8 Rich People's Habits That Will Change Your Life

Look, even though you may not be starting out with money and connections, like a lot of rich people do, that doesn't need to stop you from becoming rich. If I let that stop me, I wouldn't have been able to go from broke girl to millionaire in my 30s. Because the thing is, having money and connections helps, but you know what comes first? The right habits. Most people have it all wrong. They think, when I have the money, then I'll start doing and acting like a rich person. When actually, it's the other way around. Start acting and doing like a rich person now, and that's what will make you become rich. So without further ado, here are 8 rich people habits that will change your life and that you can start doing right now, regardless of how much money you have in your bank account. So rich people habit number one is to buy status symbols with money that you actually have. And even better yet, buy it with money that is being passively thrown off by your assets and investments. How many people have you seen driving around with a $50,000, $70,000, $80,000 car that they bought on credits, and they don't even own their own house, and they have a bunch of other student loans, and their car note is like 50% of their income. Sadly, this is so common because when you look at rich people, they've got all the nice cars, the status symbols, and you think, oh, because they have that, if I also have that, that will make me feel and be rich. When in reality, rich people actually buy assets, and those assets make so much money for them that with that money that their assets are passively generating for them, they are able to go buy the toys, the private jets, the BMWs, and the nice things. Rich people have so much money that even just the interest being thrown off by the money that they have sitting around is enough to buy and pay for most of the things that they enjoy. So to embody rich people habit number one, what you want to focus on is buying assets. Put your income towards acquiring assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate, things that will make money on your money, and then with the money that gets generated from that money, that's what you take to then buy the status symbols. Most people get this all wrong. They cut straight from the income straight to the status symbols when in reality it's much better and more sustainable and will make you richer in the long run to first put that money into assets, delay a little bit of that short term gratification for that bigger payoff down the road when you can actually afford that super nice brand new car and you pay for it in cash. I guarantee you rich people did not get there by buying assets with money that they didn't have. They didn't borrow money to buy all their toys. They first went out, earned the money, put the money to work, and then they bought the toys. Okay, rich people have it. Number two, this might surprise you is to prioritize sleep. I used to think the harder you work, you know, you'll sleep when you're dead. You got to hustle, hustle, hustle, and you, and you think that rich people that they got there somehow by just working themselves to the bone and making a ton of money that way, but that's actually unsustainable. Life is a marathon, not a sprint, and there is nothing, nothing more important to your health than prioritizing your sleep. Of course there's eating healthy and all that, but that's a given. But sleep is one of those things that gets overlooked in today's modern busy times when we're busy binging on Netflix and we're just running around and the first thing to go usually is our sleep. Studies show that people who get less sleep actually earn less than people who get enough sleep and collectively sleep deprivation in the United States is estimated to cost around $411 billion due to lower productivity. So all that being said, you need to get sleep in order to perform high performance and sleep go hand in hand, and if you don't perform at a high level, you also can't earn at a high level. I used to not always be like this, but ever since I started prioritizing sleep and my overall wellness, I definitely started to see a difference in my performance in business and in my earning potential. Some tips to prioritize your sleep. The first and easiest thing to do is two hours before bedtime, turn off all your screens. Like don't check your phone anymore. Put your phone in a drawer, close your laptop, stop watching TV and instead maybe read a Because listen, studies show that blue light exposure before bed actually affects your ability to get deep REM sleep and REM sleep is a type of sleep that you get deep in the middle of the night that actually improves your brain's performance the next day. All right, rich people have it. Number three is to set goals and execute them. Get into the habit of always having at least one goal that you are working towards and actively executing on. I actually have a whole nother video on how to set goals and achieve them where I'm going to go into a lot more depth, but basically what you want to do is first do a brain dump of all of your goals and you can set a pace. You could do this once a year. I think once every six months is a really good pace, but every so often sit down and do a brain dump of everything you want to make happen in your life and choose one to three goals. No more than that to focus on. I truly think you can't meaningfully pursue more than three big goals at a time, so one to three is the absolute maximum and when you're phrasing the goals, it's really important to make it specific and measurable instead of saying, I want to make more money. That's not a goal. That's just a vague wish. A goal would be, I want to make $5,000 more a month by January, something specific, measurable and time bound. And then once you have this big goal, you want to reverse engineer into actionable tasks like in order for you to make $5,000 more in income a month, what do you need to do starting now? Well, starting now you would need to upskill, get some more high income skills and take a class or get a mentor or read a book or do something. And then two months from now you would need to, I don't know, take on a trial project for free where you can practice out your skills. And then five months from now you would need to volunteer for that big new client or project at work so that you can look really good to your boss. And then eight months from now you would need to schedule a meeting with your boss to discuss a performance review and a possible raise. See how that works. The good news is this is a skill that you can master. Get into the habit of setting specific measurable goals in your life with a deadline and then reverse engineering and breaking it down into manageable chunks. Just by doing this, that's already going to set you apart from 99% of people who just drift around from day to day and then a whole year goes by and they've just drifted away to some place where they didn't necessarily want to be. Don't be that person. Rich