Why is it that 90% of the population finds it so difficult to become rich? It is because all of us have been told the greatest lie of all, the lie that has been keeping us from becoming rich. Before you can ever become wealthy, you must first discover the truth about wealth and remove the wool that has been pulled over your eyes for way too long.

Let me start off by asking you to do a simple exercise. I would like you to close your eyes and picture a millionaire in your mind. Picture the clothes the person is wearing, the car he drives, how he spends his money, how he spends his day and how he dines. Go ahead and do this NOW before you go onto the next paragraph.

Well, what picture came into your mind?

If you are like most people, you would have pictured a millionaire as someone who wears the latest, branded clothes, who drives the newest luxury car model, who spends lavishly, who dines in fine restaurants and spends on the priciest, choicest dishes and most superb wines.

You may have imagined someone who is relaxing in a cushy leather upholstered armchair in his mansion or yacht, puffing on his Havana cigar. Why is this so? It’s because of the way we have been brainwashed by television and movies to think this is the way millionaires live and spend their money. It is precisely these beliefs and habits that actually keep us from becoming wealthy!

The truth is that very few self-made millionaires live this way. In fact, the only ones who do live this indolent, self-indulgent lifestyle are the minority of millionaires who either inherited all their wealth or who made their money through sports or entertainment. And all of them usually have one thing in common. They inevitably end up losing everything within ten years. Their wealth is only temporary. Look at Mike Tyson, Michael Jackson, Bobby Brown and a whole list of other celebrities who made hundreds of millions within their careers. They are either all broke or heavily in debt today.

In the New York Times Best-Selling book ‘The Millionaire Next Door’, Thomas J. Stanley interviewed 300 self-made American millionaires to find out how they think, how they earn their money and how they spend their wealth. What he discovered was a shocking revelation that made his book an instant best-seller.

It was discovered that many people who had high paying jobs, drove the latest luxury cars and wore the latest designer clothes and who appeared to be have millions to spend, were usually broke with a low personal net worth. Most of these professionals and senior executives of multi-national companies were what he termed ‘Under Accumulators of Wealth (UAW)’.

In contrast, those who were actual millionaires (that is those with a net worth of over US$1 million) lived very frugally and well below their means. Eighty-percent of them were born poor or from middle class families. They wore inexpensive suits and never bought a watch that cost more than S$500. Most of them drove secondhand cars, never bought the latest models of vehicles and they usually invested a minimum of 20% of their income in the stock market or private businesses. He termed these people ‘Prodigious Accumulators of Wealth (PAW)’.

So if creating a million dollar fortune is what you’re aiming for, do what the actual millionaires do and you will accumulate wealth faster than the big spenders ever do.

You see…making money is a game. If you learn the rules of this game, money will flow into your hands. If you do not play by the rules, you will struggle all your life financially despite working very hard.

Haven’t you ever asked yourself why some people earn five times, ten times or even twenty times more than others? Is it because they are twenty times smarter? Is it because they work twenty times harder? Or are they many times luckier? The answer to all these questions is a resounding ‘NO’!

I am sure you know people who seemed to be much lazier than you in school and had poorer grades but now they are so much more successful financially. Although their school report card used to be chockfull of ‘F’s, their financial report card carries straight ‘A’s. Why? The only reason is because they know how to play the game of money whereas most people have not learnt how the game is played.

You see…none of us are ever taught how to make money, how to invest money or how to manage our wealth and yet money is the most important subject in our adult lives. Although many people say that ‘money isn’t everything’, that’s only a half -truth. The truth is that ‘everything is money’! In order to achieve excellence in the different areas of lives like our health, relationships and family, we need to be financially secure!

The traditional education system (thank God it’s changing) never taught us how to be rich but instead brainwashed us into becoming poor. We are taught beliefs like ‘study hard, get good grades and a good job and you’ll be set for life!’, ‘investing is risky’, ‘don’t play with stocks or you’ll get burnt’, ‘don’t be so money-faced’ or ‘don’t be so stingy’.

As result of all the wrong anti-wealth advice, most people work hard all their lives, going around in circles in the rat race and ending up broke and unhappy. However, a fortunate few eventually learn that wealth is not made by just getting a good job and working hard. It takes a different way of thinking and a totally different strategy. Those that learn this lesson get out of the rat race and onto the path of financial abundance and freedom.

Some people take ten years to figure this out, some take thirty years and some never figure it out until it is too late. Don’t make the same mistake!

Have you ever heard of the phrase that the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer? Well, many people think that it is obvious because when you are born rich, you have all the money to go to the best schools, the money will allow you to continue to start companies that will make you rich, or simply that you will just inherit the money and continue to be rich for the matter.

Well, this is true in some cases. The main reason why children of wealthy parents tend to continue to be wealthy is because they inherit the beliefs that support wealth. And they inherit these beliefs of wealth from their parents and their relatives. They believe that it is a normal to run a company, to go to college and to make a half of million a year and drive a Mercedes Benz. They know it is possible because they see the people around them doing it.

On the other hand, many people who are born in poor families adopt beliefs of the poor. What they see around them become their role models, their parents and their relatives. They see their friends, they see their parents earning low wages and in lower income positions and struggling to get by every single month.

So, after a while, they start to believe that, that is their reality. These beliefs limit their dreams and their actions. They do not dare to go beyond what they see around them.

