Success is often explained as a product of talent, luck, or ambition. But what if the real difference lies somewhere deeper in the way certain people deliberately and systematically optimize how they think, perform, and improve over time. Whether in their careers, business, health, hobbies, or wealth, some people seem driven not just to succeed, but to continually refine the way they live and perform. Welcome to the deliberate edge from Ytree, a four part podcast series exploring the psychology of self optimization and high performance. At the heart of the series is a major new piece of thought leadership created by Ytree. The research explores the psychological traits and behaviors associated with high achieving, high net worth individuals and asks a fascinating question. Are some people naturally wired to optimize more effectively than others? But in this episode, we're stepping back to explore the science behind it all. My guest today is professor Paul Dolan, acclaimed author, academic, and professor at the London School of Economics. He's one of the leading voices globally on how people think, behave, and experience their lives. Paul, welcome to The Deliberate Edge. Hello, Vicky. You've been working with Ytree to analyze the behaviors and personality traits of successful high net worth individuals. What were some of the key questions that you were trying to explore at the outset? Yeah. So I am interested in human behavior and well-being. So this was a great opportunity to work with Ytree to get at hard to get at people. We often find it very hard to get people who are the worst off in society or who are those that are suffering the most. Homeless people, for example, rarely have good data on them. We rarely have good data on high net wealth individuals. So it was a fantastic opportunity. I like a I felt a bit like a kid in a sweet shop to be able to explore the the behaviors and the well-being of hard to reach high net wealth individuals. So really, it was trying to find out lots of stuff about them. Their risk preferences, their time preferences, how they feel about other people, their self optimization measured in ways that we could come on and talk about, their personalities, whether they're more conscientious or agreeable or neurotic perhaps, their well-being, whether they're happier, whether they reflect on life as going well, whether they might be more anxious, whether they might be more narcissistic or psychopathic or Machiavellian. All these things that are super interesting to be able to to understand anyway, but particularly in high net worth individuals. And particularly because there's so many stories and narratives around what it's like to be wealthy and very little insight, actually, into how those people think and feel and act. Well, let's dig a little bit into your approach. The Deliberate Edge report used qualitative and quantitative research and analyzed data from the perspective of two hundred UK based high net worth individuals worth more well, having more than one million pounds in investable assets. You were trying to explore how they approach self optimization. What were some of the behaviors and traits that you were looking to measure in order to do this? Yeah. So to explore their preferences, their personalities, their happiness. Importantly, in comparison to a UK general population. Because sometimes we might think of them being different, but the question is always compared to whom. And can you see a pattern in how high net worth individuals are trying to self optimize? Well, we should probably talk about self optimization. So I think it's important that we're clear about what that what that means. Yeah. And I think the most obvious way to define it is to say what it's not, and it isn't maximization. So it's not it's not searching constantly for the maximum for more and more and more. That might be wealth, but it could be other things in life as well. People could be driven by all sorts of passions and motivations where they just keep going and never quite having enough. So an optimizer would be somebody who is a bit more balanced. Someone who is still driven, but not maximizing. They're trying to optimize across different aspects of their life, their wealth, their family, their health, and all the other things that we might care about. So self optimization play takes proper regard also of how one feels. And so someone self optimizing would be showing regard for not only their own happiness, actually, but also the happiness of those around them, the people that they care about, their family, their friends, and maybe even the well-being of wider society. So it's a much more holistic definition of how somebody leads their lives. This is not just about being a high performer in one area. This is about overall being able to balance health, wealth, achievement, and performance in different aspects of life. Yeah. I think I mean, the most obvious but overlooked these are actually, most of the best insights are obvious but overlooked is everything is dose response. If I drunk ten liters of water now, I'd die. So even water's harmful if you have too much of it. And so it's about finding balance. It's about finding the right dose of all of those aspects, including wealth, that allow you to optimize and not necessarily maximize. And amongst these high performers and optimizers, you found different segments, different groups of traits that characterized different groups of optimizers. So how can you take us a bit through Yeah. I can. High net worth individuals appear to have a much greater appetite for risk. That's true not only of the average UK person as it were, but also those in the highest decile of income in those large panel datasets. And alongside that sits higher levels of daily anxiety. So why don't we dig a little bit into those? You said that they have a higher risk tolerance. How do you think they experience risk or their attitude to risk differs from other people? Yeah. It's a super question. Thank you. I it's complicated, I think. The qualitative insights give the interviews give us some insights into what people might have in mind, and it's not straightforwardly obvious that it's like a, you know, gung ho, let's take risks. It's perhaps sometimes a bit more controlled and measured than that. Particularly in relation to playing the long game, it's hard to separate risk