Billionaire Secrets to Success by Bill Bartmann

Now this guys has an amazing story. His parents were janitors and grew up in the wrong side of the tracks. He left home at the age of 14, became a street gang member at the age of 17, and dropped out of high school. Then one night, being drunk at the age of 17, he fell down a flight of stairs and hurt his back and got himself to the point where the doctors said you will never walk again. He discovered the book Think and Grow Rich while he was in the hospital for a 3-month period and he read it everyday and that’s all he would do because that was the only thing he could do and he was really poor but he still continued to do it. That book revolutionized his life in many ways because even if the doctors said you would not be able to walk again, he walked again on his own two feet because using the concepts from Think and Grow Rich he would keep on figuring out different ways on how he can exercise his legs, his feet, his back, and whatever it was to get himself to walk again. So a really amazing inspirational story and then I think 40 years later he was born in 1948, in 1985 he founded this company called Commercial Financial Services which was a debt restructuring system where they would take consumer debt and they would have a way where they treat customers nicely in order to get them to pay their debt. The company did really well in 1997, Bill Bartmann was among the 50 richest man in America. He was worth around $3 billion. Unfortunately one of his employees was found of wrongdoing and in 1998 the company had to declare bankruptcy. Then Bill Bartmann started another company called Commercial Financial Services 2 in 2012 and he’s doing his work on that and in 2014 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for the work he was doing in terms of debt restructure and consumer financing. So there we have a big picture story of what this guy is all about. All the great things he has done in his life. There’s a lot more of course and we would get into it. But one thing to understand he dropped out of high school and then later on he went on to get his GED and went to college again, studied psychology in college and then studied law and became a lawyer as well. And this book borrows a lot from psychology. It is actually a book on psychology more than it is chronicling of his journey. It is all about how to get the best out of yourself to motivate yourself, to do the very best. And not just motivation but very precise and specific techniques proven scientifically as to how to get your brain to cooperate to get you where you want to go.

The big idea and understanding you want to take away from this book is that our self-belief will affect the action we take. The self-esteem we have, how highly we think of ourselves, that will change whether we take action in face of fear. Whether we don’t take action or whether we do take action. It’s all the function of how much belief you have that you will succeed in this endeavor that you will figure out a way that no matter what, you will find a way to prevail. If your brain says I will not succeed, it’s not going to work out, then you may not take action. Then you will not try to climb the mountain. But if your brain says I am big enough, I am able enough, I have enough self-esteem that I can do this then you will take action and you will keep taking action. So self-belief is a really crucial component of how much action we take in our life and how much success we have. Now let us understand how this self-belief is formed on a daily basis. How the brain is operating on a daily basis and what we can do in order to get ourselves to do the very best. So let’s first talk about what the brain is doing all the time. The brain is a filtering mechanism in many ways. What it does is it takes input from the external world so when someone says something, when someone does something, or you see something on TV, or newspapers, or books or anything like that. There are facts that are coming into your brain all the time. But what the brain does is it interprets these facts and it attaches emotions to all these things that you are doing. And as a function of emotion depending on how emotionally charged some topic or some subject is, it stores it away in your memory. When someone says “oh I don’t think you’re capable of doing that” or if someone makes fun of you about something. Overtime your brain gets emotionally charged information in about that specific topic. Overtime you might start to believe it. That’s just the way I am, even though the truth is very different, the facts might be very different from what your emotionally charged brain has decided to store. It’s like a computer, it doesn’t necessarily store facts, and it stores information that is multiplied by emotions. And negative emotions are way more powerful for the brain to absorb because our brain is always worried about our survival. So anytime there are negative emotions ta play, the brain will try to save that information much more efficiently because it knows that might be the difference between survival and death. So positive information positive emotions don’t necessarily have the same level of impact that negative emotions do on our brain on our survival mechanism. And that is why you see in the television, in the news, they are always mentioning all these negative news. I hate news, I hate all these news media all time because they are always talking about this person got killed, this person got shot, this happened, that happened, someone got bit by a dog, someone got theft. That’s all there is in that news, there is nothing good. Why? Because they know our amygdala, our