The financial planning group I am part of is very successful. Almost everyone in our group is what you’d call high achievers. It’s not an accident that so many of us are succeeding within out financial planning group. One of the drivers for this is the mentoring we receive from the two leaders of our group.

The two principals of our group have figured out what to do and what not to do. In an effort to help their reps, they run spring and fall training sessions. What makes those sessions so special and educational is the fact that the principals always share at least one or two mistakes they’ve made over the years.

One of the principals really does a very entertaining job sharing his mistakes. And, some of the mistakes are downright funny. But, funny or not, they are always a learning event for all of us.

When I was interviewing the rich and poor people for my Rich Habits Study, I was fascinated with the mistakes both groups willingly shared with me. I was very fortunate. From those interviews, I was able to learn from the horse’s mouth, what to do and what not to do.

Mistakes are teachers, for those who want to improve and succeed. They are dead ends, however, for those who quit on themselves, surrendering to their mistakes.

Learning from mistakes really only sticks when you get up off the ground and try again. When you quit, the learning is lost or forgotten.

Mistakes teach you what doesn’t work and force you to pivot, or make adjustments, until you figure out what does work.

When you think of it, knowing what not to do is like a quarterback throwing a 50 yard pass completion – it gets you half way down the field.

Knowing what to do, gets you down the rest of the field, allowing you to score.

Learning from others mistakes is the fast track to success. That is why I am such a huge advocate of finding mentors or coaches. Because mentors or coaches or typically Virtuoso’s at what they do, they can save you an enormous amount of time and money, by showing you what works and what doesn’t work.

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The aviation industry was one of the first industries to institutionalize checklists as part of their industry business model.

Today, ground crews are required to complete checklists whenever a plane comes in and complete another checklist before a plane departs.

Likewise, pilots must complete multiple checklists before, during and after a flight.

Why?

Checklists institutionalize success. They reduce the risk of mistakes that can lead to failure.

Checklists are, in effect, mandatory success habits. They insure against failure and put success on autopilot.

The use of checklists also happens to be a Rich Habit.

Back in 2007, when I was wrapping up my Rich Habits Study, I was trying to forge some of the Rich Habits I discovered during the study. In order to ensure I followed my Rich Habits, I used checklists almost on a daily basis. Oftentimes, I embedded them into my To-Do List.

Here’s an example of my daily checklist:

• Ran today
• Read to learn 60 minutes today
• Wrote 1,000 words today
• Lifted weights today
• Made Happy Birthday Calls today
• Made Hello Calls today
• Returned all phone calls today
• Did not drink any alcohol today
• Ate < 1,800 calories today
• Did not curse today
• Expressed Gratitude today
• Returned all emails today

I modified my checklist for certain things, like lifting weights, which I do once every three days. I’ll just write n/a next to checklist items that aren’t applicable for that particular day. You’ll notice that most of the items on my checklist are Rich Habits I am trying to incorporate into my life. In this regard, the checklist becomes your accountability partner or reminder system to help keep you on track.

My Rich Habits checklist helped me go from 212 lbs, in July of 2007, down to 174 lbs by February 2008, thanks to the running, reduced alcohol consumption and calorie restriction.

My Rich Habits checklist reduced my blood pressure from 140 over 102 down to 118 over 78, thanks to the daily running I was doing.

My Rich Habits checklist enabled me to write 4 books, thanks to the requirement that I write 1,000 words every day. The royalties and paid speaking engagement fees that resulted from my books, are now two very important additional streams of income I didn’t have before. The vast majority (65%) of the self-made millionaires in my Rich Habits Study had three or more streams of income, so building revenue streams is important for financial success.

My Rich Habits checklist helped me to forge stronger relationships with other success-minded or successful people, thanks to the Happy Birthday Calls, Hello Calls and staying on top of my phone calls and emails.

The truth is, I no longer need to rely on these checklists. After about six months, the Rich Habits became my habits. And, once they became habits, I found myself engaging in them almost every day, without needing a checklist as for external accountability or a reminder tool.

Create your own Rich Habits checklist and devote yourself to it for six months. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the progress you’ll make.

