Tuesday, June 1, 2010

9 Secrets of Achieving Financial Freedom- Part I

At the ripe old age of twenty-two I decided to study self-made millionaires in order to determine how they created their success. My hope was that by doing what they did, I could achieve similar results. Seems logical, right? I even hosted a TV show where I interviewed self-made millionaires including folks like the founder of Compass Bank and legendary banker, Harry Brock. While I made lots of mistakes, I learned that by modeling successful people’s behavior and actions you could get astounding results. I also noticed something else: virtually all self-made millionaires did a handful of things that other people didn’t do. Think of them as the ‘secrets’ of self-made millionaires. Most importantly, these secrets are skills that anyone can learn and use to create financial success in their own life.

I distilled these secrets down into what I call the ‘9 Secrets of Achieving Financial Freedom’. Once I had written the 9 secrets, it dawned on me that they are universal secrets to success and you should be able to use them to create success in any area of your life. So as a personal experiment, I intend to use the 9 secrets to transform my own fitness level over the next forty days. In this column over the next six weeks I’ll share both the 7 Secrets to Achieving Financial Freedom as well as my progress regarding my own fitness quest. By the way, wealth without health is not really wealth or said another way, “If a man has his health, it is said he can have a 1,000 wishes. If he has lost his health, he will have but one.”

The first two of the 9 secrets are the Secret of Decision and the Secret of Total Commitment.

One of the first observations I had regarding self-made millionaires was that they decided specifically what they wanted to accomplish and then became totally committed to their success. They displayed an attitude of certainty about their outcome. In Harry Brock’s case he was totally committed to changing the face of banking in Alabama from the stogy, ivory tower, white-shoe atmosphere that prevailed at the time to one focused on customer service and rapid expansion through a sales oriented approach to acquiring customers. He ruffled lots of feathers and fought many battles both in and out of the courtroom but prevailed and built one of the largest banks in America.

Knowing that the first two secrets, what achievement would you be willing to be totally committed to? In my 40-day experiment, I’m committed to reducing my body fat by 20 pounds while increasing my level of strength and cardiovascular fitness. I’ve brought in a team of health and fitness experts to coach me… and you too, if you’d like to shed inches from your own waistline. I’m calling it the Ultimate Fitness Quest and I’ve set up a web site with lots of resources to help you in your own quest. It’ll be an opportunity to test the 9 secrets in a realm other than personal finances and test myself at the same time. So if you’re ready to create your own 40-day transformation just in time for summer, visit www.StewartWelch.com and be sure to read my column each week here in The Birmingham News!

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