17 Small Habits That Made Me Rich!

I call the gratitude advantage. Now, this isn't what you've been hearing about, where you know, every day you write down all these little things that you're happy about. But it's sort of like that, because daily gratitude does rewire our brains for success. So how does it do that? Well? Early in my career, like when I was first getting started, you know, pre internet days, I couldn't just go online and watch YouTube videos of Jordan Peterson. I had to

buy programs. I had to buy courses. Now, one of the first things I bought was a book called Think and Grow Rich from Napoleon Hill. Now this book was written, I believe, in nineteen thirty nineteen thirty seven, and it's been one of the best performing best selling books of all time, over one hundred million copies. And the reason why is because it's so powerful even today, and going through how to Think and how to grow rich, it

shifted my entire mindset and literally shifted my entire life. Now. One of the things that it taught me is that we should write down a couple of key things every day. Not just I'm grateful for having food or a house like that, but more specifically, three things that I write down every day. Number one, what did I learn today? Now? We want to reflect on that, because even if bad things happen today, I could learn lessons from that that are helpful. All Right, So I write down what I

learned and why I'm grateful to have learned those lessons. Okay, Then the second thing is I write down other things that I'm grateful for. And then the third thing I write down every day is what I did well. So again, these are lessons, these are stories, and this is what drives my life forward. But I think about it in an optimistic way, and I use a tool to do this. It's a Google form that I've set up to do this. If you want to download my Google form for free.

We're going to put a link to it down below if you want to use my tool. But however you do it, it's up to you. But the key is that optimism is mandatory for wealth creation. I repeat, mandatory for wealth creation. I had to repeat that. So what do I mean by that? Well, in order to be an entrepreneur, in order to be successful in investing, you have to be optimistic about the outcome. You have to

be optimistic about the future. So many times I've talked to friends or other people who want help starting a business or taking on an investment, and know, I break it down for them and I'll tell them, you know, how they can scale it or how they can move into it, and they just say, like, you know, but what if this bad thing happens, And I'm like, well, yeah it will, So what that's okay. We'll just figure

out how to solve them. We'll figure out how to mitigate the risk, we'll figure out how to move on to the next one. And it's that optimistic lens. And without it, you're never going to get ahead, which brings us to habit number two. I call the capture rule. And I'd say that if you can think it, you should ink it. So what do I mean by that, Well, our brains should be used for creating ideas, not storing them. Our brains should be creating, our brains should be thinking,

Our brains should be connecting dots. But the problem is, if you have an idea, it just sort of rattles around inside your brain, driving you crazy, creating stress, or you forget it. So if you can think it, you should inc it. So as soon as you have an idea, I must capture it, all right. What I like to say is that time is so valuable. You don't have the luxury of having the same thought twice, So as

soon as it pops up, we write it down. Now, in the old days, I used to just carry around a notebook with me, and I have a pen and I just pull it the notebook and write it down. Okay. Then we got you know, the iPhone, and I started to put it into this app called ever note on my phone, and then you know, I could just plug

everything in there. As a matter of fact, I still have a sheet in every note today and I call it my capture page, where I literally capture all ideas now today, for the last month or so, I've been wearing this wearable device. It's a wearable AI device, and it records everything I do, and so now I don't even have to push a button. I literally just talk and like I put in a tag say like you know, like take action, and then those tags, those notes can

go straight to my assistant and automatically get done. So we're capturing everything to allow our mind to think. That allow mine to create ideas instead of trying to remember things, which brings us to hab at number three, which I call when your morning, when your day. Now, one of the worst things that you could do is to sit down in the morning at your computer and go, well,

what are we going to work on today? Because if you want to drive your life forward, then you have to be doing the things necessary to get your goal. So you should already know what those things are. And it starts out the night before. Now. Typically I put my creative work in the morning, so I want my mind to be fresh for creating work, which means then at the end of the day, I should be doing my review when all the things I need to get done, looking at all those and then making the plan for

