What are the Top Five most important things in your life?

Most people never give this much thought and, as a result, they devote too much of their time and money to things that don’t really matter to them, wasting their lives.

It is critical to know what’s most important to you. This is where you should devote an abundance of your time and money.

My Top Five:

#1 My Wife and Kids

#2 Growth of My Rich Habits Business

#3 Good Health

#4 The Relationships I Value Most

#5 Daily Self-Improvement – Self-Education and Deliberate Practice

Once you know what your Top Five are, apply the 80/20 Rule and devote 80% of your time and money to these things. Spend the remaining 20% of your time and money on everything that falls below your Top Five.

Every year, revisit your Top Five. Your Top Five changes as the circumstances of your life change. You should, therefore, revisit your Top Five periodically. This allows you to stay focused on what’s important to you every year.

Finding your calling enables you to marshall your thoughts and actions, bringing into sharp focus what you must do.

When you find your calling in life, clarity replaces uncertainty.

For those fortunate few, finding their calling in life is a pivotal, defining moment.

Very few ever find their calling in life.

Almost always, finding your calling in life involves the discovery of one of two things:

1. Some innate, God-given talent or
2. A passion that makes your heart sing.

But how do you find your calling in life when you are undecided about the course of your life or your future?

Experimentation.

You must experiment with diverse activities, one after the other, until you find one that reveals some innate talent or stirs some intense passion that permeates deep into your bones.

Only through experimentation will your calling in life be revealed.

When you find your calling, enthusiasm visits you with the morning sun.

Work becomes play.

Days become hours, hours become minutes and minutes become seconds.

When the day ends, you become excited for tomorrow.

Find your calling and you will find the stage upon which you will spend the rest of your life, happy and fulfilled.

In my study, I discovered three types of self-made millionaires:

1. Savers
2. Entrepreneurs and
3. Executives

This topic will focus on the Executives.

Executives are ordinary individuals who decide to spend their lives working for big, publicly-held companies. These companies offer additional compensation in the form of stock: qualified stock options, non-qulified stock options, discounted stock purchase arrangements, stock grants and restricted stock.

Employed, self-made millionaires use specific strategies that make them un-fireable:

• They become in-house experts within their company.
• They become industry experts within their industry.
• They develop a niche within their company or their industry.
• They forge power relationships with other influencers within their company.
• They forge power relationships with other influencers within their industry.
• They use four core relationship-building strategies: Hello Calls, Happy Birthday Calls, Life Event Calls and Networking/Volunteering.

There are many ways to become rich. Climbing the corporate ladder in a large publicly-held company is one of the less risky paths to accumulating wealth.

“Many who arrive at their future, end up blaming their past.” – Robert Half

The day to begin creating your future is today.

The future is a hazy, incomprehensible reality. As a result, most neglect their future. Those who fail to plan for and invest in their future wind up regretting it.

In my research I uncovered certain strategies that enable you to create a happy, financially free future:

Rich Habits That Secure a Bright, Happy, Healthy and Financially Free Future:

• Read to learn 30 minutes or more every day – This ensures you grow your knowledge base in your career, industry or your side-hustle (your dream).
• Deliberately practice 30 minutes or more every day – This ensures you perfect and improve your skills within your career, industry or your side-hustle (your dream).
• Exercise aerobically every day – This ensures you maintain your weight, improve your cardiovascular system, maintain a healthy, vibrant brain and reduce stress.
• Eat healthy – This ensures you maintain a healthy microbiota, lower your blood-sugar levels, maintain your weight and minimize plaque build-up in your pulmonary and circulatory system
• Save – This ensures you set aside money for your future so you can then invest those savings.
• Invest your savings prudently – Invest your savings in what you know. Investing your savings prudently puts your money to work for you. Over time, your invested savings will grow and enable you to become financially free in the future.
• Forge Rich Relationships – Seek out other success-minded people and build relationships with them. Eventually, those relationships will pay significant dividends. They will help open doors for you and your family, down the road.
• Avoid want spending – Focus on spending your money on your needs and minimize want spending.
• Avoid lifestyle creep – No matter what good financial fortune visits you in life, do not change your standard of living. Don’t supersize your life by buying things you really do not need. Live a modest life. This means buying a modest home, inexpensive cars, and avoid spending money on expensive toys, like boats and jewelry.

