Think and Grow Rich for Real Estate Investors | PREI 080 (2024)

Think and Grow Rich is one of those books you see most often on the recommended reading list of people who have achieved really great things. The book was written by the commission of Andrew Carnegie. Based on interviews of over 500 people in history who now we know as great men in the early 20th century, he’s commissioned this book. He interviewed people, such as Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilbur Wright, Howard Taft. This book is amazing. I read it so long ago. It was first published in 1937. It has sold more than 70 million copies. It gives it the distinction of being the all-time best-seller in the personal success category.

Today’s episode is about Think and Grow Rich for real estate investors. The perfect person to bring on for this is a person who I know and respect, a friend of mine. His name is Mani Vaya. Mani is the founder of 2000Books.com where he interviews some of today’s top authors. Over the last five years, Mani has read over 1,000 books in the field of business and personal development. Get this, over the last few years, he has been reading seven books a week, which basically averages out to one book per day.

The first book that revolutionized his thinking was Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. As a real estate investor, it made sense to bring him on to talk about the book and how it ties in with real estate investing.

If you missed our last episode, be sure to listen toProper Estate Planning for Real Estate Investors.

Enjoy the show!

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Mani, welcome to the show.

Hey, Marco. Thank you very much for having me. I’m so delighted to be here.

It’s great having you on. I enjoy your podcast. I wish I had the amount of time to read books as you do. It’s awesome.

Books are my love. I spend a lot of time reading and learning. That’s why this business is here.

How did you get started with 2000Books.com?

Let me go a little bit back in time. I didn’t always start off as being the book reader. I am from India originally. I’m a physics guy. I studied physics, then I moved on to study electrical and computer engineering. I had my career in engineering for a long time. I was managing billion-dollar plus cell phone design projects, cell phone launches. Until at some point, I decided that I had to move on and create my own success, create my own definition of success, create my own entrepreneurial venture. It was brewing inside of me. But at some point, I had to let go.

2000 Books came as a result of me wanting to continue down this path of learning that had been brewing in my mind for a while. Think and Grow Rich was one of the seminal books that got me started in the whole field of personal development. Before that, I did not really understand it. Or maybe I had used the principles in my life, but I didn’t even know that I was using principles that had been written about 50, 60, 70, 100 years ago, 200 years ago at some point. These were just some things I had picked up or somehow I had known, and again and again, they would show up as truths in my life. Think and Grow Rich, when I read the book, I was like, “I have been using this for so long.” 2000 Books came about a year and a half ago when I said, “I want to dedicate my life at this point to learning from these books, to teaching entrepreneurs about all the great books that are out there and publishing all that information out there.” That’s what I do now.

I love the fact that you can summarize all these great books and then make it easy to learn and digest so we don’t have to spend all the time reading like you do. I encourage people to check out your website and your podcast because it is a great listen. I was going to say a great read, but it’s actually a good listen of books that you could read. Tell us how did you got into real estate investing, because this is a good bridge into the rest of this episode?

There are so many different ways in which you can go about building wealth, but there is something really profound with real estate. That is the thing that I was so attracted to, and realized that I was building my net worth as I was working in Fortune 500 companies as I was an engineer. I spent a lot of time doing that. What I realized over time was that stock market wasn’t a predictable source of income or a predictable source of way to make long-term income. I was not excited about the way stock market moved. I could see, within being inside a Fortune 500 company, how things worked, and I could not trust the opinion outside when I could see everything that was going inside. For me, it was pretty clear that no matter where I made my money, it was going to go into real estate as the vehicle to grow the money.

A while back, I made the decision to start investing. I’ve been investing in India, of all places, because that’s where I’m from. That’s where real estate investment has been the best for me. Now, I’m looking to get into the US market as well and I’ve been working with you to figure this out and grow this.

