Prosperous and wealthy people are successful because they’ve made it a habit to do those things that increase their chances of achieving prosperity and wealth. When you take the list of thirteen (13) items here of what successful people do on a regular basis, you get habits.

A quick note about the use of the word “prosperous” and “wealthy”. I don’t like to use the word “rich” because prosperity and wealth encompass more than just money. When a person is prosperous and wealthy, he or she has a an abundance of health, wealth, and relationships. To have an imbalance in one or more areas mean a person needs to do more to achieve balance so as to gain true prosperity.

1. Hang out with other wealth-minded individuals.

Jim Rohn said you’re the average of the five people with which you spend the most time. How true this is. If you want to build wealth and live a more prosperous life, start hanging out with like-minded individuals.

Before you go and reject yourself by asking why wealthy people would want to hang around you, here are some ways to make this possible.

Find gurus online. Read their articles. Listen to their Podcasts. Watch their videos. Over and over. Once you get into this, you quickly realize that most people talking about making more money and becoming more prosperous don’t talk about money at all. They talk about about mindsets.

And that’s what you’re really after: How these gurus think. You want to develop their mindset. When you have to make a pivotal decision in your life, you ask the question: What would guru XYZ do?

2. Prosperous people constantly think about and talk about ways to make more money.

The difference is night and day between people who are wealthy and people who are poor. Wealthy people think about how to create the money to get what they want. Poor people throw their hands up in defeat and say, “Woe is me. I’m too poor to afford this.” They reject themselves and give up long before the game is over.

Growing up, my family primarily focused on and talked about two things: Food and money. Yet, when it came to money it was a constant stream of complaints about how expensive everything is, how unfair the world is, and how the rich kept stealing from the poor. I would grow up with these money myths and not realize I had a poor attitude towards money.

Instead of accepting that the world is unfair and move on to what they could change, they blamed other people for their problems. They had the victim mentality.

I would have the victim mentality for the longest time. Instead of thinking about how I might make the money to get something I want, I would just give up, saying to myself I don’t have money and that’s just the way it is.

One way is proactive. It could lead to what you want.

The other way is a dead end. You learn to give up and reject yourself long before someone rejects you. Don’t do that to yourself. Go for it so that someone rejects you instead of letting their opinion of you define your reality and your subsequent inability to take action for fear of rejection.

3. Prosperous and wealthy people do not talk in terms of income but net worth.

This is the most immediate difference between the wealthy and the just-getting-by. When you read the news, you often hear the phrase, “Ms. X is worth x-dollars.” When you hear people talk about Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, or even the CEO of your company, they often ask about that person’s net worth. Net worth is the value after subtracting liabilities and debts from assets.

Poor people, on the other hand, talk about income as a measure of success. They don’t realize a doctor can make $200,000 a year and be swimming in $250,000 in debt. His net worth would be -$50,000.

4. Prosperous and wealth people think in terms of assets, not liabilities.

Think about what you can own which would help generate passive income. Investing in stocks and real estates can provide you with that passive income. In other words, put your money to work instead of working for your money.

Make it a habit to pay yourself first by putting some of your income into a retirement account, especially if your employer matches part of it. If you don’t even do that, you’re walking away from free money. Consider contributing the maximum allowed, especially since you do receive a pre-tax advantage. Then, start educating yourself and investing in the rest.

You don’t have to become an expert in order to invest your money. You just need to know enough so that you can pay someone else to manage your money and know enough about whether they are doing the right things or not.

Starting a business is another great way to write off expenses and reduce your overall tax liability. See, there are a variety of ways to limit your liabilities and increase your assets.

5. Prosperous and wealthy people think in terms of experiences.

Would you rather spend a thousand dollars on a new iPhone or a $2000 on a week-long cruise to Alaska? Wealth-minded people think in terms of experiences. They know that things are just things. They are fleeting.

Memories and experiences last a lifetime. Part of life is telling stories of where we’ve been. The experience of travel or taking a class gives you something to talk about when you attend parties and networking events. They enrich the tapestry of your life. People love to be around a person who does things. This in turn helps you build up your network even more. Your net worth is often based on your network.

Some people would rather attend workshops and classes during their vacation in order to improve themselves. This, too, is a form of investment, especially if the knowledge you gain can help create more wealth.

