Archives for March 2018

Certain professions/trades produce more value and, therefore, those who work in those professions/trades earn more money.

Entrepreneurs, Doctors, Dentists, Prosthodontist, Oral Surgeons, Electricians, Crane Operators, Attorneys, Certified Public Accountants, Financial Advisors, Sales Managers, Financial Managers, Nurses Anethetists, Construction Managers, Boilermakers, Plumbers, Specialized Tool and Die Manufacturers, Airline Pilots, Property and Casualty Insurance Agents, Tenured University Professors, Engineers, Aircraft Mechanics, Pile Driver Operators, Computer Network Specialists, Funeral Service Managers, Software Developers, Pharmaceutical Sales, Pharmacist, Actuaries, IT Managers, – these professions/trades all produce, on average, a better than average income.

Why?

They have a perceived value that is, on average, greater than other professions/trades. These professions/trades also happen to require a greater amount of education and training, than on average, other professions/trades.

The amount of money you earn is directly correlated to the amount of perceived value you provide. The marketplace rewards those with a higher income who have the highest perceived value.

So, the common denominator is perceived value.

If you want to make a lot of money in your work life, you must provide value.

Becoming a person of value, then, should be your goal. But this is not an easy goal. It requires a constant investment in formal education, self-education and daily deliberate practice. You must, every day, maintain or improve your knowledge and skills. This requires a lifelong commitment on your part.

If you are unhappy with your income, it is most likely because the profession/trade you are in places a lower value on your profession/trade. To earn more, you must increase the value you provide to others.

Your income is a mirror. It reflects the value you provide to others.

MetLife is a leading provider of insurance and other financial services to millions of individual and institutional customers across the United States, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Europe.

In the mid 80’s MetLife was hiring 5,000 salespeople a year. To ensure their success, they were spending one hundred and fifty million dollars every two years in training costs. That’s thirty thousand dollars per sales rep.

MetLife approached psychologist Doctor Martin Seligman at the University of. Pennsylvania. Seligman developed an Attributional Style Questionnaire, or screening test, that each new MetLife representative completed. The screening test helped isolate the positive and negative mental characteristics of each representative in the group.

Seligman then tracked the sales results of these new MetLife hires for two years.

The result? The agents with an optimistic outlook drastically outsold the pessimists by as much as 21% in the first year and 57% in the second year!

Optimism, by definition, is feeling hopeful and confident about the future or anticipating a successful outcome in some pursuit.

When you are optimistic, you feel like you are in control of your destiny and that you control your own results. Optimists feel they can always do better, always improve, always make more money.

The study found that optimists worked harder in improving themselves – they devoted themselves to daily self-improvement, making self-improvement a daily habit.

As a result, the optimists in the study were able to drastically outsell their negative, unhappy competition and earn more money in the process.

Positivity and negativity is a habit. If you want to earn more money and increase your wealth, you must forge daily habits that put you on autopilot for success. Positivity is one of those habits that puts you on autopilot to become wealthy and successful.

Brain cells (neurons) communicate with one another by sending chemicals (neuro-chemicals or peptides) to one another. This communication channel is called a synapse.

Each individual neuron can form thousands of links with other neurons in this way, giving a typical brain well over 100 trillion synapses.

Synapses are the latticework of the brain. They are very much like branches on a tree. A synapse, or tree limb, grows from the trunk of the brain every time two or more brain cells repeatedly communicate with one another.

With each repeated communication, the synapse, or gap between two or more brain cells, grows closer together.

This makes the distance neuro-chemicals need to travel between brain cells, shorter.

Synapses that become habits, have the shortest distances, making habit synapses the most powerful type of synapse in the brain.

This is what makes habits so hard to break – the synapses of habits are the strongest, shortest synapses in the brain.

Once a habit is forged, all activity associated with that habit becomes automatic, meaning unconscious (we are not consciously aware of our habits).

Now, this is intended to be a good thing. Automation, or unconscious behavior, allows the brain to work less, using less brain fuel (glucose or ketones), making the brain a more efficient machine.

When you forge habits that produce good behavior (saving money, eating healthy, exercising regularly), this automation puts you on autopilot for a happy, successful and healthy life.

When you forge habits that produce bad behavior (spending more than you make, eating junk food, not exercising), this automation puts you on autopilot for an unhappy, unsuccessful and unhealthy life.

The “secret to success” is a secret because the behavior that creates success is the byproduct of habits. And habits are below the level of consciousness.

