The 5 personality traits of Self-Made Millionaires

What's up, you guys? It's Graham here. So, let's face it, there are enough videos already out there showing you how to make a million dollars. Theoretically, if everyone just stuck to the same advice strategically, pretty much you can guarantee you'll be a millionaire in a matter of a few decades. But I think we should dig a little bit deeper than that and find out where it all starts and what causes people to become millionaires much, much younger in life.

When it comes to this topic, I'm friends or I've worked with maybe a dozen or so self-made millionaires, all in their 20s. The cool thing is that they all have a very similar personality trait, regardless of how they have made their money. So, step one, the most important thing you can do is have a million dollars. Just kidding, just kidding there. But in all seriousness, it is important to recognize the commonalities that a lot of these people share and how you can begin incorporating these into your own life as well.

Now, the first thing I've noticed is that they all have a sense of urgency. There is no tomorrow, there is no next week, there is no next month. It's right now! It's today! It's this very second that matters the most. Nothing good happens tomorrow that you can't start right now. Today, thinking you're gonna get around to something tomorrow, or the next week, or the next month, it's just a surefire way to kill whatever you want to do and not get around to it.

Now, from everything I have ever done, nothing good has ever come from waiting for the right time to do something or the right opportunity to come up. It just never happens. What I've learned is that there is no such thing as a perfect time to do something. There is no right time to make something happen. The only right time that you have is literally right now, because if you wait for everything to line up in your favor, for there to be a perfect opportunity to present itself right in front of you, you're gonna be waiting your entire life and never get around to it.

What I've realized is that if you want something, you generally have to make it happen now, without waiting for everything to line up. Because it will never line up, and you'll just be sitting there waiting for all of these external things to come up in your favor, and it just doesn't happen. So if there's something you want to do and you've been waiting for the right time to do it, the best chance you have of making it happen is right now. It's today.

Now, having that sense of urgency is really what it takes to get the momentum going in the first place to get you started in doing what you want to do. It's one of these personality traits I've noticed a lot of self-made millionaires have. Now, the second personality trait I've noticed is that they're okay with delayed gratification. They're okay putting off immediate rewards for a long-term picture, with a greater benefit in the end.

It seems like so many people just want the quick fix, and they want a shortcut, and they want the fastest way possible to get what they want. But I've noticed that the type of people who are okay with delayed gratification are generally the type that are more patient and that are okay trudging through something, because they have a bigger picture and they see life as more like a game of strategic chess than just bowling a quick strike.

Researchers gave children the option of either having one marshmallow now or waiting 15 minutes and having two marshmallows. Now, where it gets interesting is that when these children were followed up later in life, it was found that the ones that were okay with the delayed gratification of waiting 15 minutes for two marshmallows ended up having a better outcome in life, not only in test scores or academia but also in their ability to cope with stress and frustration, as well as just being healthier people in general.

The reality is you're often going to have to work without any sort of recognition or reward or any sort of benefit for a long time until you reach success. It's very easy to give up at that point when you've been working so hard and haven't gotten anything in return. If you just want that immediate gratification and quick fix, delaying the gratification here will make it much more rewarding when you're doing all the work that it takes in the beginning because you're so focused on the long-term outlook, and not just what you can get right now.

The third personality trait I've seen is they have no excuses. This is a really important one. I highly recommend if you're watching this, do not click out at this point. At least just watch this one part all the way through, because I promise this one is worth it and is probably one of the most important topics I'm going to mention so far. The reality is you need to take ownership of your life. You — and only you — are responsible for your success, and nobody owes you anything. That's the harsh reality.

Something I've noticed extensively since posting on YouTube over the last year is I can tell pretty quickly who is going to be successful and who is not, just based off the type of comments they write. I cannot stand when people give me excuses, like, "I can't do this because of XYZ. I can't do this because I wouldn't be good at this. I can't do this because it's too competitive. There are too many people already doing it." I can't do this because I'm making up excuses, and that's the reality. It's not that they can't do it; they can do it. It's just they're making excuses in their head to rationalize why they don't want to take a chance to make it happen.

There is no excuse. The only excuse here is that you're too afraid to try it, and you're rationalizing anything you can do to make yourself feel better about being too scared to try something new. If you want something bad enough, you will find a way to make it happen. If it's too competitive, fine, you will find a way to stand out. If you don't know how to do something, fine, you will learn a way to make it happen. You will always find a solution. There should be no reason you will ever make an excuse from here on out.

If you ever find yourself making an excuse at this point, catch yourself and realize there is no excuse. Then think to yourself, "What else can I be spending my time on right now besides coming up with excuses and reasons I can't do something?" And I don't want you to get the wrong idea with this, because we're all guilty of this. I have caught myself many times making stupid excuses for things that don't matter. And then I realized, "Why am I making an excuse? Where is this really stemming from? And what can I be doing instead of making a stupid excuse that has no basis in reality whatsoever?"