We would love to help you. There’s nothing wrong with international real estate. If you’re familiar with it and you understand it and if it’s working for you, that’s fantastic. I remember reading Think and Grow Rich for the first time when I was a teenager. I was probably around 19. I’ll be honest, I didn’t understand some of the book in my first pass. Some of the words that he used, because the book was written so long ago, we don’t actually use in our vocabulary today. Looking back, it all makes sense now. When I read it the second time, it was just a much easier read. Why should we or any real estate investor read this book?

This is a great question because when someone asks me this question, I say, “Why should any human being read this book?” Because it’s so profound. It’s about accomplishing your goals. Think and Grow Rich is not really about rich. It’s about accomplishing your goals. As an investor, as a real estate investor, if you have some goals or even if you don’t have goals but you want to get wealthy, you have a vague idea in mind, you need to accomplish those goals. You need to accomplish that vague hope or idea that you have, the desire that you have. This book will crystallize all those steps you need to take to go from having a dream or a hope or a vision to making it a reality. The reason I say it’s good for anyone, because you can just swap out the steps. You don’t have to have money there. You could have any other thing in life and it would work just as well.

The key principle as I took from reading the book is that the subconscious mind acts beneath the surface to accomplish what it is directed to accomplish. Is that a pretty good summation?

That’s the most profound part of the equation. Marco, I’m a physicist. I’m an engineer. I don’t take hand-waving voodoo kind of stuff just like that. To me, that doesn’t make any sense. I have to really understand stuff before I say this actually works or this is useful. Being able to direct your subconscious mind, move it under the control of your conscious mind, is the most powerful faculty we have available to us. Because our subconscious mind is millions of times more powerful than the conscious mind. Most people are just wasting the resources that they have in their subconscious mind.

That’s what makes it a “weird” book for some people, especially when they read it the first time. They think, “This is hocus-pocus, hooky-type of material.” But if you just pull out the key points and the key principles, you’ll understand that we actually have control over our subconscious mind through our conscious mind. The way we control the conscious mind is through our five senses. If we learn how to utilize those, then we can control the subconscious mind. In effect, we’re basically programming the subconscious mind indirectly. Is that right?

Every moment, we’re doing that. By the way, to your point of the fact that some people might think it’s hocus-pocus or it’s hand-waving or voodoo stuff, as I said, I’m a physicist, I’m an engineer. I don’t take these things lightly. But then, there’s this great guy named Albert Einstein who said, “The greatest decision we can make is whether we live in a friendly universe or an unfriendly universe.” What he was saying was, irrespective of what is going on out there, it’s a decision you make inside of you as to what the world is going to be for you and the world will be that for you. For some people, it might be hocus-pocus, but this is Einstein, one of the greatest thinkers of all time, was saying you are getting what you’re putting out there. You are getting what you’re looking for.

We’re probably going to throw a number of quotes here today. There’s another quote that you just reminded me of that I’m pretty sure came from Napoleon Hill. It is this, “What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” Is that true?

Absolutely. Here’s the thing, a lot of people on the show today, they might have heard of the movie The Secret, they watched that movie. They might have thought that it’s hand-waving voodoo kind of stuff. The truth is, The Secret actually came from this book. It has borrowed a lot from Think and Grow Rich. What we can conceive is the starting point. Most people, when they have a hope, they can’t even conceptualize it. They can’t even visualize it, and then they wonder why it’s not happening. Conception is the starting point of it all. If you’re not going to be able to even conceive it, there is no way it’s coming to fruition. Sometimes, these things don’t happen according to the specific timeline that we have, but it will come together as long as you can hold on to that idea and you can work through the ups and downs, the ins and outs of life.

For those people who don’t know what we’re talking about in reference to The Secret, The Secret was actually a best-selling book in 2006. It was a self-help book, and then they turned it into a great movie. I think I owned the book, but I bought the DVD and I watched it several times. Someone who’s watching that who’s a bit of a cynic or a skeptic might say, “This is very intangible. It is hocus-pocus and it’s all just positive self-talk material.” To a large degree, it is. The movie, The Secret, or the book, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, it’s really the 21st century version of Think and Grow Rich to me. It’s a good read and it’s a good video to watch, if you need a mindset reframing and something to pick you up and pep you up.

