HL October 30,12

The speaker discusses the importance of thinking like a rich person in order to achieve success and wealth. They argue that money is not inherently evil and that one's mindset and thinking patterns determine their actions and results. The speaker emphasizes the need for personal development and studying successful people to cultivate the right thinking. They also mention the difference between the middle class and the rich in terms of their focus on saving versus earning and growing money. Hey, good day everybody, hey listen, I want to talk about being rich, because I know in the end, everybody really wants to be rich, even if they say they don't, they do, and there's a lot of reasons for that, it's just so many people have so many hang-ups about being rich, and those hang-ups that people have about being rich prevents them from being rich, and a lot of you who want to be rich, you still have hang-ups about being rich that are preventing you from being successful, and I want to talk a little bit about that today, so if you want to think like the rich, you have to get over that protestant mindset that money's the root of all evil, that's a common thing, you know, money's the root of all evil, and it's not, it simply isn't, because the fact is, if you think about it, what do, when you go to church on Sunday, what do they ask for every Sunday, money, what is the government always asking for, money, right, what is, that's what everybody's asking for, I mean, what does every charity ask for, money, what does every, if you went to school, right, if you went to a school, what does your alma mater ask for, money, everybody's asking for money, right, so if money's the root of all evil, why do churches ask for money every Sunday, why does the university you went to ask for money all the time, why does the government constantly looking for ways to take more money from you and I, if it's so evil, why is that, because it's not, it's what makes things, you know, possible, you need money, look, rich people do not just live differently than most of the population, they think very, very, very differently, too, and in the end, what, the way you think determines what you do, and what you do, what action and behavior you exhibit determines what kind of results you get, I mean, it's very, very simple, so I talk about this incessantly all the time, the most important thing that all of you who are serious about winning big, becoming wealthy, having success, having, you know, security someday, the most important thing that you all have to do is work on your thinking, because your thinking is what's put you in the particular situation that you are in now, if it's good, you're doing well, you're making money, things are going, you're on your way to where you want to be, then guess what, there's a 99.99% chance that your thinking is good, and if you're doing amazingly well, your thinking is really good, if things aren't going well for you, can't get recruiting going, can't get numbers going, can't get your people to do anything, can't, whatever, 100% your thinking is not as good as it could be, it needs to get better, because folks, every day you get up, your actions are 100% predicated on what you're thinking about that day, so if you're thinking, woe is me, nobody will talk to me, I can't find anybody, you know, I'm not a good recruiter, I'm not a good salesperson, I don't know if this is right for me, if I'm cut out for this or not, if that's your thinking, what's your behavior going to be like, it's going to mimic and match that thought process, are you going to be aggressively prospecting, are you going to be aggressively working on your personal self-development, are you going to be following up, are you going to be inviting people to meetings or working to set up appointments or go on appointments, of course you're not, so your thinking determines, now if your thinking is, look, I know everybody doesn't want to do this, but there are people out here that want to do this, that are looking for an opportunity, want to be somebody, I know everybody's not going to buy, but I know if I present this in the right way with intelligent people that have ability to think rationally, I'm going to close a bunch of those people, I know that everybody that I recruit is not going to do it, but there's going to be some people who are motivated and if I train them well, they're going to do well, they're going to get big, they're going to grow and I'm going to grow, so if you have that kind of thought process versus the previous thought process, what's your behavior going to be like, well, you're going to be aggressively working on getting better, you're going to be aggressively working on prospecting, you're going to be setting appointments, you're going to be following up, you're going to be doing all the right things, so your thought process, whatever you're thinking about, this is so important that you, I'm going to repeat this over and over because you must get this because this is the linchpin, okay, this is the key for all of you hearing this message. Your thought process, in the end, when you're 70, 80, 90 years old and you're looking back on your life, okay, your thinking is what's going to be responsible for how it turns out because it's responsible for your actions and your actions create results. It's always our actions, our behavior that creates our results, but the key thing is that what you're thinking about determines your actions and your behavior, so if you don't have right thinking, when I say right thinking, I say thinking that leads to doing right behavior which leads to the kind of results you want to have. It's so critically important. That's why I'm such a