95% of the self-made millionaires in my Rich Habits Study exercised aerobically 30 minutes or more a day.

I found this statistic shocking. I was under the impression that the wealthy did not exercise due to their grueling work habits – no time to exercise due to their work schedules.

As it turns out, I was wrong. Successful people are fanatics when it comes to daily aerobic exercise. There are a number of studies out there that explain why aerobic exercise is critical to success.

Ottawa Hospital & University of Ottawa Study

In this study, Dr. Picketts, senior author of the study and Professor at Ottawa University, found that running improves brain function.

When you run, a nerve growth factor protein known as SNF2H is triggered. This protein increases the myelin sheath that insulates the axons of every brain cell. The thicker the myelin sheath, the stronger and faster the transmission of electrical impulses produced by the axon. Individuals with thicker myelin sheaths think faster, have stronger synapses (brain cell communication) and more intense transmission of electrical impulses down the axon branch.

Running, it turns out, makes your brain work faster and better.

NYU Langone Medical Center

Running, or any aerobic exercise, increases the production of Brain Derived Neurotropic Factor (BDNF).

BDNF has been described as Miracle Gro for the brain. BDNF not only helps maintain the health of existing brain cells, it increases their size and it acts as fertilizer for the brain, increasing neurogenisis (birth of new brain cells) in the Dentate Gyrus. One hour a day of aerobic exercise also changes the type of fuel the brain uses to power itself.

Every cell uses either glucose or ketones as a source of fuel. Ketones are a type of fuel that comes from fat cells. Ketones, as a source of fuel, produce 20% more energy (ATP) than glucose.

My point in all of this is that if you want to increase your chances for success, you need to regularly exercise aerobically because aerobic exercise improves brain performance.

When you are pursuing a dream or big goals in life, you need to be at the top of your game.

• You will be faced with many decisions. Having high performing brains allows you to make the best possible decisions.
• You will have to think your way around many obstacles. Having high performing brains allows you to think your way around those obstacles.
• You will make many mistakes, particularly in the beginning of the pursuit of a dream or big goal. Having high performing brains allows you to learn more from those mistakes, and helps you anticipate potential mistakes, so you can avoid them in the future.

Successful people are lucky. They are lucky because they do certain little things every day to create the opportunity for luck to occur in their lives. The successful process good luck into their lives every day. How?

They forge specific, good daily habits that create the opportunity for luck to occur. What are those habits?

• Build Powerful Relationships – The successful build relationships with others who can open the right doors for them. They do this via Happy Birthday Calls, Hello Calls, Life Event Calls, Mentoring Others and building Partnerships with other success-minded people.
• Positive Thinking – The successful are open-minded, optimistic, enthusiastic about everything.
• Daily Growth – The successful constantly grow their knowledge and perfect their skills. They do this by forging the daily habit of self-education reading and by daily practice.
• Dream-Setting – The successful are dreamers who take action on their dreams.
• Pursuit of Goals – The successful take action on their dreams by pursuing goals around those dreams every day.
• Persistence – The successful never quit on their dreams and the goals behind their dreams. Through persistence, they eventually get lucky. That luck creates an avalanche of success.
• Take Risks – The successful take risks others shy away from. They put everything on the line in order to realize a dream.
• Healthy Living – The successful engage in daily exercise that keeps their brains and their bodies healthy. They eat healthy foods that feed their brain and their bodies.

If you want to succeed you must get lucky. But luck is not outside your control. You can create good luck. In order to create the opportunity for good luck to occur, you must forge daily habits that lay the foundation for luck to occur.

What’s really important to you?

If you ask the average person that question they very likely will not have a well-thoughtout answer. That’s because 95% of the population is not pursuing a dream.

For those who are pursuing a dream, they know exactly what’s important to them. Their dream has given them a very clear vision. They can see their future.

When you are pursuing a dream, you know what your destination is on your life map. You can see it clearly.

Dreams make it much easier to create goals. These Dream Goals become your construction team. They enable you to build your ideal, future life.

But, in order to get to where you want to be – your ideal future life – you must focus on the most important Dream Goals first thing every day. You must do the most important thing immediately upon waking up.

Why is it important to tackle your Dream Goals first thing upon waking up?

Every day brings uncertainty. There is no way you can predict how your day is going to go. There are simply too many moving parts. Traffic jams could set you back 30 minutes. Unexpected appointments can clog your day. Emergencies can throw a wrench into your schedule.

