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Millionaire Success Habits: The Gateway to Wealth and Prosperity By Dean Graziosi
What’s in it for me? Adopt the million-dollar mindset.
People who enjoy wealth and success just drew a lucky hand in life, right?
Nope! Success has nothing to do with luck. Successful people don’t just sit around waiting for good things to come to them – they go out and seize prosperity for themselves.
These are people who have vision, who take risks, and who throw themselves into unfamiliar situations. While it’s true that not every venture or risk pays off, this mindset makes the people who pursue them more likely to succeed in life.
That’s what differentiates successful people from average people; they possess a million-dollar mindset.
And you know what? You could have this mindset too – if you want it!
You just need to think and act like a millionaire. That means swapping out your limiting beliefs for empowering ones, and your harmful habits for successful ones.
This summary is designed to help you do just that. It will lay out a set of simple yet powerful principles, which you can incorporate into your daily routine right now.
While the main focus is on financial success, the habits presented here are designed to propel you to fulfillment in all areas of your life, from your love-life to your health. By taking the time to work on yourself now, you can achieve levels of wealth, prosperity, and happiness that you never believed were attainable.
In this, you’ll learn
why the advice you’re getting from your friends and relatives might be harming you;
how a Navajo fable can teach us about success; and
which essential ingredient all successful people possess.
Act more intentionally and stick to your goals by identifying what truly motivates you.
Could you say, truthfully, that you know what you want from life?
If not, you’re not alone. Most people struggle with this question. They have no trouble saying what they don’t want out of life, though! They might say that they don’t want to be lonely or poor, for instance. But when it comes to what they do want, they’re stumped.
This is a problem if you want to be successful in life. How can you be expected to make your desires a reality if you don’t even know what they are?
If you were to start a long car journey without knowing your destination, what do you imagine would happen? Well, you’d likely end up lost and out of gas.
Similarly, if you go through life aimlessly, you won’t end up anywhere noteworthy. That’s why it’s important to occasionally take stock and remind yourself of what you’re really working toward.
In other words, you need to figure out your why. This is what drives you – what really drives you. It’s your deepest, rawest, truest desire.
Having said that, it’s not always immediately obvious what our why really is; this can take quite a bit of self-analysis to discover.
Fortunately, the author and his team have devised a technique to help expedite the process of self-discovery. This technique is called 7 Levels Deep.
Best done with a partner, the technique involves being asked a “why” question seven times.
The answer you provide forms the basis for the next question. So, for example, in response to the question, “Why do you want to earn $100,000 a month?” you might say, “Because it will make me free.” The next question would then be, “Why is it important to be free?” and you might say, “So I can spend more time with my family.” Each round of questioning forces you to dig a little deeper into your motivations.
Once, during a motivational course he was giving, the author performed this exercise on a member of the audience. He was blown away by the participant’s final response. The man revealed that he’d been a drug addict when his mother passed away. Ashamed that this was the last image she’d had of him, he spent the rest of his life trying to make amends by doing good in the world.
Whatever your why is, having a sense of what truly drives you will help refine your vision of where you want to end up.
Overcome the negative forces within you that are holding you back.
The Navajo people have a fable that they tell their children. It goes like this:
Inside us all, there are two wolves in a constant struggle with one another. One of the wolves is a jealous and malicious creature that only sees evil in the world. The other is filled with love and compassion; it believes it can achieve anything it puts its mind to.
Which of these wolves wins the struggle? Whichever one you decide to feed.
Just like the malicious wolf in the fable, we all have a little voice within us that sows self-doubt and feeds off our self-esteem. This voice robs enjoyment from life and discourages us from moving our lives forward.
If we want to be successful, we need to learn how to shut off this voice – and that means being mindful of the bad habits that feed it.
One example of this is when we invest time in attempting to correct our weaknesses. For instance, you might have experienced that in response to a bad grade in calculus, your parents or teachers forced you to spend more time on it than on subjects you actually enjoyed. This is very common – and very harmful – advice. That’s because when you focus on your weaknesses, you spend most of your time struggling to produce average results at best, which only serves to make you feel inferior.
So, here’s some advice: Screw your weaknesses! Do what you love! When you work on what you’re great at, you’ll be more fulfilled, more confident, and more productive.
Remember, it’s more important to be a master at a few core skills than it is to be average at a lot.
