Archives for January 2016

A paper recently published by the University of Cologne in Germany in the May 2015 Journal of Personality and Psychology, in which more than 68,000 Americans and Europeans were studied, found that pessimism causes poverty.

The study noted that pessimism makes you wary of trusting others. It went on to argue that when you see people in a pessimistic light – untrustworthy, self-interested and deceitful – you are less likely and less willing to rely on others.

Those in the study who were the most pessimistic, also happened to be the poorest. If you are wary about trusting others, you’re likely to have a lower income now and in the future, the study concluded.

Conversely, those in the study who were optimistic and had a more trusting view of others, had a higher income than the pessimists. Pessimists miss out on opportunities because they are less likely to ask for help and less likely to collaborate with others.

No one succeeds on their own. I’ve written about this often. You need apostles to your cause. You need others who believe in your cause in order to succeed. It is virtually impossible to succeed on your own. The most successful self-made millionaires had a dedicated team behind them (think Sir Richard Branson and Elon Musk). They also happened to be the most optimistic people to work for. Their unbridled optimism infected everyone around them like a virus.

If you’re a pessimist you are literally sabotaging your life. You are pushing the very people you need away and are left with no choice but to rely on yourself. Pessimism is a recipe for failure.

It’s not easy changing habits. It takes time, persistence and awareness. But there is a shortcut to habit change that virtually guarantees your new good habits will stick. It’s called the 20 Minute Rule. The 20 Minute Rule involves a simple three-step process. Here’s how it works:

1. Define any new good habit you wish to adopt.
2. Devote 20 minutes a day to that new good habit.
3. Set a goal of 30 days repeating that new good habit.

The new good habit could be:

• 20 minutes of jogging
• 20 minutes of lifting weights
• 20 minutes of self-education reading
• 20 minutes of developing a new skill
• 20 minutes of thinking positive thoughts
• 20 minutes of pursuing a new goal
• 20 minutes of listening to an inspirational podcast
• 20 minutes of watching a TED video
• 20 minutes of helping your spouse with home chores (laundry, dish washer, make the bed, clean the house, etc)
• 20 minutes of mentoring someone
• 20 minutes of volunteer work
• 20 minutes of networking
• 20 minutes of developing a side-business
• 20 minutes of spending time with your family
• 20 minutes of doing home-improvement projects
• 20 minutes of reading to your children
• 20 minutes of writing, painting, learning chess, etc.

After 30 days that new good habit will begin to form. It will get easier every day. Thirty days will not create the habit, but it will lay down the neural infrastructure (brain cells talking to one another) that is necessary for every new good habit to form. Once that infrastructure is in place, your brain will want to continue engaging in that new good habit. The brain loves habits. Habits save the brain from work. But it does take repetition and time in order to get brain cells talking to each other. Thirty days gets the conversation going inside the brain. After 30 days, the new good habit gets much easier to engage in.

Once the new good habit sticks, then you can move on to the next new good habit, following the same three-step process. In the course of a year it is possible to add three or more new good habits using this three-step process. In a few years you will have created dozens of new good habits and your life will begin to improve.

Adopting good habits are like snowflakes on the mountainside. You hardly notice the cumulative positive effects these good habits have on your life on a daily basis. But over time these good habits create an avalanche of success event. When success hits, it appears to the untrained observer as if that person became an overnight success. Of course, what the untrained observer does not realize is the fact that that success was the byproduct of years and years of doing certain things every day that created the avalanche of success event.

Start your future avalanche of success event today. Adopt just one new good habit. Stick with it for 30 days. Baby steps. That’s the secret to success!

Each one of the 233 millionaires in my study was lucky. Fifty-six, or 24%, were born into it and 177, or 76%, created it. One type of luck is random and the other self-made. Luck, whether random or self-made, is a common denominator of all wealthy people. If you want to be rich, you need luck.

While you have no control over the circumstances you are born into, you do have control over the circumstances you manufacture after birth. Fortunately, the vast majority of millionaires are self-made. They start out either poor or middle-class. That’s a good thing. Success really boils down to a game of hide and seek. Luck does the hiding – you have to do the seeking. But you must look for luck in the right places. So where exactly do you look for luck? Fortunately, success leaves clues.

Luck Hides Outside Your Comfort Zones

Successful people are very much like scientists. They love to experiment. But in the case of self-made millionaires they experiment with new things, new ideas, and new people. Finding luck requires that you step outside your comfort zones. It requires an open mind; one which is curious and receptive to possibilities.

Luck Hides Inside Positivity

Opportunities have to be seen in order to be embraced. Positivity opens the mind to opportunities. Positivity means having a positive mental outlook. It means being optimistic and seeing possibilities. It means being confident and expecting good things to happen. Positivity is the fertilizer in which luck grows.

