Archives for November 2017

What is happiness?

Happiness is the byproduct of an increase in one of four types of Happiness Hormones: Endorphins, Serotonin, Dopamine and Oxytocin.

Each of these hormones, when elevated, increase the sensation we call happiness.

The pursuit of happiness, therefore, is really the pursuit of activities which elevate one or more of the Happiness Hormones.

Activities Which Boost Happiness Hormones

• Anaerobic Exercise – Weight Lifting.
• Aerobic Exercise – Jogging, Fast Walking, Hiking, Swimming, Biking, Basketball, Soccer, Dancing, Spin Cycling.
• Eating Spicy Foods.
• Gratitude.
• Exposure to Sunlight.
• Drinking Milk.
• Pursuing Goals.
• Hugging.
• Getting a Massage.
• Holding Hands.
• Taking Vitamin D3
• Talking to any upbeat person.
• Laughing.
• Moderate Consumption of Alcohol.
• Anticipation of a Happiness Activity.

If you are feeling down, find an activity which boosts your Happiness Hormones.

One of the most glaring differences between the rich and the poor in my Rich Habits Study was who the rich and the poor surrounded themselves with.

The self-made millionaires in my study built Rich Relationships – relationships with individuals who possessed Rich Traits, characterized by a positive mental outlook on life. Rich Relationships are typically upbeat, enthusiastic and success-minded individuals.

The poor in my study had a tendency to build relationships with other toxic people – individuals who shared a pessimistic, hopeless, negative-minded outlook.

Toxic people have certain Toxic Traits that act like a virus, infecting everyone around them. Becoming aware of these Toxic Traits helps you to avoid or rid yourself of negative influences which only serve to hold you back or drag you down in life.

Toxic Traits

• Sarcastic
• Gossip About Others
• Selfish
• Blame-Throwers
• Dependent Mindset
• Victim Mindset
• Low Self-Esteem
• Argumentative
• Dream-Killers
• Habitual Liars
• Untrustworthy
• Addicted to Something – Drugs, Gambling, Sex, Alcohol
• Excuse Finders
• Fault Finders
• Perpetual Financial Problems
• Inconsiderate
• Lethargic or Lazy
• In Perpetual Conflicts With Others
• Erratic Behavior – No Control Over Emotions
• Irrational
• Rude
• One-Uppers
• Envious or Ungrateful
• Deceptive
• Unresponsive to Others
• Bullies

No one’s perfect. Even the rich possess some Toxic Traits. The key is this: Does an individual have an abundance of Toxic Traits?

If the answer is yes, then avoid them. Their toxicity will hold you back or drag you down.

Self-made millionaires are self-motivated.

They create daily routines, or habits, that help them stay positive and motivated. Below are examples of some of the Motivational Habits that self-made millionaires use to stay motivated:

• Write a script of your ideal, perfect life.
• Read your ideal, perfect life script.
• Re-write your ideal, perfect life script.
• Create a Vison Board of the things that exist in your ideal, future life.
• Look at your Vision Board and daydream.
• Express gratitude for three things that happened yesterday. Gratitude gets you in the right farm of mind. It is the gateway to a positive mental outlook.
• Read something inspirational. This could be a book, blog or article.
• Surround yourself with upbeat, enthusiastic people. They will keep you infected with an upbeat attitude.
• Create positive affirmations and review them periodically.
• Engage in some activity, like exercise, which makes you feel good about yourself.
• Engage in some fun activity.
• Create a list of goals you would like to accomplish in life.
• Review your list of life goals.
• Create a Victory Log.
• Review you Victory Log.
• Listen to uplifting music.
• Listen to uplifting podcasts.
• Watch an uplifting TEDx talk.
• Reward yourself – prior to engaging in a task, specify a post-task reward. This could be a treat, dinner with friends, a beer, etc.
• Meditate.

Self-made millionaires create motivational routines that help them stay in the right frame of mind so they can engage in activities which help them move forward in life. Motivational Habits are your personal triggers which help keep you motivated.

In my five-year Rich Habits Study, I interviewed 177 self-made millionaires. I am often asked by the media how they got rich.

Essentially, my self-made millionaires fell into three distinct groups:

The Savers

The first group of self-made millionaires in my study saved their way to wealth. These Savers accumulated their wealth by living below their means, saving money and then investing that money prudently. According to my Rich Habits research, this path to multi-millionaire status took about thirty-two years.

Savers typically were risk averse, employed most of their lives, earned a moderate wage and had a low or moderate standard of living.

Self-made millionaire Savers were among the least wealthy in my study, with an average net worth of $3.4 million.

Being a Saver is the risk-averse way to building wealth. It’s the safe path to wealth accumulation. However, it required discipline, sacrifice and attention to detail in order to live below their means, save and prudently invest.

The Executives

The second group of self-made millionaires in my study worked for large publicly held corporations. Through hard work, smart office politics, constant self-improvement and powerful relationship-building skills, they rose up the ladder in their respective companies.

As executives, they received higher than normal compensation, which always included bonuses and stock compensation.