what I want to do in the morning. When i'm fresh, I predecide the task, and by predeciding the task, it eliminates the precast do nation allows me to get more done. So a simple action step you can take is that, just tonight, before you go to bed, list out tomorrow's tasks. Now, I typically write down a few things like what's the one main thing I have to get done, the non negotiable. Then I'll write down what are three tasks that I have to get done, and I write all those down

those are the non negotiables. And again, this is all done in the Google form that I fill out every single night. And again, if you want it, and I'll share it with you, it's down below. It's all free. There's a link to it if you want it. But it brings us to habit number four, what I call eating the frog first. Now, I see eating the frog first is about a term that where it's basically, you

do your hardest task first. You do the thing that you don't want to do, the biggest thing, the hardest thing, the worst thing, and you do it first because of the rest of the day gets easier. Maybe you'd say the most important thing now for me, one of the most important things for me would be working out. I've been working out in the gym since I was about fifteen years old, and I would typically always go after

work because I was never a morning person. Now, getting to work was already hard enough for me, and after work i'd go to the gym. The problem was, is things changed once I got married, I had kids. Going to the gym after work it was pretty difficult to stay consistent with. But because it was so important to me, I couldn't just fit in regular anymore. I figured, well, I guess I have to put it first. So what I'll do I guess is I'll have to wake up like two hours earlier every day so I could go

before I go to work. Now, I remember sitting there in the morning, waking up in the dark for a couple of years and just like standing there in the dark, thinking of every reason that I didn't have to go to the gym, but I would go because it was so important to me. I put it first. Now today it's my most critical task. It's been so ingrained into me now that I look at it like I have to go to the gym because my day won't go near as good, it won't be near as productive if

I don't do it. So eat the frog first. Put it first, the most important thing, which takes us to habit number five, which is what I call habit stacking. So what we do is we connect new habits to old habits. So, for example, obviously you know I'm making videos on YouTube. We make content across the social media platforms, and it's difficult to do that. I never have time to do that. I'm always too busy. So I guess let's create a habit and let's stack it on top

of the other habits. So now I get up, I go to the gym, and as soon as I get out of the gym, I create social media posts. So now I've stacked another habit on top of another existing one. So all you want to do is attach new habits to existing ones that are already there. So if you can think of just one thing you do consistently. Do you wake up at the same time every day? Do you brush your teeth at the same time every day

after you wake up? So okay, I brush my teeth as soon as I wake up, and then I'll add a habit right under the back of that. So think about one habit that you would like to build into your life that you can put on autopilot, write down one thing you're doing consistently, and then match those things up together and it'll be well in a way, which brings us to habit number six, which is what I

call the time vault. And this is a key piece that most people kind of overlook, they just absolutely don't value. And I call it the vault because the vault is where you would put your most storage, your most treasured assets. And for us in economics, everything's built off of scarcity, and the most scarce thing in the world is time. So we've got to guard our time. We have to

guard it fiercely. Now. The one problem is, just like your money, most of us wonder, you know, where it all went at the end of the month, like where did all my money go? Right, So then we learn how to budget our money. But time is sort of the same way. We look back and go where did all our time go? But most people don't think about budgeting their time, and so just like money, we don't want to figure it out like where it went afterwards. We want to plan in advance where that money will go.

And with our time, it should be the same way, we plan in advance where time will go. Now, we also want to respect our time. We don't just plan sloppily. We don't just say, hey, I need an hour for this meeting or whatever, like maybe it's only fifteen minutes, maybe it's only ten minutes. I mean, if I'm going to meet with somebody else, maybe I only need ten minutes to meet with them. Do I really need an hour or I need to block that out. I need

to respect my time. I also need to respect their time. I don't want to take up or waste their time, and in return, the respect my time as well. So an action step that you can take is to measure and budget where your time goes. Now. One thing that I do regularly multiple times a year is something called a time audit. So the first thing I want to do is figure out where is my time even going.

