Archives for March 2016

One of the many questions I had asked while conducting my Rich Habits study was focused on how rich people built their relationships. I could write a book just on the information and strategies I uncovered from that one question – hello call, happy birthday call, life event call, networking, volunteering, mentoring others, identifying relationships to build (Rich Relationships) and relationships to avoid like the plague (Toxic Relationships), etc. I literally have hundreds of pages on the strategies the wealthy used to create their team of power relationships. And they used those relationships like a howitzer while they blazed a path of success for themselves and their families. But there’s one strategy that stood out which helped transform ordinary relationships into a devoted base of fanatical Success Servants. I call it the 20 Minute Connector Strategy. Here’s how it works.

The self-made millionaires in my study devoted 20 minutes or more each day going through a list of relationships they wanted to grow to see if there was any way they could connect them with others, who might need their skills. This 20 Minute Connector Strategy involves two steps:

Step #1 – Identify Opportunities

There are always opportunities to connect people. You just have to make yourself aware of those opportunities. And they are all around you. Here’s an example:

You learn that a new bar is going to open in your town. So, you ask yourself what does a bar need? It needs TVs, a sound system, build out (construction), someone to help with the books and taxes, maybe some legal work, workers compensation insurance, liability insurance, furniture, fixtures, computer systems, computer software, waiters, waitresses, bar tenders, etc.

Step #2 Make a Connection

We all know people who have specific skills. When an opportunity arises, self-made millionaires connect the people they know with those skills with the people who need those skills. In the case of the bar opportunity, a self made millionaire would go through their contact database and ask themselves one question: Do I know anyone who has skills who can help the bar owner(s)? They would than compile a list of those skilled individuals and then reach out to the bar owner(s) and connect the owner(s) with those skilled individuals. This benefits both the bar owner and the skilled worker. If the two decide to do business together, you’ve just converted two individuals into Success Servants. They now see you differently. They see you as someone who they want to stay connected to because you have relationships they need to help them succeed.

When you spend 20 minutes each day connecting people like this, it will eventually become a daily success habit. In time, you will not even need to scour you contact database. Their names will become part of your long-term memory due to repetition. That 20 minute daily investment then takes only a few minutes of looking for connection opportunities. Becoming a connector will transform ordinary relationships into Success Servants who will want to help you because you helped them. It’s just human nature. Those who help others succeed in life create devotees who want to reciprocate.

Every self-made millionaire suffers through pitfalls, mistakes and failures. Those pitfalls, mistakes and failure teach them what to do and what not to do. They then forge habits that help them overcome similar pitfalls and prevent similar mistakes and failures. When they are confronted with another obstacle that could potentially be a another pitfall or cause them to make another mistake or fail again, those new habits come to the rescue, helping them avoid the pitfalls, mistakes and failures and realize success. This success gives them a higher level of confidence – they overcame the pitfall, avoided the mistake or did not fail. That new success infuses them with confidence to take on new and bigger challenges.

It’s the cycle of success:

Good Habits Help You Overcome Future Pitfalls, Mistakes and Failures, Which Creates Success.

Success Produces Confidence, Which Eliminates Future Doubts and Fears.

In the Absence of Doubt and Fear, You Take on New Challenges and Realize More Success, Which Creates More Confidence.

That’s why good habits are so important – they set the cycle of success in motion.

There is a world of difference between extreme optimism and wishful thinking. Wishful thinkers set unrealistic expectations. They rely on random good luck. Those who play the lottery are an example of wishful thinkers. The odds of winning the lottery are enormous and you have no control over the outcome. Wishful thinkers outsource success to outside forces.

Those who possess extreme optimism, on the other hand, do not rely on random luck. They manufacture their own luck. Extreme optimists have only one expectation – to never quit, no matter how difficult the success journey is. Winston Churchill is an example of an extreme optimist. His “Never Surrender Speech” best describes the thinking of extreme optimists:

“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender.”

Entrepreneurs do not believe their journey will be easy. They expect it to be long, hard and filled with setbacks. But they also believe they will survive that journey and, in the end, succeed. Extreme optimism means you will never, ever quit, no matter what life throws at you. Extreme optimists believe that success hides behind a mountain of mistakes and failures. They believe that the journey towards success is all about persisting and overcoming every obstacle life puts in their way. The greatest asset every successful entrepreneur has is, for this reason, extreme optimism.

The new American mania lately has been the pursuit of individual happiness. It seems like everyone is writing and talking about happiness. I have a lot of research surrounding happiness by virtue of studying the behaviors, activities, thinking and emotions of over 350 rich and poor people over a five-year period. They were all in search of happiness, but each group had there own definition of it and, as a result, each group pursued it differently.

What I learned from my five years of studying these two groups is that those who were successful in life pursued one type of happiness and those who were unsuccessful in life pursued another type of happiness. The poor group, or those who were unsuccessful in life, pursued short-term happiness while the rich group, or those who were successful in life, pursued long-term happiness. The effects of this are self evident.

