Skip to main content
Select Language:

Category Archives: Financial Freedom

Older posts
Newer posts

Aim to Please

Posted on by 16

iStock_000001708402XSmall

There was a study out a few years ago that said 80% of millionaires are self-made. That is, they didn’t inherit their millions, and they didn’t win the lottery. They literally started out wanting to be a millionaire—like everybody else—but found a way to earn their millions.

Ten percent of self-made millionaires are people who work for self-made millionaires. They join a company like Apple when it’s small and grow financially and professionally with the company. Only about 8-9% of millionaires are professionals like doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, athletes, entertainers and such. Inheritors represent about another 1 percent. These are ballpark figures.

For a vast majority of millionaires, the one skill they had in common that made them millionaires was simple: the ability to sell something at a higher price than it costs them to produce.

So for you, the purpose of a millionaire-making enterprise is to create customers in a cost effective way, and your job is to innovate what you’re selling and market it. Those are the only two things that create customers: to find newer, better, faster, cheaper ways to help people achieve their goals or get what they want, and to let as many people know about it as possible.

The measure of the success of a business is customer satisfaction. If your customers are pleased, you’ll know because you’ll still be in business. When you realize, “It’s not about me, it’s about the customer,” you become focused on that, not ‘How can I rip them off, how can I get the money and run, how can I get them to buy once and never buy again.’

Once you have learned how to build a successful business, you can use the same principles to build business after business after business. That’s how millionaires stay millionaires.

Yet, here’s another sobering fact: a vast majority of businesses go broke in the first three to five years. Businesses started by people with no experience go broke more often than not. Businesses started by people with experience succeed 90% of the time or more.

People starting out don’t know how to sell; they don’t know how to satisfy customers; and they don’t know how to create and keep customers.

The good news is all business skills are learnable. When you realize that there are certain things successful people do over and over again—and if you can learn what they are and do them yourself over and over again—you’ll eventually get the same result.

People will say, “Well, I’m not very good at selling.” Get over it! You may not be very good at it, but it’s a learnable skill.

So what is the highest paid work in our society, for most people? It’s not doctoring, or lawyering, ball playing, or singing. It’s thinking.

Think, “What can I sell that I’m passionate about but also adds value to other people’s lives in some kind of way, and how can I do this profitably?”

The customer may not always be right, but never let them know that. You want raving fans. You want supporters. You want critics who care. You want to see those people again and again. Like any relationship, it’s not only about you and what you get out of it. It’s building and sustaining rapport while your profits soar to millionaire heights.

https://bit.ly/ClickAndBeFree

The Answer Lies in How

Posted on by 28

iStock_000015049406XSmall

From now on, whenever you have a goal, the only question you ask is, “How?” If you have a problem, the question is, “How do you solve it? How do you overcome it?”

All successful people ask how. They’re proactive. They’re action oriented, and the word ‘how’ is like pushing the button on a detonator. The answer always triggers you into explosive action. You can’t ask ‘How do I solve this,’ ‘How do I achieve it,’ ‘How do I get there,’ or ‘How do I overcome it’ without being triggered into taking an action of some kind.

If top people think about what they want and how to get it, what is it that unhappy, unsuccessful people think about most of the time? They think about what they don’t want and/or who’s to blame. That’s the basic summary of all abnormal psychology. They think about what they don’t want, which makes them unhappy, and they think about who is to blame, which makes them angry.

Unsuccessful, unhappy people are always angry at someone who they blame for their problems. The goal is to mature to the point where you realize that you are in command of your own life. You’re in charge. You make things happen. You are not a victim. That was then, this is now.

Never allow your past to determine your future. Think about what you want and how to get it.

When you turn toward the sunshine; when you think about what you want and how to get it, the shadow of negativity falls behind you. You realize you can’t change any of that stuff from the past anyway, so why fret over it anymore, yes? You have control over now. Now you can ask how. ‘Instead of what thinking about what I don’t want, what do I want, and how do I get there?’

