While many of us may work a 9 to 5 job and earn a steady income, others have become millionaires within just a few years. So what is their secret? You might start by asking those with the most money. This article reveals some billionaire’s financial mantras and how they got there.
If you really want to be a millionaire in five years, continue reading and make sure to do what this article contain and in no time you too can b ]e counted amongst the millionaires.
Create a wealth vision.
“When riches begin to come, they come so quickly, in such great abundance, that one wonders where they have been hiding during all those lean years.” — Napoleon Hill
Step one to becoming financially successful is to actually create a vision for yourself financially. Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge. Arden said creativity is more important than experience.
How much imagination do you have for your future?
Do you see huge potential and possibility for your life?
Or do you see a pretty average life?
Creating a vision is an iterative process. You don’t just create a vision once and then never look at it again.
You continually create and rewrite your vision — every single day.
Look at any area of your life in which you’re doing well, and you’ll find it’s because you see something beyond what you currently have. By that same token, look at any area of your life that isn’t exceptional, and you’ll find that you don’t see something beyond what you currently have.
Most people are living in and repeating the past.
Having a vision is focused on the future.
Your life and behavior immediately shift when you begin imagining a different future and strive for it.
To do this, you must obliterate your need for consistency. From a psychological perspective, people generally feel the need to be viewed by others as consistent. This causes people to retain behavioral patterns, environments, and relationships that are ultimately destructive and unsatisfying for too long.
Instead, you could abandon your need to be viewed as consistent by others. You could be OK with the fact that you’re not perfect. You could be OK with messing up. You could be OK with having values you stand for and goals you want to accomplish, regardless of what those around you think.
Having a vision for your life means you no longer care what other people think of you. It means you’re ready to begin actually living the life you want. It means you’re no longer going to just go with the flow, as you have for most of your life. It means that regardless of what your parents, peers, and social environment have presented to you thus far, you’re going to create the life you want.
The more detailed your vision the better. The more quantifiable your vision the better.
Your brain really loves numbers and events. These are tangible. Thus, your vision should center around specific numbers and key events.
For example:
- “I will be making $1,000,000/year by January 1, 2022.”
- “I will get a check for over $100,000 by October 2020.”
- “I will take a six-week vacation in Thailand in the next six months.”
Quantify it.
Measure it.
Get excited by it.
The more detailed the vision in your mind, the more believable it will be to you.
It’s OK if you don’t know exactly what you want right now. Having more money, creating powerful experiences, and continually growing as a person are all goals that will push you in the right direction.
As you build confidence through successive, small wins over time, your vision and imagination will expand.
Thus, in order for your vision to become clarified and congruent with your values and genuine desires, you’ll need to start building confidence.
That’s where the next step comes in.
Develop a 90-day system for measuring progress/future pacing.
The following are questions Dan Sullivan, founder of Strategic Coach, has his clients answer every 90 days:
- Looking back over the past quarter, what are the things that make you the proudest about what you have achieved?
- When you look at everything that’s going on today, which areas of focus and progress are making you the most confident?
- What are the five new “jumps” you can now achieve that will make your next 90 days a great quarter regardless of what else happens?
Every 90 days you want to review the previous 90 days and then set measurable and challenging goals for the next 90 days.
In the book “The Art of Learning,” Josh Waitzkin said:
“Short-term goals can be useful developmental tools if they are balanced within a nurturing long-term philosophy. Too much sheltering from results can be stunting.”
Short-term goals are how you build progress. Working toward a timeline is crucial for productivity. Focusing on only a few key milestones each 90 days is how you build momentum.
Every 90 days, when you look back on the previous 90 days, you want a system for tracking your learning and progress. You want to get out of your routine environment and take a recovery break. Tim Ferriss calls these mini-retirements.
Every 90 days, you want to take a few days off. You want to get away where you can ponder, reflect, think, visualize, strategize, and play.
During this recovery session, you want to pull out your journal and take time to reflect on the previous 90 days.
What went well?
What were your key wins?
What did you learn?
What has you most excited?
Where do you need to pivot?
Given what you’ve done and what you’ve learned, what do you want to do in the next 90 days?
What two to five jumps or wins will make the biggest difference toward your ideal vision?
Every 90 days, when you review your progress, you could be increasing your confidence, because confidence comes from watching yourself succeed.
Very few people truly take time to reflect on what they’ve done. We’re very good at seeing where we’re coming up short. We are less reflective of where we’ve succeeded.
Chances are, you don’t even remember what you ate for lunch three days ago, let alone recognize all the good things you’ve done in the past 90 days. However, you can train your brain to notice, focus, and pay attention to the progress you’re making. When you begin seeing progress, you’ll start to feel excited.
These feelings are very important.
Feeling movement and momentum gives confidence.
Confidence is the bedrock of imagination, action, and power.
Want more confidence?
Start setting short-term goals (every 30-90 days), track your progress, count your wins, recover, reset, and start again.
When you have a big vision, you don’t need to make huge progress every day. You need to take only a step or two forward. You then track that progress and watch as the compounding effects take over.
Every 90 days, track the key areas of your life.
Track your money.
Track your health.
Track your time.
Track the progress in the areas you want to succeed.
Develop a daily routine to live in a flow/peak state.
“Assume the feeling of your wish fulfilled.” –Neville Goddard
Alright , so you’ve created a big-picture vision that inspires you. You’ve also set 90-day short-term goals to help you build confidence and keep you progressing on that path.
Now you need a daily routine to keep yourself in flow.
If you can get yourself into a flow-state every day, and live in and operate from that flow state, you’re going to feel really good.