This stock compensation was in the form of one or more of the following:

• Qualified stock options
• Non-qualified stock options
• Stock rights
• Restricted stock
• Outright stock grants

The stock compensation, irrespective of its form, was always disproportionate to their base compensation, meaning, significantly higher than their base pay. This stock compensation was responsible for generating most of their wealth.

It took this group about twenty-five years to accumulate their wealth.

The Entrepreneurs

The third group of self-made millionaires in my study were the entrepreneurs – individuals who started their own business. This group, by far, accumulated the most wealth, averaging $7.4 million over an average of twelve years.

This was the highest risk and hardest path towards building wealth. In fact, 34% of the self-made millionaire entrepreneurs in my study failed at least once in business, which took a toll on their families and their lives.

The upfront investment in time and money was significant.

The early part of the journey for the typical entrepreneur was one fraught with nothing but uncertainty.

They invested most, if not all of their time, money and energy in something with no guarantee of success.

Despite their best efforts, things often went wrong. In the beginning, there was an endless parade of setbacks, obstacles and mistakes.

With every misstep, doubt was a constant companion. These doubts fill their waking moments and invaded their dreams.

Peace of mind was hard to find. Uncertainty sucked the life out of them. It often drained them of their confidence and every setback caused them to wonder if it was all worth it.

It took superhuman resilience to survive the entrepreneur’s journey.

But the journey transformed their lives and the lives of their families.

It forced them to develop new skills, acquire new knowledge and learn how to find and build relationships with other outstanding, success-minded people.

Those who were able to survive the journey and succeed, became millionaires and found happiness and fulfillment awaiting them on the other side of their journey.

There’s no easy path towards accumulating wealth and becoming a self-made millionaire.

Saving your way to wealth is the least stressful and least risky path towards accumulating wealth, but it requires enormous discipline and sacrifice.

Climbing the corporate ladder to wealth requires unique skill-sets and more than a little bit of luck. Finding a publicly held company to work for is easy. Finding one that is in a growing and expanding sector where profits and share price are consistently rising requires some luck.

Being an entrepreneur is perhaps the hardest way to accumulate wealth. The ups and downs, characteristic of entrepreneurship, requires enormous emotional control, long work hours, persistence, resilience, focus and the ability to rebound from mistakes and failure.

Rich Thinking is a habit, or rather, many habits. Rich Thinking habits establish a success-oriented mindset, something that is critical to, and a prerequisite to, the acquisition of success.

So, what are the Rich Thinking Habits?

I Must Improve Every Day

Being obsessed with daily self-improvement triggers all sorts of daily behaviors, or daily habits:

• Reading to Learn every day in order to acquire expert knowledge in your field or craft. This requires a thirty minutes or more of daily reading.
• Engaging in Deliberate Practice every day to help perfect and improve your skills. This requires two hours of more of Deliberate Practice.
• Curiosity. This requires seeking specific answers to things you know nothing about.

I Will Never Quit

• Emotional Stability is at the heart of this Rich Thinking habit. When things go wrong, as they mostly do during the success journey, Emotional Stability means avoiding the tendency to get down on yourself. When things go right, Emotional Stability means avoiding the tendency to become euphoric. Emotional Stability means never overreacting to defeat or success. You’ve seen this habit at work in high performers like Roger Federer, Eli Manning and Michael Jordan. You would never know either of them was winning or losing because they possess the Emotional Stability Rich Thinking habit.
• Managing Expectations requires setting realistic expectations at the very beginning. When you set realistic expectations, you avoid the ups and downs.When you set unrealistic expectations you are setting yourself up for disappointment, sadness or depression. When you set realistic expectations you are setting yourself up for satisfaction or happiness.
• Focus eliminates distractions. When you make focus a habit, you ignore the noise and distractions that take most people off task.
• Persistence means you continue to pursue your dreams and your goals no matter what happens in your life.

I Know Where I’m Going

Dream-Setting is about visualizing what your ideal, perfect life looks like ten or twenty years into the future. You create a blueprint of that life by writing a script about what your future life will look like. This habits requires that you continuously tweak your blueprint, you re-write your script, as facts and circumstances change. During the pursuit of success, some things will go right and more things will go wrong. Staying focused on the end game, requires re-writing your script when your circumstances change, while still maintaining your focus on where you want to end up ten or twenty years into the future.

I Will Maintain a Positive Mental Outlook

Gratitude is the gateway to a positive mental outlook, so it all begins with being grateful for what you have. This sets in motion all of the other positive traits you will need to succeed: optimism, enthusiasm, hope, passion and inspiration.

The most successful individuals have the ability to stay positive during stressful situations. They understand that positivity is the springboard of all creativity and insight, which helps you overcome obstacles and find solutions to problems.

I Will Adopt a Solutions Mindset

Successful people do not focus on finding problems, they acknowledge a problem and then focus on finding solutions.

I Will Become Process-Oriented

Everyone who pursues success makes mistakes. Those who succeed see those mistakes as learning experiences. They learn from their mistakes. Once they figure out what they did wrong, they develop processes that enable them to avoid making the same mistakes.

I Will be Patient

Success takes a long time. Those who succeed adopt the Rich Thinking Habit of Patience. They patiently persist, waiting for opportunities and luck to manifest themselves and then taking advantage of those opportunities and that luck.

Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Romer co-authored a paper titled The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.

This paper introduced the world to a new concept that turned the nature and understanding of high performers on its head.

Their research was made famous by author Malcolm Gladwell’s blockbuster book, Outliers, The Story of Success.

That new concept is known as Deliberate Practice.

Deliberate Practice, not innate talent, is what sets expert performers apart from everyone else.

The most effective Deliberate Practice activities are those that can be repeated at high volume.

Instead of practicing only what you are good at, Deliberate Practice requires that you insistently seek out specific things you are not good at, via feedback from mentors or coaches, and then define practice activities that will make you better at those things you are not good at.

This requires an inordinate amount of practice; something most will not do, because it is not fun and it is hard, physically and emotionally.

Deliberate Practice requires a fanatical obsession to improve through repetitive practice and then seek feedback from mentors or coaches, as to your performance.

Gladwell summed up this required investment in improvement, through Deliberate Practice, as The 10,000 Rule – devoting 10,000 hours of Deliberate Practice to your craft, in order to rise to the level of mastery.

So, what are the elements of Deliberate Practice, in achieving mastery?

1. Identifying Your Weaknesses – Identifying areas within your craft that require improvement.
2. Defining specific activities around your weaknesses that you can practice on for three to four hours every day.
3. Seeking feedback from mentors or coaches with respect to your performance in those specific activities.
4. Deliberately Practicing, over and over again, those specific activities you are not good at, until you gain mastery.
5. Repeat #1 – 4 for each weakness, until all of your weaknesses improve to the point of mastery.

As a rule, most people do not like asking others for help.

You don’t want to feel like you are burdening someone else or you don’t want to feel obligated to someone else.

But I learned from my Rich Habits research that self-made millionaires get comfortable being uncomfortable with a lot of things. Asking for help, is one of those things they became very comfortable doing.

They learned to get comfortable asking for help in the form of mentorship, professional expertise, tapping the skill set/knowledge of individuals, seeking wisdom and guidance from others, or asking for financial or non-financial assistance.

When I became President of The Ashley Lauren Foundation, a non-profit organization that helps families struggling with pediatric cancer, it became apparent that I was going to have to get comfortable asking people for money.

As an adult, I’ve only ever had to ask banks, venture capitalists or private equity investors for money for the various business ventures I’ve been involved with over the years. That was easy for me to do because they would be getting something of value in return for their money.

But asking ordinary individuals to fork over their hard earned money, knowing they would be getting nothing in return, was something new for me. It took practice, but after seven years in working with the Ashley Lauren Foundation, I’ve gotten pretty good at asking for help.

Interestingly, getting comfortable asking for money has had a positive influence on my other businesses. It helped me to forge the habit of learning to asking for help.

Now, thanks to my non-profit work, I no longer worry about burdening others or feeling obligated when I ask for help. The sting of asking for help goes away the more you ask for help.

What I did find interesting and unexpected is that asking for help from others strengthened my relationship with them. We grew closer. The roots to the relationship tree grew deeper.

Asking for help forges a special kind of bond between two people; a unique bond that essentially says we have each others back.

So, get comfortable asking for help. If you’re uncomfortable with it, like I was, join a non-profit. In time you will get comfortable asking for help, which is a Rich Habit of self-made millionaires. It’s a habit that Helps improve your business, profession or career.

Why do we do the things that we do? What are the drivers behind our very existence?

In 1943 American psychologist, Abraham Maslow threw a pebble in a pond by releasing his research paper titled A Theory of Human Motivation in Psychological Review.

Commonly referred to as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, his research paper theorized that there were five levels of needs:

How can we pull Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs into the modern era in order to find out why we do what we do?

Pysiological

Eating, drinking and procreation are the historical bull work of Maslow’s Physiological Needs. In the modern era, however, this is why we have so many gyms, diets, dating sites, porn sites, 10Ks, Iron Mans, BulletProof Coffee, Whole Foods, etc.

Safety

Herding for self defense is the historical bull work of Maslow’s Safety Needs. In the modern era, however, this is why we have nuclear weapons, UFC fighting, boxing, karate, the Guardian Angels, neighborhood watches, an army, a police force, jails, etc.

Love/Belonging

Marriage, starting a family and making friends are the historical bull work of Maslow’s Love/Belonging Needs. In the modern era, however, this is why we have FaceBook, SnapChat, Instagram, why we network, why we join business groups and trade associations, why we have religion, countries, etc.

Esteem

Apprenticeships and upward social mobility are the historical bull work of Maslow’s Esteem Needs. In the modern era, however, this is why we go to college, obtain licenses and advanced degrees, buy McMansions, expensive cars and jewelry, why we strive to be successful, etc.

Self Actualization

Achievement is the driver behind Maslow’s Self Actualization Needs. In the modern era, however, this is why we pursue dreams and goals, write books, paint, start a band, take risks in the pursuit of success, work 80 hours a week, climb the corporate ladder, meditate, why we have the NFL, the Olympics, book contests, etc.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are the real drivers behind everything you do. Inside one or more of these is your WHY for getting up in the morning.