How to Become a
LIFESTYLE MILLIONAIRE
By Michael Anthony
If you’ve NEVER got enough spare time, this book’s for you
The Money Myth – why this book was written
"Study hard, get good exam results, and get a good job" – If this is what your parents taught you as you were growing up, then it’s no wonder that you’ve bought this book and it’s no wonder that you’re still searching for answers.
Let’s take a look at the typical middle class life. You study hard, you get good grades. You go to college, to improve further your chances in the job market. You get a good job with great benefits and good prospects. When you first move from home, it’s probably to college accommodation. Then you get your job and find a rental flat. Then you meet a partner and eventually you agree to move in together – suddenly you have some spare money so you decide to get a bigger place, after all there are two of you now so it figures that you’ll need some more room. Next, you get a promotion and decide it’s time to commit to a mortgage. Your partner is doing well in their chosen career too, so soon you buy new cars, bigger TV’s, have regular holidays, etc. Then you get some kids, which although they are an utter delight, (and I’d never advise against kids, they’re part of life nobody should miss out on) are also a huge additional expense. The kids also take up room too, so you need a bigger house now. Sound familiar?
So here we have the vicious spiral that is a typical hard working middle or upper middle class success story. Nice house, nice cars, happy, well adjusted kids, regular holidays – it all sounds just perfect, But is it?? Well no, because whilst Mum/Dad and the kids are enjoying the fruits of all your hard effort, you are working yourself into the ground. Sure, you’re a major professional success, but more money means more responsibilities, which usually means longer hours, stress, and the feeling that whatever time you do get to spend at home is just spent recovering from the punishing regime that is your work. Not to mention the ever present modern threat – downsizing, or getting rid of staff to cut costs, to give it it’s proper name. If this is you and you’re happy, congratulations, you do not need this book. If this is you and you’re not, read on.
Remember when you were less well off than you are today? You probably had a little mental shopping list for when you made it, as you knew you would. Such and such a car, so big a house, holidays at this ritzy hotel in this upmarket destination. Once you achieved these things, wasn’t there just a slight feeling of "Is this it?". That feeling is what I call "the disappointment of achieved material goals" – in nearly all cases, the expectation of ownership is actually far more pleasurable than actual ownership. Sure, it’s a great feeling to wander into a Ferrari showroom and point at the one you want, but once some idiot’s dented the door in the supermarket car park it suddenly dawns on you that you’re not really that special, you’ve just spent a fortune on an asset that will never go up in value (at least not in your lifetime) and after all’s said and done, it’s just another silly car.
So what qualifies me to tell you how to live a better life? Fair question, so perhaps I should start with some personal background. For most of my own life, I was the living embodiment of the material success story. I had my first flat before I was 25, my first Porsche well before that and was well on the way to being a happy and fat investment banker. But fate took an interesting turn and as a result I was forced out of the banking market. My wife was then offered a job at a Travel Agency, which she thought was too big for her – she went to the interview for a consultant and was offered a management position. She came home to explain all this and without thinking I suggested that if she couldn’t do it, I could. Next day, I had the job! After a couple of years it became obvious to us that the owners of the travel business were struggling, and we had our own ideas about why, so we discussed it with them. As a result, we bought the business for £25,000, which we thought was a steal. A year later, having realised that the deal wasn’t quite as sweet as we’d first imagined, the owners went bust, owing us £80,000. Amazingly, as we’d grown the business quite well and at that time travel agencies were a cash positive business, we were able to weather this storm.
So at a relatively early age (my late twenties) I was running a fairly successful business. My wife had worked in it with me at the start, but after some explosive disagreements in the office we agreed that it would be best for just one of us to run things and my wife duly stayed at home as we started our family. Over the next 10 years we took the business from £300,000 annual sales to £11 million, and from 3 staff to over 40. I learnt everything I could in this time, joining trade associations, reading voraciously (as I always have and continue to do), inviting owners of bigger businesses to give me advice and doing just about anything possible to improve my abilities as a manager, salesman and motivator. The business won awards for outstanding sales performance from several major airlines, we achieved the coveted "Investor in People" accreditation in under three months, a record for our area as the award usually takes 1-2 years to achieve. We had a company Lotus Elise that we would award to the month’s top salesperson, with everything but their petrol paid, to use for the following month. Our suppliers would regularly take our staff on all expense paid "familiarisation trips" to exotic destinations. We broke our own sales targets continually and celebrated by taking the whole team out to nightclubs in rented limousines. Of course, anyone with their own business reading this probably thinks of it as a great success story but the truth was quite the opposite.
As the business grew, the world in which it operated was changing. Our success was created by focusing on a specialist niche, Australia and New Zealand, and becoming real experts at all aspects of travel to these destinations. In so doing, we avoided the pitfalls of other, non-specialist groups, who eventually got snapped up as the major players in the industries consolidated their positions by buying up market share. Once these non-specialists had all been bought up, the chains then went after the niche businesses, buying them up in the same way and then stripping out all the admin costs leaving a sales operations with a back office hugely more efficient through simple economies of scale. So the big got bigger, and the small either went bust or got bought out – in fact we turned down an offer for the company less than 3 years before we closed it (This was on the advice of our accountants, of whom more later). The other big thing was the internet – as online price comparison tools became more sophisticated and connection speeds improved, more and more customers chose to shop online, and who can blame them? It was faster, more efficient, and it worked 24/7. Although it had become apparent that online sales were the way to go, by the time we’d realised this we didn’t have enough funds to set it up, and I was reluctant to consider it for some years as a good friend in the same business had bet his whole future on online sales and lost (It has to be said that he probably made the mistake all pioneers make, he wanted to be first and as such his development costs were astronomical – someone else picked up his project once he’d gone bust and continues to make a good living from his efforts, whilst he is now employed by the software house that helped him, probably out of conscience)
As a result, from making over £100,000 on sales of around £4 million in our best year, we were now struggling to make anything at all on sales of £11 million! And I was putting in more hours, dealing with more stress and seeing less and less of the gym, my family and my friends. Most weekends I would spend Saturday morning asleep from the exhausting weekdays, then spend Sunday afternoons trying to plan my working week. The crunch came in March 2002, when it looked like we needed to put a further £250,000 of capital into the business just to keep it going – as we had made some fairly shrewd property investments over the years, raising the money wasn’t a problem, but just before we bit the bullet I had what I can only describe as an "Aha!" moment.
In one of the many thousands of books I had read, there is a saying that goes like this – "If a man can remove himself from his body and look down objectively at the self that he has become, then he has the rare gift of being truly able to see". On this particular Tuesday I had already spent two days rising at 0430 (as I had for many years before, it was the only way to get everything done each day), and had not seen my son as I left home too early and returned too late. I had spent the whole morning dealing with complaint letters from customers and most of the afternoon arguing with my 26 year old sales manager about his "unreasonable" £45,000 p.a. salary package. So, like the man said, I took a look at what I was, and for once I was honest with myself. I was sick of this life. I was working myself into the ground. I was nasty to my staff because we weren’t making money. I was short and snappy with my family as I was always tired and stressed out. Friends, with the exception of one great guy who to this day will always call me even if I’ve not called him, were a luxury I had no time for. So I picked up the phone to my wife and told her. We talked it through over the next two days and both agreed that we had become blind to the facts – our lives were miserable. We had thought that by having our own business that we’d be happy and rich and much more in control of our destiny, whereas in fact we had become worse than wage slaves. So we put the business into liquidation, which was an unpleasant experience as it meant that a lot of people whom I considered my friends went unpaid. My staff, who were like family to me, were also a struggle to deal with. But the most enduring feeling, despite all this, was one of immense and overwhelming relief.
Of course, whilst I was mightily relieved to be out of the travel business, this still left us with a small problem – whilst we had plenty of equity in our home, we had no income. Our house was tied up in business guarantees to the bank and in all honesty, I was expecting it to be taken away. (Over time in fact it turned out that the bank could only repossess the house if the company defaulted on its overdraft, and as we were healthily in credit at the time we called it a day, we eventually remortgaged with another lender. ) So I did what most people in my situation do – I typed up a CV and started touting it around all the travel industry agencies. But in all honesty my heart wasn’t in this – how could I go from running a multi-million pound business to being an employee? And more to the point, having upset most of the major suppliers in the area of the industry in which I had the most expertise, who would employ me anyway? Despite these rather depressing facts, I was still much happier doing nothing than running myself into the ground.
Out of the blue, two days later, the phone rang. It was a guy that I had met through my accountant, who had been introduced to me when we had needed to do some creative restructuring of our balance sheet – he had agreed to allow us to use one of his non-trading companies to facilitate a "sale and leaseback" of the company vehicles, therefore removing them as assets and painting the required picture for one of the licenses we had needed for the travel business. With his fingers in many pies, he had a proposal for me unless I had any other pressing engagements. Turns out that he was planning to start a secured loan business, selling to other finance brokers, and he thought that I was just the man for the job. With hindsight, I wonder just how much of the offer was related to my accountant’s need to know if he would be dragged through the mud as a result of us closing the business, but at the time I was thrilled that a relatively easy opportunity had landed in my lap.
This guy, who we’ll call Peter, had spent most of his life making money from finance of one sort or another. When I first met him, he was selling car insurance with a large telesales team, but his background was financial advice and loans. By the time I joined him, the car insurance business had been wound down and had only three staff remaining, and he was growing a mortgage broking business. As the mortgage side was going well, he had decided to branch into selling loans to other brokers. It was this business that I was to build for him.
Peter’s approach to business was traditional, which meant cold calling all the mortgage and finance brokers in the area. One or two of these brokers invited me to their offices, and I quickly learned that meeting people face to face made them customers, whereas calling them did not. At one such meeting I came across a guy who was creating all his business from the internet, marketing his website on search engines and passing the leads on to another broker who did all the legwork – the eventual profit on the deals being split between the two parties. My immediate thoughts were – "I could do this, and better", so that’s just what I did.
Peter actually pre-empted my move by calling me into his office after about two months and announcing that he could not afford to continue the loans business with it’s current format as it had become too expensive and had not yet shown any returns – whilst I suggested that I would be prepared to work on commission only as I knew that there were some nice deals in the pipeline, in my heart I had already decided that this was the time to go it alone again. Peter and I had a nasty disagreement over the circumstances of my leaving, as he thought I had learned from him and then stolen the business. The way I saw it, I had created the business myself using his resources, but to an extent he was correct – he had placed me in a position where I had met and learned from others, and he himself had taught me the workings of a whole new industry. Although Peter was very angry at what he saw as me taking advantage of him and I did actually repay him some of my salaries (which were generous, it has to be said), the business I was planning was a far cry from his traditional cold calling methods and on balance it was an unpleasant end to a fairly interesting period of my life.
So, armed with my new knowledge and with assistance from my technically gifted younger brother, we built a website to collect leads for loans. Initially, these, together with mortgage leads, were passed on to a broker who paid 50% of any fees from completed loans. But this was negative cashflow with no guarantee of a return. Via a series of unconnected events, I found that there were companies online who were willing to pay upfront for finance leads and decided that this approach would make more sense for me than waiting to see if the leads converted.
That was two years ago – today I work maybe an hour a day. On a weekday morning, I get up, take my son to school, go to the gym, relax and read a little, do a little work, go shopping, bath my two year old daughter and the read and relax some more. I own several properties, some of which are rented out to provide income, and make more than ever using the internet. What I do is called affiliate marketing, and to start with I was tempted to take on clients and staff to build the business – but I took a step back and asked myself what this would create. More stress, more problems, back to the old days. My income is in the top 0.5% of the country, and I have a wonderful life. I have more time to spend with my family and cramming in all the stuff I didn’t have time for in the week does not compromise my weekends. My health is better than it has ever been. This year, I’ve had five holidays overseas, four with family and one with friends. So, these days, when an opportunity presents itself to me, my first question as I look at it is "Will this compromise my lifestyle?" – if the answer’s yes, I simply decline the deal. The issue’s never the money or what it might buy me (if I’m honest I don’t want for much these days) but simply the cost in terms of time spent improving my health, my knowledge (by reading) or doing whatever it is I want to do. This life of mine today is as close to perfection as I have known and as such I feel that I owe it to my fellow men and women to share my secrets.
What’s needed from anyone that reads this book is a readiness to change your beliefs – not your views, not your opinions, but the deep seated "truths" that you hold in your mind about life and how best to live it. If you’re not prepared to examine your current lifestyle and its priorities and question them, then you best leave us here. For those that are still with me, I invite you to join me in a journey to where the human goals are put in front of the material ones, and where you can grow into a better and happier person, for yourself and your loved ones.
Chapter 2 – Breaking the Grip of 9 to 5
When I mentioned this book to some friends over dinner one evening, I explained that its principal objective was to help people re-prioritise their lives, putting health and family before work, they said "Well, that’s very easy, if you have the luxury of money to help. It’s just not an option for us, we have to work hard to pay our bills" A fair point, you might think, but how many of us know how much time we have left.? Imagine if you were told that you only had a year to live, wouldn’t you get cracking on all those things that you’ve promised yourself you’d do when you retired? Of course, and because, for all any of us know, we do only have a year left, wouldn’t it make sense to get cracking right now?
So many people have a list of things in their head which contains all the right things that they know they should be doing. These things, which we’ll call our true priorities, will usually include things like keeping fit, spending more time with family and friends, and making a start on that idea you had for a business. But we can leave these things until later – they are important, but they are not urgent, and until we’ve got our other stuff out of the way, we can let them wait. It is this approach that is the problem. Like my dinner friends, it’s by NOT implementing these changes today that we continue to suffer from never getting to the "right" time to do so.
Even if you are working from 9 to 5, there is still no reason to make exercise part of your day. Sure, you may have to get up early or miss a lazy lunch, but time spent on one’s own health cannot be anything but time wisely invested. Exercise has several unique benefits. It increases the presence of the "natural high" substances in your body such as endorphins and adrenaline, making you feel great for hours afterwards. It clears your head, giving you space to think (I have always had my most brilliant ideas when out running). And finally, but most importantly, it helps us look good, which in turn boosts our self-esteem.
After your health, the mental and physical well being of your family is also a regularly overlooked true priority. If the only contact you have with your partner or children is after an exhausting commute from a hectic working day, your relationships with them and the example you set to them will be compromised by your desire to just relax and unwind. You need to make sure that weekends are kept for the family, if this is the only time that you are not likely to be suffering from tiredness. It is also hugely rewarding to just take a day off when your family is going to be around, just to unwind and spend quality time together.
Now we all know that these things can be ignored as there’s always tomorrow, but how many of us ever actually get there? To remind you of where we started with this, it was how would things change if you knew you only had a year left to live. My point here is simply that time cannot be saved in the way that money can – make these changes today and there will be huge, long term benefits to you and your family and friends.
There’s one other major benefit that almost outweighs all these others though. By making these changes and having the balanced, well-rounded life and attitude that they bring, your business decisions and working life will also improve. When you’re not exhausted from the workload because you’ve arrived feeling fresh from the gym, a problem is not just another huge burden to bear, but something that you are ready and confident to deal with. If you have to make decisions concerning others, you will not assume that they are all work-obsessed like you used to be, but you will be more likely to consider their own health and well being as part of the process. By becoming a more balanced individual, you will find an amazing clarity to your approach, and by building trust amongst your family, friends and work colleagues, you’ll come to have a reliable army of assistance available when you face problems.
Of course, there are no guarantees that your particular business or project is going to suddenly succeed if it’s on the brink of bankruptcy today just by you adopting these principals. But as an individual, you will be confident that you can deal with whatever life has to throw at you.
Stephen Covey, in his brilliant book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", talks about there being two possible groups into which we can place our concerns. The first, and larger of the two, is what he calls the "Circle of Concern", into which all things that we may be concerned about are thrown. The second, and much smaller area, is what he calls the "Circle of Influence", into which we place only those things to which we can actually make a difference ourselves. For example, there may be a war about to start in the Middle East, but no amount of action on your part will change that – this belongs in the circle of concern. There may also be a problem with a staff member in your business, which is clearly something that belongs in your circle of influence. As Mr. Covey so expertly points out, it is only by paying attention to our circle of influence, and ignoring those things in our circle of concern, that we can truly hope to make any difference at all to our futures.
For my own personal approach, I take this view a step further. I never watch or read news. It is simply all bad. Next time you see a TV news broadcast, watch it with these two questions in your mind. Firstly, "What difference can I make to any of this?". And second "How much of this news is good news?" I can guarantee your answers will be "none" and "none"! Some people have called me ignorant as a result of this attitude, but this is simply not the case. If a war starts that actually effects me, I’ll get problems and hassle just like everyone else. The fact that I didn’t worry about the hundred or so other times that it nearly happened means that I had one less silly issue to concern myself with each time. And why do we all need to know how many people got raped or stabbed or killed or starved half way across the other side of the world on such a regular basis? Sure, I accept that if we all ignored human tragedy, the world would be a sad place, but we don’t all need to make it the focus of our attention morning, noon and night, do we?
So, how exactly does one break the grip of nine to five? Firstly and most importantly, you need to have this as a goal, but of course in itself the goal of "stop working nine to five" is a kind of negative goal. In other words, it’s something you no longer want, rather than something that you actively want. What you need to decide is the alternative to working like this. Always fancied a try at running a small restaurant of your own? Wondered if those guys selling evening newspapers at the station are making a fortune and thought of trying it yourself? Always done well with selling bits and bobs on Ebay and daydreamed about making a living from it?
Whatever goal you set yourself (we will be covering goal setting in much more detail in it’s own chapter later) make sure that it complies to the SMART objective as defined below. It is a generally accepted business rule that all goals should comply with this measure – I personally would take this a step further and suggest that this must apply to all goals, whether personal or business or something else. So, a SMART objective must be…
S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Achievable
R – Resourced
T – Timed
For example "I want to spend at least one hour with my family, every day of the week, by the end of the year". Or, "I want a Red Ferrari 360 before my 40th birthday". Clearly these are very different goals but in both cases they comply with the SMART criteria – we’ll cover goals in much more depth later, so for now we’ll leave this subject here.
So, we’ve established that you’d rather not work 9 to 5 any more. Now we need to establish what you are going to do instead. If you would like to spend the rest of your days relaxing and doing as l.ittle as possible, no problem, but accept that this situation is unlikely to come about without some effort on your part.
What you decide to do instead will obviously depend on your own personal ambitions, but critically you need to establish what, for you, is an acceptable level of risk. It is generally true that those individuals with the mindset to deal with considerable personal risk will always be better off working for themselbves, whereas those with an aversion to risk will be more comfortable in an employee situation. Identifying which of the two types you may be requires a high level of personal honesty, but it’s better to accept that you can’t handle major personal risk and work with it than to try and convince yourself that you’re a real go-getter when really you’d rather someone else made all the big decisions.
Only you can know your own position here, and quite often you may face pressure from partners, fruiends and/or relatives to push aganst your natural insitincts. To an extent, an ability to constantly reinvent oneself and grow both mentally and psysically is an excellent quality, but if you allow yourself to be talked into a goal for yourself by someone else then you’re setting yourself up for failure.
So, to break the grip, first we need to make a plan for the alternative. No matter what your plan, it’s pretty certain that you’ll need some more money to achieve it. For the purposes of this exercise, I will assume that your current spending is at or above your current income. I will also assume that your current income is unlikely to significantly increase in the near future. So, from this base, where to start?
Sit down and take a look at where your money’s going today and ask yourself how much of your expenditure is directly related to making investments in assets that are likely to grow. For most of us, the answer will be just one, your mortgage. Now ask how much of it is related to day to day necessities such as food, fuel bills, etc. Then take a look at how much of it is set aside for repaying credit such as car loans, credit cards etc. Then there’s entertainment, eating out, holidays, birthdays, etc. Be brutally honest with yourself here and actually use your bank statements – cover every penny and don’t kid yourself that you’ve chosen an exceptional month, use three months worth to make sure that you paint an honest accurate picture of your personal cashflow. This is the first step towards establishing exactly where you are financially today.
Next, write out a list of all your major assets. Don’t include that widescreen TV or fancy hi-fi, as these will be worth a fraction of what you paid for them today and even less than that as the years pass and they become last season’s state of the art appliance. If you don’t believe me here, ask yourself how much you could sell your first ever computer for today – take a look on Ebay if you’re not sure. So, the only assets that will really count here are property, motor vehicles, investments such as savings, shares and bonds and any genuine art and/or collectibles. Now deduct the balance of any borrowings that relate direclty to these assets, for example your mortgage, car finance, etc. Include these liabilities at their current settlement value, for example, if your car loan would cost you an extra 10% to settle today as an early settlement penalty, add this to the liability. Now subtract your liabilities from your assets and what you’re left with is your true personal worth at this point in time – this is your personal balance sheet.
Now here’s the really scary part – take the monthly amount that you have left over from your cashflow calculation and divide up the total of your liabilities by this sum. Unless your mortgage is of the interest only type, don’t include this as you will already know how long until you own your home outright. For example, if you have £200 per month left over and you owe a total of £10,000 then your answer is £10,000/£200 = 50. This is the amount of months that you will have to work for until you fully own everything that you currently possess. If your monthly cashflow is less than zero then the calculation becomes even more easy and depressing, but please don’t give up yet!
Having made these calculations, it should now be quite obviously apparent to you where your money’s going and how long it will be until you achieve financial independence. Our objectibve here is to reduce the amount of time until you get there, because it is only with true financial independence that you can make decisions based on what you would like to do, rather than what you can afford to do. In order to move closer, the steps that you need to take are as follows…
Clearly, step 1) above can be accelerated by "optimising" your debts. If you have credit cards, car loans and the like, look at remortgaging your home to reduce your overall monthly repayments. A mortgage is usally one third the interest rate of a credit card and half the rate of a car loan. If this isn’t an option, look to move your debt around to take advantage of new "0% balance transfer" offers for new credit card accounts, and move these regularly as the 0% periods expire. Check the approximate value of your home every six months too, as you may find that if remortgaging isn’t an option today, a year’s worth of proeprty inflation may well change the picture.
Step 2) is where you really can start to build your personal net worth and reduce the time until you can achieve true financial independence. Don’t be tempted to use more speculative highly geared investments unless you truly understand the downside risks and can truly afford to lose the money. A potential 500% return within 6 months is usually balanced with the strong possibility that you will lose the lot within a day – with all investments, the higher the potential reward, the higher the risk. For long term gains, go for rental properties or a well balanced portfolio of investments and leave the high risk stuff to the professional speculators.
Step 3), you will notice, does NOT encourage you to go and buy sportscars, boats, or holidays. By all means have these things, but ideally AFTER you have all your outgoings covered by other income. A car is not an appreciating asset, which makes it a liability. Same goes for boats, big ticket hi-fis, laptop computers and all those things we’re encouraged to buy because we "deserve a treat" – this is the single biggest mistake you can make.
Now clearly this all sounds rather dull – no holidays, no fun, no "big boys toys", etc. Yes, it is dull. It’s also the reason that most people never achieve anything like their potential. Advertisers know how the human mind works, they understand that you will feel in need of a treat after say six months of really hard work on a new project and they target that very need.
But here is the biggest and most important choice life has to offer – make some personal sacrifices today, put your cash into appreciating, income producing assets and in ten or fifteen years you’ll have some real choices available to you. By all means have holidays, but make sure that these come from SURPLUS cash, not regular income and certainly not from borrowings. Whilst you’re watching your big screen TV with your new car parked on the drive, your neighbour may be about to quit his job as his rental income now covers his expenses, and he’s made enough on his stock portfolio that he could easily sell it and buy two new cars.
It’s only by having the self discipline and long term view that we ever truly achieve the independence and personal power that we all crave. So, next time you’re about to part with some cash for the next silly toy, stop and just ask yourself "How will this purchase benefit me 5 years from now, and how much will it add to my personal balance sheet?" If it won’t add much, think again.
So, back to where this chapter started - "Well, that’s very easy, if you have the luxury of money to help. It’s just not an option for us, we have to work hard to pay our bills" We can all have the "luxury of money", but if we waste what money we have today, our bills will increase, our income and personal balance sheet will not and we will never get out of the loop. So, to get the "luxury" tomorrow, the trick is to re-assess our financial priorities today.
Now of course there is an argument that says – "We might all be dead tomorrow, why not have all life’s pleasures as soon as possible?" Fair question, and if you truly believe that you’ll be dead tomorrow, go for it. But if we meet again in five years time and you managed to survive, I bet you’ll still be working to pay all those bills and using this as the reason you can’t get ahead in life.
The choice is yours, fun today or personal power tomorrow – you have it in you to make some tough decisions today which will empower you tomorrow or to continue having "fun" as a wage slave whilst your family and health take a back seat as you just don’t have the time.
So, commit to making this powerful and life changing decision today and you’ll be happier, fitter and better equipped to enjoy your life than ever before. And the power to wake up every day and decide what you want to do that is complete control over one’s destiny is a better feeling than you’ll ever get from silly material possessions, I promise.
Chapter 3 – The Importance of Health
It’s vital to understand something before we go any further – there is no greater priority for any human than good health. Nobody lays on their deathbed and wishes they’d spent more time at the office.
Fresh air, good food and exercise are essential requirements for a healthy lifestyle. Most of us struggle to find the time to achieve these basic, well understood principals for human well being and even fewer of us think about them for any amount of time.
For the purposes of this exercise, let’s assume that you are a full time employee with a couple of kids and generally fit but certainly not in tip-top physical condition. Right now, you don’t have the time to exercise much. So the first question here is, why should you change??
Quite simply, feeling fit and healthy is the best feeling in the world. You have regular time alone with a clear head to allow your subconscious mind to beat your "thinking" conscious mind – it’s no coincidence that most of us have our best ideas or find solutions to problems when we’re relaxed and unwound. Your body will look better and feel good, which will increase your self-esteem and confidence.
Best of all is a feeling that takes a little more explanation:- the human body’s natural "fight or flight" response, which is your body’s natural reaction to stress, is something build into the genetic code of all humans from the days when we were cavemen. When feeling threatened or under duress, early man was typically facing a threat from another animal, and this response would put all his senses on alert for a physical response – hormones, adrenaline, etc. would flood into the bloodstream and early man would indeed either fight his foe or run like mad in flight. These chemical reactions to pressure still occur in us today, but more typically they may be our reaction to say, a boss shouting or something similar where clearly convention does not allow us to fight or run away. The net result is that they remain like smouldering fireworks within us, creating muscular tension, headaches, and a generally run-down feeling. With no physical release, tension literally builds within us like a volcano and is typically released in a torrent of temper at the most inappropriate moment when it builds beyond our tolerance – for example, the guy whose boss shouted at him gets a telling off from his wife because he’s late home for dinner, the poor wife ends up with a ridiculously angry response which is in truth the total anger built up within the husband through the course of his rather unpleasant day.
By getting into the gym, out on a run, into the squash court, whatever it is, one gives these pent up energies the release for which they were designed – physical activity. And like any force released, the feeling that results is one of both mental and physical freedom and well being. These hormones, adrenalin, endorphins etc. are designed to make you work out, either in fight or in flight, and as they rush into your energised bloodflow you literally feel "high" from the experience. Ask any runner or regular at the gym about the "adrenaline high" and they’ll know exactly what you are talking about.
The relaxed feeling that one experiences after exercise is also part of this natural chemical system – you feel like a winner because you have spent time making yourself feel and look better. My wife and I have a saying for this "We go into the gym feeling like shit and come out feeling like a million dollars!"
Your friends and family will also benefit from you making exercise a part of your life – you’ll be relaxed, less prone to sulk or argue and generally more positive about life, which makes you a much nicer person to be with and people will want to have you around.
So I believe we now have a powerful case for why you should want to exercise. Next question, where do you find the time??
First, work out how much time you spend watching TV, reading newspapers or just chatting. Then think about browsing the web, shopping, eating out, etc. How much benefit do these activities provide to you and how they help you to get closer to your goals?? Yep, I make it zero too!!
So, having now established that you have the time and that you want to start exercising, what next?? Well, of course we all know that there are hundreds of different ways in which to exercise, but which is best?? Simply put, it’s a "horses for courses" situation. If you like running alone, go for it. If football’s your bag, get looking for team today. Making the activity something you enjoy is a must if you’re going to stick at it.
It is generally believed amongst the medical community that 30 minutes of reasonably vigorous exercise per day is the optimum for the average adult. Clearly, for most of us, exercising every day is a tricky thing to do, but do try to achieve around 3 and a half hours per week in total if you can. Most people settle for three one-hour exercise sessions per week, which is more than enough.
It is important also to realise that we are talking about improving FITNESS here, too, rather than just muscle bulk or a technical skill, so the activity really needs to be something that gets your heart pumping faster. Your heart is where your health begins and ends, so it’s vital that you choose something that pushes this important muscle.
Pumping weights in a gym will not, in itself, improve your health. Your strength will build, as will the size of the muscle, but your overall aerobic fitness does not benefit one jot from such activity. Most award winning bodybuilders are seriously unfit with unhealthy low levels of body fat – don’t make the mistake of thinking that biggest is best here. By all means pump some iron if you want to build strength or muscle mass, but make this in addition to an aerobic exercise.
A good aerobic exercise will make you breathe quicker and your heart beat faster. You will sweat and feel fatigued to start with, but stick with it and very quickly (usually within the first 2 weeks) you’ll start to feel on top of the world.
When starting a regular program of exercise, always be sure to stretch the muscles carefully both before and after your workout. It may pay you to take a one hour session with a personal trainer just to learn some basic stretches if this is not something you know, as this important activity really helps to avoid cramps, soreness and sprains.
To begin with, don’t push yourself too hard. If you run 5 miles on day one after 5 years of sitting around watching TV, it’s going to be too much for your body and the resultant pain may convince you to quit early. A good piece of advice is to try and exercise at a pace which would still allow you to hold a normal conversation, which you can’t do if you’re gasping for breath from overdoing it.
Build up gradually to a point where you feel that you’re pushing yourself as hard as you want, then if you want, set some goals to push yourself a little. Maybe try and improve the times to complete a certain distance, maybe a target waist measurement, whatever you think will make the difference. Believe me, nothing is more satisfying than seeing your body change just the way you planned it, and the feeling of achievement from such physical goals sure beats silly business targets in my book!
One of the hardest things to do with an exercise program is to keep to it when you don’t want to. For example, to go running in the cold and wet on a dark December morning in the UK is a most unpleasant prospect when you’re sipping the first coffee of the day in your warm PJ’s! It is my belief that it is when you get going despite these pressures not to that really make the difference in exercise. The hardest part of my regular run is always the first step out of the door, but I’ve never come back from an exercise session feeling worse than when I started. This self discipline is also particularly rewarding if you enjoy watching people’s faces when you tell them that you went running in the snow! Joking apart though, it takes a very strong will to keep pushing yourself physically when it is so much more comfortable not to, but the rewards for this huge act of self discipline are something no person should live without.
One other argument one often hears against exercise is that it is boring. This is not entirely untrue, and certainly it pays to vary your exercise for more than one reason. Your body, like your mind, has an excellent memory, which is why most of us can drive a car without having to think about every action as we do so. Similarly, your body will eventually become so accustomed to one type of exercise that it becomes progressively easier for you to carry out. This is due to a fantastic piece of natural "learning" that is within each of us – when put under pressure, our muscles actually become slightly injured from the experience. What then happens is that as the muscles heal, they grow stronger in readiness for the next time this pressure is applied. So if we continue to apply the same amount of exercise to our bodies, over time they will benefit less and less from it. In order to counter this natural process, we can change our exercise regime occasionally, which in turn forces our bodies to improve in new ways to deal with the change. And of course a happy coincidence of this approach is that you can avoid boredom.
Health of course, is not just about exercise. There is one other vital factor which we cannot overlook, namely one’s diet. Whilst I can’t begin to provide a complete guide to good healthy nutrition within the confines of this book, it is my hope that I will at least be able to provide a basic overview of the general principles of good eating.
Simply put, the further a food is from the natural, raw state in which it was picked or killed, the worse the quality of nutrition available. It’s vital to get a good supply of raw fruit, vegetables, grains and nuts into one’s diet. Red meat should only be eaten in small quantities and fish should also form at least two meals per week. It’s also important to drink lots of water – some sources recommend up to 2 litres per day (I’d say this may result in you spending the entire day in the toilet so maybe just a litre’s more realistic!)
Every one of us has a natural, healthy weight and shape that can be achieved and maintained by simply eating well. To put one’s body through the torture of excluding carbohydrates (as in the "Atkin’s Diet") to lose weight or any other silly diet is simply not sustainable in the long term. A policy of healthy plentiful eating of the right foods, ideally combined with a regular exercise routine, will create a strong body and a powerful mind.
Many of us will have experienced a hangover, or a bad stomach ache, the night after too much alcohol and bad food. This is your body’s reaction to the poison that you have put into it. The good news is that this mechanism works in reverse – put good quality food and drink into yourself and you’ll feel great.
Simply following a good regime for your body can yield huge benefits in every area of your life. There’s no better feeling than being fit, alert and on top of the world, and I assure you that no amount of money or possessions can ever come close to providing that feeling. Worse still, if you neglect your health and just focus on getting rich chances are that by the time you hit 40 or so you’ll be more likely to keel over of a heart attack than retire with millions.
As this book is principally about making changes to your lifestyle as a whole and not just another exercise and diet manual, I have not troubled to provide detailed information on what path to follow. If you are able, try and make an appointment with a personal trainer (You can usually source these at your local gym) and work with them to create a balanced program of exercise together with a suggested healthy diet plan. As these professionals have health as a priority, their advice is usually far superior to that one might receive at the local slimming club. If you do not have a gym nearby, both the internet and most libraries and bookshops contain plenty of further detailed advice on individual regimes.
Most real winners in life are fit and healthy through choice, not accident. From my own perspective, I can honestly say that the daily "fix" of clear headed thinking and self evaluation that I can only get from flushing my body with exercise is one of the things I hold most precious.
If you choose to follow just one piece of advice in this book, I urge you to make it this one – good diet and regular exercise will make you feel fantastic, look better, improve your self esteem and sharpen your mind. Ignore this and you’re missing out on the cheapest human thrill available.
Chapter Four: Getting serious – self discipline and beliefs
What do you want? What is success to you? For most people this is a question that they will anser with such words as happiness, health, to be rich, etc. But these are subjective things. To be worthwhile a goal has to comply with the SMART definition:-
S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Achievable
R – Resourced
T – Timed
So, let’s start with specific. If you want to rich, what does that mean to you? If you want a certain amount of money by a certain time, that’s more like it. If you want a particular house, or a certain car, that’s specific. Make your goal more desirable by actually going to see a few houses, or test driving the car. Find out how realistic your expectations are.
Measurable – say you go for health. Your specific goal might be to get down to a certain weight, or to run a distance in a certain time. In business, there is a saying – "What gets measured gets done".
Achievable – this is of course something you have to work out for yourself, but be reaistic. If you have a rented flat and no income then the chances of you earning £10 million in the next three months are zero. If you are as wide as a bus, the chances of you halving your body weight within 6 months are zero. By all means be ambitious, but don’t set yourself up for failure by setting unachievable goals.
Resourced – you want to work out to get fitter, so you MUST make the time to exercise. You want to invest in property then you MUST take the time to arrange the finances, inspect properties, etc.
Timed – When can you get it by? Is this realistic? Again, be ambitious but honest with yourself. Goal setting is about designing a compass for the rest of your life to follow and quite often it’s the long term stuff that can get forgotten. Life is not an emergency, it’s a journey, and if you work yourself into the grounds by pushing too hard you will forget to enjoy the ride.
When setting goals, START WITH YOUR FUNERAL and work backwards. What type of person do you want to become? What things do you want people to say about you once you’ve gone? My own goals are organised as follows:-
Next three months
Next 6 months
Next year
3 Years
5 Years
10 Years
20 Years
Life
This is a task that takes some real effort and a great deal of thinking. It is also something that you should do alone. Find a quiet place where you can’t be interrupted and really concentrate on yourself. Make sure that your mind is free from any distractions or worries. Think about it as you exercise or relax. Are you unhappy? Why? What can you do to change yourself into the person you really want to be?
As you decide on your goals, make sure to measure them against the SMART criteria. Make sure that you really want them, and taht you’re prepared to pay the price needed to achieve them.
Next, WRITE THEM DOWN and keep them in a safe place. This sounds obvious but my own experience has taught me that if you don’t make notes you foget things, no matter how smart you think you are. Also, REVIEW YOUR GOALS ONCE A WEEK.
So, having spent the time and effort deciding what you want to become, you may think that the hard work is now over, but this is only the beginning. Now you have to address the biggest obstacle of all – your own laziness!
Every day, every minute, ask yourself, "Is my time being invested wisely and in accordance with my stated goals?" There’s no point in waking up each day and telling yourself that you’ll start tomorrow, life is not a rehearsal. The only way to succeed is to invest your time in moving towards your goals. Don’t have another cup of coffee, get going, NOW!
The way that miltary personnel are trained is sometimes described as self-discipline. But it is not – military personnel have an advantage, someone is shouting at them and monitoring their every waking moment to keep them in check, so this is discipline by others. Real self discipline comes from the self. Every day, look it in the mirror and ask yourself "do I always do what I know I should be doing?". If not, that’s why you’re not getting the results you want in your life. Success is not easy, it’s hard. It’s tough studying when your friends are all out at the pub, or reading something you need to learn when your family’s stting around the TV. Which is why most people do not succeed in life. The easy option is always the path of least resistance, take it easy, relax, putting things off until tomorrow.
This doesn’t mean that you need to knock yourself out working all hours, but it does mean that you need to invest your time wisely, as you can’t buy another minute. And your goals need to become part of your day, every day. Look at your goals at least once a week and measure your actions against them. Whenever you’ve not acted according to your goals, chill out, maybe increase your exercise regime to clear your mind. Then re-assess what you’ve been doing and re-focus your priorities for the future. Think back to where you went wrong and ask yourself how you can avoid making the same mistakes this time.
Most of us don’t have the benfefit of a military situation, there isn’t anyone shouting or punishing us when we don’t measure up. Which is why you have to become your own Sergeant Major. If your own performance doesn’t get you to your goals, you need to pull yourself to pieces, tell yourself that it’s just not good enough. Nobody else is going to do this for you, so you need to have it in your mind at all times that your goal-review session is coming up and make sure that you measure up. Be tough on yourself, recognise when you’re being lazy or concentrating on the wrong thing and commit to improve in the future.
Of course, most people aren’t like this, which is why most people do not succeed. But these people will still be around you every day. Don’t expect any help or support from them, they’ll be much happier pulling your goals to pieces or making fun of you if you’re not lazy like them. Why? Because that’s the only way they can justify their own existence to themselves. I always remember the day I bought my first Mercedes and my friend said "You don’t need a big car like that". Fair point, I didn’t need it, I wanted it, but what my friend was doing was trying to make himself feel better by criticising my success.
We all have a choice in our lives and most people will not take the harder options. They have a saying in bodybuilding that says that there’s no gain without pain. This is true in life too. The pain is in making an effort to change yourself, the gain is success. If your goal is to change yourself into the person you want to be, you will also need to accept that there are going to be some causualties aong the way. Not everyone will understand or like the new you. But other people’s opinions don’t matter. Live your life for yourself and not for others. By all means help others if you wish, but don’t make your own happiness dependent on other people’s approval of your actions. Most successful people have lost friends as they’ve moved towards success, and quite often it’s their success that has driven those friends away. People don’t like to feel inadequate or second best, and as you start to realise your ambitions you’ll find that, like it or not, some people you thought liked you for yourself suddenly start to resent you. There was once a great executive car advertisement that said "It’s lonely at the top, but who cares?"!
Unless your only goal is to be popular, you’ll find that your success will move you away from some of the friends that you used to have. If you have to choose between those friends or success, of course the choice is yours, but given the choice between a better, happier life and a friend I know which one I’d choose.
Chapter Five: Time Management – Getting the Balance right
Your time is the only thing over which ou have complete control. It is yours to spend as you wish. It is also the most precious thing that you have and you can’t ever get back a day, hour, minute or even a second of wasted time. Nobody’s ever going to lay on their deathbed and say that they wish they’d spent more time at the office.
Most time management advice is fundamentally flawed as it only focuses on one area of your life, your work. And for most of us because work is the most demanding thing that we have to do, it tends to take over. The result is that you ry to cram more and more work into the same amount of time and it ends up being impossible. The solution is then seen as putting in some extra hours to deal with the overspill and the result is that our health and family life suffers. Sure, you get that ugent report out on time, but your wife’s screaming at you, the kids are always in bed by the time you get home and the pressure from all these conflicting demands means that your healh suffers. Of course you need to go to the gym, but how on earth are you going to fit that in? Sounds fmailiar, right?
Life is not about work. Your life is a gift that you are given and it is your responsiblity to invest it wisely. My priorities in life are, in order, health, family, work, and then everything else. We all have to balance the various demands that life makes of us, but how? The first thing to realise is that you can’t separate your work life from your personal life. If your health is important to you it needs attention. If your family is important to you it also needs attention. You need to pay attention to your money. And your work, and your hobbies, and your friends, the list goes on and on. What should you do first and why?
In the last chapter I suggested that you took some time to decide on what you wanted in your life and to write it down and regularly review it. In this chapter you’ll learn how to find the time to make those dreams become reality. Now, take a look at the list you’ve made and ask yourself if it would really matter if you didn’t start work on your goals today and almost certainly the answer would be yes. These things are important, but they are not urgent.
For most of us, urgent stuff tends to get our attention just because it’s urgent. But is it important? Not usually. Our health is important, but we can always put off that visit to the gym. The trick is to realise that there are very few genuine emergencies in our lives, it is just a matter of how we see things.
The first step in effective time management is to realise that you have to have time to manage your time. I once had a customer email me that he was too busy to spend time learning time management! You need time to focus your mind and attention on nothing other than how you’re going to spend your time. As with goal setting, the best place to do his is in a quiet area without interruptions and when you have nothing else to worry about – I usually do mine on a Saturday morning. I also recommend that you manage your time WEEKLY, as by seeing the whole week’s time to use it’s much easier to find space for priority tasks.
Whether you use a written diary, a piece of software, or a scrap of paper for your time management is up to you, but you need to record this somehow. I use a notepad and a diary, which is how I’ll describe my own method. First, on a piece of paper write down everything that you have to do in the next week in EVERY area of your life. Time for the gym, time with a loved one, time with your kids, time with friends, work stuff, everything.