When life is good, when things are going well, it’s hard to tell the difference between those relationships that matter and those that don’t.

But life isn’t linear. Everyone, even successful people, experience downturns in their lives.

It is when things go off the rails that Rich Relationships come to the rescue.

Rich Relationships are those relationships you’ve built over the years with other upbeat, success-minded individuals. Rich Relationships do not abandon you in your time of need. If fact, they do the opposite – they help pull you out of the abyss, financially, emotionally and through their contacts.

The relationships you should be building today should be with those individuals who have displayed courage and commitment to their relationship with you when things were not going as planned.

How many of your relationships could you honestly count on in a time of need? Make a list. Study that list. Those are the individuals you should be devoting your time to in forging strong relationships. Those who do not make the list, should be the ones you devote the least amount of your time to.

The foundation of your success is built upon the relationships you forge with other success-minded individuals who are committed to helping you achieve your goals and dreams; who are committed to your success.

Surround yourself with Rich Relationships and invest your time in those relationships.

You are the architect of your own happiness and you are the architect of your own sadness.

You are the architect of an abundant life and you are the architect of a life of scarcity.

You are the architect of your life.

Until you accept this fundamental fact of life, you will never truly have any control over your life.  Like leaves on a fall day, you will float in the air aimlessly, without direction, driven by the wind.

The habits that you forge, are that wind. The hidden power inside each one of us, is the ability to direct that wind in any direction of our choosing, by choosing habits that move us forward in life toward the life of our dreams.

I have a binder filled with page after page of the studies I’ve summarized over the past nine years. These summarized studies are all interrelated. Each study relates, in some way, to the benefits derived from various habits.

One such habit, aerobic exercise, has so many benefits, I thought I’d highlight them:

• Reversal of Mild Cognitive Impairment – The first stage of Alzheimer’s disease is known as Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Several studies of older individuals with MCI concluded that when these individuals engaged in aerobic exercise thirty minutes a day, four days a week, they showed a reduction in MCI.
• Prevents Alzheimer’s – Other studies have documented that individuals who regularly exercised aerobically throughout their lives were 88% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s. One longitudinal study even found that only 5% of women who exercised aerobically throughout their lives developed Alzheimer’s, compared to 32% of the women who did little to no aerobic exercise.
• Younger Thymus – The thymus is responsible for manufacturing immune cells called T-Cells. It typically begins to shrink around age 20, thus producing fewer and fewer T-Cells as we age. Those who exercised aerobically, however, had thymus glands of a twenty year old – meaning, aerobic exercise keeps your thymus youthful, your immune system healthy, and these two things enable you to live a long, healthy life.
• Healthier Hearts – Various studies show that those who exercise aerobically during their lives have stronger, healthier heart muscles.
• Better Cardiovascular Systems – Studies show that those who exercise aerobically have lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol levels and other favorable heart metrics across the board than sedentary people.
• Less Depression – Those who exercise aerobically have lower levels of adrenaline and cordial, stress hormones that have been linked to stress-related diseases and increased depression.
• Better Guts – Those who exercise aerobically have higher concentrations of butyrate, a type of fatty acid that helps keep you gut healthy, lowering inflammation and increasing energy production.
• Lower Cholesterol – Regular aerobic exercise, in many studies, lowered LDL (bad cholesterol) and increased HDL (good cholesterol).
• Reduction in Type 2 Diabetes – Various studies show that regular aerobic exercise increases insulin action and glucose tolerance, significantly reducing the risk of developing Type 2 Diabetes.
• Youthful Skin- Individuals over age 40 who engage in regular aerobic exercise have healthier skin than their sedentary peers. Many in various studies had skin comparable to 20 – 30 year-olds.

If you want to live a longer, healthier, more youthful life, forge the aerobic exercise habit. It’s never too late. Studies show that aerobic exercise reverses many of the aging effects that lifelong bad habits produce. Aerobic exercise, in effect, makes old people, un-old.

In the mid-2000’s, Australian researchers Megan Oaten and Ken Cheng conducted a study on a group of people. For two months this group hit the gym three times a week for weight training and cardio.

Employing a well-known visual tracking test, which measures your ability to focus and concentrate, they tested the group of participants’ willpower before and after the two-month exercise program.

The results?

The participants increased their ability to focus and concentrate after engaging in the two-month exercise regimen.

