Secret of the Millionaire Mind: Wealth File #17 Rich People Constantly Learn and Grow

This is a chapter-by-chapter summary of a book by T. Harv Eker’s Secret of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth (2005) series. One chapter, one article. Read this summary, buy the book. Enjoy!

Wealth File #17:

Rich People Constantly Learn and Grow.

Poor People* Think They Already Know.

Becoming rich isn’t as much about getting rich financially as about whom you have to become, in character and mind, to get rich. “The goal of creating wealth is to help you grow yourself into the best person you can possibly be,” writes Harv Eker. An adage says, “You take yourself with wherever you go.” If you grow yourself to become a successful person, in the strength of character and mind, you will naturally be [almost] successful in anything and everything you do. You will gain the power of choice. You will gain the inner power and ability to choose any job, business, or investment arena and know you’ll be a success. This is the essence of this book. This, I think, is MASSIVE.

“Getting rich is about who you have to become as a person to get rich.” Who do you need to be to get rich? That’s a powerful question. When you sincerely answer it, you’ll know to get rich is about you, and nothing else. “The fastest way to get rich and stay rich is,” revealed Eker, “to work on developing you!” You need to grow. What does that mean? Grow in height? Not so much. Grow your hair? Nope (I’m offended!). Grow in character? Yes. Grow as a person? Yes, that’s it! It’s about continuous improvement of self. To try every day to become the best version of ourselves. In short: If you are not growing, you are dying. Jim Rohn once said, “If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got.” So start growing!

One way to get started is to realize that: WE CAN CHANGE. It has never been easy, I know, but we must change… or die. If you want to be successful, you have to copy the successful people. Start with that. If you want to have a great body, you have to copy models or bodybuilders. If you want to be a great salesperson, you have to copy great salesperson. If you want to be rich, then, you have to copy rich people. This is all learnable. “Rich people take advice [or follow examples] from people who are richer than they are,” compares Eker, “Poor people take advice from their friends, who are just broke as they are.” You just need to change something in your lives. You need to take the actions [refer to Wealth File #16] that are necessary to become who you want to become. You need to constantly learn and grow. “The more you learn, the more you earn.” So true!

I Have A Millionaire Mind!

[*I need to note that the Harv Eker makes it clear in this book that he does not mean to degrade poor people. He does not think that rich people are better than poor or middle-class people. They’re just richer.]

12 Rules for Life #0 Introduction: The Important of Personal Change (Summary)

This is a chapter-by-chapter summary of a book by Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018) series. One chapter, one article. Read this summary, buy the book. Enjoy!

“If you fulfill your obligations everyday you don’t need to worry about the future.”

(Jordan Peterson)

According to Jordan Peterson, society's present ill(ness) can be cured by firstly healing the individuals that it's made of. "Clean your room," is Peterson's famous advice. In fact, if someone can't even manage to deal with a simple everyday task in his life, then how is he supposed to dictate to others to fix the whole society? Personal change may seem difficult for some people to apply but it's surely possible.

Changing yourself will lead you to become and feel better than you were yesterday. You may think that these 12 Rules will not really have an impact on your life but according to the author: "Small changes can have disproportionately large positive results." Moving towards goodness will constantly increase the value of your life and "find its way out of dead ends and take it out of hell in a much shorter time than you could expect." Life is hard. For some people, it might be tragic, full of suffering and malice. But although we can't fix everything in the world, we can fix things that are within our power to do so and this is more than enough to make us live a much better life.

You Can Change… Start Small

The Power of Habit #0 The Habit Cure (Prologue Summary)

This is a chapter-by-chapter summary of a book by Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business (2012) series. One chapter, one article. Read this summary, buy the book. Enjoy!

                                                  

“Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy.
But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.”

(Charles Duhigg)

One paper published by a Duke University researcher in 2006 found that more than 40% of the actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions, but habits. Habits can be changed, “if we understand how they work,” explained Charles Duhigg.

For example, a riot in Iraq. Violence was usually preceded by a crowd of Iraqis gathering in the plaza or other open space and, over the course of several hours, growing in size. Food vendors would show up, as well as spectators. Then, someone would throw a rock or a bottle and “all hell would break loose.” Then one day, a soldier who is an expert in the habit modification program requested from the town’s mayor to “keep food vendors out of the plazas.” The mayor agreed. A few weeks later, a small crowd gathered near the plaza and throughout the afternoon, it grew in size. Some people started chanting angry slogans. But at dusk, the crowd started getting restless and hungry. People looked for the kebab sellers normally filling the plaza, but there were none to be found. The spectators left. The chanters became dispirited. By 8pm, everyone was gone said Duhigg.

