Archives for February 2016

There are many things that create unhappiness. The list is a very long one: illness, death, job loss, financial problems, heartache, conflict, envy, hate and anger are just a few examples. But while there are many factors that create unhappiness there are three factors that wash away all of the causes of unhappiness:

1. Feeling in Control of Your Life – In my Rich Habits Study, 91% of all millionaires were decision makers and, interestingly, 82% of all millionaires said they were happy. When you feel like you are in control of your life, it makes you happy.
2. Unmet Expectations – We all have expectations. When we set our expectations too high and fail to meet them, we become unhappy. One of the keys to happiness is, therefore, to manage your expectations. Believe in yourself, have faith in what you’re doing, be enthusiastic about pursuing goals and dreams, but if you want to be happy, make sure, in everything you do, you at least meet any expectations you might have. How? By lowering your expectations, by setting the bar low, in terms of all outcomes, you set yourself up to either meet or exceed your low expectations.
3. Positivity – Having a positive mental outlook creates happiness. Being grateful for what you have is the gateway to a positive mental outlook. Start expressing gratitude for what you do have and you will shift your outlook from negative to positive.

Even before I finished my analysis of the data I gathered in my five-year Rich Habits Study I began sharing it. At first, I gave free learning sessions. The attendees ate it up. After about six months, some of the attendees in the first learning sessions started sharing with me some of the changes that were taking place in their lives. A few had increased their income significantly and others lost a lot of weight. There were a few who landed good jobs as a result of the volunteering/networking Rich Habit. There were many stories.

A few of these early attendees began harping on me to write a book about the Rich Habits. I was reluctant at first because I had never written a book before. I told them I’m a CPA, not a writer. But these attendees were relentless and they had planted a seed inside my subconscious which began to take root. So, I wrote Rich Habits, which was released in March, 2010. Now what to do?

I then embarked on what can only be described as the pursuit of success. Other independent observers might describe it instead as watching a grown man drown. Hard thing for anyone to watch. Everyone around me, including my own family, told me to quit.

When you write a book, you are essentially manufacturing a product. Success in any industry that sells products, is measured by how many products you sell. You can have the best product in the world but if you have no idea how to sell it, no one will be interested in buying it.

My pursuit of success was really a lesson in learning what to do and what not to do through the school of hard knocks. I made many mistakes. I failed often. I was filled with doubt almost on a daily basis. I felt lost at sea most of the time and cursed myself for writing that book. But something inside me kept me going. I was passionate about helping others succeed in the same way those learning session attendees were succeeding. I guess that kept me going.

So, I persevered. And persevered. And persevered. In 3 1/2 years of trying to promote my book, I sold less than 1,000 books and spent nearly $70,000. At one point, I came within a hair’s breath of quitting on my dream. It was at this low point that success visited me for the first time. That one success event opened up the floodgates.

Rich Habits went on to sell tens of thousands of books in a very short time and became an Amazon bestseller in three countries. I found myself on national T.V. and radio, in newspapers and in magazines, not only in the U.S., but in 23 countries around the world.

Success, I learned, hides behind a mountain of your mistakes and failures. Life wants to see if you have what it takes to overcome every obstacle it puts in your way. But most of all, life wants to see if you deserve success. You are much more than you ever imagined. You only find out how amazing you are when 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 you are about ready to quit, that is when life blinks. And what a blink. It is always some unintended great thing that happens. Something completely out of the blue that you never expected and never imagined. When you persist, life eventually bends to your will. It goes from adversary to ally in an instant.

The famous story of the mild-mannered Dr. Jekyll and the demonic Mr. Hyde ends with the death of both. Mr. Hyde became Dr. Jekyll’s undoing at the end.

There are many who have Mr. Hyde inside them, derailing them from living a healthy, happy and successful life. Negativity is not just an impediment for a good life, it is a recipe for a failed life.

A study by Eric Loucks, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Brown University, found that people with a positive outlook live healthier and live longer. They also found that negativity causes stress which accelerates aging. In a related study by Elissa Epel, University of California, she found that those who practice positivity through meditation live longer, healthier lives.

