Derek Thompson

If you ask various groups, sort of bucketed by generational cohort, how much money they consider success in America, you tend to have about $150,000 be the norm in most generations until you get to Gen Z, and they say it's $400,000 to $500,000.

The Institute for Family Studies recently looked at a monitoring the future survey that asked various questions about materialism among young boys and girls in high school.

And that line of materialism has just gone up and up and up.

And I think for the first time in the last 30 years, women are now higher on a certain measure of materialism than men.

So on the one hand, you have this extraordinary desire among young people to be successful.

They open their phones, they look at influencers, they see rich, successful, beautiful people living their rich, successful, beautiful lives.

And so that's one train track that's coming along here.

But there's this other parallel train track, and that is students cheating constantly in high school and college.

In the short run, if you cheat in every test—

you're cheating the test.

In the long run, if you're cheating on every test, you are cheating yourself.

You are removing from yourself the ability to lift the weight.

And if you want to be rich, and if you want to be successful,

I myself certainly know of absolutely no individual who is rich and successful who doesn't work unbelievably hard, who isn't very good at what I think of as cognitive time under tension.

That is to extend the fitness metaphor, this idea that if you do sort of one rep of 150 pounds on a bench press and it takes one second, that's a certain amount of resistance.

But if you make that a five or even 10 second up and down, it's much more tension on the muscles.

That's time under tension.

And I think thinking has a similar principle, that really great ideas benefit from the ability to sit with those ideas for a long period of time to figure them out, to find the simplicity that I think, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, is on the other side of the mountain.

You learn about something, and then you're able, through your learning about it, to make it simple and make it effective.

If you are cheating yourself out of all these tests, you're cheating yourself out of the ability to become rich and successful.