Financial freedom is working because you want to, not because you have to.

The secret of wealth is simple: find a way to do more for others than anyone else does. Become more valuable. Do more. Give more. Be more. Serve more. Do more and you’ll earn more.

But, you don’t earn your way to freedom. You have to make the shift from being a consumer in the economy to becoming an owner, and you do it by becoming an investor.

Success leaves clues. People who succeed at the highest level aren’t lucky; they’re doing something differently than everyone else. These are the people we are interested in, not the pundits.

Everything we create in our lives starts with thought. Biography is not destiny, and your past is not equal to your future.

Average investors can win, but they can’t do it by trying to beat the system. Playing the markets is a zero sum game, and the big boys are infinitely better at it than you.

Money managers aren’t going to help you win because they don’t have the skills or resources to play in the big game. If they did, you wouldn’t have access to them.

There is a passive way to win. It means NOT putting all your eggs in one basket, a way to protect yourself against all downsides. The best investors do this because they know they are going to be wrong, no matter how smart they are.

Anticipation is the ultimate power. Losers react; leaders anticipate.

If you are self-motivated, this world is tailored for you. The boundaries are all gone. But if you’re not self-motivated, this world will be a challenge because the walls, ceilings and floors that protected people are also disappearing. There will be fewer limits, but also fewer guarantees. Your specific contribution will define your specific benefits much more. Just showing up will not cut it.

If you know your limitations, you can adapt and succeed. If you don’t know them, you’re going to get hurt.

True mastery requires three levels:

• Cognitive understanding - the ability to understand a concept
• Emotional mastery - when you’ve heard something with enough repetition that it has stimulated enough feelings inside you that you become conscious and capable of consistently using what you’ve learned
• Physical mastery - you don’t have to think about what to do, your actions are second nature. The only way to get this is constant repetition. Repetition is the mother of skill.

Our earned income will never bridge the gap between where we are and where we really want to be. Earned income can never compare to the power of compounding. In other words, you have to move from just working for money to a world where money works for you.

The most important financial decision of your life is what you pay yourself. The percentage of your income you keep today for yourself in the future will determine the rest of your life.

15% of your income (before any expenses) is a good target number to set aside for your investments. Whatever number feels right, you MUST pay that out first, and not touch it.

You find bargains at the point of maximum pessimism. There’s NOTHING that will make the price of a stock go down except the pressure of selling. It is investing when everyone is afraid that astronomical returns become possible.

We all have the same six basic needs - they drive all human behavior. But how we value those needs, and in what order, determines the direction for our life.

• Need 1: certainty/comfort, or our need to feel in control and to know what’s coming next so we can feel secure.
• Need 2: uncertainty/variety
• Need 3: significance, or the need to feel important, special, unique, or needed
• Need 4: love and connection
• Need 5: growth, as in if you’re not growing, you’re dying
• Need 6: contribution, as in the secret to living is giving

The fastest way to feel connection, a sense of how significant your life is, a deep sense of certainty and variety, and put yourself in a state where you can give to others, is to find a way each day to appreciate more and expect less.

The core concept of successful investing is simple: grow your savings to a point at which the interest from your investments will generate enough income to support your lifestyle without having to work.

96% of actively managed mutual funds fail to beat the market over any sustained period of time!

The returns advertised for mutual funds are typically much better than the actual returns since they are time-weighted, not dollar weighted.

Brokers do not have your best interests at heart. Only a fiduciary (registered investment advisor) is legally obligated to give conflict-free advice, and their services are tax deductible.

Choices on a 401(k) plan are not the best available choices. They are the ones that pay the most to be offered up on the menu of available funds.

Target date (or life cycle) funds aren’t all they promised. There is no standard by which these funds are managed, and they perform similarly to straight up mutual funds. They might be ok for average investors, but you can get much better returns with better asset allocation.

Not all annuities are bad. There are certainly ones to avoid (especially ones that do nothing but invest in high cost mutual funds), but there are also certain ones that provide significant tax benefits.

When investing, asymmetrical risk-reward is possible for the average investor. And in fact, making money doesn’t require taking huge risks. There are three primary strategies for this:

• Structured notes - a loan to a bank for some time period, after which the bank pays you the greater of your deposit or a percentage of the market gains
• Market-Linked CDs - a CD that returns some small amount no matter what the market does, but if it goes up, a percentage of those gains are returned to you
• Fixed indexed annuities - 100% principle protection annuities, tax deferred, and some offer the ability to create an income stream for life

The ultimate thing that stops most of us from making significant progress in our lives is not somebody else’s limitations, but rather our own limiting perceptions or beliefs.

If you want to change your life you have to change your strategy, your story, and your state. That’s how you create a real breakthrough - new state with a new story and a proven strategy.

• Strategy - to find one that works, go to the best, or those who have proven results for the long term, and model their behavior
• Story - if you have the right strategy and you don’t take action, it’s because of your own story about why something couldn’t work. You choose whether to make a story of empowerment or a story of disempowerment (i.e. instead of I can’t and I won’t, I can and I will). If you change your story, you change your life.
• State - by changing your body first, you can change your mind. There are many ways to do this, but one of the simplest ways is to change your physiology - the way you move and breathe.

The lifestyle you want, even the one in your wildest dreams, probably costs MUCH less than you think. The point of money is to live the lifestyle you want, not the absolute number.

There are different levels of financial dreams, not all of which will be appropriate for everyone. There is financial security, financial vitality, financial independence, financial freedom, and absolute financial freedom.