Every step forward, no matter how small or challenging, brings you closer to your goals. It’s like climbing a mountain or running a marathon —one step at a time, and eventually, you’ll reach the summit or the finish line.
Remember, progress isn’t always linear. Sometimes it’s a zigzag, but as long as you keep moving, you’re making strides.
So keep going, even if it’s just a tiny step today. You’re already ahead of those who haven’t started or decided not to try!
Oprah Winfrey is known as one of the most successful individuals globally and her estimated net worth is almost $3 billion! To her degree of success and power, it took a lot of perseverance and wisdom.
Here are the ten rules of success according to Oprah Winfrey.
Source: https://moneyinc.com/10-rules-success-according-oprah-winfrey/
“Successful people, such as professional athletes and other top performers, have used visualization techniques to visualize their desired outcomes for ages.”
Visualization is one of the most powerful tools you can use to accomplish any goal you set for yourself. Visualization can be applied to help you improve your performance and be successful in all aspects of your life.
Visualization works because when you visualize, your mind and body don’t really know the difference between what you visualize and reality. When you visualize your goal, you create the thoughts, focus and energy that will help to pull that goal towards you.
When you visualize, your body and mind react as if they were true. Many people believe that when you believe something to be true, you attract it to you. When you visualize your success as reality you can also visualize your path to get there.https://t.co/K2kP4WSlu5
— ELB (@ebrownl33) March 23, 2022
The Power of Visualization.
When you visualize, your body and mind react as if they were true. Many people believe that when you believe something to be true, you attract it to you – you make it true.
However, believing something to be true doesn’t necessarily make it happen. For many people taking action is challenging due to lack of confidence or a lack of belief in their goal. Visualization, because it taps directly into these emotions, can strengthen your belief in yourself, in your abilities and in your goals.
Additionally, visualization helps paint the scene so you can better plan and prepare for success. When you visualize your success as reality you can also visualize your path to get there.
Before taking the stage to speak to a large audience, Matt Mayberry, Maximum Performance Strategist and a former NFL linebacker, always picture himself giving the “perfect” speech. He would begin weeks in advance by picturing the audience and the positive reaction from the crowd.
Top performers, among many others, have mastered the technique of positive visualization and openly credit it as a success tactic. Practice makes improvement. Practicing visualization isn’t just a fun exercise – the better you become at visualization the faster you will achieve the success you desire.
When you think of a big goal or dream that you want to achieve, it’s natural to think of all of the obstacles that will come your way.
All top performers, regardless of profession, know well the importance of and consistently practice of picturing themselves succeeding in their minds before they actually do in reality. It is extremely effective when harnessed and used correctly.
“The key to effective visualization is to create the most detailed, clear, and vivid a picture to focus on.”
Research shows that the more you focus on the things you desire, the better chance you have at getting them. For example, struggling comedian and actor, Jim Carrey used to picture himself being the greatest actor in the world. When Carey was still a “wannabe” during one of his appearances on “The Oprah Winfrey Show”, he spoke about his early days trying to make it in the entertainment business. He was broke and had no future. But he took a blank check and wrote out $10 million dollars to himself for acting services rendered and dated it five year in the future.
Subsequently, he carried that check in his wallet at all times and looked at it every morning, visualizing receiving $10 million. Five years after he wrote the check to himself, he found out that he was going to earn $10 million from the movie “Dumb and Dumber.”
Consider two other examples:
As the examples demonstrate, you to can visualize and create an image of what you most desire. You create a detailed mental scene of what it looks like as you achieve your goal. Visualize it happening now, and the scene that is playing out.
There is a big difference in imaging your goals and making them feel so real your mind believes it has already happened. The more you surround yourself with imagery or words related to your goal, the more real it will become to you.
To make any habit stick, you need to continue to do that habit. The same goes for visualization, the more you practice the quicker you will be in the frame of mind that helps pave the way to success.
Visualization is extremely powerful in helping you achieve success and realize your goals. However, you will still need to put in the hard work and dedication. Don’t forget to repeat, repeat, repeat!
Get in the habit of putting together a positive vision into your everyday life. Visualize yourself succeeding, achieving every goal, accomplishing every task. The key is to make your positive vision stronger than anything that can set you back. The more vivid you can get, the better it will work for you. Start thinking of your personal goals in life. Spend about 10 to 15 minutes picturing yourself achieving each one.
Get as detailed as possible. Picture what you will do once your goal is reached. How amazing does it feel? How will this change the course of your life? Remember, the little details increase the likelihood of the big picture.