I'm just coming up with excuses for myself, and you get caught in that cycle. I totally get it. Especially when you really start thinking about it, you realize just how stupid the excuse really is. Do you really think, for instance, like Grant Cardone is out there making excuses why he can't do something? No. Those people are never making excuses; they just go out and make it happen. The truth is you control what you do, and you alone, like I said, are responsible for your own success.

Now, the fourth personality trait I’ve noticed is that they see everything as a learning experience. Frankly, nothing ever goes perfectly. Nothing ever works out all the time. But instead of having a failure or instead of having something not work out and then thinking, "Oh no, it didn't work out! What am I gonna do?" Instead of doing that, they think, "How can I learn from this? How can I grow from this? Where did I go wrong? Where can I take personal responsibility? Is there something I could do better so I can learn from it and do better the next time I do this?"

It's all about just avoiding the same mistakes over and over again. If you can learn from your mistakes, then it was never really a failure to begin with. Now, of course, we've all had things that just don't go to plan, but how you handle that is indicative of how you will handle other things going forward. Now, it's also very important never to take anything personally. If something doesn't work out, if something failed, if something didn't work out how you expected, very rarely, if ever, does that actually have to do with you as a person.

It could have just been a poor delivery from your end. It could have been that you could have handled something better. Maybe you didn't know enough about it. But very rarely, like I said, if ever, does anything have to do with you as a person. So, if something doesn't work out, never take it personally. Because I promise you will get better over time as you do it more and more often, as you get more experienced.

Now, the fifth personality trait I've noticed is that they're extremely focused. They don't just go and try something for a week and then put it off for another few weeks, and then try it again, or they decide it's not for them and want to try something new. They jump from idea to idea to idea. What they do is pick one thing, they tunnel vision into it, and that's all they do. They focus on doing one thing really well. They know exactly what they want and the outcome they want to have, and that's all they do is focus on just making that happen.

It's so important that for anything you do, you have really just a laser-like focus on making it happen. Now, I know how difficult it could be with analysis paralysis in the sense that there are so many different ideas and things that you could be doing, and it's really hard to pick one thing. But the reality is you're going to have to pick one thing. Do not do too many things at the same time because what tends to happen is that you’re too scattered. Instead of giving one thing a hundred percent, which is what it takes, you're gonna give five things 20% each, and they're all going to suffer at the same time.

So it's so important, from what I've seen from every self-made millionaire that I've seen, they have one thing that they can do really, really well. So make sure to have that laser-like focus with anything that you do. I'm gonna end this video with a quick story, and this is so important to listen to this story. It's from the book "Think and Grow Rich." If you haven't read this book, it's free on YouTube as an audiobook. But the story is called "Three Feet from Gold."

Now, the premise is that in the gold rush, everyone was out there to try to find gold. One guy found a vein of gold, so what he did is he covered it up, and he raised money in his town to buy the equipment needed to mine for this ore of gold. Now, of course, he gets the money from the city, starts mining for gold, but all of a sudden it runs out pretty quickly. So he continues looking for it and continues looking for it, but it's just gone. It just disappeared entirely.

After a while, he decided to give up, and what he did is he sold all of his equipment to pay back all of the people that had invested in his business, and he sold it to a junkman. Now, this junkman bought all of the equipment for just dirt cheap, and then he did his research to try to find out what went wrong and where the gold was. It turned out that the junkman found the gold three feet away from where the first guy stopped. That junkman became an incredibly wealthy person because he just did the research and had the patience to find out what went wrong, learn from it, and then strike riches.

Now, the first person heard about this, that he had stopped just three feet away from gold. Instead of coming up with excuses of what went wrong, and instead of feeling bad for himself that he is just a loser and that he didn't do it, and that he is a failure, instead of coming up with all of this, he ended up becoming one of the world's wealthiest insurance salesmen for the sole reason that he remembers that story. Anytime he ever got a "no," anytime he ever got a "maybe" or an objection, he thought to himself, "This isn't a failure; I am just three feet away from gold."

It was this mentality that made him an incredibly wealthy person despite that initial failure because he learned from it, took something from it, and then incorporated that into the rest of his life. Think of the same thing for you. If you ever come up with a failure, if you ever come up with something that doesn't work, don't make excuses. Don't just come up with reasons why you're a failure. Don't take it personally. Instead, learn from it and just think you were three feet away from striking gold.

So, as always, you guys, thank you so much for watching this. It really means a lot. If you guys enjoyed this, make sure to smash the like button. If you guys enjoyed this too and you're not already subscribed to my channel, make sure to subscribe to the channel. Also, make sure to smash the notification bell so YouTube notifies you anytime I upload a video.

Also, feel free to add me on Snapchat and Instagram. I post there pretty much daily, so if you want to be a part of that, feel free to add me there. And then finally, I hate plugging all of these things, but if you're interested in becoming a real estate agent or if you're a real estate agent looking to expand their business and incorporate different things to make more money, I have a course of exactly how I took my real estate business from zero to over a hundred and twenty million dollars in sales in just nine years. I detail everything I've done in my entire career from A to Z. If you guys are interested in that, the link is in the description with a coupon code for $50 off. If you're into that, feel free to check that out as well.

Thank you again for watching, and until next time!