“We can either focus on what’s working in our lives or on what’s not working. There’s evidence for both in everybody’s life. If we focus on what’s not working, we’re going to feel generally much less confident and optimistic. If we focus on what is working, that’s just a great, great gift, and it’s available to us right now.”
— Arianna Huffington, interview with Dean Graziosi
Most of the millionaire success habits that can transform your income, your wealth, your happiness, and your life I learned through 25 years of being an entrepreneur, as well as from some of the most successful people on the planet. These habits will help you acquire wealth that is not just abundant with money, but abundant with all things this wonderful life has to offer.
In this chapter I want to go deeper into your next level of wealth opportunity, whether it involves pursuing a career, starting your own business, or inventing the next level of you. In this busy world, we can be overwhelmed by opportunities and choices and end up doing nothing other than standing still.
You are reading this because you want the next level of wealth, and I’m guessing you already have an idea of the direction you need to go to accomplish that goal. Maybe you’ve just been scared to take action. Or maybe you’re trying to find exactly what that action could be. So in this chapter, I’ll help you determine the exact route you should take for your personal abundance and wealth creation. Warren Buffett is quoted as saying, “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” So let’s dig in and define what should be a yes in your life and what may be best left as a no.
At the same time, I’m going to help you avoid the mistake of saying no because of an “I can’t do something” mind-set. There truly is nothing you can’t do when you have the right habits and confidence in place. I also want to dedicate this chapter to one of my mentors, Dan Sullivan. His commitment to serve others and help them achieve their full potential through his incredible company, Strategic Coach, have given me the many amazing tools and exercises you are about to encounter. Dan has worked and trained top entrepreneurs from around the world for over 40 years and has made a significant impact on my life. Thanks for the guidance and the gifts, Dan. These tools are not only powerful, they have helped me tackle new projects and clear my thinking so I could create many successful enterprises.
YOUR MAGIC LIST
Right now I want to do an exercise that will help you accomplish two things. First, it will help you discover what you should not be doing. Second, it will open your eyes to the opportunity that truly is aligned with who you are and help bring you bigger checks. (You can grab this exercise and share it with friends and family at www.thebetterlife.com under the “Book Resources” tab.)
First, answer these questions: What do you love to do? What fires you up? What makes your heart come alive, puts a smile on your face, and raises your confidence? Do you love negotiating deals? Do you love helping people? Do you love solving complicated problems? Do you love math, science, art, or literature? Do you love taking risks? Do you love being adventurous? Do you love solving conflict? Do you love selling? Do you love marketing and advertising? Do you love inventing?
Take a moment and think about what it is you love to do. So many times in life we forget what we love because we get stuck in the mundane day-to-day, and we forget our passions. Make a list of five or six things that light you up. Next, think about what you’re really good at. If you weren’t in the room, and your best friends, coworkers, or employees were talking about you, what would they say you are good at?
Would they say that you can walk into a room when there’s a problem and solve it? Would they say you’re meticulous, someone who measures twice and cuts once? Would they say that you have the ability to try something new, and that while you’re a risk-taker, you’re an educated risk-taker? Maybe you’re good at solving problems, creating ideas, developing ideas, or putting processes in place. I don’t know what you’re good at, but you do. Write down what comes to mind.
Next, we need to talk about money, and big money at that. What thing in your life, if you just took action on it, would bring you the biggest check? Is it advancing the career that you are in, starting your own business, or taking the business you are in to the next level? It could be getting a promotion at your current job. Maybe it’s getting a loan or hiring a marketing expert to help create more sales in your business. Whatever it is, what one thing will cut you the biggest check in your life? Think it through and write down what it is.