It’s important to understand that visualization alone isn’t enough. But, it is an integral part of the process of you becoming the best version of yourself. That’s the power of visualizing your dreams. That’s the power of dreaming. That’s the power of relentlessly believing and working toward your vision every single day.
If you can’t visualize yourself being extremely successful, dominating your profession, and running a phenomenal business, then chances are you never will.
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“The stock market is a device to transfer money from the impatient to the patient.” — Warren Buffett
Patience is ofter referred to as the most underused investing skill and virute. And, learning patience could help you reach your financial goals of wealth building and finacial freedom.
Be extremely patient when investing in assets and wait until you can buy an investment at an entry price when everybody else hates the investment or are extremely pessimistic about the prospects of the investment.
In other words, wait until you can buy the asset at a extremely discounted price. Keep in mind that every investment is affected by what you pay for it. The less you pay, the better your rate of return on that investment. Never, Never, Never…overpay for an investment.
People feel losses twice as much as they feel gains.
Successful investors develop a number of valuable skills over their lifetimes. And many report that patience is the most important skill to learn and master, but often it goes underused.
We’re not born patient. But, patience can be learned and, if you’re an investor, learning it could help you reach your financial goals.
Patience often involves staying calm in situations where you lack control. Even if we’re patient in some parts of life, we have to practice and adapt to be patient in new situations. Just because you’re a patient person while waiting in line at the DMV doesn’t mean you’re a patient investor.
Alway keep in mind and retain the mantra that…if there is a good opportunity now, a better one will come in the future.
Yet, patience can be difficult for investors to master, why it’s an important investing skill and how to apply patience to investing.
Why Is it so Hard to Be Patient?
Simply put, your brain makes it hard to be patient. Human beings were designed to react to threats, either real or perceived. Stressful situations trigger a physiological response in people. You’ve likely heard this called the “fight-or-flight” response — either attack or run away, whatever helps alleviate the threat.
The problem is, your body doesn’t recognize the difference between true physical danger (during which fighting or fleeing would actually be helpful) and psychological triggers, like scary movies. Being patient is difficult because it means overcoming these natural instincts. Turbulent financial markets can trigger the response too but, unlike scary movies, there can be real-world impacts you’ll need patience to overcome.
When markets are seesawing and you’re overwhelmed with negative financial media, as we experienced this year during the pandemic-driven bear market, your brain perceives a threat to your financial well-being. Even though stock market volatility isn’t a physical threat, the fight-or-flight response kicks in, emotion takes over, and your brain starts telling you to do something. Your investment portfolio is being harmed! Take action! Now! With investing, action too often translates into selling something because selling feels like you’re shielding your portfolio from further harm. But selling at the wrong time — like in the middle of a major downturn — is one of the biggest investment mistakes you can make.
Impatient investors let anxiety and emotion rule their decision-making. Their tendency towards “doing something” can lead to detrimental investing behaviors: checking account balances too often, focusing on short-term volatility, selling or buying at the wrong time or abandoning a long-term strategic investment plan. And those bad behaviors could damage investors’ long-term returns.
Selling out of the market during a correction might feel like you’re taking prudent action. And you may even derive some pleasure in seeing the market continue to fall after you’ve sold your equities. But that pleasure could soon be replaced by regret, because consistently and correctly timing the market by selling and buying back in at the right time requires an incredible amount of luck — and we don’t know any investors who have that much luck.
Investment entry point and investor patience are super-important too.
Benjamin Graham, known as the “father of value investing,” knew the importance of patience in investing. Patience and investing are actually natural partners. Investing is a long-term prospect, the benefits of which typically come after many years. Patience, too, is a behavior where the benefits are mostly long-term. To be patient is to endure some short-term hardship for a future reward.
The importance of being patient when investing can be best summed in this quote by Benjamin Graham…“In the end, how your investments behave is much less important than how you behave.”
“We agree with Warren Buffet’s observation that the stock market is designed to transfer money from the active to the patient. By only swinging at fat pitches and avoiding curveballs thrown far outside the strike zone, we attempt to compound your capital at an above average rate while incurring a below average level risk. In investing, patience often means the accumulation of large cash balances as we wait to purchase ‘compounding machines’ at valuations that provide a margin of safety.” Chuck Akre
Compounding works exponentially for the patient investor. The power of compounding is one of the most important concepts that investors need to learn and embrace. Since, patient and time are better friends to the investor than experience, expertise, and even research.