My mission is to share my unique research in order to help others realize their dreams and achieve their goals. If you find value in these articles, please share them with your inner circle and encourage them to Subscribe. Thank You!

What scares you?

My biggest fear is poverty.

When I was nine years old, my father’s business burned to the ground. He spent the next 18 months in court fighting insurance companies. Eventually he ran out of money for legal fees and the insurance companies essentially won.

Somehow, my Dad was able to keep us in our home, but it wasn’t easy. On many occasions we’d see real estate agents walking around our property, showing it off to interested buyers. The problem was, we weren’t selling. At least, not willingly. Our house had been through several near-foreclosure emergencies, which put all eleven of us living in our home, on a knife’s edge.

I suppose that fear of poverty has been following me since I was nine years old.

That fear drove me to go to college. I had no business going to college. My family couldn’t afford college tuition. So, I worked as a janitor during my college years and used that money to pay my tuition.

That fear drove me to become a CPA,  a two-year commitment to intense study, in order to successfully complete a 22-hour, three day exam (at the time, in 1986, it was a 22-hour exam). Studying to become a CPA, I reasoned, would help me to become more expert in money and finance and also help me make more money.

That fear drove me to go to graduate school at night for a Master’s Degree in Taxation. It took me three years, going to night school two days a week. I felt that getting an M.S. in Taxation would help me become a Virtuoso in taxes and enable me to make more money for me and my growing family.

That fear drove me to become a Certified Financial Planner, once again, so I could become more savvy with money and, once again, to help me hone my Virtuoso skills.

Most importantly, that fear drove me to devote five years to studying the daily habits of 361 rich people and poor people. This has become my Opus X, or highest achievement in life, all thanks to fear.

As I sit here writing these words, I find myself grateful for my fear of poverty. That fear lead me to the Rich Habits and opened my eyes to the Poor Habits.

For the first time in my life, I now know what to do and what not to do.

I am not one of the millionaires in my study yet, but I can tell you this – I am most definitely no longer one of the poor people in my study.

Successful people use fear as fuel to supercharge everything they do. Unsuccessful people get used by fear. They give into their fears, preventing them from making moves that could one day improve their lives.

Fear can either act as a springboard to great achievement, or it can become an anchor, pulling you down into the abyss of failure and poverty.

Use fear. Don’t get used by fear. Never let fear be an anchor.

The only thing to you should truly fear, is giving into it.

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Each one of us inherits 23 chromosomes from our Mother and 23 chromosomes from our Father. Residing on each one of those 46 chromosomes are genes. It is estimated that humans have approximately 23,000 genes. So, one chromosome can be home to literally hundreds of genes.

Each gene is like a computer command that directs the RNA within a specific cell to manufacture a specific protein needed to help the cell function. Different genes command RNA to make different proteins, so multiple genes are needed to keep just one cell functioning properly.

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is the technical name given to your 46 chromosomes. Those 46 chromosomes, in actuality, represent an instruction manual that tells RNA in each cell to manufacture the various proteins necessary to keep the cells in your body running smoothly.

Interestingly, an individual gene can be turned on or off by something called methylation. Methylation is the process of creating enzymes that make genes active or inactive.

What triggers methylation?

Many things, in particular – Habits.

The simple act of forging a new habit can have profoundly beneficial or harmful effects on your health and well being.

Good habits, such as reading to learn, is an example of a habit that turns on certain good genes. These good genes, once activated by your reading habit, instruct RNA to produce proteins that help grow and strengthen brain cells that are being called into service as you read. Reading, in effect, stimulates genes to help maintain and grow brain cells.

So long as you keep reading and learning, those genes will keep churning out proteins that help strengthen brain cells, which, in turn, boosts your IQ.

Bad habits, or time-wasting habits, such as sitting on a couch watching Netflix for hours at a time, is an example of a habit that keeps good genes toggled in the off position.

How?

This TV watching, time-wasting habit, in effect, keeps those learning genes inactive due to your lack of mental activity. Without these good genes working to maintain and strengthen brain cells, the brain cells and their synapses weaken.

