Millionaire Mind in Turbulent Times

How to create your own thriving Micro-Economy while the general economy is in crisis.

Exclusive Interview with T. Harv Eker, October 2008

Introduction by Kieron Sweeney, Master Trainer of Peak Potentials Training.

Hello, this is Kieron Sweeney of Peak Potentials Training. You are about to hear an exclusive interview with T. Harv Eker, author of the N.Y. Times #1 best-seller, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind and creator of the world famous Millionaire Mind Intensive.

Harv personally went from broke to multi-millionaire after discovering the powerful effects of what he calls the Millionaire Mind. Since that time, it has been his mission to share his learning with the world, and to date he has positively impacted the lives of nearly one million people across 101 countries.

Harv’s message and the fundamentals of the Millionaire Mind have never been as important as they are in this uncertain economy. In the following interview, Harv speaks very specifically about how to not only survive in today’s financial climate, but how to actually take the challenges of today’s markets and turn them in to an opportunity for abundance.

The following interview offers valuable tips to help you create your own personal economy, which thrives independently of the external economy. To get the whole story on how you can develop a Millionaire Mind and succeed in any economy, I invite you to join the three day intensive seminar, Millionaire Mind in Turbulent Times. Event Schedule

Now, let’s hear what Harv has to say about surviving in this economy.

Len: Hi, everyone. This is Len Foley in an exclusive behind-the-scenes interview with T. Harv Eker.

Harv, I’d like to ask you how your Millionaire Mind mindset and philosphy apply to a down and difficult economy.

Harv: That’s a really great question, especially right now. What economy are you talking about? There’s the general economy, and then there’s my economy. The general economy is definitely suffering. My economy is completely different, and is completely great.”

The point is that everybody has their own economy. Everybody has their own views on life, their own standards and results. My current results are obviously not what the general population’s results are because my results in general are not what the general population’s are. It makes sense that I’m going to have my own economy.

The first point, and everybody should write this down, is that you have your own economy. Now say that 100 times. “I have my own economy, and my economy is great.” Let me tell you why it’s going to be great.

I call this “micro-economies.” Everybody has their own micro-economy. Why will your economy be any different than anybody else’s? You’re different than everybody else. You look at things differently than anybody else.

When my father didn’t have any food to eat back in the old country, he would actually eat garbage off the garbage truck. He’d find good stuff and things that people threw away, like half a chicken. Of course it’s not the most sanitary thing, but in those days you either starved or you ate what was available. Today, of course, homeless people eat like that all the time. Sometimes you go down the street and see trashcans and stuff. Sometimes you see things on the street that people put out, like couches, and think, “Wow, that’s a pretty cool thing to throw out!” It’s hard to throw things like that out these days because the garbage trucks don’t take them. You have to get rid of them another way. In the old days, that’s what it was.

The point is that one person’s garbage is another person’s gold.

The fact is that there’s a very simple philosophy that we talk about all the time at our programs and at the Millionaire Mind: Focus on opportunities, not on problems. The other side of every problem is an opportunity.

This isn’t just Pollyanna. This is the way of the universe. On the other side of in, there’s out. On the other side of left, there’s right. On the other side of up, there’s down. It’s the Law of Duality. When there’s a problem, there has to be an opportunity.

What you focus on expands. If you want to have more problems, all you have to do is focus on problems. If you want to have more opportunities, all you have to do is focus on opportunities.

There is opportunity. There is a light behind every shadow. Otherwise, the shadow wouldn’t be there.

What I can tell you is that the people are in shock. Our students are in shock. It’s so funny. People listening to the media right now are thinking, “Oh my god! We’re going to get ready for a Depression. I’m going to make my money by having mattresses at the bottom of the windows people jump out of.” Guess what? Now you’re looking in the right direction. You’re looking at opportunities.

Remember, that could happen, but the chances are very slim. What is happening is that people are scared and confused. They don’t know what to do. Their money is going down. Their stocks are going down. The value of their property is going down.

What do you do right now? How do you turn that around? We have to remember, certain things do better when the economy goes south. Here are a couple of elements you need to be aware of.

First, you want to focus on what you want, not what you don’t want. Focus on looking for opportunities. Focus on utilizing what’s out there. If you resist what is, you’re going to have pain. If you accept what is, you’re going to be okay.

If you utilize what is, if you take advantage of what is all the time, then you’re going to flourish. In this economy, you have an opportunity to take advantage of what’s going on if you have some knowledge to do that. The stock market is going up. The stock market is going down. If you know how to do stock market trading, options, chicken trades, etc., you can flourish.

