Archives for October 2015

Selflessness is considered a noble trait. Selfishness, on the other hand, is considered a character flaw. Society reveres the selfless and demonizes the selfish. Those who are selfless are admired by others, while those who are selfish are reviled.

Well, that’s how most of us were programmed to think. In reality, many of those so-called selfless individuals history likes to elevate to near nobility status were anything but selfless. Individuals like Bono (U2), Oprah and Winston Churchill were actually very demanding, obstinate and self-centered. This isn’t a bad thing. It’s a good thing.

You see, if you want to be respected and treated properly by others you must train them to respect and treat you properly. Below are a few guidelines for training others to treat you with the respect you deserve:

• Stop saying yes to everything. Saying no sends a message that your time is valuable. The occasional no lets others know that they cannot walk all over you. It takes courage to say no. Don’t let fear hold you back. No is like a stop sign that says “I am not your slave”. Saying yes to everything is another sign that says “I am your slave”. Saying yes all the time trains others to walk all over you.
• Don’t give into others just to get along. Surrendering all the time to the will of others sends a powerful message that you are weak. Be obstinate every now and then. It lets others know that you are a force to be reckoned with, that you are strong and confident. Giving in trains others that you are weak.
• Don’t vacillate. Stand your ground on things you believe in. If you constantly change your mind or allow others to change your opinion you send a message that you can be manipulated. You train others to manipulate you.

Protein is critical to good health. Here’s why:

• Protein is critical in building muscles, repairing tissue and making enzymes, hormones and other chemicals in the body. Almost half of the protein we consume every day is used to make enzymes for the purpose of digestion.
• Protein is necessary for the body to produce new cells and transport nutrients to those cells.
• Protein enables brain cells to communicate to each other.
• Consuming the right amount of protein can help you lose weight – 100 calories or more each day.

Plant-based protein is the best source as animal foods have been found to increase rates of cancer. So, how much protein do you need to consume every day? About 50-90 grams, depending on your weight and level of activity. A simple formula to determine your individual protein needs is as follows:

1. Divide your weight in pounds by 2.2. This converts pounds to kilograms.
2. Multiply this kilogram # by between .08 to 1.8. .08 if you are a couch potato and 1.8 if you are a professional athlete. If you exercise regularly (4 days a week, 30 minutes each day) 1.0 to 1.2 is a good # to use.

Example, I am 190 pounds. 190 / 2.2 = 86.36 x 1.0 = 86 grams of protein I would need to consume each day.

Your body can’t absorb more than 30 grams of protein at one meal, so the key is to consume protein throughout the day in order to maximize its absorption.

Eating healthy must become a daily habit. Turning new behaviors into habits requires three things:

1. Awareness
2. Repetition and
3. Tracking

Being aware of those behaviors that improve your health and your life is always the starting point. Once you decide to engage in a new good habit, the key to sticking to that habit is to track it for at least two months. Tracking creates individual accountability and will keep you engaged in the behavior until it becomes a habit. Habits, on average, take about 66 days to form. Make a habit of being aware how much protein you consume every day and then track it for 66 days.

After eleven plus years of studying wealth and poverty, I have come to the conclusion that poverty is a mental disorder. I like to refer to it as Poverty Mind Syndrome. Poverty Mind Syndrome is born at home, primarily in poor households, with parents who are raising their kids, unintentionally, to be poor. This syndrome is like a virus that causes a Generational Cycle of Poverty, infecting the children in these households, who eventually become adults who struggle with poverty. How do you know you have Poverty Mind Syndrome? The symptoms are as follows:

