Can you really ‘think yourself rich’? I’m here to tell you that it is not only possible, but that it is also actually the best chance you have of making a lot of money. Many of us dream of living in a large luxurious house in a sunny country, we imagine wearing smart suits that exude power and confidence and we wish that we didn’t have to make so many hard choices because our funds can’t support the lifestyles we want to lead.
If that sounds familiar, then you need to make a change. And as with ALL things, that change starts with you and your mindset. If you want to be wealthy, then what are you doing about it? And is there any chance that you may, in fact, be going about it the wrong way?
Wealth and Your Career
Ask the average person in the street what they would hypothetically need to do in order to become richer and 99% of them will tell you the same thing: get a better job. Okay, fair enough. They are not wrong per say. Indeed, getting a better job won’t hurt their income and that in turn will likely mean they get richer at least a little.
But in fact, this is not the whole story. And what’s more, is that this isn’t even the main part of the story. Wealth and salary are not inextricably linked. They are related sure, but only to a small degree. If you wanted to see an equation telling you how to get wealthy, then it would really look like this:
Wealth = Income – Outgoings
So, let’s say that your income is determined solely by the amount of money you are making at work. Even in that scenario, you still have another, equally as important factor. That is your outgoings. If you earning a cool million dollars a month but you also waste a million dollars a month of lavish holidays and on nights out and clothes, then you are ultimately not going to be very well off. Rather, you’re likely to lose money over time.
But if you are earning a more normal $2500 a month but you only spend $500, then suddenly you are saving $2000 per month. In 12 months, you’ll have $24,000 saved away. That’s a decent down payment on a house! So, you now have two options. Two ways to get richer. One is that you seek to get a better job and increase your income and the other is that you save more money and spend less.
How to Spend Less
When I was at university, my summer job was working at a yacht club. Specifically, I was a waiter in one of the restaurants there that was actually paid for and owned by the clientele of the club. The club was located in Sandbanks, England – an area that is also sometimes referred to as ‘millionaire’s row’ because it has among the most expensive real estate in the world along the seafront.
So, these are people who own yachts and who belong to a club that is situated in one of the wealthiest parts of the world. Suffice to say that they were not struggling for cash. And of course, what many people would point out to me is that this should likely result in pretty big tips!
Except that’s not what happened. In fact, I received some of the worst tips I have in any job. I had a lady call me over to secretively give me 20p (around 30cents) for my hard work. She literally told me to buy myself something nice. And this is bearing in mind that it is standard practice in England to tip 10%. The meals usually cost close to $150.
I told my Mum this and her response was: how do you think they got rich, dear?
Makes sense
Look, I’m not here to tell you you should become stingy with tips. But what I am telling you is that the wealthiest people recognize that every little bit adds up and makes a very big difference in the long run. Your aim now is not to fritter. That $3 coffee you have every morning on the way to work is actually $15 over the course of a week. $60 over a course of a month and $720 over the course of the year.
That is a tiny amount and that’s before we have even considered all those other things you likely pay for that you don’t really need. Maybe your Spotify account, Netflix, 100+ TV Channels, gas for the car for all those trips you don’t really need to make. It adds up. Worse are all those larger purchases we make on an impulse.
These are things like clothes that we think will make us look smart, games consoles, PCs, overly advanced phones. How much did your phone cost you? If you’re on a contract, then chances are you’ll be paying $700 or more for it. Now ask yourself how much more that phone really does than something for $300. Do you really need the fastest processor around? Considering that even an old phone can play everything in the app store?
Do you really need a 30 megapixel camera? Or a 4K screen? Can you even see the difference between 4K and 1080p?The real problem here is marketing, the internet and other people. We have unfortunately been conditioned to associate these items with success and to find them highly desirable. We want to get the latest phone, car, computer etc. because it looks so sexy in those adverts. But the reality is that these things don’t really bring us happiness.
Likewise, we are told that we need to buy a large house, go on lavish holidays. Is this really for us? Or is it so that we can look successful to others? I’m not telling you to cut back on all the things that make you happy here. There is no point in having wealth if you aren’t going to enjoy it and have a better quality of life for you and your family.