Next, list your money goals. Earlier, you formalized your goals with the exercise that asked, “Where are you? Where do you want to go?” So where do you want to go with your finances? Take that earlier list and implement it here, making it specific to your income. Is there a certain amount of money you want to accumulate so you can retire earlier, help your parents, and protect your family? Where do you want to live; how much do you want to spend on a residence in a given area; and how much does your dream home cost? Do you want to work for yourself, and if so, what is your revenue target? Do you want to have more employees, and how much revenue do you need to make to afford them? Do you want to sell your company, and if so, for how much?
Then I want you to think about what actions you need to start taking today to move those goals forward. The action or step can be, and in many cases should be, small, but you must take a step in that direction to generate momentum. Like General Creighton Abrams Jr. explained, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” And how do you run a 100-mile race? One step at a time. How do you take your finances to that next level, start a new business, get a new career, obtain a promotion at work, or advance your company? With one step at a time, and that can start today. So what are the actions that you have to take? What e-mails do you have to send? What negative people do you have to start pushing out of your life? What people do you have to attract into your life? What do you have to say no to? Write it all down.
So far you have made a list of tasks that you love to do; skills or areas that you’re good at; activities that will cut you the biggest check; your financial goals; and action steps you need to take to move toward these goals. Yes, this exercise can relate to any part of your life, but we’re sticking with money right now.
Lastly, I want you to take a long, hard look at all the items on your list. Whatever is not on them most likely needs to go on your “make more money” what-not-to-do list. A not-to-do list is probably more crucial to your success than a to-do list. This powerful success habit will open up time and bring you clarity on a new level. So what should go on your not-to-do list because it fails to serve your future or help you become the best possible you?
To help you identify what should go on your not-to-do list, here are some common examples:
This is your laundry list of things eating up your time. It’s a crucial list of things you cannot do if you want more wealth in your life. So get your not-to-do list written and memorized so you can spot when you start doing things that are not serving your higher self.
Once you have your not-to-do list crafted, here is an extra bonus step. Next to each item on the list, write one of five things:
Eliminate
Automate
Outsource
Delegate
Replace
For instance, look at the previous example answer #2: “Jumping online to pay a bill and ending up surfing the Web, reading gossip, watching negative news, and wasting hours of your life.”
You might do the following: Automate all bill paying. Take the few hours and set up autopay or delegate someone in your family or possibly an employee to handle all bills, and check them once a month. For online surfing, you might write: Eliminate or replace with positive, uplifting messages that fuel my goals and my “why.”
The wrong habits are much easier to change when you have a plan to bump out and replace what is not serving you with things that can empower you. This gives you the tool to figure out the best course of action to get rid of the not-to-do list items and replace them with empowering success habits.
I’ve met zero entrepreneurs who are billionaires or multimillionaires who hate what they do. They all do things that they love and stuff that they are good at, which fuels their passion. They all have figured out what can cut them the biggest checks. They have goals and they know where they are going. Lastly, every day they take action steps toward their goals and aspirations. The more you do that, the more you can realize what is on your not-to-do list, and you can start to eliminate the areas of your life that don’t drive you forward in your business and don’t drive you toward that next level of income.
I told you in the beginning of this book that I don’t have a magic money machine. However, you might, and in most cases, you do! To activate that machine, cut out what you shouldn’t be doing. I love the phrase, “I’d rather give a B-level opportunity to an A player than an A-level opportunity to a B or C player.” You have the ability to be that A player. You have opportunity after opportunity at your feet to take your life, your wealth, your abundance to the next level. How? By focusing on staying away from your not-to-do list and gravitating toward your to-do list.
PUSHING PAST THE FEAR
Next levels are always scary. To go from kindergarten to 1st grade is scary. Going from 8th grade to high school is scary. Graduating 12th grade and making your way to college is scary. It’s scary dating someone new, scary getting engaged, scary getting married, scary having kids, buying a first house, starting a new job, starting a new life, meeting new friends, or even just riding a bike when you’re three. You get my point: Every change, every next level is scary!
But we have our biggest breakthroughs when we push through the scary changes, don’t we? Our next level is always on the other side of an obstacle and always on the other side of a challenge. The people who are afraid to go through the challenge are the ones who stay stuck in their lives.