6. Prosperous and wealthy people invest in themselves.

Would you spend $2000 on a new entertainment system or $2000 on a workshop learning how to start a business? Here’s the catch: The workshop may not take you anywhere. The money may be wasted because that business you dream of having never takes off running.

What should you do?

The wealth-minded individual invests the money on the class anyway. She knows that she will achieve some measure of growth, no matter how small and insignificant it seems. She looks at the entertainment center as just things that bring no value and richness into her life. Put it another way: How do you want to invest your time?

Did you know most Americans spend a whooping 8 (eight) hours a day watching mindless TV? That’s not including time spent on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, or YouTube. This is like having another full time job. In another 20 or 30 years, they will have a brain to match.

Is it any wonder around 66% of Americans do not even have $500 saved up? It takes an unexpected car repair or a medical bill to send them into a financial tailspin.

Instead of watching TV, put that time to more productive use. Watch YouTube videos on building wealth and changing your mindsets, Listen to TedTalks. Read personal development books. Learn how to build a business.

If you were born in America, you likely spent the first twenty years of your life going to school. Yet, once we graduate how many of us go back to school?

I had the same predicament. I stopped learning when I graduated from college. I realized over time that I was behind the curve. Though it took quite a bit of effort, I’ve gotten back into the habit of learning how to learn. And that is perhaps the greatest thing college actually teaches us.

So, make learning a life-long goal and dedicate yourself to constant study. Become an expert in a subject. All you need is to know a little more than most people. By definition, you are the expert. And when you are the expert, people start coming to you for help in solving their problems.

7. Prosperous and wealthy people count their blessings.

Successful people are grateful for what they have in their lives. When you appreciate what you already have, what you have appreciates even more.

It’s natural for people to fall into a mode of negativity because most of the early part of our civilization was spent protecting ourselves from threats. It was safer for our ancestors to assume the worst and not take a chance because our survival depended on it.

Times have changed and the most dangerous thing people do these days is driving. Yet, it’s still easy for most of us to look only at the negative side of things and to assume the worst.

The next time you find yourself falling into a pity party, looking for everything wrong with your life, because you might have received some bad news or experienced some new painful sensation in your body, break out of it by looking things which are right in your life.

Count your blessings and look at what you already have. You have a roof over your head, enough to eat, electricity by which to keep you warm in the winters and cool in the summers, technology that enables you to learn about prosperity and wealth, and a car to make travel easier. You have running water with which to drink and clean, carpeted flooring to keep your toes comfy, and whatever you want to watch at your finger tips. You have the connectivity of the Internet, which enables you to communicate with someone on the other side of the world in just minutes. (That sure beats writing a letter and waiting weeks for a response.)

You see, we take a lot of things for granted. When we’re able to step back for a moment and see just how lucky we are to have these things, our attitude about what we don’t have starts to improve by leaps and bounds. Pretty soon, you start learning how to reframe things when they don’t go well. You start looking on the bright side of things.

8. Prosperous and wealthy people do not fall into the victim mentality.

They accept responsibility for where they are in life. They accept things the way they are; learn to forgive so as to let go of the anger and hate, which is often counter-productive; and move on.

How do you know you have the victim mentality? Listen to your internal dialogue! Do you use such phrases as…

• It’s not fair that…
• I don’t have X because of Y.
• He only got there because of his race/who he knows.

Some people just seem to have a better time than others at getting things. But rather than be judgmental and hateful towards these people, which only brings more hateful, inferior thoughts and experiences into your own life, ask yourself what you can change.

In other words, successful people don’t fight what is. Rather, they focus on themselves.

When you fight, you create a resistance to things. When you resist something, you get more of the same because you start looking for evidence on why things are the way they are.

The same goes when you start looking at what you can change. You start looking for ways in which you can effect that change.

Forgiveness is difficult because we would rather hold onto the illusion of power that blame gives us. It makes us feel angry, which is better that despair and suffering. We think that as long as we’re fighting we’re working to change things. Yet, the more we fight something, the more of the same we seem to get.

When you start focusing on what you want and work towards its creation, you start getting more of what you put in.

9. Prosperous and wealthy people learn to set goals.

When you work towards the attainment of your goals, you grow as a person. The right books come into your life. You start meeting the right people.

Having goals help you stay focused on your wants. Rather than be dissatisfied and depressed, parking your butt in front of the television set for 8 hours a day, you start working towards your goals. Your goals give you something to look forward to.