Luck Hides Behind Courage

Creating luck requires that you take risks. Taking risk requires courage. Courage is not the absence of fear but the pursuit of something in spite of fear. Overcoming fear is something you must cultivate as a habit.

Luck Hides Inside New Relationships

Meeting the right person at the right time, requires that you ….. meet people. People do not just drop in your lap and, voilà, luck happens. You have to go out and find them. You find them by joining networking groups, by volunteering at non-profits, by taking seminars, at fund-raisers, when you take up tennis, or golf. You find them doing new and novel things that you never did before.

Luck Hides Inside Intuition

Intuition is the means by which the subconscious communicates with the conscious. Your subconscious knows all and sees all. It is constantly taking in sensory data and information that is below the radar of the conscious mind. As a result, it knows things the conscious mind does not. It exists to not only help you survive but also to thrive. You need to listen to your gut. Those who do find luck.

Most people are not successful. And most of these same people are unsuccessful, in large part, because they hold on to a belief and refuse to surrender their belief, no matter what you say, no matter how many facts you have and no matter how convincing you may be. This rigid embrace of doctrine results in closed-mindedness. Being closed-minded inhibits growth, learning and intellectual evolution. It causes you to become “stuck” in life, limiting your ability to succeed.

The most successful people are the most open-minded types of people who refuse to walk lock-step in any ideology. 86% of millionaires in my study were dedicated to the open-minded pursuit of new ideas, facts and opinions of others. This open-mindedness enabled them learn, grow and evolve.

Ideology hampers success. An open-mind contributes to success. If you want to succeed you must have an open mind. That’s how you grow into the person you need to be in order for success to visit you.

Very few pursue their dreams, goals, life purpose or success, in general. Such pursuits require changes that have a way of shaking up our lives. These changes affect those closest to us – our immediate family, friends, colleagues, etc. This environmental disruption forces those affected to fight back. At first those defending their status quo fight back one at a time with dire warnings of the enormous risks involved. When that doesn’t work it evolves into a sort of collective, everyone affected singing the chorus of impending disaster. When that strategy fails, those most affected begin taking action to protect their status quo. This often manifests itself in threats (think break ups, separation, divorce, business split ups, etc.).

Most, at this point, slink back into the fold, rejoin the herd, sidelining their dreams, goals, life purpose and any pursuit of success. Complacency is a default switch for most everyone. It’s physiological – the brain does not want to exert itself, so we are all internally wired to lean towards complacency. Staying with the status quo is easier, less stressful and physiologically less demanding.

Yet, while we are all hardwired for complacency, we are also hardwired to pursue our dreams, goals, life purpose; we are hardwired to be creative, to take risks, to go for it in life. These two diametrically opposed instincts continuously battle one another. There is a war raging inside each one of us. The vast majority of the time, complacency wins out, primarily due to those around us, influencing us. But occasionally, it loses. A few do not succumb to complacency and rattle the status quo of their personal environment, pursuing their dreams, goals or their life purpose. These few overcome the call to complacency and go for it. We call these people self-made millionaires.

I have to admit it. I am very fortunate. I was able to find 177 heroes to worship. They are the self-made millionaires in my study who taught me right from wrong, good habits from bad habits and the right path vs. the wrong path. They act like success mentors, teaching you what to do and what not to do in life.

Each success hero you find can inspire you, motivate you, direct you. They force you to look inward – to learn more about your strengths and weaknesses and the good and bad inside of you.

Everyone needs a success hero. And the amazing thing is that you don’t have to follow just one. As I learned, the more the merrier. Where can you find your success heroes? The good news is that they are all around you. You can find them by volunteering – they are on boards of non-profit groups. You can find them at the workplace, those exceptional employees, bosses or clients/customers just doing their job and doing it well. You can find them in classrooms teaching or learning. They’re alive in books that inspire and motivate. They teach at seminars, or they run webinars, or host podcasts. Anyone trying hard to improve their lives can be added to your hero list. When you find one, study how they live their lives, how they manage their lives, how they work, who they surround themselves with, what they do every day. Get to know them. It’s never too late. Find your success hero today. Follow their breadcrumbs. Those breadcrumbs will steer you in the right direction and help you find success in your life.

If you look around you will see there are only a handful of self-made millionaires for every hundred people. And those self-made millionaires seem to be in perpetual motion. They always seem to be coming and going from somewhere: seminars, speaking engagements, meetings, training, events, etc. And you’ll also notice they’re usually not alone. They seem to always have people orbiting around them: members of their team, business associates, advisors, etc. Their motion is the byproduct of the pursuit of a plan. These self-made millionaires are perpetually in motion, along with members of their team, because they are pursuing some dream. Their motion is the byproduct of pursuing their life plan.