• Victim mindset – Your financial circumstances are dictated by forces outside your control: Wall Street, rich people intent on keeping you poor, government policies, the economy, bad schools, growing up in a bad neighborhood, bad luck, etc.
• Closed-Minded – Being closed-minded means you are unwilling to embrace new ideas, new thinking or opinions that differ from your own. One of the hallmarks of self-made millionaires is the ability to be open-minded to new ideas, new knowledge and new ways of thinking. This symptom is anchored to another symptom called Ideological Constraints. 
• Ideological Constraints – Holding on to ideologies that keep you from growing out of your poverty: rich people are bad, money is the root of all evil, poor people can’t escape poverty, needing a college education to escape poverty, etc. The ability to cast aside your ideological constraints, allows you to expand your thinking, to grow and to evolve.
• Intellectually Impotent – “I’m not smart and that’s why I’m poor”. Everyone has the potential for genius. We are all born with the genius gene. What keeps the switch to that gene in the off position is your belief that you don’t have the smarts to rise above your financial circumstances in life.
• Immediate Gratification – Those with Poverty Mind Syndrome look for short-term solutions to their long-term problem. They play the lottery, they gamble on sports or they look for their 401(k) plan funding in casinos. Escaping poverty and creating wealth takes a lot of time. In my study, it took the the average rich person 32 years to accumulate their wealth. The only way your ship will come in is if you build a dock big enough to anchor it.

Long-term decisions are irrevocable decisions you make which impact your career, business, your life or your relationships. Because long-term decisions have such profound effects, you must always take time in making those types of decisions. Never make a long-term decision when you are sick or when you have not gotten enough sleep. When you are sick, suffering from sleep deprivation, or struggling with PMS, your glucose level drops significantly.

Glucose is the brain’s fuel source. When it’s low, your ability to make decisions is impaired. You’re not thinking clearly. The part of the brain that is responsible for decision-making, the prefrontal cortex, is weakened during days when you are sick, sleep deprived or dealing with PMS. Consequently, it is very likely this part of the brain will not be perfuming its decision-making function properly. You will be asking yourself, “what was I thinking” if you make decisions while dealing with illness, sleep depravation or PMS. If you have no choice but to make a major long-term decision, eat anything with sugar in it fifteen to thirty minutes prior to making that decision. Sugar causes a short-term boost in your glucose level and will temporarily restore your decision-making abilities. But be careful with sugar. About thirty minutes after experiencing a spike in glucose, due to this sugar boost, you will experience a crash in glucose levels which will leave you feeling tired and lethargic. Rest restores glucose levels and this is precisely why the brain sends you a message to sleep, after consuming too much sugar too quickly. It’s just trying to re-set your glucose levels back to normal.

My dad was a great man: WWII vet, father of eight kids, provider, smart, hard working and a devoted friend to many. He was also very stern and had difficulty expressing his emotions. When I was 19 years old I remember walking home from college because I was poor and my car broke down. It was a long walk, about 7-8 miles. Had a lot of time to think. One of the thoughts that I had was that I would be a great father to my future kids and also let them know that they are loved every day. I made a pledge that afternoon that when I had kids I would tell them every day “I love you”.

When I became a dad I made good on that pledge. Every morning and every night, no matter what was going on in my work life, I would give my kids a hug in the morning and at night and tell them “I love you”. When they became teens, this daily habit of mine seemed to annoy my kids. But I didn’t care.

My kids are all adults now and the habit is still with me. I never miss an opportunity to tell them “I love you.” Unfortunately now, I have to do it most of the time by phone, email, text or Facebook. What makes me happy is that, as adults, they always reciprocate with an “I love you too.” It has become a habit for each one of my kids to say “I love you.”

Kids need to know they are loved. No matter what happens in their little lives, that “I love you” from their mom or dad acts like an ointment that helps dress the wounds of life. Love is contagious. It spreads like a virus from one person to the next. When you infect your kids with this virus, you infect everyone they come into intimate contact with. Saying “I love you” is one habit that every parent should adopt.

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”  Winston Churchill

If anyone knew what walking through hell was like it was Winston Churchill. Every day his country, particularly during the blitzkrieg, was on the verge of anniliation. But Churchill never quit, never wavered. He kept walking through hell.

