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About Dean Graziosi

Dean Graziosi is an author, entrepreneur, and investor. At this point, he has started or been involved in over 13 influential companies. Additionally, he has written multiple New York Times Best Sellers, including Millionaire Success Habits. Dean places a strong emphasis on self-education rather than traditional education for achieving success. Recently, Dean Graziosi and Tony Robbins started the Knowledge Business Blueprint. It is now the largest online training course in history, with over 200 thousand people tuning in. 

Synopsis

Millionaire Success Habits aims to guide its readers away from where they currently are in life to where they want to be. Dean Graziosi introduces specific success habits that everybody can incorporate to push their lives in the right direction. These success habits won’t eat into your day. Instead, they will replace bad habits that are slowing down your momentum towards success. Dean focuses on becoming exceptional in things you are already good at rather than attempting to rectify your weaknesses. Plus, taking control of yourself, your schedule, and the people around you so that you can be the best version of yourself.

Understand Your Why

“It doesn’t matter how fast you can go, it doesn’t matter how much passion you have, and it doesn’t matter how much energy you put into something. If you don’t have a vision and clarity on the destination you want to reach, you’ll simply never get there.”

– Dean Graziosi

Adopt a Strong Why

Building successful habits should always start with a strong why. Without a strong why, you will quickly fall back into old habits. Any challenges will encourage you to return to the path of the least resistance. The author, Dean Graziosi, provides an example of his why in life. Specifically, Dean explains his mother died a few years ago. At this time, Dean was a drug addict. Even though Dean’s mother was an excellent parent, Dean states his behavior meant she didn’t observe the positive impact she had on him. Dean’s mother passing away is what gave him his why. At that point, he decided he would show his mother that she raised a good son who will have a positive impact. Adopting such a powerful why is sure to prevent you from procrastinating or diverting from your life goals. 

The Seven Levels

Dean introduces a Seven Levels Deep exercise to help readers identify their own why in life. This exercise involves someone asking you why you want to do something, with this why being built upon seven questions. For example, the first question will probably be something generic: ‘Why do you want to quit your job and create your own business?’ Then, the second will be a follow-up to your answer to this question. The other individual is questioning each answer so that you can eventually, by the 7th answer, create compelling answers. It is at this point in the questioning that you are likely to identify your why in life. Make sure that you don’t stop answering questions before the seventh question. Plus, make sure that you choose a partner with whom you feel comfortable answering questions honestly. 

Kill Off the Villain Inside

Dean states we all have a villain living inside us. This villain is the voice that tells us we can’t do something or question whether we deserve certain rewards. Often, this villain is particularly prominent when we are seeking to reach a higher goal. However, we are feeding this villain daily. Every time we accept a negative thought, react with self-deprecating language, react out of character, or adopt a negative language, we feed this villain. However, we all have foods that we are more prone to giving this villain. Therefore, we need to understand better what prevents us from achieving financial, romantic, aesthetic, and artistic success. Once we better understand how we support our villain, we can start to starve this villain. 

Words Have a Significant Impact

Dean suggests the words we use daily have a significant impact on our villain. For example, Dean recommends changing how you respond to the question, ‘How are you doing?’ Instead of merely saying you are okay, you must try to respond with ‘Fantastic!’ If there is an opportunity to use positive language, you should grasp it. Saying that you are okay is neutral, and you will gain nothing from it. Instead, use your words as a tool to challenge your inner villain. 

Actions to Avoid

Successful people, whether they’re working for somebody else or working for themselves, do whatever they do to the best of their ability—as if the boss is watching them every minute of every day. I learned that in everything you do, always do your best.”

