21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires Part 9

Success secret number seven, dedicate yourself to lifelong learning.
The fact is that you have more brains, ability and intelligence than
you could ever use if you were to work on developing yourself for
the rest of your life. You are smarter than you can imagine. There is
no obstacle that you cannot overcome, no problem you cannot solve
and no goal you cannot achieve by applying your mind to your
situation.
But your mind is like a muscle. It only develops with use. Just as you
have to strain your physical muscles to build them, you have to work
your mental muscles to build your mind as well. The good news is
that, the more you learn, the more you can learn. Just like the more
you play a sport, the better you get at the sport. The more you

Leaders are learners. Continuous learning is the key to the 21st
century. Lifelong learning is the minimum requirement for success in
your field, or in any field. Make a decision today that you are going
to become a student of your craft and that you are going to continue
learning and becoming better for the rest of your life.
There are several keys to lifelong learning. The first key is that you
get up and read in your field for 30 to 60 minutes each day. Reading
is to the mind as exercise is to the body. When you read for an hour
each day, this will translate into about one book per week. One book
per week will translate into 50 books per year. 50 books per year will
translate into 500 books over the next 10 years. Since the average
adult reads less than one book per year, when you begin reading one
hour per day it will give you an incredible edge in your field. You
will become one of the smartest, most competent and highest paid
people in your profession by simply reading one hour each day.
The second key to lifelong learning is for you to listen to audio
programs, especially in your car as you drive from place to place. The
average person sits in his car 500 to 1000 hours per year. This is the
equivalent of 12 to 24 40 hour weeks or as much as three to six

months of working time that you spend in your car. This is the
equivalent of one to two full time semesters at the university.
Turn your car into a learning machine, into a university on wheels.
Never let your car motor be running without an educational audio
program playing. Many people have become millionaires through the
miracle of audio learning. This is why audio learning is often called
the "greatest breakthrough in education since the invention of the
printing press."
A third key to lifelong learning is for you to take every course and
seminar you can possibly find that can help you to be better in your
field. The combination of books, audio programs and seminars will
enable you to save hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars, and
many years of hard work, in achieving the same level of financial
success.
Make a decision today to become a lifelong learner. You will be
amazed at the affect that it has in your career.

21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires Part 8

Success secret number six, develop a workaholic mentality. All selfmade
millionaires work hard, hard, hard. They start earlier, they
work harder and they stay later. They develop a reputation for being
amongst the hardest working people in their fields. And everybody
knows it.

Practice the "40 Plus" formula. This formula says that you work 40
hours per week for survival. Everything over 40 hours is for success.
If you only work 40 hours, and the average work week today is closer
to 35 hours, all you will ever do is survive. You will never get ahead.
You will never be a big financial success. You will never be highly
respected and esteemed by your colleagues. You will always be
mediocre working the basic 40 hour week.

But every hour over 40 is an investment in your future. You can tell
where you are going to be in five years by looking at how many
hours over 40 you put in every week. The average self-made
millionaire in America works 59 hours per week and some of them
work 70 and 80 hours. The average self-made millionaire in America
works six days per week rather than five, and works longer days as
well. If you want to call a self-made millionaire, phone the office
before normal working hours and after normal working hours. The
self-made millionaire is there when the staff arrives, the nine to
fiver's, and is still there when they leave.

And here's the key: work all the time you work. When you work,
don't waste time. When you get in early, put your head down and get
started immediately. When people want to talk to you, you excuse
yourself and say, "I have to get back to work!" Do not drop off your
dry cleaning, phone your friends, socialize with your co-workers or
read the newspaper. Work all the time you work. Resolve today to
develop the reputation for being the hardest working person in your
company. This will bring you to the attention of people who can help
you faster than almost anything else you can do.

21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires Part 7

Success secret number five, commit to excellence. Resolve today to be
the very best at what you do. Set a goal for yourself to join the top
10% of your field, whatever it is. This decision, to become very, very
good at what you do, is the turning point in your life. There are no
successful people who are not recognized as being extremely
competent in their chosen fields.

Remember, no one is better than you and no one is smarter than
you. And every one who is in the top 10% today started off in the
bottom 10%. Everyone who is doing well was once doing poorly.


Everyone who is at the top of their field was at one time in another
field altogether. And what someone else has done, you can do as
well.