How many people do you know who were rising in their careers, whose incomes were increasing, and who were becoming happier, and then they hit a wall? Maybe they encountered an obstacle they couldn’t get around or a challenge they didn’t know how to meet. More likely, their fear of the obstacle or challenge stopped them in their tracks. What they didn’t realize is that their next level of life was most likely right on the other side of whatever barrier caused them to become stuck in place!
SO LET’S DO THE D.O.S.
So how do you overcome the fear of starting your own business, advancing your career, getting a promotion, or taking your business to the next level? You have a couple of options. One way is the “D.O.S. Conversation”—it stands for Dangers, Opportunities, Strengths. This is one of those exercises I learned many years ago from Dan Sullivan and that’s why this chapter is dedicated to him. I’ve altered this exercise from Dan’s original concept so that it suits our purposes here. Here’s how it works:
To do this exercise, you can go to www.thebetterlife.com and use the D.O.S. worksheet. However, if you just want to create your own worksheet, make three columns with one small line at the top for the D.O.S. headers. Then on the header line, write Dangers on the left, Opportunities in the middle, and Strengths on the right.
Across the very top of the page, write your financial goal. It could be something like: Starting an online training business that does $100,000 in profit year one. Whatever it is, it needs to be specifically yours.
Now I want you to think of all the dangers and all the fears that you have regarding the goal you set for yourself. Is the danger that you don’t have money to start? Is it that there’s too much competition? Is it that you feel maybe you’re not smart enough? Do you worry that you may not have support from your family? Do you fear that if you focus on money, maybe you’ll become a different person?
Whatever your dangers and fears are, list all of them right now and think about what stands in the way of reaching your goal. This will allow you to visualize the fears that are paralyzing you from taking action, the exact things that are holding you back from starting or expanding a business, or even simply making more money.
Next, go to the opportunities column and shift your mindset, thinking nothing but optimistic thoughts. What are the opportunities that you have by creating this business? What are the things that drive you and excite you about that goal that’s written across the header? Is it a niche market where you know you could do great? Will it give you the security, the freedom, and the time with your family that you’re looking for? Would it allow you to finally reinvent yourself, get out of the job you dislike, take your company to that next level, and finally make more income? Just thinking about these opportunities should excite you.
So you’ve found the dangers, you’ve found the opportunities, now I want to move on to your strengths. What are the strengths you possess that could help you achieve your goal? Borrow from the “What’s cool about me?” section we did previously or create new ones that are just business related. Maybe you’re a great manager of people or a great problem solver. Maybe you’re an action taker and people look up to you for that? Perhaps you’re skilled at acquiring knowledge and turning it into wisdom—as someone who sought out and is reading this book, this is a likely one of your strengths. Maybe you’re a follow-through person and never procrastinate. Or maybe you’re a quick learner—you read something, absorb the lesson, and can then put your knowledge into practice.
Now you have a crystal-clear list of your dangers, your opportunities, and your strengths. That’s the power of this exercise. You get to see that yes, some dangers exist, but that’s the price of growth, both here and in all areas of life. But I hope this exercise helps you see in one glance, on one piece of paper, that your opportunities and your strengths will usually outweigh the dangers. Stand with pride, say it out loud, and maybe even pound your chest and say, “No way am I going to let those hold me back from the opportunity to evolve my life and my finances!” Do you want those opportunities to die or even worse, that you miss your chance to pounce on them like you may have missed them in the past? Heck, no. You truly have so many options to live your true purpose. The opportunity to make more money, protect your family, and live the life you desire is now! Carpe diem: seize the moment.
THE U.A. (UNIQUE ABILITY) CIRCLE
Now that you have one specific goal in mind that can cut you the biggest check and take you to that next level of wealth and prosperity, we must find out how you can make the time to take action toward that goal as well as what specific areas of your life best serve that goal. And the way to do this is by creating your unique ability circle. Unique ability and much of what I share here is once again a wonderful brainchild of Dan Sullivan.