– Dean Graziosi

One of the actions that encourages our villains more than any other is doing things we struggle with. Almost everybody will tell you that doing things you are bad at and working on your weaknesses is hugely important. This approach is something we are told by our parents, teachers, and bosses. Teachers would make us focus particularly hard on a topic we struggled with. Then, our parents would force us to put extra effort into the homework related to that topic. Dean says we should be doing the exact opposite. Instead of focusing on fixing our weaknesses, we should focus on what we are already good at. Focusing on our strengths will help us to become exceptional rather than ordinary. 

Dean also suggests we try to avoid engaging with daily feeds. The news is full of negative stories that will only feed your villain. News stories are filled with wars, famine, terrorist attacks, and suffering. Exposing yourself to this will only have a negative impact on you. Swap this time with a positive alternative, like listening to a podcast or video on a niche topic. One example could be listening to a podcast on investing. Dean still suggests avoiding any niche podcasts with negative news at their core, like a podcast on financial crashes. Instead, look for positive examples of educational content in your chosen niche field. 

Create Confidence by Becoming Your Heroic Self

Confidence Breeds Success

Dean encourages you to identify the last time you made an excellent investment or got a promotion when your confidence was low. Our success is almost always tied to our confidence. Dean states that even a 5% decrease in confidence can keep us from acting to make a difference in our lives. Hence, we must always strive to maximize our confidence.

How to Improve Your Confidence

Dean provides an exercise we can all engage with that can improve our confidence:

1. Find an unflattering photo of yourself. Don’t go easy on yourself here. You want this to be a genuinely embarrassing photo. Dean provides the example of photos where you were perhaps more overweight, less happy, or hugely drained of energy on that day.
2. Then, put this picture on a piece of paper and label it with unflattering words, including negative emotions you were feeling at this time.
3. Nickname this version of yourself with a name that you would hate. Make it something embarrassing and something personal.
4. Then, on the opposite side of the same paper, you should put a picture showing you at your best. This should be a photo of a time when you were happy, successful, and looking your best.
5. Label this photo with encouraging words. For example, characteristics that you aspire to be.
6. Finally, name this heroic version of yourself with a nickname that genuinely represents the strength, success, and power you have in this photo. Along with this, try to include some attributes and strengths that you may not have had at that time. Additionally, these attributes should be ones you would like to have in the future.
7. After you have created this tool, you should take a picture of these two persons next to each other. From now on, you are officially the heroic version of yourself. 

Therefore, whenever your confidence is feeling low, and you are thinking negatively, you should take these two photos out. Consider which version you want to be. Your heroic self should bring you inspiration and push you to take positive steps towards reaching that level of happiness and success again. Use this photo as motivation to recover from difficult situations.

Look at Things From a Return on Investment Perspective

Improve Your Return On Investment

You should be thinking about every action in your life in the context of returns on investment. Dean provides the example of individuals who work 9-5, have to find time to work on their entrepreneurial project, and do housework. Doing all these things yourself is inefficient and does not provide you an adequate return on investment. 

Dean recommends we focus on the areas that we are exceptionally talented. There are areas where we are far less efficient than others. These duties drain us of the energy required to be successful in the areas we are talented in. In this instance, Dean recommends we outsource the inefficient tasks. There will always be somebody else who is willing to do these activities for you. Due to their higher efficiency, you will be obtaining a better return on investment. 

Outsource Effective to Improve Your Efficiency

Outsourcing distracting tasks can also help you become more efficient in the crucial tasks to you. Dean provides an analogy to explain this point. Consider an individual who earns $50 per hour. It does not make sense for this individual to spend an hour cooking to save $10 by not getting a takeaway. Subsequently, this individual obtains a better return on investment by outsourcing their cooking and working during this hour.

Dean describes something called the Unique Ability Circle as a tool to understand the things you should and should not outsource:

1. Take a piece of paper and create a circle in the middle of it. In this circle, you should write ‘unique ability.’
2. Add three more circles around the first one and write the words’ excellent’, ‘good’, and ‘terrible’. You should write them in this order.
3. Then, in the middle, you should write your abilities and the activities associated with those abilities. Plus, include the activities that make you the most amount of money and you enjoy the most.
4. Ensure that the majority of your day consists of these activities from the inner part of your circle. Then, outsource everything else.

