The 13 Self-Made Millionaire Secrets That Can Make You Rich (Even If You’re Starting from Zero) by Brian Tracey

by silence | Dec 14, 2025 | finance

Here’s some good news: more people are going to make more money in the next few years than have been made in all of human history. These will be self-made millionaires.

In the year 1900, there were 7,000 millionaires in America. By the year 2000, that number exploded to 7 million—a 1,000-times increase. And in just the last two years, the number has jumped another 33% to 8.2 million millionaires.

Here’s what’s even more remarkable: virtually all of them are self-made. They started without a pot to—well, you know—and they made it in one generation.

Look at the wealthiest people in America today: Warren Buffett, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, the Walton family. All first-generation multi-billionaires. We have a $12 trillion economy growing at the rate of $500 to $600 billion per year, and all that money is going through somebody’s fingers.

Your job is to make sure it goes through yours, and some of it sticks.

The even better news? Self-made millionaires have been studied exhaustively. They’ve been analyzed, interviewed by the hundreds of thousands. We know exactly who they are, what they do, how they think, how they tick, the decisions they make, and the things they do and don’t do.

And here’s the most powerful part: if you do what other successful people do, you eventually get the same results that they do.

The Law That Changes Everything

When I started off many years ago, I came from very poor beginnings. I didn’t graduate from high school. I finished in the half of the class that makes the top half possible. I could only get laboring jobs. I worked in construction, on farms and ranches, in factories putting nuts on bolts hour after hour.

One day in a state of frustration, I began asking this question: Why is it that some people are more successful than others?

The Bible says, “Seek and you shall find.” So I began asking other successful people what they were doing differently from me. They told me. And I did it. And I got better results.

What I discovered changed my life: the Law of Cause and Effect. This law says that everything happens for a reason. There are no causeless effects. Success is not an accident. Failure is not an accident. Success leaves tracks.

If you can define an effect that you want, you can trace it back and find somebody who at one time did not have that effect, then find out what they did, then do the same things, and you eventually get the same results.

Here’s what this means: nature is neutral. Nature doesn’t care who you are, whether you’re tall or short, male or female, educated or uneducated. Nature doesn’t care. All that nature cares about is that you do what successful people do.

It’s like following a recipe. If you follow the recipe exactly, you get the dish. Nature doesn’t care who’s doing it.

The Person You Must Become

Here’s something critical to understand: becoming a self-made millionaire is not the important thing. What’s really important is the person you have to become to become a self-made millionaire.

My friend says that in order to achieve something you’ve never achieved before, you have to become someone you’ve never been before. The qualities you need to develop—qualities on the inside—are incredible qualities that make you a vastly better person in terms of character, determination, discipline, decision-making, and strength.

The real payoff of becoming wealthy isn’t because you can eat more meals or wear more clothes. It’s the kind of person you become, the kind of people you associate with, the kind of life you have.

Now let me share with you the 13 success secrets of self-made millionaires. Give yourself a score of 1 to 10 on each. If you’re weak on even one of these, it can be enough to hold you back. If you’re strong on all of these, there’s no limit to what you can accomplish.

Secret #1: Dream Big Dreams

Practice what is called “back from the future thinking.” Project forward several years and imagine that your life is perfect in every way. Imagine that you have no limitations—all the time, all the money, all the friends, all the contacts, all the education, all the experience. You could be, have, or do anything you want in life.

If you could, what would it be?

If your life were perfect in five years, what would it look like? How much would you be earning? How much would you be worth? What kind of family life would you have? What kind of health? What car would you be driving?

This is the starting point of great riches and great success in life: to have a dream or vision of a wonderful future.

Here’s an exercise: take a sheet of paper and make up what’s called a dream list. Just like a kid’s Christmas list, write down everything you could think of that you could possibly want.

I had a friend who got so excited about this exercise that he bought a spiral notebook. He went through the newspaper and every single thing he saw that was nice, he wrote it down. First time through, he had 330 goals. By the end of the month, he had 500 things he wanted.

The interesting thing? His life exploded. He activated the Law of Attraction and began to attract into his life people, circumstances, ideas, resources, and insights that moved him toward the accomplishment of his goals.

Secret #2: Do What You Love to Do

Whenever you find people who are really successful, they do what they love to do. They love their work. The great rule for success is to find something you love to do and then find a way to make a living doing it.

When you find what you love to do, it’ll give you energy. It motivates you. It enthuses you. It’s probably something you were meant to do from the time you were born.

