Here are the most important skills you need if you want to be rich in life!
There are several traits and skill which you need to have if you want to be rich and we’re about to go on a journey together! Strap on! It’s going to be an incredible ride!
Initially we wanted to do an article dedicated to DISCIPLINE alone, since you guys have been requesting it for so long and we promise we’ll do it, but there’s more to getting rich than just that.
We studied over 100 millionaires and billionaires, interviewed some successful individuals from our inner circle in order to determine the true skills which can actually make the difference in your journey to success.
It’s important to sit down and go through the entire article, including the explanations, because it’s not enough to know of the things we mentioned on this list, but actually understand them and see how you can improve in those areas.
This article is a self-analysis one, where we recommend you grab a sheet of paper and after each fact we mention you score yourself from 1-5, where 1 is bad and 5 is Amazing.
At the end of this read you should be able to tell which skills you need to develop over the medium terms and which ones are your current strengths. We recommend you bet big on your strengths for the short term and over the next couple of years invest heavily into acquiring the remaining ones.
It’s going to be a longer article, but you know if we do it, we gotta do it right. In it, you’ll find all the information you need to start making yourself a game plan.
If you don’t want to read the article we also made this incredible video covering everything we’re talking about here:
With that said, here are the 15 most important SKILLS you need to develop if you want to be rich.
Number 1: DISCIPLINE
Success in business and life is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. Your ability to keep putting one foot in front of the other, not matter how difficult, what the weather’s like, what other people say or how are you feeling each day is what will get you to the finish line.
It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to achieve, if you can not discipline your actions, you’re probably not going to get it.
So what is DISCIPLINE anyway?
It’s your ability to dig deep within yourself, identify your true goal and then act every single day in accordance to that ideal.
If you want to get in shape, it means mastering your nutrition and hitting the gym every single day, it doesn’t matter if it’s snowing outside, if you don’t feel like it or there are other distractions which you’d rather be doing.
Discipline means you will take care of the most important tasks related to your long term goal before anything else. You can not let a single day pass without closing in the distance between your current reality and your target.
This might sound easy in theory, but it’s the #1 reason why people fail in life. They are unable to discipline themselves to put in the work over extended periods of time.
How do you develop Discipline?
- Define what you want
- Evaluate why you want it
- Eliminate distractions
- Prioritize the most important tasks over everything else
- Track your progress
- Keep yourself accountable
Discipline and habits – although different things – work hand in hand. If you’ve never tried to self discipline, meaning you’ve scored yourself with a 1 or 2 here, it’s really time for a change.
We recommend you start with small things, so we have a challenge for you: Wake up at the same hour every single day and make your bed for 21 days. 95% of you will fails this, but it’s more important than you think!
The first part will make you discipline your time. It’s up to you how many hours you wish you sleep per night, but you have to wake up at the same hour every day. You’ll find it more difficult than it seems, because it’s so easy to oversleep.
The second part is the first step in organizing your life. Making your bed every single morning after you wake up will give you a sense of control over your environment.
Now think about what we’re asking you to do: wake up every single day at the same hour and make your bed. This will start creating order in your life and will allow for other things to come into effect.
21 days isn’t a long time to test this, but if you manage to pull through, you’ll find yourself increasing your self discipline score by at least 1 point.
Every successful individual we’ve known or read about is self disciplined, they know what they need to do every day in order to get to where they want to go.
If you can’t even control your time and organize your environment, you have no shot at running a large business and it’s best to accept that this is not for you and you need to rethink what it is you wish to do with your life.
Number 2: EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
People think that IQ is really important if you want to be rich or successful.
The truth is, having a high IQ could be a bonus, but it’s not what will make you rich. High IQs rarely correlate to financial success. Because money isn’t the result of word comprehension, math skills, abstract and spatial thinking, but instead it has to do with understanding how people work, how they think, what they want, need and how to really understand that information.
Emotional intelligence is far more important in business and life than IQ. You don’t have to be smart in school do be rich.
The truth is, most A students end up working for B- and C students, because while the A students waste their time trying to memorize all the useless information you get in school which does not apply to real life, B & C students are spending that time learning about others, interacting with them and developing their social skills.
