The pursuit of success requires many course corrections. Things go wrong. Most unexpected. These unanticipated events cost you time, money and create emotional stress.

If you have the financial resources, you are able to learn from those mistakes and make adjustments. You fine tune the process.

But if your financial resources are limited, those unanticipated events leave behind a trail of tears – memories that become railroad tracks on the brain.

While pursuing success, you are continuously filled with doubts and spend an inordinate amount of time ruminating about your failures and mistakes. In effect, you torture yourself by questioning all of the decisions that led to those mistakes and failures.

Until success happens. Success has a way of washing away all of those mistakes, failures, bad decisions and the emotional baggage you accumulate along the journey.

Success makes it all worthwhile. It provides a fresh coat of paint. It validates your efforts, your decisions and the innumerable mistakes and failures.

Success clears away all of your doubts and imbues you with a renewed sense of confidence because you survived the journey.

Is it worth it? Is the pursuit of success worth the cost of success?

For the self-made millionaires in my study the answer is yes. Success creates a legacy that benefits many generations of family members.

When you realize success, you are able to smooth the path for your children and your grandchildren. Their improved lives become your legacy: better education, more freedom to chose their path in life, financial security and increased happiness.

When you pursue success, it’s not just for you. You do it because, deep down, you know that your success will benefit many others.

Your mindset lays the foundation for the life you will have.

Survive

Those raised in a household with a scarcity mindset see life as a battle for survival. As a result, you are focused on what you do not have – you focus on what you lack and you spend your life fighting to get by. You see the world, your environment, as a struggle for survival.

Thrive

Those raised in a household with an abundance mindset see life as filled with unlimited opportunity. As a result, you are focused on possibilities – you focus on pursuing your dreams, goals and and spend your life becoming the person you need to be in order to realize your dreams and goals.

If you who were raised in poverty, you very likely have adopted a Survive Mindset. Those rare few who break free from the Survive Mindset and adopt a Thrive Mindset set themselves up for success. They seek to grow and improve every day.

The circumstances you were born and raised in are not etched in stone. The springboard for success in life is your mindset. How you see life will dictate the life you create. Do you want to survive or do you want to thrive?

After five years of studying the habits of millionaires, primarily self-made millionaires, I’ve identified the #1 factor to accumulating enormous wealth – pursuing something you are passionate about. It goes by another name – purpose.

When you pursue your main purpose in life, it fills you with passion. That passion acts like fuel. It energizes you to put in the hours and work hard. In my research, self-made millionaires worked an average of 11 more hours a week than the poor.

It’s not that successful people have a greater work ethic. They work harder because they love what they are doing. They’ve found their main purpose in life and when you find your main purpose in life it motivates you to work. You want to work.

But we’re using the wrong word here – work. What you do for a living ceases to be work when you enjoy it. Individuals do not become successful because they are workaholics. They become successful because they no longer “work”.

“But I don’t know what my main purpose in life is,” you say. Well, I have news for you. You do. Everyone has a main purpose. In fact, everyone has the same, identical main purpose. You just don’t know it. So, what is the common main purpose everyone shares?

To improve the lives of others by adding value to their lives.

• When what you do for a living inspires others, you are pursuing your main purpose in life.
• When you create a product that adds value, you are pursuing your main purpose in life.
• When you provide a service that adds value, you are pursuing your main purpose in life.
• When what you do for a living helps lift people out of poverty, you are pursuing your main purpose in life.
• When what you do for a living helps others become successful in their lives, you are pursuing your main purpose in life.
• When what you do for a living makes people happy, you are pursuing your main purpose in life.

When you boil it down to its simplest terms, each person’s main purpose is to add value to the lives of others. When whatever you do adds value, you are pursuing your main purpose. People will happily reward you financially when they perceive what you do for them as adding value to their lives. The more value you add, the more money your make. The more lives you add value to, the more money you make.

The formula for becoming wealthy is really very simple: More Value + More People = More Money

Your job is to figure out what your superpowers are, your strengths, and then figure out a way you can use your superpowers to add value to the lives of as many people as possible. The money will follow when what you do for a living adds real value to the lives of others.

At the time I began my Rich Habits study I had one revenue stream – my CPA business. 

In my study I learned that the average self-made millionaires had at least three businesses generating steams of income.

So, in 2006 I decided to take a page out of my own research. Now I have six streams of income and this year I am adding a seventh stream.

One of the income streams is my author business. I learned in my author business that when I got major media publicity, I sold thousands of books in a matter of a few days.

In order to get that publicity, however, I had to spend 2-4 hours a day pitching the media. 99.995% of the time I got rejected or ignored.

In the beginning of my author business, I naively expected that the media would be interested in my research and my books. I knew my research was unique. But when they rejected or ignored my pitches, I became very depressed. I got so depressed that in 2011 I was thinking of quitting. Emotionally, I just couldn’t take the daily rejection.

But, for some reason, I didn’t quit. It dawned on me that the source of my depression was my unrealistic expectations in pitching the media and expecting a yes. So, I decided to change my expectations.

I now expect to be rejected or ignored every time I pitch the media. And when I am rejected, it doesn’t bother me in the least.