For those who are science people or who are kind of cynical or critical about this idea, let me give you a little different frame of reference. There’s a new field in science called self-directed neuroplasticity. What self-directed neuroplasticity is saying is that we are constantly rewiring the physical structure of our brain by the thoughts we’re thinking. Our thoughts are changing the physical reality of our brain. The neurons that are firing together in our brain, they are wiring together. The more we think certain thoughts, the more our brains get accustomed to those thoughts, the more the brain will change to accommodate those thoughts.

Not only that, the other part of the scientific research is what’s called the reticular activation system, which states that when you are focused on something, when you are directing your attention towards something, your mind gets activated for that. So whenever you see this thing or whenever you start to hear about it, suddenly the brain starts to direct your attention towards it. You see this all the time. For example, when someone calls your name, your reticular activation system fires up and it says, “Hey, Marco. Someone’s looking for Marco. It’s probably me.” The same thing when we program our reticular activation system over and over again, we are constantly directing our brain towards what we want and our brain is getting wired to get that.

There’s really six parts to this whole Think and Grow Rich.

Napoleon had actually talked about the six steps to turn desires into riches, so that’s what we’re talking about.

This six-part method starts off with deciding the exact amount of money you desire. It sounds overly simplistic, but it really comes down to defining a very specific goal, what you want to achieve. People need to understand that there are no limitations to your mind, except those that you actually acknowledge as limitations. This is really the beginning part of goal setting, deciding the exact amount of money you desire. Mani, why don’t you comment on this?

If you’re a real estate investor, you’re thinking, “I want to get rich. I want plenty of money.” But the key is to be able to quantify specifically what it is that you want. How much money do you want to make? How much net worth do you want to have? How much rental income do you want to produce? How many properties do you want to own? How many apartment buildings do you want to own? It’s very difficult to get something if you’re not even clear on what it is that you want.

In the world, we have this habit of complaining about not getting certain things. But if you really ask people what it is they want, they won’t be able to quantify exactly what it is they want. Precision is extremely important to be able to set a target. If you are shooting an arrow towards a bull’s eye, the bull’s eye is pretty darn precise. It’s not a bull’s eye in any general direction. It’s not a bull’s eye all over that area. It’s bull’s eye. You shoot directly towards that. It’s really important. If you don’t have a specific goal, if you don’t have a specific desire, if you don’t have a specific outcome in mind, you will not go anywhere. It’s as dangerous as that.

You need to have specific goals in order to trigger those things in your mind that make it real and believable and actionable. A couple of weeks ago, Mani, we were talking about the psychology of goal setting in one of my episodes, and we were referring to SMART goals. Many people have heard of this acronym, SMART, which you use to make your goals clear and reachable. SMART simply means they’re specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. That’s really the formula that I think people need to use, and I use, to write out your goals and make sure that they are exactly that clear and reachable.

The specific part is so important. There’s another book that Napoleon Hill wrote, which is called Outwitting the Devil. I’m not sure how many of your audience have read the book or how far it has gotten. It’s a relatively obscure book. It is old school. He talks about the devil. He’s saying the way to get out of the devil’s grip, or the way to get into the devil’s grip is to drift. Drifting is the way the devil gets you. When you don’t have clarity of purpose, when you don’t have clarity of where you are going and you are drifting, you’re trying this, you’re trying that, you have no sense of direction, that’s when you are the most susceptible.

Having a clear sense of direction, a very clear goal, will make sure that you are not drifting, you’re not being taken over by the devil but you are going after your dreams with a sense of precision. It’s as simple in science as it is in any other field. Drifting is a very common thing you can see inside a pool or when things are just ambling along, if there’s no sense of direction, you’re just going to drift.