Business & Life are not about how able you are to regurgitate information, but instead connect the dots in the real world and find ways to build your life on top of that.
In order to assess how strong your EQ is, ask yourself, how well do you understand people, is it easy for you to tell how other people feel, what they want in general and what makes them behave the way they do? Rate your emotional intelligence from 1 to 5 now.
If you’ve scored below 3 on this one, here’s what you can do to enhance it. We’re going to break this into a 2 part process as well.
The first part has to do with yourself. Take a piece of paper and start to analyze your own feelings. Write down how you feel right now, what about the last time you were really sad, what happened and why were you sad? What about happiness? Try to do this exercise for as many emotions as you can. This will help you understand yourself better and get in control of your emotions.
The second part has to do with other people. Next time you’re having a conversation with someone, try to actively listen and understand the other person. When they talk, be in the present and not listen to the voice in your head which only think of what to ask next.
Very few people are able to actively listed instead of just hearing things. Those who do have a way better shot at working well with people and guess what, if you want to be rich, you need to work with others and be in control of your feelings.
Number 3: SELF-MOTIVATION
Things will get hard in your journey and to be honest, you’re in this alone.
Yes your family and friends will be around you, but it’s within yourself where you REALLY make the decision to put in that time and effort.
If you’re unable to motivate yourself we;ve got bad news for you, you’re not going to make it.
Self-motivation is one’s ability to overcome obstacles in your mind that tell you, you can’t do it or why should you even botter.
Self-motivation is when you get yourself to put in the the work because you want it so bad that nothing will stop you.
Even if everybody around you doubts you, your desire to achieve the life you want is so strong that nothing can pull you back from getting it.
Along this list you’ll realize how strongly all of the things we mention are interconnected and how together they form a strong net or structure on which one can create progress for themselves.
People who are lazy in general lack this ability. Your inability to self-motivate will lead to time being wasted, it might not seem much skipping work today, but they all add up and snowball to a life of mediocrity.
Here’s what you need to if you want to improve yourself in this regard.
The first part is to once again dig deep within yourself and find what the perfect life would look like for you.
Let’s do this experiment right now! In an ideal work where there are no boundaries, what would be a day in your perfect life? Close your eyes and try to visualize it, to the very details.
What does your morning look like?
Where are you? Who are you with?
What do you do after your breakfast? What does the house you live in look like?
What do you do in the afternoon? What are you wearing? What do you feel?
What do you smell? What does that life taste like?
Now, what you’ve just experienced is your life goal. This is why you will put in the work. If you do everything right, you can make it happen.
The second part is creating reminders of what that life is like. We recommend changing the background of your devices to fit that life. We look at them multiple times during the day and every time you’ll see it, it will remind you that you need to work harder if you want to get it.
This is how you motivate yourself when times are hard, the goal is bigger than everything and all the hard work it worth it.
Number 4: MAINTAINING FOCUS
Everything around you has been engineered to distract you. We live in a world where attention is the new currency.
We see a trend among people where it’s increasingly hard to maintain focus, because every day more and more distractions try to hook you in.
Maintaining focus has to deal with one’s aptitude to choose activities which will serve your ultimate goal over activities that feel good in the moment, but have little rewards for the long run.
“Carpe Diem” sounds good on paper, but it never lead to anyone who’s built anything worth mentioning in their lives.
How focused are you on your journey?
Let’s take yesterday or even today if you’re watching this later in the day. Apart from reading this article which actions did you take today which will impact your future?
Break down for yourself what you did throughout the day from the moment you woke up to the moment you want to sleep or this moment right now.
How many of them contribute to your journey? How many are just time being wasted?
We recommend doing this analysis of your day at least once a week in order to determine if your focus is increasing or decreasing over time.
You’ll discover that you’re wasting incredible amounts of time on things that add little to no value to your current or future life.
You don’t need to binge watch everything on netflix or spend hours playing video games. That is, if you want the life you visualized at Number 3.
Number 5: READING
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE… READ.. A LOT.. OF BOOKS!
On average they read around 50 books per year while the average person reads only 1.5
You need to start reading. And you need to do it right now. Reading is better than watching videos or audiobooks because the brain processes text differently than it does with video or audio.