Thanks to my research, the secret is out.

There are many types of habits.

There are time habits. For example, what time you wake up or go to sleep, taking a shower in the morning, watching TV before going to bed, etc.

There are relationship habits. For example, going to the bar with a particular friend, talking about sports with another friend, friday night movies with your significant other, etc.

There are commuting habits. For example, getting a cup of coffee on your way to work, reading the news or listening to a particular radio station, etc.

Then there are pleasure habits. Think of anything you do on a regular basis that gives you pleasure. That’s a pleasure habit.

Pleasure habits are the most potent type of habit. They are the hardest to break because these habits cause your brain to release a chemical called dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that makes you feel momentarily good or happy.

The more you engage in pleasure habits, the more neuro-receptors your brain cells create in order to send and receive dopamine. Once created, these neuro-receptors begin to dictate your behavior, forcing you to engage in pleasure habits in order to feed the craving of those neuro-recptors.

These neuro-receptors are physical appendages that constantly call out for dopamine. And this is why pleasure habits are the hardest habits to break.

But, they can be broken.

Breaking a pleasure habit requires self-control, discipline and willpower. Initially, the neuro-receptors will fight you, but, depending on the nature of the pleasure habit, they tend to die off after a few weeks. And so too does their power to dictate your behavior.

Beware of pleasure habits. They are the most destructive type of bad habit. They can cause you to gain weight (eating sweets to get a dopamine rush), damage your health (drinking alcohol to get a dopamine rush) or cause you to waste time (viewing pictures or videos on the Internet to get a dopamine rush).

There are thousands of receptors on each cell in the body. This includes the cells in every organ, including your brain. Each receptor is specific to one peptide (protein).

Anger, sadness, guilt, excitement, happiness, nervousness, each separate emotion you express, releases its own specific neuropeptide inside each cell.

The more you habitually express an emotion, the more receptors your cells will create for that emotion.

If you forge the habit of being upbeat, for example, you are literally causing your cells to manufacture more neuro-receptors in order to meet the demand for the positivity-induced neuropeptides your habitual optimism creates. This means, you are building a cellular foundation for more future optimism – or a positive mental outlook.

The same holds true for habitual negative thinking. The more negative thoughts you allow yourself to have, the more neuro-receptors your cells will create, perpetuating a negative mental outlook.

The good news is that every two months 100% of the cells in your body are replaced by new cells. This means you can physically change the cellular framework from negative to positive in just two months, by making positivity a habit for two months.

Thoughts do become things. Be careful of those thoughts. The wrong ones, negative thoughts, will alter the physical properties of your cells, creating a domino effect that will perpetuate that negativity.

I knew one of the self-made millionaire- entrepreneurs in my study for a long time. Several years before he became rich, he and I took a Saturday to play golf. Throughout our round he must have said to me a dozen times that he was a pathetic loser. I told him he wasn’t a loser. He was smart, a hard worker and incredibly focused. He told me all of that didn’t matter because no matter what he did, he could not turn the corner on the dream he was working so hard to realize; he could not break through and succeed.

Eventually, after many years of struggle, he did succeed. He went on to earn millions pursuing his dream. But I never forgot that golf day. I never forgot how down my future millionaire friend was that day.

There are far more bad days than good days for the intrepid entrepreneur. In fact, given all of the research data I have on entrepreneurs, I’d bet that the bad days outnumber the good days 100 to 1 during the journey to success.

Being an entrepreneur, pursuing a dream, requires broad shoulders, relentless determination, facing adversity on an almost daily basis and fighting to maintain a positive mental outlook even when nothing is going your way. It’s hard and emotionally draining, being an entrepreneur in pursuit of a dream.

If you are one of those pursuing a dream, feeling down, feeling like a loser, find solace in the fact that your negative state is part and parcel of the success journey. Those who become successful entrepreneurs are not some aberrant breed of perpetually upbeat, enthusiastic stock. They are human just like everyone else, who often fall victim to the uncertainty, worries and stress swarming all around them as they battle to realize their dream.

It’s easy to get down on yourself, to feel like a loser, when nothing is going your way. But I’ve learned from studying millionaires that the only real losers are the ones who quit on their dream. So long as you keep trying, so long as you keep pushing the ball up the hill, so long as you never quit, you are not a loser. Your persistence, in the face of adversity, will one day be rewarded. And then you will have the rest of your life living it like a winner.

Never quit on your dreams!

