If someone were to pay you 10 cents for every kind word you ever spoke and collect 5 cents for every unkind word, would you be rich or poor?

I saw this quote, and it struck me as interesting. Would I be rich or poor? So I decided to find out!

First, we assume a few things. First, I’m living in Canada, so the life expectancy will be 80.4 years. However, I don’t even speak until I’m like 1 or 2. So for our second assumption, we assume that “innocence” is lost at the age of 10. That’s 70 years of potential kindness/horribleness!

So how many times does a person speak a day? According to a study, its pegged around 16,000 words a day. According to Oxford, the average sentence length is 15-20 words. Since it takes a sentence to produce something that is meaningfully “unkind” or kind”, we will assume that in a day, the average person can say 800 kinda or unkind things.

So altogether, that’s 70 years, which is 25550 days. 800 sentences a day, would equate to 20,440,000 sentences spoken in a a lifetime, all of which could be kind or unkind. Now lets calculate this!

You gain $0.10 for every kind word. You lose $0.05 for every unkind word. So if you were a person who only spoke kinda words, you’d make, $2,044,000! Wow, I’d be a millionaire! That’s an $80/day cash flow. Not bad eh?

If you were a person who only said mean things to people, you’d be in debt with -$1,022,000. A million dollars! Most people don’t have this kinda cash, you’d have to pay $40/day to keep up with this kinda lifestyle!

What if you were neutral? So every kind word was immediately followed by an unkind word? You’d make $1,022,000 from the good words. You’d lose $511,000 for the bad words, leaving us with a net of only $511,000!

Lets graph this data, to see how many kinda words per day we would need to break even.

Wow, look at that data! What this means, is that you can figure out how rich you’d be given a percentage of good words:

Net Sum(over 70 years) = 3,066,000 * percentage of good words – $1,022,000

So to break even, you would have to only have kind words 33.3% of the time, with unkind words consisting 66.7% the rest of your speech.

To FINALLY answer the question, I consider being “rich” as being a millionaire, so lets see how many kind words we need to net $1,000,000!

$1,000,000 = 3,066,000x – $1,022,000
$2,022,000 = 3,066,000x
x = 65.9%

So there you have it, your vocabulary must be 65.9% kind words, if you wish to be rich! I guess it does pay to be a nice guy.