limbic system lights up every time there is a negatively charged news piece out there. So we got to protect our brains. Now here is what we need to do. First we need to understand that there is negative programming coming at us where the world is saying you’re not good enough, strong enough, capable enough, you’re finding yourself, and you are telling yourself that this is happening. You have to challenge this negative programming that is coming at you. Not only that, you also have to diffuse the negative emotions that are coming your way. When you find yourself in the way of those negative emotions when someone says something to you or calls you on something, those negative emotions have to be diffused otherwise the more emotionally charged something is, the higher it will be in your storage in the sense that it will be easily retrievable and more and more you will just believe that information even though it is not true. A really important piece of diffusing all this negative negativity that your brain is storing is to stop generalizing. What our brain does is because it has a bias towards keeping you safe, and keeping you away from anything that is scary or that could cause problems, what it does is it overgeneralizes. If it takes one instance, you will reject it. One instance you failed it will overgeneralize and say, okay I don’t want this I don’t want to try. That’s just the brains way of protecting yourself. So very cautious of how you are overgeneralizing all the negative information that is coming at you, you have to start challenging it, you have to start questioning this negative information. Is it really true? Is it always true? Are there times when it’s not true? Also understanding is it time-specific? Is it only certain times you feel this way when you have this challenge, when you have these problems. So the first part of this whole journey of this book is all about understanding our brain and understanding how our brain works and also understanding that we have to diffuse this negative information constantly in order to make ourselves believe in ourselves better. And one of the ways he suggest is to make a list of 50 successes. What are the 50 things that you are the most proud of in your life? When you go back to your journal today, go write down a list of things that you are really proud of. It doesn’t matter what other people think. Things that make you really proud of what you have accomplished in your life. Write down those 50 things. Write down in detail as to how you are so happy about those accomplishments because what that does is as you review this list, any time you have challenges in life, failures in life, you go and review this list of 50 successes, you will see that even though the brain might say, you’re not good enough, you’re not strong enough, powerful enough, intelligent enough, you always have this list to go back to and you say no, see I have done these things, I have succeeded so many times. I’m not going to listen to your crap and assume that I’m not good enough. I have succeeded and I’ll continue to succeed, that is what I’m going to do. I’m not just going to resign or give up because I have built up these successes in the past. So now that we understand how the brain works, let’s talk about a really important idea around goal setting.

What Bill Bartman is saying is don’t set goals. Goals are kind of not empowering enough make promises instead of making goals what that means is a promise something that you make to someone else, you tell people about it, and you make others aware of it, that this is what I’m going to do. Here it is the reason why you should have a promise, why you should tell other people about it, why you’re going to do and also find some personal motivation. something people who have challenge and have said you were not good enough never do that. When someone says you can’t do that, that’s when you say, OK I’ll show you that I will get it done. Why do you need this kind of motivation in your life? Why do you need to put so much pressure on yourself in order to accomplish great things in life? Why do you need to put yourself under such circumstances that you have to promise that I will get this thing done by this time this date no matter what. Consider this another really important idea about how the brain works. We are mostly exposed to the conscious part of the brain which is like the tip of the iceberg. Our subconscious is way more powerful than our conscious mind. It has a lot of capacity for information and it can hold a lot more information, but the problem with the subconscious mind is that it is always worried about your self preservation and safety. That’s the thing it is most worried about over everything else. It does not care about everything else if these two are in question. Always trying to keep you safe. Now even though the conscious mind might say I want to accomplish this goal, I want to get there because I know that this is a really important goal for me, and if I accomplish that goal I’ll feel victorious, i would feel happy, I feel like I’ve done something worthwhile in life and all those things will happen you will feel happier as a result of accomplishing that goal. So the conscious mind wants to work harder. The conscious mind says let’s do this, wants to do the challenge, wants to do those things, but the subconscious here is the problem with the subconscious. What it does is that every time you think of an action the subconscious is worried about is there a possibility of failure, could you lose faith, and will you embarrass yourself, could you be defeated in this process. Anytime there’s a possibility of failure, the subconscious