We have passed from a world based
on material limitations into a world that is determined by mental concepts. We
have moved from the age of things into the “Psychosis Age,” the age of the
mind. Wealth and opportunities are contained more in the person you are and the
way you think than in the assets you have acquired in life so far. Your future
lies more in your ability to apply your mind and intelligence to your work and
your life than it does in your current job or situation.
Because health, wealth, and
happiness are essentially mental, there are very few limits on how much of them
you can acquire for yourself. In this chapter, and in subsequent chapters, you
will learn many of the simple, practical, proven methods, techniques, and strategies
used by high-achieving men and women in every field to accomplish far more than
they, or the people around them, ever dreamed possible. You will learn how to
break the bonds of limited, conventional thinking, expanding your desires and
ambitions so dramatically that you will be able accomplish any goal that you
could ever set for yourself.
■ THREE MAJOR FORCES
There are three major forces
reverberating through our world today, transforming everything they touch and
creating unlimited opportunities for the creative minority. These three forces
are the incredible growth in information, technology, and competition.
Information and Knowledge
Explosion The information revolution, combined with the speed of computerised
information processing, the Internet, and wireless communications, is enabling
knowledge in every field to double every two or three years. Fully 90 percent
of all the thinkers, inventors, engineers, scientists, writers, entrepreneurs,
and creators of all kinds who ever existed are living and working today. The
results of their efforts are becoming almost instantaneously available to each
other, thereby doubling and tripling their outputs.
Technological Advances The
explosion in technology and high-speed computers is literally breathtaking.
Today, you can e-mail a message around the world to dozens, hundreds, or even
thousands of people simultaneously, in a matter of seconds, at a cost of
pennies. The World Wide Web gives you access to tens of millions of other
Internet users, as well as to the accumulated knowledge stored in more than
50,000 libraries and research institutes. Instantaneous transmission of data
enables the money markets to move a trillion dollars per day, sometimes in
seconds, making it impossible for countries to control their currencies, much
less their economies.
In the twenty-first century, you
will own a laptop computer with a microchip that can process one billion
commands per second. It will have a long-life battery and a built-in cellular
telephone, connected to cells and satellites that will enable you to
communicate instantaneously with almost anyone, almost anywhere in the world.
You will have your own personal telephone number that will enable anyone in the
world, anywhere, to telephone you, wherever you are, whether or not they even
know what country you are in. And this
Telephone technology will
probably fit on your wrist like a large dig- ital watch does today.
Thriving Competition The third
major factor driving our lives is competition. Every business organisation
wants to generate sales and make profits, locally, nationally, and
internationally, if possible. To survive and thrive, each person and business
must be continually seeking faster, better, newer, cheaper, easier ways to
deliver value to their customers.
Every advance in knowledge and
technology creates opportunities that fleet-footed competitors can grab and run
with to create new products and services to leapfrog each other in their
markets. All three forces—information, technology, and competition—are multiplying
times each other to create the greatest rate of change in human history. And if
anything, the rate of change is going to in- crease in the years ahead.
■ CHANGE CREATES OPPORTUNITIES
Fully 80 percent of the products
and services that you will be using five years from now will be brand-new or
completely transformed from today. Probably 80 percent of the jobs being done
in five years will be new jobs or jobs that have been completely transformed by
the onrush of information, technology, and competition. And the good news is
that every single change that takes place opens up more opportunities and
possibilities for you to achieve your goals and make greater progress, faster
than ever before.
The forces of change impact
everything you do. The rate of change is accelerating week by week and month by
month. The speed and variety of change is something over which you have no
control, and about which you have no choice. The only decision you have to make
is whether you are going to be a “master of change” or a “victim of change.”
Are you going to be a creator of circumstances or a creature of circumstances?
Are you going to ride the wave and stay ahead of the curve of change, or are
you going to be bowled over by it and left in its wake? It will be one or the
other, but the impact of change will be forced upon you, whatever you do.