The more volatile it is, the better. I believe it’s going to be very volatile. You need to know volatile strategies.

The first concerns the American dollar, although it’s gained in strength right now. I’m not an advisor so I would never tell you to do anything around this, but I have an opinion.

Many people’s opinion is that fundamentally, the US economy is poor. Therefore, the dollar will be weak and will continue to go down. What do you do? You need to get some, not all, of your money and consider the possibility of diversifying. Take some of your money and invest it outside the US.

What does this do? That means that should the dollar go down, which a lot of experts believe it will, if you have a 5% return on your investment outside of the US and the dollar goes down 10%, in essence you have a 15% return on your money in whatever you have outside of the country.

Real estate investments outside of the US seem to be stronger than in the US right now, places like the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica and all over the Caribbean. I’m not saying they’re great shakes based on the economy, but they certainly seem to be holding their own, if not better, and are still going up in a lot of places.

There are a lot of opportunities for you to consider real estate outside of North America, and the US especially. Even Canada - although Alberta has come down a little bit to come back to reality. As oil still is king, chances are that Alberta will continue to do really well.

Again, I’m not a prognosticator. I don’t claim to know what’s going to happen in the economy, but I frankly don’t really care. I’m going to take advantage of whatever is going on. That, my friends, is the Millionaire Mind. You focus on what you want. You focus on your own microeconomy. You look for opportunities.

Let’s talk a little bit about investment situations. The first thing is that you want to learn about strategies that allow you to take advantage when the market is going down, both the real estate and stock markets. There are many strategies out there such as short selling, although they’ve quelled a bit of short selling. There’s option trading, all kinds of ways you can do it. In the real estate market it’s the same situation.

You want to be able to learn those strategies. We have a lot of them that we’re teaching right now. At the same time, here’s my highest recommendation: I would not necessarily be buying things right at this moment for appreciation because you don’t know if it’s going to appreciate. A lot of things will, but you don’t know when.

You need to understand. Warren Buffett is no slouch. He is one of the richest men in the entire world. He didn’t get that way by being stupid. His quote was, “This is the day I’ve been waiting for for the last 10 years.” Why? He has just made a couple of major investment in some banks.

He’s purchased massive amounts of shares. He has $5 billion into Goldman Sachs and $5 billion into General Electric, the backbone of our economy. General Electric still has half of the appliances out there, sometimes branded under other names. They’re the backbone of the consumer part of the country.

He says, “This is what I’ve been waiting for.” If you would have bought real estate two to three years ago, you’d be buying at a premium. Right now, everything--real estate, stock market--is on sale.

You want to take advantage of the sale. Is it the best sale possible? I don’t know that. All I can tell you is that it’s on sale. I’ve been waiting for this day too. When I was looking at stocks, I thought they were overvalued. When I was looking at real estate, it was expensive. Now, everything is getting back to what it should be.

Eventually, since everything is energy, what goes up comes down. What goes down comes up. All energy travels in frequencies and vibrations, up and down. Eventually, whether it is six months, one year, two years, five years or 10 years, I believe the stuff that’s on sale now will rise. It will go back up again.

Why do I believe that? It’s done that for a million years. Everything that goes up goes down. Everything that goes down goes up. After problem comes no problem. Warren Buffett says that when everyone is greedy, you should be fearful, and when everyone is fearful, you should be greedy. This is why he’s taken $10 billion and put it into just two companies.

Follow what rich people do.

I’m not telling you to do that. I’m just telling you that this is how the Millionaire Mind works. You can have a broke mind right now. You can watch CNN, NBC and all these other news channels. You can watch them over and over. You can watch the Republicans talk about one thing and the Democrats talk about another. They always disagree. All you’re listening to is “blah, blah, blah” and how bad everything is. You think, “Oh my god, the sky is caving in!” So, don’t watch that stuff. Get involved in your life, in your economy.

When I see that the Dow Jones has gone down 700 points, I’m thinking, “Wow! This sale just got better.” Will it go down more? It might, but who cares? I’ll just buy more then. Things are going on sale. That’s how I’m looking at it. There’s no foolproof way to determine yes, no, no, yes. I could be wrong, but so could a lot of other people.

The most wrong thing to do is to, in fear, get paralyzed. From an investment standpoint, you want to think everything is on sale. It’s just a question of how much of a sale it is. That’s for real estate, stocks, and everything of the like.

Len: I want to note that I did an interview this morning with Scott Schilling, a trading expert. He mentioned that we hear a lot of news reports about people losing their shirts in this difficult economy, but what we don’t hear is that there are a lot of investors making millions, even billions, of dollars in this exact same moment.