The wealthy are nine times more likely to read than the poor based on my Rich Habits data.

Eighty-eight percent of the wealthy in my study read 30 minutes or more every day for self-improvement/learning. Only 2% of the poor read 30 minutes or more each day for self-improvement.

According to a 2013 Report by the Pew Research Center report, about 4% of the poor become wealthy.

Based on my research, there is a direct correlation between reading for self-improvement and becoming wealthy. So, the poor who forge the habit of reading for self-improvement, are the ones who will most likely wind up in that 4% group.

According to another 2016 Pew Research report, the affluent are twice as likely as the poor to read books. So, if you’re poor and you want to become affluent, start reading books.

But books are only one way of acquiring knowledge. Thanks to the Internet, there is a treasure trove of valuable information for those interested acquiring knowledge. The Newspaper Works 2015 Quarterly Report found that those who regularly read digital information, earned 34% more than those who do not.

There are plenty of examples or poor people who climbed their way out of poverty by forging the reading habit: Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Ben Carson.

Dr. Ben Carson’s story is particularly relevant because he is living testament to the power of reading. Carson was raised by a single mother in the ghettos of Detroit. Concerned that their sons, Ben and Curtis, were taking the wrong path in life, Sonya Carson made a fateful decision that altered all of their lives forever. Sonya Carson, a single mother with a third grade education, turned the T.V. off for her kids, limiting them to only two hours of T.V. a week and forced her two young boys to read two books every week and then write a summary of what they read and what they learned from their reading. Each week they would hand their mom this summary for her to review. Sonya would mark up the summary with notations and hand the summary back to her boys. Reading for learning, soon became a daily habit for Ben and Curtis.

Ben Carson went on to become a world famous neurosurgeon, ran for President in 2016 and now heads the Housing and Urban Development federal agency. Curtis Carson went on to become a highly successful senior mechanical engineer with Honeywell, specializing in developing braking systems for aircraft.

If you’re poor and you don’t read to learn every day, you are missing out on a foolproof path out of poverty. Get on that path today. Forge a daily reading habit. The more you learn, the more you’ll earn.

I have a challenge for you; a little thought experiment to highlight the omnipresence of habits in your life.

For one day, call it Day One, I’d like you to abandon the use of just one word or phrase that is unique to you; one that you use every day. Then, on Day Two,  I’d like you to try to replace it with a substitute and document your success on a small notepad or piece of paper.

For example, I use the phrase “No Worries” almost every day in my conversations with others. I substituted the phrase “Can Do”, which I attempted to use in conversation on Day Two.

In my little thought experiment, on Day One, I documented the use of the phrase, “No Worries”, nine times. One Day Two I attempted to use the substitute phrase, “Can Do”, and failed four times.

Habits infect every aspect of your life. They reside in the words you use, your thinking, your emotions and your behaviors. We only recognize their omnipresence through awareness. And, only through awareness, can old habits be replaced with new habits.

For those of you who take me up on my thought experiment, email me the results (tom@richhabits.net).

Do you often feel as if you are in a constant state of dissatisfaction, not content with your life?

If the answer is yes, you are in good company.

In my Rich Habits study, there were essentially three groups of self-made millionaires:

SAVERS – Individuals who saved and invested their way to wealth.

PUBLIC COMPANY EXECUTIVES – Individuals who worked for publicly-held companies and became senior executives.

ENTREPRENEURS – Individuals who pursued a dream.

Those entrepreneurs who pursued a dream accumulated, by far, the most wealth ($7.4 million vs. $3.4 million and $3.6 million) and in the shortest period of time (12 years vs. 32 years and 25 years).

This last group, the Entrepreneurs, all shared one common trait that separated them from the Savers and the Public Company Executives – they all had a profound sense of discontent.

This discontent drove them to separate from the herd. It pushed them to pursue dreams and goals that were bold and daring.

Through a process of trial and error, these Entrepreneurs experimented until they found their destiny, their fate. Then, they spent the rest of their adult lives tenaciously pursuing their dreams and their goals, until they became experts, leaders in their niche or field.

Discontent is not a deficiency. In fact, I now believe that discontent is a key driver to success. It pushes you to do what most are unwilling to do – pursue your dream.

Embrace your discontent. It is life’s scratch. A scratch imprinted on a select few. A scratch that can only be itched by pursuing a life dream.

Don’t fight discontent. Embrace it. Somewhere, within that discontent, resides your calling in life.