When you watch a video, the visualization of the information happens on the screen. When you read the information is processed within and makes correlations to your internal memories and reality.
Imagine you can absorb the knowledge someone gathered in a lifetime, in a single week just by reading a book. Reading evolves your main asset which is yourself.
We know most of the books you’ve tried reading we’re incredibly boring, so we made 2 lists of the books we believe not only you’ll enjoy reading but impact your life the most.
Those videos are called 15 Business Books Everyone Should Read and you can find them below!
We recommend you watch both of them because we carefully selected and explained which books you should read depending on what stage you are in life in those videos, so you’re definitely going to find something for you there.
Number 6: PLAY THE LONG GAME
Everything you’ve done in life so far has been for the immediate future. You studied in school, because you had a test the following week. You watched all episodes of FRIENDS because it made you feel good in the moment. You’re eating junk food because that’s the more accessible thing for you right now.
If you wish to be successful in life, your mindset needs to change dramatically.
You need to stop looking for shortcuts, for get rich quick methods.
You’re not going to like what we’re about to tell you, but it’s the truth:
It will take between 7 and 10 years to change your life.
Being successful requires you to think ahead and take actions now which will have an impact over the long term.
The quicker you realize there’s no other way around it, the quicker you can start to take the right types of action.
10 years might sound like a lot of time where plenty of things can happen, but time will pass either way and without a plan, you’ll find yourself 10 years later, doing the same mistakes but filled with more regret that you didn’t take action.
We recommend that once you find what your end game will look like, to deconstruct which are the things that need to happen for you over the next few years which will take you as close to that goal as possible. And then focus on getting closer to those things.
THERE IS NO ELEVATOR TO SUCCESS, YOU HAVE TO TAKE THE STAIRS!
Number 7: CONTINUOUS LEARNING
Rich and Successful people never stop learning! Not only through reading but learning from everything that’s around them.
It’s incredible how much you can learn about life from just observing what’s happening.
Your success depends on your ability to continuously learn, acquire new skills and use those to further yourself.
The goal is not to know as many things as possible, but to understand as many things as you can.
There’s a crucial difference between the two.
The first one, fills your mind with information, while the second one allows you to connect dots others might not be able to see.
The first one will drive you mad, while the other will help you understand the world.
Ask yourself, when is the last time you’ve actually learned something that is of real value, which made your life or the life of those around you better? This is how you keep track if you’re growing or not.
Continuous learning is about improving your current self on a consistent basis. This will ultimately lead you to make better decisions and live a more fulfilling life.
THE MOMENT YOU STOP LEARNING, YOU START TO DIE!
Number 8: HOW TO SELL
Selling has a bad rep. Because most people think of it as manipulation instead of rationalized persuasion.
Everything you do in life is a form of selling. From the minute you’re born when you’re crying in order to get milk to the moment you die.
Life is about interacting with others and selling is just convincing someone of the merits of an exchange.
If you learn how to do that you have a shot at winning at life, because you’re going to have to sell a lot of people on a lot of things in your journey.
You’ll have to convince your partner to be with you, you’ll have to convince your friends to trust you and if you want to be rich, you’ll have to prove that whatever it is you are offering is worth exchanging for money.
This is the basic folks. If you’re unable to understand the fundamentals of transactions, you’re going to have a hell of a hard time trying to get rich.
The following line will forever change the way you look at money:
People will trade their money for things that they find more valuable than the money they just spent!
Take a minute to read that again and run it through your brain.
If needed, pause the video, write it down and think about it.
This reasoning applies to TIME as well.
People will trade their time for money, if the money they receive is perceived as more valuable than their own time.
If you know this to your core, it will make you a great salesman, you will be able to rationalize their decision process and make the sale easier.
This article is about getting rich, which means getting money. But the same principle applies to every time of trade in life. Help me with this, because I will help you with that.
If you’ve ranked bad at selling, we recommend you read 2 really important books which we’ll leave a link in the description of this video. The first one is: SELL or be SOLD by Grant Cardone and the second one is Start With WHY by Simon Sinek.
Number 9: LEARNING TO OUTSOURCE
Now that you know how to sell someone on your ideas, it’s time to buy yourself the most valuable thing in the world: TIME!
