Archives for February 2020

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life.

“A fight is going on inside me,” the grandfather said to the boy.

“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, pride, superiority and ego.”

He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”

The grandfather went on, “This same fight is going on inside you and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

What you feed grows.

When you feed yourself with knowledge, you grow in knowledge.

When you feed yourself daily exercise, your body grows stronger.

When you feed yourself healthy food, your health improves.

When you feed yourself optimism, you become hopeful about all of life’s possibilities.

When you feed yourself good habits, those habits improve the circumstances of your life.

What are you putting on your plate every day?

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!

When you are doing something you like or love, time seems to fly by. They call it the State of Flow.

And whenever you find yourself in a State of Flow, think long and hard about what you are/were doing while in that State of Flow.

Why?

Because that State of Flow activity is very likely the thing you should be doing to make a living.

The State of Flow is triggered when you are doing something you love. And when you are doing something you love, to earn your income, you never have to “work” another day in your life.

That is something Richard Branson told me. We both spoke at the Titan Summit back in 2014.

I had to follow Richard Branson’s speech.

Afterwards, me and the other speakers were given the opportunity to hang out with Branson for a little while.

I told Branson that I read he was a workaholic. And I asked him if he thought he was a workaholic.

He said no.

He then turned the tables on me by asking me if I loved what I did for a living. I told him I love to write and speak.

He asked me if that was “work” to me. I told him that I always felt guilty about devoting so much time to writing and speaking. It felt like I wasn’t really working, because I enjoyed it so much.

Branson then said, “Bingo!”  and asked me this question: “If I told you I played 14 hours a day, would you think I was a hard worker or lazy?”

I told him, I would think he was lazy.

Branson then smiled at me and said that that is how he felt every day. Like he was playing and not working. He said he loved what he did so much, he did it for 14 hours every day.

“In the process, I became a billionaire,” Branson said

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!

You can’t self-talk your way to greater confidence.

Confidence is earned. It is forged in the white-hot fires of action.

The path to success is riddled with many pitfalls, setbacks, obstacles, mistakes and problems. Like a roller coaster, your confidence drops with every setback and rises with every accomplishment. One of the rewards for those who are able to ride this roller coaster to success, is sky-high confidence, gained only through taking action in overcoming obstacles/mistakes.

Every time you overcome adversity, you learn what works and what doesn’t work. This causes your confidence to grow.

For those pursuing success, understand that your confidence will be tested along the journey. You must get comfortable with this ebb and flow in confidence. There will be days when your confidence is high and there will be days when it is low.

Those who persevere and never quit, eventually figure out what to do and what not to do and are beneficiaries of certain factors which boost confidence.

Confidence Boosters – In Order of Impact

1. Victory Log – Success is the #1 booster of self-confidence. Every time you succeed at something, your confidence grows. Even small victories, boost confidence. Maintaining a Victory Log, and reviewing it during your confidence low points, is helpful in restoring your confidence levels.
2. Daily Practice – Deliberate and Analytical Practice, if done daily, will boost your confidence in your skills.
3. Daily Study – The more you know about what you do to make a living, the more confident you become in what you do.
4. Goals Accomplished Log – Every goal is like a mini-success event. Like success, every time you achieve a goal, your confidence grows. Maintaining a Goals Accomplished Log, has the same confidence-boosting effects of a Victory Log.
5. Overcoming Obstacles – Obstacles stand in the way of you and success. But obstacles are important because they teach you what works and what doesn’t work. Once you figure out what works, you can cookie cut the learning into a failure-proof process, which boosts your confidence. So, every obstacle you overcome, boosts your confidence.
6. Solving Problems – Much like obstacles, problems stand in the way of you and success. Finding solutions to problems helps you gain knowledge and this boosts your confidence.
7. Realizing a Dream – Every dream requires the achievement of multiple goals, overcoming obstacles, and solving problems. Each dream you realize, you can point to. This gives you confidence that you can realize your dreams. The more dreams you realize, the more powerful your confidence becomes.

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!

According to researchers from the University of Illinois, the more sleep a person gets, the more optimistic they are about life.

