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Some years ago, I started a new business, made every conceivable mistake that a new entrepreneur can make, and lost all my money. As a result, to survive financially, we had to sell our house to raise cash. At this point, my wife put her foot down. She decided that she was tired of worrying about money all the time. She therefore insisted on taking ten thousand dollars out of the proceeds of the house sale and putting it into a separate bank account where I couldn‘t get my hands on it. Because she was so adamant, I agreed and allowed her to do it. And you know what happened? From the time she put that money in a separate bank account, we were never out of money again.

No matter what happened in the following months and years, with the economy and the business going up and down, enough money continued to materialize so that we never had to touch the special saving account. In a couple of years, we were out of debt and able to buy a beautiful new home in one of the best neighborhoods in the city.

I’ve spoken to many successful people over the years and they’ve told me the same story. They said that as soon as they started to save their money, and put it aside, this money seemed to attract more money and opportunities into their lives. As their savings grew, they began to attract people and information that enable them to invest their funds intelligently, which caused their investment account to grow more rapidly. Probably the main reason why most people retire poor is they never put the initial savings aside to start with. It takes money to make money.

A key principle that explains how people get rich starting from nothing is called the law of accumulation. This law says that everything great and worthwhile in human life is an accumulation of hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny efforts and sacrifices that few people ever see or appreciate. This law explains that great success seldom comes overnight, or as the result of a single experience or breakthrough. Instead, enduring success gathers and accumulates over time. You have to put in countless tiny efforts that nobody sees or appreciates before you achieve anything worthwhile. In some ways, financial success grows like a snowball. A snowball starts very small, but as it rolls forward, it grows and accumulates as it adds millions of tiny snowflakes to its mass.

There are three places where you see this law of correspondence demonstrated continually. First of all, your outer world of experiences with others will correspond exactly to your own attitude. You will always see your attitude reflected back to you in the faces and the behaviors of the people around you. If you have a positive, optimistic attitude, people will respond to you almost instantly, even before you open your mouth, in a positive and cheerful way.

The second area where you see the law of correspondence is in your relationships. Your relationships will always mirror back to you exactly the kind of a person you are inside. When you feel happy, kind and loving, your relationships will be happy, harmonious and loving as well. But if your thinking becomes angry, impatient or fearful for any reason, consciously or unconsciously, you will immediately see this reflected in your relationships, especially at home and work.

The third area where the law of correspondence manifests itself is with regard to your wealth. Your external world of wealth and financial accomplishment will be a mirror image of your inner world of preparation for financial success. The more you feed your mind with thoughts, words, pictures, images and goals of making and accumulating money, the more rapidly these will appear in the world around you.

This law, like the other laws of expectation and attraction, is neutral. They can work for you or against you, depending upon the thoughts you choose to think. These laws will make you happy or unhappy, healthy or unhealthy, rich or poor. The only part of the mental equation that you can control are the thoughts you choose to think. When you discipline yourself to keep your conscious thoughts on the things you want, on your images of wealth and affluence, these laws will eventually shape your external world of reality to reflect them in every detail.

One of the most powerful principles in the universe is the law of attraction. The law of attraction says that you are a living magnet. This law says that your thoughts create a force field of energy that radiates out from you and attracts back into your life people and circumstances in harmony with those thoughts. Every thought you have is emotionalized in one way or another, positive or negative. Like iron filings to a magnet, whether it is a thought of desire or a thought of fear, you attract people, circumstances and events into your life that are in harmony with those thoughts.

This is perhaps the most important of all mental laws in explaining success and failure, good luck and bad luck. It says if you have a very clear picture in your mind of your desired goal, and you can hold that idea in your mind on a continuing basis, you will inevitably draw into your life the resources that you need in order to achieve it.

Every person who has become wealthy or successful has become wealthy and successful as a result of holding the idea of wealth and success in his mind long enough and hard enough, until he drew into his life the resources he needed to accomplish it. Your main job is to keep your mind fixed on what you really want, and keep your mind off of the things you don‘t want, until your true desires begin to materialize in the world around you.

The law of expectations says that —whatever you expect with confidence, positive or negative, becomes your reality.“ If you confidently expect to succeed, and hold to that belief, and act as if your success was inevitable, you will eventually achieve that success.

If you confidently expect to learn something from every experience, you will become wiser and smarter from every setback or difficult. If you confidently expect to become wealthy as a result of applying your talents and abilities to your opportunities, and you maintain that attitude of confident expectations long enough, it will become your reality. An attitude of positive expectations will give you a positive, optimistic, cheerful attitude will attract helpful people into your life, and will cause things to happen exactly the way you expected them to happen.

Successful people expect to succeed, in advance. They expect to be popular and liked by others, in advance. They expect to learn and grow from every experience, in advance. And the wonderful truth about your expectations is that they are completely under your control. You decide for yourself what they are going to be. You manufacture them by the way you think things are going to turn out. Always expect the best and you will seldom be disappointed.

All causation is mental. Everything that you are or ever will be will be as a result of how you use your mind. Put another way, you are merely a mind with a body to carry it around with. Everything in the man-made world began with an idea. Everything you see around you is simply an expression of thought. Your entire life is an expression of your own thinking. And since the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life, if you improve the quality of your thinking, you must, you will inevitably improve the quality of your life.