“A lot of people historically have done fairly well investing in companies they just genuinely like, whether it’s been Starbucks or Nike.” Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO, VAYNERMEDIA
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“You don’t make money when you buy a stock, you don’t make money when you sell a stock, you make money by being patient and you make money by waiting.” Charlie Munger
Successful investing in stocks and building wealth does not have to be a complex or difficult personal financial enterprise. Focusing on a few “tried and true” investing rules and behaving rationally is effectively what it takes. And, keep in the forefront that, “Every investment is the present value of all future cash flow.” The rules or universal investing laws to follow are:
Given the above investing rules, many successful investors repeatedly proclaim that the most important virtue with respect to long term investing is ‘patience’. As a tree takes time to grow, similarly investing will also take time to grow and build wealth. So, stay patient! Essentially, you should think of investing as a long term compounding system.
In contrast, impatient investors let anxiety and emotion rule their behavior and decision-making. They often succumb to the ever present tendency towards “doing something”.
Investing is the practice of leveraging one’s patience and exploiting the market’s impatience when it comes to seeking long term value. As Warren Buffett explained, “The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.”
“Investing is one of the only fields where doing nothing — sitting, being patient — is a competitive advantage.” Motley Fool
Nothing should be a rush or expedited with respect to investing. If there isn’t a good investment opportunity now, there will be a better one in the future. It’s just a matter of believing that there is a great investment around the bend.
Thus, it’s essential that you have patience and inherently understand that opportunities exist as long as you’re not buying assets just for the sake of being in an investment or succumbed to the “fear of missing out”.
Been patient is Key Value Investing 🤓🤫 pic.twitter.com/WuzISgia2W
— Diluksha Roshan Fernando (@DilukshaRoshan) February 19, 2022
Here are three quotes that express concisely the sentimant of a being patient investor:
“We agree with Warren Buffet’s observation that the stock market is designed to transfer money from the active to the patient. By only swinging at fat pitches and avoiding curveballs thrown far outside the strike zone, we attempt to compound your capital at an above average rate while incurring a below average level risk. In investing, patience often means the accumulation of large cash balances as we wait to purchase ‘compounding machines’ at valuations that provide a margin of safety.” — Chuck Akre
“The single most important skill set that you can bring to value investing is patience. You have to have a temperament where you’re very happy watching paint dry. I would say that is the most difficult thing for investors and you can trade lot of IQ points for patience. You don’t need a lot of IQ points but you need a lot of patience. That’s the piece that usually gets missed.” — Mohnish Pabrai
And finally…
“The key rules are don’t swing the bat unless it’s a slow pitch right down the middle of the plate, and don’t be bullied by the market into doing something irrational, whether buying or selling. This may sound obvious or clichéd to some, and perhaps confusingly ironic to others, but the ability to sit and do nothing may be the most rare and valuable investing skill of all. Inevitably, extreme price dislocations occur that create real opportunities for action, and only the patient and prepared investor can recognize such ideal situations and take full advantage.” — Chris Mittleman
Patience and discipline are the keys to successful investing and building wealthy through the magic of compounding. Thus, a key takeaway…investing in stocks is a long term game of patience, patience, patience!
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“Since “someday” never appears on the calendar, our good intentions don’t turn into action until we create deadlines.” Amy Morin
A staggering 92 percent of Americans that set New Year’s resolution goals never actually accomplish them, according to research by the University of Scranton.
But, when people followed two simple concepts — setting specific and challenging goals — it led to higher accomplishment of goals 90 percent of the time, according to research by Dr Edwin Locke and Dr Gary Latham. Basically, the more specific and challenging the goals you set, the higher your motivation toward hitting them while your easy or vague goals rarely get met.
Here’s an example: If your goal between now and the end of the year is to, say, lose 20 pounds, that may be challenging, but it’s not specific enough.
It’s essential to eliminate vagueness and make it more achievable by stating it in a more detailed manner: During the month of August, I will lose five pounds by cutting off refined sugar, breads, and all fast food. I will also walk briskly for twenty minutes every day.
On the flip side, goals that are too difficult to accomplish don’t get met either. While it’s important to challenge yourself, nobody completes a goal when he/she is overwhelmed by the magnitude and difficulty in accomplishing the goal.
If you find yourself with such a scenario, break down your BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) into smaller bites you can actually chew. Use the same process of defining specific and challenging marks to hit when mapping out the smaller goals that will lead you to your final destination.
Additionally, those who succeed at accomplishing their BHAG, they tend to want it badly. So, it’s essential to determine what is your level of commitment? Are you totally committed to reaching your goal even when obstacles occur along the way? Are you committed to “do whatever it takes” to reach your destination. And, do you have the desire or passion to pursue the goal to reach it.