people take charge of their life by setting goals and achieving them and being in the driver's seat of their life. Rich people habit number four that you absolutely want to think about adopting is learning how to say no a lot. If you suffer from FOMO and you end up saying yes to a lot of things, then welcome to the club. I know the easiest thing in the world to do is just to say yes and be a people pleaser and I'm speaking from personal experience here. Again, this is something that was very, very counterintuitive for me as a recovering people pleaser. Rich people realize that the most limited resource in life is not money. It's actually time. You can always make more money, but you cannot ever get a single hour of your life back. So everything that you say yes to is actually a no to other things that might be more important to you. So start thinking of every yes as something with really high stakes and the stakes are high. It's your time, which is your life. If you say yes to something that will take away time from something else that you could be doing that would be more important to you. So have you ever found yourself in a position where you've accidentally said yes to way too many things and all of a sudden you find yourself being stretched in a million directions? That's a very good sign that you need to learn how to say no more often. Not only will this help you stay a lot more sane, but it's also going to make you a lot more effective and successful in everything you do. Think of the analogy of a water sprinkler. A water sprinkler is saying yes to everything and just sprinkling their efforts all over the place, but not really making a difference on any one patch of grass. On the other hand, think of a fire hose. A fire hose is a really directed, powerful stream of water and it can actually cut holes through pretty much anything if it's strong enough. Think of your time and your focus and your energy as a water sprinkler versus a fire hose. When you say no to most things, then most of your energy can go towards that one goal that we talked about in the previous habit that is most important to you, that will most move the needle in your finances. If you want your life to become unrecognizable, this is probably the most powerful habit you can adopt. As Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world says, really successful people say no to almost everything. I've honestly had to take a look at this quote over and over and over again because the part that really gets me is the almost everything part. I used to think successful people say no to a lot of things, but no, it's actually really successful people say no to almost everything. That pretty much means like 90% of things. And looking back on my life, every time I've made huge strides in my finances, when I paid off my student loans, when I became a millionaire, every time it's because I just put my head down and I focus and I said no to pretty much everything else that wasn't that. So when I was paying off my debt, every invite I had to go out and spend money, I actually said no. And I would say no pretty much all the time. If it didn't make me money to help me pay off my debt or it would slow me down from paying off my debt because then I would have to spend money on other things. It was a no. And looking back, that was literally why I was able to get out of debt in just a few years. Okay, rich people have it. Number five is to focus on becoming the best at one thing, one thing, just one. Ever since I realized that the more value I provide, the more money I can make that completely changed the game for me because that's what made me realize that the amount of money that you make is actually in your control. If you're not happy with the money that you make, it's because you need to provide more value and how do you provide more value? You get really, really good at something that the world needs and that they'll pay for it. So going back to this rich person have it. You want to become the best at one very specific thing because if you want to get highly paid for something, you need to be the best at it. That's just how it works. If you're just mediocre or you're just a generalist, that's kind of good at a lot of things. Then you're always going to make mediocre money. Just think about all the most highly paid people in the world. Yes, sometimes they're in higher paying industries than others. Whenever you see anyone who's at the top of their game in their earnings potential, it's because they are the best at that. Now, a couple tips to make this habit a part of your life before you can become the best at something. You want to find out what you like to do slash what you're good at. Personally, I think it's impossible to become the best at something if you hate doing it. So I think it really comes down to first finding out what you enjoy and if you enjoy it, then naturally you'll become good at it because you'll want to do it so often that you will put in those 10,000 hours to cite Malcolm Gladwell's book that it takes to become masterful at something. Now you have to resist the temptation to be a dabbler. I know as human beings, we're very multifaceted. You probably have a lot of different interests. I certainly did too. But at one point I decided to choose one path to go on. So just a personal story from my life. When I was in my 20s, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do after quitting corporate on Wall Street. And I knew that I had several different passions. I was really into dancing. I was also really interested in cooking. I was also very excited about this financial journey that I was on and I was excited about real estate. And I let myself dabble for a few years knowing that at some point I was going to choose one of those things to specialize in. And sure enough, the one interest that I decided to get really, really good at was teaching about finances. That is literally the only thing that I've been doing for the last five years of my life. That's why I'm so good at it. And that's why I get paid the big bucks to do it. Now, it doesn't mean that I don't have other interests. I still do other things in my free time, but you've got to pick one thing that's going to be your one big moneymaker and become the best at it. Okay. Habit number six. I really like this one. And that is to get in the habit of talking to yourself like a winner. I know. I think if you ever put a microphone in your brain to just hear yourself talk and how you talk to yourself, we would probably be shocked at how mean we are to ourselves. Rich people are winners. That's why they're rich, right? They also surround themselves with winners. They see themselves as winners and therefore they talk to themselves as winners. It doesn't mean that they never fail or make mistakes. It's just that when you make a mistake, rather than talking to yourself like you're such an idiot, how could you be so dumb? You talk to yourself as if you are already a winner who just temporarily had a setback. That's really, really different. If you're