But for those few self-made millionaires, dedicated and determined to becoming wealthy, the secret to prosperity rests completely in one’s mindset. These rare folks resolutely believe they can go from John or Jane Doe, blue collar shelp to Jay Z with a little bit of passion and a hefty attitude adjustment—taking them all the way to the bank.
- The wealthy believe in themselves—plain and simple. Modern day boot strap millionaires like Oprah, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg, all share one major similarity—they have an indefatigable belief they can sell their ideas and use their creativity to make money doing what they love. According to best-selling author Steve Seibold of How Rich People Think, who has spent more than 20 years interviewing self-made millionaires, the cause is belief and the affect is money. “Rich people believe in possibility, whereas the average person believes in poverty. That’s what holds poor people back,” Seibold says.
- The flush take a “no guts, no glory” outlook on risk management. Rich people avoid mass conscienceless like the plague. They zig when the masses zag. When stock markets indicate investing, they divest. When businesses are shutting down, the rich open a business. Affluent people will do the polar opposite of average earners.
- Of the only three-million self-made millionaires in the US almost 90% eschew formal education, preferring to focus on learning enough to be experts only in their fields. “On average, they’re heavily educated in only one area. Instead of college, many focus on very specific forms of education, like internships. And their houses are filled with books. They’re single-minded in a desire to learn all they can about their given fields,” Seibold says.
- The moneyed look for a problem and solve it. Seibold says, “that while the masses are waiting to pick the right numbers and praying for prosperity, the great ones are solving problems”.
- Well-to-do spend little time thinking about investing or saving money, rather than earning it. They leave the investment concerns to their financial planners and money advisers. “The rich know that the primary emotions that drive financial markets are fear and greed, and they factor this into all trades and trends they observe,” Siebold writes. “This knowledge of human nature and its overlapping impact on trading, gives them strategic advantage in building greater wealth through leverage.”
- “Rich people all have a really positive relationship with money. They think about money in terms of freedom, as opposed to the negative relationship a lot of people have with money,” Seibold told Money US News.com. In other words only the poor fear being rich.
You can have it all.
“The masses have been brainwashed to believe it’s an either/or equation,” Seibold writes. “The rich know you can have anything you want if you approach the challenge with a mindset rooted in love and abundance.”
Rich people set virtually unreachable goals for themselves.
“Before they make their first $1 million, they may not believe they can make it. But once they overcome that hurdle, it seems to get easier. They get that one big success, which everyone told them they couldn’t do, and then they replicate it. They take these nonlinear leaps of success, where they go from $1 million to $10 million to $30 million, and the catalyst is their belief that it’s possible. I don’t think it’s their competence, because a lot of people are competent, but they’re confident in themselves. At some point, they stopped listening to anyone but themselves. They learned to trust themselves so much because of their success.”
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