proponent of personal development, working on your thinking and reading books about successful people, about developing yourself and growing and all that because the more you read about successful people, I've read hundreds and hundreds of autobiographies of successful people, I've read all kinds of stuff, and what that did for me is it got me thinking right. I have right thinking, do I have perfect thinking? Nobody has perfect thinking, but my thinking is much more aligned with what successful people think like. It's not that I'm better than other people, it's that I think differently, so therefore my actions and behavior are different, so therefore my results are different. It has nothing to do with being better than somebody else, okay? So those of you who think that thought, you're nuts, okay? That's not what it is. It's about thinking right because right thinking, you look at athletes, okay, how they approach their whatever their field is, whether they're golfers or baseball players or football players or basketball players or whatever, soccer players, it doesn't matter. The very, very best, the ones that perform at the highest level, they are not necessarily physically more gifted, okay? What they are is they have better thought processes than their competitors, okay? That's the difference. It always is the difference. So, you know, if you have children, for example, what you want your children to develop is right thinking, so you've got to develop right thinking so you can impart that right thinking at the dinner table, when you're in conversations, when they have a setback, when they're struggling. You need to be able to talk to them and get them thinking in the right way so they can move forward and overcome whatever adversity that might be in their place, right? If you care about your children, you've got to develop right thinking. If you care about the people within your business, you've got to develop right thinking, okay? So rich people don't just live differently than the rest of the population. They think very, very, very, very differently as well, right? It's not even close, okay? So, listen, Steve Seibold, who's kind of a friend of mine, right, he's written, you know, How Rich People Think and 177 Secrets of the Mentally Tough, I think that's what it is, something like that, but Steve Seibold, S-T-E-V-E-S-I-E-B-O-L-D, check out his website, check out his books. His books are fantastic. He spent his, you know, entire adult life, much like Napoleon Hill, studying successful people and how they think. So he lives in Florida and he's been doing this for three decades, 30 years now, interviewing, rubbing shoulders with self-made millionaires and billionaires, and he's found that what separates the wealthy and the non-wealthy is how they view themselves, how they see themselves, how they see their money and the world around them. So what the difference is, is how you see yourself. If you see yourself as limited and, you know, I could never do that, and I'm not cut out for that, and I could never be an entrepreneur, I could never be a salesperson, or I could never be a leader or a builder of businesses, if you're seeing yourself that way, well obviously wealthy people don't see themselves that way. They see themselves as somebody else did it, and my thinking has always been if someone else has done it, then I need to learn what they do, what they think about, and especially what they think about what they do, how they act, how they behave, and if I mimic that behavior, I should get similar, possibly better results. That's how I always thought. If I saw somebody doing well, you know, the difference is they have a way of doing that, they have a way of thinking and operating that if I mimic and model that, then I'm going to have, I should have, at least if it's not exact results, similar results or better results than I'm currently having, right? That's how you have to look at that, so that's why it's so important to study successful people because you want to start operating, thinking like they think and operate. Look, the middle class, they focus on saving money, he says. The rich focus on how to earn it and how to grow it. Look, you should be thinking about saving money, too. Don't get me wrong on that, but you really should be thinking how can I grow my income because look, if you want to get financially independent, one of the things, when I first started in my Prime America business, right, I was making about $50,000 a year at my job and that was enough to support my family. Okay, at that time, this was like 1979, okay, 1979, 80, 81, 83, 84 is when I got involved in Prime America, but I was making about that kind of income back then. I figured, for me, that if I could accumulate a half a million dollars, right, back then, you know, a 10% return was more realistic than it is today, but I figured if I could save a half a million dollars and a 10% return, that would replace my income and I would be financially independent. Would I be wealthy? No, not even close, okay, but I would at least be financially independent and I could continue to live in the house I was living, drive the cars I'm driving and do what I was doing on my $50,000 a year. So my objective was how can I, how could I grow my income, you know, because I was making $50,000, I needed to grow it to $100,000 or $200,000 or $300,000 or $400,000 a year so I could start investing that money so that I could invest enough money that I could accumulate a nest egg that would put off the kind of cash flow that would allow me to be financially independent. That's what I thought about when I first started. So everything I was doing in building my business back then was how to find, number one, how