I once had a graduate who said, “When I was a little boy, I loved to study airplanes. I got airplane books, had airplane models, had toy planes, competed with remote-controlled planes. When I grew up, I studied aeronautical engineering. Today I’m 35 and I own three companies—one builds small aircraft, another repairs and services small aircraft, and another is in leasing and chartering. I’ve never worked a day in my life. I’ve just played with planes since I was a kid.”

Go back to when you were young, between ages 7 and 14, before you discovered boys or girls. What did you really love to do? You’ll often find that within that is something you’re supposed to do as an adult.

Secret #3: Commit to Excellence

All people who are successful are excellent at what they do. You remember the old question they asked Willie Sutton the bank robber: “Why do you rob banks?” He said, “That’s where the money is.”

Well, being in the top 10% is where the money is. So you have to pay any price and make any sacrifice to get into the top 10% in your field.

Here’s the good news: if you’re doing what you love to do, you will want to be in the top 10%. If you don’t want to be excellent at what you’re doing, it means you’re in the wrong field.

But here’s what changed my life: everybody in the top 10% started in the bottom 10%. Everybody who’s doing well was once doing poorly. Everybody at the top of your field today was once not even in your field at all.

What that means is that if you’re willing to pay the price, work hard, and make the sacrifices, you can get into the top 10%.

How long does it take? It doesn’t take a week or a month. To achieve mastery in your field takes 5 to 7 years.

You might say, “Five to seven years? Geez, I’ll be five to seven years older before I start enjoying the big rewards.”

Well, how much older will you be in five to seven years anyway?

Here’s the important point: the time is going to pass anyway. Five to seven years from now, five to seven years will have passed. The only question is, are you going to be at the top of your field, or are you still going to be down there with the mediocre 80%?

Secret #4: Develop Your Unique Talents and Abilities

Every single person is designed from infancy with special talents and abilities that, if you develop them to their height, can enable you to accomplish anything you want in life.

Peter Drucker often asks: “What are you good at? What should you be good at? What could you be good at? What will you be good at?”

Look back in your life. What has been most responsible for your success up to now? Because success leaves tracks, and if you look back into your past, you’ll often find indicators that guide you to your future.

Remember that fellow who won $300 million in the lottery? He was a high school physics teacher. They asked him what he was going to do with it. He said he was going to take a week off and then get back to work because he doesn’t want to give up his job teaching high school physics because he loves his work so much.

That is a person who’s in the right place for him. And now he can just drive to it in a nicer car.

Secret #5: See Yourself as Self-Employed

The top 3% of adults in our society see themselves as self-employed. They see themselves as in charge of their own lives.

I was 21 years old, working as a construction laborer, living in a one-bedroom apartment, broke, taking buses two hours every morning to get to work and two hours back. I still remember sitting in my little apartment one evening when a light went off. I suddenly realized that I was responsible. That I was in charge of my own life. That no one was coming to the rescue.

It was one of the great turning points in my life.

The biggest mistake you can ever make is to think you work for anyone else but yourself. Even if someone else signs your paycheck, all your life you work for yourself.

The most valuable people in any organization are the people who treat the company as though it belongs to them. They see everything that happens as affecting them personally. As a result, they’re paid more, given more educational opportunities, promoted faster. These people, like cream, rise to the top of every organization and every industry.

Secret #6: Develop a Clear Sense of Direction

All successful people are goal-oriented. You can’t hit a target you can’t see. You’ve got to know what you want in every area of your life.

Some years ago, I worked with Hunt Oil Company in Texas, founded by H.L. Hunt, who became the wealthiest self-made billionaire in the world. At his peak, he owned 200 companies and had a royalty income of $3 million per day.

He was interviewed on television and asked what the secrets to success were. He said there have only been two throughout his life:

Number one: Decide exactly what it is you want, write it down, and make a plan to achieve it.

Number two: Determine the price you’re going to have to pay to get it, and then resolve to pay that price.

Here’s what I learned: your current life today is the result of the price you’ve been paying up to now. Whatever you’ve put in, you get out. So whatever you’re getting out today is a result of what you’ve put in.

If you don’t like what you’re getting out, you have to put in something different.

Life says this: there’s a price you have to pay, and there are two qualities. First, you have to pay the price in full. Second, you have to pay the price in advance. You don’t get it afterwards. First you put in what you need to put in, then you get out the rewards.

The One Exercise That Will Change Your Life

Let me give you my only homework exercise. Take a piece of paper and write down 10 goals you’d like to accomplish in the next 12 months. Write the word “Goals” and today’s date at the top.

Then ask yourself this great question: If you could only accomplish one goal on this list, but you could accomplish it within 24 hours, which one goal would have the greatest positive impact on your life?