Everyone who is rich or successful understands the importance of TIME and the fact that it is a limited resource.
We all have the same 24 hours in a day and no matter how much hustle you put in you can’t work more than that by yourself.
That’s when you start to acquire the time of others and use it for your goal.
In order to be successful one must be aware of his own strenghts and use those to get ahead.
In any business or any project there are time consuming tasks which are of repetitive nature. Basically you do the same thing over and over again and this takes a lot of time.
Here’s how to approach outsourcing:
First, you have to break down your entire process. From beginning to end.
Then look at the actions you take every single step of the way and determine which are the most time consuming.
Are there any repetitive tasks which demand a lot of time but not your creative mind?
If yes, these are the ones you should outsource as soon as possible.
Then you find someone who you train to do that single task, no more, no less.
Now, you’ve got an extra time slot which you can use to expand or come up with creative ideas.
One of the mistakes first time entrepreneurs make is that they try to do everything themselves, because nobody can do the job as well as you can and it’s true: nobody cares about your business more than you do. But remember this:
DONE NOW is better than trying to be perfect but never moving forward.
Number 10: WILLINGNESS TO MAKE SACRIFICES
This is where you realise that the lifestyle you want doesn’t come for free.
There’s a great saying that we love which says:
THE DREAM IS FREE, THE HUSTLE IS SOLD SEPARATELY!
It’s not going to be easy, but it’s going to be worth it IF you’re smart about it.
Nothing can be achieved without sacrifice, sometimes we even end up sacrificing more than we’d like, but it depends on the type of person you are and just how important winning is.
We are fascinated about this, so we did an entire video dedicated to this particular topic.
Honestly it’s one of our best videos we’ve ever made and we believe everyone should watch it, because it changes the way we look at wealth and at the people who do get it.
It’s called 15 sacrifices and you can watch it below!
Number 11: MARKETING
Many people confuse selling with marketing and although they happen to be in the same are there are fundamental differences between the two.
Listen up everyone, because this is the type of knowledge you only get during really expensive MBAs at the top financial universities, and you’re getting it here for free.
To put it in the simplest form possible:
SELLING has to deal with the needs of the SELLER while
MARKETING if focused on the NEEDS of the BUYER!
You sell something, because the company needs to make a profit, you market something as a solution to a problem
These two are tracked differently as well. You track sales by profits and marketing by the customer’s satisfaction.
Marketing is the art of communicating to vast amounts of people, in a simple and easy way to understand, what your product or service is and how it can make their lives better.
Being a master marketer alone could be enough to make you rich! We’ve had numerous examples on our channel, from pet rock – which made Gary 15 million dollars just by selling rocks to people – to Bottled water – which through marketing alone created a multi-billion dollar industry by convincing people to pay for something which they used to get for free.
We live in a time when anyone can become a brand and you need to start marketing yourself correctly.
We’ve recommended some incredible marketing books in the past, you’ll find them in our books videos.
Number 12: ABILITY TO MOTIVATE & INSPIRE OTHERS
There is another quote which we love that says:
IF YOU WANT TO GO FAST, GO ALONE!
BUT IF YOU WANT TO GO FAR, GO TOGETHER!
We’ve established at Number 6 that this isn’t a sprint, this is a marathon!
You need a team of people who believe in the same vision enough to share the journey with you. The good and the bad parts of it.
People follow strong leaders and if you want to do great things you need to become one!
Hopefully you’ve still got your piece of paper with you ranking yourself from 1 to 5.
Your ability to inspire and motivate others can dramatically increase your chances of success. A solid team is stronger than any single individual.
People are inspired by your example, so show them that you are willing to go through hell for your goal and those who will think your goal is worthy, will join in.
The best thing to do in order to become an inspiration is to be genuine.
Incredibly there’s so much bullshit around that when someone sees another actually working hard and being honest about his journey that they find it fascinating.
We’ve never thought about ourselves as a motivational channel, we just worked really hard to make the best possible content and some people, actually around 1.1 million, found it worthy enough to join our community.
We didn’t start with the goal of being an inspiration, we put in the work ourselves and if someone is inspired, good, but that’s a side benefit of hard work.
Please remember this distinction! There are so many people who just want to inspire others, but who aren’t willing to put in the work themselves.
