One of the lessons I’ve learned from studying self-made millionaires is that dreamers are almost always on their own in the beginning phases of pursuing a dream. It’s very hard to find individuals who buy into your dream and are willing to stick it out. Pursuing a dream is all risk. There is no guaranteed payoff and the effort requires an enormous investment in time, and sometimes money.

Finding individuals who buy into your dream is difficult because pursuing a dream is hard work, involves risk and requires persistence and patience. It is a rare breed of individual who will stick with you during your journey. You read about them in books. They have names like Paul Allen (Bill Gates partner), Steve Wozniak (Steve Jobs partner), Charlie Munger (Warren Buffet’s partner), Jamie Dimon (Sandy Weill’s partner) and Todd Wagner (Mark Cuban’s partner). These were apostles who never quit on their famous billionaire dreamers.

Don’t lose faith when people quit on you. Keep working hard every day, pursuing your dream, even when you have to go it alone. Dreamers change the world. And when you experience success, your loneliness ends.

Think back to the worst emotional pain you experienced in life. Loss of a loved one, broken heart, business failure, getting fired from a job, divorce? Whatever it was that took your legs out from underneath you very likely altered your behavior. It caused you to reevaluate your life. It caused you to engage in some very deep thinking which probably led to some major changes in your life. Were they positive or negative changes?

I’ve learned so many things from studying the habits of self-made millionaires and those struggling with poverty. One of the lessons I learned is that these millionaires had developed a “positive reaction habit” to negative events. Painful events became catalysts for growth. Every mistake, every failure, every heartbreak was fuel for growth. For these millionaires, negative events resulted in positive change. They evolved and became successful.

Conversely, those struggling with poverty developed a “negative reaction habit” to negative events. Painful events became catalysts for isolation, depression and retreat. They devolved and struggled in life.

Emotional pain can be the best thing that can ever happen to you. It can spur you on to improve your life. I inadvertently stumbled onto the “positive reaction habit” when I was nineteen. A girl broke my heart. I moped for weeks, isolated myself from my friends and family and retreated. Then one day one of my friends, Doug Savino, got fed up with my depression. He looked me straight in the eyes and said “man up Tom. Stop crying about it. Show her what a mistake she made in dumping you.” What happened next changed my life forever. I threw myself into weight lifting, school and work. I gained fifteen pounds of muscle in less than a year, took my college grade point average from 3.1 to 4.0 within two years, got on the Dean’s List, worked more hours, which increased my income that I then used to pay for college, thus reducing the amount of student loans I needed. In short, I transformed myself from ordinary to extraordinary. All because someone unknowingly taught me the right way to react to emotional pain – use the pain as a catalyst for growth.

Over the past five years, post-study, I’ve thought a lot about this story of mine. That heartbreak mobilized me because my reaction to it, thanks to Doug, was to grow in a positive way. Most, unfortunately, have never developed the “positive reaction habit”. As a result, they allow themselves to collapse under the weight of their mistakes, failure and heartbreak. They fall into depression. They put up barriers. They devolve. That’s bad.

You will make mistakes, you will fail and you will experience heartbreak. But how you react to those emotional events is what will separate you from everyone else in life. Will you react negatively and devolve? Or will you react positively and evolve? Only you can choose how you react to emotional pain. You must make a habit of reacting positively to emotional pain in order to grow and evolve.

You hardly ever hear anyone talk about goals in a negative context. Goals are almost always perceived to be good. But there are goals that add no real value to your life when achieved yet consume valuable resources. So, how do you know when a goal is good or bad?

Good goals create long-term happiness when achieved. They allow you to grow as an individual and alter your behavior in a positive way. An example of a good goal would be to lose 20 pounds. Setting a weight loss goal often involves a daily regimen of exercise, healthy eating and encourages a healthy lifestyle. Good health results from exercising and eating right. It may also motivate you to moderate your consumption of alcohol or to quit smoking. When the weight eventually comes off you enjoy the compliments, feel healthier and all of this creates lasting happiness.

Bad goals create short-term happiness when achieved. They do not help you grow as an individual, they do not produce long-term benefits and, as such, do not result in long-term happiness. An example of a bad goal would be to own a Ferrari. In order to own a Ferrari you must make more money. Making more money will likely involve either more work or taking excessive financial risk (i.e. gambling). There’s a cost-benefit to working more – you see less of your family. Don’t misunderstand me here. Working more to make more money can be a good thing. But where the goal goes south is when you then use that money to buy stuff, like a Ferrari. The happiness you derive from owning more or better stuff will fade over time, since happiness derived from buying stuff is always short term. You will eventually revert back to your genetic happiness baseline and, after a few weeks, the Ferrari will no longer create lasting happiness. The lost time with the family, however, can never be recouped. If the goal, instead, was to judiciously invest that extra money you earned into a calculated risk, such as a side business, an investment or a vacation home that would enable you to spend more time with your family, then it transforms the “work more/earn more” goal into a good goal.

The benefits of achieving a goal should create some long-term benefit or result in long-term happiness: more time with the family, more personal growth, financial independence, improved health, etc. When the achievement of a goal is to buy more and better stuff, it’s a bad goal. It’s a wasted investment. Be careful of the goals you pursue. Not all goals are created equal.

Success is a process. A big part of that process requires that you create a blueprint of your future life. 500 words is all it takes. 500 words that describe the ideal, perfect future life you desire. When you know where you’re going, it’s much easier to find a route to get there. This is where the abundance of the subconscious mind comes in to play. When you develop this blueprint of your ideal, future life you are effectively turning on the switch to your subconscious mind. To be more specific, you are turning on the switch to something called the Reticular Activating System (RAS), an area of the brain that acts like a traffic cop for all of the information we take in from our senses. This RAS, when turned on, then goes to work seeking external information that will help guide you to the route you need to take in order to arrive at your ideal you destination.

Your blueprint can also act as a guide, directing you in your behavior and decision-making. Through intuition (the subconscious mind communicating with the conscious mind through a bundle of nerves inside the brain known as the corpus callosum) the subconscious can advise you of the correct course of action or to stop what you’re doing. With a blueprint in hand, intuition is a powerful tool unique to humanity. Without a blueprint, intuition has little value.

If you really want to succeed and live a meaningful life it begins by defining who you want to be in the future. Your future you can then come to the rescue. With a  blueprint, you are directed in your actions and choices by the future version of yourself. Your future you then becomes an invaluable resource. It can advise you what to do when faced with obstacles and difficult choices in life.