and time preference out from each other. And so what our high net worth individuals have the capacity to be able to do and the willingness and the appetite to do is to ride out losses when markets fall, for example. The other interesting one was this seeming contradiction or paradox between the lower neuroticism but higher anxiety levels. How might you explain that? Again, very interesting. So neuroticism measures a trait, an underlying personality trait, alongside the other, you know, traits. The reportings of anxiety are state measures. They're how you're feeling in the moment. And so, it's not that surprising that you could have a difference in what a trait what what you might have as a trait and what you might reflect as a state. It does raise the question, I suppose, of, you know, I mean, I I guess you I you know, what would you have what would people it's really hard once you know the facts afterwards to be able to ask about what they would have thought before because we always have hindsight bias. We're always smarter after the fact. It's not surprising that there's slightly lower levels of neuroticism. I mean, it probably makes people a little more likely at the margin to be able to succeed. And to tolerate risk even. The anxiety is an interesting finding, I think. Because it's one of the very rare opportunities we've had to be able to sample significantly large numbers. I mean, it's two hundred people, so it's not huge, but it's larger than most others other survey research on high net worth individuals. To show that they have higher levels of anxiety than the general population averages are is interesting. And again, there's a chicken and egg problem. You know, does the anxiety drive them to be successful, however that might be measured, including by wealth? Or does having the wealth make them more anxious? This is an area of your own work, I'm sure. So you can speak to that well, I think. Like everything, it's dose response. I mean, I'm not sure that it would be entirely functional to have literally no anxiety at all ever. Yep. So again, identifying what the sweet spots might look like. So that it's not crippling, but it's actually a driver Exactly. Exactly. But our sample are not more narcissistic, and they're not more psychopathic, and they're not more Machiavellian. So were you surprised by that? Honestly, probably, yes. I mean, we do see some of the literature on narcissism suggests you do see more narcissists in, you know, what we might call higher status elite type occupations, senior management surgeons. Quite a lot of narcissists in the world. So so on the narcissism, I might have expected there to be a bit of a difference there, but maybe less obviously on the other two pillars of the dark triad. But yeah. So that was quite interesting that there wasn't any. There's one finding that, you know, didn't surprise me because I work as a financial psychotherapist, so I see a lot of people who are feeling really insecure about their relationship with money even when they're wealthy. But I think most people might be surprised by the fact that even high net worth individuals don't feel secure in their financial situation or at least not as much as what the facts might lead you to believe. Why do you think there's such a disconnect? That's a really, really good question, and I think this is perhaps one of the most interesting observations, at least, from the from the work, is that well, so first of all, when people were reporting their motivations for making wealth, security, family security in particular, comes out as being very high. I think maybe the first rank of all the reasons. Now, we need to carry that because we know that what's going to sound good when we're answering survey questions might not be what we actually fundamentally believe or what really motivates us. It's a nice thing to say that we're doing it for the family. Right? So we need to be you know, that's a it's not an insignificant reason. Although although, of course, these were surveys where they did them away from interviewers and all that. So, like, that social that that social desirability bias will be less, or arguably less in those quantitative surveys. The respondents all in various ways mentioned security as being important. And I remember there was one really kinda striking moment where someone was saying that he's still motivated. Someone with very, very high net worth was still motivated by making sure that his wife and kids would be okay. And I'm like, I think they're fine. And he said, well, you know, markets could crash. This could happen. That could happen. I'm like, they're still gonna be alright. And he was like, yeah. I suppose I suppose I know that. Yeah. But I don't really know that. So my clients often talk about a fear of loss. How do you think that links to this desire for security that you found in the research? Yeah. It's a wonderful question. We'd love to know that, wouldn't we? Well, actually, would we even like to know? I mean, if if you're interested in what people do Ultimately how they act, then they're acting in ways that would be consistent both with a motivation for security and a fear of loss. So in in a substantive sense, it might not make that much difference. I mean, why would you be driven for security if it wasn't the fear of what would happen in the absence of it? Right? So that's almost certainly gonna be related or maybe actually it. Right? I mean, it's hard to actually separate those out, isn't it? Like, what so what do you want security for? Well, it's to feel secure. Okay. Well, what's feeling insecure mean? Well, insecure means having lost things. So so I think they're very they're very, very tightly entwined with one another. It's worth saying, of course, as as we said, that the high net worth individuals have a greater appetite for risk. And and often you see caution and risk aversion in people that are more fearful. So so that's an interesting thing. And but again, context matters so much. And and also the as you know from your own work, it's the specificity of it that really matters. So they're not they're not fearful in some substantive sense of taking risks, maybe sometimes because they've got wealth anyway, but also that motivates them to make wealth, whilst at the same time being driven of this specific and unique fear almost about what insecurity would look like. And