There are a lot of so-called self-help experts out there who will tell you that pursuing your dream will ultimately bring you happiness. And they’re right. Except that they leave out one major component of pursuing success –  you will be walking through hell most of the time before you realize success. You will make mistakes that will cost you money you desperately need. You will, most of the time, feel like you are completely wasting your time. You will face doubt each day. Everyone around you will advise you to quit. You will face rejection and indifference almost 100% of the time by those who have the power and influence to make your dreams come true immediately. You will feel frustrated and incompetent. There will be days when everything goes wrong, your back is up against the wall and your dream feels like it’s collapsing under the weight of all of your failures and mistakes.

When pursuing a dream, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and smarter. It’s an evolutionary process in which you grow into the person you need to be in order for success to visit you. Not everyone is able to persevere and realize their dream. There is one reason for this. You must have a big WHY. Your WHY is the reason you are pursuing your dream. Some call it a mission statement but it is much more than that. Your WHY is something that dominates your thinking. For some it’s a desire to never be poor again. For others it’s about improving the lives of their family or society. Your WHY represents the core reason you are pursuing a dream. Elon Musk’s WHY is to colonize Mars. Winston Churchill’s WHY was to preserve Great Britain. Mother Teresa’s WHY was to improve the lives of the poor. Steve Jobs WHY was to bring computers into the home. Your WHY is like the sun except instead of orbiting planets there are dreams and goals that orbit around your WHY. Your WHY sets everything in motion and, if it’s personal enough and fueled by emotions, it will create the passion that will enable you to walk through hell and come out the other side a success.

Neuroscientists and research psychologists are revolutionizing our understanding of why we do the things we do. In particular, they have stumbled upon cutting-edge scientific evidence that most of our problems in life stem from a lack of self-control. And, more importantly, they have found that a lack of self-control is caused when our willpower is at its weakest.

Excersising willpower, it turns out, saps the brain’s precious fuel (glucose) and once depleted it causes you to become irrational, impairing your ability to think clearly. When you overuse your willpower, it drains precious brain fuel, causing you to do things and say things that create most of the problems in your life. Loss of willpower makes you more susceptible to addictions, moral lapses, frivolous spending, outbursts of anger, relationship problems and every sort of lapse in judgement normally prevented by your ability to control destructive impulses. Loss of willpower results in a loss of self-control.

The key to staying on course for a successful life is to preserve your willpower and brain fuel for activities that move you forward in life and help you realize your dreams and accomplish the goals behind those dreams. This is where habits become so important. Habits are automatic behaviors, thinking and decision making that consume very little brain fuel and thus, preserve willpower energy. The more things you can automate in life through habits, the more you free up your brain to exert willpower. Habits preserve willpower.

True long-term happiness is found in doing work that you love and which, at the same time, enables you to meet your needs and financial obligations in life.

According to my research, over 95% of the 361 individuals in my study did not love what they did for a living. Even more revealing, 96% of those struggling financially indicated that they did not even like what they did for a living. How on earth can you be happy when you hate what you do for a living? The answer is, you can’t.

Odds are, if you’re reading this and are struggling in life, you probably don’t like what you’re doing for a living. And, as a result, you are unhappy most of the time. The solution is to find something you love to do that can produce enough income to support your lifestyle. But how do you even start the search?

There is only one way. Experimentation. You have to devote time, on the side, to experimenting with different activities. At a minimum, you must devote six months of concentrated side-time to each new activity. Six months is all it takes. Within six months you will either feel passionate about the new activity, or you won’t. If you don’t feel the passion, move on. Passion is your brain’s way of communicating to you that it loves the activity. When you are passionate about something you will want to do it all the time. Passion is the driver for finding something you love.

But what does passion look like? Think back to when you were a child. Do you remember any activity that you did as a kid that you could spend an entire day doing? That’s what passion looks like. Any activity that you can engage in for hours at a time without wanting to stop is a passion activity. When you find a passion activity that requires developing any marketable skill (can generate income), pursue it.

I had the opportunity to talk to Richard Branson at a speaking engagement we both spoke at last year. One of the things I asked him was if he would define what he does as work. He said no. He never saw what he did as something most would call work. So when you read about the work ethic of individuals like Richard Branson or Elon Musk or Warren Buffet, dismiss it. What the world calls work, they call enjoyment. Do you think you could do something for 14 hours a day that you enjoyed?