There's a lot that goes into financial success, like luck and privilege and unfair advantages. But because one of our goals on this blog is to help you get to financial freedom, I'm gonna go over eight habits that will helped you become a millionaire. Let's go for it.
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Shift your mindset about money
Habit number one is more of a mindset shift really. And that is that most people don't become millionaires or achieve large amounts of financial success through their day job. Usually, if you wanna acquire wealth in a short amount of time, you have to,
- have multiple streams of income and,
- have streams of income that do not rely on you trading your time for money.
Strategic laziness
Habit number two I call strategic laziness. And this firstly relies on us recognising the value of our own time. Time is our most valuable non-renewable resource. It's the only thing we can't make more of. We can always make more money but we can never make more time. And that's why, I call this strategic laziness, right? Because a lot of the time there are things that we can do to automate processes that we do fairly regularly, things that we can do to speed up or be more productive in our tasks.
Often when someone starts up a business for the first time, we spent absolutely ages making a website and making a business card and making sure the logo is legit, and spending hundreds of hours on this pointless the stuff. Whereas, if we're being strategically lazy, we recognise the end goal is to get customers and to sell them something. And so, fancy website, logo, business card, it really doesn't help with that particular end goal.
Develop an entrepreneurial diagnostic mindset
Habit number three is to develop an entrepreneurial diagnostic mindset. Now, this is the sort of thing that if you're interested in starting up businesses, which you probably want to be because that's the easiest and quickest way to get wealthy very quickly in this day and age. Again, it's not gonna be through your job. But if you're interested in the idea of setting up businesses you need to have a decent idea for what business to set up. And the thing that dictates whether something is a good business idea is
- Identifying a problem that people have,
- Figuring out a way to solve the problem.
- And three, ideally people will wanna pay you money for the solution.
And so the habit here is that as you're going out into the world and going about your day-to-day life, you wanna be recognising whenever you notice that something really sucks or that there is a specific problem. Like for example, if at one point you thought, "Oh, it really sucks that to order a takeaway "I have to phone up a restaurant. "I wish there were a better way to do it." That might give you the idea for something like DoorDash or Deliveroo. If you had the idea that, "Oh, ordering a taxi really sucks. "Why do I have to phone up this company "and be on hold for five minutes?" that might have given you the idea to start something like Uber or Lyft. And the more you approach life with this entrepreneurial mindset, you start seeing these ideas in absolutely everything.
And the reason you don't have a good business idea is 'cause you're not looking at the world from this lens of what are the problems? What really sucks out there in the world? And therefore, what are the problems that I can create solutions for?
Develop a growth mindset
Habit number four is the growth mindset, which you might've come across. And the way I like to think of this is that everything is figureoutable. Often the non-entrepreneurial-minded people will think about doing something like, starting a YouTube channel and think, "Oh, I don't know how to do that. "That feels quite hard," and it will stop them there. Whereas the more entrepreneurial people will have an idea for, "I wanna make this business "or this app or this YouTube channel," and instead of thinking, "I don't know how to do it, "Therefore I can't," there'll be thinking, "I don't know how to do it, but that's fine "'cause I've got the internet and I can figure it out."
Everything in the world is figureoutable. Stuff feels like much more of a black box than it actually is. If you've ever thought about doing something but you've been stopped by this idea of, "I don't know how to do it," then the everything is figureoutable approach is a great habit to adopt, which is that your default is to Google something and figure it out because literally everything on Earth is available on the internet and you can teach yourself any skill that you want.
Ask the right people
That brings us on to habit number five, which is that although everything is a skill and everything can be learned and you can Google absolutely anything you want, there is a point at which you can accelerate the process of learning or doing anything by asking the right people. And there's a great book by Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan called "Who Not How," which kind of embodies this approach when it comes to business. Like when you have a problem you wanna think, "Who can help me solve this problem?" rather than necessarily, "How can I solve this problem by myself?"
If you're young and you're just getting started out in business and you don't know many people, then you kind of do have to do things by yourself. But when you get to the point where you have a certain amount of success or if you know people who are entered into this business thing as well, you can really start adopting the who not how habit which will really help you accelerate your results 'cause now you're taking advantage of your network.
Learn to make friends
That brings us on to habit number six which is to make friends with people in real life and more importantly, well, not more importantly, but additionally, on the internet. And the single best way I find for doing this is Twitter.
Twitter is an incredible, incredible invention that you can use to make friends with people all around the world. And the nice thing about Twitter is that it's different to Instagram. Instagram is very sort of visual and based on posting pretty pictures, but Twitter is very much based on sharing good ideas. And if you are sharing interesting ideas and you're connecting with other people who are sharing those similar ideas, that automatically leads you to kind of becoming internet friends, and then they follow you, you follow them, you chat a little bit in the DMs.
Read a lot
On a somewhat related note, habit number seven is reading a lot. And just like we can get wisdom from our real life and our internet friends via Twitter, we can get a lot more wisdom from people who have written books about stuff. You know, if you speak to anyone who's successful in almost any way, they will almost always say that they read a lot of books. And they will also almost always say that everyone else that they know who's successful also reads a lot of books.
So if you're telling yourself, "I don't have time to read," then you're kind of screwing yourself because basically every millionaire you ask will have spent tonnes and tonnes of time reading books. And again, the great thing about books is that you've got 5, 10, 20 years of experience that someone has boiled down to a thing that takes you a few hours to read. And if you read lots of books of entrepreneurship, business, finance, basically anything you're interested in, you can just get a huge amount of value from them. And it doesn't really cost very much. And it's just such a great way to accelerate your learning in almost anything.
Acquire financial literacy
And finally, habit number eight for becoming a millionaire is to acquire financial literacy. Now, this is one of those things that no one teaches us in school or university or college, but it's just one of those things that you have to learn for yourself. And you can get it through reading books, such as, for example, this book, "The Psychology of Money" by Morgan Housel.
Money is such an important part of life. It's one of the biggest sources of stress in anyone's life if you don't have much of it. And so much of our life is spent in the pursuit of money and financial freedom, financial independence, that if we don't have financial literacy, if we don't understand the basics of saving or investing or how the stock market works or how taxes work, any of that kind of stuff, again, we are just screwing ourselves. Because if you wanna become a millionaire you have to have some level of financial literacy to know what it takes to become a millionaire and how that might actually work. So recommend reading a book like "The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.
Check this out: The easiest way to make money from instagram.
Thank you so much for reading. Hope you found this blog useful. And I will see you in the next one. Bye-bye.