But, surprisingly, the two-month exercise program revealed some other unexpected and surprising results. There was a massive decrease in bad behavior and a massive increase in good behavior, post exercise regimen:

• Cigarette smokers went from 14 cigarettes a day to just 3.
• Healthy eating habits increased.
• Junk food consumption went down.
• Impulse spending decreased.
• Overspending declined.
• Participants devoted more time to their friends.
• TV consumption went down.
• Missing or being late for appointments decreased in frequency.
• Procrastination was reduced.
• Daily household chores surged.

In short, like throwing a pebble in the water, the act of establishing just one good keystone habit (exercise) triggered a Ripple Effect which gave birth to other good behaviors (habits).

Keystone Habits are infectious habits that act like catalysts, giving birth to other related habits.

This is why it is so important to forge good habits – good habits lead to more good habits. This is also why it is so important to eliminate bad habits – bad habits lead to more bad habits.

Achieving greatness boils down to one simple formula:

Doing Something You Are Inherently Good at, Which Adds Value to the Lives of Others and For Which You Have a Passion.

Innate Talent

Innate talent is something that comes easy to you. It is something you do better than others.

Value

When whatever you do adds value to the lives of others, they will gladly pay you a premium for any service or product you provide which improves their lives in some way.

Passion

When you love what you do, you happily devote every available waking moment to doing that which makes your heart sing. Those who find their passion in life become expert in what they do. They devote the most time to their careers and, as a result, become the best at what they do.

All of those deca-millionaires/billionaires you read about in the newspapers, or on the Internet, or listen to on the radio or in podcasts or whose interviews you watch on TV or some Internet video, have achieved enormous success by following this formula for greatness.

Certain professions/trades produce more value and, therefore, those who work in those professions/trades earn more money.

Entrepreneurs, Doctors, Dentists, Prosthodontist, Oral Surgeons, Electricians, Crane Operators, Attorneys, Certified Public Accountants, Financial Advisors, Sales Managers, Financial Managers, Nurses Anethetists, Construction Managers, Boilermakers, Plumbers, Specialized Tool and Die Manufacturers, Airline Pilots, Property and Casualty Insurance Agents, Tenured University Professors, Engineers, Aircraft Mechanics, Pile Driver Operators, Computer Network Specialists, Funeral Service Managers, Software Developers, Pharmaceutical Sales, Pharmacist, Actuaries, IT Managers, – these professions/trades all produce, on average, a better than average income.

Why?

They have a perceived value that is, on average, greater than other professions/trades. These professions/trades also happen to require a greater amount of education and training, than on average, other professions/trades.

The amount of money you earn is directly correlated to the amount of perceived value you provide. The marketplace rewards those with a higher income who have the highest perceived value.

So, the common denominator is perceived value.

If you want to make a lot of money in your work life, you must provide value.

Becoming a person of value, then, should be your goal. But this is not an easy goal. It requires a constant investment in formal education, self-education and daily deliberate practice. You must, every day, maintain or improve your knowledge and skills. This requires a lifelong commitment on your part.

If you are unhappy with your income, it is most likely because the profession/trade you are in places a lower value on your profession/trade. To earn more, you must increase the value you provide to others.

Your income is a mirror. It reflects the value you provide to others.

MetLife is a leading provider of insurance and other financial services to millions of individual and institutional customers across the United States, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Europe.

In the mid 80’s MetLife was hiring 5,000 salespeople a year. To ensure their success, they were spending one hundred and fifty million dollars every two years in training costs. That’s thirty thousand dollars per sales rep.

MetLife approached psychologist Doctor Martin Seligman at the University of. Pennsylvania. Seligman developed an Attributional Style Questionnaire, or screening test, that each new MetLife representative completed. The screening test helped isolate the positive and negative mental characteristics of each representative in the group.

Seligman then tracked the sales results of these new MetLife hires for two years.

The result? The agents with an optimistic outlook drastically outsold the pessimists by as much as 21% in the first year and 57% in the second year!

Optimism, by definition, is feeling hopeful and confident about the future or anticipating a successful outcome in some pursuit.

When you are optimistic, you feel like you are in control of your destiny and that you control your own results. Optimists feel they can always do better, always improve, always make more money.

The study found that optimists worked harder in improving themselves – they devoted themselves to daily self-improvement, making self-improvement a daily habit.

