Archives for November 2015

Every habit has a trigger. Example: Every day you pick up a donut on your way to work. This is because the route you take to work each day includes passing a Dunkin’ Donuts store. Dunkin’ Donuts is the trigger and eating a donut is the habit.

One of the most effective ways to eliminate a bad habit is to eliminate the trigger. In the case of eating a donut every day, the simple act of changing your route to work to avoid passing by the Dunkin’ Donut store eliminates the trigger.

This is why changing a habit while on vacation has been proven to be one of the most successful habit change strategies. Starting a new good habit or eliminating an old bad habit is easier to do when you change your environment. Vacations represent a change in environment. There is a lot of research on this, so I decided to test this hypothesis myself.

For years I have been nagging myself to get back into the gym to do some free weight training. I power lifted during college, but when I got married I stopped lifting weights. In August of 2014 my entire family went on a vacation to the Dominican Republic. There was a gym at the resort and I decided to bench press for the first time in 29 years. That was fifteen months ago and I am still going to the gym three days a week. All it took was a change in my environment to start a new good habit.

If you want to quit smoking, stop smoking while on vacation. If you want to start reading on a daily basis, start while on vacation. If you want to start flossing every day, start while on vacation. Pick just one new good habit and start it while on vacation or pick one old bad habit and stop doing it while on vacation. If you know you are going to have some time off in the near future, pick a habit to stop or start a week before your time off. Then spend that week visualizing your new behavior. That preps you for the habit change. Commit just one day to the new behavior during your time off. One day sets everything in motion. On your next vacation, make it a habit vacation.

Those of you who have been following me for a while know bullshit’s not in my DNA. So I won’t bs you. Friday’s are great. For most it’s the end of the workweek and usher’s in two days of freedom. Like you, I love Friday’s. But ever since I’ve been on this Rich Habits journey of mine, Friday’s have taken on a new meaning for me.

As many of you know, I run a CPA firm. It takes a lot of time. It’s a lot of technical work, paperwork and stressful work. I have to spend thirty minutes every weekday morning reading about taxes or financial planning or accounting or any number of things, just to stay current with my industry. I’ve always liked my financial services job. Particularly, when that job entails advising clients, teaching clients and helping clients improve their financial lives. But at the end of the day, it’s still work.

Tax season, for me, is a period when I must devote myself to CPA/Tax work seven days a week for ten straight weeks. Each workweek day during tax season is typically a twelve hour day. Weekends are six to eight hour days. As a result, Friday’s have no special meaning to me during tax season. But once tax season ends, Friday’s make me happy. I get happy because all I’m thinking about is waking up early on Saturday and Sunday mornings, knowing that I’ll be able to devote a solid four to five hours each day writing and doing research related to my Rich Habits. Imagine that. I’m excited because I get to spend more time working on the weekend.

This excitement is the byproduct of doing something that I’m passionate about. I’m passionate about my Rich Habits. I’ve found my calling in life; my main purpose. And I’ve learned what many of the self-made millionaires in my study already knew – when you find your passion in life, work, is no longer work. Passion takes the drudgery out of work.

In my research on the Rich Habits, I gathered data on the number of hours self-made millionaires worked and then compared it to the number of hours the poor people in my study worked. What I found was that self-made millionaires worked far more hours every week than the individuals in the poor group. Here’s the hard data:

96% of the self-made millionaires worked 58 hours a week. Only 5% of the individuals in the poor group worked as many hours. 

My critics (I have a lot of critics) will stop there and say, “Tom Corley is beating up on poor people. He’s calling them lazy”. And they would have a point, if I stopped there as well. But I didn’t. I dug a little deeper. And when I dug a little deeper, that is when I uncovered the truth -those self-made millionaires worked more hours because they loved what they were doing. Work, as most define it, had a very different definition to those millionaires. Work was play or something fun that they enjoyed doing.

In December of last year, I had an opportunity to speak on the same stage with Richard Branson and I was able to steal a few precious minutes afterwards to talk to Sir Richard. So, I asked him if he considered what he did work. He smiled, that toothy Branson smile, and told me that he loves what he does for a living, so he didn’t feel like it was work to him and because it wasn’t work, he devoted an enormous amount of hours to it. Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, Tim Cook (Apple) and many other self-made millionaires I’ve studied share Branson’s opinion and they, coincidentally, work an enormous amount of hours.

If your work was called fun, instead of work, and you told someone you have fun fifty-eight hours a week, what do you think their reaction would be? They’d probably think, “that person is not a hard worker”. We all pretty much see through the same lens, when it comes to our view of work. And that lens sees work as something that is not fun. So, as a result, when we look through our lens, we label every self-made millionaire who is putting in fifty-eight hours or more a week as a workaholic. And, because of our work lens,  we can’t help but think that anyone who works so many hours cannot be happy. But they are happy. And they’re far happier than everyone else precisely because they view work as fun. They get to play and have fun every day.

Well, all I can say is, thank God it’s Friday because tomorrow and Sunday I get to play for ten hours. And it makes me happy just thinking about it.

Good or bad, we seek out others who share our habits. If you’re overweight, there’s a good chance that your friends or family members are overweight. If you’re a smoker there’s a good chance that your friends or family are smokers. It is also one of the reasons why individuals who join a weight loss group, such as Weight Watchers, have a greater chance of losing weight – you are spending time with others who share your desire to lose weight.

One of the short cuts to habit change is to change your environment. Those you associate with on a frequent basis are part of your environment. If you want to adopt a good habit, such as daily exercise, you increase your chances by associating with other individuals who already have the daily exercise habit or who are trying to adopt that habit. This forces accountability, one of the keys to habit change. Association accountability is also commonly known as peer pressure. If you want to adopt a good habit, one sure-fire way is to create a new, specific peer group around that habit. These new peers will put pressure on you to stick to your new habit.