7 Habits of Millionaires - That Most People Learn Too Late

I'm going to share with you the seven habits of millionaires and these are the exact same habits that I use as an introverted teenager to transform into an - award-winning designer and to build a multi-million dollar business so let's dive into the seven habits of millionaires starting with habit number one which is to have a bias towards action as far as I can tell in the number of people I've coached in my life the ones who are going to succeed the most have the greatest propensity towards taking action often times what happens to us is

we're waiting for complete sets of instructions before before we take action so we're stuck in this state of overthinking and never taking action I know this when somebody tells me to do something I just start doing it I don't question too much about whether it's going to work out or not because my experience has taught me if it doesn't work out at the beginning you make adjustments along the way the the metaphor the analog to all of this is you don't read a book on how to play basketball you just start playing and if you

really want to take it seriously you work with a coach or a mentor and they start to make small adjustments and then before you know it your skill L goes to the roof and what I find with so many people is they are stuck at home plate actually they're stuck in the Dugout they never even step on the plate and take a swing because they're so fearful that they're going to waste time and resources that they actually waste time and resources not doing anything the converse to having a bias towards action and the consequence of

all this stuff is you wind up doing nothing and we know that when you do stuff you actually learn you make progress you learn what doesn't work and every time you learn something that doesn't work it moves you towards what might work what could work and what will work eventually and there's the great quote about this which is something like it is better to regret the things you did and not the things you did not do so I don't want to live with regret period but I know that every time I do something whether it

works out or not it's either I win or I learn something and that's the attitude the belief system you need to have if you want to be successful in this world habit number two treat your time like gold it's precious it's non-renewable and it's perishable and what do I mean by this okay a lot of you are holding on to all the tasks that you have to do when you know in your heart someone else should be doing this but you can't let go of the control the need to be able to manage every single

thing to the nth degree and you justify to yourself that I can do this better and faster than anybody but when I frame it in a different way you might have a very different answer let's just say you're a graphic designer I know a lot of our audience are designers and I say to you are you literally the world's best designer like well no I'm not saying that are you the best designer in your country no I'm not saying that either in your state no in your city no so you're not the best and then

therefore you're limiting your growth by saying and acting as if no one else could do this at your level or even better we know this within the world of startups in Silicon Valley that a players hire A+ players b players hire C players that hire people worse than them your job and your mission should be to get everything off your plate that isn't necessary for you to do and only to focus on the things only you can do and to be very strict with that definition because a lot of times we're like well I'm the

only person who can do this this is really important and you able to grow your business to a point in which you no longer have to hire be players because of financial constraints that you can actually afford to hire people better than you I've been very fortunate in my life in my career that at the very early stages I was able to hire people and surprise surprise they knew more they were more capable of doing things and I grew as a consequence or as a result of that eventually I get into a position where I

hire designers who care more about the design than I do so I rest really easy at night knowing that all of our clients are in really good hands because I put someone in charge who cares about it to a degree above my own level of quality control and that's the benefit so people often wonder like well Chris easy for you to say because you're now successful and you have the resources but I have to tell you I'm successful and I have the resources because I made this decision at the beginning and not after the fact

so people who don't have a healthy mindset around this say one day I'll be able to afford to hire someone or as the successful entrepreneur the million-dollar mindset that you have is I will make sacrifices so I can hire the people so that I can have the money to hire more people they don't look at people as an expense they look at them as an Roi by return on investment they don't look at hiring people as the dilution of the energy but as a multiplicative effect of being able to do more in less time at

a higher quality that's the millionaire mindset you need to adopt habit number three talk to strangers sounds really weird because we've been told be careful strangers they can do bad things to us and we start to internalize that you add a healthy dose of introversion is social awkwardness and lack of social skills and it can create a pretty nasty recipe how do I know about this cuz this was me this is my story and I am the type of person who when clients came by I would just hide in my room and my executive producer

would say hey we're going to have a client dinner that I was paying for and I'm like I don't want to go you go then one day my business coach tells me Kier McLaren says you know what happens when the clients no longer want to work with you who is the relationship with is it with you the creatives or the producer well I know the answer to that it's definitely not with me because they didn't even know that I this they've been working with a creative team who went out to dinner with them and the

