Millionaire Habits That Will Change Your Life

Today we’re talking about the habits of millionaires that you can also imitate and achieve any goal that you have set for yourself.

Jim Rohn said you should have the goal to be a millionaire but not for the million dollars but rather for what it will make of you to become a millionaire. It will require you to become a different person a more capable, smarter, wiser and better planner.

You will have to learn a lot of things to get from where you are to where you want to be and that’s the key reason why you should have that as a goal. I completely agree with Jim Rohn and this article shares with you six habits that you can implement that will help you get whatever you want in life, whether that’s millions of dollars or any other goal that you want.

There are two key principles I want to describe before I go into the six habits of millionaires and high achievers.

One is deliberate practice. There’s a lot of research on this subject. Deliberate practice is how you can develop skills and expertise in any subject and the research is really clear. There’s a book by Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise.

He’s been studying high performers for the last 30 years. What he’s found is is that we all have very adaptive brains. None of us have just an innate potential but rather our attention, our potential as human beings is flexible and most things can be trained.

In other words you can train and become world-class at chess, tennis, finance or anything but you need to actually define what you want. You have to have a clear vision of your future self and then you have to have specific skills and attributes that you want to develop.

Then you need coaching, teaching and mentoring from people who are already where you desire to be, who can get you there. There’s a process and a way for you to develop the skills you have to get to where you want to go.

The second concept is called Prospection. Prospection is the idea that as human beings our lives are driven by the views that we have of our own future. Whatever future you see for yourself that’s the thing actually guiding and driving your behavior in the present. Therefore it’s super important to realize that your current behavior, your mindset, your identity is being driven by your view of your own future and as human beings we create futures and then we use those futures to drive our present.

You know if you’re a college student, you want to see yourself graduating. Then you use that view of your future self graduating to drive your actions, decisions and planning in the present. It’s absolutely amazing but then it puts the impetus on you.

You have to decide the future you want and then you have to use that future to drive your present. With these two concepts out of the way, read on to find the six habits of millionaires that will change your life.

6 Habits of Millionaires to Change Your Life

Decide What You Want

People who are successful are proactive. They begin with the end in mind. As Stephen Covey would say they decide what they want, they make decisions, they own their human right to make choices. I’m not saying that you have pure free will and that you can make yourself fly but you can choose what you want. As Neil Maxwell said whatever you desire over time you eventually become.

So you have to decide what you want and you need to define it and be explicit about it. What you want is based on what you value and what you value is based on what you give meaning to. Ultimately you are a meaning-making machine. As a human being and it’s your choice to give whatever you give meaning to.

The key aspect here is is that you first have to make the choice. What do you want and who are you going to be? That’s your choice and the more you own that the more that you can define your own desires, find your own ambitions to find your own goals rather than all the goals of other people.

You grew up in a certain environment, in a certain context with parents, with culture and with friends and peers and it’s easy to not define what you want but to just fall into whatever your friends like or what your parents wanted you to do. Or worse still if you had failures, to lower your vision and your goals for yourself. You have to define what you want and at the level you want. And that’s where real personal development actually starts.

Say you want to become an author. You’ve set a goal to write 20 books in your lifetime. Nobody has told you you can or you can’t. But you have decided that’s what you want to be. You can start reading to become smart. Read hundreds of books because that’s what you value.

People may not like it but what they think really doesn’t matter. So becoming a millionaire or developing a millionaire habit starts with making a decision in the first place.

 

Study the Pros and Get a Mentor

Once you’ve defined what you want you must then very heavily study and learn from people who are already doing it at the level you want to. This goes back to the deliberate practice concept we talked about earlier. One of the key aspects of deliberate practice is not just engaging in the act of what you want to become.

For example if you want to become good at tennis, playing tennis is part of the equation but it won’t get you the pro level.

The key aspect of deliberate practice is intensely studying, mostly on your own, the people who are at the highest level doing what you want to be doing. So the best form of deliberate practice if you’re a tennis player would be to study the film, to really study in slow motion of say Roger Federer, or the Williams sisters.

Like really watch, study and analyze and then take what you learn and maybe get a coach and get coached on implementing and applying at that level. Then when you actually do train you’ll be improving rather than just repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

There’s a book called The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle and that’s the first thing he talks about and there’s a lot of research again on this the people who become high performers they are obsessive and they study and they’re staring at and watching the people who are doing whatever they want to be doing at that level.