The ability to shut down the Mr. Hyde inside you not only affects your health and longevity, it also plays a critical role in achieving success in life. Negative people get in their own way, preventing them from realizing their full potential in life. We all have a little Mr. Hyde inside us. The key is to be mindful when Mr. Hyde starts to rear his ugly head. Anger, depression, sadness, envy and jealousy, when left unchecked and not countered, are destructive forces that shackle many people to a life of poverty.

If you want to be healthy, happy, live a long life, be rich, or be successful, it may come down to the simple daily habit of practicing positivity. Gratefulness is the gateway to a positive mental outlook. So, start your day by expressing gratitude. Five minutes of daily meditation is another daily habit that creates a positive mental outlook. When you develop the daily habit of being positive, Mr. Hyde runs away. Keep your inner Mr. Hyde on the run every day. Your health and your future success depends on it.

I’ve written extensively about the Rich Habit of eating less and eating healthy because I discovered in my Rich Habits Study, that’s what rich people do. Rich people exercise almost every day, moderate how much they eat almost every day and eat healthy, almost every day. With respect to eating less, the sweet spot for men is somewhere between 1,900 calories to 2,200 calories a day. For women, it is somewhere between 1,600 to 1,900 calories per day.

Since I completed my study, I’ve been on a sort of quest to find out why eating less and eating right is so important to accumulating wealth. I thought I’d share some of that new research with you, since it will impact your ability to succeed in life.

CALERIE is a brand new 2-year study on the health effects of reducing how much you eat each day.  In this study, 218 people were split into two groups. Group #1 ate what they pleased. Group #2 cut their calories by 12%. Group #2 saw a 10% reduction in overall body weight. Group #2 was able to maintain that weight loss for 2 years (the length of the study). Group #2 saw a 4% reduction in blood pressure, a 6% reduction in cholesterol and a 47% reduction in C-Reactive Protein, a protein that causes heart disease. The conclusion of this study was that eating less reduced chronic disease and increased your life expectancy.

In another study done by Valter Longo, director of the University of Southern California’s Longevity Institute, he found that a 34% – 54% drop in daily calories reduced blood sugar and IGF-1, a growth hormone. Reduced levels of blood sugar are associated with reduced risk of Type II Diabetes. Reduced levels of IGF-1 extend the life of cells in our body. In this study, they also found that eating too much protein can dramatically increase the incidence of cancer by 400%. The conclusion of this study was that eating less and eating right reduced chronic disease and increased your life expectency.

The main take away here is to eat less and eat right. If you eat right and keep your calories down, you’ll live a longer, healthier life. A longer, healthier life increases your odds of realizing your dreams and achieving your goals. It’s much harder to realize your dreams and achieve your goals if you’re chronically ill or dead. Get healthy, your success depends on it.

Zombies are all the rage it seems. What makes a zombie a zombie? Zombies have no self-awareness. They are driven only by unconscious, instinctual behavior. They are on autopilot, oblivious to their surroundings. They are non-thinking beings, curious about nothing. Zombies do not think about their actions, the thoughts they’re thinking or the decisions they make. Zombies live in a world of negativity.

In my research, I’ve met a lot of zombies. Their lives are a mess. They struggle financially and wallow in poverty. Their zombie kids do the same, growing up to become adults who struggle financially.

To some extent, we all have a little bit of zombie inside us. We do things without much thought. We have habits, behavior and thinking that we’re not even conscious of.

How do you know you’ve got a little bit of zombie in you? Your life is dull. Your work bores you. Every day seems exactly like the day before. You’re tired all the time. You have no energy to do anything creative. You drink too much. You watch too much TV. You spend too much time on Facebook or the Internet. You eke out a living and struggle financially. You have excessive credit card debt. Your relationships are all on life support. You hang out with others who have zombies inside them. You are angry and frustrated with your life.

How do you shut down your inner zombie? Self-awareness is one way to shut it down. You must become aware of the habits, thinking, behaviors and emotions that are dragging you down in life. Only after you become aware, do you have a shot at removing your inner zombie. One by one, you then attack each zombie habit, zombie thought, zombie behavior and zombie emotion. Baby steps is the key. Make one change a month for a year. After a year your inner zombie will begin to disappear. Your life will become better. Your mindset will shift from negative to positive and you will become happier about life. Your mind will burst with creative ideas. You will begin to grow and expand as an individual.