always beating yourself up for not being perfect or not being good enough, then you're not going to have the confidence to keep taking steps and actions towards your goals. And that might be why it's hard to accomplish anything because, because you're so mean to yourself that you have no energy or motivation to take the next step. So here's a really easy way to implement this habit. Every day after you've done all of your things, take a minute, just a minute to reflect on what is a win for the day that you could celebrate, as well as what is a lesson that you can take with you the next day. So for example, if you spent the whole day, you know, writing a book, that's actually something I'm working on. Then instead of wrapping up the day, just focused on all the stuff that you didn't finish and everything that you have still left to do and beating yourself up over not writing or being productive enough. Instead, you could focus on the fact that you got two chapters done in one day or the fact that you were able to write 300 words that you're really proud of. And then as a lesson, if you notice that you were distracted and on your phone a little too often, instead of beating yourself up over it, you could just turn that into a lesson and say, Hey, tomorrow, that means I'm going to actually put my phone in the other room so that I can be more productive. A lot of times you see financially successful people walking around and you think it's because of all these external things that they did. But what you don't see is everything that's going on inside and the way they're talking to themselves. When you cultivate this culture of positive self-talk, you'll have the strength to fail forward, face any challenges that come your way and keep taking actions towards your goals. Okay, rich people habit number seven is to always be learning. I remember when I was in college, I would spend every Saturday at the Barnes and Noble and Union Square just looking through all the books in the self-help section. Even at a young age, I knew that the only thing standing between me and everything that I wanted was a set of skills and knowledge that literally were sitting inside of these books. So I fully believe that the only gap between where you are now and where you want to be next is literally something you can find in a book. So read extensively, whether that's through an audio book or actually reading or consuming information online. Learn how to process information quickly, not just consume it, but to also absorb it. So whether it's taking notes or sitting down to summarize everything you just heard instead of just blazing through to the next chapter. Learn how to speed read or listen to audio books on one and a half times speed so that you can consume more information and get through a lot more perspectives. For example, I am literally listening to like two or three audio books at the same time pretty much all the time. And it's always going to be one book in the area of business, another book in the area of finances and another book in the area of health and sometimes another book in the area of relationships. I'm always listening to new content, bringing in new fresh ideas and perspectives on area of my life. That's important. Let me tell you, nuggets of wisdom that I found in specific books at specific points in my journey absolutely changed my life. My life would have gone in one direction if I hadn't read the book, but instead it went in this direction and it was so much better. So constantly be learning, get a lot of new inputs into your brain because unless you're putting in something new, you're not going to get anything new out of it. Nothing's going to change if nothing changes. And finally, rich person habit number eight is to get into the right rooms. Rich people know that even if you're kind of mediocre, not that smart or talented, if you're just around smart and talented people, you're kind of just naturally going to also be successful honestly without even trying that hard. Now being around the right people first starts with not having the wrong people around you in the first place. It all starts there. So cutting out toxic people, people who are frankly losers and just bring your energy down because they're always naysaying and complaining rather than doing anything about their lives. You got to cut those people out. Like life is short. We don't have time for people like that. And then once you've cut all the negativity out of your life, now you want to go find positive people to hang out around. People who bring you up instead of down. When you share a dream, even if it sounds overly ambitious or even ridiculous, they don't make it sound like it's ridiculous. They actually get excited for you and increase your belief in you instead of increasing your self doubt. People who will sit down with you and actually help you strategize towards your goals rather than be jealous that you have goals in the first place. And people who will love and support you even if you fail and make mistakes and look stupid along the way. Those are the people you need to be around. And in addition, I would add people who are a little bit more or a lot more successful than you because again, just being around people like that, you're going to absorb their attitude, their way of thinking, and it's going to rub off on you. I remember earlier this year, I attended a mastermind of female entrepreneurs and for three days straight, I was hanging around with successful entrepreneurs left and right and the amount of energy and inspiration I got from just being in that room, I can't even put into words. It's kind of sad how individualistic American culture is and it makes you think that you just have to figure out how to do everything on your own, but rich people know that you don't need to do anything on your own. The question isn't how do I get this done on my own? It's who do I need to talk to? Who do I need to get help from? Start thinking who, not how. That's why you might complain all you want about how rich people have connections and they help each other out, but that is also one of the reasons why they became rich and stay rich because they do help each other out and they know the importance of surrounding yourself with the right people and being in the right rooms. So these are eight powerful habits that you can start implementing right now because remember, it's not about having the money first so that you can do these things and so that one day you will be rich. It's about being the person you want to be now so that you'll do the things that it takes so that you can ultimately have all the things that you want. It's be, do, have instead of have, do, be. So that's it for this video on eight rich people habits that will change your life. Let me know in the comments which habit was the most impactful for you. Also, check out some of these other videos on my channel for more inspiration on how to create a life of freedom and to live your best life. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video. Bye!