If you want to become successful you have to grow to be the person who can be successful.

In the 1990s, a group of researchers at MIT were studying mice to learn more about how habits are formed in the brain. The mice had to find their way to a piece of chocolate that’d been placed at the end of a T-shaped maze. Using special equipment, the researchers could monitor the brain activity of the mice as they sniffed their way to the chocolate. When the mice were first put in the maze, their brain activity spiked. They could smell the chocolate and they began searching for it. When the researchers repeated the experiment, however, they noticed something interesting. As the mice gradually learned where the chocolate was and memorized how to get there – go straight, then turn left – their brain activity decreased. This process of turning a sequence of actions into an automatic routine is known as “chunking,” and it forms the basis of all habit formation. Its evolutionary role is clear and crucial: it allows the brain to save energy and perform common tasks efficiently....

OK, you’ve got your first draft down. Bravo. Now it’s time to put your Worthy Goal through its paces.  Think of it as a stress test. How sturdy is it? Does it support the weight of your ambition, or does it look like it’s going to wobble? We’ll start with the spouse-ish test.  Here’s the idea. You’re going to run your idea past the person who knows you best. It’s spouse-ish because it doesn’t have to be an actual spouse. It could be your best friend, or your sister, or your partner. Point is, they’re someone who’s heard it all – your jokes, your dreams and ideals, your hang-ups. They have a sense of who you are, what you stand for, and where you are in life. They care.  Your sketch is still on paper. It sounds great, but it’s still abstract. It could easily stay there, tucked away in a drawer, but you’re about to change that. You’re going to both make yourself accountable and give yourself a reality check. Scary? Sure. Necessary? Absolutely. We all have our bl...

On an April morning in 1888, Alfred Nobel woke up, opened the newspaper, and learned that he’d died. There it was in print – his obituary.  If that sounds confusing, just imagine how Alfred must have felt.  Of course, there’d been a mix-up. Turns out, Alfred’s older brother, Ludwig Nobel, was actually the one who had died – but the local press had mixed up the two siblings and published the wrong obituary. Because of this blunder, Alfred got the unique opportunity to see his legacy in print while he was still alive. And it wasn’t pretty. “The Merchant of Death is dead,” blared the scathing headline. The obituary then proceeded to condemn Alfred for inventing dynamite and other explosives that are notorious for fueling worldwide destruction. It cast him as a money-hungry, immoral man who had accumulated a fortune at the expense of others – criticizing his greed and celebrating his (mistaken) death.  As you might imagine, Alfred didn’t like what he saw. All at o...

Of course, Alfred Nobel isn’t the only man to have ever felt regret. Regret is one of the most common human emotions in the world, and almost everyone feels it at some point or another. In fact, a survey of 4,489 people across the United States found that Americans are more likely to feel regret than they are to floss their teeth. (Apologies to any dentists who are listening). All in all, only one percent of survey respondents said they never look back on their life and wish they had done things differently. Meanwhile, a whopping 82 percent of people said that feeling regretful is at least an occasional part of their lives – and 43 percent of people said they engage in regretful thinking “frequently” or “all the time.” That’s a whole lot of regret. But the statistics make sense, once you take a closer look at human nature. At their core, humans are – and this might be my new favorite definition of a human being – time-traveling storytellers. Our brains have the unique abili...

Before we get to the famous financial lessons, we’re going tell you a story. The story of 9-year old Robert Kiyosaki.  It begins in the 1950’s. Robert and his friend Mike were curious boys with big ambitions: When they grew up, they wanted to become rich and make a lot of money. But just how they were going to accomplish that they didn’t actually know. So, after a failed attempt to produce coins from melted toothpaste tubes, the boys decided to get some advice. They asked their dads how they could start becoming rich. You might be able to guess what Robert’s own well-educated but “poor dad” replied: “Go to school, study, and find a good job.” It’s familiar advice – but it’s pretty misguided.  If you follow guidance like this, you’ll spend your entire life breaking your back to increase your pay, while others – the government, bill collectors, and your bosses – take most of the reward. In other words, Robert’s poor dad might as well have said, “Go and join the rat r...

Okay, let’s go back to Robert Kiyosaki’s story. When Robert and Mike were still young, Rich Dad took them under his wing, and gave them total access to his private business dealings. They sat in on his meetings with bankers, attorneys, and accountants, and discovered what being a successful business owner involves.  As a result, the boys learned a lot, and they learned it quickly – but before long, they began to encounter problems. You see, the skills the pair were learning from rich dad made it pretty hard for them to take school very seriously.  Over and over again, they were told that study and hard work lead naturally to success and wealth: the idea that financial literacy might also be important didn’t seem to occur to anyone besides rich dad.  Children aren’t taught about subjects like saving or investing, and as a consequence are clueless about topics like compound interest. Clear proof of this is the fact that, today, even high schoolers often max out ...

Humankind is obsessed with time –⁠ measuring it, dividing it, observing it, and most recently, controlling it. Throughout the course of our species’s history, humans have developed three distinct ways of thinking about time. The first is chaotic time, which was the dominant theory during our primitive days. In this view, historical events occur randomly. There’s no point in trying to determine the causes of events or to try and improve society because history doesn’t follow a path and there’s nothing people can do to influence it. The second theory of time, which became prevalent during the classical period, was cyclical time. The idea was that events occurred in cycles, much like the rotation of the earth, the orbit of the moon, or the procession of the zodiac. Humans can participate in and shape history by performing the right actions at the right times, thus winning favor from the gods. As such, this theory gives people more agency than in chaotic time. Finally, the thir...