interestingly, I mean, fear is often, you know, very disproportionate, of course, to the actual consequences of what would happen. There are many things in life that we are much much more fearful of than the harms that the resolution of that outcome would entail. And so the imagination of people thinking what it would be like to to lose it's not even everything. I mean, that's what's really interesting. I mean, some of those qualitative interviews, you know, people really deep down knew that they were alright. But they kind of didn't? Know they were because they were still clinging to this security life raft or something. So catastrophizing potentially about what the future Well, I mean, it's an interesting it's an interesting thing. Everything is about framing, isn't it? Mean, you think about what what loss would look like in terms of its final consequence, then loss for high net worth individuals would mean that their lives are still still probably going okay compared to people taking risks without any wealth. But at the same time, the absolute differences will be enormous. I mean, you could think of losing millions of pounds, which we know that we pay attention to relative changes and not just absolute levels. So the fear of losing significant amounts, as I've just said said this out loud, this feels like it's remotely interesting Connects to the sense of security because you're you're you're elevating every time as what the bar for security looks like, whilst at the same time, the drop of loss is getting bigger. So so you're never you're you're always gonna be fearful because the loss will be compounded, and the security bar is rising at the same time. So you're on to it's a kind of lose lose almost. Because we know that we experience losses. They they hurt twice as much as gains feel pleasurable. So to to fall from that up high might might feel like Yes. Context does matter. And some of the literature suggesting twice as much comes from financial gambles of very small amounts. But, yes, you're right. I mean, roughly speaking, the sort of psychological benefit from finding twenty pounds would be about the same as the psychological cost from losing ten. So security is a much deeper concept, it seems. A hundred percent. I mean, and again, you'd know much more about this than than I would from a at least, obviously, from a psychotherapeutic perspective. But it feels like that it's it's it's just an interesting when I talk about dose response, it's because it's because everything can become addictive if you have too much of it in, you know. And the idea of security doesn't feel like it's an addiction, does it? We think of addictions as being the obvious ones that manifest through people's actions in ways that end up harmful. But but security feels like it's such a good thing That how could you become addicted to it? But it feels like that might be something else that people could be addicted to in some sense. And and maybe we can we're calling it addiction because the the bar keeps moving. So people don't quite yeah. They don't have enough, and every time you've reached the target, it keeps moving. Yeah. And I'm loose and I'm using the term addiction in a very non clinical sort of lay way. And, of course, there's a whole literature that argues about even the nature of what it means to be addicted to behaviors. Again, leaving that to one side, it's the manifestation of of never being able to have enough no matter how much you have accumulated. So, Paul, can you tell us a little bit about the segments that you found, the different categories of self optimizers, and how you've grouped them? So we looked for clusters of responses, basically. So latent class analysis where you where you look for patterns in people's responses across the myriad questions in the survey. Starting with the self optimization, we we ask people about their degrees of optimization across life overall with some questions that aggregated up to an overall score, plus across domains, wealth, health, leisure, family, whatever they would so they so you can so you can look at those scores, and we use those as the glue that help hold people together, and then look at the associations with other responses across other questions. And we get basically three segments emerging from the data, which I have to say, I'm not saying that these are the ideal labels for these categories, but I think they work reasonably well. We've called steady optimizers. And they represent over two thirds, about seventy percent of the sample, who seem to be doing well in being able to optimize across different domains of life. Of the categories that I will identify, the three groups, they're the least anxious, but still more anxious than the average person in the general population. But they're the least anxious of our three groups. And then we have the, what we call, restless builders. You if we call the first group optimizers, we might call this group maximizers. Very crude, loose language. But people who seem to be constantly driven for more. And they report high levels of anxiety, and they also but here's the interesting thing. Well, lots of things are interesting, but here's something that's particularly interesting for my happiness research. They also report the highest levels of life satisfaction. So these are these make up about twenty two percent of the sample. So a significant number who, when they reflect upon their lives, think it's going very well. When they experience their life day to day, they're anxious. Now that raises a deep philosophical question about which of those metrics is the best guide to their well-being. Personally, it's how you feel day to day that I would go in. If you're if you're constantly anxious but think your life is going well, but you're still anxious. And and you might wanna reflect on why that is and whether life is actually going as well as you might think it is. But that's not but we can you know, that that could take a long time for us to talk about that more fully. They do report the highest levels of anxiety, and they are driven by, it seems I wouldn't say too much, that's gonna be probably saying too much to say too much. But they are seeking to maximise in a way that the optimisers seem to have adopted a more balanced approach to life. Right. And then, we have quite disengagers. They make up eight percent of the of the