Archives for March 2017

Those with a slight edge own the world.

As I discovered from my Rich Habits research, those who possess some slight edge, some unique niche they’ve cultivated over many years, receive a premium for whatever product or service they sell. And that premium makes them rich.

To me, this is a major revelation. It contradicts what we’ve been indoctrinated by society to believe – that success requires some huge, revolutionary idea or invention. Not true.

None of the wealthy entrepreneurs I studied created anything remarkable which propelled them to success and riches. What they did do, however, was incrementally improve upon something already in existence. By developing and honing their skills and knowledge in their particular field or industry, they were able to come up with a better way of doing what everyone else was doing.

That slight edge allowed them to capture huge swaths of their local market, displacing their competition and setting themselves up for increased revenues and increased profits.

If you were to study entrepreneurs, as I have, you would learn that about 5% of them, the successful ones, develop some slight edge over their competition that allows them to control 80% of their local market, with the other 95% fighting over the scraps, eking out a living in the process.

The fact is, the vast majority of successful entrepreneurs do not capture lightning in a bottle. Instead, they seek to become the best of the best in what they do, through daily study, daily practice and daily hard work. And then they tweak what they do in some way. This tweak gives them a slight edge over their competition, allowing them to charge their customers, patients or clients more for their services or products. Those premiums add up over time, making them rich in the process.

When your brain is foggy, you cannot think clearly, you make poor decisions, your memory suffers and things slip through the cracks that can damage your career and ability to make money.

Common Causes of Brain Fog:

• Multi-Tasking: Constantly shifting from one task to another taxes the brain. Multi-tasking demands an enormous amount of glucose (brain fuel). When that fuel is depleted the brain slows down – you feel tired and foggy.
• Stress: When you are under stress, this too depletes the stores of glucose found throughout the body.
• Eating Junk: Eating too much junk food, processed food, trans fats, dairy products and foods containing vegetable oils damages your mitochondria, which must convert that food into glucose and then into ATP (fuel for the body).
• Sleep Deprivation: You need at least four cycles of sleep a night. That is the minimum. Each sleep cycle lasts about 90 minutes. So, at a minimum, you need about six hours of sleep every day. Five sleep cycles is optimum.

The self-made millionaires in my study developed habits that not only helped clear away the brain fog, but improved their cognitive abilities:

• Focus: Self-made millionaires focus on one task at a time. They did not multi-task.
• Eat Healthy: Self-made millionaires eat right. Two out of three meals are vegetables, fruits (not too sweet) and healthy fats, high in HDL (good cholesterol).
• De-Stress: Self-made millionaires de-stress by meditating, running, taking a nap, closing their eyes for a few minutes or any number of things that put them into a relaxed state. Consider a walk or jog by a lake or by the beach, or walking along a trail or the ocean.
• Get Adequate Sleep: Self-made millionaires get 6-8 hours of sleep every night.
• Have a Glass of Wine or Beer.
• Take Supplements That reduce Inflammation: Tumeric, a baby aspirin, ginger, Omega 3, EPA/DHA (here’s a good article to read on reducing brain fog through natural supplements).

Brain Fog creeps up on you over time. Symptoms are forgetfulness, indecision, poor decisions, anger, anxiety and weight gain. If you want to succeed you need to take care of your brain. Brain Fog will derail you from success.

As you march towards success, you will meet many new people. Some, unfortunately, will be drawn to you for their own reasons; reasons that have nothing to do with helping you realize your dreams and achieving your goals. These individuals will exploit you, appropriating your time and money for their own ends. They need to be avoided, weeded out or ignored. Otherwise you will find yourself wasting your time and energy.

One of the hallmarks of successful people is being responsive. Responsiveness is a habit successful people cultivate. Being responsive means not ignoring those who matter to you. The key phrase here is those who matter to you.

It’s impossible to be responsive to everyone. So, how do you know who deserves responsiveness?

The individuals who deserve responsiveness are those who believe in what you’re doing, encourage you and offer assistance, when needed. The individuals who do not deserve your responsiveness are those who show zero interest in what you’re doing and offer no assistance, when needed.

