Archives for February 2018

In my five-year study of the self-made millionaires and those who struggled financially, I noticed the self-made millionaires seemed to be in perpetual motion.

• They were managing multiple streams of income.
• They were engaged in self-improvement activities intended to help them improve their knowledge and their skills.
• They were voracious readers, seeking wisdom between the pages of books.
• They were meeting and networking with success-minded people, hoping to learn something or pick up new ideas that would help them become more efficient or more effective in making money.
• They were listening to podcasts that interviewed successful people and successful entrepreneurs.
• They were attending seminars or speaking engagements, hoping to learn something or meet someone who could help move them forward in life.

The self-made entrepreneurs in my study were leveraging all of their available time engaged in extracurricular activities that helped them to grow in knowledge, improve their skills and to forge relationships with the right people – other success-minded individuals.

Conversely, those who struggled financially, seemed to be frittering away their non-work time, watching TV, consuming Facebook ad nauseam, reading for entertainment or generally making non-productive use of their free time.

Inertia was a common thread among the poor in my study.

Perpetual motion was a common thread of the self-made rich I studied.

Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve – Napoleon Hill

The Law of Attraction first gained world-wide recognition thanks in large part to Napoleon Hill’s 1937 book Think and Grow Rich. Hill advanced the revolutionary concept that the starting point of all success was your thinking.

With the 2006 release of the blockbuster book The Secret , Author Rhonda Byrne took Hill’s idea to a much higher level. All you had to do was create a clear vision of exactly what you wanted and that simple act would set the universe in motion to attract to you all that you desire.

This was welcome news to 19 million readers who purchased The Secret. To those readers, The Secret removed the albatross of risk, obstacles and hard work. For the first time, a self-help book offered success without all the effort.

While the Law of Attraction has helped millions focus on changing their beliefs, which is a good thing, it does nothing to change your financial circumstances in life. It is simply impossible to think your way to success. Success is a process. The starting point of that process is thinking. The real meat to success is Action.

The Law of Perpetual Action requires that you take certain consistent action every day that will help move you toward the realization of your dreams and goals. Clearly defined daily goals, weekly goals, monthly goals, annual goals and long-term goals create the framework for identifying the action you must take in order to realize success.

This is why habits are critical to success.

With habits, you engage in daily activities, whether you want to or not. Habits put the powerful Law of Perpetual Action to work for you on a daily basis. Habits don’t require motivation, inspiration, enthusiasm, or to have your brain vibrating at a particular frequency.

Habits, built around your goals, put you on autopilot for achieving your goals. The more goals you achieve, the closer and closer you get to success.

That is the superpower of Habits – Automating Success.

How much of your time do you spend with the right people?

The right people are those people who do the most in helping you earn the income you earn. They might be clients, customers, supervisors, mentors, staff, sales force, etc.

Whoever they are, they should be individuals who are responsible for generating 80% of your income.

Once you have your list, the next part is the critical part – You should devote 80% of your work-time to managing the relationships of those people.

This 80:80 Rule ensures you do not waste your time with individuals who add very little value to your life and, instead, forces you to focus 80% of your energies on the individuals who are 80% responsible for the income you earn.

Success requires focus. This focus comes in many forms. Focus on dreams. Focus on goals. Focus on building relationships that help you move ahead. Focus on minimizing expenses.

But there is one area of focus that I believe is the big differentiator between those who ultimately break through and become successful and those who don’t – Purposeful Improvement.

Purposeful Improvement is self-improvement that is intensely focused on one field for long periods of time. This self-improvement is specific, intentional and requires daily discipline.

The overall objective is to gain an expertise, or niche, that puts you in the upper echelons, making you a virtuoso in that field.

It takes many years to gain this niche knowledge or niche skill-set.

In my study, it took, on average, twelve years for that particular sub-set of self-made millionaires to break through and realize success.

Purposeful Improvement requires that you develop the following daily habits:

• Purposeful Reading – Limiting your reading to books/articles that expand your knowledge in a specific field.
• Purposeful Practice – Practicing specific techniques in various ways in an effort to master that technique.
• Purposeful Study of Facts – Limiting your study to facts that are specific to a topic and focusing on that topic until every fact about it is known.

