This is not a book about money. It's not a book about finances, where to invest, or how to beat the stock market. There are many books that deal with these topics, but this isn't one of them. This book could be more important than any of those books.
This is a book to help you acquire a mindset of riches. It's about creating a way of living where you aren't controlled by fear, inertia, or poverty. Instead, you are motivated by creative, positive action, and an open mind that is ready to receive. After all, what good is wealth if you don't believe you can achieve it?
According to research I've done over the years, as well as my experience and the experience of those I know, self-made millionaires think and act in certain ways that maximize their ability to both create and receive prosperity.
Self-made millionaires think and act in certain ways. I've found that self-made millionaires:
That doesn't mean that every self-made millionaire is a master at each one of those things. It does mean, however, that they tend to value those qualities and learn to develop them in their own lives. You can do this, too.
This book is inspired by great prosperity teachings from classic bestsellers, most of them written about a hundred years ago. But it's informed by experiences—mine and those of people I've worked with for years now. It's the book I wished I had had many years ago; it would have saved me a lot of time, trouble, and years of struggle.
Since I work in the publishing industry, indulge me a moment. Let's think of your life using the metaphor of a book. If your life were a book, you would keep writing new chapters in the book of your own life. Each year, each experience would create a new chapter in your life story.
Interestingly enough, many of us are not very good authors. In fact, some of us are not authors at all; we let other people in our lives, or the circumstances of our lives, create the content of our lives. In these situations, we become passive, taking a back seat while other people take over and tell us what our life story should be. Can you relate to that? At one point in my own life, I was in a dark place and couldn't even see how I could participate in creating my own story; I felt that I was just somehow a character of some story that someone, or fate, had written for me.
And what's more, some of us are not even main characters in our own life story. While the title of your life should be The Story of YOU, it often really is The Story of Everyone Else Who Is More Important Than I Am. Family members—especially parents—tend to want to write the content of our lives, telling us what to do, what we should and shouldn't want for ourselves, and how we should act.
Another way this is true for us is that we can often spend so much time comparing ourselves to others that we aren't truly ourselves. Instead, we base our decisions and actions and self-worth on how they measure against others.
Think about the story of your life so far. Is it fascinating? Is it prosperous? Or are you somehow stuck in a narrative that seems to go on and on and yet goes nowhere. No plot. Just day after day of the same old same old. Weeks are roughly the same as the week before, months are like the months before, and each year is roughly the same year that we have been living over and over again.
Whether it's making millions, living in a beautiful home, driving the car(s) of your choice, having a healthy savings account and full financial portfolio, or whatever way you define success (and we'll be looking at that in more detail later on), this book can help you achieve it. Wherever you are starting from, it's meant to be a guide to help you get to more of what you want—and less of what you don't want as well. If you are currently in a comfortable place but want to go from comfortable to wealthy, then the principles in this book can help you.
Or if you are like I was at one time, struggling and in debt, then The Prosperity Principles can be like a lifeline to give you the help you need to believe in yourself and create the future you want.
While this book is aimed at creating more financial wealth, The Prosperity Principles can be used to create more of anything you want. This is an important point: your goal might be to make more money and become a millionaire, but the principles will also work to help you on your journey to create more love in your life, more joy, more peace, more health, more adventure, more anything. The principles are framed for money, simply because it seems like money is often what people focus on as the main thing missing from their lives. So use this book to create a more prosperous life . . . and use this book to create more in any area of your life!
Regardless of where you are starting from, your next chapter can be more abundant than your previous chapter. Your future can be richer than your past.
Every person I admire has lived a life filled with ups and downs. It seems like the lives of most people who achieve greatness follow a pattern: they begin in a place that is painful, or difficult, or challenging, or filled with lack and limitation of some sort. And then there is a turning point. This turning point becomes the moment they draw the line in the sand, step over the line, and never look back. From that moment on, everything changes. They are no longer the victim of their circumstances; they are the author of their future.
My guess is that this is the point you are at now: the turning point.
What you do from this moment on matters. Every thought and action matter. Everything you do either becomes a way to stay where you are or to move forward. Which do you want? More of the same? Or something more?
Take a moment to really take this in. Reread the paragraph above, maybe even read it out loud if you can. And then take a breath, and answer this question: Do you want more of the same, or something more?
What you do from this moment on matters.
One of the uncomfortable truths about life is this: we don't always get what we want; we get what we settle for. After all, if you didn't settle for something, you would get more, right? That's common sense, and yet it's not always something we want to hear. It's uncomfortable because it puts the responsibility of your life squarely on the shoulders of . . . you.