Another bad habit that we’re all guilty of is putting too much stock in the advice of unqualified people. People who dream big are often given stultifying advice. They’re told they don’t have the right experience, the right education, or the right amount of money to get a business off the ground. Worst of all is the voice that encourages us to “play it safe.” This type of dream-stealing advice only encourages us to settle for mediocrity.
Being able to successfully repel this bad advice means adopting these two practices: First, only accept advice from people who are successful in the area you’re seeking guidance.
Second, always trust your own instincts.
Once the negative voices within you are muted, you can’t even begin to imagine how much more you’ll achieve in your personal and professional life!
Adopt practices that help the best version of yourself to shine.
Thankfully, the negative forces within you are tempered by another force: your inner hero. Your inner hero is you at your very best – confident, motivated, and passionate about life. When you let your inner hero shine through, there’s really nothing you can’t do.
Here, we’re going to look at three success habits to cultivate your inner hero.
The first habit is to carry yourself like a winner.
Imagine two men sitting at different tables in a restaurant. One is sullen, has poor posture, and mumbles to the waiter. The other is sitting straight up and is smiling and joking with the waiter. Which of these men is enjoying life more do you think? Who’s better at their job? Who’s the better lover? Intuitively, we conclude that the first man seems depressed and overwhelmed by life’s challenges. By contrast, the second man seems full of energy and vibrancy – or, in other words, seems more like a winner.
But, you know what? Maybe you don’t feel like a winner. So then, you might wonder, what’s the point in acting?
Well, how you act is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Countless studies have shown that smiling actually makes you feel better, and adopting power poses makes you feel more powerful.
You should carry yourself like a winner because, even if you’re acting at first, pretty soon it’ll just be who you are.
This is true for how you talk about yourself too. That’s why the second success habit is to always use positive language when you talk about yourself.
When you say things like “I feel pissed off,” or “I feel stressed,” it tends to lock you into these emotions. Instead, try speaking positively, and catch negative words before they come out of your mouth. If they do slip out, then calmly stop and restate. For example, if you said “I feel stressed,” restate this as “I’m pushing myself and learning a lot.”
The third success habit is to cultivate your social circle. You might not be aware of it, but you emulate the people around you. We all do. We pick up other people’s habits and thought patterns. If you want to be physically fit, for example, it helps to make friends with people who are into fitness. The same can be said of financial success. If you want to be financially successful, then make friends with people who are financially successful themselves.
Surrounding yourself with positive, solution-focused people is the best way to pick up even more success habits and thought patterns.
You are what you tell yourself you are.
We all have a life story – a narrative we tell others, and ourselves, that explains who we are and why we turned out the way we did.
Of course, to some extent, these stories we tell are based on how things actually panned out in our lives. It’s a two-way street, though, since the stories we tell ourselves also determine how we live our lives. For example, the author would never have been driven to become a success coach if he hadn’t truly believed that the story of his own life was one of success.
Consequently, his story reads like a rocket engine propelling him to even greater heights, while other people’s stories are more like weights dragging them down.
You should take a hard look at the stories you tell yourself because they may be holding you back too.
Ask yourself: Does my story emphasize the achievements I’ve made in life, or does it focus on the failures? Do I find myself making excuses for my mediocre lot in life, saying things like, “I’m poor because I had a bad upbringing and didn’t go to college?”
These types of narratives are toxic because they only serve to disparage us and limit our potential.
Of course, it’s not easy to change this type of self-assessment. In some cases, we’ve been telling ourselves the same story for so long – decades even – that we feel it must be true for that reason alone.
But as true and eternal as our life stories may seem, like most things, they’re open to interpretation.
Consider that the author’s attention deficit disorder, or ADD, has been a part of his story since he was a child. For the longest time, he imagined his ADD as a handicap that held him back, which deeply affected his self-esteem. One day, though, he met renowned ADD specialist Ned Hallowell, who turned this narrative on its head. People who have ADD, says Ned, are actually incredibly driven and passionate people. ADD is only treated as a problem because parents and teachers get frustrated by the children’s implacable energy! Since that encounter, the author’s ADD has played a positive role in his personal narrative of success.
Go ahead and reframe your narrative, by turning your “poor me” story on its head.
Maximize the return on your time by cutting out unproductive work.
What about hard work? Aren’t we all taught that hard work is essential to success?
Yes, self-made millionaires do have an extraordinary work ethic. But you probably work your ass off too – so why aren’t you enjoying nearly the same level of success? Do millionaires just work that much harder? Or, are they putting in incredibly long hours?
