Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker

Mastering the inner game of wealth - Think rich to get rich

We live in a world of duality: up & down, light & dark, etc. Consequently there are both outer and inner laws of money. The outer laws include things like business knowledge, money management and investment management. These are essential. But inner game is also important. Like carpenter and its tool analogy, having a top-of-line tools is imperative, but being the top-notch carpenter who masterfully use those tools is even more critical.

It is not enough to be in the right place at the right time, You have to be the right person in the right place at the right time. Stuart Wilde’s quote: “They key to success is to raise your own energy; when you do, people will naturally be attracted to you. And when they show up, bill them”. Your income can grow only to the extent you do.

If you want to change the fruits, you will first have to change the roots. If you want to change the visible, you first change the invisible. One of the most important things you can ever understand is that we do not live on only one plane of existence. We live in at least four different realms at once. These four quadrants are the physical world, the mental world, the emotional world and the spiritual world. Your active involvement results in accelerated outcomes.  Your involvement/programming leads to your thoughts, your thoughts lead to your feelings; your feelings lead to your actions; your actions lead to your results.

When the subconscious mind must choose between deeply rooted emotions and logic, emotions will almost always win. If your motivation for acquiring money or success comes from a non supportive root such as fear, anger or the need to prove yourself, your money will never bring you happiness.

17 ways rich people think and act differently from poor and middle-class people. They think differently about money, wealth, themselves, other people, and pretty well every other facet of life.

You can choose to think in ways that will support you in your happiness and success instead of ways that don’t. Most people understand we are creatures of habit, but what they don’t realize is that there are actually two kinds of habits: doing habits and non-doing habits. The only way to change these not-doing habits into doing habits is to do them. Reading will assist you, but it’s a whole different world when you go from reading to doing.

1. “My inner world creates my outer world.”
2. “What I heard about money isn’t necessarily true. I choose to adopt new ways of thinking that support my happiness and success.”
3. “What I modeled around money was their way. I choose my way.”
4. “I release my unsupportive money experiences from the past and create a new and rich future.”
5. “I observe my thoughts and entertain only those that empower me.”
6. "I create the exact level of my financial success"
7. “My goal is to become a millionaire and more!”
8. “I commit to being rich.”
9. “I think big! I choose to help thousands and thousands of people!”
10. “I promote my value to others with passion and enthusiasm.”
11. “I am an excellent receiver. I am open and willing to receive massive amounts of money into my life.”
12. “I choose to get paid based on my results.”
13. “I always think ‘both.’ ”
14. “I focus on building my net worth!”
15. “I am an excellent money manager.”
16. “My money works hard for me and makes me more and more money.”
17. “I am committed to constantly learning and growing.”

Rich people believe, “I create my life” and poor people believe, “Life happens to me”. Money is extremely important in the areas in which it works and extremely unimportant in the areas in which it doesn’t.

Rich people play the money game to win and poor people play the money game to not lose. If your goal is to be comfortable, chances are you will never get rich. But if your goal is to be rich, chances are you will end up mighty comfortable.

Rich people are committed to being rich and poor people want to be rich. The number one reason most people don't get what they want is that they don’t know what they want. If you are not fully, totally and truly committed to creating wealth, chances are you won’t.

Rich people think big and poor people think small. The law of income: you will be paid in direct proportion to the value you deliver according to the marketplace. The key word is value. It is important to know that four factors determine your value in the marketplace: supply, demand, quality and quantity. Entrepreneur is a person who solves a problem for people at a profit.

Rich people focus on opportunities and poor people focus on obstacles. Rich people see opportunities. Poor people see obstacles. Rich people see potential growth and poor people see potential loss. Rich people focus on the rewards and poor people on the risks. If you want to get rich, focus on making, keeping and investing your money. Practice optimism and focus on what you have.

Rich people admire other rich and successful people and poor people resent rich and successful people. Bless that which you want. Read Acres of Diamonds by Russell Conwell' in the last section.

Rich people associate with positive, successful people and poor people associate with negative or unsuccessful people.  Rich people don’t just join the country club to play golf; they join to connect with other rich and successful people. If you want to fly with eagles, don’t swim with the ducks.

Rich people are willing to promote themselves and their value. Poor people think negatively about selling and promotion. Leaders earn a heck of a lot more money than followers. Read books, listen to audios and CDs and take courses on marketing and sales. Become an expert in both of these areas to a point where you can promote your value successfully and with 100 percent integrity.