All I’m telling you is to make sure you are certain of what it is that does make you happy. And that often means deciding what you don’t need and what you should be prioritizing. Have you always dreamed of a beautiful big house? Then why not stop going on those big holidays for a while? Why not stop buying widescreen TVs? And how about considering getting that big beautiful house in a less expensive area?
Heck, if you move to Spain, then there are places where you can live in a five bedroom home with swimming pool and roof pool and it will only cost you $200,000. You could almost buy that in cash and think about how much money you would start making then once there was no mortgage!
Conversely, if all you want is to travel the world, then you can change your accommodation to something less glamorous. How about moving to quiet neighborhood and living in a spare bedroom for a while? Your outgoings will be low, so you can enjoy going on more holidays and still save up that wealth. Know what you want to achieve with that money. Know what wealth means to you and then you can focus on being more efficient with your money.
Financial Modelling
This will also help you to set up a budget and/or a plan. If you know how much you have coming in and how much you’d like to be making per month, saving per month and spending on things that make you feel wealthy per month, then you can create a budget that will help you to reach that point within a specific timeframe. This then is where you can look at those small things you can cut out to save money.
If you have a spreadsheet that contains all your income and all your outgoings per month, then you can look at what kind of impact cutting coffee from your routine would actually make. You’ll be left with a total profit at the end of each month and you can decide how much of that you want to put into savings and how much you intend to spend on other things.
You can even set up standing orders in your accounts so that money saved automatically gets transferred to a savings account. With such a spreadsheet, you can then multiply the savings you are making by any given number of months and see projections of what your finances are likely to be at certain points in the future. Need more money for an upcoming expense?
Then look at something else you can do to cut your expenditure. This is called ‘financial modelling’ and it’s a powerful tool for building your wealth rather than just letting it ‘happen’ without your direction or input.
A Couple More Ways to Save Money
And what if you have run out of things you can cut in order to save money? What if you are living on as little as possible? A few other options include changing your providers for bills, selling off old items, or even moving money between accounts in order to receive bonuses. A friend of mine does this religiously and will even take out credit cards with 0%APR, just so that he can put all of that money into an ISA and then make profit on it.
If he gets a cash incentive to signing up for anything then he will sign up! And he never buys a new piece of tech or even clothing without taking one of the older items to sell and thereby offset the cost. Something else to note is that if you have a dream of a wealthy future, then you might need to ‘be okay’ with living a little more simply for a while in order to get there.
You need to put the work in now, to reap the rewards in the future. And this is hard because it often once again means forgetting the conventional signals of wealth and success. Once again, you have to do this for you and not be worried about what others might think. So for example, if you want to someday have a beautiful home, one of the very best things you can do is to live with your parents if they will let you.
Sure, it’s not glamorous and it’s not fun, but if they charge a small amount of rent you’ll be able to save so much per month that it will help you to get on the property ladder MUCH faster. You could then buy a smaller home in a less attractive area but flip the property to make a big profit. You need to put in the graft and have an eye on the future.
Likewise, you might need to learn to stop trying to demonstrate your wealth and stability to friends. Have you ever met up with a friend and eaten in a restaurant that you can’t really afford because you want to see them and because it is embarrassing to suggest eating somewhere cheaper? As you can imagine, this isn’t exactly conducive to getting wealthy quickly! Again, you need to be willing to tell them that you can’t afford it and to go elsewhere.
How about you suggest they meet you at your house?
Setting Up Revenue Streams
Next come the revenue streams. We’ve seen how you can actually become richer without changing your job, simply by spending less. The other strategy is to become wealthier by having more than one income stream. Once again, your salary isn’t determining your wealth! So, what might this mean? One simple option is to take on another job, such as a weekend job.
If you are happy to work on a Saturday, then you will have potentially $150 extra to spend each week! That’s $600 per month or $7,200 per year! Save that and in a couple of years, you can be living in a nice house – or you can use it right now to feel that bit wealthier and wear those fancy clothes. This is a big sacrifice though granted. So, what would be better for most people would be to earn money online for instance.
Tim Ferriss describes creating a ‘muse’ in his book The Four Hour Workweek, which is a small online business that generates a passive income. This can be as simple as finding an affiliate product (a product that you sell for commission) and making a simple website recommending it, then sending people there with ads. This is very low maintenance but can potentially make a fair amount of money.