“Understanding habits is the most important thing I’ve learned in the army,” the major-soldier told Duhigg. “It’s changed everything about how I see the world. You want to fall asleep fast and wake up feeling good? Pay attention to your night-time patterns and what you automatically do when you get up. You want to make running easy? Create triggers to make it a routine. I drill my kids on this stuff. My wife and I write out habit plans for our marriage. This is all we talk about in command meetings. Not one person in Kufa (Iraq) would have told me that we could influence crowds by taking away the kebab stands, but once you see everything as a bunch of habits, it’s like someone gave you a flashlight and a crowbar and you can get to work.”

You Are the Sum of Your Habit(s)

Here's to the Crazy Ones, the Unreasonable People

When Steve Jobs launched Apple’s iconic “Think Different” marketing campaign in 1997, it was clearly a reflection of his own philosophy and ideals. He praised “the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.” Nobody would disagree that Jobs himself personified this category, along with the famous individuals who were featured in Apple’s ads, such as Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., Sir Richard Branson, John Lennon, Thomas Edison, Ted Turner, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Martha Graham, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Pablo Picasso.

By their nature, radical innovators tend to be contrarians, heretics, revolutionaries. They are forever discontent with the status quo. They are people who challenge conventional thinking, who show no respect for rules, or precedent, or popular opinion, and who never accept “can’t be done.” They dare to defy the deepest-held dogmas, dispute the most established industry practices, and trash the proudest of institutional legacies. Where everyone else seems content to “zig,” they feel compelled to “zag” – to swim against the mainstream, contradict prevailing wisdom, break the accepted patterns, slaughter the sacred cows, question the unquestionable, fix things that “ain’t broke,” turn the seemingly impossible into the possible, and, well… to simply “think different.”

Innovators are not satisfied just playing the game. They have an irresistible itch to rethink it, to change it, to improve it. Or to invent an entirely new game. They are, as George Bernard Shaw once explained, unreasonable people. Shaw argued that “the reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Rather than conform to the existing patterns of the world, innovators can intuitively see what is wrong with those patterns – where others cannot – and they instinctively want to put them right, or to replace them with their own patterns. They quite literally want to change the world.

In a 1994 interview conducted by the Silicon Valley Historical Association, Steve Jobs said the following: “When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much… That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that it – everything around you that you call ‘life’… you can change it, you can influence it… you can mould it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just going to live in it, verses embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

Jobs summed it up very well. Innovators don’t just accept that “the world is the way it is.” They are always driven to reshape it into the way they envision it could be. Innovators behave exactly as those “Think Different” ads said they do: “They invent. They imagine… They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy… Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Change Your Life: Accept Reality and Act on It

“Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be”
(Jack Welch)

While we can change certain things, other things are out of our control. And if something is really out of our control, we have to learn to accept it regardless of how much we wish it were different. We may not like the law of gravity and may hope it did not exist (so we can fly!), and yet most of us accept it and learn to live with it. If we refuse to accept the reality of this law, we will not survive for long, and even if we do, we will experience constant frustration. The same applies to every fact of reality, such as the fact that it is impossible to literally go back in time and undo something that was done, or the fact that all of us have some real physical limitations.

Instead of evading reality and spending our life engaged in wishful thinking, we ought to spend our time and effort on real thinking. “You cannot tailor-make the situations in life,” said Zig Ziglar, “but you can tailor-make the attitudes to fit those situations.” See things as it really are, but then don’t let those that are beyond our control paralyzed us. Facts and our limitations may seem impossible to change – accept reality - but we have the choice of how we are to react about it (attitude) and act on it (positive actions).

Don’t refuse to accept reality,

Accept reality and act on it.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

 Reference: Choose the Life You Want: 101 Ways to Create You Own Road to Happiness by Tal Ben-Shahar, PhD (New York: The Experiment, 2012) Buy this book!

Change Your Life: Experience Your Work as a Calling

Don't like your job?
1) Find work that is meaningful, or
2) Find something meaningful in your work

“This is the true joy in life –
being used for a purpose, recognized by yourself as a mighty one”

(George Bernard Shaw)

We spend a good part of our working hours at work, and yet many people derive little meaning from what occupies them for several thousand hours each year. If we do not experience a sense of purpose in our work, we can choose to do one of two things (aside from resigning ourselves to being unhappy): find work that is meaningful or find something meaningful in our work.

We don’t all have the luxury of having the perfect job – the one that reflects our values, where we work only with people we like, and whose atmosphere precisely suits our temperament. But even if we do not find ourselves in that ideal setting, we have a great deal of choice as to how we experience our daily work. Whether as a CEO or a salesman, an investment banker or a community organizer, a minister or a manager, a janitor or a cleaner – not complete control, perhaps, but some – over what elements of our work we focus on, and consequently, on how we experience our working life.