Why is optimism, and thus sleep, so important?

Reason #1 – Optimists Are More Successful

Martin Seligman was a Psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. In the mid-1980’s, he created a Style Questionnaire that MetLife’s new salesmen were all required to complete. The responses to the Questionnaire helped Seligman classify each salesman as skewing more towards optimism or pessimism.

After two years of selling, Seligman compared the success of each salesman to the answers on the Questionnaires. What he found was eye-opening – the MetLife salesmen who skewed towards optimism outsold the pessimists by 20% in year one and 50% in year two.

Reason #2 – Optimists Live Longer

Telomeres are the caps at the end of each chromosome. When your Telomeres unravel, the chromosomes fall apart and cells are unable to divide in order to create new cells to replace them.

Numerous studies have found a direct correlation between the length of Telomeres and life expectancy. The longer your Telomere, the longer you will live.

Becca Levy is a Professor of Epidemiology/Psychology at the Yale School of Public Health. She is also the lead author of a prominent study on Telomeres. Levy found that those who were more upbeat and positive had longer Telomeres and better health.

Reason #3 – Optimism Maximizes Brain Performance

When you are enveloped in pessimism, negativity or severe stress, you literally shut down half of your pre-frontal cortex, your brain’s executive command and control center.

Have you ever read stories about of individuals who were in “shock” following some type of catastrophic accident? In many of these stories, police and medical emergency personnel who arrive at the scene often describe the accident victims as being in a zombie state. They are uncommunicative, unresponsive and, well, zombie-like. Their very consciousness seems to be closed off to the world around them.

When you are faced with a life or death situation, the fight or flight process of the subconscious mind (limbic system and brain stem) takes control over your brain. It does this by overriding and taking your pre-frontal cortex offline.

• Your visual cortex shuts down, so things your eyes are seeing are not processed by the occipital lobe.
• Your hearing shuts down and all you hear is noise.
• You entire awareness to the outside world goes into shut down mode.
• You become oblivious to everything around you – your external environment.

There’s a good reason for this. During very stressful events, your thinking and focus is intentionally narrowed, so that you can focus on one thing – survival.

Pessimism creates stress and anxiety, triggering a watered-down version of “fight o flight”. Your brain’s CEO, the pre-frontal cortex, when pessimistic, automatically becomes less in control and your focus and awareness becomes narrowed. As a result of this narrowed focus and awareness, you become oblivious to solutions to problems and opportunities.

Those who remain perpetually negative or pessimistic, struggle financially, struggle keeping a job, struggle with relationships and have almost no chance of succeeding in life because they are unable to fully deploy the powers of the pre-frontal cortex to enable them see solutions and opportunities that would help them solve their problems and create a happy life.

Reason #4 – Optimism is Contagious

In a Farmington Heart Study, in which twenty years of data was analyzed, James Fowler, lead study author, found that emotions, such as optimism, spread throughout your social networks – they infect everyone within your inner circle, including your children. This optimism contagion positively affects sales prospects, investors, employees and everyone you do business with.

Reason #5 – 54% of the Rich in My Rich Habits Study Said Their Optimistic Outlook Was Critical to Their Success and thus, Their Ability to Accumulate Wealth.

Reason #6 – Optimism Produces Wealth and Pessimism Produces Poverty

A paper published by the University of Cologne in Germany in the May 2015 Journal of Personality and Psychology, in which more than 68,000 Americans and Europeans were studied, found that pessimism causes poverty.

The study noted that pessimism makes you wary of trusting others. It went on to argue that when you see people in a pessimistic light – untrustworthy, self-interested and deceitful – you are less likely and less willing to rely on others.

Those in the study who were the most pessimistic, also happened to be the poorest. If you are wary about trusting others, you’re likely to have a lower income now and in the future, the study concluded.

Conversely, those in the study who were optimistic, had a more trusting view of others and a higher income than the pessimists.

Pessimists miss out on opportunities because they are less likely to ask for help and less likely to collaborate with others.