According to Locke and Latham’s research, there are five goal setting principles that can improve dramatically your chances of accomplishing your goals:
“Even if your goal is something that will take a long time to reach — like saving enough money for retirement — you’re more likely to take action if you have time limits in the present. Create target dates to reach your objectives. Find something you can do this week to begin taking some type of action now.” Amy Morin, Psychotherapist and author of ’13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do’
Additionally, the following strategies can increase your likelihood of accomplishing your goals:
Identify some of those goals and dreams that you’ve always wanted to work on but just never had the motivation to start. Look for strategies that will help you view those goals in terms of the present and you’ll increase the likelihood that you’ll start taking steps to turn those dreams into a reality, explains Amy Morin
Goal setting is something that many of us recognize as a vital part of achieving success in the areas of health, wealth and emotional well-being. Understandably, goal-setting research confirms the usefulness of SMART goal setting.
To use the results of the research, you must set clear, challenging goals and commit yourself to achieving them. Be sure to get regular feedback on your progress towards achieving your goals. Also, consider the complexity, and break your goals down into smaller chunks, where appropriate.
If you follow these simple rules, your goal setting will be much more successful, and your overall performance and accomplishment rate will improve.
The path to building wealth and financial freedom is paved with goals!!!
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Investing and managing money successfully is all about how you behave. Morgan Housel
Most investors are not as smart as they thought they were a year ago in the midst of a raging bull market and rising stock prices. Fortunately, they’re also not as dumb as they feel today during a market correction, says Morgan Housel, author of “The Psychology of Money”
Investing, specifically successful investing, is, and has always been, the study of how people behave with money. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart and educated people. Effectively, success in investing is achieved by being patient and remaining calm through ‘punctuated moments of terror’ and volatility in the market.
You can’t sum up behavior with systems to follow, formulas to memorize or spreadsheet models to follow, according to Housel. Behavior is both inborn and learned, varies by person, is hard to to measure, changes over time, and people are prone to deny its existence, especially when describing themselves.
Actually, the best strategy is to invest as a long-term business owner which isn’t widely practiced on Wall Street or Main Street. It’s one thing to say you care about long-term value and another to actually behave as a long-term business owner. None of this is easy, but it’s never been easy. That’s what makes investing interesting.
The only thing that you can control in investing is your own behavior.
There is the old pilot quip that their jobs flying airplanes are “hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” It’s the same in investing. Your success as an investor will be determined by how you respond to punctuated moments of terror, not the years spent on cruise control.
Managing money and investing isn’t necessarily about what you know; it’s how you behave. But that’s not how finance is typically taught or discussed in business school and at financial institutions. The financial industry talks too much about what to do, and not enough about what happens in your head when you try to do it.
There were 1,428 months between 1900 and 2019. Just over 300 of them were during a recession. So by keeping your cool and staying in the market during just the 22% of the time the economy was in or near a recession would have allowed your investments to compound and to grow significantly.
You must invest in the U.S. stock market every month, rain or shine. It doesn’t matter if economists are screaming about a looming recession or new bear market. You just keep investing. How you behaved as an investor during a few months will have the greatest impact on your lifetime returns.
There is the old pilot quip that their jobs are “hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” It’s the same in investing. Your success as an investor will be determined by how you respond to punctuated moments of terror, not the years spent on cruise control.
For many investors, they are their own worst enemies. Since, the biggest risk to you as an investor is yourself and your own biases, your win mindset, your own misconceptions, your own behaviors, that impact your returns as an investor.
“Investing is not the study of finance. It’s a study of how people behave with money. It’s a really broad, all-encompassing field of how people make decisions around risk and greed and fear and scarcity and opportunity,” says Housel.
You can’t control what the economy is going to do or how the market will react. You can’t control what the Fed is going to do next. The only thing that you can control in investing is your own behavior. Thus, it’s important you realize that the one thing you can control, your behavior, is the thing that makes the biggest difference over time. Your investing behavior is the most fundamental factor in your investing success.
Simply, investing is about how you behave with money. And, it’s the ability to sacrifice spending money in the present with the expectation of making money in the future. Investing is a risk.
“A good definition of an investing genius is the man or woman who can do the average thing when all those around them are going crazy.” Morgan Housel
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Value investing is one of the most preferred ways to find strong companies and buy their stocks at a reasonable price in any type of market.
Value investors, such as Warren Buffett and Monish Pabrai, use fundamental analysis and traditional valuation metrics like intrinsic a value to find companies that they believe are being undervalued intrinsically by the stock market.
A stock is not just a ticker symbol; it is an ownership interest in an actual business with an underlying value that does not depend on its share market price.
