Seven Years to Seven Figures: The Fast-Track Plan to Becoming a Millionaire

Chapter 1. What the Heck Do I Know?

This book is all about creating a seven-figure net worth in seven years or less. That may sound outrageous ... even impossible. But it can be done. In fact, I've done it many times.

It started in 1983, when I first decided to get rich.

I was taking a 14-week Dale Carnegie course. Each week, we were given a challenge—to learn how to give a good "hello," to refrain from criticism ... that kind of thing. We would read what Dale Carnegie said about the subject in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People, figure out how we intended to implement that lesson in our lives, come into class and explain to everyone there what we specifically aimed to do—and then, the following week and for the rest of the course, we would practice that skill and report back to the class on our progress.

The lesson for week four was about priorities. Our challenge was to identify our 10 top goals, narrow them to five, narrow them again to three, and finally pick one as our primary goal.

In his book, Carnegie said something that had a profound impact on me. He said that while it is true that most people don't succeed because they don't have clearly defined goals, some people fail to make progress because they have too many.

He was right. That was my problem. If you have many goals—as I did—you can't achieve them all. If you don't narrow them down and prioritize them, you may achieve none of them. I realized that for ambitious people like me (and maybe you, too), establishing ...