Seven Years to Seven Figures

The Fast-Track Plan to Becoming a Millionaire

Michael Masterson

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118429242
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Finance

In Seven Years to Seven Figures, self-made millionaire and renowned wealth coach Michael Masterson reveals the steps you can take to accumulate seven-figure wealth within seven yearsor less. Seven Years to Seven Figures will give you the tools to increase your income, get the highest possible returns on investments, save wiselyand secure your financial future faster than you may have ever dreamed.

PART I

SEVEN YEARS TO SEVEN FIGURES: IS IT REALLY POSSIBLE?

I’ve broken this book into three parts so you can use it efficiently. Here’s what you’ll find:

In Part I, I make my case: that you can’t get rich quickly by following most of the advice you get from newspapers, television, booksellers, and the Internet. Such popular advice is all about passive investing. My experience (and the lessons I’ve learned from friends and colleagues who’ve made money quickly) suggests a different course of action.

Part II presents eight inspiring stories–step-by-step accounts of the successes of eight people I know personally. Read them once for motivation. Read them a second time for specific strategies and techniques you can use to build your own wealth.

If you’re a baby boomer nearing retirement–or someone younger who simply doesn’t want to wait 40 years to get rich—you’ll have a particular interest in Part III, which explains why the Seven Years to Seven Figures program is perfect for you.

Get ready to begin your path to seven figures. . . .

CHAPTER 1

WHAT THE HECK DO I KNOW?

This book is all about creating a seven-figure net worth in seven years or less. That may sound outrageous . . . even impossible. But it can be done. In fact, I’ve done it many times.

It started in 1983, when I first decided to get rich.

I was taking a 14-week Dale Carnegie course. Each week, we were given a challenge—to learn how to give a good “hello,” to refrain from criticism . . . that kind of thing. We would read what Dale Carnegie said about the subject in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People, figure out how we intended to implement that lesson in our lives, come into class and explain to everyone there what we specifically aimed to do—and then, the following week and for the rest of the course, we would practice that skill and report back to the class on our progress.

The lesson for week four was about priorities. Our challenge was to identify our 10 top goals, narrow them to five, narrow them again to three, and finally pick one as our primary goal.

In his book, Carnegie said something that had a profound impact on me. He said that while it is true that most people don’t succeed because they don’t have clearly defined goals, some people fail to make progress because they have too many.

He was right. That was my problem. If you have many goals—as I did—you can’t achieve them all. If you don’t narrow them down and prioritize them, you may achieve none of them. I realized that for ambitious people like me (and maybe you, too), establishing priorities is a critical first step toward achieving anything.

So I got to work on our assignment for the week.

It was easy to narrow my many goals to 10, but thinning out the list even further was tough. At the time, I had a decent job as editorial director for a fledgling business-newsletter publisher in south Florida, but I wanted—really wanted—to be many things. I wanted to be a novelist, a humanitarian, a teacher, a black belt, a philosopher, a poet, a perfect specimen of physical health and fitness. And, yes, I wanted to be rich, too. (Though, being a child of Woodstock and a former Peace Corps volunteer, I was a little embarrassed by my monetary desires.)

It took me a couple of days to get that list down to five. Getting to three was excruciating, but I managed to do it the day before I was due to announce my number one goal in class. I had 24 hours to choose among my favorite three: writer, teacher, and (my noblest ambition) humanitarian.

The task proved to be almost impossible. In fact, this final cut was so difficult that I was still undecided as I walked into class. And it wasn’t until I was actually walking up to the podium that it came to me.

I thought to myself, “Hmm . . . writer, teacher, humanitarian . . . rich guy . . .

“Rich guy! Right! And if I’m not happy with the money, I can always give it away. That would make me a humanitarian!”

HOW TO MAKE DECISIONS THAT STICK

It was a last-minute, illogical, and cowardly decision, but it turned out to be one of the most important decisions I’ve ever made. It changed my life. It led directly to my becoming wealthy. And it eventually proved to me that I could do just about anything I wanted to do.

This wasn’t the first time I had identified a top-of-the-list goal for myself. I had done it plenty of times before. In fact, my longest-standing goal—to become a professional writer—had been at or near the top of my list of “wants” for as long as I could remember, it was a perennial New Year’s resolution.

But, as Dale Carnegie said, making a decision to achieve a goal won’t do you any good if you have already decided to achieve a dozen other goals.

After we announced our top priority in class, we were told that we had to spend the remaining 10 weeks of the course focusing on it. At the beginning of every day, we had to remind ourselves that we had a purpose. And throughout the day, we had to make sure that all our actions and decisions reflected that purpose.

Dale Carnegie argued—and I’ve come to believe he was 100 percent correct—that the best way to guarantee that you will accomplish an objective is to make it your number one priority. The combination of making “getting rich” my top priority and focusing on it for 10 straight weeks made a huge difference. In retrospect, it sounds like a commonsense strategy—but to me, at the time, it was revolutionary.

All of a sudden, I was thinking differently at work. Before, when challenged by business problems, I was sometimes unsure about which direction to take. Choices were complicated. Decisions were difficult. I had no way of cutting through the maze, because I didn’t have a final objective against which I could measure my options. But once I had “getting rich” as a priority, much of the confusion evaporated. All I had to do was ask myself, “Which choice will result in making me richer?”

I don’t mean to imply that I ignored other important considerations (like the editorial quality of our publications, customer satisfaction, etc.). I didn’t. But I was no longer stymied by them, either. I’d first figure out which option would result in greater profits for the company (and thus more income for me) . . . and then I’d weigh the other issues accordingly.

Often, I opted to take a course that would result in less profit but more quality (sometimes simply because I felt a moral imperative for quality). Even then, having my number one priority firmly in place made those decisions easier.

ANATOMY OF A REALLY BIG RAISE

Driving to work the day after I made that momentous decision to get rich, I realized that there was no way I was going to do it by gradually working my way up the corporate ladder. I was making $35,000 at the time. So, even assuming I would get above-average salary increases, there was no way I’d be enjoying the million-dollar lifestyle I wanted in a timeframe that was acceptable to me.

I had to drastically increase my income. And since my only income at the time was my salary, it was crystal clear to me that I had to transform myself. I could no longer afford to be an editorial taskmaster. I had to somehow become my company’s top employee.

Prior to making that decision, I had been spending lots of my time fussing with the company’s editors, trying to get them to write better. “Better” to me meant writing the way my college English professors had taught me to write. But now that I had this clear focus—on getting rich—I realized instantly that I had been wasting my time. Ninety-eight percent of the people reading our newsletters didn’t care about the stylistics or grammar. What they cared about were exciting, money-making ideas.

If I wanted to help my company grow, I had to forget about Strunk & White and the Chicago Manual of Style and focus on how to find more and better opportunities for our subscribers.

So that’s what I did. In doing so, I realized that the growth of the company would depend on the direct-mail efforts made by our marketing department to attract new customers and keep old ones. I didn’t know anything about that side of the business, but I committed to learning all about it. I read everything I could lay my hands on—including the marketing classics written by David Ogilvy, Claude Hopkins, John Caples, and Eugene Schwartz. Based on what I read, I started asking questions. How many pieces are we mailing? What elements are we testing? Why didn’t we include a busines...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Seven Years to Seven Figures: Is It Really Possible?
• Part II: Eight Stories, Eight Successes
• Part III: Why You Must Act Now
• Afterword
• Index