One example here happened during a training session with a student from a government school.

There was a student who did not set a goal to get a university degree. So when I asked him, “Why do not you want to go to college?” “Why do not you want to get a degree?” You know, he told me that no body in his family can study and that no body has ever made it pass their ‘O’ level exams in his family.

And there are many cases where many people who are born into poor families eventually break out of the cycle of poverty and become extremely successful and wealthy.

It is because along the way, they had managed to meet powerful role models that gave them the beliefs of possibility that brought them out of their little world they were living in.

By adopting the beliefs and mindset of empowering role models, we can change our financial status, environment, results and destiny.

By Adam Khoo

Some entrepreneurs tell me that they have no interest in expanding their business operations. “I am happy just running a small business so why should I expand?” or they say, ” I just want to maintain my sales and profits.”

I have found that it is absolutely crucial to keep expanding your operations, sales and profits. The moment your business stops growing, it starts dying! The moment you stop expanding, your business starts shrinking. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is true.

Nothing remains constant in your business environment. New competitors enter all the time. Existing competitors keep getting stronger by the day. They keep improving their products/services and expanding their own market share. Consumers’ needs keep changing and expectations keep rising.

So, if you keep running your business the same way, you are not really maintaining the status quo, you are slowly but surely getting left behind, as everything around you is changing and moving forward.

I have seen so many cases of entrepreneurs who used to do well at the beginning. Soon, the markets they were serving began to change or disappear and their once lucrative business quickly disappeared.

Here’s a good example. During the late 1990s owners of CD shops began to see their customers disappear as people starting buying and downloading music online. Then many retailers went bust as consumers of luxury goods lost their spending power during the last recession.

The cause of all these business failures was not the external factors alone. It was primarily because these business owners did not expand fast enough to diversify their operations among different markets so that a boom in India can make up for a downturn in Singapore. They did not expand into new product offerings so that when one revenue streams dries up, they have ten more to make up for it.

Another reason why you have to keep focusing on growth is to retain and continually attract the very best talents in the industry. Remember that every employee that joins you has the dream of earning a higher salary every year. All of them aspire to be promoted and to become the manager/director of a division in the foreseeable future.

Unless you make higher profits every year, you cannot fulfill your employees’ aspirations of higher incomes. Unless you grow your business operations, your staff will never be able to move up and take on larger roles. This is why a business that experiences stagnant growth will soon begin to lose their best employees and managers. This will lead to the eventual downfall of the company.

By Adam Khoo

Your beliefs drive your goals.

In other words, what you believe about yourself and the other people around you will determine what you want in your life. What you want in your life will determine your strategies, your actions, and your beliefs also will determine what you will do when you fail. Do you trigger it as feedback or do you give up? You see, your beliefs are like the operating system to your brain.

They determine how we perceive the world and how we respond to what happens. They determine what we will or will not do or what we will or will not try.

The beliefs we have about a person determines how we interact with that person, whether you go out make friends, or whether you avoid a particular person. The beliefs you have about the kind of food will determine whether you eat that food.

The beliefs you have about the economy will determine the kind of business or career you will pursue. See, beliefs are one of the most single, most important filters that we have, and at any given time, we will have about two million bits of information hitting us at per second and it is physically impossible for us to be aware of everything that is happening around us.

And that is why two people can see the same movie, but come out having very different opinions and experiences about what the whole movie was all about. One person may remember all the long conversations and feel that the movie was totally boring.

The other person may focus on the dialogue and feel really moved by the interaction of the characters. See, both people filtered the same movie so differently. They deleted, distorted, and generalized and created a very different internal representation for the movie.

So, in order for our brain to cope, our mind filters all this information by deleting, distorting, and generalizing all this data into an internal representation of what is actually happening around us. So, in other words, we do not perceive reality, we perceive a filtered version of reality.

Here’s an example of the power of beliefs.

Roger Banister was a marathon runner from Oxford, somewhere in the 1950′s, I think it was in 1954. What he did was that he set a goal to run a mile in less than 4 minutes. Now, bear in mind that no one in the world ever ran a mile in less than 4 minutes.

Everyone tried but failed, over and over again, until many doctors came out and said that it was physically impossible for a human being to run that fast. But, Roger Banister decided never to believe that. He did not want the belief to hold him back.

So, he decided to set a target for himself. Now, the difference was besides training physically, he would mentally prepare himself. The trouble was he had no evidences; no one could ever do it before. So, what did he do? He created it.

Again, the human mind could not tell the difference between what is real and what is clearly imagined in your mind. So, in his mind, he saw himself running and beating the mile in less than 4 minutes. He saw himself doing it again, and again and again. He created this evidence as if it was so real, that it became real for him. So what happened? He did beat the mile in less than 4 minutes.

But, that is not the amazing thing. The amazing thing that was that the minute he did that, within a year, about 37 other runners broke his record. Within a period of about 3 years, about 300 runners broke his record.

So, the question is this. Why is it for thousand of years, no one could run the mile in less than 4 minutes, but the minute one person does it, hundreds of people do it? See, what was holding everyone back was not their physical ability, was not their physical potential.

Therefore it is clear that what are actually holding many people back are their own beliefs. And it is precisely our beliefs that determine how we think, act and what we will or will not do in our life.

By Adam Khoo