’t sweat the small stuff! 

Another study recently found that complaining can change the composition of our brains. Though it might feel great to let off steam, does this really help us long term? 

Psychologist Jeffrey Lohr made a humorous analogy based on his research on venting:

‘People don’t break wind in elevators more than they have to. Venting anger is…similar to emotional farting in a closed area,’ he said. 

Read more: 4 ways to stop emotions from wrecking your wealth

As reported by Inc. Magazine, one of the first things neuroscience students learn is that when you have a thought, it builds a bridge over the synaptic cleft, or space between the synapses. If this thought happens over and over, the synapses move closer and closer together, actually rewiring your brain.

‘The brain is rewiring its own circuitry, physically changing itself, to make it easier and more likely that the proper synapses will share the chemical link and thus spark together–in essence, making it easier for the thought to trigger,’ says author Steven Parton of Psych Pedia.

But, the good news is, this works in reverse also. Gratitude has been shown to re-wire the brain in a positive way.

A study by Indiana University led by Prathik Kini asked 43 participants suffering from from anxiety or depression to participate in activities expressing gratefulness, or not. Some of the activities included writing a letter of gratefulness to someone in their lives or donate a portion of money to a charity. 

Their findings? ‘The participants who’d completed the gratitude task months earlier not only reported feeling more gratefulness two weeks after the task than members of the control group, but also, months later, showed more gratitude-related brain activity in the scanner. The researchers described these ‘profound’ and ‘long-lasting’ neural effects as ‘particularly noteworthy,” said psychology writer Christian Jarrett on the Science of Us blog.

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Though we may not be able to change or control our circumstances, we can change the way we think about them and respond to them. As the research on millionaires has shown, positivity has a huge impact on success, both in finance and in other areas of life. 

Read more: 10 simple scientifically proven ways to increase your happiness

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