7 Traits Of Self-Made Millionaires: How do self-made millionaires get rich, when most people never get there? What are they doing that everyone else doesn’t? How do millionaires think different?
In this week’s video I go over 7 traits I’ve seen in millionaires I’ve met during my business journey + my own experience having built a 7 figure net worth by 31.
Think about how you can use these traits in your own career to advance your position faster.
- Leverage – This is the art of getting a disproportionate return on your time and effort. Rich people are masters of getting leverage. How can I put in 1x effort and get 3x return?
- Skillset – This is a non-negotiable. How will you ever be paid extremely high amounts of money if you’re not in the top 5% of your industry? It’s hard to justify. Invest in your skillset.
- Independent Thinkers – They aren’t swayed by popular trends or common opinions. They think in terms of what’s the best move for me to make, even if most people wouldn’t choose that option. Following others can be dangerous.
- Commitment / Persistence – This is something anyone can do. I honestly think 90% of success comes down to not stopping no matter what obstacles pop up. This doesn’t mean continuing to flog a dead horse that’s obviously not working, but staying committed to your objective, and being flexible with how you get there.
- One Main Focus, Diversify Later – Most people who don’t have much money are always dabbling in 20 different things. Majority of rich people I know did one business or career for a long time, then diversified into multiple businesses later. How will you compete with people in your industry if your focus is split by 10 projects.
- Manage Their Ego – Competitive when they need to be, put it aside when asking for help.
- Work Ethic – No avoiding this, simply putting in the hours to get the outcome you want out of life. There will be sacrifices and that’s the way it is. If you’re not the #1 hardest worker in your company, your department, your industry – can you really expect to make the #1 most money too?
Hope you’ve found that useful and be sure to leave me a comment below with your thoughts – anything I missed?
Ray
@raycorc on Instagram
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Transcription:
A question that I’ve always asked in this channel is what is the difference between people that get rich and people that never seem to quite get there? What are they doing differently? What decisions are they making? How is their mindset different? How do they think different? What are the things that separate people essentially? So in this week’s video, I’m going to be talking about seven traits of self-made millionaires, both from my own experience building my net worth over seven figures, and also from mainly my business journey, people that I’ve met along the way.
I’ve been really lucky to meet a whole bunch of amazing people, people worth a few million dollars, tens of millions of dollars, and even hundreds of millions of dollars. There are a few traits that I’ve noticed that a lot of them seem to have in common, and they’re all different in their own way, but you do say a certain number of traits keep showing up again and again and again. And what we’re going to look at in this video is, well, how can we start incorporating those traits into my own life or my own career, or my business so that you can help propel yourself forward even faster?
So the first trait is leverage. It’s really important that you understand what leverage is and how to incorporate that into your own life? Leverage is essentially getting disproportionate returns on your time or effort. So leverage could involve hiring other people to help you get more done. It could involve getting software or technology to help you get more done with less. Leverage is all about getting disproportionate outcomes. Now for a lot of people, and for myself included, when I was working in a day job, I couldn’t mentally comprehend how I would make $500,000 in a year or $1000,000 in a year, how does that even happen?
I had early jobs where I was making $30,000 a year, $40,000 a year, Australian, and I couldn’t fathom how someone could make a 10X that or 20X that? How is that even possible? I felt like I was working very, very hard and I could maybe do 10% more, maybe 20% more. Then how do people make 10X that? One thing that I think rich people understand that a lot of people don’t understand is that if you can’t get leverage in what you do, you’ll always make a smaller amount of money because you don’t know how to use investments that can work for you and generate money outside of your personal effort. A lot of this is separating your outcomes from your personal time.
So it can involve you having investments, so having a lot of investments on the side that you build up from a small amount to a big amount that can generate you ideally hundreds of thousands of dollars and up every single year without you actually having to do anything. And it does take time, but you want to build that up on the side because you start getting leverage and you start making money beyond your personal effort day-to-day.
Another reason why I really encourage a lot of people to consider starting a business, is in a business you can get a lot of leverage by hiring other people. So you might be able to work 80 hours a week, or 40 hours a week or whatever. But if you hire other people you can get there 40 hours a week as well, and that person’s 40 hours a week. And now you can start getting 10X what a single person could get done. This is something that I personally took a long time to figure out, and I mentally understood it, but I didn’t really start doing it until only a couple of years ago, to be honest. And since then, it’s really, really helped grow my income because it’s not just about my personal effort.