You can create your own U.A. Circle by following the directions below (or go to www.thebetterlife.com and download the “Unique Ability” sheet under the “Book Resources” tab). Take a piece of paper and draw a small circle in the center of the page. Then draw three more circles around it creating three rings. In the middle of the first circle, write the words, “unique ability.” (I’ll explain this in more detail soon.) In the next ring, write “excellent.” In the next ring, write “good.” Then in the last ring, write “stink.”
So what do these circles represent? In the bull’s-eye is your unique ability, which is the thing or things in this world that you are naturally amazing at, things that put you in a flow, make you the most money, and cause you to feel the best doing them. As you move outward on the circle, you start getting away from those things that can grow your life and income the fastest and end up focusing on things that keep you doing busywork; it’s like running on a treadmill and getting nowhere.
To understand how this is so, let’s take a deeper look at the unique ability section. Your unique ability is your financial sweet spot—it confers the capacity to make the most money you possibly can. When you’re in your unique ability circle, you may be able to make $500 an hour, $1,000 an hour, or even $2,000 an hour. Whatever that number is, when you’re doing the thing that you love, the thing you were put on this earth to do, that is when you will receive the biggest check.
I look at my time from a “return on investment” perspective, which is an incredible success habit to have. For example, I pay for different people to do different things for me that are not in my own unique ability circle. There’s no reason I should mow my lawn when, not only can I pay someone else to do it and free my time up to work in my unique ability areas, but also I can help the economy, giving other people the chance to make money. While someone else is mowing my lawn and landscaping my yard, I can be working in my unique ability. I get a significant return on my investment and make multiples per hour what that costs me to have my grass mowed! The return on investment of your time when you focus on your unique ability can be huge.
Here’s a quick story that will drive home this point. When I was younger and was investing in real estate for the first time, I decided to put energy, effort, and the little money I had into an old run-down mansion and convert it into nine small apartments. After this project was complete, it was time for upkeep and maintenance. It had a massive front lawn and mowing it took me many hours every Saturday. So one day I hired someone for $50 to do it for me. That same day my dad happened to stop by to say hi, and when he saw someone else mowing the lawn and found out I’d paid $50 for this service, he completely flipped his lid. He said, “I can’t believe you, paying someone to do something you could do yourself! You are going to go broke! You are not too good to mow your own lawn.”
Given that this was my father’s “story” at the time, his response makes perfect sense. Being born during the Depression and raised amid lots of scarcity had fostered this way of thinking. He didn’t like borrowing money. He did everything he could himself and managed his affairs the old-school way, which unfortunately hindered his opportunity to make great money. He is smart as heck and a hard worker, but that wasn’t enough. His story kept him anchored to an income that never rose above $30,000 a year no matter how hard he worked. He was on a treadmill for many years. Luckily I got him off of it. He has changed in a massive way since then, but at that moment he was darn mad. He left so fast in his car that the tires spun gravel all over the yard as he peeled out, not even saying good-bye.
I was upset my dad was mad at me, but I realized how wrong he was. That lawn at that big old apartment complex used to take me a half a day to mow. At that period of my life, I was fixing wrecked cars and selling them, while also looking for and negotiating my next real estate deal, and in that same half day that I paid $50 for someone to mow the lawn I could fix or even sell a car or I could put together a real estate deal that would make me far more than $50. My time for that half day fixing and selling cars was worth $500 to $1,000, maybe even more. So when you can pay someone to do something that you are not good at, or pay for something to be done by someone else and create a return on investment on what you pay, then you can concentrate on the things that make you the most money.