You could try matched betting alternatively (a form of betting that ensures you can’t lose – it uses only the free bonus amounts that you get given for signing up) or you could look for a simple online job. How about selling photography online? Working as a writer or a web designer? Or, like a friend of mine, try commentating on sports for websites?
You can also make money from arts and crafts of course and sell some things you make on the side, or you can buy and sell items in bulk on eBay! Then there are the other options that work offline: these include such things as renting out rooms to students, such as mowing the neighbor’s lawn, cutting hair, teaching an instrument etc.
All these options will help you to make an income that will be additional to your current income.
Not only does this of course give you a better total, but it will also help to make you more ‘resilient’ so that if anything ever happens with your main job, you’ll of course still have some money coming in. Another tip? The more you make, the more you’ll make. Try to look for investment opportunities, whether that means buying a second house and letting it out to someone else, or whether it means moving to an area that you know is up and coming.
A strange thing to think of here is board games. If you’ve ever played Monopoly, or any other game where you have to amass a kind of resource, then you might have found that it pays to invest wisely early on. To get the card that will pay out just a little bit every round, or that will prevent you from losing a little bit every round.
These seem like small changes in the short term but over the course of the game, they ultimately put you in a position of great power and help you to win decisively! It's the same in real life. Make a few right choices that will build up over time. Know what you want. Be patient. And avoid the temptation to splurge on the short-term gratification. That is how you get into a wealthy mindset!
Mindset and Emotions – How to Control Your State of Mind
If you could genuinely master your emotions take complete control over the way you felt at any given time – then that would be the ultimate technique. I’m serious. If you could do this, then you would become unstoppable in a fight. You would become relentless in the gym. And you would be able to apply yourself to a task in a way that would previously have been impossible.
I imagine that you’re probably rolling your eyes at this point. You probably think I’ve been reading too many hippy blogs. Maybe reading a little too much fluffy self-help. But I’m serious. Most people seriously underestimate the power and influence of their emotions. So, allow me to elucidate you and then demonstrate how you can get your state of mind back under control. At least to some degree.
Unlimited Strength, Perfect Focus, Incredible
Creativity and Social Skills
That’s quite a bold heading right there and you might already be shaking your head in disbelief. But hear me out.
Emotions and Strength
Want strength? Some of the most feared fighters in history were known as the Beserkers. These Norse warriors were so called because of their ‘bersker rage’ – a mad fit of anger that they would fly into on the battle field. In this heightened and agitated state, they would become almost invulnerable and would also be able to accomplish feats of incredible strength.
There have been more recent accounts of something similar too. Hysterical strength is a term used to describe more recent scenarios where individuals have seemingly been able to dig into an immense reserve of strength at will. This is where the stories of Mothers lifting cars off of their children trapped beneath come in. Likewise, there is a story of a rock climber who managed to bench press themselves free of a huge boulder likely 200KG or more.
Think it’s just a myth? Turns out there is a solid scientific explanation for how this might be possible. Under extreme stress, it seems likely that the body produces excess amounts of testosterone, adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones increase the heartrate, focus, awareness and muscle tone and that is where the extra strength comes from.
Actually, it goes a little deeper than that even. You see, all of us have limits to our strength imposed by our minds and our biology. When you go to lift a weight, you do so by recruiting muscle fiber little bands that make up the muscle and contract in order to give us our strength. The most muscle fiber that the average person can recruit at once under normal circumstances is around 30%.
The most that a highly trained athlete can recruit is closer to 50%. So, a highly trained athlete is only capable of tapping into roughly half of their maximum strength. This is what we mean when we refer to a ‘mind muscle connection’. Ever seen someone get electrocuted in a movie (think Jurassic Park)? As you know, the idea is that the individual will get flung across the room into the far wall.
What throws them? Their own muscle. The electricity causes all the muscle to contract at once, which creates such a jolt that the person goes absolutey flying. Imagine if you could harness that power and use it to leap up onto a roof!
The reason we can’t access so much of our strength is a) that it would likely cause us injury as we would break a muscle, pull a ligament etc. and b) that it would fatigue us.
If we were to use that much of our muscle power in a single movement, we’d have no energy left for anything else!