When you attack the most important things in the morning – your Dream Goals – even if everything goes wrong with your day, you know you are still moving forward on your dreams.

What’s important to you, your Dream Goals, should never be put on the back burner. They need to be the first things you do at the start of every day. This virtually guarantees that you will continue to progress towards your dream life, no matter what life throws at you.

“Wealth is largely the result of habit.” – John Jacob Astor

It’s the little things in life that you do that lay the foundation for long-term success.

The media loves to promote stories of the needles in the haystack – individuals who become overnight successes. But for 99.9% of the successful people out there, success is not event-driven. It’s habit-driven.

Success, for the vast majority, is about doing the little things every day that help build momentum in your life. This momentum keeps you moving forward, growing in knowledge and skill.

When you forge daily habits that are all directed towards some lifelong dream or long-term goal, success is inevitable.

The successful do a thousand little things that make success possible. So, what are some of those thousand little things:

• Saying NO often – Make a habit of saying NO to things which do not align with your dreams and goals.
• Saying YES infrequently – Make a habit of saying YES only to those things which are directly tied to your dreams and goals.
• Learn every day – Make a habit of learning something new every day. Growth comes from acquiring new knowledge and developing new skills.
• Maintain every day – Make a habit of maintaining your knowledge and perfecting your skills every day.
• Save money – Make a habit of saving money. Money gives you options. It empowers you. Opportunities can only be taken advantage of when you have the financial resources to take advantage of those opportunities.
• Focus on the fundamentals – Make a habit of mastering the basics. Learn the fundamentals before you dive into anything. Ignoring the basics is how most lose money and fail in life.
• Associate with like-minded individuals – Make a habit of surrounding yourself with individuals who feel, think and behave the way the ideal future you would feel, think and behave. Our environment, our social circle, influences how we feel, think and behave. Make sure you have the right people inside your social circle and eliminate from your social circle the wrong people.
• Devote time to greatness – Make a habit of devoting blocks of time to your dreams and your goals. Isolate time every day to things that will help build a foundation for success and avoid doing things which take time away from those activities. To become truly great at anything you must dedicate time and energy to it.
• Be patient – Make a habit of being patient. Great things take time to bloom. The best investments take time. Success takes time. Survive until you thrive. Do the things every day that will help move you forward and be patient. Those things will eventually begin paying dividends.

Winners attract winners. And winners seek out other winners. What is a winner? Someone with a success mindset. What is a success mindset? It is an upbeat, positive, can-do outlook on life. It is a habit of thinking that sees opportunity and possibility everywhere.

71% of the self-made millionaires in my Rich Habits study stated that optimism was critical to their success in life.

You simply cannot succeed with a negative mental outlook. You see stop signs, intractable obstacles and dead ends everywhere when you have a negative outlook on life. Everything is impossible.

For this reason, successful people seek out and foster relationships with other success-minded, optimistic people. They avoid building relationships with negative people because negative people bring them down and infect them with doubt.

There are six ways self-made millionaires build relationships with other like-minded people:

1. Hello Call – Periodic calls made to relationships you would like to keep or strengthen. Typically, these are monthly calls.
2. Happy Birthday Calls – They pick up the phone and call their success relationships on the phone. This is less efficient than birthday cards, emails or texts but it is 10X more effective.
3. Life Event Calls – These are calls made when something important happens in the life of one of your success relationships. Examples: birth of a child, anniversary, wedding, death, illness, hospitalization, promotion, retirement, etc.
4. Networking – This could be formal or informal. Formal is when you are part of a networking group. Informal is when you ask someone out to breakfast, lunch or to have beers.
5. Volunteering – Many individuals that head non-profits are successful individuals. When you volunteer, you are able to build relationships with successful people who run those organizations.
6. Mastermind Group – This is typically a weekly or monthly meeting with no more than six individuals who are doing what you do for a living. These meetings enable you to learn what to do and what not to do without having to learn it from the school of hard knocks.

If you want to be rich and successful, hang out with rich, successful people and avoid negative people like the plague.

• Woke up at 5 am to start my work day – check
• One hour of technical reading today – check
• Three mile jog today – check
• Prepare To-Do List today – check
• Phone pitched five companies today on my business – check
• Two prospect meetings today – check
• Wrap up project today – check
• Returned all phone calls and emails today – check
• Lunch networking meeting – check
• Prepared for tonight’s speaking engagement – check
• Solved two intractable problems with customers today – check
• Rush to bank to make today’s deposits – check
• Speaking engagement done – check
• Home at 8pm
• Bed by 10 pm

Every day, those who strive to become self-made millionaires juggle so many things it would make your head spin. And they do this day in day out, year after year, completely out of the spot light and oblivious to everyone except their employees and family.

