Archives for June 2018

Everyone wants a better life. But what if you’re stuck in a boring, dead-end job that only serves to pay the bills and keep you stuck in life?

With many businesses shifting to outsourced part-time or temporary workers in order to fill a need, opportunities to make more money are expanding for those stuck in boring, dead-end jobs.

Welcome to the Gig Economy.

Uber is a perfect example of this gig economy at work. Investing in real estate on the side, is another example. Social media marketing is yet another example.

But my favorite is helping entrepreneurs or small businesses looking to expand.

Why? They offer unique opportunities, can help you develop valuable skills and they put you in touch with success-minded high achievers, which as you know, is a Rich Habit.

My friend John, a seasoned entrepreneur, hires part-time and weekend operators for his sports recovery business. Training is minimal and their only requirement is that they own a pick-up truck and are willing to learn. The payoff can be $50,000- $100,000 in additional income every year and a shot at becoming a revenue center in his rapidly expanding business.

But John is just one example that I know of. There are tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and business owners out there trying to grow their businesses just like John, and looking for good part-time people to help them do it.

Finding a part-time gig is a good idea for a number of reasons:

• More Money – You can make more money.
• Develop New Skills – Part-time gigs can help you develop new skills. New skills make you more marketable and enable you to add more value in the service of others.
• Expose an Innate Talent or Passion – Part-time gigs might expose some latent talent or hidden passion, you didn’t even know you had.
• Safety Net – If you lose your full-time job, you can amp up your already existing part-time gig to help you make ends meet until you find another job. Here, your part-time gig buys you time to find a job you want, rather than one you need.
• New Business – If you’re able to grow your part-time gig, you might eventually be able to leave your full-time job. For those with boring jobs or jobs they don’t particularly enjoy, this is their light at the end of a tunnel.
• New Relationships – Relationships are the currency of the wealthy. A part-time gig introduces you to new people. If any of those new relationships are high achievers, they can help lift you up in life through mentoring or by opening doors for you.
• Unmask Your Inner Entrepreneur – Part-time gigs can fuel a latent entrepreneurial fire or expose a hidden entrepreneurial side you didn’t know you had.
• Future Partner – You might just find your future partner in a part-time gig; someone who can help guide and mentor you to become rich and successful.

The gig economy is a good thing. It’s a low-risk path towards developing new skills or finding a passion or talent you didn’t know you had.

And here’s the best part – if you don’t like your new gig, you can quit and move on to the next one. Eventually, through experimentation, you may find a gig that will completely change the trajectory of your life.

Getting to the next level in your career or business requires many things. Foremost among them is forging specific new habits that help make you better at what you do.

But, what habits take you to the next level?

Level Up Habits.

These are habits possessed by those who are at the level you desire to be.

As an example, let’s say you’re a real estate agent making $50,000 a year. But your goal is $100,000. How do you get there?

Find two or more real estate agents making $100,000 a year and take them out to breakfast, lunch or dinner. Then ask them what daily activities they repetitively engage in every day in their real estate business. Write them down and identify those daily activities that are different from your own.

Pretty simple, right?

You can do this for any career or business. Just identify two or more people who are where you want to be and find out what they do on a daily basis, that you are not doing.

Then spend the next three months incorporating their new habits into your daily routine. This is the next best thing to having a mentor to help guide you along.

Level Up Habits, like all new habits, take time to deliver their benefits. The benefits are cumulative. But, eventually, the cumulative beneficial effects of those new habits will begin to show up in the form of increased productivity, increased knowledge, improved skills and higher income, taking you to the next level.

Want Spenders spend more money than they make on their wants. They surrender to instant gratification, eschewing saving in order to buy things they want now: 60 inch TVs, nice vacations, expensive cars, bigger homes and jewelry. Want Spenders routinely gamble away part of their income. They also spend too much money at bars and restaurants. Worse, they incur debt in order to finance their standard of living.

Want Spenders create their own poverty.

Want Spending is a Poor Habit fueled by envy.

When you are envious, you want what others have, even if you can’t afford it. The non-rich want what the rich have. So, they engage in Want Spending in order to satisfy their envy. This is one of the main reasons credit card debt has exploded among the non-rich.

What shuts off Want Spending’s fuel, is gratitude. Gratitude is the gateway to a positive mental outlook and the salve which cures the Poor Habit of Want Spending.

When you are grateful for what you have, you no longer envy what others have.

But, gratitude, like envy, is a mental habit that must first be forged before it does its magic. Once you forge that habit, gratitude stops Want Spending in its tracks.

If you want to live below your means and save money, you must shift your thinking habit from envy to gratitude.

How?

Every morning express gratitude for three things that went right in your life the day before:

• My car started, and I am grateful.
• My air conditioner worked, I am grateful.
• Someone said something nice to me, and I am grateful.

This morning routine helps reprogram your thinking from negative (envy) to positive (gratitude). Within a few weeks you will start to see things differently. Positivity will replace negativity. Your glass will begin to be seen as half-filled, not half-empty.