“What do you mean, I've settled for all of this debt? Aren't you just blaming the victim here?” you might be asking. Well, I used to think thoughts like that, too. What do you mean that I settled for this credit card debt? What do you mean that I've settled for this low-paying job? I felt like all of my life was pressing down on me and that I didn't have much choice in what was happening.
And yet . . .
Something inside me realized that if I wasn't the one settling for these outcomes, then why did it feel like I was taking a back seat in my own life? Why did it feel like I was not in control of my life? Why did it feel like I was always waiting and waiting for things to change, and yet nothing ever did?
Your prosperous future is waiting for you. I didn't always believe that when I couldn't “see” the future or how what I wanted would come to me. This book shows the way that I “wrote” the next chapter of my life, from scarcity to wealth. And in these pages, I'll teach you how to do it for yourself.
Richard Bach wrote a profound truth in his book Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. There are a number of profound ideas that book, but one in particular was like an arrow that hit the bullseye in my mind when I read it the first time. He wrote, “Argue your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.” That idea changed my life.
It's so much easier to blame our circumstances on other people, on other factors, on all the hurdles we have to jump over. Some of those things we label as limitations are very real—I'm not making light of them. Some of the conditions in our life are difficult and are not all of our own making. However, our experience of the conditions in our life is mostly under our control.
For every reason you can pinpoint as the main reason that you aren't where you want to be, or why haven't achieved what you want to, you can find someone who has had that same reason and yet has had amazing success. There are people who started with even less, people who have more dire circumstances, people who have started out far worse than where you are, and yet they have achieved more.
Just do an internet search for “people who achieved unlikely success” and you'll see amazing stories of people who have done amazing things. If you think age is your limitation, search for amazing people over fifty (or sixty or seventy or eighty, or whatever age), and you will find dozens and dozens of stories of people older than you who started a new chapter in their lives and had great success. Or if you think you're too young, search for amazing people under twenty-five (or twenty, or seventeen, or fifteen, or even twelve) to find stories of people who have achieved amazing things at a young age. Whatever your circumstance, the internet is a great place to find inspiration from others who have shared that same circumstance and overcame it.
Those people didn't settle for mediocrity. Neither should you.
The more we tell ourselves and anyone who we can get to listen all of the reasons we aren't where we think we should be—financially or in any area of our life—the more those reasons hold us back.
The people who aren't held back are the people who won't be held back by anything.
Which kind of person do you want to be?
I didn't invent the Prosperity Principles, I discovered them by reading the ideas in various books I read over the years by great prosperity teachers like Napoleon Hill, U.S. Andersen, Dr. Joseph Murphy, Ralph Waldo Trine, Ernest Holmes, Wallace Wattles, Helen Wilmans, Annie Rix Militz, Catherine Ponder, Emmet Fox, Eric Butterworth, Florence Scovel Shinn, Thomas Troward, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Anthony Norvell, Christian Larsen, Raymond Charles Barker, James Allen, and many others. They didn't invent the Prosperity Principles eiether, but each one of them discovered them for themselves and taught them in the way they understood them.
I discovered them as more than just “principles” when I began to apply them to my own life. I took certain ideas, adapted them, reworded them so I could understand them better, and created my own process of using them. Sometimes it was easy to apply the ideas to my life, sometimes it was difficult, but always it was beneficial. I learned them in even more profound ways when I taught them to others. Now, more than thirty years later, the Prosperity Principles have become a way of life, and I continue to learn how to apply them in ever deeper ways.
This book brings all of these ideas together in the most succinct, easy-to-use ways.
In many ways, I'm the least likely person to write this book. Raised in a small town in Nebraska, my family was never flush with cash. My parents, while intelligent, weren't graduates from Ivy League schools, and had no special connections or “family money.” They were hardworking people who often worked multiple jobs to pay the bills and allow us to have fun as well. It was a frequent sight to see overdrafts in our mailbox—those pink slips that required my parents to pay an extra $20 fee for every check that bounced. At least one or two of those pink overdraft slips seemed to make it into our mailbox each month. I'm not suggesting we were living hand-to-mouth, but we definitely weren't affluent. There were many nights my parents stayed awake trying to figure out how they were going to pay all of their bills.
Living in that small town in Nebraska didn't seem to offer many opportunities to increase our financial standing. At age nine I began working in the grocery store my father owned—cleaning, stocking the shelves, bagging groceries for customers, and even occasionally as cashier. When the business closed, my parents needed cash for our move to another town, and we kids contributed our earnings to the move. Starting over again wasn't unknown to us.