The answer is, of course, “No.” It's not a matter of how hard they work or how many hours they put in. It’s simply a question of how efficiently they use their time. In fact, millionaires often work fewer hours than the average person. The hours they do put in, however, are far more productive.
Think of time as an investment that nets you a return. You always want to maximize the return on an investment, so you should aim to maximize the return on your time too.
But what does that mean, exactly?
It means you should maximize the amount of time you spend doing the work that brings in the most income, and minimize everything else.
Start off by identifying the activities that are most profitable for you – perhaps a creative skill, or a business you're working on. Whatever it is, this is your financial sweet spot. You want the majority of your time to be spent on this because it’s what’s going to grow your life and income the fastest.
Using your time efficiently is just as much about cutting work out as it is about actually doing work. That’s why a “not-to-do” list can be as useful as a “to-do” list! A not-to-do list can help you streamline your life by identifying and eliminating work that doesn’t produce much value.
On this list, you can write all the things you do throughout the week that you’re not particularly good at, don’t enjoy doing, or that sap time and energy that could be better spent elsewhere. Examples might include wasting hours surfing the web and doing chores like mowing the lawn.
Then, next to each entry on the list, write either “eliminate,” “replace,” “automate,” “delegate,” or “outsource.” For instance, you could probably completely axe aimless web-surfing from your life. Other tasks like your chores and finances will still need to get done. In these cases, think about using technology or hiring professionals to do the work for you.
Once you cut all the tedious stuff from your life, you’ll be free to focus on what makes you money and what makes you happy.
Transcend your inhibitions by cultivating your confidence.
What do you think is the one essential ingredient that all successful people have in common? The answer is more obvious than you’d think – confidence.
Let’s be honest for a moment. Have you ever achieved anything worthwhile in life when your confidence was in the toilet? Probably not. For example, without confidence, you never could have asked that special someone on a date, nor made that decisive career move.
Confidence, much like a fine whiskey, causes our inhibitions and our self-doubt to fall away.
But confidence isn’t exactly something you can have served in a glass – you either have it or you don’t, right? Well, yes and no. While you can’t literally buy confidence, there are things you can do to develop and nurture it.
A helpful formula for improving your confidence is to remember the Four Cs, which stand for Courage, Commitment, Capability, and Confidence.
Let’s begin with courage. All renewed confidence begins with an act of courage. Whether it’s starting a business or having children, courage is about showing a willingness to go out of your comfort zone and throw yourself into the unknown.
Then we have commitment. Commitment is all about having the grit to see something through to the end. No matter what it is – a relationship, a job, a diet, or a work of art – you’re not going to achieve anything without having the commitment to see it through.
Next comes capability, which refers to the skills we possess already and our willingness to learn new ones by taking courses and reading books. We need to be prepared to work on specific skills if we’re to achieve our goals. If your goal is to become an expert chef, for instance, then you’re going to need to pick up a few cooking skills.
By focusing on the first three Cs, confidence will follow by default. Courage, commitment, and capability all improve your confidence because they’re the basis for any real achievement.
For a little confidence boost right now, grab a pen and paper and write a list of your victories – these include every skill you’re good at, every achievement you’re proud of, and every quality you admire in yourself. We tend to move on from our victories pretty quickly and dwell longer on our failures. So, this last exercise helps to remind us that we’ve actually achieved way more than we give ourselves credit for.
Final summary
The key message:
You can implement success habits right now to alter the course of your life and put you back on the path to the future you desire. These habits will support you in becoming a thermostat rather than a thermometer – in other words, they’ll enable you to be in control of your life instead of your life being controlled by external circumstances. Some of these habits are designed to help you regulate your mental state and confidence levels; some aid with fine-tuning your past story and future goals; and others ask you to get a handle on how you spend your time. By putting in the effort to take control of your life now, you can yield some major positive changes down the line.
Actionable advice:
Complete the 30-day Better Life Challenge.
Learning success habits is a great start, but in order to actualize them you need to incorporate these habits into your life. So, now’s the time to stop reading and take action! A good way to start is by doing the 30-day Better Life Challenge at www.thebetterlife.com. This exciting program of challenges and exercises is designed to shift your thinking by small degrees each day, for a month. With just minutes per day, you’ll begin to reprogram your habits effortlessly, improve your confidence, and put you back on track toward the future you desire.
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