And one thing that I was taught was no matter how productive you are, there’s only so much one person can do. Even the most productive person ever you only have a certain number of hours that you can do in a week without sacrificing your health and that sort of stuff. If you’re in a job, it can be quite hard to get leverage, and that’s why I really encourage people to either start a business on the side or fully transition to business.
Looking at roles where you can get leverage, a lot of sales roles are dependent on outcomes rather than hours, and this is the crux of leverage. It’s about getting the outcome not just putting in hours. Because like I said, you’re going to tap out with your hours very, very quickly. So it’s important that you understand how can I, even if you work in a company, could you build out a team so that you could get paid more to generate a bigger overall outcome for your company?
The second trait is skillset. So if you’re not excellent at what you do, you really can’t expect to be paid abnormal amounts of money. You really should really focus on regardless of whether you hate your boss or you hate your job or whatever, even for your own personal standards, I think that you should be working towards being the best in the company or in the department or in the state or in the country, the world, whatever it is, start by focusing on developing your skillset.
I’ve had jobs I’ve liked, I’ve had jobs I haven’t liked, but I’ve tried to keep a personal standard where I try to deliver the best quality work regardless of whether I liked my coworkers or my liked my boss, or I even wanted to stay in that industry because it’s about having a personal standard. And even if you don’t like your job now or where you’re at at the moment, if you move into a business or you move into something that you do like, you need to build up that muscle of work ethic anyway. So it’s really important that you develop a skillset and develop real world skills that you can get paid for.
You don’t need to be the best in the world necessarily, although it would help, you just need to make sure that you have above average skill set in your area. If you’re someone that’s trying to make a lot of money with an average or below average skillset, it just won’t happen unless it’s going to be due to luck. You need to be focusing on investing. And that’s why I encourage a lot of people early on, once you’ve paid off a lot of your debts and you’ve saved up savings buffer is to go hard on developing your skillset. If you don’t have skills, what can we pay you for? That’s ultimately the end game.
The third thing I noticed about the self-made millionaires that I’ve met, they’re very independent thinkers. They don’t do what everybody else does, they do things, sometimes they go with the flow if that decision makes sense, but they don’t necessarily do that. They’re willing to go against the grind, they’re willing to do the things that other people would think would be strange or not a good idea, because they think for themselves. And I think that more people could do this these days. I’ve made definitely lots of the decisions where I’ve kind of followed the crowd at the time or done what everybody else was supposed to do, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. But I was always kind of following what other people were doing and just doing more of that.
And when I started to shift more doing what I think I should be doing and what I enjoy or focusing on industries that I think that have growth potential, or offering services I think that would be useful, everything changed. And it’s same for yourself, you need to be able to think independently of what you see on social media, what you see on the news and think for yourself because it’s a lot easier to be the captain of your own ship rather than just following people all the time. Because that way you’re not waiting for other people to do stuff before you could copy them, you can sort of curve your own path essentially.
The fourth common trait of self-made millionaires is their commitment and persistence. Their level of commitment and persistence would be leagues above most ordinary people because they stick with stuff when it doesn’t seem like it’s going well, or it seems like it’s going slowly and that sort of stuff. And to be honest, I think that 90% of success does come down to just being a stubborn person and being someone that is going for the gold no matter what. Now this doesn’t necessarily mean that you are not flexible in how you get there. They’re going to be some things that you try or pursue that aren’t going to work no matter how hard you try or how much good intentions you put behind it.
Now, if you can think about just be focused on where you want to go, the end point or the end outcome, but be flexible in how you get there. If I think about a lot of people, they try for a little bit and give up and they try for a little bit and give up, and they constantly do this cycle of trying a little bit and giving up. All the stuff in terms of career success and making a lot of money is on the other side of you persisting for a really, really a long time.
Any of the wealthy people that I’ve met over my career, they’ve all had, I would say more challenges than the typical person, a lot more stress, a lot more drama and uncertainty in their life to get to where they needed to get to. But they’re really back to what they were doing and they’ve stuck with it and they did it for a quite a long time, even if the signs weren’t great. And I think that a lot of people could embrace that and do that a lot more. People do things for five minutes these days and they give up. But I think if you can incorporate more commitment and persistence in your own career, you’ll be much better off.
