One of the common threads I found in the 177 self-made millionaires I studied was the aura of confidence each exuded. My visceral reaction was that self-made millionaires must all have been born with some innate self-confidence; something hardwired into them from birth. I would later learn, after completing my nearly two-year analysis of my data, that I was wrong. What these self-made millionaires all had in common were certain daily habits that boosted their self-esteem and infused them with self-confidence.

My study of daily habits has taken me down many holes that I never imagined I would explore. One is neurology – how the brain works. When it comes to self-esteem and confidence, there are certain daily habits that light up the reward center of the brain. The reward pathway begins in the center of the brain in a region called the ventral tegmental area. Here, special neurons release the neurotransmitter dopamine, which gives you a jolt of pleasure and makes you feel good. In order to make sure you repeat this behavior in the future, the reward pathway is connected to areas of the brain that control memory and behavior. Whether they knew it or not, those self-made millionaires had forged certain daily habits that were lighting up the reward center of the brain, infusing them with self-esteem and an abundance of confidence. What were those daily habits?

• The Daily Habit of Learning Something New – Your brain loves novelty. It loves to learn new things. Each time you learn something new, your brain rewards you. And this boosts self-esteem and confidence.
• The Daily Habit of Overcoming the Fear of Risk – Most people avoid taking risks. Risk spells danger. Risk forces you outside your comfort zone. But self-made millionaires refuse to succumb to the fear of risk. They move outside their comfort zone. They take risks. Every time you take a risk and survive, your brain rewards you. And this boosts self-esteem and confidence.
• The Daily Habit of Producing a Desired Outcome – Achieving goals is about producing a desired outcome. Self-made millionaires pursue desired outcomes. Every time you realize a goal and produce the outcome you desire, your brain rewards you. And this boosts self-esteem and confidence.
• The Daily Habit of Overcoming Obstacles – When we are faced with an obstacle we have a choice. Overcome it or succumb to it and move around it. Those who overcome it, succeed in life. Those who move around it, make a habit of avoiding obstacles life throws in their way and never reach their full potential. Self-made millionaires don’t move around obstacles – they attack them and overcome them. Every time you overcome an obstacle, your brain rewards you. And this boosts self-esteem and confidence.
• The Daily Habit of Persistence – Winners never quit and quitters never win. When you persist and do not quit on yourself, your brain rewards you. And this boosts self-esteem and confidence.
• The Daily Habit of Productivity – When you accomplish those things on your to-do list that are directly related to your goals and dreams, you get closer and closer to achieving those goals and realizing your dreams. When you are productive in the pursuit of your goals and dreams, your brain rewards you. And this boosts self-esteem and confidence.

Self-esteem and confidence are created by our habits and are not innate. In order to become more confident, you must create specific habits that light up the reward center of the brain. When you do, your brain will reward you with more self-esteem and confidence.

Negativity narrows your focus. Narrowing your focus blinds you to most everything in your environment. This narrowed focus limits your ability to see solutions to your problems. Negativity also prevents you from seeing opportunities.

Opportunities are all around us. When you are in a negative state, part of your brain literally shuts down – the executive command and control center goes to sleep. And opportunities and potential solutions simply pass you by. So, negativity enslaves you to problems and poverty.

In a famous study published in 1984 by Robert Ulrich, now at Texas A&M University, they studied surgery patients over a ten year period on a single floor of a hospital. One side of the hospital looked out on a brick wall and the other side looked out at lush, leafy trees. The study found that those patients in the room looking out at the trees spent less time in the hospital, required fewer drugs to numb the pain and were more optimistic about their recovery. In fact, those in the “green room” were 75% more optimistic, or less negative, than those who were not exposed to nature.

There have been many “window studies” conducted over the years and the results are always the same – exposure to the great outdoors increases your positive mental outlook and is a firewall against negativity. Nature relaxes the mind. A relaxed mind enables you to find solutions to problems and see opportunities. This is why so many self-made millionaires make it a daily habit to meditate. Seventeen percent of the self-made millionaires in my Rich Habits study engaged in daily meditation. Others took a walk outside, or had an outdoor happy place in which to relax their minds (i.e. beach, park, trail, etc.). A relaxed mind allows you to think clearly. Inside that clarity of thought are the solutions to all of life’s problems.

There are 3 opposing types of happiness that different types of individuals embrace:

1. Immediate Happiness
2. Past Happiness and
3. Future Happiness

Immediate Happiness

This type of happiness is fleeting. It comes and goes. Most people focus only on pursuing Immediate Happiness. They engage in activities or purchases that give them instant gratification. The problem with focusing only on Immediate Happiness, is that, once it is gone, you are, once again, unhappy. Those who pursue Immediate Happiness as an end to itself, live only for today. There is no tomorrow, there is only today. When tomorrow does come, they find themselves, once again, sad and unfulfilled.

Past Happiness

This is the type of happiness that infects millions. These individuals are constantly looking back on the happiness of yesterday. They make a habit of reminiscing about past happiness events. These individuals are perpetually depressed. They live in a world in which they believe their best days are behind them.

