The Daily Habits that Made Me a Millionaire

Making money is a skill.

It's a skill that can be learned and improved upon.

Everyone can become wealthy, including you.

The sooner you realize that, the sooner you will start to accumulate wealth, freedom, and utility of your choices.

In this week's article, I will give you a transparent insight of the personality traits I had to develop that allowed me to become wealthy.

I hope you can apply these lessons to your own journey.

Being Intentional about Making Money

Everyone wants to know "the secret" of wealth. What are the tactics and tricks that rich people know, that they are not telling you?

The secret is mindset. Wealthy people have a different relationship with money than poor people. Fundamentally, that is the biggest difference between the rich and the poor.

Rich people aren't afraid of money and their not ashamed of money. In fact, they see money as a tool to use as opposed to a necessity to survival. The wealthy aren't afraid to talk about it or to claim their intentions about getting it.

There is nothing I can tell you that will help you get wealthy if you haven't fixed your relationship with money.

For some reason, talking about wanting to make money is taboo in our culture

It's likely that the statement "I want to make a lot of money" makes you feel uncomfortable. Have you ever said those words out loud? Have you ever announced to the world that you want to get rich?

Why not? Are you ashamed a money? Do you think that rich people are evil?

Many people disguise their desires for wealth and leisure as part of a bigger purpose. You say things like "I just want to make enough money to be happy."

Happiness is the worst goal you could have, because happiness is fleeting and irrelevant. If happiness is your goal, you will never be satisfied because being happy is only an emotion. It comes and goes in the same way that sadness, excitement, or grief does.

If you want to make money, you need to remove all the secondary emotional attachments you've created and be deliberate in your intentions to make money for the sake of making money.

Money gives you options and it gives you the opportunity to do good in the world. You being rich does not take away from anyone else's ability to be rich.

So the first step is to rephrase your thinking. Repeat after me.

"I want to make a lot of money because money gives me options."

You want options. You want utility of your time. Why is that something you need to hide behind or be ashamed of?

As such, the first step you need to take is to become comfortable telling the world and the universe what it is you want. You need to realize that becoming wealthy is not a net negative, but a net positive.

Wealth is a positive sum game. In order for you to become wealthy, you will have to create a product or service that proliferates convenience or abundance for other people.

There are plenty of examples of exploiters, parasites, and crony capitalists in our society. However, there are many more examples of people becoming wealthy by building great businesses that create products and services to make other people's lives better.

In fact, the amount of money you make is directly correlated to the amount of value you add to the world.

You need to drill this into your head, because unless you have accepted this truth, then you will always be putting money on a pedestal and your relationship with money will be flawed. Money will always be the prom king / queen that was out of your league.

The reason why I was able to become wealthy was because I was able to break out of my poverty mindset that was taught to me as a kid and announce to myself and to the universe that my intentions were to make money.

The same will be true for you

The Difference Between Money and Wealth

There is a cultural persona around entrepreneurs that they are visionaries and risk takers.

I haven't found that to be the case at all. In fact, the opposite is true.

There is a difference between money and wealth. Money is a currency, wealth is a machine. Money itself isn't what makes you rich, what makes you rich is the engine that self proliferates revenue and profits.

The reason why millionaires stay millionaires is because they never lost their money.

That seems like such an obvious statement, doesn't it? It's more nuanced than you realize.

When you lose money, you lose more than the money you lost ...

You also lose the future money that the money you lost would have grown for you.

Hardly anything in life grows linearly. Most things grow exponentially. This is true in nature, society, and network effects.

The way to get wealthy is to use your money to make more money, and your money will grow at a compounding rate. There are many ways to do this. Some examples might include investing in the stock market, buying rental properties, or reinvesting your cash back into your business.

Either way, the mechanism that creates exponential growth is actually the machine that generates wealth, not the money itself.

So when you lose money, what you are actually losing is the opportunity to compound. The formula for compounding guarantees that the more you grow, the more you grow.

Wealthy people understand this, and they protect their capital at all costs, because they know that protecting their capital means protecting their leverage to the up side.

This is why most rich people keep investing in themselves

It's easy to think that once you become a millionaire, your life is full of leisure and comfort. I don't know any wealthy people, (including my friends in their 70's or 80's) who have stopped looking for ways to grow.

Money will solve your money problems, but the work doesn't stop there. Keeping your wealth requires constant reinvestment. To keep your money, you need to develop healthy money habits.

For instance, when I started making money, I instantly developed an automated investment strategy. Every week, I invest $500 into the S&P500. This happens automatically, without needing to think about it.

Or in another example, as Stodzy continues to grow in revenue, I must continue to invest in building the skillset, size, and infrastructure of our team. If we were to keep closing deals without investing in our foundation, then the entire company would collapse on itself.

Even though it's easier to close deals than before, it's more difficult to steer a ship at this size. As you generate wealth, your mindset transitions from grind to discernment. Having good judgement is what prevents you from total ruin.

Making money is one thing, keeping your money is something entirely different. The two require completely different skillsets.

If You're Not Growing, You're Dying

Sometimes I look at what I've built and I ask "can I retire?"

The answer is yes, I probably could. The math works out as to where I could probably spend the next 6-9 months figuring out how to liquidate my assets and then go buy a mountain house and live on a tropical island.

That's the dream, isn't it?

When will I get to the place when I give myself a break and stop obsessively driving myself towards this goal?

The answer: never.

Success begets success and failure begets failure

Wealth is not a goal or a target number. It's not a milestone you hit. Wealth is a lifestyle and a way of living.

Wealth is similar to fitness. Fit people stay fit. As soon as they stop trying to be fit, they get unfit. If you ask a healthy person "you're already healthy, why don't you take a break?", they will tell you that the reason they are healthy is because they never take a break.

Similarly, wealthy people stay wealthy, and as soon as they stop trying to be wealthy, is when they lose their wealth.

These are universal concepts and the evidence can be seen everywhere.

Take a second to look out your window. Find a tree or a bush and focus on it. How long do you think it has taken that tree to grow to where it is? It's reasonable that the tree took 100 years to get as big as it is now. Growth was a slow process

However, if you cut the tree down, it will die instantly.

This concept is true for your health, your relationships, your reputation, and your money. Growth proliferates slowly and death can come in an instant.

So wealthy people never look for escape valves. They don't see wealth as a achievement to be accomplished but rather as a way to live their lives.

This is why becoming wealthy starts with a mindset, because poor people don't realize that there is no such thing as "getting rich" or "achieving wealth." There is no final boss to beat and there is no final exam.

Wealth accumulation is a continuous process or iteration and trial and error in an attempt to add value to the world.

Conclusion: The Battle is in Your Mind

If you notice, I didn't once mention sales tactics or product design or marketing strategies in this article.

This article is about mindset, because mindset is the biggest differentiator between the rich and the poor.

I was taught a poverty mindset as a kid. Money should be worshipped and hoarded. I was taught that making money required an ungodly sacrifice of work and labor that took away from time with family and holidays, and required you to give your body in exchange for food.

That's not how money works. Money is a forest and if you plant the seeds, water the trees, and give it sunshine, the forest will grow on its own.

Your job is to protect your forest from parasites, insects, and wildfires.

In order to escape your poverty mindset, you must first give yourself permission to have money and believe that you are worthy of abundance.

Until you do that, money will continuously find other people who have accepted the truth for themselves.