Here is a great rule for success: "Your life only gets better when you
get better." And since there is no limit to how much better you can
become, there is no limit to how much better you can make your life.
Your decision to become excellent at what you do, to join the top 10%
in your field, is the turning point in your life. It is the key to great
success. It is also the foundation of high levels of self-esteem, selfrespect
and personal pride. When you are really good at what you
do, you feel wonderful about yourself. It affects your entire
personality and all your relationships with other people when you
know you are at the top of your field.

Here is one of the most important questions you will ever ask and
answer, for the rest of your career, "What one skill, if you developed
and did it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive
impact on your life?"

You cannot become good at everything over night but you can
identify the one skill that can help you the most and then throw your
whole heart into developing that skill. Set it as a goal. Write it down.
Set a deadline. Make a plan. And work on becoming better in that
area every single day. You will be absolutely amazed at the
difference this commitment to excellence will make in your life. This
alone can make you a self-made millionaire in the course of your
career.

21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires Part 6

Success secret number four, do what you love to do. This is the one of
the great secrets of financial success. This is also one of your primary
responsibilities in life. It is to find out what you really enjoy doing,
what you have a natural talent for, and then to throw your whole
heart into doing that, very, very well.

Self-made millionaires are those who have found a field where their
natural strengths and abilities are exactly what is required to do the
job and achieve the results desired. Most self-made millionaires say
that they "never worked a day in their life." You must find a field in
which you can be totally absorbed, a job or area of endeavor that
completely fascinates you, that holds your attention, that is a natural
expression of your special talents and abilities.

When you are doing what you love to do, you seem to have a
continuous flow of excitement, energy and ideas to do what you do
even better. Here is a question for you: "If you won a million dollars,
tax free, tomorrow, would you continue to do what you are currently
doing?"

This is a great question. It simply asks you what you would do if you
had all the time and money you needed and you were free to choose
your occupation. Self-made millionaires, if they won a million dollars
cash, would continue doing what they are doing. They would only
do it differently or better or at a higher level. But they love their work
so much that they wouldn't even think of leaving it or retiring.

Perhaps the greatest responsibility of adult life, when you are
surrounded by so many different choices of occupation and activity,
is for you to find out what it is that you really love doing and then
dedicate yourself to that field. And no one else can do it for you.

21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires Part 5

Success secret number three, see yourself as self-employed. Accept
complete, 100% responsibility for everything you are and everything
you will ever be. Refuse to make excuses or to blame other people for
your problems or short comings. Stop complaining about things in
your life that you are not happy about. Refuse to criticize other
people for anything. You are responsible. If there is something in
your life that you don't like, it is up to you to do something about it.
But you are in charge.

The top 3% of Americans see themselves as self-employed, no matter
who signs their paycheck. The biggest mistake you can ever make is
to ever think that you work for anyone other than yourself. You are
always self-employed. You are always the president of your own
personal services corporation, no matter where you might be
working at the moment. When you see yourself as self-employed,
you develop the entrepreneur mentality, the mentality of the highly
independent, self-responsible, self-starting individual. Instead of
waiting for things to happen, you make things happen. You see
yourself as the boss of your own life. You see yourself as completely
in charge of your physical health, your financial well being, your
career, your relationships, your house, your home, your car and
every element of your existence. This is the mindset of the truly
excellent person.

Self-responsible people are intensely result oriented. They take high
levels of initiative. They volunteer for assignments and they are
always asking for more responsibility. As a result, they become the
most valuable and respected people in their organizations. They
continually prepare themselves for positions of higher authority and
responsibility in the future. You should do the same.

Here's a question: "If you were president for a day in your company,
or were completely responsible for results where you work, what one
change would you enact immediately?" Whatever it is, write it down,
make a plan and begin on it today. This alone could change your life.

21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires Part 4

Secret number two, develop a clear sense of direction. This is where
you take your dreams out of the air and you crystallize them into
clear, specific written goals. Perhaps the greatest discovery in human
history is that, "You become what you think about most of the time."
The two factors that determine what happens to you in life, more
than anything else, are what you think about and how you think about
it.
Successful people think about their goals most of the time. As a
result, they are continually moving toward their goals and their goals
are moving toward them. Whatever you think about most of the time
grows and increases in your life. If you are thinking and talking and
visualizing your goals, you tend to accomplish far, far more than the
average person who is usually thinking and talking about their
worries and problems most of the time.

Here is an exercise for you. Take a sheet of paper and write the word
"Goals" at the top with today's date. Then, make a list of 10 goals that
you would like to achieve over the next 12 months. Write your goals
in the present tense, as though a year has passed and you have
already achieved them. Begin each goal with the word "I" to make it
personal to you. By making out a list of 10 goals for yourself for the
next year, you will have moved yourself into the top 3% of adults in
our society. The sad fact is that 97% of adults have never made a list
of goals in their entire lives.