But under the right circumstances, being able to dip into these huge reserves of strength is incredibly useful. And adrenaline and other hormones under the right conditions allow us to tap into that power.
Studies show that yelling in the gym can actually increase adrenaline and thereby enhance muscle fiber recruitment, resulting in strength improvements! Now imagine if you could tap into even just 80% of that power at will? Simply by harnessing your emotions?
Emotions for Calm, Collected Focus
But there’s only so far that being able to leap tall buildings and punch through walls will get you. In the real world, physical strength isn’t really what matters. This then is where the ‘flow state’ comes in. A flow state is often describes as a state of calm, focused, bliss. It is what happens when the world seems to slow down because you are so intently focused and engaged on what you are doing.
Have you ever opened a cupboard and seen everything fall out but moved in super-fast motion to catch it? That’s a flow state. More often we hear about it in extreme sports – athletes finding their flow and being able to pull off incredible stunts at incredible speeds. Outside of physical activities it is seen in music. When the entire band synchronizes during a jam, this is a type of flow state.
When you have a conversation with someone that lasts all night, that’s a flow state. When you’re writing a book and you write so long that you don’t even notice the time passing that is a flow state. Studies show us that executives in flow manage are hugely more productive than those that aren’t. The same goes for startups.
So, what is flow? Essentially, it’s another emotion. Another mental state that is triggered by the release of hormones and neurotransmitters. In this case, it is a subtle variation on the fight or flight response, a subtle variation on stress and panic. Here, you believe something is just as important as preventing yourself from getting injured, it is just as compelling as fighting for your life but it is also fun rather than scary.
You have the entire attention of your body and mind which brings about a release of excitatory hormones along with calming ones and those related with bliss such as anandamide. This actually suppresses activity in the prefrontal cortex, triggering a state known as ‘temporary hypofrontality’. This prevents us from worrying, from second guessing or from over-thinking.
We just do. It’s the opposite to how most of us live our lives today and that’s why many of us are filled with anxiety, frozen with fear. Imagine being able to talk up to a woman/man in a bar and deliver your wittiest conversation ever. Imagine being able to talk in front of an audience with passion and conviction and enrapture them completely in what you’re saying. Imagine being able to work on the projects that matter to you for hours on end without even looking up.
No fear. No doubt. No bursts of anger or unwanted emotion. And this is when our best work is done. This is when we are happiest. Many people try and live their lives in flow as much as possible. The problem is that most of us are full of anxiety and busy with chores and things we need to do.
These limitations leave us stressed, anxious and busy and they take our mind out of the moment. Our entire body and mind cannot possibly be in-sync when we are worrying about debt, or what our boss said at the office.Entering flow means being in the moment which not only makes you happy and confident it makes you unstoppable.
Creativity
Changing your emotions can even make you more creative. The opposite of a flow state is something called the default mode network. This is a network of brain regions that spring into action when you are engaged in boring repetitious work or when you are just relaxing. This is what happens when you allow yourself to become completely at ease and let your mind wander.
Now many people give this mental state a hard time. They say that this is when your ‘inner Woody Allen’ chirps up. This is the opposite to ‘living in the moment’. But in fact, this is also when your creativity kicks in. This is the state that Einstein was in when he came up with his special theory of relativity (while working in a patent office!).
This is daydreaming and that is when we come up with plans, ideas and more.
No emotion is a bad thing. The answer is just being able to tap into the right emotion at the right time. It’s about emotional control.
Social Skills
And finally, the obvious power of emotion: social skill. If you want to seem confident, then you need to stop worrying about what others think. If you want to be a leader, then you need to be able to take command, not second guess yourself and not get upset and visibly riled when things go wrong. If you want to engage others and make friends and partners, you need to be charismatic, engaging and entertaining.
All these things are based once again on having control over your emotions. But the thing is: most of us don’t have any control. Most of us sulk when we don’t have a good day and put ourselves in even more of a funk. Most of us are scared when things are wrong. When we’re stressed, we argue with our partners and avoid important work in the office. We sabotage ourselves, undermine ourselves and struggle to get things done all because we can’t control our emotions.