Purposeful Imprvovement equips you to handle just about anything that can possibly come your way in a field or niche. It forces you to a higher level of expertise. As a result, the world is willing to pay you more money for your knowledge or expertise.

If you are a student of success, you’ve likely noticed that most of the “experts” out there focus almost exclusively on wealthy, successful people. They write books, articles, do seminars, podcasts, and media interviews sharing the secrets of wealthy, successful people. Few, if any, focus on the secrets of failure.

Why? Because most of those “experts’ have not done their homework and really have no idea why people fail or what mistakes they made that caused their failure.

What a shame. It’s a shame because they are actually setting people up to fail.

How?

Studying successful people, or studying what to do, only gets you halfway down the field. What gets you the rest of the way is knowing what not to do.

If you really want to succeed, knowing what to do will never get you there. What will get you there is knowing what to do and knowing what not to do. You need to also be well-informed about why people fail. You need to understand the mistakes they made. You need to know what went wrong.

In fact, I believe that understanding failure is more important than understanding success. Failure teaches lessons that success masks.

This is why, in my Rich Habits Study, I not only focused on the habits of the rich. I also spend an equal amount of time explaining those habits, those mistakes, that result in failure. Knowing both sets you up for success. It opens your eyes, allowing you to see or anticipate potential mistakes that can lead to failure.

Most new businesses fail because they run out of money. They run out of money because they make too many mistakes. These mistakes are almost always the result of incorrect assumptions. These incorrect assumptions force entrepreneurs to learn what not to do through trial and error.

If you have enough money, you can survive this trial and error process, figure out what works and what doesn’t, and then create processes around what to do and what not to do.

If you don’t have enough money, however, making too many mistakes can mean the end of your business (your Dream), leaving you wondering what might have been. All because no one ever told you what not to do.

My job, as I see it, is to be that one unique resource who covers the entire playing field of success (what to do and what not to do), helping to take you from the fifty yard line, all the way down the rest of the field and into the end zone.

Adversity is painful. It pushes you, challenges you, tests you.

No one likes going through adversity. In fact, it stops most people in their tracks. That’s one of the reasons why there are so few successful people. Most quit as soon as they realize the path to success is through adversity.

Your true potential, however, is only revealed through adversity. Adversity forces you to a higher level – higher level of focus, higher level of knowledge, higher level of skill.

Through adversity you acquire willpower, patience, street smarts, knowledge, foresight, insight, intuition, resilience, attention to detail and mental toughness.

Adversity also exposes your innate talents. Talents you never knew you had.

Adversity toughens you up. It makes you better.

Adversity is the progenitor of growth. Without adversity you will never grow into the person you need to be in order to be a success.

Don’t run away from adversity. Run to it. Embrace it. Adversity is you friend, not your foe. It is the beacon that shines a light on the correct path – the path towards success.

You work for it. Every day you devote a huge chunk of your day to earning your income. But is it really your income?

If you’re like 90% of the population, your income doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the bank who holds your mortgage. It belongs to the credit card companies. It belongs to the company you pay your car lease to.

In fact, your income belongs to just about everyone, except you.

And that 90% happily accepts this insanity. Or put another way, that 90% is unwilling to make the hard choices that allow them to regain possession of their income.

But there are a few who refuse to play this game. These are the individuals who diligently save 20% or more of their income every month and somehow are able to make due on the remaining 80%. For these individuals, at least 20% of their income, they can call their own.

And, every year, as their saved income grows due to prudent investing, they inch closer and closer to owning 100% of their income.

Their invested savings grows and compounds and they are able to use that money to pay down their mortgage, buy stuff without credit cards and purchase, not lease, their cars.

We call those people who own 100% of their income, rich people.

Maybe the goal should not be to become rich. Getting rich sounds too hard anyway for most people. Maybe the goal should be simpler – to increase how much of your income you actually own.