Cell phones continuously ring, beep or notify us of incoming calls, messages, appointments and reminders. Email has its various noises. TV noise is all around us at home, in airports, in gyms and waiting rooms. Sirens, horns, people talking.

To some extent, the brain is able to shut out the noise. But that takes effort, which consumes brain fuel, and eventually wears us out. After a day of noise we can find ourselves exhausted, without really understanding why.

Worse, all this noise distracts us from focusing on our tasks and pursuing our goals. If you want to succeed in accomplishing your goals and ultimately realizing your dreams, you need to shut down the noise.

On a recent episode of Follow the Leader, Farnoosh Torabi interviewed John Paul Dejoria, the co-founder of Paul Mitchell Systems and Patron Tequila. Dejoria admitted that he did not use email because he felt it would be too much of a distraction. Dejoria, in fact, avoids computers entirely so that he can focus on building his billion dollar empire.

While Dejoria is an extreme example of successful individuals who shut down the noise, there are certain strategies I uncovered in my five-year Rich Habits study that millionaires use to help them tune out the noise of life:

• Early morning isolation for 2-3 hours – Wake up 2-3 hours before your workday begins and find your quiet place to get things done. Those things should be directly related to your goals and dreams.
• Turn off your email – Many of the self-made millionaires in my study ignored their email for most of the day. They blocked off 30 – 45 minutes twice a day to check and respond to email. Otherwise, they just ignored it.
• Don’t answer the phone – Same logic as with the emails here. Block off time during the day to respond to and make phone calls. Otherwise ignore your phone most of the day.
• Wear ear plugs or noise cancelling headsets – I have become an ear plug enthusiast. Wearing ear plugs at night allows me to get a good nights sleep. Wearing ear plugs during certain parts of the day when I need to really focus, helps to drown out the office noise. I’ve noticed more and more people, especially on airplanes, wearing those noise cancelling headsets while they get some work done on the plane ride.
• Find your quiet place – Recent neurological studies on peak performance found that the brain cycles every 90-120 minutes. After this timeframe, the brain tires and operates inefficiently. Researchers found that a 20 minute rest break after each 90-120 minute cycle restores the brain’s normal functioning. Rest breaks could be a simple as a 20 minute walk, closing your eyes, or putting those ear plugs in for 20 minutes while you recharge.

If you’re a beach person like me, you’ll understand my metaphoric title. On many beaches, in order to get to your spot on the beach, you have to trudge through a seemingly endless duration of scorching hot sand, carrying your umbrella, chairs, cooler and many other things. If you don’t properly prepare yourself for the pain by wearing flip flops, sneakers or shoes, that journey through the hot sand towards the cool ocean can be almost unbearable.

The success journey is a lot like that journey towards the ocean. You have to endure the pain of the success journey in order to realize success. That pain includes obstacles, pitfalls, mistakes, failures, rejection, indifference by influential people and the roller coaster of emotions that make the journey almost unbearable.

Most, unfortunately, never make it to their spot on the beach. They underestimate the pain of the journey. As a result, the scorching hot sand is simply too hot for them to handle. So, they quit, oftentimes right before they succeed. 

The few who do succeed, are able to because when the pain does come, they are prepared for it. The key to realizing success, is not tolerating the pain of the journey towards success, but preparing for it. You must expect obstacles to be in your way. You must expect pitfalls. You must expect mistakes and failures. But above all, you must expect the journey to be a long and painful one. So when those who succeed encounter the hot sand along their path, they’re ready for it – they bring along their flip flops. Being prepared for the pain enables you to focus on one thing and one thing only – getting to your spot on the beach.

As many of you know, I ‘m big on binders:

• Fact Binder
• Mistake Binder
• Book Binder – This is a binder where, in 1-2 pages, you summarize the key points of every book you read.

I literally have 5 of these binders at my feet in my home office that I use almost every day to help me along the way in my success journey. I can’t take the credit for the idea, however. About a dozen of the self-made millionaires from my Rich Habits study gave me the Binder idea.

There’s another Binder idea I’d like to share with you called the Vision Binder. This is a binder that includes pictures of all of your dreams: your future home, future vacation home, future vacation destinations, future goals (pictures of goals you hope to achieve one day), future awards (awards you hope to win one day), future relationships (famous people you hope to get to know one day), etc.