executive producer who's in their ear all the time and so we've learned that whoever is closest to the client makes the most amount of money so your inability to go and to talk to people to connect with them in a genuine way I don't even want to use the word networking but to be able to build real relationships with people means you'll almost always be at the end of that chain because everybody takes a little bit of the money away from the budget as it moves down the chain this is why the people who actually

do the work work have the least amount of money and the lowest amount of profit okay so you're sitting there thinking to yourself well what am I supposed to do about this here's the simple thing literally make the habit of speaking to strangers go talk to somebody you've never met with no other agenda except for to help them or to just start up small talk this is the power small talk so there's cafes I go to and I'm a creature of habit and this one place in particular fast casual restaurant would always have a queue

in front of the door mostly because the register right by the door so it created kind of a little bottleneck but their menu wasn't the easiest to figure out and so I would always sit there and I would Eaves drop on what somebody else was talking about and I noticed like they were struggling with figuring out what the menu was I said are you guys new in town is this your first time here they're like oh yeah we are like okay let me just tell you something everything you order is going to be great I

come here all the time and here's all you need to do you can either order one of the preset salads or meal or you just pick a protein pick a veg and pick a side and you're going to be great like oh is that it and I would do this for every single guest I became an unofficial unpaid Ambassador for this cafe or this restaurant and it it didn't go unnoticed because the manager would always like Chris I put something extra in your order I'm like you did every time I did this I felt like

I was being of service to people helping them to make a decision also Expediting the line on behalf of this place that I really care about I would just transfer those skills and do it with other people so what I want to tell you all is go make some small talk be The Unofficial ambassador to some place you feel comfortable with where does the skill apply well when I was being The Unofficial ambassador to this fast casual restaurant that I go to almost every single day it did not go unnoticed so the the manager John

and I became friends we would talk and he would always greet me he like Chris the usual all those kinds of things so here's the interesting thing I had learned that they were looking into rebranding because I said I love this place so much I'm curious if you got are looking to do new design work and he goes you know what I heard from the general manager that this was happening so through that point he then introduced me to the chief marketing officer and we had a whole dialogue we went through what they were doing

it didn't go beyond that but it's really interesting that you can start off doing something super innocent to be of service to people and it builds natural connection that can open doors you didn't even know existed habit number four be a forever student there's an expression that goes something like this the more I learn the more I know what I don't know it's the problem of the ignorant people who assume they already know everything and there's a certain amount of judgment or stigma to say to people I'm a student but here's the thing I love

to learn my own happiness my own self-worth comes from the progress that I make every day every month every year the person that I become versus the person that I was and I love to learn and I want to be a forever student what does that mean I don't consume information to say that I've done something it's not a thing I do on a checklist it's not something I do at a dinner party to tell people how educated I am with pinky rays in the air what I know comes from the materials that I've absorbed

with the intentionality that I'm going to teach or talk about this at some point in the near future so I create scenarios for myself the books behind me and the books that I read the videos that I watch I try to teach someone because I need to use that information I need to get it out of my system and the more times I share that with someone the more likely it is going to stick with me here's the really cool part I'm not trying to do this but what happens as a consequence as a byproduct

of this is that people start looking at you a little bit differently they say wow you have deep thoughts you have a wealth of knowledge and experience and they just assume you've lived all these Adventures but you know what I've read most of them I've lived some of them but the lines start to blur because in a way in my command of the information I learn it becomes part of my experience and my identity and so I think it's kind of important that we go outside of our field of expertise like once we achieve some

level of Mastery quote unquote Mastery and to expand that so that we can then tie different ideas together and be more strategic and kind of look at the broader picture and I'm able to do this in a lot of aspects and that way when I enter into a conversation with a business person that might have a whole different area of expertise in an industry I know nothing about it's much easier for me to find the common ground and tie things together for them this is how you become a strategic thinker and to be a more

valued person other than to do the things that you know how to do so be a forever student habit number five questions are greater than answers in our society we've been trained and socialized to give answers first student raises their hand with the answer is rewarded the student who can answer all the questions quickest fastest most accurately wins so we grow up in a system where the rules have been clearly defined the answers are more important than questions in fact when a teacher gives you instructions and you raise your hand like uh Miss Smith uh