to get really good at the business and then how to find the right people, motivated people that I could train and develop so that I could grow my income so I could save and invest the excess cash flow that I was making so that I could accumulate that half a million dollars so that I could get financially independent and I could get free. That was really my main objective. I never in a million years thought at that point, right, I didn't see myself, you know, I've earned well over $60 million in Prime America since I got started. I didn't see that happening. I didn't see myself having millions and millions saved. I really focused on just having a half a million so I could replace my income, I'd get financially independent. That to me was a realistic or somewhat realistic goal, but I also knew in order for me to save a half a million dollars, right, I was going to have to really grow my income. I could see that in Prime America, the way that I was going to do that was, one, get really, really, really, really good at the business, that all those seven fundamentals I talked about in the prior call, okay, I knew that if I could get really good at the business, master those seven fundamentals, how to prospect, how to set appointments, how to do great presentations, how to overcome objections, how to know the products inside and out so I could sell them and market them much, much easier, right, get people to see why they should own them and then recruit people and then know how to get those people trained in the field through their Walmart and build those people a team, okay, within my team. So I knew I needed to get really good at that first, okay, so that was number one. And then through training and developing these right people, I knew I could grow my business by growing my business, by helping people become successful, by helping Rick Susie and Gary McCrummon and Chris Howard and George Verdugo and Dennis Flang and the list goes on and on, all these different people, by helping those people get really good at the business themselves and then grow their businesses, I would automatically grow my business. So my objective then became, after I got really good, was to transfer all the skill sets and all the knowledge that I've acquired to these motivated people so they could go then do the same thing and duplicate themselves just like I was duplicating myself through them. Those are the two main things I focused on and then as my business started to grow, folks, my first year in the business I made $18,000, I was part-time and I saved about $10,000 of that. I paid off my credit card debt and I saved about $10,000 so I had no credit card debt. I still had a mortgage and my cars, I think I had one car payment which was about $200 a month and I had a house payment that was about $1,200 a month back then, okay. So my net was relatively low. My net at that time was probably about $3,000, $3,500 a month. That was what I needed to support my family, wasn't a lot, okay. But what happened, the next year I made $35,000, Jan was still working as an x-ray technician but I was getting better. I was growing and I was doing what I was telling you but I was getting better at the business. I was focusing on that, number one. Number two, I was focusing on trying to find the right people. When I found those people, I trained them, okay. In the beginning, I was training everybody and spending lots of time with everybody but I learned after about two years that I really needed to be focused on spending time with the most motivated people. That some people just aren't motivated and they won't do the work but the motivated people, I was spending 80% of my time with the motivated people and 20% of my time with the other people that were just showing up. So I started focusing my attention and my energy and transferring skill sets and knowledge to those most motivated people. When I started to do that, that's when my business started to really take off. So I made $35,000 my second year. My third year, I made $86,000 so that was that philosophy, okay. Started to pay off. I could really think started to move and then I started attracting even better people. For one, I was a lot better at the business. Number two, I was a much better trainer because I learned that training people was the key to everything. It was the key. I was able to train people really, really well. Duplicating myself was the key to everything I wanted in my life financially and in growing a business. That training people to be as good as I was across the kitchen table, right, was the most important thing once I found them, right, once I found the right people. The energy I expended in training people to be and operate like me at the kitchen table was the single most important focus I had. That's led to all the success I've had has come from that philosophy, that focus, that maniacal focus I had on transferring the skill sets I had acquired and the knowledge I had acquired over those years, okay. So I started to do that. I started training these people like crazy and all of a sudden in my fourth year, my income jumped like crazy. It went from $86,000 in 1986 to $409,000 in 1987. Well folks, that's like a 400 and some percent increase in my income. But the most important part of this equation, folks, is that I still lived in that track house, 1800 square foot track house that cost me $1,200 a month and I had a $200 car payment. So I didn't have a lot of overhead, so my overhead stayed really low, but my income exploded and what I did after paying my taxes and paying my overhead, I had a little bit of operating expenses and my business wasn't that much. I started saving a lot of money. I started saving $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 a month and then the next year, 1988, my income jumped to $855,000 and I still had that low overhead. So I saved all that difference, right? So all of a sudden what happened is I just started saving more money, right? So after my fifth year, I had close to a million dollars saved and invested. I was, based on my lifestyle at that point, right, because I kept my overhead. I didn't get trapped into buying all that stuff and things that everybody does. I kept it low. I was very, very, very conservative with my personal overhead and so as a result, I was able to save more and more money. And so what ended up happening, because I started saving more and more money, I needed people less and less because I was already financially independent, so I didn't worry about the ones that were the whiners and the complainers and the people that didn't do anything. You know, people say, well, I've got this guy who could be really, really good. What should I do with him? I said, go recruit somebody else. Go get wider. Yeah, but I've got this person, Hector, if I could just train him and if you could just tell me what to do with him, I know they could be really good. Go find somebody who's motivated. Go find somebody who wants to do this. Look, I learned that you can't motivate people. You can't make people want to be successful. Look, sure, you can win a contest or whatever. You can motivate a person short term, but in the end, right, for somebody to keep driving at this thing day after day, month after month, year after year, that person has to be completely self-motivated. I can't make anybody on my team want to do the work, want to stay focused to be successful. There's nothing I can do to do that, but what I can do, what I learned, this is important for a lot of you who are still trying to turn up into gold, right, trying to make pigs fly. I learned that I can't make anybody want to do this thing, but I could help somebody who is really motivated. If I spend enough time transferring my skill and my knowledge to the ones who are really, really motivated, I could help them really succeed. I could help them grow like crazy, right? A perfect case and example is Chris Howard. Chris Howard was not in my business, okay? Chris Howard, highly motivated person. His upline quit, which was Hubert Humphrey left the Prime America, started his own thing. The whole organization in Las Vegas got decimated by him taking off and stuff, and he didn't want to go with them. He wanted to stay in Prime America, and he wanted to go under me, so he ended up in, this was like the end of 1991. He had made about $100,000 that year, right? He was doing okay, and he wanted to get under me. We had developed a relation because I had helped him. I had helped Chris before. It was just because he called me and asked for help. I saw him in Hawaii. He asked if we could play golf. He picked my brain, and he was always picking my brain, always calling me, asking for advice and stuff, so I was giving it to him because, you know what, he's motivated. He wanted to get better. His upline left. The company gave him an option to go with any person in Prime America he wanted to go with. I had been helping him, so he went with me. Now, folks, I didn't know that was going to happen. I didn't have an ulterior motive for trying to help him. I just helped him because he was motivated. I could see that. He wanted help, and he asked for it, so I offered it. I told him what I was doing. I told him what he should be doing, and so what ended up happening, he ended up getting under me. By the end of 1991, I told him and Susan, his wife Susan, I told him, I said, listen, man, if you listen to me and you do what I tell you to do, next year you're going to make $300,000. Well, Susan thought I was a lunatic. She said, no, yeah, right. She thought I was just full of it and stuff, so I told Chris, I said, you've got to listen to me. You've got to do what I tell you to do. You've got to get wide. You've got to build a big base. You've got to teach your people how to close. You've got to focus on these fundamentals that I'm talking about all the time. If you do that, I'm telling you, your business is going to explode because Chris had a tremendous work ethic. They were recruiting people, but they didn't know what to do with the recruits. They didn't have a problem recruiting people. They just didn't know what to do with them. They didn't have those fundamentals down, so it was like throw some up against the wall, some stick, some don't. They were just going through people like crazy because they didn't know how to train them, so they went through tons and tons of people, and they didn't make any real money, so what I did, just to give you a clue, folks, what I would do if I were you in your business. This is what I did with Chris. This is what I did with my own business, too, but this is what I did with Chris. This should help you if you listen to what I'm saying right here. I flew to Las Vegas 12 weeks in a row, so for three months, 12 weeks in a row. I went there on early Wednesday morning. I left Friday afternoon, and all I did is train his people and him on all the fundamentals, how to destroy cash value, how to set up appointments, how to prospect, how to overcome all the most common objections, how the products work, how to destroy cash value, and then show them why buy term and investment difference is better, and Hopkins, all the closing techniques, and all the fundamentals. That's all I did. I didn't do anything. I didn't do anything. I just didn't have any motivation. I didn't go there to pump his people up. I was looking for the people that were motivated. I already knew at that point that I