We can, for example, remind ourselves how our work is making a difference in other people’s lives; we can focus on the elements that we find exciting and interesting, the meaningful interactions that we have with colleagues and customers; or we can appreciate the opportunity our work gives us to develop or expand our professional skills. If we can find no inherent value in our current occupation, we can tell ourselves that our work is our current occupation, we can tell ourselves that our work provides for us and for those we care about, or that it enables us to engage in meaningful activities after hours.

Researchers have found that those who made the choice, conscious or not, to see their work as merely a job, were less happy, were less satisfied with their life, than were their colleagues who viewed what they did a calling. “Even in the most restricted and routine jobs,” the study concluded, “employees can exert some influence on what is the essence of their work.”

Don’t treat the work you do as a job,

Experience your work as a calling.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

 References:

1. Choose the Life You Want: 101 Ways to Create You Own Road to Happiness by Tal Ben-Shahar, PhD (New York: The Experiment, 2012) Buy this book!

2. The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life by D. William (New York: Free Press, 2009).

Change Your Life: Make a Difference

Pay It Forward is a 2000 American drama film based on the novel of the same name by Catherine Ryan Hyde.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,

Committed people can changed the world.

Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has”

(Margaret Mead)

Don’t resign yourself to the status quo – make a difference. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of serious problems that our world is facing. The falling standards in education, the rise in corporate scandals, the economic crisis in Malaysia and the world – not to mention wars, pollutions, and terrorism. How can I, one person among so many, make a difference? How can I, with my shortcomings and insecurities, possibly bring about meaningful change? While it is true that much of what happens in the world is beyond our control as individuals, our capacity to bring about change is greater than we imagine.

I can make a world of difference – if I choose to put my mind and heart to a cause, and take action.

Tal Ben-Shahar writes: In the movie Pay It Forward, a schoolteacher assigns his class the task of finding a way to bring about positive change in the world. Trevor, one of the students, decides to do three good deed for others – three acts of random kindness – and in return ask them to do three good deeds for three other people, who will be asked in return to do the same for others, and so on. If every person who has just been helped pays this help forward to three others, then within twenty-one rounds, everyone on earth would have been helped. The movie follows Trevor and shows how his acts create a positive ripple effect that touches numerous people whom he never meets in profound and meaningful ways. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can changed the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Make a positive difference in the world. Pay forward what has been given to you, and encourage others to do the same. You can make a difference!

Don’t resign yourself to the status quo,

Make a difference.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

 References:

1. Choose the Life You Want: 101 Ways to Create You Own Road to Happiness by Tal Ben-Shahar, PhD (New York: The Experiment, 2012)

2. Change the World: How Ordinary People Can Achieve Extraordinary Results by R.E. Quinn (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000)

Change Your Life: Carry Yourself with Strength and Confidence

“A good stance and posture reflect a proper state of mind”

(Morihei Ueshiba)

When we walk into a room with slumped shoulders, dragging our feet, or with our head down, we communicate lack of confidence and energy. When we enter with a natural posture, with a strong stride, shoulders open and relaxed, we send a very different – and positive – message to those around us. So crucially, the way we hold our body sends a message not only to others but also to ourselves. When we walk like someone who is confident, we actually become more confident; the physical act of sitting up straight actually boosts our motivation and increases our energy; when we shake hands firmly, we become assertive.

Assuming the posture of how we would be if we were more assertive and energized in fact boosts our confidence and invigorates us. Our behaviour changes our attitude. Sit up straight. Walk confidently. Carry yourself in a way that communicates to the world – and to yourself – strength and confidence.

Don’t neglect your posture,

Carry yourself with strength and confidence.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

 References:

1. Choose the Life You Want: 101 Ways to Create You Own Road to Happiness by Tal Ben-Shahar, PhD (New York: The Experiment, 2012)

2. The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem: The Definitive Work on Self-Esteem by the Leading Pioneer in the Field by N. Branden (New York: Bantam, 1994).

Change Your Life: Choose to Choose

Don't just go with the flow in choosing college: What's your interest?
What's your dream? What's suit your talent and passion? Choose to choose.

“Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege.
Use it. Dwell in possibilities” (Oprah Winfrey)

Lately I’ve noticed that a lot of conversation about dealing with the stresses of modern life seem to conclude with someone advising that we should all stop worrying so much and trying so hard, that we should go with the flow and “just live our life.” Sometimes this is good advice, as many things are beyond our control and worrying about them will not make any difference. And we can often be so focused on the future that we miss out on all there is to enjoy in the present moment. But this advice has a serious downside: “Just live your life” can lead us to turn our back on our most sacred privilege, our ability to choose our own path. In the guise of freeing us from stress and struggle, “just live your life” can actually have the sinister effect of preventing us from making the most of our life.