I’ve carried this ideal with me for my whole life. Some people may look from the outside and say, “Well, Dean, you have money; you easily can hire people to do things.” But I realize now, looking back, that I hired people to do the things I sucked at even when I didn’t have much money at all. I knew from a young age that if I could hire a personal assistant to book my travel, to pick up my dry cleaning, to buy me groceries, and to get my house taken care of, then I could work in my unique ability zone and make the most money possible—this yielded the best return on investment. When I first hired an assistant, I finally found the time to work on the things I’m excellent at, the things that are in my unique ability circle. Eventually, this philosophy helped me focus on speaking on stage, writing books, educating others, doing bigger real estate deals, and meeting people to do deals with. In turn, these activities helped my businesses flourish.
This unique ability approach is especially relevant in today’s world where you have interns and virtual assistants who will work for pennies on the dollar for the experience. In fact, I’ll give you a list of companies that provide virtual assistants that are incredible and can do small projects for you; they will free you to work on the things that are in the inner ring of your unique ability circle.
Think about how you spend your time. What things can you say no to that are not in your unique ability circle that will then allow you to say yes to the things that make you feel the best and can make you the most money? Because I promise you, when you learn to say no to things that don’t take your wealth to that next level, you will find yourself accomplishing your income goals faster than imagined.
So if you took the time (and I hope you did) to create the visual circle or went to our website and grabbed the worksheet, start filling it in. What do you think are your unique abilities? Then progress to the other rings: what you are excellent at, what you are good at, and what you stink at. You can also label the hourly rate you anticipate for each item you list.
As Dan Sullivan teaches, the U.A. Circle is designed to be peeled away like an onion. Each week, each month, and each year you’re peeling away one layer at a time; and these outer layers are the things you shouldn’t be doing. Eventually you’ll end up at the core of the onion, which signifies the things you should be doing. This is the exercise that can allow you to have more hours in a day, make more money by working fewer hours, and align yourself with the things you were meant to be doing.
THE GAP
Now that you understand the value of working in your area of unique ability, you will see how much easier and smoother the ride can be when you are working in and on things that ignite passion and get bigger checks. In theory, you would never again fall into a funk or feel insecure. Oh, how I wish it were that easy! As much as I hope this was possible, the truth is we all fall into a funk at one point or another. We all have self-doubt and think we’re not good enough. Most of us relapse, thinking that we’re not living up to our full potential and that we can’t do something.
And because I know this to be true, I want to go through an exercise that Dan calls the gap. The gap is the funk that we fall into and the funk that stops us dead in our tracks. And it’s not about if it’s going to happen. It’s about when, and then how fast you can rebound when it does.
Did I ever fail? Absolutely! I failed a ton in my life, but the thing I did best was that I failed fast and I had a quick rebound rate. And there is a way that you can strategically get out of your funk quickly and back on track using a tactical process that will become a habit. Let’s face it: We constantly chase an ideal or even more commonly, perfection. We are chasing the perfect finances, perfect body, perfect parent, perfect spouse—perfection in all aspects of ourselves. You know exactly what I’m talking about.
When you’re hitting the gym and looking good, you stop and realize you’re not spending enough time with your wife or husband and you criticize yourself for neglecting this person you love. Or your relationship is great in so many areas but you hate your job or you’re not making enough money and you give yourself a hard time about this failing. Or you’re making all the money in the world, but you’re not the parent you always wished you could be and you beat yourself up over it. And why is this?
We all have major accomplishments in our lives. But when is the last time you celebrated one of them? When’s the last time you did something that was a goal of yours and you stopped and let it sink in, congratulating yourself? When was the last time you said, “I’m going to do something in the next ninety days!” and you did it and you rewarded yourself? I bet you haven’t done these things in a very long time.
In our culture and society, when we complete our goals, we immediately look to the next thing that we haven’t accomplished. Maybe you got a promotion or started your own business in the last year. You should be celebrating, but instead you respond to this achievement by saying, “Yeah, but I neglected my kids. I need to work on my relationship with my kids more.” Then you get a relationship going with your kids, and you look down and notice you’re a bit overweight and you say, “Yeah, I’m closer with my kids, but look at my gut.”