couldn't motivate anybody, but if I found some motivated people, I could train them, so that's all I focused on. What ended up happening is the next year, Chris made $286,000. He didn't make $300,000. He was a little short, but his income went from $90,000 to $280,000. It grew up 300% in 12 months, and then it went from there to almost $400,000, and $600,000, and $700,000, and five years later, he's making $1 million a year. Got financial independence, doing fantastic today, but folks, it was the focus. There's a lot of people that hear this, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you can't get everybody to ... Look, you're never going to have a great business until your people are great. Any people who think that, well, some people do it and some people don't, nothing you can do about that. You just need to get a bunch of people, that's ridiculous. What great company would operate with that point of view? Think Apple operates that way, or Microsoft, or any great Walmart, any great company. You think they operate with just bring them in, and the winners win, and the losers lose? That's completely moronic to think that. Your business can only be, listen to this, your business can only be as good as you are and your people are. The better equipped and trained they are, the better they'll do. Folks, that is plain common sense. Anybody that refutes that, that disagrees with that, run away from them. They do not know what they're talking about. The quality of your business is only ever going to be as good as the quality of you, yourself, and your teammates, simple as that. Can't be anything else but that. Look at sports, okay? The quality of a team is only as good as the coach and the quality of the people that are performing, right? The athletes that are performing, it can't be any better than that. If you see a team that's in last place, in relation to the other teams, especially the teams that are top, the quality of the coaching of the players is the problem. It's the same thing in Prime America, there's no difference, or any business for that matter, okay? You go into any really well-run business, I guarantee you it's the quality of the leadership at top and how well-trained those people are. I eat out a lot. I talk about this all the time. I eat out every day, okay? I like really good food. My food budget's a little bit ridiculous, but I like great food and I can afford it, and so we eat great, okay? One thing I've noticed, I don't think there's anybody that's been to more restaurants than me because we virtually eat out every day for the last 20 plus years. Anybody that says home-cooked food is better than really great food in restaurants is a liar. There is no home-cooked food that's as good as the best food in restaurants because you don't have professionally trained people in homes. You don't have the equipment that's necessary or the ingredients necessary to make food the way they make in fine dining establishments. I'm sorry, it's ridiculous to even think that. Is there home-cooked food that you really like, that you feel familiar with, that tastes good to you? Of course there is, okay? My mom made great food, too, but nothing compared to some of the food I've eaten in some of the great restaurants of the world. Not even close. Not even close, you know? The same thing is true in your business. That people don't get this has always completely baffled me in Prime America. Simple fact. Yes, you have to recruit tons of people, but when you're recruiting, what you're really looking for is motivated people. If you recruit ten people, you might have two motivated people, maybe three if you're really lucky. What you've got to get good at is identifying who those two or three people are, and then you need to spend an immense, enormous amount of energy and time with those people to grow them. They're the ones that are going to help you explode your business. You're not going to do it with those fringe people that don't show up to meetings, that aren't motivated, that don't study, that don't work on themselves, that don't listen to the audience, that don't read the books, that don't work. You're not going to build a business with those people. Not going to happen. Steve Seibel, as I said, I got off on track a little bit, I just stuffed that I thought was important, author of How Rich People Think. He spent three decades, 30 years, interviewing and rubbing shoulders with self-made millionaires and billionaires, and he found that what separates the wealthy and the non-wealthy is how they view themselves, their money, and the world around them. That's very important that you get that. The middle class, they focus on saving money, as I said. The rich focus on how to earn it. The middle class worries about money. The rich dreams about it. The middle class has a lottery mentality, believing their lives are influenced by luck or other external forces. This is a big deal right here. Those of you who think that you've been unlucky or something outside of you is creating your situation, you are dead wrong. You're creating it with the way that you think, the way that you act and operate and behave. The rich has an action mentality, where they determine their own futures. They don't think life's happening to them. They say, look, for things to change, I've got to change. For things to change, I've got to take action. I've got to be proactive. I've got to get after it. I've got to do massive, massive action in the right area. That's what they think. Look, rich people aren't any smarter than us or better. Look, folks, I have a lot of wealthy friends today. I'm a golf nut, so I belong to four different country clubs. Every country club I belong to are fantastic