The Millionaire Filter

I met a girl in an elevator and asked her out on a date. This was between marriages. The first thing she asked me on our date was, “How much are you worth?”

I had made and lost millions but nobody knew at that time what I had. I lied. I said, “$1 million.” But I was worth less.

“Not good enough,” she said. Still, we dated for a while but then it ended. Like most things, it ended horribly.

I had made and lost so many times at that point that I had to ask myself: “Why can’t I keep the money?”

There’s three skills to making a million:

Making it.

Keeping it.

Growing it.

Sometimes I was good at #1. And sometimes I was bad at it. And, at that point, I was always bad at #2… keeping it. Like the time I blew it all on bad investments, or bad tax decisions, or bad house decisions, or other bad spending decisions.

But it wasn’t any one decision. It wasn’t someone ripping me off, or me being irresponsible. I catalogued all the reasons I would fail to make or keep $1 million. The reasons were never on the outside world. The reasons were always inside of me.

Every failure to become a millionaire will boil down to these nine reasons.