Tony Robbins (54:00)
Put it in your dream bucket. Put it in that bucket where you're saving money to buy that condominium, you say, well, that condominium is an investment. Yeah, maybe. But the truth of the matter is, if you're doing it just for fun, it's kind of an investment. But it's really more of a dream, right? Or a better example is to buy the island. I bought an island. You know, let me tell you something. Once you put money in your first two buckets, don't touch it till you make profit. Because if you start pretending your island is an investment, I got news for you. It'll Drain your security bucket, your growth bucket and everything else. Or if you buy a boat, that is definitely not investment. A boat is a hole in the water that sucks money, right? I mean, it's like. Or you buy a bunch of horses. I got seven horses because I play polo. Let me just tell you something somebody said a long time ago. Anything that eats while you sleep is not a good investment, right? I mean, you can't. They're wasting your money they're sucking out. So those are dreams. So once you put money in your security and growth, you don't touch them until you make a profit. You only take profits out of the growth bucket. You take a third of it, put it in your dream bucket and enjoy it. If your dream bucket requires more money than that, don't make that dream a reality yet or it's going to drain your life. Does that make sense? Everyone's got different levels of dream. From an outfit to a little boat, to a big boat, to a condominium, to, you know, a sports team, to an island. Whatever it is you really want in your life, you should have a way to start building towards that and compounding towards that as well, separate from everything else. Does that make sense? So let's just recap real quickly. The most important investment decision you're ever going to make is your philosophy towards investing called asset allocation. You must decide today out of whatever money you're going to decide to Invest, whether it's $100 or a million dollars, a percentage of it's going to go in a security bucket, a percentage is going to go in growth. Decide right now what that should be. Now if you're risk adverse, like you know, you don't like losing money, then you better put more of it in the security bucket. If you're more of a person who's willing to take risks and it's a gut check for you, but you do it anyway and you're young enough to take it, then maybe you put a little more in the growth bucket and a little less in the security bucket. But everyone must put a substantial amount in the security bucket to guarantee your long term success and to insulate yourself from failure, from the things you cannot control called the market. Whether it be the real estate market, the art market, the market for your business, the market for stocks. You've got to make sure that you have a way to guarantee your success if nothing else on this tape grabbed you. But understanding that getting started now is a must. Going out and getting 10% deducted so you can't touch it and making sure you use this form of asset allocation, then this tape was well worth it and can make the difference between whether you succeed or fail financially. It's that important. So decide right now what your percentage is. Make a decision and write it down. So the next time somebody says, oh, I got this great investment, you go, you know what? Can't make it right now because I got to put this much in my security bucket first. Or I can do a smaller amount of that. I'd love to do more, but I got to do a smaller amount because I got to be smart long term, not get seduced by the short term. This is the difference between someone who becomes wealthy and someone who is struggling. So if it's really this simple, why don't more people become wealthy? Well, really, I'm going to give you 12 reasons. There isn't just one, there's lots of them. And they're actually pretty simple. And as I describe these 12 reasons why people fail to become wealthy, with each one, you should think about doing the opposite. And you have basically 12 simple steps to becoming wealthy. The first reason people never become wealthy is they never clearly define what wealth means to them. See, if you go to our Wealth Mastery program, you're going to find that you might be sitting next to somebody who's worth $100 million, and you might be sitting with someone on the other side of you whose net worth is minus $10,000. I mean, we literally have that diverse a group that comes to the program, people that are totally sophisticated and unsophisticated because the principles are the same. What's interesting, though, is most people never define what it takes for them to feel wealthy, to feel abundant. See, one of the things we do in those seminars is have you define precisely what it would take for you to feel secure. As an example, for most people, if you ask them what would it take for you to be financially secure, they can't tell you. They go, million, $10 million? But it's random. They've never taken the time to really define it. So, for example, if I told you there was a way to be able to pay for the following things without ever having to work again as long as you live? How would you feel if you knew for the rest of your life all of your housing would be paid for, all your utilities, gas, electric, etc. All your car costs, automobile travel costs, all of your food costs, all of your insurance costs, and all your taxes, if all those were paid for the rest of your life, and you never had to Work for it. How would that feel? Wouldn't that be unbelievable? Now, for most people, that amount of money is so small, it blows you away. They think in terms of $10 million, $100 million, a million dollars. When the truth is, for most people, all they'd have to do is be able to generate enough money to cover 30 or $40,000 a year max. Maybe 50. Not for some people, it's 100 or 200. It's all relative. But the point of the matter is, whatever you think the number is, it's so much smaller