Future Happiness

This is a type of long-term happiness that comes from investing in your future. Those who are the happiest in life, build a future that pays dividends for many years. Creating Future Happiness takes time and effort. It requires making sacrifices today that often require deferring or putting off Immediate Happiness in order for you to create a foundation for long-term happiness to down the road.

Those who are not focused on building their Future Happiness, default into Current and Past Happiness. Relying on these two types of happiness will always leave you feeling unfulfilled. The key to long-term happiness is building your Future Happiness today. When you do, you escape the temptation of pursuing Current Happiness and create a fire wall against the quicksand that is Past Happiness. Both lose their hold over you when you focus on building long-term happiness by focusing on creating a future ideal life. 

Building a team is not easy. It’s a process of trial and error. Finding individuals who all buy into the same dream and the same goals is not easy. Individuals tend to have their own dreams and their own goals and can throw a wrench into the team you are trying to build. Eventually, they are removed from the team (fired) and the trial and error process of finding another apostle for your cause, starts all over. Building the right team that will help you succeed is just messy.

Those who eventually succeed, cobble together a team of people, single-mindedly focused on the same dream and the same goals. They create apostles for their cause. When you have a team pushing the same ball up the hill, you get to the top of the hill much quicker. We are witnessing the wonder of successful team-building right before our very eyes.

Elon Musk has masterfully cobbled together not one, but two teams: Space X and Tesla Motors. In an interview, not too long ago, Musk said that in the early days of Space X and Tesla, he interviewed every new hire, in an effort to create his core team. That core team has made Space X and Tesla Motors household names and transformed Musk from a near bankrupt entrepreneur to a billionaire almost overnight.

Great entrepreneurs are also great team builders. They have a knack for finding team players who are smarter then they are and who have different, complimentary skills that help to multiply the entrepreneur’s chances for success.When you are able to get even just one person, who buys into your dreams and goals, to join your team, you geometrically multiply your chances of success. For entrepreneur’s like Musk, 1 + 1 = 3 (or more).

Michael Jordan, the first billionaire basketball player, failed to make his high school varsity basketball team in his sophomore year and was sent down to his junior varsity team instead.

J.K. Rowling failed 12 times to get her book Harry Potter published. Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hanson (Chicken Soup of the Soul authors), Stephen King (Carrie) and myself, were repeatedly turned down by publishers.

Legend has it that Colonel Sanders heard 1,009 “no”s to use his chicken recipe (Kentucky Fried Chicken) before he heard his first “yes”.

Failure is perceived by most in western society as a bad thing, something to be avoided. Yet failure is a prerequisite for success. In my Rich Habits study, 36% of the self-made millionaires in my study failed at least once in business. But the reason they became self-made millionaires has everything to do with what happened after they failed – they figured out what went wrong, adjusted their goals and activities and tried again.

Failure is instructive. It teaches us what to do and what not to do. It prepares us for success by helping us figure out how to overcome mistakes, pitfalls, setbacks and obstacles that stand in the way of success. Persisting through failure enables us to eventually succeed. And most of the time that success is represented by the little things that go right during our journey towards success. Only in failure can we appreciate success. Those who do not quit after failing, and keep trying, eventually realize little successes along the way. Then they cookie cut, or duplicate what went right over and over again. Failure is nothing more than a learning experience that acts more like a dress rehearsal for future success. So go out and fail. Your success depends on it!

One of the characteristics I most admired in my study of self-made millionaires, was their confidence. At first, in the early days of my five-year study of the rich, I considered confidence a prerequisite, an inherent characteristic, that all successful people must have had prior to realizing success. But I was wrong. Confidence, I learned, was a byproduct not a prerequisite.

It takes courage to pursue your dreams and the goals behind those dreams. Courage, because the pursuit of a dream is very risky. In the beginning, nothing goes right. Mistakes, pitfalls, setbacks and obstacles are ever present in the lives of those who pursue a dream. In the early going, the pursuit of a dream feels like you are at war. Every day is a new battle to overcome mistakes, pitfalls, setbacks and obstacles. But those mistakes, pitfalls, setbacks and obstacles force you to learn what to do and what not to do. You grow. You evolve. You learn. And that growth, evolution and learning becomes the foundation upon which those who pursue their dreams build their foundation for success. The more mistakes, pitfalls, setbacks and obstacles you are able to overcome, the sounder that foundation. Success, it turns out, is built upon a mountain of mistakes, pitfalls, setbacks and obstacles. The more mistakes, pitfalls, setbacks and obstacles you are able overcome, the higher your mountain.

True success is defined by your ability to overcome the mistakes, pitfalls, setbacks and obstacles that you encounter during your success journey. Each time you overcome them, you gain confidence. Confidence grows with each victory. And the more confident you become, the more certain you become that you will ultimately succeed. That confidence then fuels you with optimism and enthusiasm and you gain more courage along the journey. You begin to believe in yourself like never before. You begin to believe that you can overcome any mistake, pitfall, setback or obstacle that life throws at you. And those challenges lose their power over you. They no longer intimidate or frustrate you. Confidence, it turns out, is an acquired trait. One acquired during the journey towards success.