Throughout my childhood (and even when I was older), my mother often worked three jobs at a time. When I was thirteen, my father arranged to have me begin working at a friend's restaurant (for $1.65/hour, no tips). When I turned fourteen, I added a second job at the town's bookstore, and then at sixteen I added a third job working at one of the local shoe stores. I also had two paper routes (the local paper and the big Omaha World-Herald) and took various other odd jobs that came up (mowing lawns, tele-sales for the local policeman's ball, etc.). I took some courses at the local college and then moved to Denver, the nearest big city. At eighteen I became assistant manager, and then manager for a chain bookstore in one of the local shopping malls. In addition to my full-time job, I did various jobs on my days off, since I was always broke. Like my parents before me, I developed the habit of being overdrawn frequently and working as many jobs as possible to pay for my bills.
The story of my life seemed small, and it was about to take a turn for the worse.
23 CREDIT CARDS
I had developed another bad habit during these years, one I created all by myself . . . using credit cards to pay for everything.
Eventually my credit card habit grew into an addiction. The credit card companies kept sending me cards in the mail, all with “special offers,” and I took advantage of every one of them. I figured, if the credit card company thinks I can afford yet another card, who am I to argue? Well, of course, I learned the hard way. The more credit cards I used, the more in debt I became. The more in debt I became, the more I learned how dark and oppressive the world of debt can be. Eventually I got to the point of having twenty-three active credit cards, and nearly $60,000 in personal credit card debt. My salary at the time was half that amount, and I was living just north of San Francisco, where the cost of living is very high.
With basic living expenses, plus twenty-three minimum payments to make each month, I was essentially just moving credit card balances around to try to stay afloat. Eventually I reached a breaking point (which I describe in more detail in my book My Life Contract) and finally began the journey from debt to debt-free and then to prosperity.
When I was at my lowest, I thought that what I needed to go from overwhelming debt to becoming debt-free was just a check for the amount of debt I was in. But what I learned on the journey to becoming debt-free was that in order for me to receive more prosperity in life, first I had to become more in life. I had to learn how to be a different person in order to have a different experience. To be completely candid, learning how to be a different person was the last thing I wanted. I wanted the easy and quick way out, just something to erase the debt. But I committed myself to the journey, and now, looking back, I can see that the easy way out wouldn't have changed me, it would only have temporarily changed my bank account. If my mind and actions didn't change, then my outcome wouldn't change. If I didn't learn the principles of true prosperity and change my life, I would have no doubt gotten back into debt, and probably even worse. There are studies that show that people who win the lottery more often than not experience a brief respite from their monetary woes, but then get into more financial trouble than before they won the lottery. Why? Because they didn't expand their personal definitions and change their actions. They didn't write a new story for themselves.
There are certain qualities and principles of prosperity that I needed to learn before I could actually experience lasting prosperity in my life. I needed to acquire a “Millionaire Mindset” before actually becoming a millionaire. Lasting change needs to come from within, and as I did the work to make those changes in both my mindset and in my actions, my external experience changed as well. That's what we're learning in this book.
Remember those twenty-three credit cards and the nearly $60,000 in debt? Well, long story short, on the day that I decided I couldn't live the way I had been and committed to change, I decided that the first thing I should do was to see an accountant for a professional opinion of my situation. I went to his office (well, it was actually a cubicle; he worked in a large firm). He took all my bills and my information (salary, monthly rent, etc.) and used an old-fashioned calculator to run all the numbers. At last, when he was done, he looked at all the papers from his calculations, looked up at me, and said, “Good news! If you don't use your credit cards again, and if your salary increases at a reliable rate over the years, it will only take you twenty-eight years to get out of debt!” Twenty-eight years! And then he gave me his bill, which of course I paid with my credit card. I was definitely in a dark place, financially and emotionally. Maybe you can relate to this in some way? If so, keep reading, there is good news ahead.
Here's how that chapter of my story ended: I did dig myself out of debt, but instead of taking twenty-eight years, I did it in just over three and a half years. And along the way, my salary continued to grow, taking some major jumps. My savings accounts grew, and eventually I went from having not enough, to “just enough,” to more than enough. I began teaching these ideas to others and seeing their lives change for the better as well. Regardless of their situation, the ideas helped them realize positive results. You'll read the stories of some of these people throughout the book.
I learned how to write my next chapter and become the hero of my own story. I'll teach you how I did it in these pages. Let me say this again: If I can do this, you can, too. Really.
My hope is that you will be inspired by my story, and the stories of others, to write a whole new chapter of your life story.