I have a question about this and eventually Miss Smith will get so agitated it's like no more questions Chris let's get into the quiz or whatever it is we're going to do they shouldn't do that but sometimes that happens and maybe it's happened to you or maybe you're the one who's done that now when we enter into a business context and we hold on to these ideas that the answers are what they're looking for we get into a really bad habit which is to give answers before we fully understand what the problem is I think

it was myangelo who said there's no such thing as the right answer to the wrong question so if I'm asking you the wrong question and you give me an answer I can walk away with a false sense like I have a solution to my problem only to later realize this wasn't a problem at all this happens a lot right so the the analog to this in a non-b business context is you have a problem with your car you go into the mechanic and you say oh I have a problem with the transmission XYZ is wrong

and they go and fix that they've given you an answer you've given them the problem and then two weeks later two days later that problem exists again and you bring it back in and you're like hey you didn't fix the problem he goes I know but you told me this is what you wanted to do so I did exactly what you wanted to do he goes well if you had known that why didn't you fix the real problem this is why we need to slow down be curious a little bit longer be slower to give

answers and to make sure we're solving the right problem this is the big reset here for everybody we've been told and we we champion this idea be a problem solver be a problem solver your value is in solving problems we need to shift away from being a problem solver to a problem Seeker if you want to move away from being an order taker like would you like fries with that you have to learn how to ask better questions the reason why people pay me so much money for my time is because I help them get

clarity on what their problem is by asking better questions and if you're paying careful attention my ability to do this is tied to our previous point which is a forever student I don't want to assume I have the answers and that leads me to Habit number six which is feedback is a gift so most of us when we make something we're reluctant to ask for feedback from anybody because our greatest fear is they're going to say this is not good or they're going to give us critique or reasons why it's it's not going to work

or something else and we're so in love with our own ideas at this point we're so deep in the process we can't bear to change anything so we don't seek feedback we don't seek criticism so what happens is we go and launch a product a service or we WE Post an article or a carousel or something on social media only then for people later to say well I wouldn't have phrased it that way we're like well where were you well they weren't there because you weren't seeking the feedback and you don't perceive feedback as a

gift real feedback isn't saying this is dumb or that's great those are just opinions those are very subjective real feedback is thoughtful intentional communication to you as to what's not working and what can be improved it takes a real skilled person to be able to do this so as I say feedback is a gift not everybody's giving gifts that you want so be careful of who you seek feedback from but be open-minded and open spirit and realize the gift that you're getting so that you can better yourself and improve the things that you're doing and

if you want a deep dive on this very idea there's this video that you want to check out it's called why critical feedback will help you grow and now on to Habit number seven last but not least why Innovation is messy and wasteful so there's this idea within corporate culture within companies that we want to be Innovative everybody says of course we want to be Innovative we want to come up with new ideas we want to think outside the box conversely they say we need to be really efficient those are two opposing ideas they don't

live in the same universe you cannot be simultaneously Innovative and efficient so most companies prematurely decide they're in an efficiency building mode mode they try to cut cost they try to systematize everything and create processes and ways of working so that they can do more in less time they've settled into an efficiency mindset and then what happens is they get t-boned on the freeway of innovation and their business is no longer viable in the marketplace they've let time go by they're not jumping on certain Trends and shifting attitudes and behaviors of people so what you

want to do is you want to have a mindset and a culture of you know what we have to try lots of things before we know what's going to work and we don't want to be stuck in the mindset of trying things we actually need to try them in the book rework there's this chapter on making small bets versus one big gamble the way that you can mitigate the potential disruption that's going to happen to your own business and service right you want to take one large project one big initiative and chop it up into

10 smaller projects or initiatives the way that would work is you would take a $100,000 budget and instead of launching one gigantic video or one gigantic refresh of an app or website you would say what is one idea we can try that we can execute this month that we can spend $10,000 on and see if the result the cool part is you'll probably make lots of mistakes on your way by the time you hit mistake seven or eight you've learned a ton so it informs each new initiative that you take this is how you create

a culture of innovation because you've realized that Innovation is messy and and inherently very wasteful and this is exactly how I was able to reinvent our creative agency every 3 to 5 years to stay relevant and top of mind and be able to make over $80 million and if you want more on that watch this video here titled how I scaled my agency to $80 million in business