So then I can track it for typically two weeks, where all my time is going, and then I can take a look back at it and go, hmmm, I should probably spend more time here, less time there. So when I budget out and I set new time blocks on my calendar to make sure I'm completing those tasks and spending the right amount of time in each section,

which brings us to habit number seven. Decision diet. Now this is not diet as in food, although it could include that, But I think about the decision diet is trying to limit the amount of decisions that I have to make, because decision fatigue is real. If we can simplify our decisions, then we can preserve our energy, and more importantly, we can preserve our creativity. So all my creativity goes into the morning when my mind is fresh, and I put all the decisions like management and calls

and things like that in the afternoon. So, for example, why do you think you see me wearing a black shirt every single day, Because that's one of the first decisions I make in the day. I don't want to make that decision, so I just wear the same thing at lunch. I don't think about what I'm gonna eat for lunch. I just eat the same thing every day. Now, the reason why is because fewer decisions mean I have

more mental bandwidth to do higher value things. So an action step that you can easily do is just think about things that you do on a regular basis, like getting dressed or eating lunch. What do you wear every day? What do you have for lunch every day? How could you audit made those things so you don't have to think about them, putt any time, effort, in energy in or decisions into them. What about getting your haircut once a month? Should you just schedule that on autopilot? Right?

What are those things that you can automate and take the decisions out now? Just make it in standing appointment every single month. What are the things that I can automate? What are the things I can get rid of? What are decisions so I could use my cognitive ability for higher value things which brings us to habit Number eight curate to elevate. Now, a lot of us watch the news. I mean you should. We should be paying attention to

what's going on in the world. We should be looking at the way things are evolving around you know, in our business, our profession, and you know, for me specifically, I have to study the markets, have to study the macro environments all the time. I have to study marketing. I have to study content creation, I have to study technology coming out. So how do I stay on top

of that? Well, instead of just curating my news, I also curate my learning you see, we have so much news that we can go through and we can read all the news websites. But I learned early on is that other people do that as well. And there's some people that write newsletters where they've already taken all the

news and then they provide analysis to that. So there's a handful of email newsletters that I subscribe to, and they tell me what the macro markets are doing every day, they tell me what the tech markets are doing every day. They tell me what the greatest AI tools that are coming out every single day. And so these guys, they're already going through all the information and then they curate the very best of it and they give me the

analysis on them. And so by following just a hand pick selection a curated list of newsletters and feeds and YouTube channels, then I get not just the news, but I get it analyzed, I get it curated, and I get it brought right to me, so I get quality inputs and I get quality outputs. And so you can do this very easily, just cure your news feed intentionally.

So for example, on Twitter, what you could do is if you wanted to follow a bunch of people, I guess that's fine, But what you could do is make a list of people that you need to follow for certain things. So, for example, on my x profile, I have several lists. I have a macro list, I have a Bitcoin list, I have my AI coding list, I have my a I prompt list, and then I can just look at those people that provide the signal on

those things. Now, the rest of my social media like Instagram or whatever, I don't even have any friends on there. I just follow people in the industry. It's where I curate the news, so I'm not wasting time. It's all learning for me, which brings us to habit number nine. The idea factory, and the idea factory produces well ideas. Now, what I've learned is that creativity is like a muscle, and that muscle, that creativity, it can be built up.

So for example, right now, I run multiple eight figure businesses. On top of that, I'm an advisor or a chief visionary officer to four different companies that total over half a billion dollars. Now, these people have brought me on because of my creativity, my ability to see things, to see patterns, to connect dots that most people just don't see. But I wasn't always this way. I did it intentionally. It was about fifteen years ago again in my personal

development quest. I was listening to a program I had purchased from Brian Tracy, and he talked about building the idea factory, and he talked about building the creative muscle, and he said that every day I should get out a piece of paper in the morning and write down ten ideas. So I thought, okay, let me try that now. In the beginning, the ideas were terrible. I didn't even know what to write down. It was just gibberish. But over time it got better and better and better, and