Jeff Bezos began Amazon in 1994. Three years later, he was a millionaire. Just three short years later, Bezos became a billionaire.

Mark Zuckerberg began Facebook in 2004. Two years later, he became a millionaire. In 2007, after Facebook’s IPO, Zuckerberg, age 23, became the youngest billionaire ever, at the time.

In 1956 Warren Buffett had a dream. In pursuit of that dream he started three investment partnerships. At the time, his fledgling dream had only seven investors, which included himself. By 1962 his investment partnerships officially made him a millionaire. He continued pursuing his dream and in 1990 he was rewarded for his pursuit when he reached billionaire status.

There is a reason I devote so much time writing about dreams. Dreams are the #1 most powerful way to amass the most wealth.

They are also one of the most difficult ways.

I spent five years studying the good and bad habits of 177 self-made millionaires and wrote four books, sharing that research. I’ve also traveled the globe speaking to thousands about my Rich Habits/Poor Habits research.

One of the many things I learned from my research, which I will share with you, is that the pursuit of a dream is not for everyone. It requires an investment in both time and money. As you may well know, inherent in any investment, is risk.

And some people are just not cut out for that risk.

Risk, when it comes to pursuing a dream, takes several forms.

Time Risk

You must devote time, often years, in making your dream come true. There are no guarantees, going in, that you will derive any financial benefit from the pursuit of a dream. This is the #1 Time Risk you take – that all of your time will be for naught. It doesn’t take very long before spouses, significant others or family members weigh in on the prudence of continuing to devote your time to the pursuit of your dream.

There is a secondary Time Risk – during this dream-pursuit phase, it is unlikely that you will accrue any benefit (income). Even if you are successful in realizing a dream, it still takes many years for a dream to generate income.

Money Risk

Dreams also often require a financial investment. The #1 Money Risk associated with the pursuit of a dream is that you will lose all of the money you invested, if that dream does not become a reality. Once again, the many voices that make up your inner circle will be asking you to raise the white flag, if your dream doesn’t start to pay dividends.

The secondary Money Risk is that, even if your dream becomes a reality, the money you invest during its pursuit will be locked up for however long it takes for your dream to become a reality.

Despite all of the above, when you realize a dream, the financial rewards are very often huge when compared to the investment. And that payoff is life changing. Money problems disappear, doors previously closed, magically opening up, opportunities to increase your wealth, manifest out of thin air and last but not least – more freedom because you have the money to do what you want, when you want.

Freedom! Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

This significant, down the road financial windfall, and all of the tag-along benefits that accrue, is why the pursuit of a dream is the #1 method for amassing the most wealth.

Practice makes perfect.

We’ve all heard someone, probably a teacher, tell us that. That is why teachers assign homework.

But the truth is, practice only makes you good enough – good enough to master the basics of whatever skill you are trying to learn. Then, you move on to the next thing, another topic or skill. That’s the process millions of schoolchildren follow. It’s the educational process in America.

Analytical practice, however, takes you from good to virtuoso.

Analytical practice is very different from plain vanilla practice. It requires more consistent effort and more time.

In the case of analytical practice, analysis results in improved quality. You practice and then you dissect and analyze every component of the actions involved in that skill.

Take tennis, for example.

The good tennis players master every skill: serve, volley, backhand, forehand, overhead and drop shots.

But virtuosos don’t stop at good.

For virtuosos, once they master the basics, that is when the hard work really begins.

Virtuoso tennis players will focus months on one stroke. They will hit hundreds of backhands down the line and hundreds of backhands cross court. They will hit hundreds of backhands with topspin. They will hit hundreds of backhands with a slice. They will hit hundreds of short backhands, those that land within the service lines. They will hit hundreds of long backhands, those the land within on inch of the baseline.

Each time they hit one particular type of backhand, they stop to analyze what went right and what went wrong. Then they make adjustments and practice some more.

Since 2013 I have been applying Analytical Practice to my writing. Every morning I write for at least one hour. Then, at night, I analyze what I wrote that morning. I dissect it, study it, and often, re-write what I wrote that morning.

After years of doing this, I have had at least a dozen of my media articles go viral. I’ve had books that have become bestsellers. That’s not an accident. It’s the byproduct of analytical practice.

If you want to take your life to the next level, you must become a virtuoso in whatever it is you do. Virtuosos make more money. Because they make more money, they are able to accumulate more wealth.

And the path to becoming a Virtuoso is Analytical Practice.

Life is hard.

Loss of a major client/customer, kids struggling in school, family or close friends getting divorced, cancer, heart attacks, recessions that affect your business or job, bad politicians messing things up, countries at war.

As long as you are alive, there will be problems. And those problems, if you allow them too, can get you down. They can even break you, if you allow them too. 

What’s not easy is to stay positive before, during and after dealing with life’s burdens. What’s not easy is to forge the positive mental attitude of looking for the rainbows after the storms.

