For most of us, money is a struggle. We’re stuck in a day job that just about pays the bills, but not much else. And we find that we spend a lot of time planning for future expenses, like college or holidays, without living well in the present.
If that sounds like you, then you’ve got to read this article. Here we’re going to go through some of the advice given by self-help mega-millionaire guru, Dr. John Demartini. Demartini made his fortune as a behavioral and performance specialist. He’s spent his whole life doing everything he can to make the lives of his clients better, and in the process, he’s made a lot of money.
He’s one of those rare people who was able to combine his passion with his job. His work wasn’t so much work but more a hobby that he got paid for. For most of his career he was having fun, so being motivated to get up in the morning and work hard wasn’t so great a challenge.
Demartini is a great believer in people. He says that most people have some form of inner genius, but it never gets a chance to shine because of the way they prioritize their goals. Often people will put an awful career ahead of their own happiness, a surefire way to sap a person of their enthusiasm and drive and leave them procrastinating, without any ambition for the future.
His advice is for people to prioritize whatever goal they have in their life right now, at the moment. If that goal is to have a family and children, then they should do that first. If the aim is to make a lot of money, then that should take precedence. The wisdom that Demartini is trying to impart is that people are usually successful doing the thing in which they place the highest value – so figuring out what that is is important.
Above all, Demartini’s emphasis here is to focus on what you want. He says that many people find this hard, given the fact that society teaches that selfishness is a bad thing. But he takes a different perspective. He sees people who choose their own fulfillment as a priority as those who realize that they are worthy of success. It’s these people who break out of the mold that their communities and families put them into and achieve lasting wealth.
So what’s his advice for us?
Don’t Be Intimidated
How you see yourself is critical when it comes to building wealth and its correlated with how likely you are to succeed. If you only see yourself as somebody in a small-time job, working 9 to 5, that’s exactly what will end up happening. You’ll remain in that job, never breaking out, and never building your own business empire like your boss has done for themselves.
Demartini’s observation is that a lot of people who want to achieve great wealth tend to put those who have done so on a pedestal. The automatically casts them as inferior, looking up to the achievements of another and lowering themselves by comparison. The trick here is to know the difference between admiration and intimidation. People who admire successful people are often motivated to emulate them, doing what they did in order to acquire the lifestyle that they have for themselves. People who are intimidated by successful people, minimize themselves and their own capacity for success. This then plays out in the real world and undermines their life chances.
Saving Money Is A Key Habit
Saving is something that has gone out of fashion of late among the middle class. Now something like 47 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. But this isn’t how to build a family fortune. Demartini is keen to emphasize the importance of saving and planning your estate. Any comprehensive wealth-building program starts with saving and investing – that’s how the ball gets rolling.
After all, have you ever wondered how some families manage to build up such enormous wealth? It’s not because they’re all CEOs of international mega-corporations; it’s because they reinvest their money, over and over again, generating big returns in the process.
Demartini suggests that families start small. He suggests putting money away in a 401(k) or some other interest-bearing asset that will grow over time. Automating the process, he says, is also important. Too many people fuss over paying money into savings accounts, and it’s all unnecessary. Set up an automatic debit from your current account through your bank.
Set Goals That You Value
Making money isn’t just about being disciplined and getting the job done. It’s also about having a passion for what you do. Wealthy families rarely got to the position that they are in, slogging it out every day without a goal in sight. Usually, there’s something that they wanted to achieve that made it happen. For some families, Demartini points out, it’s the wealth itself that is the goal. They want to get out of the cycle of working just to consume and want to build a nest egg that they can enjoy and pass on to the next generation.
Many people work their entire lives and at the end of it, have no money whatsoever to show for it. They prioritized things that depreciated over things that build wealth. It’s okay, he says to grow your collection of shoes or buy a fast car, but be prepared for the fact that you’ll never find lasting wealth if you make a habit of spending all your money as you get it. The key here is to prioritize long-term benefits over instant gratification, he says.
Always Serve Other People
The media likes to portray the rich as being ruthless exploiters of the poor. But the vast majority of individuals who get rich are driven to do so out of their own desire to help others. Serving others, be it in business, or some other arena of life, is a huge motivator and something that is sustainable over the long run and has helped millions of families make a fortune.