So if your goal for example is to make money a lot of money and become a millionaire, you need to study the people who are doing that. Really learn from them. Learn what they do, learn how they think like that needs to become your focus. There’s a popular quote again by Jim Rohn that

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

Personally I have my own take on this quote that you really are the average of more than just the five people you surround yourself with. I think the number of people in your circle that influence you go way more than 5. However, the point is that everyone in your social network seriously affects your behaviour and your life outcome.

Most people they’re studying, analyzing and examining their peers and that’s not a very good way to get good at something. You need to study and analyze and obsess on the people you want to become. Whatever it is you want you need to study those at the level that you want to be at.

You need to really understand the in and out, how it works.

Get Coaching

Another key aspect of that is actually getting coaching. People who get where they want to go they invest in themselves, they invest getting teachers, mentoring and coaching. Then they get feedback on how they’re doing. So it makes perfect sense that if you want to get to a high level you need to invest in yourself, even small investments.

Investing in yourself doesn’t have to be huge. It could simply be buying a book authored by the person you want to be mentored by from Amazon or your favourite bookstore. Or you could pay a $100 for an online course of what you want to achieve.

You need to do this so that you know you’re doing it right. The more invested you become the more committed you become and commitment is a key aspect of creating results.

There’s an amazing quote in the book by Jim Dethmer, et al The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership and what they say is that

Commitment is a statement of what is

You can know what you’re committed to by your results not by what you say your commitments are. So basically the idea is what you say you want is not what you’re committed to. What you actually are getting on a consistent basis is what you’re committed to.

That’s why investing in yourself is big is because investment precedes commitment. In other words commitment follows investment. Whenever you invest in something you then become more and more committed to it. If you’re getting coaching by someone who’s an expert on that subject they can help you advance more quickly.

The bottom line is that there’s two aspects of this millionaire habit. The first is study the heck out of the people who are where you want to be and then second is actually get training and mentoring ideally by people who are already where you want to be.

If you can’t get physical access to their mentorship, get hold of their products such books, audio books, videos and other digital products they’ve made available.

 

Constant Learning

The third of the millionaire habits is that you are continually refining your identity and your values through learning. Basically you need to continuously be learning, reading lots of books, having new experiences, meeting new people, facing failures. Your view of your future is what drives who you are and you need to ultimately have a lot of learning so that you can set bigger and newer and better goals.

Constantly be learning and be refining your perspective. That is a crucial aspect of becoming successful, becoming a millionaire or achieving any goal is constantly learning. There’s a really good ratio that I’ve heard and that’s that as far as entertainment and education are concerned, you should apply the 80/20 rule: 80% education versus 20% entertainment.

very important have entertainment very important have relaxing

You need to sharpen your saw. There’s the quote that’s famously attributed to Abraham Lincoln where he says that

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

We’re more interested in the life lesson from this famous quote and that is you want to actually spend 80 percent of your even working time learning versus just chopping or just trying to do. As you constantly learn your values, goals and your very identity will change and you will be able to do a lot more in less time.

Think about what would happen if you read 50 or 100 insanely powerful books? You would see yourself and the world differently. You’d value and approach things differently. One thing that’s certain though is that you would not have your current goals.

You would be letting go of your former views that are ultimately keeping you at your current level because your future self sees things differently than you see them right now. Your future self, that is the person who is where you want to be, has learned things that you haven’t learned. They value things you don’t currently value. They know things you don’t know and therefore they can make better decisions than you can currently make.

Bottom line: Continuously educating yourself is a crucial millionaire habit you need to form if you’re to get achieve your goals.

 

Have Peak Experiences

The next of the habits of millionaires and high performers is to continually stretch yourself through new experiences. There is a great quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and he said that

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its former dimensions.

There’s a story that really illustrates this point this point about having new peak experiences. The famous chef Charles Trotter was a Chicago restaurateur whose skills attracted people from all over the world to eat at his restaurant. The meals was just absolutely mind-blowing, pristine food.

Here’s the really interesting part about Charlie Trotter. Regularly when the restaurant was closed for example like during various hours, he would bring in groups of homeless kids from Chicago and give them the full experience of the courses that people pay hundreds for. This was just to give these kids new experiences and stretch their minds to let them know what was possible. He was stretching their view of reality.

Stephen Covey has this amazing quote where he says

 

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are – or, as we are conditioned to see it.

None of us see the world the same way. We all have been conditioned to see our own subjective reality. What Charlie Trotter was doing was he was taking these kids and exposing them to something completely beyond anything that they had ever experienced. He got flack for it but the lesson here is that he was giving these kids new experiences, expectations and perspectives of what is possible for them.