In other words, your brain cells become impaired by your time-wasting habits. This can result in a lower IQ, at best, or Alzheimer’s, at worst.

When you have bad habits, good genes can’t do their job. We can see this manifest itself in the form of various disorders such as obesity, Type II Diabetes, heart disease, dementia, and all sorts of other preventable diseases.

You are your habits, right down to your genes.

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According to the Tax Foundation, only 5% of America’s households make enough money to be considered “wealthy”.  And this 5%, according to the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finance, controls 60% of America’s wealth.

According to my Rich Habits research, this 5% share 4 common traits:

#1 The Rich Don’t Follow the Herd

Human beings so desire to blend in, to be a part of the herd, that they will do almost anything to avoid standing out in a crowd. It’s not theory. It’s science (http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/131009/srep02905/full/srep02905.html). Many years ago Candid Camera decided to test this science in their famous Elevator Prank. As funny as that Candid Camera prank was, it highlighted the lengths people will go to blend in and be part of the herd

The problem is, in order to become successful and wealthy, in order to become part of the top 5%, you must separate yourself from the herd – the other 95%. Separation from the herd is a prerequisite for achieving success. Consequently, successful people must become outliers by pursuing various paths towards accumulating their wealth:

• The herd does not save and invest 20% or more of their income – Saver-Investor millionaires, do.
• The herd does not devote hours every day to Deliberate and Analytical Practice or in growing their knowledge-base – Virtuoso millionaires, do.
• The herd does not devote time to forging strong relationships with Powerful Influencers – Big Company Senior Executive Climbers, do.
• The herd is risk averse. They do not put everything they own on the line in pursuit of a dream – Dreamer-Entrepreneurs, do.

If you do what everyone else is doing, you’ll wind up being part of the 95% herd. If you want to be rich and successful, you must separate yourself from the herd.

#2 The Rich Have Growth Habits

Greatness is an evolution. It is the byproduct of daily growth. Growth Habits are daily habits that enable you to grow and improve – to become the person you need to be in order for success to visit you:

• Reading to learn 30 minutes or more every day in order to grow your knowledge-base.
• Thirty minutes a day of daily study of new or important facts you learned from your daily educational reading.
• Perfecting your skills through Deliberate and Analytical Practice in an effort to become a Virtuoso in what you do for a living.
• Focused study in specific niche areas – niche-building helps separate you from everyone else in your field.
• Pursuing dreams forces you out of your comfort zone and into the growth zone. Every dream you pursue exposes you to new information and may also require that you develop new valuable skills.

#3 The Rich Are Persistent and Relentless – They Never Quit

Success takes a long time. How long it takes to become wealthy depends on the path you’ve chosen ( 4 Paths to Becoming a Self-Made Millionaire – http://richhabits.net/4-paths-becoming-self-made-millionaire/). Nonetheless, each path requires a different type of persistence:

• The Saver-Investor Path requires persistence in the form of saving and investing your income, year in and year out.
• The Big Company Senior Executive Climber Path requires persistence in doing excellent work and in building alliances with powerful influencers within your company.
• The Virtuoso Path requires persistence in gaining Virtuoso Knowledge or developing Virtuoso Skills. The persistence part involves a daily commitment to growing your knowledge or perfecting your skills. It takes many years to become a Virtuoso. Only the persistent reach Virtuoso levels.
• The Dreamer-Entrepreneur Path requires persistence in overcoming obstacles, pitfalls, mistakes, poor decisions and failure. Entrepreneurs who never quit, never fail. We call them self-made millionaires.

#4 The Rich Have More Good Habits Than Bad Habits

Most habits are below the radar – most, the 95%, are generally unaware of the habits they have. Those who succeed, on the other hand, are totally aware of their habits. They are obsessed with their habits. They proactively alter their habits – eliminating bad habits that can undermine everything they are trying to achieve and adopting good habits that help them automate their success.

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Time, depending on how you use it, can be your greatest asset or greatest liability.