This is a great question because it’ll usually jump out at you. Sometimes it’s a financial goal, sometimes health, sometimes relationships.

Circle that goal. Then turn the page over and write it at the top. Set a deadline. Make a list of everything you could think of to do to achieve the goal. Then begin working on your list.

Here’s the kicker: do something every day that moves you one step forward toward your major goal.

My promise to you: this exercise—selecting your most important goal, making a plan, and working on it every day—will change your life in ways you cannot imagine.

People begin to become great when they determine their major definite purpose and work on it every day. It’s the secret to becoming a self-made millionaire. It’s the secret to great success in life.

I was giving a seminar not long ago when a gentleman came up to me. He said, “That goal-setting exercise changed my life. Ten years ago, I was broke, divorced, and an alcoholic. Somebody dragged me to one of your seminars. I did that exercise and picked my major goal. It changed my life.”

“In what way?” I asked.

“Today I’m worth $40 million,” he said. “And I owe it to that lesson.”

Secret #7: Refuse to Consider the Possibility of Failure

The fear of failure is the greatest single obstacle to success in adult life. It’s not failure itself—each one of you is a professional failure. You’ve failed over and over again. All of us have failed. Nine out of 10 things we try don’t work out the way we expect.

It’s not the failure that holds you back. Failure makes you smarter. It’s the fear of failure, not failure, that holds you back.

The way you overcome this is: never consider the possibility of failure. The rule is this: there’s no such thing as failure, there’s only feedback.

When you try something that doesn’t work, you get feedback, not failure. Most things you try aren’t going to work the first few times. So you say, “Oh, that’s an interesting bit of feedback,” and you pick yourself up and move forward.

Henry Ford once said, “Failure is merely an opportunity to more intelligently begin again.”

Here’s what self-made millionaires do:

First: They look into every failure for something good. They say, “There’s got to be something good in this that I can benefit from.” And surprise, surprise, they always find it.

Second: They always seek the valuable lesson in every setback or obstacle. And they always find the lesson.

Your biggest problem today could be the biggest gift you’ve ever received because it may contain within it the lesson that will make you successful.

Secret #8: Dedicate Yourself to Lifelong Learning

What takes you from rags to riches is personal and professional development. In the 21st century, knowledge and skill are the keys. The only skill that will be relevant is the ability to learn new skills, because virtually everything you know is becoming obsolete at a rapid rate.

Stephen Covey says your current knowledge base has a half-life of two years, which means half of everything you know will be irrelevant within two years.

If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse. If you’re not constantly learning, you’re falling behind.

Here are the three keys to continuous learning:

1. Read in your field 30 to 60 minutes each day. Turn off the television, turn off the radio, put aside the newspaper, and just read books—the best-selling books written by the most successful people in your field. I’ve had countless people tell me that reading an hour a day doubled and tripled their income within a year.

2. Take every course you possibly can. The person talking to you for several hours has spent thousands of hours learning their subject. When you take a course, you can learn more in one or two days than you could learn in two or three years or maybe even a lifetime.

I knew a dentist who attended a dental congress in Hong Kong. He attended one session on a particular technique of cosmetic surgery. He came back and implemented it in his practice. People began flying from 500 to 1,000 miles away. Eight years later, he retired as a self-made millionaire at age 53 from what he learned from one session at one convention.

3. Listen to audio programs in your car. The average driver drives 500 to 1,000 hours a year. If you listen to audio programs in your car, according to the University of Southern California, you’ll get the equivalent of almost full-time university attendance just listening as you drive around.

The more you invest in yourself, the more you like and respect yourself. The more energy you have. The bigger goals you set. The more you persist.

Secret #9: Develop a Workaholic Mentality

In our society today, people talk about balance, relaxation, having fun at work. This is loser talk.

There’s a time in your life when you can back off, but that’s when you’ve made it, not before. Before you’ve made it, you’re in competition with millions of other people who also want to make it. In order for you to win, you’re going to have to work harder, work better, and work smarter than they do.

Use what I call the 40 Plus Formula: Working 40 hours a week gets you survival, and that’s all. Every hour you invest over 40 is an investment in your future.

You can tell what your future is going to be with unerring accuracy by looking at how many hours over 40 you put in.

How many hours does the average self-made millionaire work until they pass the million-dollar mark? 59 hours. Some work 70, 80, 90 hours. The average is 59.

Here’s my second principle: Work all the time you work. Fully 50% of working time today is wasted on idle conversation, personal business, family phone calls, surfing the internet, reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, long lunchtimes, coming in late, and leaving early.

If someone comes in and says, “Hey, you got a minute to talk?” say, “Yes, but not now. Why don’t we talk after work? Meanwhile, I’ve got to get back to work.”