We start creating this imaginary perfect person in our minds, and we’re always falling short of it—it immediately puts us in the gap. It’s like we are all stuck chasing the sunset. No matter how fast you go west, you can never catch the sunset. The same holds true with trying to reach this imaginary perfect person state. We are chasing an impossible task and setting ourselves up for disappointment and depression.
I want you to think about it this way. When we compare ourselves against our imagined perfect selves, we will always come up short. When we compare ourselves to the perceptions we have of others, we lose confidence and we start to fall into a funk. We start saying things like, “I could never have a family as loving and perfect as my neighbor’s.” Or we say things like, “I may be making the money I want, but it’s not as much as John or Mary is making.” And in most cases we don’t know what’s happening in other people’s lives and what they are dealing with behind closed doors, so who are we to use them as our role models when we don’t know the facts? It’s just a habit many people fall into, and it sets us up to feel less capable, successful, happy, wealthy, and wise than John or Mary.
So, whether the funk comes from comparing ourselves to the perfect us or someone else, here’s how you get out of this comparative hole fast and effectively. First, look at where you are right now in life. What have you achieved? What have you accomplished? What have you done really well? And whenever you think you’re sliding into this gap of not feeling good enough or that you haven’t accomplished enough, the secret is looking back. Remember all you’ve done in your life to get you to where you are today. Look at all the crap that was thrown your way that you overcame and got through. Because you truly have accomplished so much amazingness in your life!
Understand how much you’ve evolved! Fill your soul with self-appreciation for what you’ve done. Even when thinking about your past mistakes, recognize that you got through them and you’re still here standing tall. You didn’t give up, and you surely didn’t crawl into a hole and hide. You’re still chugging away, you’re still pushing, you’re still persevering, and in my book that is pretty damn amazing!
If I were going to be in a room with thousands of people, I’d want you to be in that room. Why? Because you made the choice to read this book, which means that you want to move forward in your life. That says a lot about who you are, since most people wouldn’t even make the effort. So when you’re trying to chase the horizon and chase the perfect version of you, and you fall into a funk, stop, mentally turn around, and remind yourself of what an impressive person you are and of all the things you’ve done to get where you are today.
The quicker you can make it a habit to turn around and focus on how far you have come rather than comparing or berating yourself, the quicker you can make that funk disappear. When you get out of your funk quicker, you have the ability to rebound faster and get back on track, working on things that serve your true vision. Think about this: Do you know why the ideal person and that perfect version of yourself are there? It’s not to judge your current state against them and beat yourself up over what you haven’t accomplished! No, they’re there for you to use as the source of your goals. If you’re coaching your kid’s Little League team and you look down and you see a little belly below, you don’t beat yourself up and say, “Ugh, I am fat. I can’t believe this. How lazy must I be?” No! You just take what you see and you use it as a new goal on your list! You don’t judge yourself; you see something you know needs your attention and then apply actionable steps to it. You say to yourself, “I’m going to lose five pounds in the next two weeks by giving up sugar and dairy. Oh, and I’m also going to run on the treadmill three days a week.” How much better is that than saying, “I’m fat and I failed”? The secret is to pull goals from the ideal version of you, but don’t ever compare yourself to the ideal. Those are two completely different things.
We’ve covered a lot of ground in this chapter, but what I hope you hold on to most is the idea of one shining goal and how it can take you where you want to go financially. If you set that goal firmly in your mind—and if you identify what you should and should not do—then you’ll reach the abundant life you’ve dreamed about. The exercises I’ve shared—the D.O.S Conversation, the U.A. Circle, and the gap—all will help you reach that one shining goal. It’s like a beacon in the night. Its brilliant light helps steer you toward it.
Of course, that light alone isn’t enough. You don’t just need to know where you’re going; you need additional elements to make your journey safe and fast. In the next chapter, I’ll share with you two of these elements: attraction and persuasion.