The words you use matter. They can empower you or enslave you. Your words seep into your subconscious mind, infecting it, good or bad. The words you use reinforce your beliefs.

Some words are good, reinforcing beliefs that help propel you to success. Some words are bad, reinforcing limiting or negative beliefs which hold you back in life.

Good Words

• I will
• I can
• I won’t
• I don’t
• Yes
• No
• Absolutely

These words dictate that you have control or have made a definitive choice. You direct your behavior. They are words used by winners.

Bad Words

• I can’t
• If
• Because
• I should
• I couldn’t
• But
• Since
• Except for
• I wish
• Maybe
• I might

These words imply that you don’t have control. They are excuse words that imply you are controlled by some force or circumstance outside your control. You are giving up control over your behavior and empowering some outside force when you use these words. These words reinforce the belief that your life, your behavior and your circumstances are not within your control. They are words used by quitters.

The price of success is huge. It requires enormous sacrifices: long hours, financial investment, lost family time, lost friend time, mental frustration, emotional turmoil, hard decisions, forced habit change, deferring many of life’s pleasures, lost relationships, loss of a consistent paycheck, loss of downtime, lost holidays and vacations and many other things.

You must give up so much in the pursuit of success. So, why would anyone pursue success?

Because success is worth the sacrifices. Why success is so sweet:

• Redemption – Success is a big exclamation point that you were right.
• Wealth – Success can make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.
• Freedom – Success buys you freedom. Freedom from wage slavery and freedom to do the things others only dream of.
• Increased Opportunities – Success is a magnet for new opportunities; opportunities you are able to take advantage of.
• Foes Become Fans, Adversaries Become Allies – Detractors are proven wrong and change their thinking about you.
• People Treat You Better – Self interest drives human behavior. People will want to participate in your success and will treat you like a king in order for become part of your success.
• Your Confidence Skyrockets – Success boosts your confidence; it fills your confidence bucket up all at once.
• Your Optimism Soars – Success is like steroids for a positive mental outlook. It changes the lens through which you see the world. Everything seems possible when you succeed.
• Less Fear of Fear – Success increases your courage to take on new opportunities. You no longer fear failure, obstacles and potential pitfalls because you experienced all of those things and still came out on top.
• Growth – Success changes who you are. Your pursuit of success forces you to grow in many ways. You become more knowledgable and more skilled at what you do. You develop new relationships along the way. You become relevant.
• You Can Make a Difference – The fruits of success allows you to help improve the lives of your family, friends and those in your community.
• Revenge – Success is the sweetest revenge. Living a good life is the best revenge.

You can’t fake your way to confidence. It’s not something you can manifest by good thoughts alone. Confidence is a byproduct of taking action that produces results which helps build confidence.

The more you achieve, the more you succeed, the more your confidence grows. In a way, confidence is very much like a bucket. It can be filled, but it can also be depleted.

What Fills the Confidence Bucket?

• Perfecting your skills
• Increasing your knowledge
• Making money
• Saving money
• Growing your money
• Overcoming obstacles and pitfalls
• Overcoming failure
• Navigating around potential obstacles and pitfalls
• Solving problems
• Surrounding your self with positive, upbeat people
• Surviving unexpected, bad consequences
• Positive self-talk
• Helping others
• Achieving goals
• Having good daily habits
• Appreciating what you have
• Taking action
• Writing down your victories and successes
• Making decisions
• Stop making excuses
• Stop comparing yourself with others
• Hard work
• Being productive

What Depletes the Confidence Bucket?

• Procrastinating
• Inactivity/Laziness
• Being unproductive
• Time wasters like TV, the Internet, Facebook, etc.
• Lack of goals
• Not pursuing goals
• Making excuses
• Indecision
• Envy
• Surrounding yourself with negative people
• Quitting on dreams, goals, problems, obstacles
• Focusing on your mistakes and failures
• Having bad daily habits
• Being selfish
• Giving into failure
• Losing money
• Negative self-talk
• Too much debt

If you lack confidence it is because your Confidence Bucket is depleted. You need to fill it up in order to gain confidence. When it comes to confidence you cannot “act as if”. Building confidence requires daily effort!

The average individual performs far below their abilities. They do what they have to do to survive; to get by. They avoid taking risks that could disrupt their lives.

True success is the byproduct of unleashing your innate abilities; exposing them to the light of day for all to see. But this requires risk. That risk is taking a leap of faith in yourself and your abilities. Few ever do.

Unleashing your innate abilities is really nothing more than pursuing something you enjoy – something that brings you joy while engaged in an activity. The problem? Oftentimes exploiting your innate abilities requires an enormous investment in your time before that investment begins to pay dividends. Because the investment does not produce immediate rewards, it’s a problem. Developing your innate abilities by through hours and hours of daily practice combined with hours of daily reading to gain more knowledge to perfect those abilities, simply requires too much time for the average Joe.