Reason #7 – Optimists Have a Higher Risk Tolerance Level

In 1998 and 2001, B.L. Frederickson conducted two studies, measuring cognitive ability and risk tolerance. What he found was that those who were more optimistic had a greater degree of risk tolerance.

Elon Musk is perhaps the best modern day example of someone who was willing to take enormous calculated risk, putting everything he had on the line. His over the top optimism made that possible. He used it to infect everyone he came into contact with. The investors, employees, the government, even NASA became infected with Musk’s unbridled optimism. The all took significant risks in partnering with Musk. Risks they would have otherwise found intolerable.

Reason #8 – Sleep Improves Long-Term Memory

The hippocampus and pre-frontal cortex send signals back and forth to each other, thousands of times, during the REM portion of sleep. Like a well choreographed dance, this process converts short-term memory to long-term memory.

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!

What is your oldest memory?

How old were you?

In 1964, my family moved into a new home on Staten Island. Very soon after we moved in, my Mother took me to Staten Island Academy. They had a day care or summer care camp for children.

To this day, I still remember everything about that first day at Staten Island Academy.

I remember screaming-crying as my mother tried to pull away from me to leave. I remember holding on to her for dear life as some older woman was pulling me off and away from my Mom. I remember standing around the outside playground area crying as other kids swarmed around me, curiously looking at the new crying kid on the block.

I shared this memory with my Mom some years ago, before she passed away. My Mom somewhat shocked. She said that memory was burned into her brain because she felt so guilty having to leave me with the day care facility. She also said there was no way I could remember that day because I was far too young.

How young was I? I asked my Mom.

She said I was about to turn three years old.

Three years old!

Good or bad, certain childhood experiences become permanently imprinted in your brain because of something Behavioral Scientists refer to as the Primacy Effect.

According to this Primacy Effect, first impressions are likely to carry more weight than other memories.

We remember early, emotional events in our childhood even into our very adult years.

We remember first best friends, first teachers, first vacations, first swimming lessons, first base hits, first kiss, first fight, first broken bones, etc.

When it comes to habits, the habits we forge in our childhood, due to this Primacy Effect, stick with us into adulthood.

• If you were raised in a family with good or bad money habits, those money habits follow you into adulthood.
• If you were raised in a family where alcohol consumption habits were commonplace, those habits will follow you into adulthood.
• If you were raised in a family where parents fought with each other, you will fight with your spouse as an adult.
• If you were raised in a family where everyone worked hard to get what they wanted, you will work hard as an adult, in order to get what you want.
• If you were raised in an optimistic/pessimistic family, that optimism/pessimism will become part of your adult personality.

This Primacy Effect is why some habits are so hard to change – they may have been imprinted into your brain at a very young age.

And this Primacy Effect is also why many habits are invisible to you – they’ve been with you so long, you aren’t even aware you have them, until someone like me forces you to confront them.

Without awareness, habit change is impossible. You can’t change a habit if you don’t even know it exists.

But once you become aware of your bad habits, change is possible, even probable.

If you know how.

That’s why I wrote Change Your Habits Change Your Life. Included in that book is the latest in habit change science.

Rich Habits, Rich Kids, Rich Habits Poor Habits and my latest book, Effort-Less Wealth, teaches you What habits to change.

Change Your Habits Change Your Life, teaches you How.

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!

All habits are created and regulated by the brain. So, in order to fully understand habits, you need to understand how the brain works.

This turned out to be quite a rabbit hole for me. One I didn’t expect to enter when I began my Rich Habits research.

But, nonetheless, I did stroll down that rabbit hole and in the process, learned quite a bit about the brain and how it works.

Habits are turned on or off by brain cells (AKA “Neurons”). Most habits require multiple brain cells that must work together in order to initiate a habit.

When those brain cells are fired up to engage in a habit, this requires them to be connected somehow to other parts of the brain.

For example, the brain cells that are involved in the exercise habit must somehow tell the cerebellum (area of the brain that controls motor activity) to get the legs and arms moving.

How does it do that?

Thanks to it’s amazing infrastructure, the entire brain is interconnected. Here’s how.

