How to Become a Money Making Robot

How would you like to become a wealth building machine?

If you wish to become rich, one of the first things you have to realize early on is that YOU are the vehicle to your wealth. You are responsible for your success or failure in the financial front, and you are the only person to depend on.

For this reason, you have to take care of making yourself function as optimally as possible. You have to become a well-oiled machine.

Making money is hard, so you have be at your best condition in order to maximize your chances of success.

In fact, you should think of yourself as a Robot. There are many aspects of this, so let’s take a look at each one of them.

1. Hardware

Your hardware is essentially your physical self, your body. It is the foundation, the base for all the rest. If your body is not working properly, trying to make money is a hopeless act.

Your personal health should be your top priority in life. Without a good health, everything else is pretty much worthless.

The major pillars of your health are the following:

• Nutrition
• Exercise
• Sleep
• Stress

Nutrition refers to eating proper food, the kind that evolution has designed us to eat. It is an oxymoron that in this era of abundance, finding quality food is getting more and more difficult.

As a first step, you should educate yourself on proper nutrition. After that, you should create a nutritious diet plan and stick to it. At a minimum, eliminate junk food, sodas and all the known culprits.

Next comes physical exercise. Our bodies are designed to move, that is how they thrive. Yet we have devolved to a sedentary lifestyle and barely move more than the necessary.

Make sure that you work out at least a bit each and every day. Men should also do some weightlifting on a regular basis.

An overlooked part of our modern lifestyle is our sleep. People often adopt atrocious sleeping habits and end up walking around like “zombies” without even realizing it.

Sleeping might appear as “wasted time”, but in reality is enormously vital to our health and well-being. Productivity wise, you cannot expect to perform at your best if you are not sleeping properly.

A quick checklist for sleep:

• Go to bed at as regular hours as possible
• Spend as much time as possible outside during the day
• No electronic devices at least half hour before sleep
• Keep your bedroom cool and dark (simulates night time)
• Drink moderate amounts of coffee (if any) and not too late
• Avoid alarm clocks for getting up, wake up naturally

And then we have stress, something that we take its existence of for granted nowadays. Well, stress is a modern age mass killer.

Our bodies have not evolved to cope with the chronic stress we face in modern society. This leads to all kinds of dangerous body states like inflammation, high cortisol levels, high blood pressure and even DNA damage.

In short, higher stress equates to a shorter life expectancy. So you better take the appropriate measures to manage it.

Reducing stress in your life is usually not something that can be done very quickly since it requires structural changes in one’s life. For example, you might have to leave your obnoxious day job and venture on your own.

In the short term, you can schedule for more downtime and relaxation periods, and even experiment with meditation. Having a streamlined and optimized workflow will also help, at least for the work related part.

Your body is the robot’s hardware. It is the foundation of your life and your success. You should guard it and tend to it.

“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.”

– Jim Rohn

2. Software

The software is what runs the hardware, what drives the machine. Your software is your brain, your mind.

There is a physical aspect to that. Proper brain function requires appropriate nutrition, adequate sleep and good overall health. But other than the brain itself, it is also your mind you have to nurture.

How do you nurture and upgrade your mind?

The first step is to re-adjust and calibrate your money mindset. The best way to do that is focus on building up knowledge and start reading high-impact money books.

After that you should read, read and read some more. All great leaders and successful people read voraciously. In fact, your self-education should never stop.

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

– Mahatma Gandhi

Keep in mind that as finite beings, our brains have limited capacity. For this reason, we must “feed” them only with top quality information. You can’t spend hours on TV or mindless “entertainment”. That is a highway to modern “slavery”.

Another way to upgrade your hardware is to make sure you associate only with the best of breed people. This means individuals that are also on the path of self-development and wealth building.

It might sound elitist, but you cannot afford to do otherwise. You have to associate only with those that help you become a better, more successful person, either directly or indirectly. And of course you help them back, it is an exchange of value.

Additionally, you should seek out the influencers and best players in your industry and watch carefully how they operate. Contact them gracefully and make them part of your social network if possible. Their advice will be priceless.

On the same spirit, try to avoid pessimistic and “toxic” people who will infect you with their negativity. Those are the whiners who prefer to complain about something rather than go out and deal with it.