■ LEARN FROM THE EXPERTS
If you want to learn how to cook,
you study cooking. If you want to be a lawyer, you study law. If you want to be
an engineer or an architect, you study engineering or architecture. And if you
want to be financially successful, you study others who have become financially
successful before you. You find out what they did, and you do the same things,
over and over, until you get the same results.
Making money is a skill, like
riding a bicycle or operating a computer. Because it is a skill, it is
therefore learn-able by anyone who wants to acquire wealth. If in the past you
have accepted the false idea that you cannot make or keep all the money you
want, it is now time for you to get rid of that idea. It is a false belief. It
is time for you to decide to become financially independent.
■ THE GREAT LAW
The Greek philosopher Aristotle
first articulated the foundation principle of Western philosophy in about 350 B.C
It became known as the
Aristotelian Principle of Causality. Today, we call it the Law of Cause and
Effect. This law says that for every effect in your life, there are specific
causes. It says that everything happens for a reason. Success is not an accident.
Failure is not an accident, either. What happens to you is not determined by
luck or by coincidence. It is the result of unchanging law.
My journey from unemployment and
poverty to success and financial independence started when I began to study the
most successful people in our society. My idea was simple: I would find out
what they had done to accomplish so much, and then I would do the same things.
Why reinvent the wheel? What I discovered changed my life. It will change yours
as well.
■ MILLIONS OF MILLIONAIRES
When I began my reading and
research in the 1960s, there were seven hundred thousand millionaires in the
United States, mostly self-made, having started with nothing. By 1980,
according to the IRS, there were 1,800,000 families or individuals with a net
worth
of more than one million
dollars. Today, there are more than five million millionaires, an increase of
277 percent in 22 years. And most of them are self-made as well. These are men
and women who started with little or nothing, often broke or deeply in debt,
and who gradually accumulated enough money to become financially independent.
Self-made millionaires come from every walk of life, with every
level of education and skill, and with every difficulty, obstacle, handicap,
and challenge to overcome that you could ever dream of. Some are young and some
are old. Some are new immigrants who arrived in America unable to speak
English, and some are from families that have been in America for generations.
Some have excellent educations from the finest universities, and some are high
school dropouts. Some have superb physical health and others are in
wheelchairs, hard of hearing, blind, or have other physical limitations.
The most important thing to
remember is that no matter what difficulties you have, no matter what problems
you feel are holding you back, someone else, and probably thousands of other
people, have had far greater obstacles to overcome than you could possibly
dream of, and they have gone on to become successful nonetheless. And what
others have done, you can do as well.
■ EXHAUSTIVE RESEARCH
Dr. Thomas Stanley of the
University of Georgia spent more than 30 years studying self-made millionaires.
He interviewed thousands of them and compiled his findings into a variety of
books, research studies, and reports, including two best-selling books, The
Million- aire Next Door and The Millionaire Mind. His research shows that every
single kind of person, from every walk of life, has been able to start from
nothing and pass the magic million-dollar mark by doing certain things in
certain ways, over and over again.
■ START WHERE YOU ARE
When I began studying self-made
millionaires, I was living in a rented apartment with rented furniture. I had a
used car that was not paid for and I was deeply in debt. I was between jobs and
living off credit cards.
The first thing I found was that
self-made millionaires did things differently from average people, and I was
tired of being average. I therefore decided to stop doing what I was doing,
which wasn’t working, and to start doing what they were doing. My life has
never been the same since this decision.
It wasn’t easy to change my
thinking about money and my financial future, but eventually these efforts
began to pay off. Like a large ocean liner changing direction, one degree at a
time, my habits began to change. Within five years, I was out of debt and
making good money. In another five years, I passed the million-dollar mark.
When I look back, I see that it was no miracle. All I really did was to learn what
other successful people had done before me and then do the same things until I
got the same results.
