Replace those things that are not serving your future with success habits designed specifically to assist you on your journey to a better you.
Animated Video Summary by The Swedish Investor
Key Takeaways
Imagine a farmer, who’s getting up every morning at 5:00 a.m. He puts grain in the back of his tractor, and drives out to feed his cows. Then he takes the tractor and goes back again.
Are you stuck in your old ruts? Have you let go of the steering wheel? Is the path you’re on, and the habits you’ve adopted so far, truly taking you where you want to in your financial life? If your answer isn’t an obvious “Yep. I’m totally crushing it right now!”, this video is for you.
Small shifts can yield big results in the long run.
"People will overestimate what they can do in a year, but underestimate what they can do in five".
1: Understand Your Why
Without a strong why, you’ll soon be back in your old habits again. As soon as you face even the slightest bit of headwind, you’ll be eager to return to the path of least resistance, not so when you have a great why though!
You can find your true why by doing something he calls the “Seven Levels Deep” exercise. Basically, you should get someone to ask why you want to do something, seven times.
It’s only at the fifth, sixth or seventh why that you are truly getting some powerful answers. Don’t stop before seven, and have someone you feel comfortable with doing the exercise with you.
2: Kill Off the Villain Inside
Inside of all of us, there’s an antihero living. This villain is the person who keeps saying “you can’t do that” or “what makes you think you deserve that?!” whenever we try to reach a higher goal.
There are ways that we feed this guy daily – among others through our thoughts, our words, our actions and our body language. Sometimes other people’s villains are even cooperating with our own through our external environment.
If we want to achieve success of any kind – be it financially, romantically, aesthetically, artistically, we must learn what feeds this villain and – on the other hand – what starves him out.
- One quick thing to say regarding your words: try switching “Well, I’m okay” into “fantastic!” and “I’m so stressed out right now because of everything I have to do [sight]” into “My life is filled with opportunities, of which I am truly grateful!”
Let’s focus on actions. One action that turns our inner villain into a real super villain, is by doing something that we’re terrible at. And what’s one of the most common advice that we are raised to believe, thanks to our teachers, parents, friends and strangers in the streets? “You must work on your weaknesses!”
The millionaire success habit that will allow you to minimize the inner villain is to do the exact opposite: Focus on what you’re naturally good at, and become exceptional at that instead.
A very important factor in our external environment is the news we’re exposed to. I think most people aren’t even aware that this is robbing them of their success, but think about it. Every day we are bombarded with negativity! Wars, scarcity, disasters, terrorist attacks, sickness, and suffering.
It’s difficult to focus on positive thoughts and your next level of success, while you’re constantly fed information on a world that seems like it’s doomed! The solution? Cut off the daily feed, or convert into listening to a very niche field – like investing. Still, you have to beware of negativity though.
3: Create Confidence by Becoming your Heroic Self
The truth is that even a 5% decrease in confidence can keep us from doing that important thing that would’ve meant all the difference. So how do we stay at 100%?
Try doing this exercise:
- Find a truly unflattering picture of yourself. Drained of energy that day, was a little bit overweight, or had a bad hair day. Now put that picture on a paper. Associate unflattering words with the picture, that you might have felt when you were hitting rock bottom of your life, like embarrassed, insecure, boring etc. And now name that person. Give it a nickname that you definitely wouldn’t want, like “Michael the Mouse”.
- On the opposite side of the same paper, put a picture that shows your best sides. This should be from a time when you looked great, and felt great. Perhaps you had recently closed a big deal. Associate your strengths and positive attributes that you have at times when you feel great with this picture. Name this heroic version of you something awesome, like “Michael the Mighty”. Also, add some attributes and strengths that you want to develop in the future.
- Take a picture of these two persons next to each other. From now on, you’re officially the hero version, “Michael the Mighty”.
Sometimes, our confidence can take a hit. How quick you’re able to recover from such a bump in the road is of major importance for your future success. When this happens, bring out the two pictures of you and say: “Do I want to be the old version of myself, that lets life control me, or do I want to be the new hero version of me?”
Use this as a trigger. You should truly be disgusted by your old self, and inspired by your heroic self. Of course you don’t want to be Michael the Mouse! You want to be, and you are meant to be, Michael the Mighty! Now go act like it.
4: Look At Things From a Return on Investment Perspective
Should you do everything by yourself? Is it a good idea that you’re at your 9-5, work on your entrepreneurial project, do your dishes, cook your meals every day, clean your house, do your laundry, iron your shirts, mow your lawn etc. etc., all by yourself?
The answer is no – it’s not. Why? Because you have areas, in which you are exceptionally talented, and others where you are truly inefficient.
- For example, if cooking food every day is a duty which drains much of your energy, and which takes a considerable amount of time, you should probably try to outsource that activity.
- Chances are that someone else is willing to do this activity for you, and that they are much more efficient doing it anyways.
- Chances are also that you are much more efficient when doing something else.
You must start to look at things from a return on investment perspective. If your hourly wage, doing what you’re best at is, say $50, it wouldn’t make sense to cook for an hour every day just so that you could save $10 buying food from a grocery store instead of a restaurant.
To understand what to outsource you can create a “Unique Ability Circle”
- Take a piece of paper and create a circle in the middle of it. In that circle you write: “unique ability”.
- Now add 3 more circles around the first one, and write excellent, good, and stink, in that order.
- In the middle, you write the abilities and activities that you are amazing at, those that makes you the most amount of money and that you enjoy the most.
- See to it that most of your days consist of activities from the inner part of the circle.
- Outsource everything else.
5: Three Productivity Hacks
Productivity is something that moves you towards your goal. Everything else makes you lose momentum.
- For instance, a new real estate investor should only focus on this: create unique marketing, making offers, building a buyer’s list and selling houses. Anything else is basically waste.
Here are three tips on how to improve this truly important millionaire success habit.
Schedule your day. Perhaps you think that this one is obvious and that you’ve heard it before. But do you really have a schedule? And if you do, do you really follow it? I think that the most common reason why people fail with this habit is because they bite more than they can chew.
Try scheduling 2 hours of uninterrupted productive work each day on your project of choice. Scale up only once you’ve shown yourself that you can do it, and once you’ve turned it into a habit.
Build systems around your working processes. Systemising your most common working habits will increase your productivity tremendously, because you’ll reduce the resistance for getting started. There’s never any confusion or hesitation associated with what your next task is.
- For instance a process for these YouTube videos looks something like this: 1. Read book and add highlights. 2. Filter out the most important takeaways. 3. Write a script. 4. Record voice 5. Animate.
- Once you have a baseline, it’s also much easier to improve the process.
- For instance, if reading the book is the bottleneck in the process, as it might take up to 50% of the total time associated with producing the video, you can focus your energy on improving that step of the process first.
Don’t be accessible at all times. This goes for emails, social media and phone calls. In time, people will learn and accept that you’re not available 24/7, and they will respect that.
Never try to rationalize unproductive distractions. Just because you are having a bad day and aren’t getting anywhere on a particularly difficult task, doesn’t mean that it’s okay to suddenly go on some social media spree. You can set limits on your phone on how much time you’re allowed to spend using certain apps every day.