I watch the Chase quiz programme with Bradley Walsh when I’m having my late afternoon cup of tea and if you haven’t seen it a contestant goes up against a quiz champion to try and win money.
The champion – or Chaser – offers the contestant a sum of money dependant on how well they did in a qualifying quiz round against the clock.
This results in the contestant answering say 5 questions correctly and the Chaser then offers them £5k or an lower offer and a higher offer and the contestant chooses what offer to take when they compete against the Chaser.
What amazes me is the amount of contestants who choose the middle offer because ‘I’ll take what I’ve earned’ and there is a sense from contestants that they’ve earned the middle offer because that’s the number of questions they got right.
It’s a curious thought and one that permeates throughout our culture. We have this idea that we have to ‘earn’ money with slog and with an interchange of our time or an appropriate number of correct answers.
It’s a limiting belief. And one that keeps people poor. If we constantly believe that we have to work hard for our money then there’s little possibility for working smart or getting your money passively.
The secret to true wealth is to separate out what you do with your time from how you get your money and that’s a separation that we are not conditioned for. We are conditioned that we have to exchange our time for cash and that we have to ‘earn’ it in some way. No-one ever admitted to getting wealthy by being smart – they always say ‘I worked hard’.
We need to challenge that assumption. And on the Chase contestants would often do better by accepting the lower or higher offer as a strategy – taking the smart option rather than the ‘earned’ option!
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