Self-made millionaire turn time into their greatest asset by continuously investing their time. They invest their time by daily educational reading. They invest time by constantly meeting with or communicating with certain Rich Relationships. They invest their time through Deliberate and Analytical Practice, in order to become Virtuoso’s at what they do.

Those who Invest their time, create assets that generate future benefits, typically in the form of multiple streams of income. Those income streams take many years of sacrifice to create. But self-made millionaires are willing to make the sacrifice, in the hopes their income stream assets will produce an abundance of cash flow well into their retirement years.

Those who Spend their time are not interested in sacrificing their today time in exchange for future benefits. Their hedonistic approach to life is intentional and regretted only when they are older and wallowing in poverty, dependent on their children or friends.

When you invest your time in the hopes of a better future, that investment becomes an asset that pays dividends until you die.

Investing your time is a Rich Habit. Any investment you make should pay dividends down the road in the form of happiness events, financially security, a legacy or adding value to the lives of others.

When you see time as the greatest risk of all, it will force you to become more aware of exactly how you use the limited time you have.

Invest it wisely today, because you will never get it back.

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If you try to make massive habit changes immediately you’re going to fail.  Your new habits will only last a few weeks and your brain will force you back into old habit patterns.

Creating new habits is a brain energy hog. It sucks up a lot of the glucose and oxygen (brain fuel) that the brain desperately needs for other vital tasks.

Eventually the prefrontal cortex will send a directive to the basal ganglia (habit command and control center and energy efficiency manager for the brain) that this new massive habit change is consuming too much brain fuel and the basal ganglia will hen peck you until it succeeds in forcing you back to your old ways.

Therefore, the key to lasting habit change is to prevent the prefrontal cortex from putting the basal ganglia on high alert. In other words, you’ve got to keep your habit change below the radar, so to speak.

There are two ways to change a habit without going to war with your prefrontal cortex:

1. Make The New Habit Easy – If your new habit consumes very little time and effort, your prefrontal cortex won’t take notice. For example, if you want to read 30 minutes a day to learn, so that you can become more successful, don’t. Instead, read ten minutes a day. Do this for about a month. Why one month? After one month, a new neural pathway will form. Only a few neurons will be involved, too few to get the attention of the prefrontal cortex or basal ganglia. The following month increase your reading to fifteen minutes a day. This will force the brain to add a few more new neurons, too few to create a fuss. After five months you will have forged a new, powerful habit. You can use this example for forging other new daily habits, such as exercise.
2. Habit Stack – Habit Stacking occurs when you add a new habit to an existing habit. Think of an existing habit as a train on a track, except it’s inside your brain. If you add your new habit to that same train, as if it were a new passenger, the brain won’t put up a fight because you’re not trying to take control of the train or the track. You’re just taking a ride. When an old habit does not perceive a new habit as a threat, the prefrontal cortex does not wage war against the formation of that new habit.

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Successful individuals are copy cats.

They seek to mimic or model themselves after other successful people they admire. Typically, these are individuals within their same industry. Benchmarking forces you to work harder, improve your knowledge or skills and to constantly self-assess your progress.

It forces you set the bar higher, which necessitates that you grow and improve to meet that bar.

Not having someone to model yourself after can leave you drifting in the wind, like a leaf on a fall day.

If you want to increase your chances for success exponentially, find someone in your field who you admire and use them as your benchmark. This will allow you to grow into the person you need to be in order for success to visit you.

How do I know it works?

Since 2009, I have been on a journey to become the best self-improvement expert in the world. My journey started small – writing one book, Rich Habits.

JC was the main character in Rich Habits. He possesses amazing qualities and is wildly successful. He represents the ideal, future version of Tom Corley.

So, I modeled myself after JC. I did everything I thought JC would do. I made decisions I thought JC would make. I took risks I thought JC would take. And, most importantly, I never quit on my dreams because JC never quit on his dreams.

With JC as my benchmark, all of my books have become international bestsellers – I have people from every corner of the globe now reading my books.

I also have a big following on my blog/website and social media. And many of my media articles have gone viral. On one article I got as many as 11 million hits.

Like JC, I am frequently asked to speak at big events, some in very exotic places.