There’s a great story of a little girl who goes to her mother and says, “Mommy, why does Daddy always bring his briefcase home and work evenings and weekends and doesn’t spend time with the family?”

The mother says, “Well honey, you have to understand—Daddy can’t get all his work done at work, so he has to bring it home.”

The little girl says, “Why don’t they put him in a slower class?”

Secret #10: Get Around the Right People

Dr. David McClelland at Harvard did studies for 25 years looking at why some people succeed greatly. What he found was that as much as 99% of your success in life is determined by your reference group—the people with whom you habitually associate.

We’re like chameleons. We absorb through the skin the attitudes, opinions, behaviors, style of dress, and style of speech of the people with whom we associate most of the time.

If you start to associate with winners most of the time, you’ll find they have a totally different worldview. They’re positive, upbeat, focused, learning, growing. And you start to become like that.

Our relationships determine 85% of our happiness or unhappiness in life. If you have bad relationships, they’ll drag you down worse than a sea anchor. If you work for a bad boss, it’ll destroy all your joy at work. One negative person in an office can cast a blackness over the whole office.

So the most important thing you do is choose your relationships with care and only associate with people you like, respect, and enjoy being around.

Secret #11: Be Prepared to Climb from Peak to Peak

Life is never one continuous train. It’s always up and down. If you climb a mountain peak, you have to go down into the valley before you climb the next peak. All of life is cycles and trends—up cycles and down cycles, uptrends and downtrends.

Life is two steps forward and one step back. Successful people focus on the two steps forward and protect themselves on the downside. They build up cash reserves. They carefully watch what they’re doing so the one step back isn’t so far, and the general curve is upward.

Secret #12: Develop Resilience and Bounce Back

Most things won’t work. You’re going to be knocked down over and over again. My friend Charlie Jones says you have to bounce, don’t break.

What I learned was a technique called mental rehearsal: mentally prepare for the inevitable downturns before they occur. Say, “In the course of life, things are going to go wrong, but when they do, I’m not going to become upset. I’m just going to take it, learn from it, pick myself up, and keep going.”

All of life is a continuous series of problems. The problems never end. They just keep coming like waves of the ocean. The only break will be the occasional crisis.

Life will be: Problem. Problem. Problem. Problem. Problem. Problem. Crisis. Problem. Problem. Problem. Problem. Problem. Crisis.

Which means everyone here is either in a crisis right now, has just gotten out of a crisis, or is just about to have a crisis.

The hallmark of superior people is how you respond to a crisis. Superior people look for the solution to every problem. They don’t allow themselves to become upset when something goes wrong. They say, “Okay, what’s the solution?” and become intensely solution-oriented.

Secret #13: Become an Unshakable Optimist

Unshakable optimists think and talk about what they want most of the time. They look for the good in every situation. They seek the valuable lesson. They’re constantly feeding their minds with great ideas.

Optimists have three wonderful qualities:

1. They learn more things, which dramatically increases the likelihood they’ll learn the right thing at the right time.

2. They try more things, which dramatically increases the likelihood they’ll try the right thing at the right time.

3. They persist. They never give up. Once they decide they’re going to become wealthy, they just never stop until they achieve that goal.

Almost everybody succeeds in a different direction from what they originally intended, but they just keep going—like a football player running down the field, blocking, changing, moving back and forward, but continually moving toward the goal.

The 20 Idea Method That Creates Millionaires

Let me give you one last technique. Take your major goal and write it at the top of a page in the form of a question. Let’s say your goal is to double your income. Write: “What are all the things I could do to double my income in the next 12 months?”

The more specific the question, the better. If you’re earning $50,000 a year, write: “What could I do to earn $100,000 over the next 12 months?”

Then write a minimum of 20 answers. The first three to five will be easy. The next three to five will be difficult. The last 10 will be incredibly difficult.

I have given this exercise to people who’ve gone on to become millionaires so many times I’ve lost track. They often find that the 20th answer changes their whole life.

Once you’ve got your 20 answers, pick one and take action on it immediately. It doesn’t matter which one. Just take one and act.

Your Move

More people have become millionaires with this simple 20-idea method than any other single method of creative thinking ever discovered.

The time to start is now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not when conditions are perfect. Because the time is going to pass anyway.

The only question is: five to seven years from now, where will you be? Will you be at the top of your field, financially independent, living the life you’ve always dreamed of? Or will you still be where you are today, wishing things were different?

The choice is yours. The answers have been found. The tracks have been laid. All you have to do is follow them.

Success leaves tracks. Start following them today.