Menu
Investorship Financial Education Foundation
Coined by Paul Heys and Dr. Ronald Smith in 1999, the word Investorship describes the characteristics exhibited by highly successful investors, specifically their attitudes and behavioral qualities. By defining these qualities, Investorship recognizes an important but little understood financial and investment reality. An individual’s attitude and behavior relative to investing and investments play as large a role in determining an outcome as do the investments themselves. Sometimes, they play an even larger role.
The principles of Investorship are summarized in Paul Heys’ book, Spending Your Way to Wealth, available now.
Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman describes these attributes in his bestselling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, a brilliant look into how our minds work. He holds that normal human beings respond to situations in one of two ways: Reactively or Reflectively. The former, known as System 1, “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.” The latter, System 2, “allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex calculations.” (A summary of this 500-page work is available here.)
Investorship is the application of Kahneman’s principles to the subjects of spending, investing, and true wealth. When we react rather than reflect, we are far more likely to spend more (if not everything) on things that decrease in value—thereby forfeiting enormous potential future wealth.