If your dream has anything to do with financial success, you need to learn something about what I call “The Entrepreneurial Mind.”

There is a very famous statement made by the writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald that goes like this: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”

Fitzgerald was both right and wrong.  The rich are very different from most people, not because they have more money, but because, if they have made their own wealth and not just inherited it, they have a way of looking at life that is simply different from most of the people in the world.   And that makes all the difference.

I call it, “the Entrepreneurial Mind”, and it is an enormously powerful tool.  It is the difference between those who rise to the top 20%--or even the top 1%--of the economy and those who wonder why they haven’t.  It is also something that anyone can learn and develop if they really want to.  

The best way I can illustrate the process of change from conventional thinking to the Entrepreneurial Mind is a very personal example.

As a young man, I used to have a fantasy that one morning I would wake up rich and never have to work again.  Then one New Year’s morning as I read the morning newspaper, I realized something:  I didn’t have to work that year—or any other year, ever!  Nor would I have to lower my standard of living or change my lifestyle.  

An even greater realization came later—and that is what I want to share.  I didn’t get to financial and personal freedom because I started out rich

Or was smarter

Or had a better education

Or won the lottery or a Las Vegas jackpot

What really happened was that, over time, using some of the techniques we have already discussed, I was lucky enough to realize that the power to change my life was within me and not dependent on anyone else’s rules. 

Your definition of success can be anything from wanting to create highly successful companies to wanting to cure cancer, but if you can’t wake up every morning wanting to achieve that goal—and loving even the tedious things you have to do to get there—then just get a job, put in your 40 hours per week, and hope that the pension they promised you will actually be there.   For some, that is enough. For me, it would have been a slow death.

But most of us are programmed from a very early age to believe that a lot of things are just impossible for us, that we are too poor, to uneducated, from the wrong ethnic group or have the wrong skin color to succeed.  Those negative belief systems can destroy our dreams.

I could tell you story after story—all true—of friends of mine who have started with nothing but a belief in themselves and achieved incredible success. One was an orphan in a war torn foreign country who came to this country with no money and without speaking English; another was a young man who had to flee from Iran after the revolution at the risk of being put to death by the revolutionaries and arrived in New York with little more than the clothes on his back; another is a woman whose mother was murdered, she herself was raped, and her business destroyed.  Yet each of these people is now extremely happy and successful.

The reason:  they each believed that they had the power to create their own success, no matter what happened to them from the outside.  And they did just that. How does one do that?  You replace every negative thought that tells you why you can’t succeed with one that says, “Why not; I can do that.”  It takes time and practice and there are many resources, books, courses, mentors that can help you get there, but the key to it all is to believe and act as if you were already the success you intend to be; and make that the overwhelming priority in your life.