After all, we are goal-oriented creatures. We find fulfillment in mastery. Goals help us achieve these things.

And even if you don’t get what you want, you still grow. In this way, goals aren’t about getting. They are about growing.

10. Prosperous and wealthy people learn how to really decide.

Schools fail us in more ways than one. They train us to work for someone else, to be an employee. Think about that for a moment. We go to school for 20+ years just to learn how to work for someone else. Not once are we taught how to manage money, save and invest for retirement, or start our own business.

You also aren’t taught how to think. Thinking is really a prerequisite for making decisions. And in making decisions, we often have a goal in mind.

But many of us give up when we believe that we are not able to attain that goal. So, we don’t decide. What we do is go back to watching television 8 hours a day and watch life pass by. The majority of people are dead on the inside by the time they’re 30.

Most of us decide to play it safe, tip-toeing from the cradle to the grave, hoping to make it safely in one piece.

Most of us have jobs we hate. Yet, we go to work every day, doing the minimum, and hoping we don’t get fired.

Deciding means having faith that what you want is already within your reach. It is already here. You are not given your dreams if the means to attain them aren’t already here. It’s up to you now to manifest them into reality.

This goes back to hanging around with the people who are most closest to what you want to become.

This means learning how to learn.

This means having absolute faith that what you want is already here, then acting like you already have it, thinking like the person who is already in possession of that goal. Then, you working backwards to the present-day you, asking yourself what steps you can take. Then, move forward with faith that you will get what you want. Accept that you deserve your dreams and expect success.

And remember that even if you don’t, you still grow as a person. This is the real joy and benefit in setting goals, deciding, and working towards them.

11. Prosperous and wealthy people accept the monotony of success.

I have a little secret for you. Success is boring. You have to do the same things day in and day out. Is it any wonder most of us would rather watch TV than endure the boredom that comes with success?

For instance, to be healthy so as to enjoy the wealth you’re working hard to create means…

• Going to the gym three times a week for the rest of your life, whether you feel like it or not, whether you have time or not.
• Eating healthy (no soda, sugary drinks, and junk food)
• When you injure yourself (e.g., pulling a back muscle), you have you keep going to the gym, even if it means just doing cardio in order to maintain the habit of going to the gym.

If you want financial freedom, you have to work on yourself and be aware of your resistance to money. It means developing the discipline to save a few hundred dollars every month from not eating out for lunch so that you can invest this money. This means…

• Cooking and bringing your lunch to work.
• Potentially eating the same foods in a set rotation (hey, you only know how to cook so many meals)
• Enduring leftovers (because when I cook dinner, I cook extra so as to bring to work the next day for lunch).

In short, success means doing the same old shit a different day. It means being able to accept failure and meet it with a smile. Winston Churchill said that success is the ability to fail again and again with renewed enthusiasm.

12. Prosperous and wealthy people are growth-oriented.

As you can see from this long list, successful people are growth-oriented. They constantly look for ways to improve, invest in, and grow themselves.

They always have a personal development book in hand, listen to motivational or personal development Podcasts, and take consistent action towards achieving their goals, even if they don’t feel like it.

They go to the gym three times a week, even if they are sick or it’s been a long, 10-hour work day. They know that it’s dangerous to make it a habit of not going because a habit is a habit.

Successful people also know there will be times when they are in the dumps. So, they practice gratitude and appreciate what they already have so that those things keep appreciating. They listen to motivational speeches on YouTube or listen to Ted Talks.

In other words, they submerse their minds with success-oriented materials in order to work on changing their mindsets, which brings me to the point of this article.

13. You become what you think!

As Earl Nightingale said in his seminal work, The Strangest Secret, “Man becomes what he thinks. If you think about nothing, you become nothing.”

Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich contains the same lesson, even if Hill never tells you what the “secret” is. The secret is in the title!

So get into a growth-oriented mindset. Study the successful people who blazed the trail before you and learn how they think. Stop blaming other people or circumstances for your current station in life, no matter how tempting it may be to wallow in self-pity or to gain the pity and compassion of others.

Accept the things you cannot change, and change the things within your power. In the end, no one will give you shit.

Finally, faith is a major prerequisite to what you are doing. I’m not talking about religious faith but believing that what you want is already here, well within your reach. Now, you just have to believe in yourself enough to start taking consistent and mundane action so that one day you can hold it in your hands.