Taking Control
So how do you take back control over your emotions? There are multiple ways, but let’s address two important points: physiology and mindset. Physiology refers to the fact that your emotions are really an extension of how you feel. Emotions describe things like happiness, sadness, anger, fear. We think that these emotions are born from our minds but a lot of the time, that’s not the case at all.
Rather, emotions come from our bodies. Emotions come from feelings which include things like hunger, tiredness, hot, cold. The very function of your emotions is to trigger behaviors that will help you to fix the way you feel. When you haven’t eaten enough lately, your blood sugar dips. This in turn triggers a release of cortisol – the stress hormone. This tells you that something needs to change and wakes you up and in the wild, this would have encouraged you to look for food.
When you eat, your blood sugar spikes, you produce leptin and serotonin. This makes you happy and content and encourages you to sleep eventually serotonin converts to melatonin the sleep hormone. So, in other words, the way you feel is often the result your physiology and that changes the way you think. You think you’re angry because you had a bad day? Possibly. More likely, you had a bad day because you’re angry.
And you’re angry because:
•You didn’t sleep
•You’re in mild pain
•You haven’t eaten enough
•You’ve eaten the wrong things
You get the gist? So, one way to change your emotions and to take back control is to acknowledge this. Firstly, recognize that if you’re angry, it’s probably due to physiological reasons and it will pass. At least it won’t seem so bad later.
Secondly, seek to change this. Eat something. Sleep. Take the cue. Learn to follow your own rhythms and work when you’re naturally most productive. Follow the rhythms of the day and get your circadian cycles in check.
And at the same time, look at ways you can directly control your physiology. The very best way? Breathing!
If you learn to breathe correctly (using belly breathing to fill the lower portion of the lungs, then the upper portion) and if you use slow, controlled breaths, then you will be able to lower your heartrate and calm your entire body. This will change your parasympathetic tone, taking you out of ‘fight or flight’ and into ‘rest and digest’.
Try it the next time you feel overly stressed, overly competitive or worked up after an intense workout – your heart rate will slow and your mind will grow calmer. The other tool you can use is something called CBT. Now we’re looking at the psychological, self-talk aspect. CBT stands for ‘Cognitive Behavioral Therapy’ and this is a popular form of psychotherapeutic intervention used to treat phobias and other anxiety disorders.
The idea is to look at the content of your thoughts. The self-talk that you give yourself to work yourself into a panic, or to calm yourself down. If you are thinking things like “I’m worried I might fall off that ledge” then of course you are going to be scared. If you think things like “I’m grateful for my wife” then you will be less likely to feel unhappy with where you are in life.
It goes deeper than that of course. You can use CBT to challenge long-held beliefs and to break negative self-talk habits by challenging your thoughts and testing your hypotheses. This is called ‘cognitive restructuring’.
In the short term, you can use CBT techniques in order to more honestly assess your state of mind and your emotions and to then change the way you feel about a situation.
So if you were stressed that you had a deadline you couldn’t meet and it was ruining your evening, then you might use cognitive restructuring in order to assess the thoughts making you stressed and replace them with more productive ones.
For example, you might consider:
What is the point of being stressed? Will it make matters better?
What’s the worst case scenario? Would it really be that bad to tell the boss you can’t finish work on time? Are they expecting too much of you anyway?
When was the last time you did this?
Are there other ways you could lessen the blow?
What would you rather pay attention to right now?
Combine this with controlled breathing and bring your focus to the thing that is most useful to you right now. In the long term, you can use CBT in order to bridge the gap between your thoughts and your physiology. You see, your physiology and your emotions are designed to drive you toward desirable states: sex, food, shelter, love, success, social acceptance.
The problem is that the tasks you need to accomplish often don’t get you those things in the short term. In the long term, entering data into that spreadsheet helps you keep your job which helps you pay for food and keep your family!
But in the short term, it just means more boring paperwork.
So now you need to remind yourself why you do what you do. And you’ll do this not only with words but with visualization. Picture where you want to be. Picture the wealth you want to have, the success, the satisfaction. Then remind yourself that the things you do today are actually driving you toward the things you want. This is when your heart and mind will finally be on the same page. And that’s when anything becomes possible.
Thanks
I thank all friends for the motivating words and confidence, and I thank the community for reading my articles, criticisms and suggestions has helped a lot to improve the content.