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7 Important Skills Self-Made Millionaires Must Have

Becoming a self-made millionaire is the American Dream. It is also the European Dream, the South American Dream and the dream of everybody that lives in a country where money exists. But here is the problem, dreaming doesn’t pay. If you want to be a millionaire then you have to put in the work, you have to get a little bit lucky and you need to start thinking like a self-made millionaire. There are simple things that they know, that you do not. You need to start learning before you start earning. Here is what you need to know:

1. Self-Made Millionaires Know How to Manage Their Money

How much do you think that just living out a normal day of your life costs? If you can’t answer that then you are already losing money. Without careful attention your losses can easily outstrip your gains in a day. Right now we are only talking about your personal finances. Imagine how quickly things can spiral out of control once you are running a major corporation or two.

Get a head start on your financial future of by using tools like Mint to create budgets and check your credit score, SmartyPig to prepare savings against planned projects and investments and RetailMeNot to maximise what you get back for every penny that you spend.

2. Self-Made Millionaires Know How to Create Win-Win Relationships

A self-made millionaire cannot afford to think small. Every bridge that you burn in business will eventually come back to haunt you. There is a reason that Richard Branson is nice to every Virgin employee he meets. You never know when the waiter you are tipping well today is going to be the technology start-up genius you meet at a black tie dinner in five years time.

Every conversation that you have could be the one that leads you to your next big deal and the goal of every deal should be to make sure that all sides are happy. But don’t take my word for it, here is advice on building win-win relationships from business development powerhouses Forbes.com and Entrepreneur.com.

3. Self-Made Millionaires Make Themselves Clear

Communication is the key to any good relationship and as we have already established, everything in business is about your relationships with other people. You are not going to be spending a lot of time face to face with the people that you are dealing with so what you write and how you write is going to become important. Not everyone is a natural writing genius, not even self-made millionaires. Which is why it is vital to develop your writing just as much, if not more than all of your other business skills.

Using samples like those found at EmailExcellence is a great starting point, their templates can help you craft your message from before you even begin. Hemmingway online tool will tidy up your writing as you go. Besides, such online writing service like UK Writings can fulfill all of your copy writing and content creation needs. An online writing tool like Essay for sale can help you to pull those big writing projects together. Wridea and similar brainstorming apps can help you put all of the concepts you want to convey into logical order.

4. Self-Made Millionaires Know How to Influence People

The world is run by people. When you get to the top of the corporate ladder you start hearing about market forces and demographics but what all of those complicated ideas boil down to is just people in large groups. To be a success in business you are going to have to get people on your side.

How you choose to do that is up to you. If you show up with the best idea that people have ever heard of and you can talk about it with absolute confidence then you are going to be a winner every time. But if you know how to network, if you know how to make sure your words reach the right ears, coming from the right lips, then suddenly your ideas don’t need to outshine everything in the world. People follow you and keep following you because they trust you. Not just because they can see the profit in you.

5. Self-Made Millionaires Surround Themselves with Greatness

It doesn’t matter if you are the best singer in the whole world, if your backing band are terrible then that is all that people are going to remember. Don’t let your support network turn into a noose and a millstone. By hiring only the best people you surround yourself with success.

The world has moved on from the days when you had to have all of your staff under one roof. It has even moved on from you needing all of your experts to be on the payroll. You can find an amazing team of all skill levels that will work to your schedule and budget using websites like Upwork, Essay Roo, PeoplePerHour and Freelancer.com.

6. Self-Made Millionaires Never Stop Learning New Things

It is easy to become stagnant as a person. We all know somebody that barely scrapes by with the absolute minimum of effort. If you want to be a self-made millionaire then that person cannot be you. The world never stops changing and the moment that you stop learning, your business is going to start slipping through your fingers. You need look no further than newspapers to see what happens to industry leaders that aren’t paying enough attention to new technology.

You can improve yourself with daily learning using tools like Udemy, CourseEra and EDX. With access to educational material from some of the world’s top universities you can improve your education, your skills, and yourself in your own time. Or if you prefer, you can go the way of the dinosaurs. There is no middle ground when it comes to success. Millionaires are like sharks, if they stop moving forward they die.

7. Self-Made Millionaires Know Actions Speak Louder than Words

Talk is cheap, or so they say. For all that communication is absolutely vital to building your business empire those words are going to ring hollow if you never back them up with actions. It isn’t easy to drastically shift your focus from talking to people to actually doing things so you need to learn how to keep your focus where it is meant to be.

By making yourself a daily list of things that need to be done you can ensure that your attention never drifts. It seems simple but it grants you the benefits of seeing a tangible result of your efforts and it shows others that you are capable. Everybody in the world would love to be a millionaire, yet somehow most people fall mysteriously short of that goal. Sure there are plenty of people out there who were born into money, people born with the biggest silver spoons you can imagine stuffed in their mouths. Their money isn’t worth the paper it is printed on. You can do better.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Gloria Kopp .