Secrets of the Millionaire Mind

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind

*T. Harv Eker, 2005. Mastering the inner game of wealth.*

The basement and the borrowed Visa card

Picture a guy in his late twenties, lying on a single bed in his parents' basement in suburban Toronto. The wood paneling is the same shade of brown as the carpet. There is a card game upstairs, and Harv Eker can hear his father laughing through the floorboards. The laughter is not aimed at him, but it might as well be. This is the third time he has moved back home. The fitness equipment business he was sure would change everything has, like the half dozen ventures before it, gone nowhere. He is reading every self help book he can find. He is going to seminars. He is, in his own words, almost obsessed with becoming a success. And he is broke.

Then a wealthy friend of his father's, on his way out the door, takes pity on him. The man is not warm about it. He says something close to: "Harv, if you're not doing as well as you'd like, all that means is there's something you don't know." And then, with the casual confidence of a person who has never had to count change for parking, he adds: "Most rich people think in very similar ways. Copy how they think."

Eker had heard this kind of thing before, but for whatever reason this time it stuck. He started studying wealthy people the way other people study tennis or chess. Not just what they did with money, but what ran through their heads when they thought about it. A few months later he borrowed two thousand dollars on a Visa card and opened one of the first retail fitness stores in North America. Two and a half years after that he sold half the company to a Fortune 500 firm for 1.6 million dollars. He was thirty something, and he was rich for the first time.