When I asked the people in my study who were successful,  “Are You Happy?”

82 % said YES

When I asked the people in my study who were struggling with a life of poverty the same question

98% said NO

Short-term happiness is the result of engaging in activities from which you derive immediate pleasure or immediate gratification. This might include drinking alcohol, doing drugs, gambling, watching an abundance of TV, spending hours on the Internet, reading books of fiction (fantasy, science fiction, romance or suspense), or engaging in arousal activities such as sex-related activities, skydiving, amusement parks, etc. These short-term happiness activities pay off immediately. You get an instant dopamine rush and feel good almost instantly. But then the happiness feeling fades away and you eventually recoil back to being unfulfilled, sad or even depressed. So, you seek out another short-term happiness activity to get that dopamine rush. It’s a vicious cycle, chasing one happiness activity after another. Yet, despite all of that happiness chasing, you are never truly happy for long.

Long-term happiness, on the other hand, is a completely different type of happiness. Those successful individuals in my study who found long-term happiness were not on a singular mission to find happiness. They were after something completely different and far more significant – they were on a quest for a life of meaning. They found meaning by pursuing something they were passionate about, something that gave their life purpose, meaning and fulfillment. They were pursuing their dreams!

True happiness cannot be pursued as an end to itself. Those 82% of successful individuals in my study who found happiness devoted their entire lives to the pursuit of their dreams. They created a script or blueprint of their ideal future lives, defined the dreams that made that life possible and then spent the rest of their lives creating, pursuing and achieving the goals that turned each dream into a reality. It wasn’t always easy. Oftentimes, they encountered obstacles and roadblocks that created stress, doubt and uncertainty. But their passion for pursuing something meaningful gave them the strength to forge on. Ultimately, they found their long-term happiness within the journey itself. True happiness, I learned, hides behind a life of meaning and purpose.

The circumstances of your life are a mirror of your habits, beliefs, emotions and your thinking. You see this mirror effect at work in your life all the time. You see it whenever someone walks into your office, place of business, a train, bus, a waiting room, a meeting room or any room smiling, happy and upbeat. Their presence fills the room or place, elevating everyone’s attitude.

Conversely, you see it when another person enters a room or place with a scowl on their face, negativity dripping off them like sweat. Their presence also fills the room or place, dragging everyone down along with them into negativity.

What’s behind all this? Mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are brain cells that cause us to unconsciously mimic the actions, emotions, habits and thinking of those around us. Researcher Paul Marsden, University of Sussex summarized his research on the effects of mirror neurons, stating that not only yawns and smiles were contagious, but so too were emotions, optimism, pessimism, stress, happiness, unhappiness, habits, behaviors and many other things.

Be careful who you associate with. Your subconscious mind, through this network of brain cells called mirror neurons, seeks to mirror the habits, behaviors, thinking and emotions of those you associate with on a regular basis. If you associate with negative people, you will become a mirror, reflecting back their negativity to those around you. If you want to succeed in life, you must avoid associating with negative people, who will infect you with their negativity, making you repulsive to other success-minded people. Be a mirror of positivity by associating with other upbeat, optimistic people. This is the real Law of Attraction at work.

Becoming a successful entrepreneur is not easy. I spent five years studying 177 self-made millionaires Rich Habits Study – Background on Methodology and I have to say, they are among the most courageous, fearless individuals I have ever met. They put everything on the line. They took enormous risks in the pursuit of their dreams. Success or failure often hinged on one or two things going right or wrong. The outcome, succeeding or failing, was separated by a margin so slim that it was invisible to the human eye. And some did fail. In fact, 27% of those self-made millionaires in my study failed at least once in pursuit of success.

I learned from my research that entrepreneurs pursuing a dream often feel like they are on the precipice of success or failure. They see themselves sitting on a wall, with one side of the wall representing success and wealth and the other side representing failure and poverty. A strong wind, blowing in either direction, can push them off the wall. Winds of fortune can blow them one way and unfavorable winds can blow them the other way. These winds are unexpected things that go right or go wrong. Success for an entrepreneur is very much dependent on the winds blowing in the right direction.

Whenever you embark on an entrepreneurial journey, you will come face to face with a very frightening reality – that part of your fate is in the hands of variables that are outside your control. And those variables, those outside forces, can be aligned with you or against you. What makes successful entrepreneurs so heroic is how they react when those variables are aligned against them and push them onto the wrong side of the wall. Successful entrepreneurs somehow find the resilience to pick themselves up and climb back up onto the wall. They persevere. They survive. And that survival, in many cases, is day to day. Entrepreneurs who refuse to surrender, are able to endure until the winds of fortune finally blow their way. The story of the successful entrepreneur is really a story about putting everything on the line and of survival. When you put everything on the line, you simply have no choice but to survive. Most entrepreneurs, however, don’t put everything on the line. They quit when the costs and the risks get too high. They give into their fears of failure and poverty. That is why there are so few self-made millionaires.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you will eventually come to a fork in the road. One road sign says “Go All In” and the other says “Cut Your Losses”.  If you are already there, you have a choice to make. Left or right? Entrepreneurs who truly believe in their dream do not allow the fears of failure and poverty to dictate the road they choose. For them, there is no choice.