When you begin to think about yourself as capable of achieving all your financial and personal goals, and constantly seek for ways to make them into realities, your whole attitude toward yourself and your possibilities will change for the better.

Choosing the right job is perhaps the most important form of leverage in America. The one common denominator of successful, wealthy men and women, aside from self-discipline, is that they do what they love to do. The most important decision you ever make in your career is choosing the right kind of work for you.

It is only possible to work hard, overcome obstacles, and persist through to success when you are working at something that you care about, something that interests you and absorbs you completely. In fact, if you don’t love your job enough to want to be the very best at it, you are in danger of wasting your time and wasting your life.

Here is a question for you: If you won a million dollars in the lottery tomorrow, would you continue to work at your current job? If the answer is no, then your first responsibility to yourself is to admit that you are on the wrong road, and to begin seeking your ideal job or position. You must dedicate yourself to finding something you love to do, where you have the potential to excel, no matter what that may require in terms of change or sacrifice.

Once you have found the right job, the work that is perfectly suited for your unique combination of talents, interests, abilities and temperament, then you are ready to start getting rich in America.

If you sincerely desire to be rich, there is nothing outside of you that can stop you. Every type of person with every imaginable handicap, limitation and obstacle, has found a way to overcome their difficulties and go on to great success.

No matter how many obstacles you face, someone else has faced ten times as many and been successful in spite of it. If you sincerely desire to be rich, there is no miracle to it. Becoming wealthy requires a goal, a plan, self-discipline and hard, hard work for a long, long time. These are all qualities that you can learn and develop.

If you are willing to pay the price of success in advance and keep on paying it over and over until you achieve your goals, you will surely succeed. The only real question you have to answer is, how badly do you want it?

Most successful people have higher energy levels than the average. Because of this, they can work longer, harder hours with greater enthusiasm and persistence. They are more resilient and can bounce back from the inevitable problems and difficulties that occur on the road to success.

It is therefore vital for great success that you organize your lifestyle around proper diet, proper exercise and proper rest. For example, one common habit of virtually all successful people is that they watch very little television and they go to bed early. Early to bed, early to rise does seem to make people healthy, wealthy and wise. Successful people organize their time and lifestyle so that they can get up early and plan their days while the average person is still sleeping. This habit alone can give them an edge over the competition.

There is another element of success that is mentioned over and over again in the stories of wealthy men and women. It is the factor of luck. Luck is a form of leverage and it is part of every great success. Fortunately, luck is largely predictable and happens to people for specific reasons. In many respects, you actually create your own luck by the things you do, or neglect to do.

Luck is largely a matter of probabilities. There is a probability that virtually anything can happen, and these probabilities can be calculated with considerable accuracy. In almost every case, you can increase or decrease the likelihood of something happening or not happening.

For example, there is a certain probability that you will be killed in a traffic accident. But you can reduce this probability by driving sober, more carefully, and wearing seatbelts. Some people drive all their lives and never have an accident or a speeding ticket.

There is a five percent probability that you will become a millionaire in the course of your working lifetime. This means that there is a 95% probability that you will work all your life and retire poor or dependent on others. One of the main purposes of this book is to help you increase the likelihood of achieving financial independence by giving you the knowledge and tools practiced by the top five percent.

One thing we know, for example, is that luck is a function of activity. The more things you try, and the faster you try them, the more likely it is that you will try the right thing at the right time that will bring you the success you desire. The fact is that most things don‘t work the first time, and often, they don‘t work the first ten times. Nonetheless, if you keep trying new things, and learning from every setback, you will inevitable develop the skills and experience you need to succeed.

There is a saying that, —luck is when preparation meets opportunity.“ The more time you take to learn, study and prepare yourself in your chosen field, the more luck you will seem to have. The better prepared you are, the more often you will both recognize and be prepared enough to take advantage of opportunity when it arises.

Most importantly, luck seems to happen to people with clear goals and detailed plans of action. When you know exactly what you want and you are working diligently to achieve it every day, all kinds of wonderful things happen to you to move you more rapidly toward your goals, and your goals toward you.

When you are clear about your goals, you trigger the law of attraction and begin to attract into your life people, ideas, circumstance and resources that help you to achieve them. A series of happy coincidences and serendipitous events occur that help you in ways that you cannot now explain. I will explain more about becoming a money magnet and attracting luck in the next chapter.

The leverage that can help you is good work habits. Good work habits give you an edge over others in every field. In a survey of 104 chief executive officers, they were asked what qualities would be most helpful to advancement in their companies. Almost all of them agreed on two: the first was the ability to set priorities and the second was the ability to get the job done fast. These two behaviors would lead most rapidly to promotion and increases in pay. In every study, it seems that good work habits will bring you to the attention of the important people in your life as fast as or faster than any other qualities you can develop. In final analysis, you always get paid for results.

If you develop a reputation for being the person who gets the job done fast, who consistently and predictable gets the results required, that alone can put you onto the fast track in your career.