Key point here is that you need to have goals that are clear and reachable and you do that by having SMART goals; specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound goals. The second part of all this is to determine exactly what you intend to give in return for the money you desire. We need to break down this word “give” a little bit because it’s maybe not what people are thinking.

I think this is where the movie, The Secret, missed the mark a little bit. They didn’t talk about action enough. In this step, what Napoleon Hill is talking about is the idea of giving effort, giving energy, giving everything you’ve got. You don’t have to give money in order to make money. You don’t even have to start with money in order to make money. What you still need to be able to do is give your very best in terms of your effort, your dedication, your energy, your mental focus. All your resources can come to bear on the problem and that’s when the problem yields its way.

Most people, for some reason, we believe that we have a sense of entitlement, that we should get these things without having to go to the trials and tribulations, without having for the things to be so hard or things to be so tough, or without having to give. In case of real estate investments, you can take the idea as simple as you have to make that initial investment. Sometimes you don’t even have to make that initial investment because you can work with others to find that investment.

I think you need to define what you’re going to have to give or put up in order to achieve that goal, in terms of hours of your time, cash towards an investment or a down payment. What steps you need to take, number one, number two, number three. Maybe even what you need to learn and educate yourself on. Napoleon Hill talks about education , he says, “The way of success is the way of continuous pursuit of knowledge.” Which is just a 1920’s-1930’s way of saying that you need to continually educate yourself and build your education, in this case, your financial education because that knowledge will make you a better person, a better investor. You need to define what you need to do and give up. Like you said, these are, simply put, action steps towards achieving that goal that you want to achieve.

One of the biggest things you can give is the time towards acquiring that knowledge, the time towards learning about that investment, the time towards understanding all about investment so that you can be a smart investor as you go into your next steps. The time you put into doing the due diligence, the time you put into learning about real estate, the time you put into learning about entrepreneurship. Because face it, if you’re a real estate investor, you are an entrepreneur.

The third part of this is to establish a definite date by which you intend to possess the money you desire. He uses the word “money” here, but money could be anything. It’s not just money. It could be the achievement of a certain milestone or the pursuit of something that is not monetarily related. It’s all about deadlines. It’s having a date to reach.

Deadlines are so powerful for the reason that they force action. Not only do they force action, they force a certain way of thinking onto us. When we have a deadline, when we are forced into a constraint, we tend to give our very best. We don’t give our very best when things are easy and there is no end goal in sight, there’s no external force to make clear direction for us. When we are constrained, when we are boxed in and when we have limited resources, that’s when we can do our very best. Time is one of the most limited precious resources we have. We have to establish a timeline. We have to establish a deadline by which we’ll accomplish these goals.

I want to caution, not every time will you be able to meet those timelines or deadlines. But having that deadline and making it very real is really important to get yourself to take massive action. The deadline component is almost like you cannot get the best out of yourself without a deadline.

The way to tie these three things together thus far is this: I will purchase three single-family homes in B-grade neighborhoods by December 31st 2017. That’s a goal as I would write it out. I would probably be a little more specific, but that has a deadline and it has some specificity as to what it is I’m trying to achieve. The more specific I can make it, the more realistic and believable it becomes to me and my mind and my subconscious.

You can do an experiment right now. If I say, “Think about the last vacation you had.” Maybe you might just think about it. But if I start drilling down into the details and say, “What was that place? What hotel did you go to? What room did you stay in?” Now that vacation starts to come to light in your head and you’re like, “I remember what that room was.” Specificity is super critical. What you said, Marco, the three steps you outlined, you say, “This is the number of properties I want to acquire. These are the dates by which I will acquire them. This is what I’ll give in order to get those properties.” In a lot of your audience’s case, it’s probably the time they need to give in order to learn about this. Not only that, they’ll also have to give a certain amount of money to acquire that property.