It is your responsibility to organize your life so you can be in flow as much as possible. In positive psychology, a flow state, also known as being in the zone, is the mental state in which yeou are fully immersed in a fee
ling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment.
In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting loss in one’s sense of space and time.
That’s a great way to live.
Flow creates high performance.
High performance creates confidence.
Confidence creates imagination and excitement.
Imagination and excitement lead you to thinking bigger and differently about yourself and your life.
With that in mind, it’s key to look at why most people are not in flow most of the time. Not surprisingly, it starts first thing in the morning. Momentum is activated with the first decision of your day. Rather than proactively putting themselves into a flow state, most people put themselves into an unconsciously reactive state.
People are not the product of habits, they are the product of environments(see point four below). According to Stanford psychologist and behavior expert BJ Fogg, design beats willpower. Design is about how you’ve set things up. Most people have not designed their environment for flow. Instead, most people’s environment and life have been set up for continual distraction, which is the opposite of flow.
Flow is something that must be designed for.
You have to decide to live in flow. You have to commit to it. The reason flow is so commonplace in extreme sports is because extreme sports require a great deal of commitment, risk, and focus.
If a motocross rider loses focus while trying a backflip over a 100-foot dirt jump, they could die. Therefore, the situation evokes deep flow.
Flow comes by not overthinking it.
Flow comes when you just let it happen.
For example, when I’m writing a blog post, my best writing is when I stop thinking altogether. I just let it rip.
That’s how high performance works. You put in the preparation, then you just let your body take over.
When it comes to morning routines, the primary purpose is to put yourself into a flow or peak state.
Here are some useful activities for putting yourself into flow.
First, you want to change your environment to change your mindset. Begin visualizing and imagining your desired future. Affirm to yourself that you are going to achieve that future. Florence Shinn stated, “Faith knows it has already received and acts accordingly.”
That’s what morning routines are all about. You put your mind into the mode of your future. You emotionally commit and connect with that future. You then be that future self.
You act as that future self would act.
This is why consistency is not a useful goal.
Instead of being consistent with who you’ve been, you want to realize who you’re going to be. If you’re going to be a millionaire, you need to start acting like one now.
Recent research studied the brains of actors with MRI machines. What they found is that when the actors were in character, their brains showed significant change.
In other words, acting a different role changes your brain. And this is actually what you want to do every morning in your morning routine.
Rather than triggering the brain of your former self and addictions, you want to trigger the brain of your desired self or character.
Who do you want to be?
Imagine that self.
Feel that self.
Assume the feeling of your wish fulfilled.
Affirm the reality of that self.
Know that what you want, you can have.
Commit big.
Invest yourself in that reality.
Begin right now acting with that reality.
Enjoy the rush of flow that comes from being present.
Put your Skills to Work
For you to become a self-made millionaire in a very short time, you have to learn to be creative. You need to learn how to create what you can sell to people. You need to find something that fills a consumer need that you can produce and sell for an income.
It may be crafts, food, cleaning, writing books, just about anything that you are proficient in. You should dust up those skills you usually use to impress your mates back then, and make a business out of it. Learn to be a provider and not a consumer.
Every millionaire is a producer. Only producers get rich. They do this by seeking to satisfy the needs of people at all times. If you are a good marketer, you can start a business in retail, if you are good with wood, start looking for things to produce and sell, if you love to write, start a blog or something; the key is to offer something people can pay for.
Since you do not have the finances yet, you can start on a small scale. Clean houses for your neighbours, refurbish old furniture and sell, become a sales representative for a particular company you like their product, etc. This should be your very first approach when intending to make it big in a short while.
Look for Ways to Improve Yourself or your Business
So maybe you have taken the advice and have started a small business, the next thing to do is evaluate. Think of ways to double your profits, and if you have not started making profits, think of the reasons and figure out ways to get the cents rolling in. Yes, I say cents, because it is the cents that bring the dollars. Calculate your daily worth and think of ways to increase that number.
If you are earning $100 per day, you should try to double it. Just imagine, if you did twice as much, you would earn twice as much. What are you doing to improve your daily rate? If you are making 10 sales calls per day, double your number of calls to 20. If you are babysitting one child, find a way to multiply your results by opening up a day-care for 50 kids. Of course, it would be best to maintain or increase your quality of work as you pursue these endeavors.
Always seek for better ways to improve your income be it in business or on the job. If you have a paid employment, think of ways to generate passive income that can help shore up your earnings. But you have to note that the possibility of becoming a millionaire in 5 years on a paid employment is quite slim unless you adopt an aggressive saving policy.
Take Big Risks
Many people are scared of taking risks, they prefer to stay put in that comfortable position so as not to upset the milk bowl. But the fact here is that without taking calculated risks, you would never become a millionaire.
To approach a risk more judiciously, ask yourself two questions: “What is the worst thing that can happen if I take this risk?” Then ask yourself, “What is the best thing that can happen?” Owning a million dollars is no small feat, and you should be able to sacrifice everything to get there, even if it is your last dollar. The key here is to know which risk is worth taking and which one would end in disaster. But in the end, your gut is your best guide.
Conclusion
Have you ever looked at someone who is wealthy and asked, “How did they get so rich?” It’s easy to assume that it takes lots of money or years of hard work to accumulate a seven-figure net worth. Many people assume that these wealthy people are just lucky, born with a silver spoon in their mouth. But while luck does play an important role in wealth creation (you won’t believe how many billionaires attribute some degree of luck to their success), there are very specific things rich people do — things anyone can do — to become financially responsible and create real wealth.