11 Skills That Millionaires Master

One of the many things I firmly believe is that anybody who learns the skill sets of a millionaire can become a millionaire. When I say “anybody,” I mean anybody, minus people with severe limitations such as health and disabilities.

 In today’s video I’m wearing a shirt that says, “Enjoy Capitalism.” It’s not a perfect system, but I’ve lived in socialistic environments, dictatorship environments, and with half of my family that are communists and imperialists, and after experiencing all of those things, I believe in capitalism.

I have followers in 220 countries around the world,and I encourage people to study capitalism because it works effectively.

People say things like, “You don’t understand, I don’t come from a rich family” — I didn’t either. My dad worked at a 99 cent store for 15 years. My parents got a divorce. My mother had to go back to Iran because she ran out of money. I’m a welfare child. I joined the Army. I had a 1.8 GPA.

If you ask any of my high school buddies, they’d tell you that I’m the last person anyone would have ever expected to become successful. But there was one event — my father having a heart attack — that completely changed me. And it wasn’t a temporary change. It was a permanent change.

A lot of people work hard for 90 days and then go back to their bad habits. It takes a permanent, obsessive change to make the kind of money that millionaires make.

It’s important to understand that the money is out there. It circulates.

I want you to think about the money I have in my wallet right now. This $200? Ask how many people has this touched? Thousands and thousands of people have touched it, and it’s with me now. I can do what I want with it, but it will keep circulating. Eventually, the hands that get it the most are the ones that learn the skill sets of attracting this and retaining it and growing it.

And in this video I cover the 11 skills that millionaires master.

#1: Persuasion

Millionaires master the skill of persuasion on many levels. They have to master:

• Family, so they’ll get their support as an entrepreneur
• Investors
• Employees to come and work with them when they’re small
• People, to convince them that their product or industry matters

You even have to persuade yourself. You have to psyche yourself out to get into the mode of wanting to work on a daily basis.

#2: Reading People

Millionaires generally become good at reading people because they’ve been ripped off, back-stabbed, lied to and cheated so many times that there are a lot of signals they learn to recognize.

You have to be able to read customers, employees. You have to be able to read people who are absolutely full of it. Sometimes it surprises me how easily some people who are reasonably successful fall for the trap of believing someone who is full of it.

Reading people isn’t just on a negative side. You need to also be able to read people you to make a right effort to take care of, and treat them in a way they need to be treated.

Another one is being able to think what a customer is going to need now, a year from now, three years from now, and so on.

You need to be able to read a person that starts with your company at an early stage, and what they were thinking about when they were at your level. Millionaires need to be able to read people at all stages, and give people the belief they need at their level.

#3: Sharing the Wealth

The people that I’ve met who have created a lot of wealth, share that wealth with others.

When Steve Jobs died, he only owned .6% of Apple stock. Think about it, the founder only ended up owning .6% of stock. So many people became wealthy with Microsoft, with Amazon and anything that’s ever at the highest scale, wealth has to be created by multiple people.

There was a gentleman I worked with who was Jewish. He always told me things about why the Jewish community makes money. He told me that the key to success in the Jewish community is that when they make money, a lot of people make money. If you’re like that, everyone wants to go into business with you because they know that people who go into business with you make a lot of money.

#4: Leverage

Millionaires master leverage. One of the reasons they understand leverage is that the sooner you learn that in order to do anything big, you need a team is the sooner you’ll start scaling at a very fast pace.

A lot of driven, self-motivated guys that have high GPAs or did very good in school and had good grades and are perfectionists , they typically have the hardest time. The guys that didn’t have the best grades don’t have a hard time with this because they’ve always needed help, and they recognize that they still need help. But the ones that did things well in school independently have a hard time knowing they need help.

Leverage is a big deal. You have to learn how to delegate and crowdsource. I love to ask my staff what they think about things. I like to ask every type of personality, such as people who are very skeptical but very technical and smart, someone who is excitable, someone who is normally in the middle. I want to get input from everyone because I want to know what they think about. That’s all a part of leverage.