You should also never get involved in “serious” conversations with them, e.g. about money, politics, etc. They will never understand, you will waste your time and your relationship might get into jeopardy. No positive outcome at all.

Your brain is a powerful machine that builds your perception and ultimately shapes your reality. You can nurture it and achieve great things by leveraging it or you can let it degrade and lead you to a life of mediocrity.

3. Emotions

Emotions are the various states of consciousness we experience in our life, like joy, sorrow, fear, hate etc. Most often they are accompanied by specific changes in our body’s physiology, like increased heartbeat or respiration, and often observable cues, like crying or shaking.

As with everything that happens in our body, emotions have been developed due to evolutionary reasons. It has been evolutionarily beneficial for humans to be emotional. For example, by being fearful of the environment, our ancestors were extra careful to avoid dangers and potential risks, keeping them alive long enough to pass on their genes to later generations.

However, the environment we live in modern times has tremendously changed and these same emotions that have been serving us for millennia, sometimes work counterproductively and fail us.

Emotions are very primitive and more powerful than our logical brain. They can cloud our thinking about matters that require total clarity and lucidity. They can take over our logical thinking and lead us to the wrong decisions.

Particularly when it comes to money, being emotional is detrimental to one’s progress.

The examples abound, but let’s consider one of the most common: splurging on unnecessary consumer items. While we rationally know that we cannot afford some items or shouldn’t purchase them, we are carried over by our emotions and buy them anyway. Modern advertising is so sophisticated that triggers those mighty emotions and renders our critical judgement useless.

Another great example would be fear. As we mentioned, fear was very helpful to humans as they evolved since it kept them safe. But in modern age, fear halts our progress and makes us lose money related opportunities. For example, one of the most prevalent reasons that people stay on jobs they despise is because they are afraid.

But unlike humans, robots lack emotion, they are the definition of rationality. They just use their hardware in order to execute on the highly sophisticated software they are loaded with. No deviation, no second thoughts.

This sounds stiff and inflexible. Why would you like to become a robot like this?

The reason is that the rational approach is the optimal in the majority of times. The best way to tackle problematic issues and evaluate certain circumstances is by using your rationality.

Keeping your emotions at bay allows you to be logical, examine the matter at hand in an unbiased way, properly assess the pros and cons of each approach and ultimately make the best decision.

Sure, this does not always lead to the correct decision. Sometimes our “gut” has the correct answer. But realistically, this happens only in a few occasions.

When it comes to money, being unemotional or at least being able to control your emotions, is a surefire way to success.

Of course, you and I are humans, we can never be 100% unemotional. What we can do however is control our own emotions (and sometimes of those around us) and mitigate their influence.

This is where Emotional Intelligence (EQ) comes into play:

“Emotional intelligence (EQ) is the ability to identify, use, understand, and manage emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges, and defuse conflict. Emotional intelligence impacts many different aspects of your daily life, such as the way you behave and the way you interact with others.”

EQ is paramount to success. In fact, research has shown that people with strong emotional intelligence are more likely to succeed than those with high IQs or relevant experience. Additionally, it has been shown that the biggest predictor of career success is not skills or education, but emotional intelligence.

It is not enough to have installed the best “software” (proper money mindset). If your emotions do not allow it to work in an unaffected way, the outcome will almost always be poor.

You have to hone these EQ skills, something that will allow you to manage your emotions properly. Managing emotions is a major pillar of success, do not neglect it.

4. Willpower

Have you ever felt that you could not go through a task you had planned to complete, even though you consciously knew you should do it?

It is because your willpower failed you.

Willpower refers to the ability to control yourself and determine your actions so that you carry out your decisions and plans.

In its core, willpower is a conscious regulation of the self by the self.

Unfortunately, willpower is a limited resource. We only have a specific amount of it.

Willpower is depleted when we “force” ourselves to do things that we do not “feel” comfortable doing or do not (subconsciously) want to do.

This might range from making a phone call to close a business deal to resisting a slice of pizza when on diet.

Did you notice the operative word? “Feel”.

Willpower is directly linked to our emotions. Its those emotions that make us postpone the task to be done and procrastinate. Its those emotions that make us eat that pizza slice.