than you can imagine. Now, that may not be your ultimate goal, but the point is you have to define wealth at different levels. Otherwise you'll never get started. The second reason people never become wealthy is they make it a moving target. They say, okay, I need, you know, $100,000. Then they get it, and they go, I need $10,000. And they get it and they go, I need 100,000. They get that, and they say, I need a million. Then they say, I need 10 million. I mean, 200 billion. And what happens is they never win the game of life. They never get to ring the bell and say, I won. That doesn't mean you don't keep accumulating or achieving or expanding, but you never feel like a winner because you're always moving the target so you always feel like you're losing. No one wants to play a game where the minute you shoot the ball, they move the target. You got to be able to win. Third, they define it in ways that make it feel impossible to achieve. If you're thinking you need $10 million and you don't make more than $50,000 a year, that sounds pretty impossible, doesn't it? But the truth of the matter is, you probably don't need $10 million to achieve the lifestyle you deserve. That's why you got to define it and go through this process. Four, because they make it so big, they don't believe they can ever achieve it, so they never even start. Five, they never make it an absolute must to be wealthy, to be abundant. See, for most people, it's a should. And I just got to tell you, everybody gets what they must have, not what they should have. I said this before. Right now, you're earning exactly what you must earn, not a dime more. I know your goals are higher, but your goals are shoulds. We get what we have to have as the nature of human beings. If you have to be in a quality relationship, you will find it. If you should or you'd like to you're in one if it's convenient, if it shows up. That's true of any area of your life. So you've got to make it a must to be abundant, to be wealthy, to have more than enough. 6 Reason people fail to become wealthy, they don't have a realistic plan. Now again, if you come to wealth mastery, you can put together a plan that's very real, very realistic, conservative for that matter, and still know you can achieve it. Because using the power of compounding and asset allocation can produce results you never thought were possible for. But you got to have a plan. And I'll tell you the next one. Number seven is some people actually get a plan, which is very few people, but then they fail to follow through. If you don't follow through, obviously it's not going to work. That's why you want to make sure you can't help but follow through. Get that 10% taken right out of your paycheck before you see it. Number eight, they tend to fail because they listen to experts and give experts the responsibility to make things work rather than making themselves responsible. So you gotta realize something. No matter how great a person issue you work with, no one's gonna care about your money as much as you do. Nobody. And you can't afford to have someone else be the expert and then wake up one day and say, what happened? That happened to Elton John, to Billy Joel, to Kareem Abdul Jabbar. There's some famous names from the past. I mean, all these people got nailed because they gave all their money to somebody else to watch. And they just did their music or did their play, did their basketball. This is so common. You don't have to be rich and famous to make this mistake. You got to look at people for coaching advice. But you've got to understand it before you make an investment. If you don't understand it, don't invest. Because in the end, if you make a mistake, then you can learn from it. If someone else made the mistake, all you learn is you're an idiot. You trusted somebody else, and you're paying the price. That's not the way to learn. And by the way, I learned this way too. That's why I know about how dumb this is. Number nine, they give up when they face major financial challenges. I'll tell you something. More than anything else, one of the reasons I'm wealthy today is because I've been through so many times when I should have quit, when it looked like there was no way to turn around, but I wouldn't give up. I got a chance to talk with Ted Turner recently right after the announcement of the merger between AOL and Time Warner. That day, he had made $3 billion billion in that day. Now, it was only 12 years earlier that he made his first billion. The next day, by the way, he lost a billion and a half because the stock price changed. So this is an interesting thing that happens. I've experienced this myself. I've looked at my stock one day and go, oh, my God, I made $50 million today. Oh, my God, I lost $25 million. If you do that, you're crazy. It's all on paper. Plus, you know, I asked him, I said, how much money did you spend this week? He said, well, actually, all I spent this week was $2.57 on an egg McMuffin. Meanwhile, I made 3 billion. He goes, I guess I got some abundance, you know. But one of the interesting things he told me was, he said, the secret to his wealth is that all the bad times he made it through where everyone told him to give up and he wouldn't. He said, I got to tell you, Tony, there was just a few years ago, it wasn't that long ago, where, like, we had the executives in our company at cnn, well, we told them they couldn't cash their checks. He said, we didn't tell that to the rank and file because we knew they'd freak out. But we took the executives, said, you got to hang on to these things for two weeks. He said, even then, we pay people dirt cheap to keep this thing going and grow it and get it where we need it to be. He said, I gotta tell you, man, I'm here today because of the losses I've been able to absorb. He said, when I took over the superstation in Atlanta, I lost $900 million, 900 million, almost a billion dollars. And I found a way to hang on. That's why I was able to make $3 billion in a day 20 years later. That's