Everything JC would do, I am now doing. And, it works!

Find your benchmark – someone you can relate to and who can help push you to become the person you need to be in order for success to visit you.

The only regret will be that you didn’t do it sooner.

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Multitasking is a myth.

It is physically impossible to perform two conscious acts at one time. Neurologically, the human brain is only capable of performing one conscious task at a time. When you switch to another task, one set of neurons turns off and a new set of neurons are are turned on. If you continuously switch from one set of neurons to the another set of neurons, you lose efficiency and tax your brain.

This is known as “multitasking”.

Multitasking consumes too much brain fuel (oxygen and glucose or ketones) and wears out your brain. Those who pride themselves as great at multitasking are actually burning much more brain fuel and using their brains inefficiently.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a little exercise to prove that those who multitask are far more inefficient than those who focus on one task at a time:

EXERCISE #1

1. Take out a piece of paper and draw a horizontal line across the middle of the page. On the top portion of the page I will ask you to write the words: I AM A GREAT MULTITASKER.
2. On the bottom portion of the page, write the numbers 1 through 20. Example, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.

It should have taken you about 15 seconds to write out the words: I AM A GREAT MULTITASKER.

It should have taken you about 35 seconds to write out the numbers 1 through 20.

EXERCISE #2

Now, I would like you to turn the page over and draw the same horizontal line across the middle of the page. This time I would like you to time yourself as you perform both tasks simultaneously (at the same time). For example, write the letter I and then write the number 1. Then write the letter A and write the number 2. Then write the letter M and write the number 3. Keep doing this until you have completed the words: I AM A GREAT MULTITASKER and you have completed writing all of the numbers from 1 through 20.

It should have taken you about two minutes, or twice as long, to perform EXERCISE #2  as it did to perform EXERCISE #1.

Self-made millionaires do not multitask. They focus like a laser on completing one task at a time.

Focusing on one task at a time, until you complete the task, is a Rich Habit. Multitasking is a Poverty Habit.

If you want to be successful in life, you must walk in the footsteps of the wealthy. And, the yellow brick road, self-made millionaires walk, is paved with Rich Habits.

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World traveler, famous musician, CEO of Big Company XYZ, professional tennis player, top expert in your field – so many youthful dreams. What the hell happened?

School happened, people happened, life happened, obstacles happened.

We are given this great capacity to dream. It’s genetically hard coded into each one of us. Yet, somewhere along the way, we cast our dreams aside.

School prepares us to be the best employees; to work for others. Our parents, family, family friends, our neighbors and our guidance counselors steer us along a path of practicality. Rung by rung, we climb our ladder, firmly ensconced on someone else’s wall.

Fast forward 20 years later and we are all wondering where it went wrong. Why aren’t we happy? We wake, shower, dress and commute 45 minutes to a job we do not like and have no passion for, but need because we have children and a mortgage.

It’s not the life we ever imagined and we feel so lost.

That lost feeling is a good thing. It’s your brain’s way of telling you that you’re pursuing the wrong path in life.

It’s never too late to dream.

Grandma Moses began painting at age 80. Colonel Sanders was in his early 60’s when KFC was born. Ray Kroc was 55 when he founded McDonalds.

The ability to pursue your dreams never dies, until you do. You are never too old to reinvent yourself. People are living well into their 90’s. At age 70, you could be looking at 25 more years ahead of you.

Take an hour out of your frustrating existence and script out your ideal life. In 1,000 words or less, paint a picture, with words, of the ideal, perfect life you desire. This exercise will rejuvenate you, inspire you and rekindle the long-dead fire from which dreams are born.

You can baby step your way into a dream. An hour a day is all you need. Side gig it – keep your zombie job, which you need to survive, and start experimenting with different paths. The time is going to march on no matter what. You might as well use that time to pursue your dreams.

Don’t let life pass you by without pursuing your dreams.

We are infinitely greater than we ever imagined.

My mission is to share my unique research in order to help others realize their dreams and achieve their goals. If you find value in these articles, please share them with your inner circle and encourage them to Subscribe. Thank You!