The president of Peak Potentials Training, one of the fastest growing personal success training companies in the world, and author of the phenomenal book Secrets of the Millionaire Mind,T. Harv Eker preaches his philosophy of “street smarts with heart,” and through this gets people to produce real success in the real world.
TAMMY LAWMAN: You went from broke to millionaire in less than three years. How did you do that?
T. HARV EKER: I guess the story is pretty simple. When I grew up I didn’t come from a very wealthy family, obviously. It wasn’t poverty, but it was not too much better than that. I struggled out of college, hoping and looking. I left college after the first year, looking for my Holy Grail, which was to make millions of dollars like a lot of other people. For 14 years I did nothing but struggle.
I thought I had what it took. I thought I knew what I knew. I thought I could make it. I didn’t think it was that hard, but I guess it was hard for me. I was extremely frustrated and disappointed, not just in my financial situation but in myself, if you know what I mean. I think a lot of people can relate to that. You’re talking about intentions here. People have an intention but are not seeing it come to fruition.
They’re wondering, “Is it ever going to come? Am I doing the right things? What’s wrong?” Literally, I ended up struggling for 14 years. I actually went through 14 different jobs in 12 different businesses during that time. Nothing worked for me at all. I finally moved back with my parents. You know what that’s like. I hope you don’t know, but it is pretty brutal. I ran into a friend of my father’s. He was a very wealthy man.
He took pity on me. He gave me some advice that I’ve never forgotten. He said, “Harv, if you’re not doing as well as you’d like to be, that means there’s something you don’t know.” Of course, being a brash young man at the time, I thought I knew everything. I was not doing well. I was very depressed. I asked, “What do I do?” He said, “It’s very simple. What do you want?”
I said, “I want to be rich.” He said, “If you want to be rich, then you should do what rich people do.” It just landed on me. I said, “Wow! That’s different. I never heard that before. What do rich people do?” He said, “That’s what you should study. You should find that out, and then do that for yourself. If you do what rich people do, you probably will be rich, too.”
I said, “For the first time, it’s so simple that it just makes sense to me.” I wasn’t working, so I took six months to devote myself to study. He said, “How do you want to be rich? Do you want to be rich as a piano player or as a surfer? What do you want to do?” I said, “I don’t know. I want to be rich in business. That’s what I like.” He said, “Study rich businesspeople.”
I did. I studied rich businesspeople, people who had passed and gone, from the Rockefellers on, and from the current time. I studied everyone. I boiled it down to seven very specific principles that seemed obvious that everybody was using. Then I showed it to him. He said, “Don’t show it to me. I’m not going to do anything. Put it to the test.” I opened up my next business.
It was my 15th business. Within 2 1/2 years I was a millionaire by using these principles. I had opened one of the first retail fitness stores in the world, selling exercise equipment to the public. Within 2 1/2 years I had 10 stores. I sold half my shares to the H. J. Heinz Corporation, the ketchup people, for a substantial sum of money. That’s how I made it. The interesting thing is that I was so thrilled.
I was finally a millionaire. I had done it quickly, not counting the 14 years before that. Literally everything was fantastic, except for one problem. Two years later it was all gone. I couldn’t believe it. I was in shock. I didn’t even know where it went. Some went to investments. Some went to buy a house. Some I gave to friends and family. It was gone. That’s when my whole life turned around.
It was then that I realized the serendipity in what had happened and the universal presence in it. What had occurred-talk about the power of intention-is that I was looking at my bank account. It was back to where it always was, which is about a couple thousand dollars at the most. In those days we had bank books. I could see where I was over the last several years.
I noticed that I kept coming back to the same number every single time, over and over again. My financial history had been up and down. Here’s where it gets really interesting. As I said, I was in the fitness business. I talked about this thing called a “set point” when it comes to your weight every single day. I talked to my clients about it. I said, “You have to change that set point on a permanent level if you ever want to have permanent results.”