Rich people are bigger than their problems and poor people are smaller than their problems. The secret to success is not to try to avoid or get rid of or shrink from your problems; the secret is to grow yourself so that you are bigger than any problem. If you have a big problem in your life, all that means is that you are being a small person. The bigger problems you can handle, the bigger the business you can handle; the bigger the responsibility you can handle, the more employees you can handle; the more customers you can handle, the more money you can handle and ultimately the more wealth you can handle. Rich and successful people are solution oriented; they spend their time and energy strategizing and planning the answers to challenges that come up, and creating systems to make certain that problem doesn't occur again.

Rich people are excellent receivers and poor people are poor receivers. If you say you are worthy, you are. If you say you are not worthy, you are not. Either way, you will live into your story. How you do anything is how you do everything.

Rich people choose to get paid based on results and poor people choose to get paid based on time. There is nothing wrong with getting a steady paycheck, unless it interferes with your ability to earn what they are worth. There is the rub. It usually does. Never have a ceiling on your income.

Rich people think “both” and poor people think “either / or”. Rich people believe ‘you can have your cake and eat it too. Middle class people believe ‘cake is too rich, so I will only have a little piece”. Poor people don’t believe they deserve cake so they order a doughnut, focus on the hole, and wonder why they have nothing.

Rich people focus on their network and poor people focus on their working income. The true measure of wealth is net worth, not working income. Rich people understand the huge difference between working income and net worth. Working income is important, but it is only of the four factors that determine your net worth. The four net worth factors are: Income, savings, investments and simplification.

Rich people manage their money well and poor people mismanage their money well. Until you show you can handle what you have hot, you won’t get any more. The Habit of managing your money is more important than the amount. Recommendation is to create four accounts: 10% not Long-term saving for spending account, 10% into your education account, 50% into your necessities account and 10% into your give account.

Rich people have their money work hard for them and poor people work hard for their money. Rich people see every dollar as a ‘seed’ that can be planted to earn a hundred more dollars, which can then be replanted to earn a thousand more dollars.

Rich people act in spite of fear and poor people let fear stop them. Action is the bridge between the inner world and the outer world. A true warrior can ‘tame the cobra of fear’. It is not necessary to try to get rid of fear in order to succeed. If you are willing to do only what’s easy, life will be hard. But if you are willing to do what’s hard, life will be easy,. The only time you are actually growing is when you are uncomfortable. Training and managing your own mind is the most important skill you could ever own, in terms of both happiness and success. There is a difference between positive thinking and power thinking. With positive thinking, people believe that their thoughts are true. Power thinking recognizes that our thoughts are not true, but since we are making up a story anyway, we might as well make a study that supports us. With power thinking, we understand that everything is neutral that nothing has meaning except for the meaning we give ti. and that we are going to make up a story and give something its meaning. Employ power thinking and observe yourself & your thought patterns. Entertain only thoughts that support your happiness and success.

Rich people constantly learn and grow; poor people think they already know. Philosopher Eric Hoffer quoted, “The learners shall inherit the earth while the learned will be beautifully equipped to live in a world that no longer exists”. In other words, if you are not continuously learning, you will be left behind. To get paid the bet, you must be the best.

http://www.millionairemindbook.com/

Russell Conwell’s Acres of Diamonds.

The ideology of success—the notion that anyone could make it with enough hard work—was widely promoted in Gilded Age America. An aggressive proponent of the success ideology was Russell Conwell, a former minister who helped found Temple University. His lecture “Acres of Diamonds,” parts of which are excerpted here as text, was his own route to riches.

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Now then, I say again that the opportunity to get rich, to attain unto great wealth, is here in Philadelphia now, within the reach of almost every man and woman who hears me speak tonight, and I mean just what I say. I have not come to this platform even under these circumstances to recite something to you. I have come to tell you what in God’s sight I believe to be the truth, and if the years of life have been of any value to me in the attainment of common sense, I know I am right; that the men and women sitting here, who found it difficult perhaps to buy a ticket to this lecture or gathering to-night, have within their reach “acres of diamonds,” opportunities to get largely wealthy. There never was a place on earth more adapted than the city of Philadelphia to-day, and never in the history of the world did a poor man without capital have such an opportunity to get rich quickly and honestly as he has now in our city. I say it is the truth, and I want you to accept it as such; for if you think I have come to simply recite something, then I would better not be here. I have no time to waste in any such talk, but to say the things I believe, and unless some of you get richer for what I am saying to-night my time is wasted.