Be responsive to those who matter and ignore those who don’t. When you are pursuing a dream, time is your greatest commodity. Use it wisely.

“There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.”
– Douglas H. Everett

I confess, I am a dreamer. I’ve always been a dreamer. I can remember sitting in my Physics high school class staring out the window, daydreaming about my future. I’ve never stopped dreaming. In fact, my life has been filled with dreams about what my life would be like one day. Here’s a list of my One Day’s:

One day I will be one of the top tennis player’s in the country (1978 & 1979).

One day I will be able to afford braces to fix my teeth (1981).

One day I will be able to afford to go to college (1983).

One day I will find a beautiful, perfect girl to build my life with (1986).

One day I will become a CPA (1988).

One day I will run a half marathon (1992 & 2016).

One day I will get a graduate degree in Taxation (1992).

One day I will have my own company (2004).

One day I will find my purpose in life (2008).

One day I will write a book (2010).

One day I will have children and I will pay for their college education (2011, 2014 & 2015).

One day I will be a muscular 175 pounds (2015).

One day I will become a bestselling author (2013, 2014, 2015 & 2016).

One day I will visit Ireland (2013 and 2015).

One day I will visit Australia (2016).

One day I will golf at St. Andrew’s in Scotland (work in progress).

One day I will visit China and see the Great Wall (work in progress).

One day I will pursue my main purpose in life full-time (work in progress).

One day I will become a world-famous author (work in progress).

One day I will be a successful speaker, getting paid to travel the world (work in progress).

One day I will be be a success, admired by millions for my accomplishments (work in progress).

One day I will be able to buy my wife a beautiful house down the Jersey shore (work in progress).

One day I will be able to work anywhere I like (work in progress).

One day I will be able to vacation for a month every year (work in progress).

One day I will be like the self-made millionaires in my study. I will be debt-free and have more money than I can ever spend (work in progress).

One day I will run a non-profit dedicated to helping rescue others from poverty (In 2017 I became President of The Ashley Lauren Foundation – we help families struggling with pediatric cancer survive financially. But I still consider this a work in progress).

As you can see by the dates, I’ve achieved some of my One Day’s. Yet, at age 55 I am still dreaming.

What is your One Day?

When you realize all of your One Day’s, it make’s for one hell of a life.

Keep dreaming and never quit on your dreams.

When most people think about self-made millionaires they imagine some entrepreneur working around the clock, passionately toiling away in the pursuit of greatness. Yet, 39% of the self-made millionaires in my Rich Habits study became rich working for someone else. How did they do it?

I discovered three ways employees were able to strike it rich:

#1 Save and Invest 20-30% of Income

Saving your way to wealth is the safest way to accumulate wealth. It is also the longest way. It took the average self-made, employee-millionaire in my study 32 years to accumulate their wealth. By assiduously saving 20-30% of their income every year and then investing it diligently they were able to accumulate an average of $3.3 million. Most of their investments were in stocks and real estate.

#2 Work for a Big Publicly-Held Company in a Good Industry

Other employees in my study worked for big, publicly-held companies in an industry where profit margins were very good or in an industry that was growing. Due, in large part, to prodigious profits, these employees were beneficiaries of generous stock option or employee stock purchase plans. Because the stock of the companies they worked for continuously appreciated, the stock they received provided the lion’s share of their compensation packages and made them rich.

#3 Sales Commissions

The salesforce is the engine of growth for most companies. Big companies rely on their sales people to grow their revenue. Salespeople often receive commissions, in addition to their base wage. The best salespeople get the biggest commissions and can become extremely wealthy selling products or services for their employer.

Working for someone else takes most of the risk out of the pursuit of wealth. You don’t have to worry about working capital needs, profitability, meeting payroll or expenses like business owners do. You can focus on one thing – whatever it is you do for your employer. From my research, the key is finding a company to work for in an industry that is prospering and growing. These companies pay their employees generously and are often publicly-held companies whose stock is listed on some stock exchange.

There are many paths to wealth. Not every self-made millionaire got their by running their own business.

Humility is a hallmark of the successful. Successful, self-made millionaires become humble during their journey towards success. They become humble because they are focused on succeeding and because they are focused on succeeding they seek the truth.