How much do I need to save or put away for the down payment? How much knowledge do I need to gain in order to acquire that property or those two properties? What kind of due diligence do I need to do? If can answer those questions, then you’re essentially creating the action steps that you need to take in order to get to where you need to go. This leads into the fourth part of this, and that is to create what they call a definite plan to acquire the money and take the first step immediately. This is all about creating that plan. The caution here, as I’m sure you’ll agree with me, is that you’ll never have the perfect plan. I know you have something to say about this.

The definite plan and taking action right away are boosters for your rocket ship. There’s a story from the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon Bonaparte, the great French general, we all know about him, we’ve heard stories of him. People may not know how amazing he was at certain things. One time, he was in certain battle and his general came to him and he said, “Sir, I recommend that we delay the attack for another day because the conditions are not right. Right now, the conditions are not right. We should delay.” Napoleon Bonaparte got really furious. He said, “Conditions? Hell, I make conditions. I make circ*mstances. Attack! I say attack right now. We’re not going to wait until the conditions are right.” That is the truth.

For some reason, the war time people understand this better than anyone else. George Patton, he said, “A good plan violently executed today is much better than a perfect plan executed a week from now.” That’s the key. You make a plan and you attack it. You don’t wait for everything to line up because then the opportunity is gone, the situation has changed, and now you’re starting all over again.

Also, when you do have a plan and you execute on that plan, don’t just give up and stop. You never want to stop too early. It’s like Napoleon says, “A quitter never wins and a winner never quits.” Once you have that plan, you need to take the first step and you need to execute and you need to keep going until you achieve your goal.

In the case of your audience, it might be something as simple as giving a call to your team. Take the first step. Start that process.

Here’s one that I relate to you in reading so many books, a lot of people have the desire to read a book or read more than one book, or read a book a month, and they never get to it because they don’t have the time. The first step, we keep talking about this first step, what’s the first step? The first step is take seven minutes. That’s my magic number, seven. If you take seven minutes a day and read for just those seven minutes, you’ll find that sooner than later, you’ll be reading ten minutes. Then sooner than later, you’ll be reading for fifteen minutes. All of a sudden, you’re going to start reading a chapter a day. All of a sudden, you’re going to have a book accomplished. That first step is really just taking seven minutes out of your day to read a book.

That’s actually a scientifically-proven way to defeat procrastination. Take as little as a few minutes to do something that you need to do, because when you do that, the neurons start firing in that area or in that specific thing. The more certain neurons are firing in a certain area on a specific thing, the more you’re going to start to attract your brain resources in that area.

Just tying this back to never having the perfect plan, we sometimes talk to real estate investors that say, “Before I start investing, I need to read this certain book. I need to educate myself on asset protection. I need to get my limited liability company set up.” They’re just creating one excuse after another that they have to have done before they can actually pull the trigger and purchase their first property or their next property. This is really just an exotic way of procrastinating. The thing is, if you keep doing that, you’ll never get to achieving your goals. You need to take that first step and move on to the next step, and move on to the next step and not create your own roadblocks in front of you.

Someone said, “Speed of implementation is one of the number one predictors of success.” If you can see someone who is implementing fast, they’re going somewhere.

There is a lot to be said about taking action quickly, and it builds momentum. The longer you sit on your hands or on the fence, the more complacent you become.

As a physics guy, I studied momentum. That’s the beauty of momentum. When you have it, it very difficult to stop it. You have to get off your ass. You have to get away from that inertia to get it going. Once you have it, watch out.

Moving on to the fifth point here is you put the four items above into a clear, concise, written sentence describing each part. This is where it becomes crystal clear. This is where everything above gives you clarity and a sense of direction.

All these four steps are so powerful. This is something Napoleon Hill talks about in his book again and again and again. He says, “Most people will read this book but they will never implement the ideas. Then they’ll complain about why it’s never happening.” If you’re not writing your goals down and if you’re not writing the specific things you need to do, you don’t have a deadline and you don’t have a plan, you don’t really have any goals. You just have a hope or a wish that’s floating around in your mind.