One of the greatest wastes of life is to be upset about something that happened in the past that you can’t change. One of the great uses of life is to think about what you want in the future and how you’re going to get it. You keep your mind so focused on the future that all those other things just peel away like dead skin.

Don’t allow unhappy experiences in the past to keep re-emerging in your daily life. This is what holds us back. This is what stops people from succeeding.

Maybe some things happened to you that were beyond your control. Maybe those events had consequences that detoured or even derailed some goals in your life up until this point. Maybe you’re still living with those consequences. You are responsible for your life now. You are responsible for the things that you want and how to get them.

Nobody is smarter than you. Nobody is better than you. If they are doing better, they have just figured out how. They’ve gotten the recipe before you did, but the recipes are available to everyone.

What was the recipe for your success? How were you able to use basic, simple psychology to turn your situation around from lethargy to activity? What’s your story? We want to hear from you!

Time: Your Friend or Your Foe?

Posted on by 13

iStock_000001291947XSmall

How long does it take to get to where you want to be?

The answer for most people is ‘Too long!’ In our culture of instant gratification, the likelihood that it can take years to become a millionaire is enough to keep most from ever trying.

The truth is few businesses make money in the first four years. In fact the average business takes two years to lose money, two more years to pay back the money it lost, and three more years to become profitable. In other words, it typically takes seven years for a business to succeed.

For a lot of people that’s way too long, but for most fields of study, work, or career, it takes about seven years to become a master. Seven years seems like a long time, and in some ways it is, but in seven years how much older will you be regardless?

One of the prime rules for success also happens to be one of the hardest to swallow. I choked on it for a while, maybe because it’s so painfully obvious and avoidable: that time is going to pass anyway. Seven years from now, seven years will have gone by. Three years from now three years will have gone by, so whatever you know you’re supposed to be doing anyway, get on with it!

Put your head down, pull out every stop, and pay any price you can to get into the top 10% in your field. Then you’ll remain one of the highest paid people in your field for the rest of your life.

But here’s another important point to remember: the pay-off is not when you get to your goal. If you think that’s the case, you are setting yourself up for some serious disappointment. You only get to a goal once, yes, then what? Then the next, and the next, and then your head is always looking ahead instead of where you’re at right now.

The pay-off is every step of along the way. Every step you take toward becoming better, you feel yourself improving. It raises your self esteem. It releases endorphins in your brain which make you happy. Every step you take toward the goal makes you happy and gives you energy. It’s people who are not moving in the direction of becoming better who are negative, unhappy, miserable complainers.

We constantly have to work on ourselves. Your life only gets better when you get better, and there’s no limit to how much better you can become. Conversely, it’s your weakest skill that is holding you back. Your weakest key skill in your field sets the height of your income.

Time is on your side, and it’s not. Time, in reality, doesn’t really care what you do or don’t do. It’s going to keep moving (or not “moving,” depending on how Zen you want to get here!) regardless of whether or not you get up and stop wasting it, or stop pushing things off, or stop making excuses. Time can be your friend or ally, but never your enemy. The real enemy is usually within.

What one skill—if you developed a mastery of it—would help you the most to increase your income? What would help you the most in terms of learning a skill within your career or business right now?

https://bit.ly/ClickAndBeFree

Think Rich, Get Rich: Is it really that simple?

Posted on by 12

iStock_000012425671XSmall

Each time I am on stage or working directly with my students in my mastermind groups, I tell them, “Don’t just take my word for anything.” And I mean it. Not everything is always right or wrong, and experience is always the best teacher. Anything we learn has to put it to the test for ourselves.  However, I will say that what I’ve learned has worked for me, and it’s worked for thousands. I am sure, especially during this economic challenge, that you have seen “financial gurus” promising you secrets on how to change your financial situation instantly. What makes me any different than the others? Why should anybody listen to me?

It’s not like I had some special gift that got me to where I am today. Like some of the best things in life, the turning point in my financial destiny came to me completely out of my control. See, after yet another failed business venture, I was forced to move back into my parents’ basement. A visiting friend of my father’s—a very rich friend—took pity on this 20-something still living with his folks and gave me advice that literally changed my life.