I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich. How many of my pious brethren say to me, “Do you, a Christian minister, spend your time going up and down the country advising young people to get rich, to get money?” "Yes, of course I do.“ They say, ”Isn’t that awful! Why don’t you preach the gospel instead of preaching about man’s making money?“ "Because to make money honestly is to preach the gospel.” That is the reason. The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community.

“Oh,” but says some young man here to-night, “I have been told all my life that if a person has money he is very dishonest and dishonorable and mean and contemptible.” My friend, that is the reason why you have none, because you have that idea of people. The foundation of your faith is altogether false. Let me say here clearly, and say it briefly, though subject to discussion which I have not time for here, ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. That is why they carry on great enterprises and find plenty of people to work with them. It is because they are honest men.

Says another young man, “I hear sometimes of men that get millions of dollars dishonestly.” Yes, of course you do, and so do I. But they are so rare a thing in fact that the newspapers talk about them all the time as a matter of news until you get the idea that all the other rich men got rich dishonestly.

My friend, you take and drive me—if you furnish the auto—out into the suburbs of Philadelphia, and introduce me to the people who own their homes around this great city, those beautiful homes with gardens and flowers, those magnificent homes so lovely in their art, and I will introduce you to the very best people in character as well as in enterprise in our city, and you know I will. A man is not really a true man until he owns his own home, and they that own their homes are made more honorable and honest and pure, and true and economical and careful, by owning the home.

For a man to have money, even in large sums, is not an inconsistent thing. We preach against covetousness, and you know we do, in the pulpit, and oftentimes preach against it so long and use the terms about “filthy lucre” so extremely that Christians get the idea that when we stand in the pulpit we believe it is wicked for any man to have money—until the collection-basket goes around, and then we almost swear at the people because they don’t give more money. Oh, the inconsistency of such doctrines as that!

Money is power, and you ought to be reasonably ambitious to have it. You ought because you can do more good with it than you could without it. Money printed your Bible, money builds your churches, money sends your missionaries, and money pays your preachers, and you would not have many of them, either, if you did not pay them. I am always willing that my church should raise my salary, because the church that pays the largest salary always raises it the easiest. You never knew an exception to it in your life. The man who gets the largest salary can do the most good with the power that is furnished to him. Of course he can if his spirit be right to use it for what it is given to him.

I say, then, you ought to have money. If you can honestly attain unto riches in Philadelphia, it is your Christian and godly duty to do so. It is an awful mistake of these pious people to think you must be awfully poor in order to be pious.

Some men say, “Don’t you sympathize with the poor people?” Of course I do, or else I would not have been lecturing these years. I won’t give in but what I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins, thus to help him when God would still continue a just punishment, is to do wrong, no doubt about it, and we do that more than we help those who are deserving. While we should sympathize with God’s poor—that is, those who cannot help themselves—let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings, or by the shortcomings of some one else. It is all wrong to be poor, anyhow. Let us give in to that argument and pass that to one side.

A gentleman gets up back there, and says, “Don’t you think there are some things in this world that are better than money?” Of course I do, but I am talking about money now. Of course there are some things higher than money. Oh yes, I know by the grave that has left me standing alone that there are some things in this world that are higher and sweeter and purer than money. Well do I know there are some things higher and grander than gold. Love is the grandest thing on God’s earth, but fortunate the lover who has plenty of money. Money is power, money is force, money will do good as well as harm. In the hands of good men and women it could accomplish, and it has accomplished, good.

I hate to leave that behind me. I heard a man get up in a prayer-meeting in our city and thank the Lord he was “one of God’s poor.” Well, I wonder what his wife thinks about that? She earns all the money that comes into that house, and he smokes a part of that on the veranda. I don’t want to see any more of the Lord’s poor of that kind, and I don’t believe the Lord does. And yet there are some people who think in order to be pious you must be awfully poor and awfully dirty. That does not follow at all. While we sympathize with the poor, let us not teach a doctrine like that.

Source: Russell H. Conwell, Acres of Diamonds (New York: Harper Brothers, 1915), 17–22.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to. I shall argue that the fundamental unit of selection and therefore of self-interest, is not in the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly the individual. It is the gene, the unit of heredity.