One of the trademarks of unsuccessful people is that they have no plan and no direction in life. They are literally like leaves blowing in the wind on a fall day. When you lack direction, when you don’t have a plan you are following, your default plan becomes failure.

Having a plan means pursuing your dreams and the goals behind each one of those dreams. Find some time today to script out your ideal future life. Bullet point each one of the dreams that are in your script. Then sleep on it. Your old brain (your subconscious) will immediately go to work, while you sleep, trying to help you get from point A (where you are now) to point B (your ideal future life). Keep reading your script every night, right before you go to sleep. Your old brain will start to communicate with your new brain (your conscious). This communication will come to you in the form of intuition. Through intuition or gut feelings, your old brain will begin feeding you with ideas and solutions. The more you focus on your ideal future life, the more ideas and solutions you’ll be fed. These ideas and solutions are the actions you will need to take in order to realize your dreams. These actions represent the goals you will need to achieve in order to make each one of your dreams a reality.

It’s time to stop blowing in the wind and create your life’s plan. Script your ideal future life today and your plan will begin to unfold before your very eyes.

Human beings are wired for short-term gratification. It’s a fossil of evolution which served us very well in the early days of humanity, where each day was a fight just to survive until the next day.

Two separate brain systems are at war with each other when it comes to immediate and delayed gratification. The ventromedial area of the frontal cortex is the passion system that seeks immediate gratification. The ventrolateral area of the frontal cortex is the self-control system that fights to delay gratification in exchange for some future benefit.

Those who are able to get the brain’s passion system and self-control system working in harmony with each other become self-made millionaires. How do they do it?

They toss a wrench into this immediate gratification hard wiring when they pursue dreams and the goals behind those dreams. Dreams and goals re-program passion from it’s fondness for short-term immediate gratification to a fondness for long-term delayed gratification.

Pursuing dreams literally re-wires your brain for long-term success. 

In the mid-1970’s a team of behavioral scientists, psychologists, health professionals and many other experts rom different disciplines embarked on a comprehensive and ambitious study of over 1,000 children aged 3-11 from Dunedin, New Zealand. Their goal was to analyze each child’s self-control and determine, 30 years later, how these children were doing in life. What they found was that those children who exhibited the greatest self-control were wealthier and healthier as adults. Willpower emerged as the single greatest predictor of success and good health. It was as powerful and influential to their success as their social class, family wealth and IQ.

The bottom line is that you can be born in the best of circumstances and still struggle in life and you can be born in the worst of circumstances and become successful. The great predictor of success in life is self-control: your ability to control your emotions, forge good habits and focus on goals. In other words – having Rich Habits.

We literally have two brains: The Conscious and The Subconscious.

The Conscious Mind

The conscious mind is located in the brain’s topmost layers. It includes the neocortex and the lobes. More specifically, it is located at the top and sides of our brain. Some neuroscientists refer to it as the upper brain. I like to to call it the new brain because it represents the most recent addition to our brain. Our new brain has only been around for about 300,000 years. It is responsible for the following functions:

• Voluntary thought
• Awareness
• Self-control
• Planning

The new brain can overpower automatic routines – habits. It can mute our emotions and sudden impulses. It is where willpower resides. Our ability to focus for short periods of time is fueled by willpower. Our new brain cannot multitask. It can only perform one function at a time. When we “multitask” we are actually switching from one function, activity, group of brain cells to another. This wears out the brain. Willpower is a very limited resource.

The Subconscious Mind

The subconscious mind is located in the limbic system and the brain stem. Some refer to it as the lower brain. I like to call it the old brain because it’s been with us for millions of years. Our old brain has massive computing power. It operates constantly, solving complex problems offline (without conscious effort, without using any willpower). It is responsible for the following functions:

• Autonomic nervous system – controls our internal organs
• Forges and manages all habits
• Insight and creativity
• Emotions

The old brain is much faster and more efficient than the new brain. It has the capacity to multitask. It gives us the ability to make quick decisions. While our new brain is at rest our old brain is at work helping us solve problems, uncover opportunities, comprehend the incomprehensible, solidify memory and nudges us into doing things or to stop doing things. When you have a gut feeling that something is wrong it is because your old brain identified a problem that is invisible to your new brain. Intuition is the old brain’s way of communicating  knowledge it has that the new brain doesn’t.

Some of the scientists who study the brain (neuroscientists, behavioral psychologists, etc.) believe the vagus nerve or spindle neurons that connect the prefrontal cortex (new brain) to the insula (old brain) may be the communication superhighway that links the conscious (new brain) to the subconscious (old brain). The subconscious brain may be using this very superhighway to communicate intuition, gut feelings and insight (aha moments) to the conscious brain.