Three Productivity Hacks

Dean describes productivity as anything that moves you towards your goal. Anything that is not productive is making you lose momentum. You can lose momentum from actions that are slowing you down and actions that are keeping you at the same level. The latter involves losing momentum as you could replace those actions with ones that improve your productivity. Therefore, we should always be focusing solely on the activities that move us forwards. 

Dean provides an example of how new real estate investors should streamline their actions to improve their productivity. Dean suggests these investors should only focus on:

• Creating unique marketing
• Making offers on houses
• Building a buyer’s list
• Selling Houses

Any other action for real estate investors is a waste of time. 

You can take specific approaches to minimize the likelihood of wasting time and maximize your focus on productive actions.

Schedule your day

This is one of the most common tips. However, you have to ask yourself whether you have a proper schedule in place. Plus, do you follow this schedule? Dean explains that one of the most common reasons for failure is that people schedule too much into their day. Therefore, Dean recommends scheduling just 2 hours of uninterrupted productive work each day on your project of choice. You can get lots done in this amount of time, and it is not expecting too much of yourself. Once you have shown that you can consistently fit this amount of productive time into your day, you should seek to scale up. Then, this productivity will become a habit.

Build systems around your working processes

As well as scheduling your day, you should aim to systemize your most common working habits. Developing systems within your habits will significantly improve your productivity. Building systems will also help reduce the resistance you feel towards getting started on an activity. After developing a baseline for your system, it will become easier to improve this process and make it even more productive. Dean recommends you first focus on your systems’ bottlenecks, e.g., the activities within each system that take up almost all your time.

Don’t be accessible at all times

When Dean outlines accessibility, he talks about emails, social media, and phone calls. In time, people will learn and accept you are not available 24/7. This rigid approach will breed respect. Your accessibility also relates to your habits. Tell yourself that you should never rationalize unproductive distractions; you should never be accessible to these distractions. Having a bad day is not an excuse for sitting on social media for an hour. Dean recommends you set limits on your phone regarding how much time you can spend using certain apps. Dean describes this as an info weight reduction program. Instead of spending your time exposing yourself to this detrimental media, you can spend it feeding your hero. Feed your hero instead of your villain.

With text messaging and emails buzzing in our pockets, our constant availability for phone calls, and hot new apps and social media on our phones, we are more distracted, more unfocused and more enmeshed in sweating the small stuff than ever before. And this leads to many of us feeling like we’re sprinting every day but really not getting anywhere.”

– Dean Graziosi

Optimize Your Social Circle

Everybody in your life is either a battery drainer or a battery charger. Essentially, some people will continuously be robbing us of our confidence, wasting our time, and stopping us from being productive. These people are battery drainers and are feeding our villains. Then, some people empower us and feed our heroic selves. We should spend more time with empowering individuals.

Dean also recommends we surround ourselves with individuals who embody what we want to be. Humans tend to adapt to their environment and mirror the people they surround themselves with. Hence, Dean states we should surround ourselves with productive people who are financially stable and aspirational. 

Don’t Get Stuck in Habits

Although positive habits are essential, Dean also suggests we should never let ourselves get stuck in cycles of habits. He provides the analogy of a farmer who travels the same route in his tractor for 20 years. Over time, the route this tractor has taken will start to develop ruts on its path. These ruts will become so deep that the farmer won’t even have to steer their tractor anymore. This rut is what long-term habits are like. The longer we use specific habits, the more automated they become. Automation can prevent us from achieving new goals. Therefore, Dean recommends making minor changes to your life and your habits. He does not expect people to change their lives completely. Instead, keep yourself on your toes by making small changes to your habits occasionally. Small shifts yield large outcomes.

Comment below and let others know what you have learned or if you have any other thoughts.

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