clubs, the best clubs in the area, and I have a lot of very wealthy friends. A few of them are billionaires. You know what I found out? That's absolutely 100% accurate. They're not smarter than you or I or better than you or I. They just think about money and success and wealth differently than the average person. It's not that they're not smart. It's just that they're not smarter than you. They're not better. They see things differently. As a result of seeing things differently, they behave differently. As a result of behaving differently, they get better results. Look, as a self-subscribed multimillionaire, Steve Seibel credits his own wealth to the lessons he learned, which helped him change his middle class mindset. Folks, that's exactly what happened to me. I'm a multimillionaire today, and I changed that because I changed my middle class mindset. I had a lower middle class mindset. I grew up in a home where nobody made any money. Relatives hadn't made any money, big, large Mexican Catholic family with tons of uncles, aunts, and cousins and whatever. Nobody, not one single person in my gigantic, huge, extended family was successful financially. Not one person owned a business. Not one person in my family ever went to college. They didn't see themselves as that. They all worked in either as instruction or factories or whatever, but nobody was doing well financially. They're all making a living. They're getting by, but nobody doing well. If I grew up in an environment and that's all I'm seeing and that's all I'm hearing is the way that these people talk, how do I break out of that? I did it through the books I've read, the tapes I've listened to, the audios I've listened to, seminars I've been to, the people that I've worked hard to associate with. All those things is what contributed to me changing my middle class, lower middle class mindset to a millionaire mindset. That's what you've got to do. If you want to become a millionaire, you've got to develop a millionaire mindset. Your mindset right now, if you're not a millionaire, guess what? You probably don't have a millionaire mindset. If you're not moving aggressively towards becoming a millionaire, then you don't have a millionaire mindset. You have a middle class mindset. You've got to change that. You've got to change that. The biggest lesson he says was to quit thinking wealth acquisition as an evil pursuit. In other words, one of the biggest things he learned, I learned this too, is you've got to stop thinking that this desire to become wealthy, to become successful, to become a millionaire, that it's evil and wrong. That's how most average people see that, as people being selfish. If you watch television, you watch the movies, you read the newspapers, the media, and I'm talking mostly about movies and television and newspapers. They paint successful people as evil. That's what Obama's been trying to do with Romney this whole last year, is paint him as this evil, rich, greedy person that takes advantage of people. That's what they do. That's what every movie you go to, the bad guy is always some rich corporate guy. Same thing in television. Same thing in the newspapers. I guess that's what they do, because they want to have an excuse for why they're not successful. I don't want to be successful, because I have to be a bad, evil person to be successful. But then, all the churches, all the charities, who do they go to for money? These rich, evil people. It's ridiculous. Look, use your common sense. You're never going to get a great job from a broke person, from somebody who's poor. The money that the U.S. government gets in taxes, right? The top 50% of earners in the United States pay 97.3% of all the income tax. The bottom 50% pays 2.3%, or 2.7%. They don't pay any taxes. Where did it come from? The evil, rich people that the government's trying to portray them as, that the media's trying to portray them as. Folks, you've got to break out of that. You've got to stop worrying about what people think about you wanting to become successful financially and to take care of your family. Look, people who are not rich, they tend to think of money as a bad thing, noting that as long as you have such negative thoughts about money, folks, you're never going to have any of it. There's no question about it. Very, very few people become rich without the belief that it's a good thing and they should be going after it. I'll tell you why it's a good thing. Let me just give you, in building a Primerica business, folks, I have 10,000 licensed people in my business, approximately that many. Probably 2,500 are full-time. That means, let's say it's 2,000. Because I built my business, I'm indirectly and somewhat directly responsible for 2,000 people having a business opportunity and a job, if you will, who pay taxes, who support their families, who pay mortgages, who buy automobiles, who eat out, who do whatever. The great thing about our business, when those people leave their jobs, 9 times out of 10, somebody has to fill that position. In reality, by creating 2,000 full-time people in Primerica, you're creating about 4,000 jobs overall. Tell me what's a problem with somebody like me, building a business, being motivated to take care of my family, creating 4,000 jobs directly and indirectly. Can you tell me what's wrong with that, how that somehow is an evil thing? My payroll in my business is close to $60 million a year. I don't know what the taxes are on that, but let's say it's 20%. That's $12 million a year of income tax paid to our government. I created this business, not by myself, with the help of a lot of people. I'll give you that. But the fact is, I let it. I pushed the envelope to make that happen. I started this