Archives for January 2020

Why is Success So Hard?

January 7, 2020 by Thomas C. Corley 2 Comments

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Human beings are simply amazing.

They are the only species on earth who have the innate ability to convert outlandish thoughts into reality.

We see a beautiful woman, and paint the Mona Lisa.

We see a bay, and we build a bridge to cross that bay.

We see birds fly, and build airplanes, so humans can fly.

We see the moon, and create rockets so we can fly to the moon.

The Burj Khalifa is the tallest building in the world at 2,717 feet. It is 644 feet taller than the 2nd tallest building in the world. Its height pierces the cloud barrier.

Humans built that. Amazing!

What is our limit? None. Human beings are the most amazing species to inhabit the earth. Because of this unique creative ability, we are in many respects…. godlike.

I believe there is no limit to any individual’s capacity to do great things.

And yet there are those who would have you believe that if you were born into poverty you will be stuck in poverty.

Nonsense.

Poverty is a temporary condition that can be changed, if you really want to.

It was not intended for humans to be poor, to struggle financially or to live a life of quiet desperation. We exist to be great, to achieve great things – to create the life we desire. It is within our genetic makeup to create, to produce, to innovate and to grow in knowledge and skills.

Every able-bodied human being can grow their way out of poverty by reading books, seeking feedback from others, by trying and learning from our mistakes or even by watching a YouTube video.

Our brains are hardwired to be rewired.

Because each one of us is born with this unusual ability to create amazing things, this blessing mandates that we dream big dreams.

But when we pursue our dreams, life places obstacles, impediments, detours, and unforeseen problems in our path.

Out of sheer frustration, we ask why?

Here’s my answer to the why – those obstacles, that adversity, forces you to grow into the individual you need to be in order to realize success.

Adversity sharpens us. It forces us to improve and become better at what we do. As we improve, the obstacles become easier to see and easier to overcome because we are better than we were before.

Life isn’t working against us – it’s working for us.

Each one of us is endowed with a godlike creative genius to design the life we desire. We can achieve whatever our minds can conceive.

My mission is to share my unique research in order to help others realize their dreams and achieve their goals. If you find value in these articles, please share them with your inner circle and encourage them to Subscribe. Thank You!

Filed Under: Daily Success Tips, Featured Articles

Happiness is Freedom

January 6, 2020 by Thomas C. Corley Leave a Comment

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Those who are truly happy are free.

But what does freedom mean?

Freedom is not one thing. In fact, it is many things:

Financially Free – You are financially free when your invested assets generate enough income to fund your standard of living and pay the taxes on that income.
Emotionally Free – You are emotionally free when you have become the master of your emotions.
Stress Free – You are stress free when you mastered the habit of remaining calm under pressure.
Time Free – You are time free when you can choose how you spend your time each day.
Need Free – You are need free when your income is adequate enough to provide for your daily needs.
Want Free – You are want free when you no longer want what others have and are grateful for what you have.
Debt Free – You are debt free when you are no longer burdened by debt.
Ideologically Free – You are ideologically free when you are no longer a prisoner to ideology and are open to new ideas and new perspectives.
Guilt Free – You are guilt free when you no longer care what others think or say about you.

One of the reasons happiness is so elusive is due to the fact that there are so many variables to happiness. On any given day, unexpected things happen for which you have little to no control over.

Those few who are masters of their lives, respond to life’s unexpected occurrences in a thoughtful and deliberate manner, meaning they control how they react to the unexpected.

Filed Under: Daily Success Tips, Featured Articles

Passionate About Parenting Interview – Enable Your Kids to Conquer Fear

January 4, 2020 by Thomas C. Corley Leave a Comment

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I wrote the book, Rich Kids in order to help parents teach their children the Rich Habits the self-made millionaires in my Rich Habits Study said they learned from their parents.

I was recently interviewed by Passionate About Parenting and shared some of those habits with host, Samantha Kirkegaard.

Here is a link to the site: https://passionate-about-parenting.app.virtualsummits.com/

You’ll have to register, but after you do you’ll have access to my interview, which is scheduled to be released January 23.

Filed Under: Featured Articles

Using Fear to Your Advantage

January 3, 2020 by Thomas C. Corley 1 Comment

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Those who are satisfied with the status quo of their lives, do not feel compelled to push themselves to grow in order to reach a higher level of achievement. So, in a real sense, complacency is a mindset that keeps you stuck where you are in life.

Dreamer-Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, often put everything on the line – their savings, their home, their retirement funds, personal guarantees on any money they borrow to fund their dreams, etc.

When every asset you own is being used to finance a dream, the prospect of failing is a scary thing, not just to you but to your spouse or significant other. That very real fear of failing forces Dreamer-Entrepreneurs to do what they have to do in order to survive. That fear of failure forces them to learn everything they need to know in order to avoid mistakes and when they do make a mistake, they become quick studies, so they won’t make the same mistake twice.

