Two out of every five minutes of our lives are devoted to habits. This means 40% of the time we are all zombies, unconsciously thinking and acting. This is why when we are confronted with the question who am I, most of us don’t know. How can you peel that onion when 40% of the time we are engaged in unconscious behavior? The key, therefore, to understanding who we are, is to track our habits, our unconscious behaviors.

Habit awareness is the key to answering the question who am I. Our daily habits reveal the answer. We cannot possibly know ourselves until we know our habits. Habit awareness is the lens through which we are able to see our true selves. Our habits reveal who we are. Habit awareness is like pulling the curtain on our otherwise unconscious existence. Only by studying our habits will we be able to truly see, for the first time, the nature of who we are.

Habits define us. They shape our lives. If you want to understand your strengths and weaknesses look at your habits. Some are good habits, which create a life of success and happiness, and some are bad habits, which create a life of misfortune and unhappiness. Our strengths and weaknesses, therefore, are revealed through our daily habits. Make habit awareness a priority in your life. Only through habit awareness will you be able to answer the question who am I.

The subthalamic nucleus is a region in the brain that interrupts our ability to focus on tasks. It is called into action whenever something in our environment catches our attention. Its purpose is to prepare us for fight or flight by clearing out all current thinking so that we can focus on the external stimuli that interrupted our thinking. In the modern age of email notifications, text message notifications, Facebook notifications and phones ringing, the sub thalamic nucleus is perpetually at work, distracting us. As a result, we are constantly preparing for fight or flight. Thus, our focus is constantly shifting from one thing to another. And this is very bad. An overactive subthalamic nucleus means we are constantly distracted at work, decreasing our efficiency, productivity and costing us (if small business) or our employers (if employee) time and money. It’s no wonder so many individuals and companies are struggling financially.

So, what can we do? Daily meditation may be the solution. Like exercising a muscle, daily meditation increases your ability to focus and, through daily practice, when distractions occur, your brain is strong enough to shut down the subthalamic nucleus from pulling you in different directions. A study from Emory University found that 20 minutes a day of meditation is enough to override this region of the brain, allowing you to focus. Also, shutting off notifications limits external distractions from pulling you away from the tasks you are focused on. Lastly, taking a break from a task, every hour or so, helps restore your willpower reserve, enabling you to focus more on those tasks. So, start meditating, shut off notifications and take a short break every hour or so and you will increase your ability to focus, which will improve your efficiency and productivity.

One of the most important Rich Habits is growing relationships with other success-minded individuals. These relationships lift you up in life and open doors that are otherwise closed to you. One of the most common Poor Habits almost everyone has is having long-term relationships with individuals who turn out to be toxic, meaning they drag you down in life: they ask for money, they engage in negative gossip that hurts you or a close family member, they throw you under the bus and damage other relationships you have or they drag you into their problems.

It’s not easy to just turn off a long-term Toxic Relationship because they were very likely forged over many years. There’s just a lot of history there. Consequently, I’m constantly asked the same question, which is:

How do I distance myself from Toxic Relationships?

One common thread with Toxic Relationships is that these individuals eventually cross the line and when that happens there’s always a lull in the relationship following an event. Their M.O. or routine is to try to repair their relationship with you by offering an apology or by doing something nice for you. This lull represents your opportunity to pull back and distance yourself. Your reaction should be to not react when they attempt to repair the relationship. When they attempt to repair the relationship, ignore it, pull back, distance yourself. Then, the next step is to make a habit of limiting your exposure to these Toxic Relationships. Limit your contact with them as much as possible. This sends a message to them that the relationship is not going to continue as it did in the past. Eventually, the Toxic Relationship will weaken. They will shift their focus away from you and onto others who are more tolerable of their transgressions.

Remember, Rich Relationships are the currency of the wealthy. If you are on a path towards success, you need to build up your Rich Relationships and weaken your Toxic Relationships. Toxic Relationships will hamper you on your journey towards success. Avoid them like the plague.

One of the common traits of self-made millionaires is that they are leaders. 91% of the wealthy in my Rich Habits Study held leadership roles either as a small business owner or as a key employee working for a large company.

There are many studies on leadership. In these numerous studies, a common trait often cited among leaders is vision. Leaders have the ability to see things that are invisible to everyone else. They see solutions to problems others can not see. They see opportunities in situations where others only see pitfalls. They see a path towards success where others only see obstacles.

I have seen this trait at work while advising small business owners and senior executives in large organizations. What separates leaders from everyone else is their ability to see through the invisible. When you develop the ability to visualize solutions, opportunities and alternate routes towards success, you are able to pivot and pursue those solutions, opportunities and alternate paths towards success.

