Your language could be influencing your financial health.
In this video, Keith Chen gives a very interesting Ted Talk on how language affects how you view the relationship between the past, present and future. For many English speakers, as well as those from many other linguistic backgrounds, it may seem strange that some languages don’t have past and future tenses. Mandarin is an example of this but there are many others.
Not having these tenses affects how we think about the future and the past. We commonly hear in English: “Don’t worry about your diet. Celebrate today – eat that cake. Tomorrow you can go back on your diet.” We can do this easily in English since we separate the past and future very clearly in the way we speak. Keith Chen shows how this influences our savings patterns. But what else works in a similar manner? Really anything which takes putting effort into something in order to reap benefits in the future. So watching our diet, exercising, quitting smoking – all are influenced by this aspect of language.
So lots of food for thought! Eat up…