sample. They're actually doing the least well across most of our metrics, including including happiness. And anxiety, I think, well. And they there's a small number of them, but they seem to have I'm not quite sure checked out is too strong a term. But, you know, Bruce, we're making inferences from what this latent class analysis throws up. They basically, just to be clear, it throws up segments. It says segment a, segment b, segment c, and we call them something based on an inference of what those clusters of responses look like. So they they appear to be maybe not quite sure what to do with their wealth now, maybe. So if somebody listening wants to become better at self optimizing, where should they start? Yes. It's a super question. I I mean, I'm always very reluctant because I get asked questions like this a lot in various fora to be prescriptive about how people should live their lives. And I'm sure you feel similarly. There's so much individual heterogeneity, so much variance across people that we are all fundamentally different because well functioning societies require us to be. But to give a one size fits all prescription, I think, is trying to sell snake oil. Having said that, what could what could people do? Well, there is an opportunity for all of us to reflect a little from time to time, not always that it paralyzes you, and that's again about those. But to reflect on just what it is that you're motivated by and for, and ultimately for. I mean, what is anything for? The quest for success, status, wealth, all these things that might motivate us. What is the fundamental reason for those? And, you know, it looks as if from our data, some people are our steady optimizers, making up seventy percent. It's a good number. You know, sort of seem to be doing that reasonably well. They're satisfying to some degree our our outline of what self optimization looks like, you know, accounting for all of these impacts. But the maximizers may be less so. So if you're one of those people who is constantly driven and striving for more, ask yourself perhaps what that more is for. Yeah. Well, and how sustainable it is to keep going like that. And I've certainly met people who even their hobbies and their leisure time turns into performance and competition, and so you never quite get that balance that is needed to to keep it all sustainable. I I it is it is interesting that from the qualitative interviews as well, some people were not just driven by their career success or financial success and wealth, whatever, But also, as you say, some of the leisure activities become quite performative and very competitive. And you do wanna just say, as much as I say there's not a one size fits all, you wanna say to them sometimes, just can you not just do something for fun? Like, it doesn't always have to be about the consequences beyond enjoying yourself. Yeah. But then, I guess, you might expect me to say that as a happiness researcher. You you have a a unique angle to this, but but one that is very relevant for people because it isn't. And as this research is showing, it isn't just about achieving on one dimension. This is about holistic well-being and and health and wealth and all of it. I'm also struck by something that someone else said about the security piece, about how this was not the same person that said he wanted more and more still for his family. But he was saying that he was out for dinner with another high net worth individual and their two wife wives. And he was saying about how he was still motivated by the family and stuff, and she sort of tapped him and said, it's fine. You don't have to keep working. You work because you want to keep working, not because we need anymore. So so again, so maybe that it's not just the reflection, it's the introspection maybe to really see if you can understand what underlies, what looks like the motivation. But not to do too much of that, you know, you've got to live life. I, you know, it's for me, and this is beyond what we might advise for high net wealth individuals or whatever, this is a more general observation or insight that I'd like to provide, which is that you want to reflect and introspect enough to be able to design your life in ways that make it easier for you to pay attention to and do the things that make you feel good, and then almost like letting your dog off the lead to then run around in the park, having carefully designed it in a way that you know is good for the dog. But in the end, the dog's gonna have to run around. You can't just keep reflecting and introspecting. Again, it's about finding balance. Well, in a way, you've addressed it, but let let me ask in case you want to add anything. What do you think that ultimately defines a well optimized life? We have a definition in the report of self optimization. It's been actually quite interesting working on on that. I think in its original incarnation, it started, from my perspective, a bit too much like performance maximization. It's it's now, I think, a really nuanced performance alongside pleasure and purpose and connection, and and using your your wealth, and your time, and your resources, your energy, which are all scarce, in ways that enable you to advance and be deliberative, at the same time as letting the dog off the lead and run around, at the same time as enjoying your life, really thinking about the impact that you are having on other people, particularly those close to you, and what's motivating you on their behalf. I think that's that's important. And I think that, you know, if there's anything that comes out of this report, it's enabling people just to just to take a deep breath for a moment perhaps, and reflect on whether they are optimising and not necessarily maximizing. Paul, thank you for joining us. Vicky, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. You've been listening to the Deliberate Edge, a four part podcast series from Y Tree exploring the psychology of self optimization, high performance, and what it really takes to build a meaningful edge in life. You can listen to the rest of the series now, including our conversation with Welsh rugby legend Dan Bigger, and to explore the full thought leadership report from professor Paul Dolan, including deeper insights into the personality traits and behaviors of high performing, high net worth individuals, visit the Y Tree website.