Ultimately, if they do succeed, the only thing others besides employees and family see, is the fruits of that success – profitable business, nice home, new car, big bank account, etc.

Self-made millionaires deserve every dollar of their success. They earn that success in the early morning hours, when most are still fast asleep. They earn that success by navigating the financial stress pursuing success often requires. They earn that success by juggling ten things in a given day, any one of which could derail them from success. They earn that success by relinquishing family time for twelve hour work days.

What outside observers do not see is the monumental effort it takes to achieve success. Like an iceberg, all of the effort behind success is below the surface, invisible to the naked eye. But it’s there, holding aloft the success that everyone does see.

Those who know how to manage money make it their slave. Those who do not, become its slave.

In my research I discovered specific money habits of the rich that they used to accumulate enormous wealth:

• Put Money to Work – Accumulating money is good but it will not make you rich. You must put money to work if you want to become wealthy. And putting money to work means taking smart, calculated risks with that money. The rich put their money to work by investing it in stocks, bonds, real estate and businesses.
• Borrow Money to Create Assets – There is good debt and there is bad debt. Bad debt is debt you use to sustain your lifestyle. Good debt is debt you use to build assets that generate cash flow down the road.
• Save Money – Saving 10% or more of your earnings/income allows you to accumulate money. You want to accumulate money so that you can take advantage of opportunities that come along.
• Track What You Spend – Do you know where your money goes? You should. Tracking what you spend empowers you. It opens your eyes so you may know exactly where your money goes. Tracking your spending allows you to make adjustments to how you spend your money. If you don’t track your money it will disappear and once it’s gone you can’t get it back.
• Avoid Spontaneous or Emotional Purchases – Never buy anything on impulse. It is almost always the wrong thing to do. That spontaneous or emotional purchase will lose its luster after only a few weeks. Then you’re stuck with something you don’t need and that does not generate any income.

If you want to become rich you must become the master of your money. If you don’t it will fly away and land in someone else’s pockets, never to return again.

Success is a process. Self-made millionaires forge the habit of processing success in their lives by engaging in daily goal-focused activities.

Nearly half of the self-made millionaires in my Rich habits study woke up at least three hours prior to work in order to focus on getting important things done in those early morning hours. Almost always, those early morning tasks were tied to their dreams and their goals.

If you don’t process success in your life, you will not have any control over your success. Like a tree that works every day driving its roots into the ground, building a strong foundation in order to grow, you must work tirelessly building your success foundation. If you don’t, you will be like a leaf on a fall day, floating aimlessly, waiting and hoping for another breeze to carry you along.

Don’t be a leaf, with no control over the direction of your life. Instead, work every day to build a strong foundation by making a habit of doing specific things every day that will help you grow in knowledge and skill.

Like a tree, your daily success habits enable you to drive your success roots deeper into the ground, building a foundation for success that will one day pay enormous dividends.

One of the most valuable self-help books I ever read was How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie.

I had read that book twenty-five years ago, when I was really just beginning my career. I dusted that book off when I completed my Rich Habits research and re-read it. I took copious notes so that I could compare the teachings in that book to my research findings.

One of the many Rich Habits that I unearthed was one I called Rich Thinking – possessing a positive, optimistic, success-oriented mindset. In Dale Carnegie’s book, he touched on the Rich Thinking Rich Habit. In his book, he offered the following rule of success:

Never criticize, condemn or complain.

In my research, I found that the poor people in my study were filled with criticism and condemnation of their boss, co-workers, spouse, family, friends and rich people in general. They also complained about their lot in life. They complained about their jobs. They complained about their poor parents. They complained about the poor neighborhood they were raised in. The complained about the economy, politicians, government. I did not enjoy interviewing the poor people. They brought me down with their negativity.

Conversely, the self-made millionaires in my study were swimming in positivity. They were upbeat, optimistic and enthusiastic about life. I heard little to no criticism, condemnation or complaining in my interviews of those self-made millionaires. And, consequently, I very much enjoyed interviewing them.

When you take a look at the individuals inside your social circle, who are the ones you like hanging around with? My guess is, it isn’t the ones who constantly criticize, condemn and complain.