today I see ideas everywhere. My idea factory is running full steam. But again it wasn't because I was born this way. It was because I built the idea factory intentionally. So the action step for you to do is what I did. Get out a piece of paper every morning, write down five ideas. Start with five, right, Write five ideas every morning, and just know they're going to be bad. In the beginning, you're not going to know what to write, but continue down that path. Now today I can't turn

it off. I just get new ideas coming at me NonStop, never ending. So I built the habit. I built the idea factory, which brings us to the next habit happen. Number ten, just in time learning. You see, we've been taught that, especially in the information age, that knowledge is power, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Only knowledge apply this power. And so what we want is to learn on demand or learn exactly what we need to solve the problem right in front of us, what I

call just in time. You see, there's three levels to learning and understanding something. The first level is of course, reading the information, receiving the information. The second level is then we need to apply the information, and then the third level, well understanding, is to teach the information. Now, what we want to do is we want to read it, learn it, and then we want to apply it right away, which means we should only be reading, we should only

be learning things that we need right now. So if you look through my book library, hundreds and hundreds of books, they're super diverse. I have books on human resources or hiring. I have books on marketing, I have history books like you know, all these different things, right, And the reason why is because when I'm hiring people I'm reading books on hiring or human resoce and recruiting. And when I'm

scaling my business, I'm reading books on scaling businesses. And when I'm building new marketing promos, then I'm reading books on marketing. Right I learn exactly what I need for the problem in hand, just in time now, at the time I need the information, I read it, I apply it, and because of that, I learn it faster. But it also saves me all the time of reading and watching and learning a bunch of things that I don't need

right now. So the action step to take is what is the thing that you need to know right now to move your biggest domino, the biggest thing you need to move forward in your life right now? Then ignore everything else. Go get that information, receive it, apply the information right now to solve your problem immediately to see your growth blow up. A small business owner, are you buried in all types of work keeping you from the real thing that makes you money? Well that's where just

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kinds of small businesses with real human support. So visit justworks dot com slash podcast to join the thousands of small businesses that trust just Works to take care of payroll, benefits, compliance and more. Again, that's Justworks dot Com slash Podcasts. Habit number eleven. The growth budget. Now, this is the next piece. So we're obviously we want to be growing, right, but we also want to be growing as fast as we can do. You want to grow a little bit in a year or a little bit in a week,

which is what these habits actually bring to us. And to speed this process up, we need to be investing in ourselves. Now. If I've been watching my content for some time, you've probably heard me tell the story of how in two thousand and eight, during the Great Financial Crash, I got wiped out. I was completely caught off sides. I had built up a couple of businesses and sold them off some big exits. I did amazing in business, but I wasn't paying attention to the global financial market

and it got me. So I had to go figure that out. That was the information, the just in time information that I needed right then. So what do I do well? I invested into investment newsletters, I invested into coaching offers, and I spent years spending lots of money, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars on these newsletters, on these coaching programs. But they enabled me to get the knowledge and the information that I have today, and so I believe it's been proven for me the highest

return on your investment comes from your own personal growth. Now, the markets come and go, they crash, they boom, My businesses could crash. But the knowledge that I have of how the markets work, how business works, it can never be taken from me, and so I can just go use it again and again, which is the highest return we can ever have. So an action step you is literally budget some money for learning and maybe for masterminds.

Put some away, just like you'd put away for a new car, you'd put away for a new house, you'd put away for a vacation or whatever. Start budgeting money to go into a conference to learn something, a course, a program that you can buy, a mastermind that you can attend. Now I typically go to one to two masterminds every single year. They typically cost like twenty five thousand to fifty thousand dollars because they continue to pay those types of dividends for me, which brings us to

the next habit, Habit number twelve. Autopilot your wealth. And what we want to do here is we want to automate our savings and really we want to think about paying ourselves first. So all of this, all these habits are about getting the life that I want. Of course, first I have to determine what that is that I want. So once I know what those things are, then I want to automate it. I want to guarantee my success, and so I do that thing with my wealth. I

automate my savings. So for example, if I want to save money for vacation or for a car for my education, for example, well I would decide how much I need, when do I need it buy, what percentage of my income should I put aside to achieve that goal, and over what period of time? And then once I've figured all that out, spent the time and energy doing that. Then I automated so I never have to think through all of that ever again. So I spend the time upfront,