There will always be problems in life. Problems, like wrenches, get tossed in everyones path. Problems which can momentarily take you off task. When you have a positive outlook on life, however, you learn from those problems, smile and move on.

Those problems help you grow into the person you need to be in order for success to visit you.

You have a dream. And deep down you know that dream will create a better life for you and your family. But life wants to know if you have what it takes to become a success.

Whether you know it or not, you do. You are stronger than you ever imagined.

Stand up to life’s hardships. Refuse to surrender to adversity.

Your dream will become a reality if you learn to waltz between the hardships.

It’s the common denominator in all self-made millionaires which allows them to keep moving forward.

There are 1,440 minutes in each day. That is the one common denominator we all share. With respect to time, we are all on equal footing.

Most people, rich or poor, consume about 1,200 of those minutes engaged in the following activities: work, commuting, family-related, sleeping, eating, bathing, bathroom, grooming and dressing.

That leaves about 240 minutes of time, each day. And it is what the rich do with those 240 minutes that separates them from everyone else in society.

According to my Rich Habits Study, the self-made rich make good use of their 240 minutes by forging daily habits that cover the following activities:

82% Engaged in Sixty Minutes a Day of Dream-Setting Activities

Dream-Setting activities involve the pursuit of a dream and the goals behind that dream. Typically, this is something extracurricular to work, such as engaging in some side hustle or spending time creating one or more additional streams of income. I cover Dream-Setting in detail in my book Change Your Habits Change Your Life.

77% Engaged in Sixty Minutes a Day of Deliberate Practice/Self Education Activities

Each day, the self-made rich in my Rich Habits Study regularly practiced some skill and regularly devoted time to increasing their knowledge related to that skill, their career or their industry. This daily habit helped them maintain and improve their skills and their knowledge, making them virtuosos in whatever it is they did to make money.

95% Engaged in Thirty Minutes a Day of Aerobic Exercise

Aerobic exercise has numerous benefits:

• Improves Mental Functioning – Aerobic exercise floods the bloodstream with oxygen. This oxygen eventually makes its way to the brain. Since the brain uses 20% of our oxygen reserves, increased oxygen flow into the brain soaks up more free radicals inside the brain, making brain cells cleaner and healthier.
• Improves Health –Aerobic exercise increases blood flow, feeds the body with oxygen, strengthens the heart, helps reduce the risk of osteoporosis, helps lower high blood pressure, helps control blood sugar levels, boosts your high-density lipoprotein (HDL or “good”) cholesterol and lowers your low-density lipoprotein (LDL or “bad”) cholesterol. The self-made rich understand that healthier people have fewer sick days, more energy and this translates into more productivity at work. More productivity makes you more valuable to your organization, customers or clients, which translates into more value and ultimately more money.
• Reduces Risk of Sickness and Disease – Oxygen is like a sponge. It soaks up free radicals (cancer causing elements) and converts these free radicals to carbon dioxide. The blood carries this carbon dioxide to the lungs, which then removes the carbon dioxide from our bodies by exhaling it into the environment. Aerobic exercise reduces the risk of many conditions, including obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke and certain types of cancer.
• Reduces the Effects of Stress Which Improves Immune System – When we feel stress, there is a domino effect of physiology that takes place inside our bodies which depresses the immune system and opens the door to sickness and disease. Because aerobic exercise contributes to an overall feeling of well-being through the release of certain hormones, it acts as a stress reducer.
• Makes Us Feel Happier –Aerobic exercise contributes to an overall feeling of well-being by releasing endorphins, natural painkillers that promote an increased sense of well-being and make us feel “happier”.

You can’t make money in a hospital bed. Creating wealth requires good health. Good health translates into longevity, which means more time to create more wealth.

89% Devoted 30 Minutes a Day to Building Rich Relationships

The self-made rich in my study did certain things every day to maintain and grow powerful relationships:

• Networking – Participating in or running business organizations, non-profits or trade associations.
• Hello Calls – Calling important relationships just to say hello.
• Happy Birthday Calls – Calling the relationships that matter on their birthday.
• Life Event Calls – Making calls to relationships who have had a baby, gotten married, experienced a death in the family, etc. Life Event Calls are critical because life events are always emotion-based and emotions create powerful memories. They will remember you and your call.

100% Engaged in Relaxation/Leisure Activities

The self-made are not superhuman. Like everyone else, they require some daily downtime. The difference between them and everyone else is that they moderate that downtime to no more than an hour a day.

How you spend your time each day determines the financial circumstances of your life. The rich forge daily habits that make productive use of their time. They stick to their daily routines for many years. These daily habits have a cumulative effect which eventually shows up in the form of increased wealth towards the later part of their lives.

Every productive minute pays dividends down the road in the form of virtuoso skills and knowledge, good health and increased longevity, strong relationships and greater wealth.

For the rich, every minute counts.