He said, “If you thought the way rich people do and did what rich people do, do you believe you could become rich too?” I probably hemmed and hawed some kind of ‘I guess’ response, and he added, “Then all you have to do is copy how rich people think.”

The missing ingredient in my bid for financial success was two-fold. Not only was it knowing what other successful people know, but it was also knowing what was going on in my own mind.

Without examining our true beliefs, sometimes we can block our own success and not even realize it. For me, even though I said I wanted to be rich, I had some unconscious worries about it. I was afraid that I might fail, or even worse, succeed and then lose it all, then look like a fool.

Eventually, I became aware of how my own thoughts were holding me back from wealth, and more importantly, I learned several powerful ways to “unlearn” what we’re typically conditioned to think when it comes to money, so I would think in the same ways that rich people do.

How many times have you challenged your own thoughts and beliefs about money, or about who you really are for that matter? How do you really feel about yourself? Do you actually believe that you deserve to be wealthy? Our personal blueprint ends up determining our money blueprint, and we need to understand these influences before we can begin transforming into a millionaire mindset.

I believe our lives are shaped by defining moments and the decisions that we make from them. From one embarrassing yet insightful incidence, I made a decision to learn everything I could about the psychology of money and success. My results speak for themselves.

It’s true: rich people really do think differently than most. To make that transition, you have to let go of some of your old ways of thinking about money and about yourself, and adopt some new thought patterns. In other words, you need to learn how to think like someone who is rich.

It really is that simple. If you think like rich people do and do what they do, chances are you’ll get rich too!

https://bit.ly/NewMMI

Money is Not the Answer

Posted on by 17

iStock_000015980801XSmall

That’s got to sound ironic coming from someone who believes whole-heartedly in the benefits of being rich. Forget about getting out of debt, paying bills, buying nice things, etc. That stuff’s great, but at the end of it all you’re not going to give a damn about your credit rating. Money’s the last thing on your mind in that moment, I would imagine.

Money can reduce the stress of living, but it can bring just as much if not more anxiety. I’ve gone through my cycles of accumulating and losing money, getting more and losing it again. The money wasn’t burning a hole in my pocket. I just had a big hole in my pocket and didn’t bother to sew it up. That hole represented something in my mental blueprint that kept me from being stable with money. There was nothing wrong with the money.

On the other hand, people without money often think if they just had enough to do this or that, then things would be better. While that may be true, what happens when the mind goes into ‘Only if …’ consistently? That’s exactly what you get … ‘only if.’

‘This will only happen if…’

All of a sudden nothing’s happening and you don’t even know or remember that rule you created. In business that thinking often translates into “It takes money to make money.” No! If you have money it can certainly grow more money, but it doesn’t take money to make money. It takes creativity to make money.

Throwing money at a problem is disaster! In business there’s no such thing as a money problem. That problem grew out of somewhere else. You want to fix the root of the problem. If you throw money at a business problem, you’ll have the same business problem for the rest of your life and no money. Creativity and knowledge are the answers, not money.

It’s also not logical to blame money for people’s shortcomings, or the world’s for that matter. Obviously there are people that are rich and greedy, but there are poor people who are greedy and there are middle class people who are greedy. There are rich, poor, and middle-class people who are generous. There are rich, poor and average income people who can be both generous and greedy, depending on the stress they’re going through at any given time.

To say rich people are greedy as a blanket statement is just as unfair as saying poor people are lazy. I’ve met many a hard-working poor person who just hadn’t yet turned the corner on working smarter instead of just harder.

Money can’t be the root of all evil. Envy, jealousy, and greed—all based on fear of not having or getting enough of something we want—pre-dated currency (think about the story of Cain and Able). It’s a part of what it means for us to be human.

If money isn’t the cause of all that’s wrong, it’s not going to be the cure either. It’s not the answer. It’s the fruit of our expansion—or lack thereof—beyond ourselves and of the impact we’re having on the world. What we choose to do with that is a result of who we choose to be, not because of money.

Older posts
Newer posts