During this survival period, Dreamers grow into the individuals they need to be in order to survive and avoid failure. That growth is like a bank account of knowledge that they tap in order to help keep them moving forward, further and further away from failure.

And, the further away they get from failure, the closer they get to success.

So, don’t let fear hold you back from pursuing your dreams. Double down if you have to, but never quit. When you know you have everything to lose by failing, failure does not become an option. Success is your only escape hatch.

Use fear to your advantage. Let fear push you to become the person you need to be in order to succeed. When you make a decision to go for it, leveraging everything you own, you’ll be forced to grow and achieve, in order to avoid failure.

Being scared is not always a bad thing.

Filed Under: Daily Success Tips, Featured Articles

My Story

January 2, 2020 by Thomas C. Corley Leave a Comment

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I grew up in a family of eleven. There were 8 kids in our family, my Aunt Peg and my Mom and Dad.

My Dad had been a very successful entrepreneur. He was the #1 distributor of tools along the east coast. Sears, Woolworth’s and many other big-brand companies were my Dad’s customers.

We lived in a big house on Todt Hill, the most affluent area on Staten Island, a suburb of New York City. We all attended St. Joseph Hill Academy, the most prestigious primary school Staten Island had to offer and among the best primary schools in New York City.

It’s a much more complicated story, but in 1970 my Dad’s warehouse burned to the ground and his business soon went under and, almost overnight, everything about our lived changed forever.

I was nine years old when we became poor. I don’t remember much about being rich, but I remember almost everything about being poor.

My family had no money for college, so I had to work 20 hours a week as a Janitor at Curtis High School, while going to college full-time at St. John’s Universtiy. I graduated college in four years in 1983 and, after a few minor bumps, began my CPA career working for Arthur Andersen, at the time the largest Accounting firm in the world.

I muddled along in my career as a Tax Accountant and then, in 2004, I took over the helm of a CPA firm I had just acquired. Two months into my tenure I received an urgent call from an owner of one of the firm’s long-time business clients. I met with my client late that night. His bank had just termed his $300,000 line of credit and shut it down. He didn’t have enough money to meet payroll at the end of the week and he was desperately looking to me to help him get a line of credit, asap.

I told my client it would be impossible to secure a new line of credit so quickly. I told him it took years to build relationships with bankers. My client broke down and started crying. In between his sobs, he asked me what my successful clients were doing that he wasn’t doing and he also wanted to know what he was doing wrong.

I had several meetings with my client, in an effort to figure out what he was doing wrong. At one of our lunch meetings, several months later, I confessed that I could not diagnose the cause of my client’s financial problems. I told my client that they only thing I saw that was different was the fact that he paid himself about $40,000 more per year than my other clients were paying themselves in the same business.

My client was not happy. I was not happy. We sat in silence at our table for a few long minutes. In an effort to break the uncomfortable silence I asked my client what he did when he went home at night, after work. There was an immediate shift in my client’s demeanor. An almost impish look took hold and he asked me, “Which night?”

“Pick your favorite night,” I replied.

My client told me that would be Wednesday.

“What do you do on Wednesday nights?” I pressed my client.

My client leaned in, eyeing the restaurant and said ever so quietly, “I get a couple of ladies of the night, a few bottles of wine and…”

My client, in response to my obvious look of shock, stopped mid-sentence. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should not have shared that with you. I talk way too much sometimes. I started doing it after my divorce about seven years ago. I was lonely.”

I told him that I was an Irish Catholic New York boy from a family of eleven and that there was very little I had not seen in my life. My shock was not from moral indignation, but from the realization that I had been asking my client all the wrong questions these past months. The epiphany I had was that there was much more to financial problems than meets the eye and that I needed to ask the right questions.

I asked my client how much he paid for those Wednesday night trysts. He said about $600 a night. When I did the math, that Wednesday night habit worked bout to a little more than $30,000 a year or about $300,000 over a seven-year period. I then realized why my client needed to pay himself that extra $40,000 a year.

That aha moment spurred me on. Over the next several months of 2004, I came up with a list of 144 questions in 20 categories that I asked 361 rich and poor people over a five-year period. I called it my “20 Question List”. The purpose of my 20 Question List was to find out what the rich and poor did from the time the put their feet on the floor in the morning, to the time they put their head on the pillow at night.

The data I gathered from those 144 questions seemed to be predominantly habit-related.

After I was done compiling the data, I formatted it into something I called my “Research Summary”. This “Research Summary” gave me the ability to easily compare the various data points from my “Rich Group” to the data points from my “Poor Group”. I was astonished by the differences between the habits of both groups and realized that there was a difference the size of the Grand Canyon in the way rich people and poor people in my study lived their daily lives.

This one client unknowingly took me down a path toward the discovery of the secret to financial success – your daily habits.