This proves your point that a bad external economy, met by somebody with a good internal economy, can produce a phenomenal economy.

Harv: Absolutely. That’s a great point.

A lot of you are losing right now. You’re selling things at a loss. Whether it is real estate, stocks or anything of the sort, if someone sells something at a loss, the operative word is “selling.” That means there are two people in that transaction. There’s a seller and there’s a buyer.

If someone is selling at a loss, the buyer must be buying at a very good price. They’re buying a win. Somebody is losing and somebody is winning. Hopefully it doesn’t pan out just like that. In general, when people are losing money, there are opportunities to take the other side of that. Somebody has to buy that at a loss.

If I bought something at $50 and am selling it now at $30, someone is buying it at $30. That person has the gold, basically. That’s a critical thing. On the other side of every transaction is another purchaser. Someone is calling this garbage and getting rid of it. The other person is thinking, “Wow, this is gold! I’m going to take it.”

Len: What are some good businesses to get involved in right now in this difficult economy?

Harv: Let’s talk about business in general. First of all, this is a great time to get better at what you do, to get better at business, get more knowledge, and set your business up in such a way that it’s literally fail proof.

You need to go on a business diet. You have to tighten up your belt. You have to become lean, mean and--here’s my key word--nimble. You have to be flexible. You have to be able not only to survive, but also to do decently at lower revenue if that’s the way it is. I’m not saying that it’s going to be that. You want to stay positive, increase your sales, etc. If worse comes to worst, if it’s going to be chopped down by 40%, then your expenses must be chopped by 40%. There is nothing that is more important than that.

Expenses can kill you. Overhead can kill you. It can destroy. It does destroy almost every business that doesn’t make it. You have to take whatever in your business, and you have to go to need, need, need. There’s no more want.

In a diet, you would eat healthily. You would eat vegetables, fruits, and a bit of protein here and there. You wouldn’t be having drinks, ice cream, etc. A lot of the things you like and want, you have to cut out for the time that you are slimming down and getting to your right size. It’s the same way in your business.

You really have to cut out some of the things you might like and want. At this point in time, you’re on a business diet, so you don’t have that luxury anymore.

You can only get that luxury back when your business has those extra sales, when you come up with methodology to increase those sales. Then you can increase the luxuries again, but I wouldn’t do that.

Here’s the coolest thing. Now you really go with the Millionaire Mind. You are intelligent in your marketing and sales and at bringing in new strategies that do that. Most of your competition has gone by the wayside because they didn’t do what I’m telling you to do right now. People still need what you have.

Now you’re increasing sales, but you’ve learned a better lesson and now have a new eating habit. You are still on your healthy diet and eat that way for the rest of your life. Now you get freaking rich.

Before, you weren’t forced to make more money. You weren’t forced to tighten things up. You weren’t forced to have better sales and marketing methods.

Now you’re forced to do it in order to survive and do decently. What happens is you go on that diet. You stay on that diet for the rest of your life, but you increase your sales and revenue. Now you’re going to get rich. Does this make any sense to anybody here?

Len: This is great, Harv. In the old model of business, we contended with our competitors. We were content doing that. We could make a decent living at our business. Now we need to foresee so many variables.

That’s what people miss when they watch the news. They’re getting the information that the average person is getting, not the cutting-edge information that the multimillionaires are getting. As a result, they’re able to profit from these difficult times, even make billions and multimillions of dollars.

Harv: You need to get some knowledge. You need to get some strategies under your belt. I’m not going to stand here and talk to you about options, certain real estate plays or certain locations. You need to learn those. Where do you learn them? I don’t know. You tell me. I know that we teach them. If you find someone else to teach them, do that.

Let me cover one more point about investing, if you don’t mind. If you’re looking at investments right now, be careful of only going for asset appreciation. I was talking about this before. You don’t know if things are going to appreciate.

What we’re looking for right now is cash flow. Many times you have both cash flow and appreciation. In the worst-case scenario, you want to have cash flow in economic times like this. If you’re going to buy a stock, look at stocks that have excellent dividends.

If you’re going to get involved in real estate, maybe you decide to invest in more of a commercial real estate that has a positive cash flow. Maybe you’re buying a part of a plaza or a little retail mall, or something like that, that has strong AAA tenants who are serving with necessities.

What you’re buying is cash flow. You’re not worrying about whether it goes up or down. You don’t care about that because you’re not selling the thing.