Inflation eats away at your returns and takes away your wealth. Inflation is easy to overlook and it is important to measure your investing success not just by what you make, but by how much you keep after inflation. Defenses against inflation include:
The future value of every investment is a function of its present price. The higher the price you pay, the lower your return will be.
No matter how careful you are, the one risk no investor can ever eliminate is the risk of being wrong. Only by insisting on a margin of safety – by never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be – can you minimize your odds of error.
Knowing that you are responsible is fundamental to saving for the future, building wealth and achieving financial freedom. It’s the primary secret to your financial success and it’s inside yourself. If you become a critical thinker and you invest with patient confidence, you can take steady advantage of even the worst bear markets. By developing your discipline and courage, you can refuse to let other people’s mood swings govern your financial destiny. In the end, how your investments behave is much less important than how you behave.
Every investment is the present value of future cash flow. Everything Money
Three things to know is that it’s important to understand and acknowledge that a stock is a piece of a business. Thus, it becomes essential to understand the business..
Because the stock market has the emotions of fear and greed, the lesson here is that you shouldn’t let Mr. Market’s views dictate your own emotions, or worse, lead you in your investment decisions. Instead, you should form your own estimates of the business’s value based on a sound and rational examination of the facts.
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A major factor regarding effectively managing your money and achieving financial freedom is maintaining a positive and confident mindset. Maintaining a positive growth mindset takes effort and knowledge. Here are some ways to start thinking about financial matters and building wealth:
Focus On What You Want – And Take It! So many people are too timid to admit they want something and go for it. When there is something that you want to accomplish don’t think “I could never actually do that”, think “I could do that and I WILL do that”. Play to win, not to avoid defeat.
This doesn’t mean to have to become a selfish jerk. What it means is becoming more assertive and honest with yourself. You don’t have to grab off other people. There is a big pot of unclaimed gold in the middle of the table — why shouldn’t you be the one to claim it? You deserve it!
Confront closely-held beliefs. Spend some time dissecting and understanding the previously-held beliefs you have about money. You learn a lot about money from your family at a young age—either that money is good or money is evil, for example.
Some people may grow up believing that money is a scarce resource, while others understand money as a tool. There are many numbers of qualities that get assigned to money that are not objectively true.
If you have major fear or shame regarding money, you may want to consider working through these emotions with a financial therapist. Your feelings are valid—but that doesn’t mean you have to live with them.
Integrate affirmations into your daily routine. You may find affirmations to be a grounding part of your day. For example, affirmations such as “I am worthy of wealth,” “I am capable of managing my money,” and “There is money out there to be made by me” could act as helpful reminders that you are in charge of your money and not the other way around.
To develop a positive mindset and to become a person who is “good with money”, it is essential to understand that achieving financial freedom and accumulating wealth is a journey. So, consider taking it step by step. Start by building familiarity with your financial situation, and look for small ways to improve it and make it better every day.
Don’t Spend Your Money – Invest It. The reason you need to save your money is to grow it by investing it for the long term. Millionaires tend to be frugal people, and that’s because they know the true value of money is in investing. Being your own boss goes hand-in-hand with building wealth. You’ll want to quit your regular job at some point.
Bottomline is to stop working for your money and invest, which puts your money to work for you.
Rather than buying yourself a new iPad, that $500 could be used to invest in the stock market. Find the right shares (more on that later), and that money could easily double within a year.
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“It’s a textbook example of why panic is not a[n investment] strategy, unless you’re deliberately trying to lose money.” Jim Cramer, CNBC Mad Money Host
CNBC Mad Money Host Jim Cramer made his comments after the stock market indexes moved higher after a previous major market downturn due to COVID-19 Omicron variant concerns and fear. Wall Street experienced a strong melt-up session led by the technology heavy Nasdaq Index’s 3% jump.
Markets had sold off sharply on November 26, with the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq all losing more than 2% in market cap value as investors knee-jerked reacted to the discovery of the Omicron variant.
“I want you to use it as a reminder that, most of the time, it pays to wait for cooler heads to prevail rather than freaking out in a situation where everyone else is freaking out and lost their heads without complete information,” Cramer said.
“Look, it would’ve been great if you bought stocks something near the lows—that’s what I urged you to do, actually, even if you had to hold your nose because we were simply too oversold. I was relying on technicals,” Cramer said. “But the cardinal sin here was selling stocks out of fear, rather than sitting tight out of rationality.”
The obvious takeaway for investors is that fear and panic are not sound investment strategies, “…unless you’re deliberately trying to lose money.” Never make permanent investment decisions based on temporary market circumstances.
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