This is just simply saying that once you have a goal, to write it down in a clear, smart, written way, correct?

Yeah. It’s really powerful. The act of writing down is something that I don’t know why it works. I’ve tried writing on computers. I’ve tried writing it on other places. But the best thing is just pen to the paper. Write that damn thing down. Over time, you will start to feel a certain sense of reality to it.

I think what it has to do is you’re using different parts of your brain to actually pick up the pen and move the pen and write on a page. I think you’re firing the neurons in different parts of the brain that now ties all those things together. You have to think about your goal. You have to visualize your goal and you have to write it down in the physical world on a page. I think bringing all those things together is what manifests itself. The key principle of the book is to get the subconscious mind to act. The way you program the subconscious mind is through your five senses. It’s through the conscious mind that you program the subconscious mind. That’s probably why it works.

We’re constantly trying to program the subconscious through our actions, and writing is one of those things. As you said, writing is helping introduce more senses into the action. Someone might say, “Typing on a computer does very similar things because you’re moving your keys or moving your fingers and doing all those things.” I get it. I understand where they’re coming from, but there is something about writing, the journal part or whatever it is, it works way better than anything else.

Even John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur on Fire said that about three-four weeks ago on my show. In fact, he believes that so strongly that he created a success journal, How to Achieve Your Goal in 100 Days or less. It’s all about reading your goal every day, writing it out every day, and just having it in front of you with you in your backpack, in your pocket, everywhere all the time. You reference it, you refer to it, you rewrite it, and it just converts whatever it is you have as a goal into reality.

I think you just molded in the sixth step right there.

This is the perfect segue because the sixth is the big one for me, and that is programming your subconscious mind through repetition. You take everything that you’ve done, everything we’ve talked about right now. But now, you need to get that down into the subconscious mind. It’s recommended that you write your goal down and maybe write it down every day, and then you read it twice a day or as often as you need.

There is no maybe about that part. It is a requirement. You have to write it down every day, in the morning, when you wake up, in the night time, right before you go to bed. Write it, read it out. But beyond that, what is much more profound is when you can visualize it, when you can see it happening right now. That is the key distinction. Neville Goddard, he’s one of the great spiritual thinkers around the same time as Napoleon Hill. Amazing, amazing thinker. I would recommend highly to go check out his stuff, just look him up. One of the things he said is, “You have to think of the goal from the vantage point of as if you’ve accomplished it rather than think of it.” Don’t think of it, think from it. That’s the key distinction. Those are the two words I was trying to get at, think from versus think of.

What I mean by that is when you think from, you’re thinking from being there, from having accomplished this goal. When you’re thinking of, you’re actually sitting here thinking of what would happen if I accomplish this goal. No, we have to think from that vantage point when we have already accomplished that goal. Now, that is probably the most difficult thing to do. That is one of the most fundamentally difficult things to do because we cannot see ourselves as having already accomplished a goal, but that is a requirement.

I know that visualizing the goal is very important, to see yourself as having achieved the goal, and then what you get from that is the feeling as if you achieved it. That feeling is what fires up and triggers your subconscious mind. If it’s something that you’re working towards, you should act as if you achieved it. Again, that brings on the neuropsychology, the physiological parts of it. You start to feel successful or feel as if you achieved something because you’re acting like it and you’re visualizing it. You see it clearly in your mind, vividly, full-screen, in high definition, full color. You hear the sounds, you smell the smells around you. The more real you can make it in your conscious mind, the more your subconscious mind believes it.

That’s the key. The more real you make it, the more your subconscious will start to believe it is possible and it will start to go towards to work on it. There’s a great book called Psycho-Cybernetics. It’s by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. He talks all about how powerful it is to be able to visualize in the moment right now. He has so many different exercises as to how to do that visualization. You can find all of that on my website.