But here’s the amazing part. Every now and then someone in the media says yes. And when they say yes I get happy. By setting my expectations low, I became emotionally equipped to deal with the rejection.

This little shift in thinking has kept me in the game. I now expect failure and when I fail, my expectations are met and I don’t get emotional about it.

But while I now expect failure, I still hope for overall success.

Sounds like a contradiction, but it isn’t. Expectations and hope, I learned, are two very different things.

Lowering your expectations does not mean giving up hope. It just means that you realize that the daily pursuit of a dream will be filled with obstacles, hurdles, rejection and failure.

Once you expect obstacles, hurdles, rejection and failure, you are emotionally equipped to deal with it. This keeps you in the game.

Eventually you figure out what to do and what not to do. And that growth equips you with new skills and knowledge that will one day allow you to overcome those obstacles, hurdles, rejection and failure.

If you want to be successful, you simply cannot quit on your dreams. You need to manage you expectations so that daily obstacles, hurdles, rejection and failure do not drag you down emotionally to the point of quitting.

You must also keep your focus on the big picture – the hope of one day realizing your dream.

Lowering your daily expectations while maintaining long-term hope keeps you in the game and empowers you to persist until you succeed. 

Sounds ridiculous. How can one new habit completely change your life?

One of the self-made millionaires in my Rich Habits Study, who at the time of our interview was worth $17 million dollars, explained to me how one new habit transformed him almost overnight into a money-making machine.

Here’s his story.

He was struggling in his business and out of sheer disgust he decided to adopt one new habit of reading every day for a month. He said he had always hated reading to learn, so he set the bar low – 10 minutes of reading to learn every day in one area – selling.

On the first day he forced himself to a small desk in the basement of his home. It was more a picnic table than a desk. He pulled out a book on cold-calling and began reading. For the first few days, he absolutely hated it. But he kept at it.

After those dreadful first few days passed, the habit slowly began to form. On the fifth day, he read for 20 minutes. On the tenth day, thirty minutes.

By the end of the month he moved on to another book and was reading for over an hour a day. He documented many of the ideas he picked up from his reading in a notebook and began experimenting with some of those ideas in his business. Some of the ideas paid off and for the first time in his life his sales started to grow.

As the month came to an end, he felt compelled to attend a seminar on selling. He liked the seminar and then signed up for another one. Soon, he was attending one seminar a month. He filled his notebook with more selling ideas from the seminars and experimented with those ideas. Sales continued to grow.

He continued to read to learn and attend seminars over the years. And his sales continued to grow and grow and grow. And each year his business grew bigger and bigger and bigger.

After ten years, he realized he was a millionaire. After twenty years, a multi-millionaire. After forty years he was worth $17 million and sitting in front of me, a self-made millionaire, answering my questions. The self-made millionaire sitting in front of me during my study was a very different man than the man he used to be, the man who struggled in his business.

That one small habit change, reading just 10 minutes a day, had a domino effect on his life. It helped him form other habits, seemingly unrelated to his new reading habit: daily exercise, eating right, no more sitting on the couch watching TV at night along with many other habit changes. All contributing to his evolution into a self-made millionaire.

Our ritual behaviors are interconnected because all ritual behaviors are habits and all habits are controlled by the same parts of the brain. When you change just one habit, it bleeds out, affecting other habits.

The key to massive change is not massive change. It is small change. Small changes to our behaviors ripple through our brain and foster other small changes. Eventually, all of those small changes add up to massive change. All it takes is one habit.

Drag yourself to your one new small habit and stick to it for thirty days. You will hate it in the beginning. But, in time, you will love the effect that one small habit change has on your life and that one small habit change will spread like a virus, affecting other behaviors in a positive way and transforming your life.

Cher, Warren Buffet, Richard Branson, Madonna, Matthew McConaughey, Kelly Ripa, President Obama, Michael Corbat (CEO Citigroup), Condoleeza Rice (former NSA Director) all have one thing in common: they are obsessed with habits.

High achievers are routine-focused.

Each of these individuals begins their day with 30-60 minutes of exercise. And, it turns out, exercise helps you forge other success habits.

Certain habits, such as daily exercise, helps build willpower muscles. The more willpower you have, the better able you are to stick to good habits.

If you want to become a habit machine start your day off with some form of exercise. This one Keystone Habit will carry that discipline over to the office or your place of business and give you the willpower to stick to success habits that will help you become a high achiever.

High expectations influencers place in you can have a dramatic impact on your future success in life.

The University of California, Los Angeles, studied data from a national surrey of 6,600 children born in 2001.

Professor Neal Halfon and his colleagues found that the expectations parents have for their kids pushes their kids to achieve important, life changing goals.

They concluded in their study that kids have a tendency to live up to the expectations of their parents.

In their study, 96% of children who were expected to go to college excelled on standardized tests.

This if known as the Pygmalion Effect, which states:

“What one person expects of another can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

This can be self-imposed. You can create your own expectations for yourself in life. This creates a good type of mild stress which has the effect of agitation you enough to steer you in the direction of your own personal self-imposed expectations.