I looked at it and said, “Oh, my gosh! Look at this! In the same way that you have a set point when it comes to your weight, you must have a set point when it comes to your money. This is mine!” It also happened that I was working on myself very heavily to change my belief structures and inner consciousness around parenting. I had a newborn son. I have to be honest.
I wasn’t treating him the same way as I treated my daughter who was 18 months older than him. I don’t know what it was. It was a habitual program that was inside me about having a son and the expectations or whatever. I don’t know. I guess I was simply doing what my dad did. I found myself not treating him with the kind of love and respect that I was treating her with.
I started working on myself because I swore that the one thing I would be was a good dad. I would be not just a good dad but a great dad. It wasn’t happening with him. He was still young. He was six months old. I was working on myself with some of the best people in the world to actually redo my inner consciousness around parenting and having a son. It was working brilliantly. Things started to shape up beautifully.
I was proud of myself. I was starting to be a really great dad to him. I was feeling good about the whole thing. I said, “These technologies work incredibly well.” I started working with the same technology in my money. Lo and behold, pretty soon my money started taking off. All I can tell you is that it’s never stopped. Now I’ve taught over a million people these methodologies on how to change your money set point.
It’s what we call the “money blueprint.” We’re blessed to be able to do this for people. Tammy, this money blueprint and money set point are the root cause of financial success, mediocrity, or failure. Everything else is important, but they’re all branches and flowers on the tree that has already grown. The point is that if you want to change the fruits, you’re going to have to start with the roots.
You can’t jut pick lemons off a branch and hope that apples grow there automatically next season. They won’t. You can pick off all you want, but in the end, in the next season, lemons come back. Until you change those roots, nothing will change permanently. This is the Holy Grail that people have been looking for. Tammy, your event is about intentions.
A lot of people hold wonderful intentions, and they are worried and frustrated that they’ll never come to fruition. They don’t know why. They believe they’re taking the actions. They believe they’re good people. They believe they have the knowledge. For some reason, it’s just not working in the way or up to the level they want. I can tell everyone right now that I can guarantee 99.99% of that reason is your money blueprint.
You should also know that we have blueprints or set points in every area of our lives. The same way you have a money blueprint, believe it or not, you also have a relationship blueprint, a happiness blueprint, and a health blueprint. If any of those are not working to their fullest potential, it’s because of that inner programming. That original programming, which we’ll talk about in a moment, is set for the level you’re at instead of the level you want.
One of the examples I give is that it’s like a financial thermostat. This is critical. I’m happy everyone is on the call because they’re going to save themselves years and years of continuous frustration. You can never be more successful than what that money blueprint is set for. If you get more successful than that, you’ll somehow manage to lose it.
TAMMY LAWMAN: Wow! I’ve never heard it explained like that before. It makes perfect sense. That’s amazing. How have you been able to hold onto the wealth that you were able to regain?
T. HARV EKER: That’s the thing. When you reset that money blueprint, you can now set it for a whole new level of success, like mine was. It’s set to not only create that success, but to keep it and grow it. It really takes some energy to reset that blueprint. A lot of people say, “Give me an example.” Here’s an example: Donald Trump. We’ve all heard of Donald Trump.
He’s a multi-billionaire who lost everything and more. Two years later, he has it all back again and more because his money blueprint is set at “high.” On the other side of the coin, we’ve all heard the stories of the lottery winners, haven’t we? They win $5, $10, $50, or $100 million. Five years later, virtually half of them are right back to where they started because their money blueprint is preset for “low.”
The fact is that we were all taught how to do money. Nobody comes out of the womb doing money. We were all taught how to do it. Most of us were taught by people who either didn’t have a lot of money or had a lot of emotional issues, non-supportive beliefs, and negative habits around it. Their ways of being and thinking automatically were ingrained in you and became your ways of thinking, being, and dealing with money.