What you do today, determines how you live your life in the future.

In my research of 177 self-made millionaires, I discovered they all shared one common trait – a positive mental outlook. They were all optimistic and enthusiastic about their dreams, their calling or their life purpose.

This positive mental outlook was not an inherent trait – something they were born with.

Rather, it was a trait they developed over time by deciding to pursue something they had an innate talent for or something they were passionate about.

Once they discovered their innate talent or passion, this toggled on certain success traits they previously never knew they possessed:

• Obsession With Daily Self-Improvement – They became fanatical about growth through learning and deliberate practice. They desired to learn everything about their passion. They desired to practice every day in order to perfect their innate talent or skill.
• Resilience – It was not the desire for money that made them resilient. Rather, it was the desire to pursue their innate talent or passion that gave them resilience. They were doing what they were good at or what they loved and nothing could stand in their way. Obstacles, pitfalls, mistakes and adversity were all able to be overcome.
• Persistence –  Nothing would stop them from perfecting their skills or growing in knowledge.
• Focus – They were able to focus on their innate talent or passion every day, every month , every year and oftentimes for the rest of their lives.
• Patience – Because they loved what they were doing, they patiently pursued it. They were not chasing money as an end unto itself. They were chasing perfection. Money was just a byproduct.

Find your innate talent or your passion and the success traits that transform ordinary people into extraordinary people will manifest themselves out of thin air.

Being wealthy requires two things:

1. Accumulating Wealth and
2. Keeping It.

It’s one thing to become wealthy. It’s another thing to keep and grow the wealth you’ve accumulated. Here are some of the most important Rich Habits that help you keep and grow your wealth:

• Automate Saving – Making a habit of automating how much you save every month.
• Invest Your Savings – Putting your savings to work requires that you invest your savings. This requires doing your homework for every investment and only investing in what you know.
• Monitor Your Investments – This also requires doing your homework. You must monitor your investments regularly and make changes if your investments are not producing adequate returns.
• Frugal Spending – Being frugal is about seeking high quality products or services first and then finding the lowest cost in acquiring those high quality products or services.
• Avoid Want Spending – Want spending is spending your wealth on wants rather than needs. It is the habit of giving in to immediate gratification to satisfy some immediate impulse. Want Spenders create their own poverty. They are undisciplined with their money. They have been brainwashed by advertisers and a consumerist society into buying things they do not need.
• Avoid Lifestyle Creep – Lifestyle Creep is increasing your spending to meet your increased income. No matter what financial good fortune visits you in life, do not change your standard of living. Don’t supersize your life by buying things you really do not need. Live a modest life, always.
• Use Professionals – Use professionals to reduce your taxes. Use professionals to protect your wealth. Use professionals to help guide your investment and financial decisions.

I am often asked by the media what are the most important Rich Habits. In my opinion, these are the top ones:

#1 Experimentation – Experimenting with diverse activities that can be monetized, until you find one or more activities that reveal an innate talent or which make your heart sing with passion and enthusiasm.

#2 Dream-Setting – Creating a script of your ideal life. This helps you to define your dreams and the goals behind your dreams.

#3 Daily Self-Education – 30 minutes or more a day of reading to learn. You can substitute podcasts, videos or audio books for reading. The key is to summarize what you learn. I use a Fact Binder to capture new knowledge/facts.

#4 Living Below Your Means – Living off of 80% of your net pay and saving the difference.

#5 Daily Aerobic Exercise – 20 minutes or more of cardio, every day.