There’s a very common adage: “luck comes when preparation meets opportunity”.  When you devote yourself to something you are passionate about, you are engaging in activities that tap into your innate abilities.

But developing those abilities requires an investment. You must engage in them over and over again, until you become an expert. Developing expertise takes time. Five to seven years, at a minimum. Sometimes longer. And with little to no immediate payback. This investment in yourself, tees you up for success later in life. Opportunities eventually present themselves. If, however, you are not prepared when an opportunity comes your way, then the opportunity passes you by. But if you are prepared, if you’ve done the hard work for many years, when the opportunity does come along, you are ready to pounce.

Many people call this fortuitous alignment of preparation and opportunity, luck. Those who prepare their entire lives, those who invest in their abilities their entire lives, become beneficiaries of luck; the meeting of preparation and opportunity.

Every human being has innate abilities. These are inborn strengths hardwired into your DNA from the moment of birth. Your job in life is to find out what you’re good at and devote yourself to it for the rest of your life. What you’re good at is usually something that comes easier to you than to others. That’s life’s way of winking at you. Your strengths are the clues to finding  your inborn, natural abilities. Find your strengths, devote your life to improving them and luck will follow.

Luck is the precursor to success. You cannot become successful without luck. In order for luck to occur, you must relentlessly develop those abilities that come naturally to you. You must invest your time and energy in perfecting them. Find your strengths, develop those strengths relentlessly and luck will follow. 

There are four ways to become rich:

1. Live Below Your Means
2. Expand Your Means
3. Do Both
4. Getting Lucky

Living Below Your Means

Living below your means and investing your savings prudently is the only guaranteed way to become rich. But, this approach requires enormous sacrifices – you must manage your spending your entire life and that requires making sacrifices: small house in an inexpensive neighborhood, no vacations, no restaurants, no kids. If you do have kids your kids are forced to sacrifice along with you. They have to buy their own stuff: iPhones, movie tickets, toys, cars, college education, etc.

Most are unwilling to make those sacrifices. We want the nice home in the safe neighborhood, we want the nice vacations, we want to give our kids their iPhones and a college education. So, for the vast majority, living below your means requires too much sacrifice.

But, for those willing to make the sacrifice, wealth is virtually guaranteed. So, the question is, how bad do you want to be rich? Is being rich so important to you that you are willing to make the sacrifices that are required?

Expand Your Means

Expanding your means usually requires taking on risk and working long hours, by pursuing a dream or starting a business. According to my research and many other studies on wealth creation, about 80% of the multi-millionaires and billionaires make their money this way. The upside is enormous wealth where everyone in your family benefits from your risk taking and hard work. The downsides include time away from family due to long work hours or poverty, you could fail.

Doing Both

Living below your means and expanding your means requires the most sacrifice.

Getting Lucky

Getting lucky means you fall into money somehow without any real effort. Examples of this are big gambling wins such as hitting the lottery, the slots, horses, etc. Or, you you inherit your wealth – you’re born into a rich family or inherit money from a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, brother or sister. The reason so many gamble is because they are unwilling to make the long-term sacrifices required.

Almost everyone wants to be rich, but they want that wealth without having to take on risk, work long hours, or make sacrifices for themselves or their family. Becoming rich is not easy.

We all have flaws. Some flaws are so egregious as to constitute physical or mental disabilities. You can fall back on your flaws, using them as excuses to hold you back from the pursuit of achievement. Or, you can use your flaws as motivation for achievement.

Don not let flaws stand in the way of pursuing success. Do not make excuses due to your flaws, defects or deficiencies. Instead, overcome those flaws. See them as a springboard, propelling you, against all odds, towards achievement. Let your flaws motivate you, and never hold you back. Flaws are just obstacles to be overcome. They should not be used as a crutch to excuse the pursuit of achievement.

It is in overcoming your flaws, where true greatness emerges.

We all have habits. We forge habits during our lives. Some habits begin at an early age, some we adopt during our lives and others later in life. We are barely aware of the habits we have because habits are unconscious. Through repetition they become automatic and do not require conscious thought.

The quality of your habits defines the quality of your life. But if you have not defined what type of life you want, you cannot possibly know what habits you need. So, real habit change starts by defining what’s important to you and then selecting those habits that will help you shape the life you want.

What’s Important to You?

• I want to be successful and rich
• I want good health
• I want a strong, devoted family
• I want to be an expert in my industry
• I want to be a CPA, attorney, doctor, professional athlete, etc.
• I want to be a celebrity, big brand, well known, etc.