Number five is they have one main focus and then they diversify later. So there’s a lot of people out there that are what I call dabblers, and they try 50 different things and they’ve always got something going on and they don’t stick with it. When I think about my own journey, I spent years and years and years, and it’s one of the best decisions I made I think in terms of my whole, I guess, career, if you want to call it that, is picking the marketing and sticking to it. And I made a decision maybe 10 years ago-ish that I was just going to pick that one thing and stick it and not change. I knew that I wanted to do that at the time, but I didn’t realise the positive impact that would have until years later because I started to get momentum. And you can’t get momentum if you’re trying 20 different things at once.
And if you think about your industry, there’s no way that I could be a leader in my industry if I was approaching it with I had 20 different things going on at the same time. I focused on this one thing and I’m still doing that now, and it’s still the main source of my income. And the reason that I can get paid well now is not because I have any special talents, but it’s because I’ve been doing stuff in and out for pretty much 10 years in my own time, invest in my own money, but just constant applying. Just keep applying pressure to that same area, week in, week out, and then over years, you get to the point where you actually do build a skill set. It’s almost impossible not to build a skill set.
So have a think about what lane that you’re going to stay in and commit to it. Any of the successful business owners that I’ve ever met, they’ve all had one main thing to start with then they spun off and made lots of companies later. They didn’t have 20 companies to start with, or if they did, they were hiring lots of people to help get that done, but they weren’t personally dividing their time and trying to do everything themselves from the get-go
Number six, and interesting one, it is they’re great at managing their ego. So ego can be used as a tool for good or bad. So ego can be bad when you have too much ego to the point where you are not okay asking people for help or revealing vulnerability, that can be a negative sort of ego. Whereas a positive side of ego is you’re competitive, you can’t see yourself losing, you don’t want to see yourself lose, so it drives you to bigger and better things.
I’ve noticed that a lot of self-made millionaires that I have met over the years is that they’re really good at managing that sort of opposing dynamic. They understand that they don’t know it all, they’ll never know it all. And other people are always going to be smarter than them, that I can learn from. But at the same time, they leverage their ego when they just need to dig their heels in, be competitive and back themselves. So just having that sort of balance is really, really crucial because you can use ego as a tool to help you and not harm you.
Number seven is an obvious one and it’s something that anybody can do, and it just simply comes down to putting in the hours and work ethic. For me personally, I’ve been working six sometimes seven days, and obviously it’s not from morning till night, but I’ll be working seven days, six days every single week and I’ve been doing that for years now. And there’s something that it’s just by default, until I’m getting to a point where I’m happy with where I’m at, and then I can ease up a bit, I want to put in as many hours as possible as I can.
Sometimes there’s no substitute for just putting in the hours and putting in the work. And any of these people that I know they work and generating income is a major part of their life, it’s not something they’re doing as a side thing, it is a big part of their life and a big focus in their life. Just like the people that don’t have fitness as their big focus, they don’t look as good. Their fitness levels aren’t as good, it’s not a priority for them, same for making money. If making money, and people have all these weird funny things about making money, but if making money is not a focus for you, the chances of you making a lot of money, probably not going to happen, or it won’t happen quickly. So you need to make sure that it is a big priority for you in your life if that’s what you want and make sure that you’re putting in the hours.
If you’re just doing regular hours, a lot of people say, “Oh, I need work-life balance.” And that is really important, and it is true. And I don’t recommend that you stop sleeping eight hours a night and you start eating crap because you just always in front of the computer or something like that. But you need to understand that you do need to put in more hours in most, and if you don’t, then it’s going to take longer. And I think for a lot of people, the way I approach it is if I can do say two, three, four years of really, really hard work and just put my head down, I can live the next 30, 40 plus years cruising because I’ve kind of built out that momentum. And I’d rather do that than work at a lower pace for a longer period of time.
For me personally, I want to be fully retired or have the option to be fully retired between age 37 and 40. So to do that, right now I need to be putting in massive hours. And I don’t actually mind, it doesn’t actually feel some people grown at the thought of it, but, for me, I feel good because I know I’m getting closer to what I want. So let me know in the comments what do you think? Which of the traits did you like the most? Did you think I missed anything? If I missed something, please let me know. And other than that, I’ll see in the next video.