Archive for April, 2009

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

A couple of years ago a good friend of mine gave me a book called Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. I enjoyed reading it a lot and I immediately gave it to my partner Helen to read and she enjoyed it too, and now I’m recommending it to you. This book changed our lives for the better, more about that in a minute.

The Book

The book is about the fact the we all have a “financial blueprint” that defines how we think about money, how we handle money, and how much money we can make in our life. This financial blueprint is set early in life, normally by our parents and peers and by key events in ours childhood. Often our financial blueprint is not set to a very high level and thus UNLESS WE CHANGE IT we will plod through life dealing with money in the same way forever. Think about your own childhood. Did your parents say “we can’t afford that”, “money doesn’t grow on trees”, “rich people are bad”, “we’ll never have enough money to do that” etc? If so, the chances are that you financial blueprint could be optimised A LOT 🙂

The author is quite funny, he doesn’t pull his punches when he talks about the dumb things people do to sabotage their own success. It has many great sayings in it that I’ve taken on board such as “Millionaires choose both” which is a reworking of “the power of AND”. He encourages you to make personal affirmations verbally every day. I didn’t actually do that, I wrote mine down and read them and thought about them a lot – but I still got great results. Perhaps if I had done spoken affirmations, my success would have been even bigger! It certainly something I’m considering now.

The effect on us

I’ve been optimising my financial blueprint for many years (without calling it that) and this book really helped me to accelerate that process. It worked for Helen too, she tripled her hourly income for Science Writing in a matter of months – impressive.

I implemented a new system of money management for our joint and personal finances that empowered us to earn more money. I cleared off my personal debts in a year and then built up a healthy positive balance that included 10% savings that I never touch and 10% of money that I give away to friends, family and charity (money needs to flow out so it flows back in).

I had enough money to pay for a much needed operation and to pay for a dental brace and soon I’ll be flying back to England for a week long Aikido course. I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that if I hadn’t set up a new money management system (it was based on things in the book but was my own invention – that’s not to say it hasn’t been done before, I bet it has).

Seminars

The author occasionally mentions the seminars that he runs in the book and I recently got a taste of what they are like. He (T Harv Ecker) came to Vancouver and Helen and I went to see him last week. It was like $30 for a 2.5 hour talk and the place (a huge hotel ballroom) was packed. He talked about how to be successful in the current economy and the crux of it is trust in yourself and look for opportunities, don’t sit on your ass, stuff like that.

Anyway, it was a cultural experience for us because he shouts a lot and encourages a lot of audience participation, and being reserved British types, we are not used to that sort of thing. We had to shout stuff out and raise our hands a lot when we agreed with him (like every minute or so), and we also had to stand up and high five people and say “you’re awesome!” – stuff like that. If that sounds weird or cheesy, well it was at first. But soon our egos dropped away and we just joined in because everyone else was doing it, and then we found it to be strangely empowering.

At the end of the seminar he gave us free tickets to a 3 day course where we get to reprogram our financial blueprints for higher success. At first when he was upselling the course I thought he was going to say “if you register tonight, I’ll give you 50% off” or something, but he gave us COMPLETELY FREE tickets. I can’t really loose by going to it (apart from time and I could always abort if I find it crappy, but somehow I don’t think I will). Clearly he uses that as a marketing trick and it works because here I am blogging about it.

Anyway, please check out the book, you won’t regret it, it’s worth the tiny investment – and let me know what you think.

I’ll let you know how I get on at the Seminar which is running from Fri May 22nd to Sun May 24th in Vancouver. It’s this one.

Free Tickets For You

One more thing, I actually have two EXTRA FREE tickets to the seminar. I’m asking some people I know personally if they are interested in going and may have some takers but if you know me (in person or virtually) and would like to attend, drop me an email and I’ll see if I still have the free tickets. There’s no catch, nothing to loose, just free tickets to a seminar that could (and probably will) change your life. A friend of mine who lives in Austria just flew to London to do the same seminar and said “It was mindblowing”, so I’m pretty excited about it.

Don’t forget to check out The Book 😉

My game was on TV last night!

Friday, April 17th, 2009

Last night my game, Unwell Mel, was on Urban Rush, a popular Canadian cable TV show on Shaw TV (Channel 4 in B.C).

The show had a Big Fish Games feature that showed off Unwell Mel and some other games such as Return to Ravenhearst, Azada 2, and some Hidden Expedition games. They interviewed Jeremy Lewis, the CEO of BFG, and talked about the games and the customer demographic etc. It was probably about 10 minutes long so it was a pretty decent slot.

It certainly felt good seeing my game on TV for the first time! Let’s hope for more media appearance of my games in the future 🙂