Once you define the life you desire to have, that is when you select the habits that will get you there.

Examples

If you want to be successful and rich then you must adopt the Rich Habits that make that possible: Dreamsetting, reading to learn every day, networking, building relationships, etc.

If you want to be in good health then you must adopt the Rich Habits that make that possible: daily aerobic exercise, limiting your consumption of junk food and alcohol and eating healthy nutritious food.

If you want a strong, devoted family then you must adopt the Rich Habits that build strong families: putting your family first, showing love to your family every day, mentoring your children to succeed, educating your children and spending time with your family.

If you do not define the life you want, you cannot possibly know which habits you must forge in order to improve your life. Changing your life begins by knowing what life you want to change to.

It’s impossible to succeed without moving forward. You define your dream, build goals around those dreams and then take action on those goals. But if the action you are taking does not help move you forward in achieving your goals, you will never succeed.

The key is to track your progress. You must be able to measure your progress somehow. How you do that is by tracking your progress. Let me give you an example:

Let’s say you are studying to get some license. In order to get that license, you are required to take a test and pass four key sections. In order to pass the test, you must learn the material.  You talk to others who have the license you want and they tell you that you will need to study between 300 – 400 hours in order to pass the exam.

You have six months to do this. How do you learn the material in those six months? By studying and taking practice exams for each section during this six month period. This requires that you devote 180 days to studying and taking practice tests. You further determine that you will need about 360 hours of study during those 180 days. With 360 hours at your disposal, you decide that you need to devote two hours a day to studying and taking practice tests. Since you work eight hours a day, you make a plan to study one hour in the morning and one hour at night. So, each day you track how many hours you are actually studying.

After the first month, you look at your tracking schedule and realize you only studied fifty hours, or ten hours less than you budgeted.

This is feedback. With this feedback, you are able to re-set the remaining amount of time you need to study for the next 5 months and then track your progress. Each day you monitor your progress through your tracking schedule in order to make sure you are on track. After six months, your tracking schedule tells you that you studied the requisite 360 hours. You take the exam, pass it and get your license.

Tracking your progress is critical because it tells you if you are on track in your progress. Tracking provides you with the critical feedback you need in order to determine if you are moving forward. Without tracking your progress, there is no way to know if you are on track. Tracking makes success possible.

Successful individuals are masters of their emotions. Because the success journey is mostly about overcoming negativity, disappointment, criticism, obstacles, mistakes and numerous failures, successful people develop the Rich Habit of controlling their emotions.You don’t see successful individuals celebrating excessively when they are victorious, nor do you see them down in the dumps when they fail.

When you allow your emotions to run high, you are literally turning off half of your brain. The prefrontal cortex shuts down when your emotions, good or bad, are allowed to run wild. This is a particularly bad thing when you experience defeat or setbacks because that is when you need your entire brain to help you to overcome defeat and setbacks.

Always be humble in victory and defeat.

I am often asked “what is the difference between a dream and a goal?”

It’s critical to understanding the difference between a dream and a goal because, with respect to a dream, there is no element of control. You have no control over the realization of a dream. A dream is merely the desire for some future outcome.

A goal, however, is something you can control. It represent some specific future action you intend to take for some specific period of time that will help you realize your dream. Because it requires action, you have control over whether or not you take that action.

Let’s take a look at some typical examples of “goals” to help you separate the two:

• “I want to lose 20 pounds.”
• “I want to run 3 miles a day for 6 months.”
• “I want to increase sales by $$5,000 a month.”
• “I want to make 10 prospecting calls a day for a month.”
• “I want to write a book this year.”
• “I want to write 500 words a day for 3 months.”

“I want to lose 20 pounds” is a dream because it represents the future outcome of losing 20 pounds.

“I want to run 3 miles a day for 6 months” is a goal because it represents some future action you intend to take that will help you realize your dream of losing 20 pounds.

“I want to increase sales by $5,000 a month” is a dream because it represents the future outcome of making an additional $5,000 a month in sales.

“I want to make 10 prospecting calls a day for a month” is a goal because it represents some future action you intend to take that will lead to the realization of your dream of making an additional $5,000 a month in sales.

“I want to write a book this year” is a dream because it represents some future outcome.

“I want to write 500 words a day for 3 months” represents a goal. Five hundreds words a day for 3 months = 45,000 words, a good number of words for a good sized book.

The key to realizing a goal is to define your dream and then identify the specific action steps required in order to realize that dream. Each specific activity required in order to realize your dream represents a goal. Most dreams require multiple goals you must achieve in order to realize your dream. After you achieve each of those goals, your dream becomes a reality.

Summary:

A dream is some future outcome you desire.

A goal is some specific future action you take for a specific period of time in order to realize a dream.