Millionaire Secrets Series – Part 5: Designing Your Million-Dollar Roadmap

Welcome to the final lesson of the Millionaire Secrets Series. Over the last 4 lessons, you’ve learnt how to think like a millionaire, how to manage your money the rich way, how to massively increase your income, how to create passive income and the power of investing to massively grow your money.

Wealth Academy Graduation

It is now time to begin designing your own roadmap to becoming a millionaire. I know a millionaire may seem like a far-fetched goal. But really, it’s all about designing your ultimate lifestyle and planning the strategies and actions to achieve your goal.

Why Do You Need a Plan?

Imagine if you’re going to throw a wedding banquet. You must first have a clear vision of how your wedding is going to look like. Then you must plan the number of guests, the number of tables, the songs that are to be played, the food that’s to be served, how you’re going to march in, what entertainment you’re going to provide and so on.

Can you imagine throwing the party of your life with no plans and no idea of what it’s going to look like?

I seriously do not think that’s how you’re going to do it. But amazingly, this is how most people live their lives! They have no plans and no idea of how their lives are going to turn out!

Sometimes, I really wonder how people can live a life like that – without knowing what they want in life and simply live day by day without knowing where they’re heading.

Everyday, they just work and work without a clear idea of what they’re working towards.

You’ve got to put your destiny in your own hands and leave nothing to chance. No successful people achieve their success by chance. They design their own success.

Everybody has the power to design his/her own destiny. So do you.

You’ve got to set specific goals so that you know what strategies to adopt and what actions to take in order to achieve them.

For example, if your goal were to make $20,000 a month five years from now, then your strategies and action plan would have to be very different from if your goal were to make $10,000 a month ten years from now.

There’s a very well known research done on the impact of goal setting. In 1952, when a batch of Yale University students were asked how many of them had clear specific and written goals, only three per cent said ‘yes’.

The remaining ninety seven per cent had no clear goals and had no idea where they’d be in five to ten year time after they graduate.

Twenty years later in 1972, a follow up study was done on the same batch of students and they discovered that the combined income of the three per cent who had clear goals was three times greater than the combined income of the other ninety seven per cent!

5 Keys to Designing Powerful Goals

Have you ever had a new year’s resolution? What happened in the end? Did you realise your resolution? No huh? I guess so.

Have you ever wondered why you never seem to be able to achieve what you set out to achieve? Is it because you lack the motivation? Is it because you don’t have the ability to accomplish it? Or is it because you forgot about it entirely?

There are a few reasons why you never achieve your goals.

First, you never write your goals down. And when I say write, I mean you’ve to be committed to take at least 30-60 minutes to sit down, free yourself from all distractions, think of exactly what you want in your life and put them on paper. Use pictures (e.g. a beachfront house) if necessary to help you visualise your goals.

If you don’t write your goals down, they’ll just remain as dreams.

Second, you don’t remind yourself of your own goals. You’re not done after you’ve written your goals down on paper. You’ve got to look at your goals every day so that they stay constantly at the top of your mind.

To do that, you have to pin them up somewhere prominent such as next to your work desk so that you’ll see them every day.

What Adam Khoo did is that he typed them out and digitally pasted them on his computer desktop so that he’ll be reminded of his own goals whenever he turns on his computer. And I’ve done exactly the same.

Third, your goals lack the key characteristics to be motivational and achievable. You can only hit your targets if you can see them and know why you want to do it. When setting your goals, you have to ensure that they possess the following 5 key characteristics:

1. Specific & measurable

2. Stretch you out of your comfort zone

3. Driven by powerful WHYs

4. Time specific

5. Action plan

1. Specific & Measurable

If your goal is to ‘become richer’, ‘be healthier’, ‘look better’, ‘retire early’, ‘live a better lifestyle’, then you’re not being specific.

What’s your definition of rich? How much money do you exactly need to have to consider yourself rich?

How do you define healthier? If you’re overweight now and you’d like to reduce weight, how much weight do you need to shed?

How do you measure whether you look better? Do you have a lot of pimples on your face that you want to clear? Or do you want to develop a 6 pack abs?

How early do you want to retire? 35, 45 or 55? What kind of lifestyle do you want to lead? What kind of house do you want to live in? What kind of vacations do you want to take? How much money are you going to need to lead that kind of lifestyle?

You see, when you have a non-specific and non-measurable goal, there’s no way you are going to achieve it because there’s no way you’re going to know whether you have achieved it.

However, if you set a concrete goal like ‘I want to make $100,000 within the next 12 months’, you’ll know precisely whether you’ve achieved your goal in 12 months time because $100,000 is a specific figure which can be measured.

2. Stretch You Out of Your Comfort Zone

If you’re going to set a goal at all, why not set it big? Which would excite you more? Making $100,000 in 12 months or getting a 5 per cent pay rise to help pay your bills?

You see, small goals are lame. They don’t excite you. They don’t inspire you. And they don’t motivate you.

