So I've stumbled upon some awesome TED talks recently, from friends sharing them on facebook. So this morning, instead of perusing facebook for inspiration/education/entertainment, I decided that I would just go to TED talks site and watch one of the videos I found which had an interesting title.
I found this:
"Could Your Language Affect Your Ability To Save"
Of course, most of you know since the husband and I have been married, I've been investing a lot of time and thought into money, and how to get it to work best for us. Dave Ramsey says something like, you have to tell your money where to go and what to do, otherwise, it will always have control over you.
All that to say, money interests me, and the way we think about money interests me.
This Keith guy, he proposes the language we speak has an affect on how we see money and how we save money. Our English language has a past, present and future tense where we have a lot of things that change in our terminology.
It rained last night vs It is raining vs It is going to rain tomorrow
Other languages approach the tenses differently, and translated is like this:
It rain yesterday vs It rain now vs It rain tomorrow
Obviously, he does a much better job explaining it [you should go ahead and watch it :)]. But his studies show USA citizens are worse savers than most [well, everyone except Greece] countries where the language for future encounters is not as different as present encounters.
It's fascinating to think about.
My favorite part though, when when he goes on to talk about health benefits.
He talks about smoking. While saving is a current pain in exchange for a future pleasure, smoking is a current pleasure in exchange for a future pain. And of course there are links to people who suck at saving, also being smokers, and overweight. Clearly pointing to current pleasures outweighing their future pains.
-mrp-
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