I live in the future. I'm constantly focused on tomorrow... or six months from now... or further out. I'm not worried about today. I focused on today yesterday. So the present is largely meaningless to me, as I've already penned my game plan. This is why I'm not fazed by volatility or sell-offs. They're opportunities to me and always have been. When shares of companies fall 10% or more during a market downturn, it's a gift. Because those shares will be higher a few months from now... maybe even a few days from now. Broad market collapses - like the one we recently saw - are often steep and swift. But moves higher last far longer, with massive gains to be won. That's why the future always has more weight than the present, in my opinion. And studies have shown that this type of thinking not only makes better investors but also results in better financial decisions. What if there's more to it than that? What if the language you speak - and how it relates to the future - can make you a better investor and saver? This is an idea that's reemerged over the past decade. And because of my love of behavioral economics - like those championed by Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler - I've been intrigued by the idea. Back in the 1930s, linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf developed the theory of linguistic relativity. It's all about how the structures of the languages we speak impact the way we see the world. The idea is that a person who grew up speaking, reading and writing English thinks differently about certain concepts than someone who grew up speaking, reading and writing Mandarin. And it's not cultural. It has to do with the way a language is structured. Several years ago, behavioral economist Keith Chen revisited the idea of linguistic relativity. But he explored how it relates to our ability to save and plan for the future. His question was this: If there's no clear grammatical distinction between the present and the future, do speakers of that language view the future and the present differently? For example, in English we say, "I will go to the play." English is a futured language. It forces us to divide time into tenses so that there's a distinction between present and future events. But in Mandarin you say, "I go to the play." | 
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