Acquiring this trait, however, takes practice. Vision is an acquired habit. And this habit emerges only by developing a positive mental outlook. When you have a positive mental outlook you open up your mind to possibilities. Positivity gives you a superman-type X-Ray vision. Those with a negative mental outlook, on the other hand, are only able to see problems, pitfalls and obstacles. Negativity makes you blind to possibilities. It causes a type of tunnel vision that shuts down your peripheral vision. There’s a lot of science to back this up. Dr. Barbara Frederickson, University of North Carolina, recently published the results of a study she conducted on this very topic. According to her findings, when you are able to adopt habits that shift your thinking from negative to positive, you expand your thinking. An abundance mindset takes hold and you are able to see solutions and opportunities that are all around you. You turn on your entire brain, which then goes to work helping you see solutions, opportunities and alternate paths to take that lead to success.

If you want to succeed you need to lead. Leadership requires a positive mental outlook and a positive mental outlook takes daily practice. You have to practice positivity every day. Gratitude is the gateway to positivity. Gratitude shifts your focus from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. So, the starting point for those desiring to become leaders is to develop an abundance mindset. An abundance mindset enables you to see a garden of flowers. Those with a scarcity mindset see only the weeds. The key to becoming a leader is therefore to become a visionary and this requires a positive mental outlook. It’s a domino effect. Positivity creates an abundance mindset which allows you to see solutions, opportunities and helps you find the yellow brick road that leads to your City of Oz.

There is a pervasive obsession with individuals who seemingly come out of nowhere and rise from obscurity to the front pages of newspapers and magazines throughout the world. The media loves to profile entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, Google Founders Larry Paige and Sergey Brin and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg who seemingly rise from ordinary to extraordinary in the blink of an eye. But when you peel the onion, you find out that their overnight success took many years to accomplish. The real truth reveals that such individuals forged daily habits that made their success possible.

Daily habits are a boring topic to most. We yawn reading about individuals who spent years honing their skills every day to the point of excellence. But it is precisely those daily habits that enable individuals to rise from obscurity to overnight success. No one becomes wealthy without daily habits which provide the infrastructure for success to occur. Day after day of reading, learning, practicing and perfecting the skills that eventually result in success are the key to success.

Don’t be seduced by the overnight success story. Barring lottery winners, there simply is no such thing as the overnight success. The only true path towards creating success and wealth is in forging good daily habits. Good daily habits are your transportation system to realizing your dreams.

Life has a way of going wrong. Our natural inclination is to blame someone or some thing when life doesn’t go our way. We blame our parents, our spouse, Wall Street, the rich, politicians, the economy, our boss, our company or our circumstances. This knee jerk reaction helps protect your fragile ego by taking individual responsibility for your actions out of the equation. Blame is anchored in negativity and negativity is the default mode for most everyone.

If you were to spend just one day listening to the words that come out of the mouths of others, or listen to your own internal self-talk, you would fill an entire page with blame-ridden excuses. Try it. Spend one day writing down every excuse you hear from others or from your own internal self-talk. It’s worth the exercise. It will open up your eyes. 

Even for the most successful people, things rarely go right. But what separates the successful from the rest of the world is that they refuse to play the blame game. They make a habit of owning their failures and mistakes. It’s not easy to do this, however. Refusing to play the blame game is a habit that must be forged over time. Changing this habit first requires awareness. You must turn your channel and tune yourself in to this negative way of responding to life’s lack of cooperation. Once you do this you will become aware at just how pervasive blame is. Don’t play the blame game. It will only anchor you in poverty and perpetuate your negative mindset. Instead, replace every excuse with the phrase: “I am responsible”. This stops blame in its tracks and empowers you to take future action that will prevent future negative outcomes and will help put you on the path towards success.

In the pursuit of a dream you will have ups and downs. In the very beginning of that pursuit, there will be far more downs than ups. Passion for your dream keeps you in the game, it endows even the laziest individual with superhuman persistence. Eventually, that persistence is rewarded with Opportunity Good Luck – unexpected good consequences.

97% of the self-made millionaires in my study experienced Opportunity Good Luck. Opportunity Good Luck only visits those who never quit up on their dream. Eventually, the persistent get lucky. Unexpected good things occur that transform a dream into reality.

Groupthink is the natural inclination of individuals to go along with the thinking, ideologies and activities of the influencers in our lives. It is a part of the Herd Doctrine that I’ve written about often.

Our desire to be liked is hardwired into our DNA. Our brain is always seeking approval from others. It is so pervasive that we will do almost anything to be accepted by others. This desire to fit in often leads us to do things we would not otherwise do, just for the sake of fitting in.

Groupthink will hold you back from living the life of your dreams. Those who do not allow themselves to be victimized by Groupthink blaze their own trail in life. We like to call them self-made millionaires. Self-made’s make a daily habit of swimming upstream. They break free from the Groupthink that holds most back in life. They challenge Group-Thinkers and, as a result, are often subjected to intense criticism. Don’t be a victim of Groupthink. When you think like the group, your success or failure depends on the group. You become a slave to the group. Instead, blaze your own path in life. That’s what self-made millionaires do.