Here’s an example. I’m involved in some commercial real estate. I invest. Some of them I buy on my own. Some of them I buy with managed groups so I don’t have to put up as much money. You can actually put up a very small amount and get involved with that. I get a check for positive cash flow every month.

I’m not selling it, so I don’t care if it’s appreciating $1 million or $5 million or if it’s going down $1 million. I don’t care. I just get my same check every month. They still pay their rent. Their rent is the same every month. In fact, it’s going to go up in about a year. I’m just looking for cash flow.

One of the key things in investing right now is if you have things on sale, then appreciation is fine. But if you buy things for cash flow, you’re going to be jelling right there. One more thing we were talking about is this idea of the kind of businesses. There are two elements. First, if you sell to high net-worth individuals, such as multimillionaires and millionaires, and you have an expensive product, you’ll probably do okay.

Most people I know who are high net worth aren’t going to be overly affected by this whole thing. They’re the ones who are buying up the stuff that everybody else is selling.

Right now, I’m trying to sell things just to get into cash in order to buy other stuff. My philosophy, however, in this type of economics is that you want to be looking toward the best as possible, either serving the higher-end market, because they’re not as affected, or being able to offer needs versus wants.

You have to compete with the disposable income. If the disposable income is less and people have less confidence, they’re going to tighten their belt and, like you, buy needs. The question is what is a need?

They are the things that are a necessity. People still have to eat, but they may not go out to a fancy restaurant like they used to every Saturday night. They might go once every two or three weeks now. People still have to wear clothes and shoes, but they may not be buying 40 pairs of shoes. The more needs you can get, the better.

Second, people in this type of times are fearful. What they need is some hope and some optimism. They need some pragmatic optimism that allows them to not only say, “Look at the bright side of things and take advantage of it,” but also how to do it. That’s exactly what we offer.

From strictly a financial point of view, this is the best time in the last 10 years if you have a Millionaire Mind. It’s the worst time if you have a broke and middle-class mind. You choose the kind of mind you want to have. You choose if you want to be garbage or gold, the one who’s selling or the one who’s buying. If you say, “I might lose my job,” well, good, lose it. Get rid of that albatross, that security blanket.

This is your time. The Universe is forcing you to make your move. If you can make money in a business now, in this economy, then when the economy changes, you are going to flush. Diversification is excellent. Cash flow is excellent. Parking your money and sitting on the sidelines right now if you have cash is a decent idea with the intention of moving in and buying sale-priced items when you believe it’s the right time to do it.

I think it’s all in your attitude, mindset, knowledge, willingness to get educated and willingness to execute a few simple strategies that people are doing right now on the other side of the coin. When people are selling, people are buying. Be one of the buyers right now. If you’re in need, change your mindset first. Look for opportunities. Get involved with people and educate yourself with people who are doing well. Come to our freaking programs! That will help you a lot. That will turn your head around big time and put some new glasses on your eyes.

The way the Universe works is very simple. In and out, up and down, light and dark, back and forth, left and right, good and bad, duality and duality, problem and solution, problem and opportunity.

I hope this has been a bit of a help for people to at least get their mind straightened out and their eyes readjusted to the light instead of the darkness.

Take advantage, just like everybody else. Don’t hurt anybody, but utilize what’s going on.

Take the opposite side.

As many people will be hurt by this as will get rich by this. People will feel the pain. Other people will feel the pleasure. Which one do you want to be? Which one do you choose to be? That is a choice. I’m going to leave you with a quote from Warren Buffett. “I have been waiting for this day for 10 years.” I agree.

Bye for now.

Closing by Kieron Sweeney

Hi, this is Kieron again. No doubt after listening to this interview your mind is turning towards the direction of opportunity for success and abundance in this market. Much of what Harv discussed here is about mindset, and the importance of building one that supports your personal success. Most of us develop unsupportive beliefs and behaviors through early conditioning – and while we are often aware of them, at times we feel powerless to change them. That’s why Harv developed the Millionaire Mind Intensive; a 3-day seminar which uses a variety of highlyaccelerated learning processes to help you recognize the unsupportive thoughts and behaviors, and change them, right there, right on site.

The next step is to take these ideas and put them into action. The Millionaire Mind Intensive will give you the skills you need to do exactly that. Plus, Harv has just developed a new segment which speaks directly to the current economy. This special edition Millionaire Mind in Turbulent Times is only planned for this season, to deal with the very specific circumstances of the financial climate of today. If you want more out of life... more wealth, more happiness, more fun... register today. Simply Register Here for the Millionaire Mind Events

We hope to see you at an event soon, and until then, here’s to your continued success.