So leverage is team, recruiting, sales, software, technology, social media, marketing, branding, collaborating — in everything you need to ask, “How can I leverage to make this thing go faster?”

#5: Recruiting 

You recruit a media platform to build you up. You recruit talent. Executives. The best sales people. You recruit friends that want to go into business with you. You recruit solid, high-identity associations. You recruit good friends. You recruit other people who are extremely successful that also want to associate with you. You recruit them, and not in a way to sell them anything. It’s to sit down and talk and learn from them. You recruit a board.

You recruit the best mentors. Millionaires are great at recruiting the best mentors. You recruit partners and investors. Millionaires are incredible at networking and connecting. They’re incredible at doing any of those things because they know they are one executive away from scaling their business and doubling their revenues. They know they are one sales person away from incredibly growing their volume of sales.

#6: Energy Management

Listen in here for my thoughts on why energy management is so important and what that means to me.

#7: How to Process Issues

If you’ve been following my content for a while, you know I made a video about the most important thing to teach your kids, and it’s how to process issues. Millionaires know how to process issues.

They know how to think about a problem and come up with a step-by-step system for doing something. It’s purely done by learning how to process issues. Millionaires know that a part of learning how to process issues is saying no to 90% of things that are presented to them, because they’re trying to identify which areas are worth them putting their time and resources into.

#8: Time Management

Millionaires learn time management. A lot of rookie entrepreneurs may not even make it because they spend too much time on the Facebook newsfeed, on games, following people on Snapchat, and they aren’t putting a lot of time into selling, prospecting, creating, networking, building relationships. They’re not in the hunt. And so they don’t make it. They go straight to the cemetery of entrepreneurs.

Time management is when you learn how to make a one-and-a-half hour appointment become an hour, and have it still be effective. You learn to make a 30-minute phone call become 10 minutes. You learn how to leave a message that is effective but isn’t a six-minute message. You learn how to communicate things in a faster way.

Millionaires also know what areas not to put the same types of time limits on, such as important relationships. Sometimes you can be the complete opposite and the other person is offended, by how busy you come off. Everybody is busy, so when you play the busy card, it can rub people the wrong way.

Millionaires still find ways to save their sanity because you have to stay sane to go long term. You don’t hear a lot of people who make it to the highest levels taking too many vacations. But they do a schedule refueling at a spa on a Sunday, spending the whole day relaxing. They do that sort of thing to re-energize. A lot of rookie entrepreneurs take a lot of vacations and wonder why their business doesn’t explode. It’s because they’re more concerned about vacations than doing the work.

#9: How to Manage Money

Listen in here to hear why my wife and I rented a house for five years, even though we could afford to buy.

#10: How to Be Aggressively Patient

Here’s how to become aggressively patient. First, you are so aggressively assertive on your part and what you can do to grow, but psychologically you’re patient and know that everything is going to work out.

You’re going to have to learn a part of success is working, working, working, combined with patient, patient, patient. You need to constantly tell yourself, “I know it’s coming.” And the reason why patience is important is that regardless of what type of thing you sell, you know that if every week you plant 100 seeds, in two weeks you have 200 seeds, in three weeks, 300 seeds, etc. When I do that, I KNOW that something is about to happen. Because I’m planting the seeds, I’m guaranteed to have success. I know for a fact that it’s going to happen.

After planting a lot of seeds, all of a sudden the floodgates will open, and people will start coming to you.

#11: Learning

Millionaires constantly focus on improvement. They are always looking for better ways to do things. And all of a sudden, every department is getting better and improving. They’re all about self-education. They have a beginner’s mindset. A beginner’s mindset is someone who is so curious and always looking for better ways to do things. Everything is about learning, learning, learning.

So those are 11 skill sets that millionaires master. My challenge to you is if there are any areas here that you want to get better in, find out what you need to do by being resourceful and finding out how to become better in that area, and eventually, you’ll become better in those skill sets as well. But this is going to take effort. One video isn’t going to change everything for you. No. You need to score yourself in these 11 areas, and create a plan of action on improving yourself.

This article was originally published on PatrickBetDavid.com