just stops you from taking an action because it is worried about your safety and self-preservation. It doesn’t care about your long-term well-being or long-term happiness. it is only worried about short-term. If in short-term you might encounter pain, it just is not going to let you take that action and what happens as a result is you, you go through life and you have big goals and you stop taking action let’s say you have the goal you want to hit $1 million in revenue next year. But what you find yourself is you’re not able to do the important things, you’re not putting out that blog post that you said you would, you’re not calling the customers that you know you really must, the most important customers. You’re not doing the things that scare you, with the things that actually grow your business. You’re trying to play it safe, you’re playing way below the level that is possible for you and you wonder why you’re not successful. Well this is because your subconscious is constantly sabotaging your effort. Every time you try something big, the subconscious will say don’t do that. So it stops you and it doesn’t let you take action because its scared for you. it is worried about you. It’s just worried about your survival. But here is an amazing thing what happens in the case of when we make a promise when the thing that we want to do is a promise not a goal. Let’s say you tell the person who always questions you someone who always challenges you and say you can’t do that. If you tell that person this is what I’m going to do, I will have $1 million in revenue by December 31, 2016, whatever the date is or whatever your timeline is. You say I will have a net worth of $1 million by December 31, 2017, whatever it is to you tell that person and the person says ha ha you can’t do it you’re such a loser I have seen you in the past and you can never figure it out. Know what that does, that motivation, not only do you tell it to that person but you tell it to 20 other friends. This is my goal and I will get it done. Now what happens when you do that? What happens is the subconscious stops being a protective parent. It stops being worried about your temporary pain your temporary embarrassment because now what has happened is the subconscious is worried about your long-term survival in a way that it wasn’t worried before because as soon as you make those promises to people, those people have challenged you do something that you’re not good enough as soon as you make that promise, what happens is now the subconscious is thinking well what if I don’t accomplish that goal? If I don’t accomplish that goal I will lose face in the society, I will lose status in the society. And one of the most important thing is the subconscious can do on a daily basis just to make sure you don’t lose face because 10,000 years ago if you lost face if you’re an outcast in your tribe, your chance of survival were really low so always worried about your survival and once the subconscious realizes that this goal is now challenging your fundamental survival in this world because if you don’t meet this goal your friends will mock you, your personal motivators will make fun of you, and you will lose face in front of all these people. Now the subconscious wants to help you because its way more worried about the goal here rather than the temporary failures along the way. It is way more worried about the big goal that you have in the distance now the promise that you made than it is worried about the temporary failures that you will encounter along the way. So when you stop yourself from working too hard or when you are not putting out the blog post or when you’re not making the sale, or when you’re not going for the dream client that you always wished you had, the subconscious will say no you must go after it. it will force you because your survival is at stake. Those things don’t matter anymore the small loss of face in society doesn’t matter anymore because there’s a much bigger loss of status on the line if you don’t follow through, if you don’t make this promise come true. And once you get this idea once you understand that the promise is making those big promises and going after your goals, after you make those promises what will really super Charge your success. it will help you harness the emotional charge that mental charge that you have a lot of times you might feel that you don’t have that passion for getting to that goal you don’t have the same charge, you don’t have the same excitement you don’t have that level of motivation that you may have had at some point in life. Maybe this will help you get that motivation, maybe this will help you get the charge, that drive, that intensity of purpose so that to the point where you’re only worried about sleeping 4 hours a night. You say I have to get this done. I’m on a mission to save my status, my life. That is what subconscious is thinking at this point. And once you get the subconscious to get to that level of arousal, challenge, it can do great things you’re constantly challenged, you’re constantly motivated, you’re constantly pushing the boundary of what you think is possible.

The most important concept you want to take away is the role reversal of your subconscious mind which is you can use the promises. You can use the motivations in your life to reverse the role of the subconscious mind from being an overprotective parent to being someone who supports you and not only support you but pushes you to get to your goal. From someone who doesn’t allow you to take action from someone who actually pushes you to take massive action because it is worried about your long term success and status in society.