The beauty of the Vision Binder is that you can continue to fill it and refer to it, day after day, without worrying about running out of room. Vision Boards are bulky and limited in terms of space and not very practical. Building your Vision Binder is a fun thing to do. Plus, every time you add something new to it, it immediately puts you in a positive mindset. You get happy, optimistic and enthusiastic every time you open it. Your personal, customized Vision Binder will keep you focused on your dreams and goals. It will keep you motivated and inspired. It will shift your mindset from negative to positive every time you open it. Start your Vision Binder today. Add it to your arsenal of success tools.

In my Rich Habits study, one of the data points I found interesting was about gossiping. 94% of the wealthy avoided it vs. 79% of the poor who engaged in it regularly.

I never thought much about gossiping until my research. Since then I’ve learned quite a bit about it from numerous studies. Here are some startling stats that I uncovered in my research on gossiping:

• 90% of workplace conversations are gossip.
• 15% of workplace email content is gossip.
• 60-70% of gossip is negative – Gossip is 2.7 times more likely to be negative.
• Gossip irreparably damages relationships.
• Gossip causes chronic stress.
• Engaging in gossip, either by communicating it or listening to it, flips your mindset from positive to negative.
• 60% of gossip is judgmental.
• Gossip often destroys reputations in the workplace.

Spontaneous trait transference, also known as the Boomerang Effect, is a phenomenon where people are perceived as possessing a trait that they describe in others (Hovland, Janis and Kelly, prominent psychologists, first recorded and named the boomerang effect in 1953). Telling others that your friend is lazy will cause them to infer that you are lazy. Those who engage in regular gossip, most of which is negative, are inadvertently creating negative perceptions of themselves. It’s one of those Poor Habits I talk about frequently that act like an anchor, dragging you down and creating a life of misery. 

No good can come from gossiping, which is predominantly negative. It not only damages the reputations of those you gossip about, it also has a boomerang effect, damaging your own reputation. Like many behaviors, it’s a habit that must be broken if you hope to succeed in life. Awareness is the key to changing any habit. When you find yourself engaging in gossip, stop and change the subject immediately. Or, only engage in positive gossip, which is a Rich Habit. Good gossip, saying something positive about someone when they are not around, will make others like you. They will unconsciously assume that you will say nice things about them to others as well.

My wife has a lot of friends. More friends than anyone else I know. I find it counterintuitive because she seems to demand a lot from her friends in the form of favors. But, she always reciprocates, meaning, it’s never one-sided. What amazes me the most is that my wife will ask someone she just met for a favor right out the gate and, of course, eventually reciprocate.  

These two habits my wife has forged have long intrigued me. I didn’t understand how or why they helped her in building strong relationships until I embarked on my obsessive study of daily habits many years ago. There are actually two psychological phenomenons at play, I discovered.

The Franklin Effect

The Franklin Effect is named after one of the most famous founding fathers in America –  Benjamin Franklin, who used it as a relationship-building tool. It has now become an accepted method for building strong relationships. Here’s how it works:

If you want to get someone to like you, either ask them for a small favor or perform a small favor for them. 

For some strange reason, human beings like doing small favors for each other. 

The Law of Reciprocity

The Law of Reciprocity states the following:

If you do a small favor for someone they will feel obligated to reciprocate.

The rich people in my Rich Habits study all seemed to have one thing in common – they had a lot of relationships. 88% had 200 or more relationships. Conversely, 95% of the poor people in my study had less than 200 relationships. When I dug deep into the reasons for this dichotomy, that’s when I discovered that the rich people in my study were using the Franklin Effect and the Law of Reciprocity for relationship building. As a result, these two tools became part of my arsenal of Rich Habits, which I obsessively write, talk about with the media and teach to millions around the world.

My wife, without knowing it, was employing both tools to build her enormous number of relationships. And many of the wealthy in my study, like my wife, were completely oblivious to their use of these two relationship-building tools. My wife had picked up these tools from her Dad and then turned them into lifelong habits. This is not uncommon. Most of the habits the wealthy had forged in life came from their parents as well.

Less than 5% are raised in families where parents teach their kids the Rich Habits. We are most definitely not all on equal footing when we step foot onto the adult stage. Those who have the Rich Habits have at their disposal certain habits or tools, like the Franklin Effect and the Law of Reciprocity, thanks mostly to their parents. This enables them to cut through their competition, like a hot knife through butter, accumulating millions of dollars along the way.