Two other great quotes that further establishes this millionaire habit, one from Albert Einstein

Imagination is more important than knowledge

and one more from Napoleon Hill he said

Whatever the mind can conceive and believe the mind can achieve.

You have to conceive it which means you’ve got to have had the most expansive experiences. With Charlie Trotter’s story, later on in life he would get letters from those kids saying thank you so much I want to now open a restaurant or thank you for giving me that experience. I now believe in myself.

So you are like the kids in Charlie Trotter’s restaurant. You are limited by what you know. You don’t see the world as it is but you see the world as you are or as you’ve been conditioned to see it. You need to regularly have those peak experiences which stretch your mind so that it can never go back to its former dimensions.

As people age they usually become less and less open to having new experiences. A lot of research shows that people in their teens and in their 20s their personalities change more than any other period of their life not because that’s when they’re most pliable but that’s because that’s when they’re having the most new fresh experiences.

They’re seeking a bigger future. First time on a date, first time in a job, first time living on your own, first time in almost everything. When was the first time you experienced anything recently? You need to continually stretch yourself put yourself in new environments put yourself around new people, under new conditions and stretch yourself.

One of the reasons why people don’t seek new experiences is because either they’re physically or emotionally difficult or uncomfortable think about it for example taking an ice cold shower like or even more jumping into like an ice lake you know like having an intense experience it opens you up obviously you want to do it safely but people avoid new things because it’s outside their comfort zone. You need to be psychologically flexible and experience new things.

Bottom line: Habits of millionaires number number four is that you need to continually stretch yourself through peak and new experiences so that you can then see have new possibilities

 

Powerful Relationships

Millionaires habit number five is that you continually expand yourself through higher and higher quality relationships. There’s a theory in psychology called the self-expansion model and basically what the idea is is that as human beings our ability to produce results that’s what they call efficacy, is not innate but it’s rather contextual and relational. In other words my ability to produce results in my life is based on the resources I have to put towards those goals and the resources I have to put towards those goals are based on the relationships I have.

Your potential is based on who you’re in a relationship with. What you can do with some people is very different from what you can do with other people and who you are in relation to some people is different from who you are. So if you start surrounding yourself with different mentors, with different friends, with different people, you start stretching your ability.

Your potential as a person is expanded as you develop higher quality relationships. People who continually grow in their life they’re continually surrounding themselves in creating connections and collaborations with higher and higher quality people. This is something I can definitely say I’ve applied but I can even apply it enormously better because you take massive leaps when you start creating transformational relationships with the right people.

There are transformational relationships and there’s transactional relationships. People who are low level generally have transactional relationships where it’s just all about giving and taking. You just get whatever you can get it’s more 50/50 whereas transformational relationships you create relationships for the purpose of self-expansion, growth and for the purpose of change.

When two very high level people are entering those types of relationships the goal is that you both come out different people with different capabilities and different potential.

Maybe you’re an author and you read a lot. You’re able to write your own books and you probably are doing well. However, things would move faster if you co-authored with someone who is much more experienced than you. You develop a transformational relationship with that person who may be older and have accomplished more than you have.

Based on what they know, their resources such as their network and knowledge would make you a different, better person author and person.

The bottom line is you can develop collaborative, powerful, transformational relationships in the form of business or in the form of anything. You could develop a transformational relationship with your spouse. They may have knowledge, skills, capabilities and resources that you just could never have. You could also bring the same or different things to the table.

 

Invest Heavily In Yourself

I’ve already covered this millionaires habit a little bit in the first habit. But let’s look at from a different viewpoint and more deeply. Invest heavily in whatever goal you have for your future. So for example if you want to succeed in any area, let’s just say tennis.

The more invested you become in that the better and faster you’ll grow in that area. You’re the ultimate investment in yourself and you never want to view investing in yourself as a cost because you’re not a cost you’re an investment. When you invest in something you become a higher level potential. When you invest in yourself your potential expands and grows and you ultimately can do it.

Invest in your future self and invest at the level of your future self. The more invested you become the more committed you are and the more committed you are the more your results start to change.

Conclusion of Habits of Millionaires

So those are six millionaire habits than have certainly is moving me in the right direction of my future self. These are:

1. Defining what you want,
2. Getting trained and studying at the level of those you want to be at,
3. Continually refining your mindset, beliefs, behavior through constant learning,
4. Stretching yourself through new experiences, Expanding yourself through improved relationships, and,
5. Investing in yourself at higher levels.

Which of these millionaires habits resonate with you the most? Got any questions or other habits of millionaires left out? Share them with us through the comments section below.