■ GET RID OF THE MYTHS
There are a great many myths
about self-made millionaires. If you want to become a self-made millionaire
yourself, you must dispel these myths from your own mind. Remember, as the
humorist Josh Billings once said, “It’s not what a man knows that hurts him;
it’s what he knows that isn’t true.”
Many people have fixed ideas or beliefs about themselves and
money that are holding them back. These ideas may be completely untrue, but
they will cut off your chances of success nonetheless. You must get over them.
To achieve something you’ve never achieved before, you will have to think in
ways that you have never thought before. One myth is that you have to have a
great education to become rich. Another myth is that you have to start off with
a lot of money. Some people are convinced that financial success depends on
get- ting a lucky break of some kind, like picking a hot stock in the stock
market.
None of these myths are true. In
fact, a survey of members of the Forbes 400, the 400 richest men and women in
the United States, found that high school dropouts in the group who made it to
the list were worth, on average, $300 million more than university graduates on
the list.
■ THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY
The most successful immigrant
group per capital
As a result, Russians start
business after business and achieve successes that the average American
continually claims are no longer possible. Because they absolutely believe that
it is possible for them, they make their dreams come true. Their beliefs become
their realities.
■ THE REALITY PRINCIPLE
The past president of General
Electric Company, Jack Welch, was considered to be one of the best business
executives in the world. He said that the most important single quality of
leadership is what he calls the “reality principle.” The reality principle says
that you must deal with the world as it is, not as you wish it would be. You
must strive to be completely honest with yourself and your situation. You must
refuse to engage in self-delusion and the hope that things will work out whether
or not you do anything about them.
Especially when it comes to
building wealth, you must be totally honest with yourself. You cannot afford to
play games with your own mind if you truly want to be wealthy. You cannot wish
and hope and pray that somehow you are going to win the lottery or strike it
rich as a result of luck or some remarkable external circumstance.
■ YOU CREATE YOUR OWN LUCK
Often people ask me about the
role of luck in success. They are convinced that luck is a critical factor in
achieving anything worth- while. They feel that some people are just lucky and
some are not. They talk about luck as if it were a matter of fate or destiny,
largely inexplicable. They insist that a person gets to the top of his field
Largely as the result of getting
lucky breaks, which they, of course, did not get.
I have studied the concept of
luck for many years. My conclusion is that luck is a word that people use to
explain away things that turn out much better than could have been expected. If
a person achieves great financial success at a young age, people say he was
“just lucky.”
Some people use luck to describe
something remarkably good that happens that is out of the ordinary. But it is
not luck at all. The fact is that all so-called lucky outcomes are really the
result of probabilities. There is no such thing as luck.
The Law of Probabilities says
that there is a probability for everything that happens. These probabilities
can often be deter- mined with considerable accuracy. The entire insurance and under-
writing industry is based on probabilities, which are expressed in actuarial
tables.
■ BECOMING A MILLIONAIRE
There is a probability that you
will become a millionaire in the course of your working lifetime. Today in
America, one family in 20 has a net worth of more than one million dollars.
This means that your likelihood of acquiring a million dollars is one in 20, or
5 percent.
However, this also means that
your likelihood of not acquiring one million dollars, should that be your goal,
is 95 percent. These are not good odds. Your job must be to improve the odds in
your favor. Your aim should be to dramatically increase the probabilities of
achieving financial independence by doing more and more of those things that
will help you to achieve your goal. This principle applies to anything you want
to accomplish.
The more different things you do
that are likely to help you to achieve your goal, the more likely it is you
will do the right thing at the right time. If you set clear, written goals,
make detailed plans, and continually upgrade your skills to increase your
income, you in- crease the probabilities that you will earn a good living. If
you study money and investments, save and put aside 10 per- cent to 20 percent
of your income every month, keep tight control over Our expenses, and think
long-term about your financial life, you will eventually become a millionaire.
It is not a matter of luck. It is just a matter of probabilities.
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