For today’s Monday Motivator, I’m featuring a guest post by Brian Tracy. Brian is one of the top motivational and success gurus out there, and he’s the real deal.
I heard him speak back in 1994, I think, at an event sponsored by The Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC. He generously offered everyone who attended that event a free set of about a dozen of his success programs. I requested them all – they were on cassette back then – and I learned a lot. Wish I had put it all into practice back then. But what I did put into practice did make a difference in 1996, when I made a major lifestyle design move and career change.
The Five Roads to Financial Success in America and How to Choose Your Own
There are basically five ways that you can become wealthy starting with nothing in America, based on over 25 years of research into American millionaires.
The First Way
Number one, you can inherit it. Less than 10 percent of wealthy Americans inherited any of their money, and it’s less and less every single year.
The Second Way
The second way that you can become wealthy is you can achieve it professionally. You can become a doctor or a lawyer or an architect or an accountant. You can become extremely good at what you do, be paid very well, and hold on to the money.
The Third Way
The third way you can achieve it is you can become a senior executive of a large corporation. You can be highly paid; you can have stock options and bonuses. And if you stay with the company long enough, for enough years, you can be paid enough to become wealthy.
The Fourth Way
You can win it. But only a tiny fraction of one percent of wealthy Americans got that way by winning their money some way or another. As a matter of fact, the odds against you winning the lottery are the equivalent of lightning striking twice in the same place. They’re millions and millions to one.
The Best Way
The fifth way that you can become wealthy is you can start your own business and earn it all by yourself. Starting your own business has been and will always be the high road to becoming wealthy for most self-made millionaires. Entrepreneurship in America offers more opportunities and opens more doors than all other possibilities put together. This is why it has been said that if you have the ability to start your own business and you don’t do it, you are a fool. I’ll repeat that. If you have the ability to start your own business and you don’t do it, you’re a fool.
Where do you start?
The very first thing you do is you make a decision to get your finances under control. Some years ago, a man named George Classon wrote a book called The Richest Man in Babylon. It’s a classic on financial success and what Classon said in that book was that the key to becoming wealthy is to pay yourself first. Take ten percent off your earnings, off your gross income every month and put it aside. Learn to live on ninety percent or less of your gross income. So the very first thing that you do is you begin to save your money.
Action Exercises
Now, here are two things you can do immediately to put yourself onto the high road to personal wealth:
First, resolve today to begin saving your money a little bit at a time. Set a goal to save 10% of your earnings, to put it away and to never touch it. This will change your life.
Second, immediately register your own business or sole proprietorship. Open a bank account, get business cards and letterhead and create the corporate entity under which you can do business. Your business opportunities will appear far sooner than you think. If you build it, they will come.
Special Offer
Brian Tracy is offering his new book, “Getting Rich Your Own Way” along with 2 bonuses–worth over $150, for only $33!
Offer includes:
1. Getting Rich Your Own Way–371-page book guiding the way to making your OWN fortune.
2. Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires— Digital DVD, he reveals secrets of other millionaires that he has studied.
3. Financial Success Strategies–CD, exactly what you need to do in order to succeed financially in this economy.
If you’ve ever wanted to be your own boss, this sounds like a great resource and a great deal!
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