Steve Siebold knows 'How Rich People Think'

This is not a story about "The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous." But Steve Siebold, an East Coast motivational speaker, knows a lot about the upper crust's attitudes, which he shares in a new book called "How Rich People Think" (London House, 224 pages).

He studied business in college in the 1980s, interviewing 50 millionaires for kicks. The gist of what they told him? " 'You're not going to learn to be rich from a person with an average income,' " Siebold recalled. "When I asked what I should do to be wealthy, they said, 'Do what you want to do and you'll find a way to solve a problem, and then you'll make money.' It was a philosophy I'd never heard before. It was the opposite of what my professors were teaching."

After college, he played on the pro tennis circuit, and was good enough to rank in the world's top 500 - and not good enough to keep from going broke.

But playing against million-dollar athletes taught him a few things, too, chiefly that there are differences between successful people and unsuccessful people - not just in talent, but in the ways they think.

The masses, he once thought, are lazy people who only want to sit around and watch football games. The problem isn't their duffs - it's their heads, he says.

"They don't believe that action will lead to the result they want," he says. "Their belief is the cause, and the lazy behavior is the effect. You have to change the root of the problem, which is the belief - the cause - and not the effect. People mix this up."

To build a career, he found a problem and solved it, doing something he loved. For two decades, he has coached Fortune 500 sales teams in classes on mental toughness, a feature their training had lacked.

His book's 100 brief chapters read like PowerPoint slides, framed in "middle class vs. world class" views.

Chapter titles include:

-- Middle class focuses on saving; world class focuses on earning.

-- Middle class believes hard work creates wealth. World class believes leverage creates wealth.

-- Middle class believes rich are crooks. World class believes rich are ambitious.

-- Middle class believes money is earned through labor. World class believes money is earned through thought.

-- Middle class is waiting to be rescued from mediocrity. World class knows no one is coming to the rescue.

With the average American household income hovering at $49,000 a year, according to a 2010 U.S. census report, Siebold thinks his advice could help.

"Probably the best way is to try it," he says. "If I keep thinking the same thought, I'll always get the same result, unless I improve it and think differently."

One more thing. Siebold, who splits his time between Gainesville, Ga., and Palm Beach, Fla., is now one of those millionaires he's been talking about.

E-mail Carolyne Zinko at czinko@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle