How These 5 Habits Turned My Life Around and Made Me a Millionaire

We often hear the phrase that money is not everything in life, but people often equate being rich as being successful in life. 

Now, although it is true that money is not the only indicator of success, it still plays a huge role in my opinion. 

Therefore, today we are going to break down and analyze some of the strategies and core habits that are shared by many millionaires around the world. 

The best part of this is it is tried and tested, as many before us have used the same ways to build their wealth, so we can mimic and modify it to better fit our needs to become financially successful in life. 

So, after digging around some numbers, it turns out that only about 12% of millionaires have inherited much of their wealth so this is a shocking statistic, but what I discovered is that really, anyone would be able to build wealth over their lifetimes. 

Alright, today we are not going to discuss some of the cliché habits like reading, eating healthy and exercising, and all that stuff. I mean, we already know those habits are commonly practiced by financially successful people, but let’s talk about the ones that are less talked about, but equally as important. 

Some of these, particularly the fifth one, have helped me to double my income, increased my productivity, and I found it to be extremely valuable in my life. 

Habit #1

The first habit on the list would be journaling, or note-taking, whatever you want to call it. 

But the basic idea is that you would be writing down whatever ideas or plans you have in your mind. 

Now people have many reasons where they would want to put these ideas into writing, but I personally practiced this, and I think it is very important for people to essentially dump their thoughts on paper somewhere. 

There are a variety of reasons for doing this, one is that it helps with clarity when planning for long-term goals, especially if you are on your journey of building wealth or maybe you have some specific goals for yourself that you would like to achieve in the coming years. 

By writing them down and having it there for yourself to look at, there may be times when you have some struggles or hesitations, or you have a hurdle to overcome, you can look back at what you wrote and recall on your thought process last week, last month, or a few years ago to better internalize the direction that you need to or had planned to take when you were writing things down. 

Now this is not limited to just business-related items, it can be great for other things as well. 

I think people who are struggling with depression or struggling with other mental illnesses in their life, can try to write things down also. 

This can, in a sense, be somewhat therapeutic and I think it can be an all-around positive for most people to just write things down, dump your thoughts on paper. 

And for me, I always have a notebook on my desk for this purpose, although I have started to transition to a digital process lately, but it works all the same. 

It really does help me a lot with everything in my life and I would go back and flip through over these after the years. 

I look at what I wrote down, and sometimes I would laugh and think: 

Wow, I have hit some of those goals which feels amazing, and it makes me want to write down more in the future.

Habit #2

Another habit that I feel is important for people to adopt, and I learned this by studying the behaviors of some of the most notable billionaires, is to focus on producing instead of consuming when you find yourself with some free time. 

A great example of this is most people, when they have some free time, maybe this is after work or this is before work or maybe on a Sunday, most people would choose to consume content, say on Netflix or playing games or finding some type of entertainment. 

Now I am not saying that you can’t relax or have fun, as I watch movies as well, and even the most successful people in the world watch movies, but what I found is that a lot of millionaires and billionaires will actively choose to use their free time to build their skills instead of consuming content. 

This can be something as simple as just learning to draw, but the difference is if you focus on building skills in your free time, it’s going to make you more valuable as a person in society because you have more skills at your disposal. 

Another example would be reading a book an hour before bed instead of watching TV to feed your brain, you should always aim to be somewhat productive for the most part. 

Now obviously you can splurge a bit and have some down time to watch TV but try to limit it so that you are spending most of your time growing, learning new things, building new skills, and becoming more valuable as a person.

Habit #3

Now, this 3rd habit is from reading a few books on Bill Gates. 

I learned that he likes to do something over his entire life, which is known as ‘Think Week’. 

Bill Gates is one of the richest people in the world, and he currently has a net worth of over 100 billion dollars. 

So what the founder of Microsoft does is that he will do a 7-day Think Week twice a year, where he goes into a secret cabin that is secluded from civilization, his friends, family, coworkers and just spends the time thinking and reading about life and ideas, but the purpose of this, from what I learned, is to kind of take a step back from time to time. 