Another way to defeat your inner zombie is to find something that you are passionate about and pursue it. Build a side business around anything that excites you, that stirs your emotions and inspires you. Still, another way, is to pick up some new skills. Do something that is outside your comfort zone and enables you to grow. Paint, write a book, create an app, start a blog, etc. When we engage in creative pursuits we cease being zombies.

Those who struggle in life are doing unconscious things that are undermining their lives. They do not challenge themselves or push themselves outside their comfort zones. they get stuck in routines that are not helping them grow as human beings. If you want to defeat your inner zombie start tracking your daily habits, thinking and emotions. Pursue something novel and creative. Zombies don’t succeed in life. Take steps today to defeat your inner zombie.

I was raised in a good old fashioned Irish Catholic family in the New York City area and we had some bad money problems growing up. I remember when money was, well not there, and that gets to everyone in the household. It got to my Mom, that’s for sure. She would be in the kitchen, drinking coffee while we (the kids) were in the kitchen and she would say things like “money is the root of all evil” or “it’s harder for a rich person to get into heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle”, or something like that. Her best one, I think, was, “God must love poor people because he sure makes a lot of them.”

And my Dad, who was at one time the Democratic leader on Staten Island, and his close political friends, would, on the campaign bus or in campaign headquarters, tell us (the kids) that rich people needed to be taxed more in order to shrink the wealth gap (the disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor). The idea seemed sound, take money from those who have a lot of it and give it to those who have the least of it (the poor).

Well, I bought into all of that. And then I started studying the habits of the rich and the poor and as I was studying the data from both groups I started to notice some things that simply did not hold up to my youthful indoctrination. There were a number of data points that really stuck out and made me scratch my head. One was exercise. According to my data, the rich exercised much more than the poor. Now, my youthful indoctrination taught me that rich people didn’t work nearly as hard as the poor and that they indulged in all of the pleasures that life could afford them. I just assumed all rich people were fat and lazy. So, either this statistic was wrong or an anomaly, or my rich vs. poor programming was wrong.

It took about a year for me to realize that the rich vs. poor programming I had received as a child was the opposite of reality. The 233 rich people in my study shared nothing in common with the evil, greedy, fat and lazy rich people that existed in my indoctrinated mind.

Let me get back to the exercise data I gathered on the rich and poor. One data point I uncovered indicated that 76% of the rich ran or jogged 30 minutes a day at least 4 days a week, while only 23% of the poor had this habit. I have since continued my research, particularly in the area of habits and their effect on the brain. Here’s what I found with respect to the habit of running or jogging:

The brain uses 20% of your oxygen reserves. Running or jogging increases oxygen flow into the brain. This nourishes brain cells and acts like a janitorial crew, soaking up the waste (fee radicals) inside each brain cell. This additional oxygen from running and jogging helps make the brain cleaner and healthier. Twenty – thirty minutes of exercise every day has been found in numerous studies to stimulate the growth of the axon branches on each brain cell. The number of axon branches you have is directly correlated to how intelligent you are. Those with more axon branches on their brain cells are more intelligent than those with less. Exercise also increases blood flow into the Dentrate Gyrus. The Dentrate Gyrus is part of the brain’s Hippocampus, a region involved in memory formation and neurogenisis (birth of new brain cells). Running and jogging, it turns out, also stimulates the production of Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDFN). BDFN is miracle grow for brain cells, which keeps brain cells growing and expanding.

In a new study, which was just published in the February, 2016 edition of the Journal of Physiology, researchers at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland compared, head-to-head, the impacts of running, weight training and high-impact intensity interval training on the brain. Here’s what they found:

Running or jogging increases brain volume more than any other exercise. When we run or jog, we actually create more new brain cells at a rate that is double or even triple that of other types of exercise.

