This post was originally published on October 5th, 2010 with the title, Do You Have Wealth and Abundance in Your Genes?

In his book A Farewell to Alms, professor Gregory Clark of the University of California at Davis suggested that the values that lead to economic prosperity may be encoded in your genes.  In his study of English economic history, Clark deduced that the most prosperous families in the Middle Ages had more children, and those larger broods survived because their families had the means to take better care of them.  Through values of hard work, saving and investing, prosperous families, well, prospered. And those larger families begat more large families, and eventually, those families were able to share their value systems in such powerful ways that the Industrial Revolution was born in England.

At the same time, the Fletcher School at Tufts University has launched the Cultural Change Institute, a think tank whose mission is “to accelerate political, economic, and social development in poor countries and among underachieving groups in the advanced democracies.”  They are doing this by exploring and testing the cultural values, beliefs and attitudes associated with societal prosperity.

The experts that launched the institute participated in two major debates at both Harvard and Tufts.  Although the viewpoints were quite varied, all of the debate participants agreed on one thing, in the words of Carlos Alberto Montaner of www.firmaspress.com: development and wealth, or underdevelopment and poverty, are a state of mind.

It is your beliefs, values and attitudes that will determine how much wealth and abundance will be available to you in life.  You may or may not have been privy to a history in which you were exposed to the cultural and genetic influences that would promote prosperity.  But with whom are you studying now?  By absorbing the beliefs, values and attitudes of those in possession of the abundance you would like to create in your own life, you can accelerate not only the creation of wealth in your own life, but in the lives of your children and grandchildren.

It really is whom you hang out with.  In my book The Science of Making Things Happen: Turn Any Possibility into Reality, you can read the stories of people who rose from poverty to amazing wealth literally overnight by changing their beliefs, values and attitudes.

Do you have such a story? Please share!