Once you have your list of 10 goals, go back over the list and ask this
key question: "Which one goal on this list, if I were to achieve it,
would have the greatest positive impact on my life?"
Whatever your answer to that question, circle that goal and make
that your number one, most important goal for the future. Set a
deadline, make a plan, take action on your plan and do something
every day that moves you toward your goal.

From now on, think and talk about that goal all the time. Think and
talk about how you can achieve that goal. Think and talk about all the
different things that you can do to make that goal a reality. This
exercise will stimulate your creativity, increase your energy and
unlock your potential.

21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires Part 3

The fact is that most self-made millionaires are average people with
average educations working at average jobs and living in average
neighborhoods in average houses driving average cars. But they have
found out what other financially successful people do and they have
done the same thing over and over again until they got the same
results. It is no miracle and it is no accident. And when you think the
thoughts and do the things that self-made millionaires do, you will
begin to get the same results and benefits they do. It is all up to you.
There are 21 secrets of success of self-made millionaires. Each of these
is indispensable to your becoming financially independent. The
absence of any one of these factors can, by itself, undermine and even
destroy your chances for health, happiness and great prosperity.

The good news is that you can learn every one of these principles by
practice and repetition, over and over again, until they become as
natural to you as breathing in and breathing out. Just as you have
learned to ride a bicycle or drive a car, you can learn the secrets of
success of self-made millionaires and apply them in your life. And
there are no limits except the limits you place on yourself.

Now, let us begin:

The first secret of self-made millionaires is simple: Dream Big
Dreams! Allow yourself to dream. Allow yourself to imagine and
fantasize about the kind of life you would like to live and the kind of
money you would like to earn and have in your bank account.
All great men and women begin with a dream of something
wonderful and different from what they have today. You know the
song that says, "You have to have a dream if you want to make a
dream come true."
Imagine that you have no limitations on what you can be, have or do
in life. Just for the moment, imagine that you have all the time, all the
money, all the education, all the experience, all the friends, all the
contacts, all the resources and everything you need to achieve
anything you want in life. If your potential was completely
unlimited, what kind of a life would you want to create for yourself
and your family?
Practice "back from the future" thinking. This is a powerful technique
practiced by high performing men and women that has an amazing
effect on your mind and on your behavior. Project yourself forward
five years. Imagine that five years have passed and that your life is
now perfect in every respect. What does it look like? What are you
doing? Where are you working? How much money are you earning?

How much do you have in the bank? What kind of a lifestyle do you
have?
Create a vision for yourself for the long-term future. The more clear
your vision of health, happiness and prosperity, the faster you move
toward it and the faster it moves toward you. When you create a
clear mental picture of where you are going in life, you become more
positive, more motivated and more determined to make it a reality.
You trigger your natural creativity and come up with idea after idea
to help make your vision come true.
You always tend to move in the direction of your dominant dreams,
images and visions. The very act of allowing yourself to dream big
dreams actually raises your self-esteem and causes you to like and
respect yourself more. It improves your self-concept and increases
your level of self-confidence. It increases your personal level of selfrespect
and personal happiness. There is something about dreams
and visions that is exciting and that stimulates you to do and be
better than you ever have before.
Here is a great question for you to ask and answer, over and over
again: "What one thing would you dare to dream if you knew you
could not fail?" If you were absolutely guaranteed of success in any
one thing in life, large or small, short-term or long-term, what would

it be? What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew
you could not fail?
Whatever it is, write it down and begin imagining that you had
achieved this one great goal already. Then, look back to where you
are today. What would you have done to get to where you want to
go? What steps would you have taken? What would you have
changed in your life? What would you have gotten into or gotten out
of? Who would you be with? Who would you no longer be with? If
your life was perfect in every respect, what would it look like?
Whatever it is that you would do differently, take the first step today.
Dreaming big dreams is the starting point of achieving your goal of
financial independence. The number one reason that people never
succeed financially is because it never occurs to them that they can do
it. As a result, they never try. They never get started. They continue
to go around in financial circles, spending everything they earn and a
little bit more besides. But when you begin to dream big dreams
about financial success, you begin to change the way you see yourself
and your life. You begin to do different things, bit by bit, gradually,
until the whole direction of your life changes for the better. Dreaming
big dreams is the starting point of financial success, and becoming a
self-made millionaire.