It’s now very clear why rich people had developed this habit of running or jogging – running and jogging improves brain performance. It makes you smarter. But what’s more interesting is the fact that the rich had this running or jogging habit log before they made their first million. They had been doing it for years. They were fine tuning their brains their entire lives, making them smarter. Their brains, because of this lifelong habit, were superior to the brains of those who did not run or jog. And when you have a superior brain, especially in the fast-paced world in which we live, you have a significant advantage when it comes to making money. Plus running or jogging requires discipline in the early going (until it becomes a habit, which takes about two months), which increases our self-control or discipline muscles. Not only are rich people smarter because they run or jog, they’re more disciplined, because they run or jog. Now, I’ll concede that running and jogging are not the only reason the rich get rich. But it is one of the reasons. Running or jogging are another success weapon in your holster. Let’s face it, smarts and discipline are formidable success weapons for those in pursuit of wealth and success. So, if you want to become rich, start running or jogging. It will literally put your brain on steroids. The smarter you get, the more opportunities you begin to see. And opportunities are all around us.

In a recent report from the Brookings Institute, they found that rich people live longer than poor people. Rich men live 12 years longer than poor men and rich women live 10.5 years longer than poor women.

Why? There is no single variable. It’s a multitude of things:

• Rich People Work Longer – Poor people work fewer hours and retire at a younger age than rich people. How does this affect longevity? For most retirees, retirement usually means a significant reduction in productivity and a reduction in your associations. Being productive keeps the brain alert. Interacting with others at work is contributes to longevity. When you retire, those interactions drop off or stop altogether. According to Harvard Professor of Public Policy, Lisa Berkman, social isolation is a significant factor in reduced longevity.
• Rich People Exercise More – Rich people exercise more (predominantly cardio exercise) and this improves overall health, reduces obesity rates and increases brain performance and intelligence.
• Rich People Associate With Upbeat People – Poor people surround themselves with negative people, which keeps them in a negative mindset. Associating with other negative people impairs your health. Negativity causes long-term stress, which impairs your immune system and causes chronic disease. You can’t make money if you are chronically ill. Negative people are unable to find solutions to problems because negativity narrows your focus, creativity and capacity for insight (aha moments). If you associate with other negative people they are like Miracle Grow for a negative mind. Negative people also come with baggage. This baggage often arrives at your doorstep unexpectedly, which distracts you from pursuing anything worthwhile.

What’s happiness? I don’t think happiness is any one unique feeling. Joy is happiness. Laughter is happiness. Being around your loved ones is happiness. Feeling content, for whatever reason, is happiness. Feeling satisfied is happiness. That feeling you get when you win at something is happiness. Relief is happiness.

If I had a gun at my head to define happiness in one simple way I suppose I’d define happiness as feeling good at a particular moment in time.

I experienced happiness yesterday. It started with a call from a friend who had a complex international tax question that I was able to explain in a way that was no longer complex. He was so appreciative and I felt good. That happiness feeling lasted about 15 minutes. Then a few hours later I received an email from a first time, self-published author who wanted to know what he needed to do to succeed. I spent about 30 minutes crafting a very long email, bullet pointing the key things I learned over the past 5 years that I felt were critical to my success. I got an email back from this person thanking me profusely. That happiness stayed with me for about an hour.

While neither of these two individuals will very likely ever be able to adequately repay me for helping them, I think they already have. They gave me 1.25 hours of happiness, I wouldn’t have otherwise had, in a very hectic day during the busiest time of the year for me (tax season). They gave me the opportunity for happiness by asking me for help. And I took advantage of that opportunity.

I think the real take away is that we should all devote a portion of every day helping others. Giving creates happiness for the person doing the giving. The key is being on the lookout and making yourself aware of opportunities to help others. When you make giving a daily habit, you’ll be happy every day of your life.

Poverty sets limits. Those growing up in poverty embrace a belief system which sets limits that often extend out to many generations. And beliefs define your destiny in life. That poverty-destiny mindset then becomes a blueprint for your future life. You build a life of poverty around this mindset. Essentially, this poverty-destiny mindset says: I was born poor, I’m a victim of my circumstances and the world in intent on keeping me poor. That thinking and those beliefs make poverty a mental disorder.

Conversely, those with a rich-destiny mindset believe they can change their circumstances, no matter how wretched they might be. They then create a blueprint of their future lives that has the effect of removing any limitations. This Rich Thinking breaks the cycle of generational poverty, enabling the poorest of the poor to achieve great things in life. If this was not true there would be no Andrew Carnegie’s, no Oprah Winfrey’s, no Ralph Lauren’s, and no Howard Schultz’s (Starbucks).

The only limitations in life are the ones we set.