Some Ideas to get the Million.

If your goal is to make a million dollars, there are a couple of easy ways to reach your objective:

If you are looking for the easiest path to wealth, inheriting the money would have to be at the top of the list. Of course you have little control over this.

Marrying the money would probably be the next easiest, assuming you can find an appropriate spouse (Note that I did not take my own advice here and followed the path of "true love" instead).

You can buy lottery tickets or head for Vegas and hope for the best. It seems like there should be an easier way, and in fact there is...

If you want to make a million dollars, all ya gotta do is put $5 in a bank account every day. Just about anyone can come up with $5 a day. It is not a huge deal -- heck, a pack of cigarettes costs $5 in a lot of places these days. You put the money into an account, like a stock mutual fund, that gives you 10% per year interest on average and presto. In 42 years you have a million bucks. What could be easier than that?

The problem is, who wants to wait 42 years? It takes too long. What do you do if you want to short-circuit the process and make a million bucks in less than 5 years? There is only one way to accomplish that reliably...

Yes - you need to start a business. In America, starting a successful business is the surest, most controllable path available to you for making a million dollars in less than 42 years.

And really, this decision to start a business gets us to a key part of our conversation. There are two mentalities at work in our economy today. Either you can be someone else's employee, or you can be the one who hires the employees. You can work for a business, or you can own a business of your own.

Now please note that I am not saying that "being an employee" is a bad thing, Iam an employee as well. There are lots of good reasons to be an employee. For example, being an employee is a great way to learn how a business works so that you can open a business of your own. You simply need to become an employee with that approach in mind. In other words, you work so that you can learn the ropes. Go into the job with the intention of learning everything you possibly can while someone else pays you to get your education.

So let's assume that you have made the decision to start a business, and you have worked to learn the ropes. If you follow this "start your own business" path, then what people will call you is... An entrepreneur. The dictionary definition goes like this:

A person who organizes, operates, and assumes the risk for a business venture.

Here's another definition:
An entrepreneur is someone who starts successful businesses. People are not very kind to those who start unsuccessful businesses. The instant you are successful, however, you are a hero and they start calling you an entrepreneur. The instant you lose some money on the market some trust on you is lost as well.

The whole point of creating a successful business, of course, is to have it generate money. There are two ways to extract the money from a business you create. You can either take the money out as you go along, in the form of a salary and dividends. Or you can sell the business and take your reward in a lump sum. Or, in the ideal case, you do both.


In the ideal case, the money that you pull out of the business is being generated as passive income. For example, let's say you start a restaurant. You hire all of the staff, and then you hire someone to manage the staff so the restaurant "runs itself" without you ever having to actually be there. That is passive income. A house you own that generates steady rental income every month is another example.

Note that the dictionary definition of the word "entrepreneur" includes the word "risk." That is important. If you are starting a business, you are going to have to invest both your time and (in many cases) your money in getting the business going, There is some chance that the business will fail without generating anything. Businesses fail all the time. That's part of the game. There are three things that you should keep in mind...

Woody Allen's quote is so true: "Eighty percent of success is showing up." If you will simply take the first step toward starting a business, you improve your chances of success dramatically.

The first reason for that is obvious -- if you don't take the first step, then you will never start a business and you cannot possibly succeed at it.

The second reason is more important. If you ever listen to motivational speakers like Dennis Waitley, Tony Robbins and Zig Ziglar, one thing you will hear over and over again is this interesting fact about setting goals -- if you will simply take some time to create some goals for yourself and then write them down, the chances of reaching your goals goes up by a huge amount. It is huge. Putting your goals on an index card and taping them to your bathroom mirror so you see them first thing every morning is also a smart move. I do not know why this works so well, but I do know that it works.

So what you should do is write down on a piece of paper a few goals for yourself, and one of them should be, "get my xyz business going," and you should tape your goals to the bathroom mirror. I would do that today.