You don’t even know why you make the decisions you make. You make the best decisions you can, but for some reason, the result is not what you want. That’s the reason. Your money blueprint is set for the level you’re at. The insidious, sad thing about this is that this blueprint will stay with you for the rest of your life unless you actually change it. That’s what we’re able to do for people. That’s why we’re so popular.
TAMMY LAWMAN: How can people tell where their financial or happiness set point is? How can they change it?
T. HARV EKER: That’s a great question, Tammy. It’s like a blueprint for a house. Think of a house. If you don’t have the blueprint in front of you, how do you know what the blueprint looks like? It’s simple. Look at the house. That will tell you what the blueprint looked like. There will be a couple of minor changes, but that’s about it. That’s how you’ll know. Look at your results.
That’s the simplest way. Look at your results, your income, your net worth, how much you trust people around your money, how much you worry about money, and how well you manage money. What is your level of consistency? Do you have a very balanced life around money, or are you unbalanced? Do you work really hard, or do you take a lot of time off?
Those are all in your blueprint. Are you up and down and inconsistent? That’s your money blueprint talking. It’s every single way you are and the results that you have in all the arenas of money. Do you argue with people a lot about money? That’s your money blueprint at work. There are actually some very specific numbers of settings. Do you earn $50,000, $100,000, $200,000, or $500,000 a year?
Each of those is a result of your money blueprint. For the most part, this is how you can tell: most people earn approximately the same amount of money every year. They might go down a little bit one year, and they might go up a little bit another year, but if you have a semi-stable or consistent income, you’ll see it’s about the same all the time.
Here’s the issue: if you go a lot higher than that blueprint is set for, you’re going to lose it. The next year, you’ll have a very bad year to make up for it. You say, “My income isn’t the same all the time.” Then I guarantee it’s very different all the time. It’s up and down. You have what I used to have, which is the up and down, yoyo effect blueprint. First you have it, and then you don’t. Then you have it, and then you don’t.
You have a lot. You have a little. You have nothing. You have more. It’s up and down, and you never have anything steady. That’s your money blueprint in action. Whatever your result is right now, it’s your blueprint talking. It’s what’s going to happen in the future. I’m very well-known in my book and all over the world for saying, “Give me five minutes, and I can predict your financial future for the rest of your life.”
In a short conversation, I can identify your money blueprint. That’s what I’m talking about. Let’s do this right now for everyone. We’re going to do a test for everyone here. Would you like to know your financial future? Here it is. You have to change the money blueprint, and I mean actually change it, almost physically, where you have to be there to do it. If you don’t recondition or reprogram it, your financial future will be identical to your current financial situation.
Over the next 10 or 20 years, you might increase a little bit, like 10%, 20%, or 30%. I’m not talking about that. There will be no radical changes. You won’t go from earning $40,000 a year to $300,000 a year or from $40,000 to $1 million a year. You won’t do that. If you do, you’ll lose it. I hate to be a naysayer or bring any bad news, but this is good news.
The good news is that you can actually change that blueprint permanently. That’s what we’re able to do for people. As I said earlier, it’s the essential thing when it comes to finances. People have intentions. I guarantee that a lot of the intentions they have written down have to do with money. It’s not that money is the be-all and end-all. Some say, “I want to have a beautiful home.”
That’s great. What is it going to do? Is it going to fall from the sky? You have to have some money to do it. “I want to live on the beach.” You’ll need more money. “I want a beautiful car. I want to send my kids to the best colleges. I want to live in the best neighborhoods. I want to go on beautiful vacations with my family.” That takes money. That’s the critical thing. If you get to the root-and this is the root-everything will change quickly.
Want even more tips and tricks? This article was just a small portion of an hour-long interview. And this interview was just ONE of 24 top interviews conducted by Ric Thompson for Internet Marketing TNT. If you’d like to get your hands on ALL 24 interviews, simply click here and check out Internet Marketing – Very Important Profit Systems.
