7 Strategies for Wealth & Happiness summary

Introduction

7 Strategies for Wealth and Happiness by Jim Rohn Jim Rohn shares seven foundational strategies in goal setting, financial discipline, and personal growth to help you design a truly wealthy and happy life. Power ideas from America's foremost business philosopher. Do you often find yourself exasperated by money troubles? Do you feel like success is something unattainable, existing only in your fantasies?

If so, you're far from alone. The author Jim Rohn felt this way himself when he dropped out of college and began working in sales. He worked hard for six years yet remained stuck in the same position with the same salary. However, things changed when he met his mentor, Earl Shoaff.

Under Shoaff's guidance, he learned effective strategies for building wealth through discipline and concentrated effort. By implementing them, he became a millionaire by the age of 31. While wealth and success can mean different things to different people, following the seven strategies can help you achieve any financial goal, whether it's becoming a millionaire or freeing yourself from debt. So let's get started.

The Power of Goal Setting

Setting clear goals will help you discipline yourself and create structure. Think back to the last time you completed one of your goals or crossed an item off your to-do list. What happened afterward?

Inevitably another task cropped up to take its place. While this may seem frustrating, it's ultimately a good thing. You don't want to have just one goal at a time, because after you achieve it you could be left lost and aimless. Consider the Apollo astronauts after they returned from their life-changing trip to the moon.

Sadly several of the astronauts fell into depression because they no longer had anything to strive for. Nowadays as part of their mandatory training, astronauts develop goals to work toward after their missions are complete. You too should have goals. To get started it's important that you set aside some time to work on them.

Try the following journaling exercise to help you visualize your long-term goals and get you thinking about how to achieve them. Grab a notebook and think about what you want to accomplish in the next one to 10 years. Then write down a list of those goals as quickly as possible. Try for around 50 goals in total.

After your list is complete, assign each goal to one of four categories based on how long it will take to achieve it. One, three, five or ten years. Next, balance your list so you don't have too many goals in any one category. Remove items from categories that have too many goals and add new goals to categories with too few.

Then circle the most important goals from each category. You should now have a list of 16 goals in total. Finally, write one paragraph about each goal. In the first half of each paragraph, describe exactly what the goal is.

If it's a product you want to purchase, for example, write down the model, color, cost and any other significant details. Then in the second half of the paragraph, write down why you want to achieve each goal. If you can't think of a strong enough reason, it's possible this particular goal isn't worth your time. In that case, consider replacing it with a different goal.

After you've refined your list, you'll be able to refer back to it to check your progress and review which goals are still important to you and which aren't.