Look, I’m not just a peeping Tom, peering through the window at the lives of these self-made millionaires and disbursing theoretical information. I’m living this stuff. I’ve adopted the Rich Habits and put it all on the line in my author start-up business. I took financial risks that, in my weakest moments, scare the hell out of me. I’ve been at this author business for nearly 7 years. I’ve invested nearly $100,000 into this business. In those 7 years, 99.8% of the time nothing’s gone my way. I paid close to $35,000 on publicists and marketing companies that failed to deliver, forcing me to figure it out on my own. Over these nearly 7 years I’ve spent at least 3 hours a day pitching the media, trying to get them to interview me so that I can get more people to find out who I am and read my books. I’ve had some success, but not nearly as much as I want. During all this time, I can count on one hand when things went my way: Yahoo interview, Dave Ramsey radio interview, CBS TV interview and SUCCESS Magazine interview. That’s it – 4 pitches went my way out of 35,000 cumulative pitches that did not go my way. That’s a success rate of .001%. But those 4 pitches that went my way helped this first time, self-published author sell 40,000 books and secure a traditional publisher.

If you want to succeed as an entrepreneur you have to go all in and then stick with it. One or two things can completely transform your life and help make your dream a reality. For some self-made’s like Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, the guys from Google and a few others, the winds of fortune blow sooner. But they’re the exception to the rule. For the average Joe, self-made millionaire, those winds take many years to arrive. You must never quit on your dream. Eventually good luck will find you. But luck will never find you if you quit. So never quit. Persist. Be courageous. Believe in yourself and what you’re doing. Go all in and never stop trying. Eventually life will bend to your will. It will go from adversary to ally. And when it eventually does, you will find yourself on the right side of that wall – a successful, self-made millionaire.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to succeed. You don’t have to figure our what to do and what not to do through the school of hard knocks. If you want to truly be wealthy, enormously successful or leave behind a legacy that would fill an entire newspaper page in the obituary section, you simply need to learn how to mimic others who have achieved greatness in their lives.

Find others who have succeeded in your industry, at your company, in your career or in life and walk in their footsteps. When you do, they will mentor you. They will teach you what works and what does not work. When you find some successful person to mentor you, you short cut an otherwise arduous journey. And these people are all around you. You can find them at work, in trade groups, in books, on blogs, in podcasts, running non-profits, etc.

Those self-made millionaires in my study who found a mentor, cut their path to becoming rich down from 32 years to 12 years. And, even more important, they accumulated nearly 2x’s the average wealth ($7.4 million vs. $3.4 million) of other self-made millionaires in my Rich Habits study who had no mentor in life. Granted, it’s not easy finding success mentors. But if you don’t look, you will not find.

Make it a priority in life to seek out those who can help you succeed. Successful people, believe it or not, are only too happy to help others succeed. That’s why many of them write books. Those who have made it in life, desire to share their knowledge with other like-minded, success-minded people. Find out who they are and learn from them. Allow them to mentor you.

Those who realize success, a dream, accomplish big goals or relentlessly pursue something they are passionate about are courageous and maybe even heroic. They’re heroic for one reason: they do not quit even though the outcome is uncertain.

Uncertainty holds most back from pursuing success. Uncertainty is omnipresent, up until the time you actually succeed. This means that those who pursue success are faced with uncertainty constantly.

Uncertainty is that unwelcome companion who rides along with you, like a passenger on a train, forever by your side. They never leave your side during your success journey. That companion will follow you to every stop along your success train ride. They board the train with you from the moment you decide to take a risk and pursue a dream. And that companion will fill your mind with all sorts of negative outcomes. “This is a waste of time”, “You can’t possibly succeed”, “What makes you think you’re different from others who have tried and failed”, “What makes you think you’re like others who have succeeded”, “You’re not good enough”, “You’re not smart enough”, “You don’t have what it takes”. 

Your uncertainty companion will never stop trying to deflate you and distract you. They will stay with you until the bitter end. Your uncertainty companion will only abandon you when it realizes that, despite all of its efforts, you are never going to quit, and success is a foregone conclusion. When there is light at the end of the tunnel, you will notice that your uncertainty companion is no longer sitting along side you on your train.

If you are on such a journey, you will face uncertainty almost the entire time. Most can’t take it. Most quit. Most will fail. But if you’re reading this, you’re not most. You’re different. Never quit on your dream. Don’t let uncertainty cloud your thinking. Never give in to the relentless clamor of uncertainty. Eventually uncertainty will flee. Uncertainty does not enjoy the company of the courageous.