If your goals don’t excite you, inspire you or motivate you, you’ll never develop the burning desire to achieve them. A burning desire is what will get you out of your lazy mode to start taking actions.

The most important factor of setting big and exciting goals is that it forces you to think out of the box and do something you’ve never done before. You can’t expect to get a different result by doing the same thing over and over again.

You have to dare to set big goals. You have to dare to dream. It doesn’t cost you a dime to dream. If you don’t even dare to dream, what do you dare to do?

If you’re afraid that you won’t be able to achieve your goals if they’re too big, let me tell you, stop worrying about that!

I’m sure you’ve heard of the saying, “If you aim for the moon and fall short, you’re still going to be among the stars.”

All you need to do is to devise different strategies and take different actions. You just need to stretch yourself out of your comfort zone to think and act differently.

But you have to first dare to dream big.

3. Driven by Powerful WHYs

Nobody does something without a reason. There’s always a reason to why you’re doing something. And the reason(s) will determine how much effort and time you’ll commit to do whatever you set out to do.

The reason is known as the WHY. One major reason why many people fail to follow through to achieve their goals is because they do not know their WHY. That means, they have no idea why they want to achieve what they want to achieve.

If you want to start a business and become your own boss, do you know why you want that? If you want to make more money, do you know why?

Many people want to become their own boss because they want more freedom. And people want to make more money because they want more security in life and to provide their family a better life.

However, simply knowing your WHY is still not good enough. It has to be a strong WHY because if it’s not strong enough, you’ll never be motivated to achieve it.

In order to develop a strong WHY, you have to look into your key values in life. Your values are your emotions or hot buttons that drive you.

For example, you want to make more money because:

• You want to prove yourself so that you’ll feel proud of yourself

• You want to provide financial security for your family

• You want to contribute more to the society

What’s truly important to you in life? What is it that will really fire you up? You need to seriously think about it because only if your WHYs are aligned to your core values will you be driven to achieve your goals.

4. Time Specific

In our everyday lives, we’re constantly working within a specific time frame to complete a specific task. Be it to summit a report by the next day; to finish watching a rental dvd and return it in 3 days; or to pay the bills by month end.

The same goes for accomplishing your goals. You’ve got to set a deadline whereby you have to achieve your goals.

Without a deadline, you’ll never feel the urgency to make it happen. Would you submit your report the next day if your boss didn’t demand it? Probably not.

Always set a deadline for your goals. Otherwise you’ll think you have all the time in the world to realise them.

5. Action Plan

As mentioned earlier, you need a plan as your roadmap to guide you to accomplishing your goals.

Goals are more long-term and broader in scope. So you need to break them down into medium-term objectives and short-term tasks.

You can break them down into five-year and one-year goals, quarterly, monthly and weekly objectives, and then daily tasks.

They could look something like this:

Five-Year Goal: Create a net worth of $1 Million.

One-Year Goal: Earn a net income of $200,000 within the next 12 months.

Quarterly Objective: Increase my sales by 50 per cent.

Monthly Objective: Increase my leads by 50 per cent.

First Week’s Objective: Interview potential telemarketers.

First Day’s Task: Place a ‘Telemarketer Wanted’ ad in the classifieds.

Breaking down your goals into bite sizes allow you to have a better chance of achieving them because they seem less daunting and more achievable.

For every goal you set, you may have a number of objectives, and for every objective, you may have a number of tasks.

Once again, for each of the goal, objective and task, you need to put them on paper and remind yourself about them on a daily basis.

Finally, you have to TAKE ACTIONS in order to turn your goals into reality.

Well, there you have it. We’ve come to the end of the Millionaire Secrets Series.

I’ve shared with you some of the most powerful lessons I’ve learnt at the Wealth Academy.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the series as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. Most importantly, I hope you’ve found it to be of value to you because that’s the number one reason why I started this blog – to provide value.

Like I said, these are just some of the lessons I’ve learnt. So if you want to learn more about creating wealth, perhaps you might want to consider enrolling in the Wealth Academy if you reside in Singapore.

And you may contact me prior to that so that I can tell you how you can get your $100 rebate. My email address is mark[at]thebigdreamer.com (Change the [at] to @. This is to prevent spammers from spamming my email).

However, if you reside outside of Singapore, you can still learn all the millionaire strategies from Adam Khoo. Simply hop over to his website ‘Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires’ to get a copy of his audio programme.

Whatever is taught at Wealth Academy will be included, except the millionaire game, personal email mentorship, WA forum membership and Adam’s updates of his investment portfolio.

So good luck to you my friend!

Cheers~

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Related Posts You Should Read

• Millionaire Secrets Series – Part 1: Developing a Millionaire Mindset
• Millionaire Secrets Series – Part 3.1: Increasing Your Income and Creating Passive Income
• Millionaire Secrets Series – Part 4: Growing Your Money
• Millionaire Secrets Series – Part 3.2: Starting an Internet Business
• Millionaire Secrets Series – Part 2: Managing Your Money The Rich Way
• A False Assumption Made By Too Many Aspiring Entrepreneurs
• Law of the Seed