As a result, the optimists in the study were able to drastically outsell their negative, unhappy competition and earn more money in the process.

Positivity and negativity is a habit. If you want to earn more money and increase your wealth, you must forge daily habits that put you on autopilot for success. Positivity is one of those habits that puts you on autopilot to become wealthy and successful.

Brain cells (neurons) communicate with one another by sending chemicals (neuro-chemicals or peptides) to one another. This communication channel is called a synapse.

Each individual neuron can form thousands of links with other neurons in this way, giving a typical brain well over 100 trillion synapses.

Synapses are the latticework of the brain. They are very much like branches on a tree. A synapse, or tree limb, grows from the trunk of the brain every time two or more brain cells repeatedly communicate with one another.

With each repeated communication, the synapse, or gap between two or more brain cells, grows closer together.

This makes the distance neuro-chemicals need to travel between brain cells, shorter.

Synapses that become habits, have the shortest distances, making habit synapses the most powerful type of synapse in the brain.

This is what makes habits so hard to break – the synapses of habits are the strongest, shortest synapses in the brain.

Once a habit is forged, all activity associated with that habit becomes automatic, meaning unconscious (we are not consciously aware of our habits).

Now, this is intended to be a good thing. Automation, or unconscious behavior, allows the brain to work less, using less brain fuel (glucose or ketones), making the brain a more efficient machine.

When you forge habits that produce good behavior (saving money, eating healthy, exercising regularly), this automation puts you on autopilot for a happy, successful and healthy life.

When you forge habits that produce bad behavior (spending more than you make, eating junk food, not exercising), this automation puts you on autopilot for an unhappy, unsuccessful and unhealthy life.

The “secret to success” is a secret because the behavior that creates success is the byproduct of habits. And habits are below the level of consciousness.

Thanks to my research, the secret is out.

There are many types of habits.

There are time habits. For example, what time you wake up or go to sleep, taking a shower in the morning, watching TV before going to bed, etc.

There are relationship habits. For example, going to the bar with a particular friend, talking about sports with another friend, friday night movies with your significant other, etc.

There are commuting habits. For example, getting a cup of coffee on your way to work, reading the news or listening to a particular radio station, etc.

Then there are pleasure habits. Think of anything you do on a regular basis that gives you pleasure. That’s a pleasure habit.

Pleasure habits are the most potent type of habit. They are the hardest to break because these habits cause your brain to release a chemical called dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that makes you feel momentarily good or happy.

The more you engage in pleasure habits, the more neuro-receptors your brain cells create in order to send and receive dopamine. Once created, these neuro-receptors begin to dictate your behavior, forcing you to engage in pleasure habits in order to feed the craving of those neuro-recptors.

These neuro-receptors are physical appendages that constantly call out for dopamine. And this is why pleasure habits are the hardest habits to break.

But, they can be broken.

Breaking a pleasure habit requires self-control, discipline and willpower. Initially, the neuro-receptors will fight you, but, depending on the nature of the pleasure habit, they tend to die off after a few weeks. And so too does their power to dictate your behavior.

Beware of pleasure habits. They are the most destructive type of bad habit. They can cause you to gain weight (eating sweets to get a dopamine rush), damage your health (drinking alcohol to get a dopamine rush) or cause you to waste time (viewing pictures or videos on the Internet to get a dopamine rush).

There are thousands of receptors on each cell in the body. This includes the cells in every organ, including your brain. Each receptor is specific to one peptide (protein).

Anger, sadness, guilt, excitement, happiness, nervousness, each separate emotion you express, releases its own specific neuropeptide inside each cell.

The more you habitually express an emotion, the more receptors your cells will create for that emotion.

If you forge the habit of being upbeat, for example, you are literally causing your cells to manufacture more neuro-receptors in order to meet the demand for the positivity-induced neuropeptides your habitual optimism creates. This means, you are building a cellular foundation for more future optimism – or a positive mental outlook.

The same holds true for habitual negative thinking. The more negative thoughts you allow yourself to have, the more neuro-receptors your cells will create, perpetuating a negative mental outlook.

The good news is that every two months 100% of the cells in your body are replaced by new cells. This means you can physically change the cellular framework from negative to positive in just two months, by making positivity a habit for two months.

Thoughts do become things. Be careful of those thoughts. The wrong ones, negative thoughts, will alter the physical properties of your cells, creating a domino effect that will perpetuate that negativity.