how you make it happen. He said, I lost a million dollars in an hour on a TV show. He said, the Goodwill Games. He said, we saved the world, but we lost millions of dollars. Ted's real quiet and gentle in his approach, right? But the point of the matter is, he said, that's what it takes. The people that succeed are not the ones that never failed. They're the ones that fell down and jumped back up as fast as humanly possible. And that's what you've got to do. Here's the 10th reason why most people fail to become wealthy. They fail to think about their life and to conduct their life like it's a business where they have to have a profit at the end of each year. If you conducted your life like a business, most people will be bankrupt. Would you be willing to go run a business year after year after year after year, where at the end of the year you had nothing or you were in the hole? Pretty soon you'd say, get rid of this business. Well, this is your life. Your personal life must be conducted. So it's a business. So at the end of the year, you say, okay, I worked for a whole year of my life, and here is my profit that I'm building a new future out of. You must change your mindset, because otherwise you'll accept losses each year. You'll accept breaking even is okay, and time is passing you by. You got to change your mindset. If you haven't already created that. Your life is your business. And finally, our last two, number 11, they allow other people's pessimism or other people's optimism to affect their intelligent implementation of their plan. Listen, guys like Ted Turner, guys like Donald Trump, these are people that go against the grain. Donald Trump became wealthy initially because he bought real estate in New York when every other developer was fleeing the city when they thought the city was going to go bankrupt. So not only did he buy things dirt cheap because everybody else was pessimistic, but he got the government there, the city government, to give him, I believe, $100 million in tax credits. You can't do that normally, except when people are totally pessimistic. People are wealthy, go against the grain. They do not allow other people to control their thought process. If you become one of the crowd, you're going to get slaughtered. You've got to think on your own. And finally, 12, they never get quality coaching. Nobody's an island. Listen, the guy I work with is worth billions of dollars, and he hires me to coach him and pays me a fortune to do it because he needs a fresh point of view. He needs somebody who looks at it from a totally different perspective. So if you want to be wealthy, you got to do the opposite of these 12 things. You got to first, define what is wealth for you? How much is it going to take? Secondly, lock that definition in place. Don't keep raising the bar continuously. You can raise the bar for what you enjoy. But know when I hit this number, I'm financially secure, I'm financially free. Third, make sure you define it and you create a Plan that you believe is achievable. That's third and fourth. Fifth, make it a must for you. Write down a paragraph. Why you must be wealthy, you must have abundance. What it'll do for you, your family. Not why you'd like to be, why you have to be. Six, get that plan. Seven, make sure you follow through on that plan. The minute you have a plan, do something towards its attainment. The first thing I do when you end this tape is I call Schwab, I call my bank, I call whoever I do business with and say, deduct 10% even if I don't know where I'm going to put it yet. Put it in a money market, hold it there while I decide where to invest it. Eight, make yourself responsible for what shows up. Don't just trust the experts. Let them coach you, but don't give them the responsibility. Nine, do not give up when the going gets tough, right? Most people are tested when you're five feet from the goal. That's when most people give up. You got to keep pushing and you will get there. 10, do the opposite of everybody else. Make your life a business. Say, I'm gonna have a profit at the end of the year, financially, personally. 11, don't let other people's emotions control you. They're pessimistic. You still think it through. They're optimistic. Don't run and do it. Think it through. Make sure you understand what you're doing. And make sure, no matter how optimistic or pessimistic they are, don't vary your asset allocation. That's what protects you. And finally, get good coaching. A coach is so invaluable for your body, for your relationships, for your finances, for your career. I really encourage you to really test out our coaches because I think you'll be thrilled. And if you want to do that again, I'll tell you. You can call us at 1-888-834-9096. So, in summary, what is this really about if you're going to be wealthy? Well, to be financially wealthy, all you got to do is this. Spend a less than you earn. This is the magic formula. This is the thing nobody wants to hear because it's so basic, but it's the whole secret. Spend less than you earn and invest the difference and then reinvest that for compounded interest until you have an amount of money that sets you free for life. That's all it takes. And the only way you're going to spend less than you earn is if you make it a must by not having a choice. And if you guarantee you're going to reinvest it, that's what you gotta do. Put in the right asset allocation and you will win. You got it? That's it. There's no way around it. And if you can save more than 10% and make yourself do it. John Templeton literally saved 50% of what he earned when he was struggling. See, you gotta remember the power of compounding. So what do you need to get started? Here's what you need to get wealthy. Only four things, and we're wrap this tape up. Number one, you need time. And guess what? You've already got that. You know, everybody I talk to says, God, you know, if they're in their 40s, they go, I wish I started in my 30s. If they're in their 30s, they go, I wish I started in my 20s.