I documented over 340 of these habit differences and wrote several books about my findings. Due to the success of my books, my Rich Habits have received international attention in the media, newspapers, magazines, online sites, nation-wide and international TV and podcasts in 27 countries.

I now travel the world speaking to audiences, sharing my precious Rich Habits research. I have become a mentor to millions and I owe it all to a failing business owner-client.

Filed Under: Featured Articles

When You Find Yourself On the Right Track – Everything Suddenly Gets Much Easier

January 2, 2020 by Thomas C. Corley Leave a Comment

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Success takes a long time, for those who succeed. Unfortunately, very few succeed.

Why is success so elusive?

Most individuals who are pursuing financial success are doing it wrong.

What do you mean when you say, they are doing it wrong?

There are two big things that prevent individuals from succeeding:

#1 – You Are Not Doing What You’re Supposed to be Doing

When you are not doing what you’re supposed to be doing, this means you are not engaged in an activity for which you have a natural, innate talent. When you are engaged in something you are just not naturally good at, it’s like trying to fit a circular object in a square hole. Because you are trying to be something you are not, your work life is hard and unfulfilling. This shows up in your net pay check.

When you are engaged in something you were meant to be doing, this means you are exploiting some natural, innate talent that is unique to you. Your brain alerts you in one of two ways, when you stumble upon a natural, innate talent:

It’s Easy – The task is easier for you to perform than it is for other people.
Passion – You enjoy the activity. When you are engaged in some activity you like or love, time flies by and you don’t want to stop doing it.

We all have natural, innate talents but almost none of us every figure out what they are. Consequently, most do not enjoy what they do for a living, feel unfulfilled and the pay they receive keeps them perpetually stuck in mediocrity.

#2 – You Are Following the Wrong Path to Wealth

There are 4 Path’s To Wealth:

Saver-Investor Path
Big Company Climber Path
Virtuoso Path
Dreamer-Entrepreneur Path

Everyone inherits certain genes from their parents, which helps shape their personality. Also, everyone is raised in different environments – we are all raised in different households, in different neighborhoods, go to different schools, etc.

Our unique genes and upbringing help to shape the individuals we become as adults.

Everyone’s different.

And because everyone’s different, each path to creating wealth, is different for each person.

Some people are outgoing or shy. Some are risk takers or risk averse. Some can shoulder great stress, without affecting their health and relationships; others crumble under too much stress.

You see, everyone is different and because everyone is different, their path to accumulating wealth must be in alignment with their particular personality.

For example, shy, risk averse, low stress-tolerant individuals would find the life of a Dreamer-Entrepreneur or Big Company Climber, ill-suited for their specific personality. Most likely, they would hate being in either of those two work environments and their pay would reflect this.

Such individuals would be better suited pursuing wealth by following the Saver-Investor or Virtuoso Path. Either path would work best for them, given their personality type.

Likewise, outgoing individuals who love high-risk challenges and seem immune to stress, are perfectly suited for the Big Company Climber Path or the Dreamer/Entrepreneur Path. If these individuals worked in a back-office job, they would very likely dislike their job.

Because there are four paths to wealth, it is critical for those who seek wealth to understand which path is right for them. If you pick the wrong path, success will remain elusive.

When you eventually stumble upon the right track, you know it. Everything starts to get much easier for you. When you are on the right track, it’s as if everything in your universe comes into perfect alignment.

When you are on the right track, life rewards you financially and emotionally.

Filed Under: Daily Success Tips, Featured Articles

For Dreamer-Entrepreneurs, the Distance Between Success & Failure Can Be Measured in Inches

January 1, 2020 by Thomas C. Corley 1 Comment

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At the end of 2008, Elon 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. He was rapidly running out of money.

Musk had gone through most of the $180 million windfall he received in 2002, when eBay acquired his PayPal stock. Plus he had tapped all of the hundreds of millions of dollars venture capitalists and the Federal government had collectively invested in SpaceX.

Most would have thrown in the towel after so many failures. But Musk refused to quit. So, he put everything on the line on September 28, 2009, the fourth attempt to put his Falcon 1 rocket into orbit. Everything hinged on that fourth flight. If it failed, it was over.

Only it didn’t fail. On his fourth and final try, the first privately built rocket made orbit and Elon Musk entered the history books.

Due to his rocket’s success, Musk was able to cobble together enough money to get SpaceX through the end of December, 2008. Then, on December 28, 2008 NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract.

The rest, as they say is history.

Today, Musk is estimated to be worth north of $23 billion. His companies are changing the world.

Success miracles often happen when relentlessly persistent Dreamers are able to overcome adversity and survive until they thrive.

For Musk, the difference between success and failure was one day – September 29, 2008. One day completely changed his life. One day was the difference between success and bankruptcy, for Elon Musk.

Life rewards Dreamers who simply refuse to quit.

Filed Under: Daily Success Tips, Featured Articles