The future is not in college, it's not in higher education, it's in self education.

More and more people are starting to recognise this. If you are not constantly and diligently improving your skill set, improving your human capital, you're absolutely falling behind.

The people who are going to be winning at life, in the decades to come, are going to be those people who control their income and who work on themselves by constantly building new skills.

And the greatest thing about it is that it can be done by anyone, of any age, at any time.



There are 1700 new millionaires every single day in this country. No matter what you've been told, the formula for getting rich is simple: spend less than you make and save and invest the rest in things that you understand.

No matter what your work is, if you do that for long enough, you're gonna amass yourself a great deal of money. If you choose to invest the rest on YOU, you're gonna get rich; you can blow up.

Taking control of your own life is good for everybody: your family, your community, and especially you because here's what wealth buys:

• Wealth buys you security;
• Wealth buys you freedom;
• Wealth, especially when you control that wealth, buys you time and that creates a less stressful life.

How many times do I have to hear "Oh, I can't start my own business 'cuz I, you know, I'm working two jobs just to pay my mortgage right now."

Get a smaller house for awhile.

"I can't learn something now, I've got two leases on two brand-new cars."

Turn them in and go buy yourself some thousand dollar beater that'll get you to and from.

Save yourself the $400, $500, $1000 dollars a month that you've got going there and redeploy it on you—on your life—on putting yourself in a position where you can buy as big a house as you want and all the toys you could ever dream of and you still wouldn't go broke.

We spend too much time trying to keep up with the people next door. We look at our neighbours and our friends and we say "She just got a brand-new truck," or "oh, they just moved into a bigger house."

Forget that. That's not where wealth comes from and it's not where freedom comes from.

Freedom Comes From Controlling Your Life—Every Aspect Of It.

Freedom comes from redeploying assets and putting them to work for you. You will not see a greater return in your life, on money spent, than money spent on YOU—on your education, on your self-improvement.

These things are essential for us and yet the vast majority of people, dare I say 99% of us, spend very little time and money on them, if any.

Get this: 55% of people who have a credit card in America, which is basically everybody, 55% of them have credit card debt—that's more than half of everybody in America. They're spending their resources. They would rather have the vacation this year at the all-inclusive resort than buying the penthouse five years from now and never having to worry about money again.

These are the types of trade-offs that we make—the ability to delay gratification—and we have a problem in this country, we have a problem in this world right now because nobody wants to wait.

The difference between the wealthy and the poor is this: the wealthy have long time horizons the poor have short time horizons. The poor think about the now and immediate satisfaction, the wealthy are able to delay that, reinvest in themselves, and grow into the person who is worthy of the life they want to lead.

If you want something different, if you want a different life, you've got to make your life different, you've got to get new skills.

Look, we've all got some stuff in our lives that causes us to make decisions that we know aren't the best for us. Whether it's because of something that happened in our childhood or in school or a past job or relationship, we all have stuff that distorts our vision of the world.

So you need to be very self aware and honest with yourself.

If you don't know yourself—if you don't understand why you make decisions and, more importantly, if you don't understand what's broken with you—you're going to have an impossible time understanding what you truly want from life let alone how to get it.

A Gallup poll conducted in January 2020 concludes that 74% of Americans are optimistic that they will be in a better place economically in the coming years than they are now. But why do they feel that way?

I look at my life and I absolutely believe that 5 years from now I'm gonna be in a far better place than I am right now. That's my expectation. But it's not just going to come to me so here's the trick—this is what this is what separates the winners from the losers:

Take the actions that will ensure that 5 years from now you're better off than you are today.

Do You Control Your Life Or Does Somebody Else?

Having the assumption that tomorrow will be as good or better than today without being deliberate about it is relying on magic.

If you're not deliberate about your life, if you are reacting to life, if you wait for things to happen to you before you make decisions, you're not in control, someone else is.

When you have a specific destination and a direction that you're moving in, you are in control.

Most people react but they don't act and that's why most people are living with a false sense of security that tomorrow will be better than today. But they're not in control and one of these days when that expansion changes to contraction (look at history, it always does,) the jobs aren't going to be there and they're gonna be working the same job, for less.

These are the types of things that catch people off-guard. These are the types of things that make one in three consumers max out one or more of their credit cards.

We are in what is arguably the greatest expansion in the last sixty years. People are doing better, the unemployment is lower, opportunity is greater than it has ever been and yet people are unsatisfied and we're still spending more money than we make to a significant degree.

37%-40% of those surveyed said that they had already maxed out their credit card and fourteen percent that said they had maxed out more than one. 35% of card holders are starting 2020 with more credit card debt than they had in 2019 so, going back, 37% to 40% of people are continuing to put more debt on the credit card than they're taking off.

The average credit card debt in the U.S. is $7,000 in revolving credit card debt. People are paying roughly $1,100 a month on that debt.

$1,100 a month!

That's $1,100 a month of their freedom, of their wealth, of their power, of their self control that they transfer from their control to the credit card companies control.

Why?

Well, we have to be honest with ourselves about it.

The future is going to be owned by the people who recognise these damaging behaviours now and fix them. They're realising how negative some of these behaviours are and, instead of relying on someone else or, ha!, the government to fix it for them, they're making changes and taking control of their own lives.

Operate on that level, and you will be light years ahead of everybody else.

Think about all of those times where you went out to some event and spent a whole night doing whatever it is, then, the next day felt empty. You probably didn't say anything or even convinced yourself that it was awesome simply because everyone else says it was awesome—at least that's what they posted on twitter, along with a posed picture for evidence.

You know what, I bet everyone felt the same. If they're really honest with themselves, everyone of those people thought it was an empty night but none of them are willing to say so.

So everyone is having a bad time, posting that it was a great time, and the cycle goes on forever. Meanwhile everyone is getting more and more depressed because it really did suck but no one is willing to say anything about it.

Take control. No one is telling you not to have fun - you have to, it's part of the proces and it's part of life. But you have to find the balance. You have to learn when it's time to work you work and when it's time to play, you play so that you can say to yourself, "I am not just going to work, I'm building a life."

Take control. Spend less than you earn. Invest the rest in YOU and your skills.