When the injunction to just live our life becomes a license not to choose, we end up being pulled along by other’s choices, simply behaving the way we always have in the past, passively reacting to life rather than actively creating the life that we really want to be living. To make the most of our life, we must first of all choose to choose – this is the fundamental choice underlying all other choices. We must commit ourselves to the idea that there are far more possibilities than we normally see, and then to the effort that it takes to examine these possibilities and choose the one that is best for us.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

 References:

1. Choose the Life You Want: 101 Ways to Create You Own Road to Happiness by Tal Ben-Shahar, PhD (New York: The Experiment, 2012)

2. Think! Why Crucial Decisions Can’t Be Made in the Blink of an Eye by R. M. LeGault (New York: Threhold Editions, 2006)

                                                                     

How to Spark Your Creative Mind

“All human beings have the capacity to generate novel, original, clever, or ingenious products, solutions, and techniques. Creative human beings develop that capacity… Creative people take risks and frequently push the boundaries of their perceived limits” (Art Costa).

“A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimensions”
(Oliver Wendell Holmes).

Creativity can be hard to define. How do you describe the “Eureka!” moment when a person experiences a creative insight? Some researchers define creativity as combining existing elements in an innovative way that creates a new purpose (for example, motor + bicycle = motorcycle). Others see creativity as the art of generating novel ideas from taking a fresh look at how things are interrelated (for example, as Charles Cave writes, “…noting the regular diet of ladybugs inspired organic farmers to bring ladybugs in to consume crop-destroying aphids”).

Thinking about what is creative may call to mind images such as street buskers playing guitar and drummer banging out a complex rhythm at Waterfront Kuching or the designs for the Dewan Undangan Negeri (DUN) Sarawak building. Creativity, however, encompasses much more than music and art. Creativity gives rise to innovative ideas and products that bring changes both great and small.

Consider the following examples of creative innovations that have had an impact; Art Fry and Spence Silver invented the Post-it^TM in 1980, enabling people to save paper and protect documents by using removable notes; agricultural chemist George Washington Carver developed the revolutionary method of crop rotation – alternating soil-depleting crops with soil-enriching ones – allowing land to be used more efficiently; Jim Henson revolutionized children’s television and the way children learn about the world through his invention of the Muppets and development of Sesame Street (a TV program that I like very much when I was a kid); and more.

Creativity doesn’t just happen on these world-shifting levels. You too are a creative thinker. Every day you do some sort of creative works. Your everyday moments of creativity might include events similar to mine as following: Thinking of a new way to talk to co-worker about a problem, changing how I commute to office so that I can work or listen to audiobook while I’m in transit, and finding a unique way to write a blog topic that sets it apart from other articles posted in the internet (Okay, maybe not everyone doing these. But I hope you get what I mean). 

Learning how to heighten your creativity will boost your ability to think productively and successfully. Begin by thinking of creativity in three separate ways:

1) The characteristics of the creative person

2) The type of environment that fosters creativity

3) The stages of the creative process

As you work toward any creative outcome – a novel solution, idea, approach, tangible product, work of art, system, or program – focus on these three elements to maximize your creative abilities. I will post each how-to boost your creative thinking in following post article. Stay updated.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Nurture Creativity: Be Crazy, Think Differently

After watching Computer History Museum channel interview Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs: The Authorized Biography, I instantly mesmerized by Steve Jobs’ personalities. I then watched BBC’s Steve Jobs Documentary: Billion Dollar Hippy and Discovery Channel’s iGenius: How Steve Jobs Changed the World on Youtube. After that, I went to Popular Bookstore to get any books on Steve and I found a very great book offer of Jay Elliot’s The Steve Jobs Way: iLeadership for a New Generation for RM15 only! Usually it’s RM85.90. Wow! Awesome!

When I or anyone think of intuitive leadership, innovative thinker, visionary, and world changing creative-idea guy, one cannot not think of Steve Jobs and his company Apple. Have you heard it famous “Think Different” campaign before? Not long after some conflicts and leadership problems in his own founded company, Steve Jobs returned to Apple. When he returned, the iconic “The Crazy Ones” commercial was aired as part of the larger “Think Different” campaign. What was less known at the time was that Steve Jobs write the commercial himself. He wanted to revive the company and inspired not only its customers but its employees as well. The version of “The Crazy Ones” that Steve himself narrates didn’t aired until after his dead. If you already watch the commercial, you will remember this legendary speech:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Mind you, there’s a fine line between creativity and insanity. I don’t mean (I think Steve Jobs also don’t mean) clinical insanity – there’s nothing good about that. But when I say “Be Crazy, Think Differently” I mean a kind of functional craziness that should inhabit our creativity. That wacky and insane-sounding concepts of ideas are what I’m talking about. Be crazy. Remember, not all crazy ideas will worked out. Sometimes crazy ideas has to come at the right time. But what is sure is that the world need “The Crazy Ones” – are you the one?

Be crazy, think differently

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)