Self-made millionaires do not “work”, they produce outcomes. One after another. A goal is nothing more than the pursuit of an outcome. We create outcomes by engaging in activities that tap into our inner talents, our inner genius.

Each human being has certain gifts, certain inner talents they are born with. Those few who are able to unearth their inner talents, excel in life. These rare individuals focus their energy on developing their talents and applying those inner talents to produce outcomes that benefit society in some way.

Unfortunately, our education system has succeeded in shifting the focus of education from identifying and unleashing each individual’s inner talents with the need to learn certain basic skills that do nothing but prepare individuals for a job. We have been systematically reprogrammed from creators into machines.

When we are not using our inner talents we are unhappy. Most individuals are unhappy in the work they do. According to a 2012 survey conducted by “Big 4” accounting firm Deloitte, 80% of those surveyed did not like their jobs. In another survey conducted by Gallup in 2013, 63% of the 230,000 employees in the survey said they were unhappy with their jobs.

The self-made millionaires in my study have succeeded in bucking the system. Somehow these individuals were able to break free of the systematic programming to earn a living, to creating a life of meaning. They pursued things in life that they were interested in and passionate about. That is their legacy.

If you want to succeed in life you must buck the system. You must find your inner talents. There’s a process. I’ve written about it often. It’s called Dream-setting. When you Dream-set you create a blueprint of your ideal life. Inside that blueprint you will find your inner talents, the preprogrammed greatness that exists within each individual’s DNA. When you tap into your inner talents you cease being a machine. You become a creator, focused on creating outcomes rather than a paycheck.

At some level we all desire to be financially successful. Financial success solves many of life’s problems. Being financially successful means you no longer have debt, you no longer worry about paying your monthly bills and you don’t need lenders to finance major purchases like cars, homes or college education for your kids. Financial success means you no longer have to “work” at a job you do not like or are not passionate about. At it’s core, financial success is all about freedom.

But financial freedom comes at a cost. For millions, that cost is a lottery ticket – the short-cut to financial success. But for self-made millionaires, there are no short-cuts. Creating financial success is a process and that process comes at a cost far more significant than a lottery ticket. That cost often involves giving up the good for the great.

Jim Koch, co-founder of Boston Beer Company, left his $250,000 a year consulting job in 1984 to pursue his passion – building a business around his family’s beer recipe. Everyone around him, including his father, advised him against it. Despite the many entreaties from his family and friends, Jim made a fateful decision to give up the good in pursuit of the great. Today, Jim is worth in excess of 1 billion dollars.

Over the past sixteen plus years I have devoted all of my available time to studying the differences between the rich and the poor. One thing I’ve noticed, one correlation, one common thread, is that at some point, the self-made millionaires in my study made a decision to give up the good to pursue the great. That almost always involved taking a risk by leaving their current job and going all in on something they were passionate about.

When we leave the good for the great, we invariably must step outside our comfort zone. That’s not an easy thing to do. And because it’s not an easy thing to do, very few do it. That’s why there are so few self-made millionaires. The average person is simply unwilling to give up what they have, the good, in order to pursue something great. Fear and limiting beliefs holds most back from pursuing the great. If you want to be financially successful, to be free from financial worries, you must give up the good for the great. Or, do what millions of unsuccessful people do – buy a lottery ticket.

It’s hard to change a habit. According to a famous 2009 study conducted by University College London, it took anywhere from 18 to 254 days to change a habit, depending on the complexity of the behavior forming the habit. The more complex the behavior, such as washing your face verses swinging a golf club, the more time it took for the habit to form. Unfortunately, willpower depletion will derail most from habit change, and force you back into old habits, routines and behaviors.

If you are truly disgusted with your life, and desperately want to change your life, what can you do? Well, I have some good news for you. There’s a lazy man’s path to habit change that requires almost no effort at all and it’s backed by scientific research into habit change. In 1921, 1,500 bright children were tracked for more than 80 years in a massive longitudinal study conducted by psychologist Lewis Terman. Terman and his successors collected millions of details about these subjects. Psychology professors Howard S. Friedman and Leslie Martin hen spent 20 years analyzing Terman’s research data and wrote a book about it called The Longevity Project.

According to this research, if you want to change your habits, all you have to do is find some new friends. It turns out, habits are contagious. They have a ripple effect, spreading like viruses, through every person within our inner circle. Exercise, weight loss, weight gain, drinking, reading, smoking and even happiness habits are infectious. If you spend time with different people, you will become a different person. You will be infected by their habits.

This is the very reason why Weight Watchers is the most successful weight loss program around. It’s also why Alcoholics Anonymous is so successful. When you regularly associate with certain people, you become infected by their habits, behaviors and thinking. The people you associate with on a regular basis unconsciously affect your behavior in many ways, both positively and negatively. This is why you should choose your friends, coworkers and relationships very carefully. If they have habits that create an exceptional life, eventually you will become infected by those very habits. Our associations dictate the life we have. Make sure those associations are exceptional.