When things go wrong, success-minded people seek the truth, rather than someone to blame. Sometimes the truth is that you screwed up. Self-made millionaires park their egos and embrace their mistakes, enabling them to learn from them. They make a habit of accepting responsibility when things go wrong.

Those who never take risks in pursuit of success have a penchant for assigning blame to everything that goes wrong in their lives. They have the Poor Habit of avoiding responsibility when things go wrong. These Blame Shifters are not interested in the truth. Instead, they outsource the blame for the mistake to someone or something else. Consequently, they never learn from their mistakes. 

You must avoid Blame Shifters like the plague. Specifically, you must never allow them to become part of your dream team – individuals you rely on to help you realize your dream. Blame Shifters are not interested in seeking the truth – the real cause of the mistake. They are only interested in assigning blame to protect their egos.

Self-made success is built upon a mountain of mistakes. The more mistakes, the higher your mountain, the greater your success and the more money you’ll ultimately make.

In my Rich Habits study, I stumbled onto something I thought was counter-intuitive. The self-made millionaires in my study acknowledged that they had made a lot of mistakes over the years. Those mistakes set them back and cost them an enormous amount of time and money. Yet, they said those costly mistakes were the reason why they became rich.

Mistakes helped them figure out what to do and what not to do. This is school of hard knocks stuff. The school of hard knocks is the hard, costly way to wealth. The mistakes you make are painful and agonizing. They cost you precious time and money. But, they stick. They are like railroad tracks on the brain. You never forget them and you never repeat them.

Probably the poster child for mistakes leading to success is Thomas Edison, who made thousands of mistakes that eventually led to the invention of the incandescent light bulb. But today, we are witnessing in real time another future poster child for mistakes leading to success, Elon Musk.

Musk is the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors. Musk’s mistakes, in the early stages of those two companies, were so numerous and so costly that they took him to the very brink of personal bankruptcy. At one point, Musk was literally one event away from bankruptcy. At the end of 2008, Musk and all of his companies were on the verge of outright bankruptcy. His Falcon 1 rocket had failed to reach orbit for the third time in early August, 2008. Everything hinged on a fourth flight in September, 28 2008. If it too failed, it was over. Only it didn’t fail. The first privately built rocket attained orbit. Musk was able to cobble together enough money to get them through the end of December, 2008. On December 28, 2008 NASA awarded SpaceX with a $1.6 billion contract. Today, Musk is estimated to be worth $10 billion.

Spectators, or those who are averse to risk, make very few mistakes in life. Most people are spectators, watching and criticizing the courageous who try. Those who refuse to be spectators in life, make many mistakes. But those mistakes lead to growth and growth leads to success and success leads to wealth.

Wealth is the reward for taking action, making mistakes, pivoting to change what you are doing, and persisting until you succeed. Mistakes are part of the get rich process. Mistakes, in fact, are beautiful things.

We are defined, not by our success, but by our ability to overcome adversity, in the pursuit of success.

A crucible is, by definition, some harrowing adversity that can leave us momentarily thunderstruck with pain, anguish, anxiety and uncertainty.

The Great Depression was a crucible for millions in America. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were crucibles for an entire country – Japan. Surviving cancer is a crucible for too many individuals.

Almost every self-made millionaire in my Rich Habits study had to face a crucible during their march towards success. Running out of money was a common one. Failure was another for 27% of the millionaires in my study who failed at least once. Bankruptcy and divorce, were other crucibles that tested their resolve.

A crucible is an event that pushes you to the brink of surrender. It is the ultimate test of your ability to survive. It is often a turning point for those who are somehow able to survive. Crucibles test you, push you, challenge you and forever change you.

If you think you are alone, facing some crucible that is dragging you down into a dark hole, you are not. Many, just like you, have had to face crucibles at some point in their lives and survived to talk about it. Crucibles are meant to test you, challenge you and transform you. When you battle through your cocoon of adversity that is your crucible, you emerge a butterfly, better, beautiful and forever changed.

As Churchill famously said, when you find yourself in hell, keep going and never, never, never quit.