Churchill's quote is also right on target: "Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." What does that mean? It means that, whenever you stretch yourself and try to do something successful, there are going to be failures along the way I experienced some hard failures in fact It will take me a couple of months to recover. Sometimes lots of failures will come. All you can do after a failure is get up and try again. If you keep doing that, one of two things will happen -- either you will succeed eventually, or you will die. And if you die, then you won't care anymore. And at your funeral people will say, "You know, he never amounted to anything, but you sure have to give him credit for trying. The guy had a lot of heart." And the final objective is what matters.

Larry King's quote is amazing in its accuracy: "Those who have succeeded at anything and don't mention luck are kidding themselves." That is so true. The thing is, luck can only happen to you if you try something. If you will just take the first step toward starting a business, and then the second, and so on, you immediately open yourself up to the beneficial power of luck. If you don't, then luck cannot happen to you. Everyone who has ever succeeded has benefited from luck -- sometimes lots of luck. But you have to be playing the game in order for luck to find you.

"If you try, there is some chance of succeeding." If you don't try, obviously, there is not. You've got to be playing the game in order to win.

"Those who keep trying eventually do succeed." That is a fact of life. Luck favors the prepared, and it also favors the persistent.

You will hear people say, "Nine out of every 10 businesses fail, so why bother?" Here is another way to look at that -- the chance of success is 10 percent. You start nine businesses that fail and then the tenth one succeeds and you make a million bucks -- those are damn good odds. Compare that to a lottery, where, for example, 9,999,999 out of every 10,000,000 tickets fail. And tens of millions of people play the lottery even though the odds are that bad. Starting a business is not as easy as buying a lottery ticket, sure, but keep in mind that, "Anything you practice gets easier." Let me repeat that, because it is very important: "Anything you practice gets easier." The more you practice something, the easier it gets.

So the first business you start, it is going to be hard. You don't know anything. You will make mistakes. You will try things that don't work. Whatever. But the second business you start is a lot easier. And the next one is easier still. Right now you look at "starting a business" and it looks hard. That's because you've never done it before. You haven't practiced. Simply start practicing and it will become trivial eventually What I would suggest is that you get rid of your television. Take the music off your iPod.

Instead go get some audio books that talk about starting businesses. Put those on your iPod and listen to them over and over again. The first time you listen, they might not make much sense. That's because all of the material is new. The second time through the book it will make a lot more sense. And then the third time you will understand what is going on. Practice makes perfect.

Now you are starting to get somewhere. You have taken some steps. You are learning about starting a business from the books you are listening to. Let's look at the environment...

All that you need to do is to find something that people would find valuable...

So come up with an idea. Find something that you can do in the American economy that would make people's lives better and that they would be willing to pay money for. Build a simple business around it. Start making a profit.

What you have created is called a "cash cow." You have a business that generates excess cash. Now, either you milk the cow, or you sell the cow to someone else. That's it. Suddenly you have become an entrepreneur. Then either you go relax on your Caribbean island, or you try to start another one. And it will be a lot easier the second time because you have been practicing.

Start by putting some business books on your iPod and listening to them in every spare minute you have -- while driving, while walking between classes, while waiting in line, whatever. Most books now come on CD or as an MP3 file. Here are five books that I would start with. These are "mindset books" -- they get you into the right mindset to start a business:

Mindset books:

• Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki - A perfect book for getting you head in the right spot to start a business.
• The automatic Millioanaire, by David bach - Teaches you how to manage your finances. A basic guide to "saving $5 a day to become a millionaire in the future.
• The One minute Millionaire, by Victor Mark Hansen - a little over the top, but encourages you to think differently about starting companies and building wealth.
• How to be a Billionaire, by Martin Fridson - Really makes you look at the world differently.
• The Warren Buffet Way, by Robert Hagstrom - Not light reading, but helps you see how one of the richest men in the world thinks about the business world.
• Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi - Helps you to think about business relationships differently.

That's it -- start reading these books and thinking about something you can do that other people will find valuable and let me know. We are on our way. We just have to take that first step...

And once you make your first million, please let me know by sending me an e mail.Or if you have some interesting idea to reach the goal of a Million in less than 5 years you are welcome to share it!

Best Regards.

JC.