business before I was making $50,000 a year, probably paying $5,000 a year in taxes, but now I've built a business that gives the United States government about $12 million a year in taxes. Tell me what's wrong with that. How is that somehow evil? Personally, I pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes every year. Hundreds of thousands. I've paid multi-millions of dollars of taxes in my lifetime. There are probably $20, $30 million of taxes I've paid since I've been working. The average person probably only pays maybe a couple hundred thousand in their lifetime. Tell me how me paying, personally, millions of dollars in taxes is somehow wrong. All the people that I've employed directly in building houses and having an office and a staff and having people take care of my homes and all the people that I've employed over the years, tell me how that's wrong, me building a business and employing countless numbers of people is a negative thing or a bad thing. Do you see how brainwashed you all are about money and making money? Look, they never tell you this part of the story, do they? Never. When you see wealthy people being villainized, know for certain that the people doing the villainizing are idiots. They don't know what they're talking about. These are the same people that never created a job in their lifetime, that haven't paid hardly any money in taxes. They're ridiculous. Look, Seibold says, once he started immersing himself among the rich, even going so far as to buy the cheapest house on a block where three billionaires lived, through socializing, attending neighborhood parties, he says, I would walk away from those encounters thinking, no wonder I'm broke. They're looking at possibility and opportunity, and I'm worried about paying my bills. Clearly, however, he was sufficiently flushed to live in the neighborhood in the first place, so he wasn't doing too bad. Look, becoming rich is a process he describes as identifying a problem and finding wealthy customers who would pay him to solve it. By the way, folks, you don't have to find wealthy customers. A good friend, Dr. Robert Anthony, said, money flows to those people who solve other people's most pressing problems. Let me repeat that. This is so critical that you get this. Money flows. Do you want money flowing to you? Because money flows to those people who solve other people's most pressing problems. Your job is to solve other people's most pressing problems. Folks, in Primerica, what we do is we solve people's financial issues. We do a financial needs analysis. We show them how to increase their savings, reduce their debt, save for retirement, put together a plan so they can improve their financial situation because there's a gigantic problem right now for people in terms of their financial situation in this country. In Primerica, by building a sales force, by training yourself first and then training and developing other people and building a sales force, you can now solve not just two or three or four or five or ten problems a month. You can solve literally hundreds of problems a month or thousands in my case because in my organization, we do three or four thousand life insurance sales a month. We do several thousand investment sales a month and et cetera, et cetera, folks. Because I built this business, my organization is solving thousands of problems every day, every month. As a result of that, because you can make a lot of money one of two ways, either solving really big problems or solving a bunch of smaller problems. Well, in Primerica, we're solving a bunch of smaller problems. It's numbers. That's why getting good at training and developing people and especially at recruiting people then finding the motive and train them is how you're going to do this. That's what you should be spending all your energy doing. So look, what's further changed the way he thinks, Steve, is money has freedom to think about the bigger picture problem, he says, as opposed to where I'm going to get money to fix the flat tire on my car. There's bigger issues, much, much bigger issues, folks. Among the lower classes, there's a sense that no matter how hard I work and how much talent I have, the context is so powerful, the politics involved, the inequalities that arise, other people's inheritance, the advantages that they have are going to be the determining factors and not my individual abilities. That's what Michael Krauss, who's a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, says, right, that people have this thought, it's their thinking, right, a sense that no matter how hard I work and how much talent I have that I'm screwed, right. That's what people do to people, trying to make them feel like the rich have all the advantages and no matter what you do, you can't succeed. That is a crock, that is a complete lie, that's a distortion of the truth, folks. The reality is every one of you could change your life if you changed the way you thought and you changed your behavior patterns. Does that mean it's going to be easy, a walk in the park, right? No, it's going to take work, it's going to take discipline, it's going to take, you know, tremendous focus and persistence on your part, but it's doable. You know why? Because there's thousands, millions of cases where this has happened over and over throughout the ages and especially even now in this troubling times, right, we're having, people are still winning and succeeding, the ones that have the right thought processes and don't let up and don't give up, they're doing well. Psychologists have found that people who are not wealthy are indeed more prone to think that outside forces determine their outcomes rather than inside forces. In other