One of my gym buddies who knows that I help companies improve their financial circumstances by fixing their bad habits, pulled me aside to tell me about the new company he just started working at. My gym buddy was hired as a manager because the company had very high turnover, kept losing their good employees and they were struggling financially. They were hoping my buddy could help turn things around. My friend told me that after working there for just ten minutes he saw immediately what the problem was. The business owner had this nasty habit of using profanity and creating degrading nick names for his employees like “hey stupid” or “hey dummy” (I’m being generous here – think derogatory racial slurs). Worse, the owner’s son, who also oversaw some of the employees, was doing the same thing as his father. Parent habits transfer to their children.

As a result of this bad habit of the owner and his son, employees felt degraded and worthless. The good ones quit, while the bad ones stayed on. The company was being run primarily by employees who believed they were worthless. As a result, the business was struggling financially.

I asked my friend if he talked to the owner about this.  He said he had. I then asked him if he thought he could stop the owner and his son from talking this way to the employees. He said no. “You know more than I do Tom, bad habits are hard to eliminate if you have no desire to change.” I reminded my gym buddy that I help companies like this, all the time, change their financial circumstances by changing their habits. I told him I had a process to change bad habits within companies that was foolproof, as long as there’s a real desire to change. He didn’t think there was any desire on the part of the owner to change.

I’ve learned over the past 11 years of studying habits that most of the financial difficulties companies and individuals experience are caused by bad habits. In companies like this trucking company, most are formed at the top (think owners) and then trickle down to managers and eventually employees. Bad habits infect companies like a financial cancer, affecting morale, productivity and ultimately, cash flow.

What we eat, how much we eat and when we eat are all habits. In order to lose weight you must change your eating habits. Reducing the number of calories you consume every day is the most consistently proven method to weight loss. But it’s hard to watch what you eat every day. I know. In my mind, I’ve struggled with maintaining my ideal weight (185 pounds). I’ve never had a problem exercising almost every day, yet despite my regular exercise, my weight still increased. Then, in 2007, after having completed my Rich Habits research, I discovered a formula for weight loss that I stole from my research. Those self-made millionaires who were able to maintain their ideal weight all had one thing in common – they tracked what they ate every day and used something that I now refer to as the 2:1 Rule. I took a page out of the book of these healthy millionaires and in seven months I was able to go from 212 pounds to 174 pounds. That’s 38 pounds!

The combination of the use of the Tracking Schedule and using this 2:1 Rule was so successful that my friends began talking behind my back to my wife, asking her if Tom was ok. They thought I had some horrific disease or something. I actually had to stop using this 2:1 Rule temporarily until I got back up to 185 pounds (I’m 6 foot 3, by the way). This 2:1 Rule is so simple, yet enormously effective. Here’s how it works. [Read more…]

“Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.”
— Thomas Edison

One of the things that stood out from my Rich Habits Study was how important thinking was to self-made millionaires. I tracked ten different types of thinking habits these millionaires engaged in frequently, if not daily. From my research, it was so evident that thinking was fundamental to their success that I decided it needed to become one of the ten Keystone Rich Habits.

When self-millionaires think, they do so in isolation, closed off from the world. Most engaged in their daily thinking habits in the morning, some during their commute in their car, others in the shower, and still others at night. Morning seemed to be the most dominant time frame, however. Typically, immediately upon waking, these self-made millionaires would find a quite space and think. How long? It ranged from fifteen minutes to thirty minutes. What did they think about? Well, they thought about a lot of things and when they thought, they thought in a way that most would refer to as brainstorming. They spent time every day brainstorming with themselves about numerous things. I was able to boil down those brainstorming sessions into ten core Rich Thinking Habit categories. Here they are: [Read more…]

From my five-year study of the daily habits of self-made millionaire, I learned that these millionaires know something about goal-setting that almost no one else knows. They understand that a goal is only a goal when you can control the outcome. If you can’t control the outcome, it’s a wish or a dream. There are two parts to the definition of a goal: [Read more…]

When I walked into the gym this morning I was depressed and pessimistic. My outlook on life sucked. It was really an accumulation of many things: [Read more…]