I have empirically noticed that, in general, the more rational you are as a person, the easier it is to “control yourself” and act on the plans you have made, no matter how uncomfortable they might make you.

A lot of things can deplete your willpower during the day. Being stuck in a traffic jam, meeting face to face with an annoying person, struggling with a difficult problem and so on.

These are pretty much self-evident. What is more subtle is that our willpower is depleted when we make decisions. Making a decision is something that we (subconsciously) dislike because of the unknown of its nature and the responsibility it brings.

Consequently, for each decision we make, our willpower is depleted a little bit, even if it is about trivial stuff, like what to wear. That is the reason why you see successful people wear the exact same clothes every day. They want to restore their willpower for more important things.

Having a strong willpower is crucial to your success in life. Unless you can stay focused on your long term goals and “make” yourself work towards them even if you don’t “feel” like it, you will not accomplish much.

“The strength of your life is measured by the strength of your will.”

– Henry Van Dyke

Building wealth is hard and has a lot of challenges. It is your willpower and self-discipline that will push you to carry on when things get tough.

Actually, this is the number one reason that most wannabe entrepreneurs fail:

Lack of self-discipline and a weak willpower.

A robot on the other hand has infinite willpower. It always executes, no matter the circumstances. It doesn’t procrastinate, it doesn’t give up.

So how do you become a self-disciplined money making machine?

You build habits that will forge your willpower.

The good news is that willpower is like a muscle. You can train it and develop it. By picking the correct habits, you will be able to gradually strengthen your willpower.

Additionally, when a habit is established (after around 30 days of practicing it), it gets “installed” in your subconscious brain. After that, the decision to do the habitual action is made on the subconscious, while the conscious part is circumvented, leaving your willpower intact.

Habits are a dual-fledged attack to building your willpower.

Here are some useful habits to incorporate into your daily routine:

• Physical exercise
• Meditation and mindfulness
• Focusing on a single task
• Sleeping well

If you want to make it in the game of wealth, it is imperative to increase your willpower. Its importance cannot be understated.

“Willpower is essential to the accomplishment of anything worthwhile.”

– Brian Tracy

5. Recharging

A robot cannot go on forever without recharging. It needs to replenish its energy. A machine cannot work at its maximum capacity non-stop. It needs some cooling period. Similarly, you shouldn’t expect from yourself to be working ceaselessly at full throttle.

While building wealth, you will work long hours, that is for sure. But since it is going to be an extensive journey, you have to strategize for the long term. This is the reason you should plan for downtime and periods of recharging.

Of course recharging does not mean lying on the couch and doing nothing.

The best way to recharge is to have some form of mild exercise near nature, something that resembles the life our ancestors were living. In that way, we are close to our natural element and we temporarily get away from the stress of modern life.

For example, great ways to recharge are walks through the woods or swimming in the sea.

During your life, your recharge periods should match the timeframe you take them. With that I mean that the duration of your downtime should be related to how often you take them.

A framework on how often you should recharge could be as follows:

• During the hour, take a short break of 5 minutes for every 25 minutes you work.
• During the day, take a break of 1 hour to clear your mind and adjust your focus.
• During the week, block a 2 hours period on Sunday for meditation and introspection.
• During the month, take 1 day off to visit place a near nature.
• During a quarter, take 2-3 days off to stay at a village or cottage house outside the city.
• During the year, take 1-2 weeks off to visit a foreign exotic country.

This is obviously just an example to give you a rough idea. What you should keep in mind is that the activity of working on a project is a cyclical thing.

There will be times when you are on the peak firing on all cylinders and being productive as hell. But there will be also times when you will have to take it a bit easy and allow yourself to regenerate.

And of course, as with everything in life, you should proactively arrange how and when these cycles will play out. That is why you should have a rough plan as the one I provided above.

Conclusion

In your money making journey, you should think yourself as a robot. This will allow you to finetune yourself so that you operate in an optimal way.

There are 5 elements you have to take care of:

1. Hardware
2. Software
3. Emotions
4. Willpower
5. Recharging

By keeping these in mind and proactively designing your life so that all of them are appropriately handled, you will be far more efficient and effective than the majority of the people out there and you will be marching on the path to becoming rich.