words, they think there's something society is out to get me or because I'm Hispanic it won't work, because I'm a woman it won't work or because whatever, okay? It's ridiculous. Those things have nothing to do with your success or failure. You have everything in your thinking, your actions have to do with your success or your failure. You may be wondering this. You may say, wow, you don't understand my situation. I understand perfectly well. Nobody's situation is perfect. Everybody has issues, except the people that end up winning, they fight through those issues, they overcome them. They improve their skill sets so much and their work ethic and their persistence so much that they overcome those things, whatever they think those outside forces might be. They also tend to be more attuned to others' thoughts and actions and are acutely aware of outside threats and limitations. In other words, they're worried about what other people are thinking about them and they're worried about what other people would do or not do instead of worrying about what they should be doing. Look, the rich people, their wealth offers them greater freedom to pursue their own interests. They're more inclined to assume they're in control of their outcomes, which is what I know I'm in control of my outcome. There's no question about that. I know. In the end, it's me. In the end, it's you too. Their individualist orientation means they tend not to be as empathetic. Individuals that are wealthy, their mindset can come across as being blissfully unaware, but they're not. They just know that their life is determined by what they think and by what they do and what their behavior is and what their actions are. They know that, so they just focus on that. Can't control what everybody else is doing. You can't control what any of your teammates are doing. You can't control what anybody else is doing, but you can control what you think and what you do, and that's what, in the end, ultimately determines where you end up. Studies have shown that low-income and high-income individuals even have different physiological response to various situations. Look, they either look at the glass half full or half empty. Most people see any change as negative, but it's not. It's not, folks. Look, some wealthy are selfish, absolutely, but see, the thing is, even like I talked about all the jobs I've created and the taxes that are paid because of my business and blah, blah, blah. I said that just a little while ago. In the end, even if my intention was completely selfish, which it wasn't, folks, my goal has always been to grow people's self-images. That's my fundamental core philosophy of my life, is to grow people's self-images. To do that, how I've done it is through helping them grow themselves, to teach them, to give them food for thought and skill sets so they can do better. That's how I've chosen to do that. Even if I was totally selfish in my desire to succeed, all those numbers still would have happened. All those people still would have got those jobs. I would have still created those four million jobs. I would have still paid all those taxes. My team would have paid all those taxes. All that stuff still would have happened. Even if you are selfish, it doesn't matter if you succeed, you can't help but help other people because you can't get there on your own by yourself. It's not possible. You need other people's help. You need other people to be on board. It's the gaps in their thinking that may help explain why people do well and why people don't. It's not that people who are wealthier have a lower capacity to be generous or to be kind to other people. In fact, they're the ones that donate all the money to charity. They're the ones that donate the vast majority of money to all the churches you belong to. It's just that wealthy people, they sort of go around their lives not thinking about all that negative stuff. They're thinking about how can I grow? How can I get better? How can I grow my business? How can I provide a product or service that more people will want, that will want to take advantage of? How can I do that? Because in the end, folks, if you're not solving people's problems, you can't make big money. Look at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is gigantic because they solve people's problems. They offer products at such a reduced price that people who have limited incomes can go shop there and get the things they need and still have money left over. That's a problem people have because if you shop at Wal-Mart, even if you're a snob, you don't think about shopping at Wal-Mart. The fact is their prices are super ultra-competitive, which allows people to stretch their budgets. That's solving a problem. Or you look at Microsoft. They create operating systems for computers that are in about 90% of all computers in the world that solve problems for people that, whether it's business or individuals or whatever, they solve people's computing problems. That's what they do. Even in the entertainment industry, folks, the actors that make big money, the really great actors like Denzel Washington or Meryl Streep or whoever, those people need to be entertained. Those are the best at that business, so they entertain people. Because they entertain people, they solve a person's problem of a need for entertainment. That's what they do, so just think about this. Money flows to those people who solve other people's most pressing problems, and you need to change your thinking to change your life. If you keep thinking the way you've been thinking, you're going to keep getting what you've been getting. It's that simple, folks. Don't be that person that just keeps thinking the old way, the same old way.