The definition of “more” is different for each one of us. One thing I have learned is that my definition changed over the years as I changed. My “more” grew and changed as I grew and changed.
One of the books that has had a powerful impact on me is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. When I first saw the book, my focus was mainly on the word “rich.” As I began to read it, I began to think that the important word was actually “think”—how to consider my way to wealth. If I thought in a certain way, I would have money galore. But by the time I had reread the book several times, I realized that the most important word in the title is actually “grow.” Hill writes over and over that there is no such thing as something for nothing. We can't expect to receive more while we remain exactly the same. In order to have more, we must first become more. As we grow, our circumstances grow, including our finances.
However you define “more” in your life, hold on to it loosely, and let yourself continue to evolve and redefine success.
My hope is that you will read through this book with an open mind. I know that there is a tendency to find ways to say “Well, that couldn't happen to me . . .” But while the exact experiences will be different for every person, the Prosperity Principles are time-honored and have worked for millions of self-made millionaires over the years. I didn't invent these principles, I discovered them and then applied them to my situation. That's my wish for you: that you read this book, take away the positive ideas in each chapter, and then find ways to apply these ideas to your own situation.
Now, here's a hard truth, and I'm going to just come out and tell it to you. If you are not where you want to be financially (and actually, in any area of your life), then you need to know this:
If you do not change your attitude and your actions for the better, then your situation will not change for the bettter.
I know that sounds obvious, but one thing I have found from my own experience, and from having taught these ideas to thousands of people over the years, is this: we often say we want change, but we don't commit to the change. Then nothing changes, and then we complain about it. It's important for you to embrace this simple truth—you will need to change your attitude, and you will need to change your actions.
This book has several parts. I want you to read it, but more importantly I want you to use the ideas and actions as tools for your transformation. You can use them to write your next chapter and grow rich in the ways that you want.
The book itself is divided into two parts: Think Like a Millionaire and Act Like a Millionaire. The chapters in the first part are focused on changing and enlarging your mindset to create the wealth that you wish to have. Part One is about adopting the mind of a millionaire. Those in the second part are focused on the positive million-dollar actions you can take that will support you as you create your new chapter.
Throughout the book there are small sections that serve as powerful reminders of the ideas you just read about. Sections called DO THIS include actions to take to move you forward. While they are suggestions, I strongly encourage you to practice them, not just read them. To paraphrase the 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi, you can't get drunk on just the word ‘wine.’ He meant that you need to drink the wine in order to feel its effects. Similarly, you need to “do” the book to experience it.
Each chapter concludes with a STOP and START section. These are pretty self-explanatory. STOP includes ideas of what to cease doing as these activities will hamper you on your journey. START includes ideas of what to begin doing to aid you on your journey.
Finally, there are two things I encourage you to do as you read the book, to maximize your experience of thinking and acting like a millionaire:
Journal—Get a journal to write your thoughts, goals, and actions and to chart your progress. As you write a new chapter in your life, literally write about it! I will refer to writing in your journal occasionally throughout the book. Believe me, your journal will become a valued companion on your journey to riches.
Success Partner—Find someone to read and “do” this book with. Pick a best friend, significant other, trusted coworker, or family member. Make sure to pick someone who is as dedicated as you are, who will support you as much as you support them, and who you will be accountable to, so that you both take this endeavor more seriously.
I was once talking to a friend when I discovered that we both had the same financial goal, which was to become a millionaire. We decided to meet regularly to talk through our journey and to make the other person accountable for our actions. We even named our partnership the Million Dollar Club, and when we met, we focused on our goal and what we were doing to accomplish it. It was great to have a companion on the road to riches. We helped each other by seeing the “millionaire” in each other before we could even see it for ourselves.
Meet with your success partner regularly, discuss the ideas in the book and how they apply to your life situations, and then do the activities together. Bring your journals and make each meeting focused on your goals (no complaining allowed!).
Speaking of no complaining, try to not complain or speak negatively—about a situation, about other people, or about yourself. A self-help author once said, “Your word is your wand,” meaning that the words you say—externally or internally—help to create the experience you have. So it's vitally important to use your words wisely, both the ones you say out loud and those you say to yourself. Develop the habit of positive talk and positive self-talk.
When you are tempted to complain about something, ask yourself these questions:
Let me confess something right here. I do repeat certain ideas several times, and I do that by design. It's because those ideas are important enough to be repeated so that they make an impression.
Okay, it's time. Open your mind, get ready to take some positive actions to experience prosperity in your life, and turn the page.