“Keep all your eggs in one basket, but watch that basket closely.” Warren Buffet

This is one of Warren Buffet’s most famous quotes. It is also one of the worst pieces of advice for anyone who is working on becoming rich. My father took Buffet’s advice without knowing it and in one night lost everything when his main warehouse for his business burned down. My dad had most of his wealth tied up in his business. We were considered wealthy at the time of the fire. My dad’s business was valued at around $3 million, which is north of $20 million in today’s dollars. We lived in a very nice house in Todt Hill, one of the most affluent neighborhoods on Staten Island. When my dad’s warehouse burned to the ground, all of that wealth disappeared into thin air. Our family struggled financially for the next 15 years, trying to recover from that nightmare; struggling almost daily to prevent foreclosure on our home. My dad told me later in life that he wished he had his eggs in more than one basket. That would have been the smart thing to do, he told me. [Read more…]

According to my five-year habits study, self-made millionaires were taught certain success habits from their non-millionaire parents that helped propel them to success later in life. From my latest book, Rich Kids (http://richhabits.net/rich-habits-books/), here are the top 7 success habits every parent will want to teach their kids: [Read more…]

On November 6, 2013, CBS aired it’s interview about me and my Rich Habits research. My CBS Nightly News interview aired across the entire United States and portions of Canada. This was my first nationwide network T.V. interview. It had taken me 9 years to get there. And, yet, it almost never happened. Here’s why I nearly quit on my dream: [Read more…]

How long does it take for the average rich person to become rich? Ten years, twenty years? How about thirty-two years. That’s how long it took the average self-made millionaire, according to my data. It took 38 years for 52% and 42 years for 21% to become rich. Only a handful, 4%, became wealthy in less than 27 years.

Let me share some of my data with you. 76% of the wealthy in my Rich Habits Study (http://richhabits.net/rich-habits-study-background-on-methodology/) were self-made millionaires. They came from non-wealthy households . 31% of these self-mades came from poor households. 45% came from middle-class households. What’s more compelling about the data I gathered, is the age in which these self-made millionaires actually rang and bell and struck it rich. Here’s the breakdown:

• 1% (2 out of 233) became wealthy before the age of 40
• 3% (6 out of 233) became wealthy between age 40 and 55
• 16% (38 out of 233) became wealthy between age 46 and 50
• 28% (66 out of 233) became wealthy between age 51 and 55
• 31% (73 out of 233) became wealthy between age 56 and 60
• 21% (48 out of 233) became wealthy after the age of 60

The romanticized notion of getting rich quick always finds an eager audience. We are stimulated by stories about the young and the wealthy. The immediate success of youthful billionaires like Facebook’s Mark Zukerberg or Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brinbut play to our get rich quick desires. We obsess over stories about lottery winners. And the lottery people know it. California’s lottery catchphrase is Imagine What a Buck Could Do. New York’s lottery catchphrase is  Dollar and a Dream. Australia’s got a dandy: Live a Lotto Life. There is even a popular reality T.V. show called Lottery Changed My Life about how the lives of lottery winners were changed. Immediate gratification, especially when it comes to wealth accumulation, is the rallying cry of many in the modern world these days.

Unfortunately, getting rich quickly is a rare phenomenon. It’s clear from the above data that accumulating wealth takes a very long time. It just doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, 80% of the self-made millionaire in the Rich Habits Study did not become wealthy until after age 50. What’s even worse, 27% of these self-made millionaires tried and failed at least once in business. The path to riches is a long lonely one, paved with many potholes and numerous dead ends. Those few who do make it, are seasoned veterans in the world of entrepreneurs, deserving of their own, well-deserved catchphrase – Self-Made Millionaire.

Did you know that our daily habits can turn genes on or off? It’s known as gene expression or epigentcis. Gene expression is a process in which certain genes are turned on or off during one’s lifetime. The human body contains approximately 100 trillion cells. Within each cell is the nucleus. Inside every nucleus of every cell are our genes. Experts estimate that the average human has over 20,000 genes. Some of these genes came from our mothers and some from our fathers.

Our daily behavior, our daily habits, can turn genes on or off. [Read more…]