Main Brain Areas

It’s much more complicated than I’m making it out, but most neuroscientists/neurologists/brain experts agree that there are three main parts to the brain:

1. Cerebral Cortex
2. Limbic System
3. Brain Stem

Peduncles

Peduncle’s connect each of these three main brain regions to each other.

What the hell is a Peduncle?

Peduncles are like bridges. They are thick brain fibers that connect one major part of the brain with another major brain region.

There are three main Peduncles, or brain bridges:

1. Cortex Peduncle
2. Spinal Preduncle
3. Cerebellar Peduncle

The Verrazano Bridge connects Staten Island to Brooklyn. When you cross the Verrazano into Brooklyn, you can take the Belt Parkway or the Gowanus Expressway.

Much like the Verrazano Bridge, each Peduncle bridge connects to other brain parkways/expressways.

Which brings me to Fasciculis.

Fasciulis

Fascucu what?

Fasciculis are the expressways that project out from each Peduncle. There are twelve of these expressway, Fasciculi’s. The Optical Nerve is one, the Arcuate Nerve Track Fasciculi is another.

These Fasciuli’s are actually bundled Cranial Nerve Tracks that branch out and connect to numerous brain cells.

Pons

Pons are the brain’s relay station, or a hub. Think Penn Station. The brain’s Pons receives passengers (brain signals) and sends passengers off to where they need to go. When a brain signal reaches the Pons, just above the Brain Stem, it is instructed where to go.

Overview of Our Connected Brain

Here’s an example of how the Limbic System brain region is connected to the Cerebral Cortex brain region:

Brain Stem —> Pons —> Cerebellar Peduncle —> Fasciuli —> Cerebral Cortex

There are billions of brain cells that are all interconnected to each other through this neural infrastructure of brain regions, bridges, expressways and hubs.

The cool thing is that, despite this complex infrastructure, the communication along this infrastructue occurs instantaneously.

Habits are amazing because the brain is amazing!

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!

Parents serve a very important, basic function in society – they turn children into functioning adults. This is a critical function because without it, society would fall into utter chaos.

But if you want more for your children, you must become more to your children, than a parent. You must become a success mentor.

About 24% of the self-made millionaires in my Rich Habits Study had success mentors. Interestingly, when I asked them how important were their success mentors to their success, 93% said they owed all of their success and wealth to their mentors.

Also, these mentored-millionaires said that their success mentors fast tracked their success. Their mentors taught them what to do and what not to do, which helped them avoid costly mistakes. They also served as advisors, helping to guide them in making the right decisions/choices in life.

As I mentioned, only 24% of the self-made millionaires in my study were fortunate to have had a mentor. That is because finding a mentor is hard. Seventy-six percent of the self-made millionaires in my study did not have any mentors. As a result, they had to figure out things the hard way, through the school of hard knocks. The school of hard knocks lengthens the success journey due to costly mistakes made along the way to gaining wisdom.

Which brings me to parents. Parents are often the only shot most of us get at having a mentor in life. The fortunate few who are raised by success mentors, achieve unusual success in life.

Warren Buffet

Warren Buffet’s father was a stock broker. It’s no accident that Buffet became the world’s best known value investor. He was mentored by his dad.

The Kennedy’s

Joseph Kennedy was a very successful politician who mentored sons JFK, Bobby Kennedy and Teddy Kennedy.

Ken Griffey, Jr.

Ken Griffey Jr., arguably the most talented baseball player ever, was mentored by his professional baseball player-dad, Ken Griffey (NY Yankees).

Bill Belichick

Many probably don’t know that Bill Belichick’s father was a football coach for Navy for 33 years. At age three Bill could be found on the knee of his father watching film of Navy football players. Bill was mentored by his dad.

Parents are in a very unique position. They have the opportunity to be success mentors to their children. All they need is knowledge.

In my Rich Habits research, I found few books that taught parents how to raise millionaire children. So, I decided to write one – Rich Kids.

Parents who become success mentors to their children teach their kids what to do and what not to do. They help guide them in important life decisions and choices.

Imagine if every parent decided to become a success mentor to their children. What a very different world it would be.

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!