If you are focusing on your goals or focusing on your personal growth, sometimes it is important to take some time off from the grindstone and think: 

Am I going in the right direction which I intended. 

At times, people are just focused on work, work, work, that they forgot to take a step back to strategize and maybe find a more efficient way to complete this task, and so I think taking a step back in the form of something like meditating could really help you get into a state of mind where you are crystal clear on what you are doing. 

Sometimes I like to go for a swim in my local pool to really just take a step back and get a clearer state of mind from all the work done.

Habit #4

Now the fourth habit which I think is extremely important that I didn’t start implementing until the past few months and has really increased my productivity is by doing something called block scheduling. 

This is a form of time-tested productivity system which can organize your day into activity blocks for broad goals and specific tasks. 

For years, I have been juggling between different things and I would do them on an everyday basis without writing it down, so what I started to do is I would whip out my phone and fill out my Google Calendar religiously, it would be fully packed with everything I have to do for that specific day. 

Now, if you are not running a business and you are just trying to build wealth and maybe dabble in the stock market, then I think that having a calendar is just going to help so much. 

You are going to forget less parties that you have to attend on a Sunday because your mind was wandering in 3 different directions at the time. 

And I found that by keeping a calendar, it makes my life a lot more organized, so you should really start doing it. 

Now, people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates and some of the most successful people in the world would literally block out schedules in their day by five-minute increments, so that is some serious productivity.

Not everybody’s gonna want to do this and I didn’t go into that level of five-minute increments, but it does certainly create some order in your life and having some sort of routine in your life is definitely going to help. 

You don’t have to schedule for when you go to the bathroom or whatever, but a general plan like 2 hours of studying, 2 hours of deep work, and an hour of workout would suffice. 

Compare this to what most people do, they just find themselves running around frantically trying to be productive but they have all these unexpected things that come up which would deter them from making any solid progress. 

So all in all, scheduling everything really helps with productivity, and high productivity should equate to a better life in the long-term.

Habit #5

The last habit that I want to share with you would be networking. 

Now this was not a no-brainer to me at first, I believed in my ability to work alone, but soon I realized that many things cannot be done alone no matter how skilled you are. 

The truth is that you are very much the average of the five people that you spend the most time with, and it is empowering to know that the people you associate closely with are going to be the people you are going to become. 

So an example would be if you spend time with people who smoke, chances are you would be smoking yourself. 

Now, this doesn’t necessarily correlate 100% of the time, but the point I am trying to make is that if you are spending time with people who are financially ahead of you, then you are likely to end up financially successful as well.

Because this would be one of the topics that’s discussed very often when you are sitting around the table talking or even when you go out to a bar somewhere, and when you are with successful people, they would probably end up discussing about success and hyping each other up. 

I genuinely found this to be very true, especially since I started mingling with people who are leagues ahead of me, so now I try to associate with people who are very much driven towards their goals rather than people who just maybe inherited money from wealthy parents. 

I wouldn’t find that to be valuable because they probably don’t work for all their money so it would be difficult to relate in certain aspects, instead I much prefer to connect with people who made it on their own without much external help from their family or background. 

Now a quick and easy way to do this is just go through your neighborhood and look for people who are real estate investors, you can start to talk to them and understand how they started their investing journey. 

Or maybe you can talk to one of your family members or relatives who is considered the successful one, and maybe ask them to, in a sense, mentor you or show you how they did what they did. 

Social media is so widespread nowadays that you can even just go to LinkedIn or just message an account on Instagram who is successful and interact with them to get some pointers. 

Now, a word of caution here.

You don’t have to pay them to mentor you, I think that would be excessive and you wouldn’t want to fall for that as I believe that you can learn stuff for free these days on the internet but that’s just my personal opinion. 

All in all, these are all the habits that I have adopted, or am trying to adopt which have helped me in doubling my income in the last three years and that’s some things that I am really passionate about.

- Ivan