#6 Healthy Eating – Two out of three meals that do not include carbs or processed food or intermittent fasting with one healthy meal a day.

#7 Automate Savings – Automatically directing 20% or more of your net pay into a savings account.

#8 Prudent Investing – Investing your savings prudently. This requires that you do your homework. By homework I mean studying every potential investment until you feel you are confident you understand it very well. Homework also includes regularly monitoring every investment you do make.

Apathy can only be overcome by enthusiasm and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal which takes the imagination by storm and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice. – Arnold Toynbee

Happiness is really enthusiasm. Eighty-five percent of the self-made millionaires in my study possessed it. They woke every morning, eager to begin a new day, plying their talents, skills, and knowledge to something they believed in and were obsessed by.

The key to enthusiasm is doing something you love or have an innate talent for. When you discover your main purpose in life, it fires you with enthusiasm. It makes your heart sing.

Your sole objective in life, should therefore be to find and engage in those activities which make your heart sing and then spend the rest of your life perfecting your knowledge and skills, doing that which keeps your heart singing.

The path to lifelong enthusiasm is experimentation – experimenting with diverse activities until you find one which arouses enthusiasm.

If you want to stop working and turn hours into minutes, you must experiment and then invest in activities that one day will enable you to earn money while doing what you love.

The two biggest enemies of success are fear and doubt. They hold most back from taking action.

The interesting thing about fear and doubt, however, is that they never go away, no matter how successful you become.

So, if fear and doubt exist for the successful, why don’t they hold them back from taking action?

The problem isn’t fear and doubt. The problem is habit. Successful people simply make a habit of taking action, despite the fear and doubt. They habitualize action.

Only by taking action do you gain the experiences of facing obstacles and overcoming them, facing mistakes and learning from them, taking risks and surviving failure.

Through action you gain life experiences that become a reservoir you can reach into during a time of need.

When you face obstacles, that mental reservoir in your mind says, we’ve faced a similar obstacle before a few years ago and this is the way around it.

When you face an uncertainty, that mental reservoir in your mind says, we’ve faced a similar uncertainty before and this was the mistake we made and need to avoid.

When you face a risk, that mental reservoir in your mind says, we’ve taken a similar risk before and we survived.

Courage grows through action because actions create a mental reservoir of historical experiences and those historical experiences give you the courage to take future action.

If you were to ask most people if they want to be rich, they will emphatically answer YES almost every time.

But, as I learned from my five-year study of self-made millionaires, the journey to success isn’t easy.

It often requires that you take numerous risks.

Success is also riddled with obstacles, adversity and mistakes, which requires sacrifice – long work hours that separate you from your family and friends. It takes time to overcome the pitfalls you will face during the success journey.

Success is also an emotional roller coaster ride. Most days things will not go your way and you need to gain control over your emotions or that emotional roller coaster ride will break you.

In reality, most people do not want to become successful because most people do not want to take risks, face adversity or make the sacrifices success requires.

The grass is always greener until you have to mow the lawn.

Most people simply want success to happen to them. Deep down, they do not want to do the work required of success.

But success never just happens. It has to be made to happen. It has to be earned. And when the rubber meets the road, most are simply unwilling to devote their heart and soul to doing what it takes to become a success in life. The fear of the unknown stops them in their tracks.

They fail to take action because they do not believe they have what it takes to survive the success journey.

Unfortunately, what most fail to realize is that courage, work ethic, persistence, focus, patience and resilience are not success traits you must possess before you pursue success. They are success traits that reveal themselves during the success journey.

Everyone possesses these success traits. They are part of every human being’s DNA. But they remain dormant until they are called upon. And they are only called upon when they are needed.

When you pursue your dreams in life, these success traits spring forth, like a fountain of riches you never knew you had.

Don’t let fear of the unknown stop you from pursuing your dreams. All you need is already deep inside of you. You just need to take that first step. You need to take action on your dreams. You are much more than you ever imagined.