I think through it, and then I automate it. So easy ways that you can do this are one, you could just go to your bank. You can open up as many bank accounts as you want, and then you know, let's let you do that, and then you can set up automatic transfers from bank account to bank account. So what I suggest is you want to have all your money go into one account, but you don't spend from that account. The money then distributes out to other accounts

that spend. So this one, you know, pays the car, this one pays my loans, this one pays the bills or whatever it is. And you want to set that up automatically so you don't have to do this manually. And you could do it manually, but it defeats the whole purpose. Now there's a tool that I've checking out recently. It's called get sequence, and you can build this all out automated, in like an automated workflow. It's pretty cool.

But however you do it, make sure to automate these things and automate your wealth, which brings us to have at number twelve weekly health pulse. Now, some people will tell you that you should look at your money every single day, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that, and maybe you should in the beginning, but I like to look at it more in depth every single week. It's like you know, stepping on the scale once a week to see how much weight you're gaining or losing, or

checking your vital signs. And I want to understand my overall wealth in my business and for myself personally. Now, there's three things that you should be looking at every single week, at least every single month. Now. The first is the profit and loss. How much money did I bring in and how much money did I spend. I don't care if it's a business, I don't care if you're a W two. You should be looking at this. For yourself, we want to be looking at that every

single week. Then I want to understand my statement of cash flows, like where did my money actually go? And then ultimately number three. Most people do not do this, but you should. I want to look at the balance sheet. The balance sheet is what I like to call my scorecard. This is where all my assets are listed minus all my liabilities, and then what's the balance of that. Like

I said, that's the scorecard. Because the goal in the game of building wealth is to take earned income and turn it into assets, and this tells us how well we're doing in that game, and we can monitor that on a regular basis. So the action step for this is to figure out when every week you can do this. Again, I do it every week. I do it on Fridays. Maybe for you it's on a Sunday, but then you put it on your calendar. Then you get all three

of these reports. If you don't have them, you need to figure out how to get them so you can review them every single week. Now this brings us to habit number fourteen income insurance, because now that we're looking at our profits, how many streams of profits or income do we have? And if it's just one, then we need to be thinking about how we can diversify that income. You've heard many times that the wealthy have multiple streams of income, but I think most people get that wrong

when they think about it. You see, what we want is we want to diversify our income sources. So we're not beholding to just one income stream. But like I said, it's not how most people think about it. Now. I had to learn this lesson the hard way. What happened to me back in two thousand and eighties, as I told you earlier, is that I had multiple businesses and I had two big exits. I sold them off and I sold all that and I put it into investments.

And when the market's crashed, I found myself owing a lot of money, but I had no income. I had sold my income streams. So whether you sell your income streams or you only have one income stream and you lose it, the risk is still the same. So if I have a business, I don't want all my business to be coming from just one customer. I want to

have multiple customers. As a matter of fact, if you want to sell your business and you only had one customer, your business isn't worth a lot of money because it's so risky. So you want to diversify the income streams across one multiple customers, two maybe across multiple products, so you don't have to go start multiple businesses. You see, that's where most people get this wrong. They want to start all these businesses here's focus on your core competency,

but have multiple customers, have multiple products. Now let's say that you're an employee. Well, it's the same thing. Your income is then coming from just one source, your job. So for you, you probably should start thinking about some side hustle, some contract work that you could do to diversify those income streams, at least building up the skills. So if you need to do you could go find more income at least have the skills to do that. The one thing they can't take away. So the action

step here is to build multiple income streams. Again, if you have a business, how can I find more customers? How can we launch more products within the existing business? Not that I need to go start new businesses that makes sense. This brings us to habit fifteen, build or be built. If you follow me on social media, you see the posting about this probably all the time, and it basically means that we should engineer our ideal life. So for me, I want to think about what is