Number 13: MONEY MANAGEMENT
Remember this: you can make all the money in the world and still end up broke.
Making money is important, actually is really important, but that’s just the first part of it. The second one is what you do with it after you get it.
This can make you or break you, so it’s important for you to be a good Patron to your money. You need to take care of it and help it grow so you can use it later for the things that really matter.
Think of your money as little soldiers! Do not just give your army away in exchange for temporary things, instead let them go out into the marketplace so they can return with more prisoners. That’s how your army grows.
Getting rich is actually a lot easier than people think, if you’re willing to learn how to do it and put in the work. Most people assume that getting rich is just a matter of luck and they simply are not lucky enough. But those are the people who don’t watch this type of videos on youtube in their spare time.
Money should be used in order to protect yourself. The more you have it, the better protection you have.
We recommend creating multiple streams of income from different industries. Unless they all fail at the same time, you should be able to survive and built better ones in the future.
How many people do you know that immediately once they get their salaries they go on a shopping spree, buying things they don’t really need?
You need to be smarter with your money, even if that means not having the latest iphone or the coolest new clothes.
What would you rather do, impress some people who you don’t really care about and who don’t care about you OR use that money to put another brick towards your dream life.
It’s one of those sacrifices we’ve talked about earlier. Choose who you want to be!
If you’ve scored poorly on this one, we recommend you try to keep track of your money for 2 weeks. Use the notes app on your phone to mark down every time you pull your wallet out and how much you spend on what. At the end of the two weeks you’ll be shocked about how much money goes towards things which had 0 to no impact to your happiness or well being.
Number 14: ABILITY TO QUICKLY ADAPT TO CHANGE
IT’S NOT THE STRONG THAT SURVIVE, IT’S THOSE WHO ADAPT THE QUICKEST!
The world is changing faster than ever and with it so do the rules.
To quote the now legendary Carlos Matos in his Bitconnect speech, “The WORLD is not anymore the way it used to be”
We just wanted to slip that in, because we giggled remembering him.
Your ability to learn, connect dots that didn’t exist before and use everything to your advantage is what will determine if you can outlast this storm.
How many people you know who’ve build incredible businesses but failed to adapt and now their empires are gone.
A third of the people watching this video don’t even know what this is [We show on screen a Compact Cassette]
Blockbusted failed to adapt to the future, even though Netflix wanted to sell their company to them.
Remember when Yahoo didn’t want to buy Google for 1 million dollars. Yahoo remembers!
At the beginning of this video we’ve mentioned INTELLIGENCE, well.. In the words of the great Stephen Hawking:
INTELLIGENCE IS THE ABILITY TO ADAPT TO CHANGE
It’s time to see how intelligent you really are!
Number 15: ABILITY TO BRING QUALITY PEOPLE AROUND THEM
Do not mistake this for Number 12.
If there we were talking about people who will push you forward, here we’re talking about people who will open new paths for you.
We’ve heard this numerous times:
YOUR NETWORK IS YOUR NET WORTH!
And to be honest, we’ve always been skeptics about it, until we realized this also has to do with protection.
If you’ve got the right type of friends, the right type of mentors, these people will protect you, will help you grow faster and will leverage their own knowledge and resources to your aid if it is required.
We’ve always said that: YOU ARE THE AVERAGE OF THE 5 PEOPLE YOU SPEND MOST OF YOUR TIME WITH!
If you’re surrounded by 5 poor people, you’re probably going to be the 6th.
If you’re surrounded by 5 multi-millionaires, it’s highly likely you’ll join the club sooner than later.
We’ve touched upon this numerous times in our videos and if we were to pick what will have the greatest impact in your life is finding the right mentor early on. Mentors are incredible people who accelerate your growth and help you navigate your world more easily, because they’ve walked the same road before you.
If this is the first time you hear about Mentors, we have an incredible video titled 15 Reasons Why You Should Have A Mentor.
That video not only will show you the benefits of having one, it will also show you how to find the right one for you!
If you get better at even half the things we’ve mentioned on this list you’re off to a great start and we genuinely wish you the best of luck in your journey!
We’re curious to know Aluxers, which of these skills do you need to improve the most on? Let us know in the comments below!