The account of the origin of life that I shall give is necessarily speculative. We don’t know what chemical raw materials were abundant on earth before the coming of life, but among the plausible possibilities are water, carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia. Under further influence of energy such as ultraviolet light from the sun, they combined into larger molecules. At some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. We will call it the replicator. It had extraordinary property of being able to create copies of itself. Replicators began not merely to exist, but to construct for themselves containers, vehicles for their continued existence. The replicators that survived were the ones that built survival machines, for themselves to live in. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

The plans for building blocks a human body is spelt out in 46 volumes (23 pairs of chromosomes). Let us call them as volume 1a and volume 1 b, 2a & 2b... 23a & 23b. Volume 1a, 2a...23a came say from father and the other volumes (1b, 2b...23b) came from mother. The paired chromosomes do not spend all their lives physically in contact with each other or even near each other. Sometimes the two alternative pages are identical, but in their cases, they differ. If they make contradictory recommendations, what does the body do? Answer varies. Sometimes one reading prevails over the other. A gene that is ignored in this way is called recessive and the opposite of a recessive gene is a dominant gene.

Apart from 23 pairs of chromosomes, there is another kind of division called meiosis. This occurs only in the production of the sex cells; the sperms or eggs.

We have already asked what the most general attributes of a good gene are and we decided that selfishness was one of them. But another quality that successful genes will have is a tendency to postpone the death of their survival machines at least until after reproduction.  A gene that makes its possessors die is called a lethal gene. A semi lethal gene has some debilitating effect, such that it makes a death from other more probable. Any gene exerts its maximum effect on bodies at some particular stage of life and lethal and semi lethal are not exceptions. Most genes exert their influence during foetal life, others during childhood, others during young adulthood, others in middle age, and yet others in old age.

Early acting lethal genes will tend to be removed from the gene pool and a late acting lethal will be more stable in the gene pool (e.g. a gene that made young children develop cancer would not be passed on to any off-springs. Selection will favor genes that have the effect of postponing the operation of other, lethal genes and it will also favor genes that have the effect of hastening the effect of good genes. If we want to increase the human lifespan, there are two general ways in which we could do it. Firstly we could ban reproduction before a certain age, say forty. After some centuries of this the minimum age limit would be raised to fifty and so on. It is conceivable that human longevity would be pushed up to several centuries by this means,. Secondly, we could try to ‘fool’ genes into thinking that the body they are sitting in is younger than it really is. In practice this would mean identifying changes in the internal chemical environment of a body that take place during aging.

The existence of sexual reproduction and crossing-over is more difficult to justify. Female greenflies can bear live, fatherless, female offspring, each one containing all the genes of its mother (incidentally, an embryo in her mother’s womb may have an even smaller embryo inside her own womb. So a greenfly female may give birth to a daughter and a granddaughter simultaneously, both of them being equivalent to her own identical twins). Manny plants propagate vegetatively by sending out suckers (e.g. elm trees) If greenflies and elm trees don’t do it why do the rest of us go to such lengths to mix our genes up with somebody else’s before we make a baby? The evolution of sex results from the fact that number of his genes that survive. In these terms, sex appears paradoxical because it is an inefficient way for an individual to propagate her genes; each child has only 50% of the individuals’ genes, the other 50 percent has only 50 percent being provided by the sexual partner.

Animals Became active go-getting gene vehicles: gene machines. Plants move, but very slowly. Animals on the other hand, have evolved ways of moving hundreds of thousands f time faster. Moreover the movements they make are reversible and repeatable an indefinite number of times. The gadget that animals evolved to achieve rapid movement was the muscle. Muscles are engines which like the steam engine and the internal combustion engine, use energy stores in chemical fuel to generate mechanical movement.

The basic unit of biological computers, the nerve cell or neuron. Plants have no need of the neuron, because they get their living without moving around, but it is found in the great majority of animal groups. . .

Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends. Brought up as we have been on the good of the species, view of evolution, we naturally think first of liars and deceivers as belonging to different species: predators, prey, parasites and so on. However, we must expect lie3s and deceit and selfish exploitation of communication to arise whenever the interests of the genes of different individuals diverge. This will include f the same species. As we shall see, we must even expect that children will deceive their parent, that husbands will cheat on wives and that brother will lie to brother.

An evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) defined as a strategy which, if most members of a population adopt it, cannot be bettered by an alternative strategy. Hawks always fight as hard and as unrestrainedly as they can, retreating only when seriously injured. Doves merely threaten in a dignified conventional way, never hurting anybody. If hawk fights a dove the dove quickly runs away and so does not get hurt. If a hawk fights a hawk, they go on until one of them seriously injured or dead. If dove meets a dove nobody gets hurt; they go on posturing at each other for a long time until one of them tires o decides not to bother anymore and therefore backs down. What we want to know either hawk or dove is an evolutionary stable strategy. A retaliator plays like a dove at the beginning of every fight; however if his opponent attacks him, he retaliates. Another conditional is bully who goes around behaving like a hawk until somebody hits back and then he immediately runs away (like dove). Out of these five types, retaliator emerges as evolutionary stable.

In many species a mother can be more sure of her young than a father can. The mother lays the visible, tangible egg, or bears the child. She has a good chance of knowing for certain the bearers of her own genes. The poor father is much more vulnerable to deception. It is therefore to be expected that fathers will put less effort than mothers into caring for young. Similarly maternal grandmothers can be more sure of their grandchildren than paternal grandmothers. Similarly uncles on the mother’s side should be more interested in the welfare of nephews and nieces than uncles on the father's side.

Individual parents practice family planning, but in the sense that they optimize their birth-rates rather than restrict them for public good. They try to maximize the number of surviving children that they have and this means having neither too many babies nor too few. Gens that make an individual have too many babies tend not to persist in the gene pool, because children containing such genes tend not to survive to adulthood.

It is strongly to be expected on evolutionary grounds that where sexes differ, it should be expected to be the males that advertise and females that are drab, Modern western man is undoubtedly exceptional in this respect. It is true that on average, our society the equivalent of the peacock’s tail is exhibited by female not by the male. Women paint their faces and glue on false eyelashes. Women seem to be interested in their own personal appearance and they are encouraged in this by their magazines and journals. Men’s magazines are less preoccupied with male sexual attractiveness and a man who is unusually interested in his own dress and appearance is apt to arouse suspicion both among men and among women. When a woman is described in conversation, it is quite likely that her sexual attractiveness or lack of it will be prominently mentioned. This is true whether the speaker is a man or women. When a man is described, the adjectives used are much more likely to have nothing to do with sex. Faced with these facts, a biologist would be forced to suspect that he was looking at a society in which females compete for males rather than vice versa. In the case of birds of paradise, we decided that females are drab because they do not need to compete for males. Males are bright and ostentatious because females are in demand and can afford to be choosy. The reason female birds of paradise are in demand is that eggs are a more scarce resource than sperms. What happened i n modern western man? Has the male really become the sought-after sex, the one that is in demand, the sex that can afford to be choosy?

A long memory and a capacity for individual recognition are well developed in man. We might therefore expect reciprocal altruism to have played an important part in human evolution. Trivers goes so far as to suggest that many of our psychological characteristics - envy, guilt, gratitude, sympathy etc. - have been shaped by natural selection for improved ability to cheat, to detect cheats, and to avoid being thought to be a cheat. Of particular interest are subtle cheats who appear to be reciprocating, but who consistently pay back slightly less than they receive. It is even possible that man’s swollen brain, and his predisposition to reason mathematically, evolved as a mechanism of ever devious cheating and ever more penetrating detection of cheating in others. Money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism.

The fundamental unit, the prime mover of life is the replicator.  A replicator is anything in the universe of which copies are made. Replicators come into existence in the first place, by chance, by the random jostling of smaller particles. Once a replicator has come into existence it is capable of generating an indefinitely large set of copies of itself. No copying process is perfect, however and the population is replicators come to include varieties that differ from one another. Some of these varieties turn out to have lost the power of self- replication, and their kind ceases to exist when they themselves cease to exist. Others can still replicate, but less effectively. Yet other varieties happen to find themselves in possession of new tricks: they turn out to be even better self-replicators than their predecessors and contemporaries. it is their descendants that come to dominate the population,. As time goes by, the world becomes filled with the most powerful and ingenious replicators. Certainly in principle and also in fact, the gene reaches out through the individual body wall and manipulates objects in the world outside, some of them inanimate, some of them other living beings, some of them a long way away. The only kind of entity that has to exist in order for life to arise anywhere in the universe is the immortal replicator.