my ideal life? So for example, I was coaching one of my high end members and he was very well off, and he came up in front of the crowd. You know, I was talking to him in the hot seat and he said, you know, Mark, the problem is I feel like I'm just not spending enough time with my wife. I think I'm working way too much. I don't spend enough time with her. And I said, great, it's a good problem. So how much time should you spend with your wife? But of course he didn't know the answer

to that. So the question is how much time should you spend with your wife if you want to have a good relationship, or how much time with your kids? Or what do you do with your health to look you know, what do you want your health to look like? Or what do you do with your day to day life? What do you want that to look like? You see, what we want to do is design what our ideal life is. And if we can define it, then we

can engineer it our business, our relationships, our legacy. But we have to have that clear vision first and we have to have our aim. And then once we have our aim, our path becomes clear. So the action step to take is to spend a little bit of time or maybe a lot of time thinking about this. Now. The way that I would do this is I future pace it, so I think of myself in the future, some time in the future, and think about yourself and

imagine what your ideal day would look like. Not your single dream day, right, but just like your average day in the future. You want a billion dollars, what would you do? You know, you know billionaires still work, right, It's because they found things they like to do. So what would those things be for you? What would you wake up? Would you have a spouse, would you be married, Would you be in a different country. Would you be on a beach, would you be in the mountains? What

would your day be like? Would you be filled with just leisure and lay down all day for eighteen hours a day, or would you like work on things that bring you energy? Would you be using creativity at night? Would you be with family or friends? Would you be doing dinners? What would you be doing? What would that look like? See? Once you figure out what you want your lifestyle to look like, then you can work backwards

from there. So the action step here is to think through that, write that down, summarize it into a single statement about yourself. And I'd recommend them to write it down and probably print it out and put it on your workspace or something like that, so you can see it every single day, and then your mind can start working towards that goal, which brings us to hab A sixteen,

the legacy lens. If we really want to achieve these things, and we really want to have that legacy, then we have to reflect daily on what our legacy is building towards. So journaling, of course at the end day, is part of that. It gets us to sit down and think through the lessons that we've learned and how we're tracking, how we're pacing to do those things. But of course it only works if we know where we're trying to go.

You see, legacy focus creates what we call purposeful living, and that's what most of us actually want, right we want a purpose. Society has kind of trained most people to think that they should work for forty years save for a retirement, so one day you could just like, live off your savings and do nothing. What people really want, they want a life of purpose, of meaning and challenge. And so we do that by journaling, and then by reflecting on what we're doing, What are we doing, what

do we like, what do we hate? What gives us energy, what takes our energy? What do we want to do more of? What should we do less of? What do we absolutely love? What do we absolutely hate? Write all those things down, reflect on them, and then think about how you can take action to move those things forward,

which brings us to habit number seventeen, blissfully dissatisfied. Now, this came from ed Milette's mindset, and it's sort of like ignorance is bliss, But it's more about being able to balance being content on one side, but on the other side continuing to want more. It's a tough thing to balance being happy with where I'm at, being happy with the progress that I've made, but at the same

time pushing to continue to get better. I mean, why wouldn't we Once we figured out what our poor values are, the goal should just be to continue to get better and better at those. Not be a better husband or a better wife, or a better father or son or daughter. Why not be better in your position, at your role? Why not be in better shape? Why not be better right? And so be content on where you're at with the

progress you've made, but continuing to push more. So the action step here is to regularly assess and push for growth, because it's that growth, it's the hope of achieving the growth that provides us the energy for the growth that we need, and the hope comes from knowing or believing that we can achieve that goal. So, what's my health goal, what's my relationship goal, what's my business goal, what's my own personal goal? How do I assess those? How do

I push for growth in those areas? That gives us hope? And that's what keeps us going. Now, these habits might seem small individually, but when you combine them together, their combining effect creates extraordinary wealth. It provides clarity, provides massive impact. And if you're serious about building lasting wealth and designing your life intentionally, then you might want to watch this video about how to live your life. I like a CEO,

even if you're not. If you really want to see growth in your life, and I'll see you over there,