How would you like to add  20 or more years to your life expectancy? How about never having to worry about heart disease? Or, how about reducing your risk of cancer by as much as 50%? Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? It’s not. The latest science on longevity very likely discovered the secret to the Fountain of Youth. Not only that, they have found that just by slightly altering your habits, behaviors and lifestyle, you can eliminate chronic disease and cancer. [Read more…]

Probably the most significant take away from the book How to Win Friends and Influence People was the insight that we are consumed with ourselves and that if you want to win new friends and influence others, focus on their needs, wants and their lives.

In my Rich Habits study this doctrine of me, me, me played out in a number of different ways:

• Mentoring others was a habit practiced by 68% of the wealthy in my study.
• Calling others on their birthday, to say hello and to acknowledge some life event was practiced by 80% of the wealthy in my study.
• Gossiping about others was avoided by 94% of the wealthy.
• Sending thank you cards was a habit of 75% of the wealthy.
• Not saying what’s on your mind and vetting the words that come out of your mouth was another habit practiced by 94% of the wealthy.
• Volunteering 5 hours or more a month to help those in your community was practiced by 72% of the wealthy.
• The wealthy used tools in order to remember the names of those they met infrequently, such as the Grouping Tool.
• And lastly, controlling negative emotions was a habit 81% of the wealthy forged in order to build lasting relationships.

It’s clear that we are obsessed with our own lives. When anyone comes along and focuses their attention on what’s important to us, we melt like butter on a hot stove. The key to building strong, long-lasting relationships is to fight the urge to talk about yourself and your life and, instead, to focus your conversation around the lives of the relationships you want to grow. When you make this relationship-building doctrine a daily habit you will win over almost anybody in life. In the success game, relationships play a critical role in opening doors that would otherwise be closed. If you want to win that game you need to play by the rules.

Mistakes are beautiful things. They not only teach you what not to do, they also help point you in the right direction. Mistakes are so critical to your success that they should be documented and studied.

There’s a tool I use to do just that. I call it my Mistake Binder. The Mistake Binder is a running list of every mistake I’ve made since I started it back in 2013. Each mistake is documented on one page. You want to document four things on that one page:

1. WHAT went wrong.
2. WHY did it go wrong.
3. HOW to avoid repeating it in the future.
4. LESSON you learned.

The goal is to fill your Mistake Binder with page after page of mistakes that you’ve made. Every other week spend a few minutes reviewing your Mistake Binder. This helps make the learning stick and will also keep the mistakes in your working memory, acting like a radar system, alerting you when you are about to repeat a mistake. The Mistake Binder will take the taboo out of making mistakes and will change your negative perception regarding mistakes. You’ll soon find yourself embracing mistakes and the lessons they teach.

We all have habits we are unaware of. Sometimes these habits are good and sometimes they are bad. One bad habit that 90% of the poor people in my study had was not taking responsibility for the circumstance of their lives. In short, they blamed everyone but themselves for their financial circumstances.

There are plenty of people who have this Poor Habit of making excuses. You see them all around you. They blame traffic for getting into work late. They blame their boss or “politics” for not getting the promotion. They blame the economy for their financial problems.

When you make a habit of blaming others or outside forces for things that go wrong in your life, you essentially give up control of your life. You become a blamethrower. And it doesn’t take long for those around you, especially bosses and supervisors, to label you as a person who cannot be trusted with responsibility. When you blame others or outside forces when things do not go your way, you are essentially saying to supervisors, clients, customers or anyone else who relies on you – “don’t’ trust me with responsibility“.

Blamethrowers do not get raises and promotions and they are the first ones to be fired by their company, clients or customers. Let everyone you know see you, instead, as someone who throws themselves on the sword when things go wrong. Taking individual responsibility for everything that happens in your life, even bad things, helps you regain psychological control of your life. People around you will respect you for it. They will see that you as a person who can be trusted with responsibility. Stop being a blamethrower and start making a habit of taking responsibility for things that go wrong.

In a study published in the British Journal of Psychology, evolutionary psychologists Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Norman Li of Singapore Management University found that individuals who were focused on some long-term objective (dreams/goals) had higher IQs and were happier than those not pursuing a dream or long-term goals. Brookings Institute researcher Carol Graham concluded from this research that the pursuit of dreams and goals is directly correlated to intelligence and happiness.

Pursuing dreams or goals gives your life meaning and fulfillment and this translates into higher IQs and happiness.