The fundamental thing we’re doing in these six steps is we’re programming our subconscious mind. The way to program the subconscious mind, as you step back from these six steps, the realization that you need to have and the realization hopefully as you listen to this interview more than once, you’ll realize it’s intensity of emotions and repetition. That is what will program your subconscious mind; repetition and intensity of emotions. That is crucial. That is where you will make or break this whole thing.

Because if you don’t repeat this often enough and if you don’t have enough emotional intensity built into it, your subconscious cannot be programmed. Then, you will keep going one step forward, one step back, one step forward, one step back, and there is no sense of progress because you’re losing the charge you built up. It’s almost like you have to create a burning desire. It’s not just a regular desire. It’s not a hope or a wish. You have to create that burning desire, and that only happens when you repeat with emotion.

This whole exercise is the practice of communicating to yourself, using your conscious mind, for the purpose of convincing your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind will believe what you tell it if you consciously believe it strongly enough. That’s what you’re saying is the burning desire. Not just a desire, but having a burning desire for it.

The subconscious is like a garden and the conscious mind is like the gardener. The conscious mind has to constantly go and sow the seeds and nurture the garden, and water the garden, and take care of the garden. Only then do you get the right fruits. It’s a constant exercise, constant work in progress, never ending work in progress. Because as soon as you light up on your subconscious mind, as soon as you let other things come into your conscious mind, they will affect the programming of your subconscious mind and possibly screw it up. It’s real. I’ve seen this in my life. I’ve seen this in everyone’s life. When people lose their sense of focus, when they lose their sense of desire, when they lose their sense of vision, they falter.

Napoleon Hill says in his book, “Set your mind on a definite goal and observe how quickly the world stands aside to let you pass.” Basically, what he’s saying is define your goal, program your subconscious mind and it will manifest itself.

The manifestation, again it’s not a hand-waving, voodoo kind of stuff, it will happen because you will take action. Here’s the thing. People think this is hand-waving voodoo because nobody is going to drop that million dollars in your pocket tomorrow. Very, very true. But if you charge up your subconscious mind and you are wired up, if your desire is so strong, you will take action. That is the key. Action will not go away. If your subconscious is wired up, action will happen, so you will take action.

It’s a good practice. I write my goals out. I actually do it in Excel. I break it into categories such as career, business, family, health, etc. Then I just save that as a PDF and then I keep the PDF on my iPhone and I can look at it anytime, anywhere, just by opening it up in iBooks. It makes it very easy for me to have it portable, so I can read it all the time. I don’t have it on paper. I just have it in digital format.

The way I do it is I’ll take some pictures of the things that I want or the things I like or the goals that I have, I have some pictures. On those pictures, I will put those specific goals. I’ll scribble them using some app on my phone. The picture stays on my phone. I’ll even go out to create videos of this. I have used so many different ways to program my subconscious mind. It’s unbelievable. I have created all sorts of systems and processes to do that because I find that it works. I’m an engineer and I’m not kidding when I say that it actually works.

They call that vision boarding. Create a vision board for yourself.

Sometimes, I’ll actually create audio recordings of my goal and I will play it while I’m driving or while I’m working out or while I’m running over and over again. It’s almost obsessive. I’ll tell you this, Marco, obsession is not a bad thing when it comes to getting what you want, because you need that.

I totally agree. In fact, to quote Grant Cardone, he says, “Be obsessed or be average.” Mani, this has been great. I think we’ve covered the key concepts and the nuts and bolts. Again, just to repeat, the key principle of this book is that the subconscious mind acts beneath the surface of the conscious mind and it will accomplish whatever you direct it to. It’s just a matter of knowing how to program it, how to tap into it. This is what the book is all about.

There are, of course, a lot of great books that are associated with this idea. Realize, the subconscious is your servant. You can use it the way you want to use it. It is all up to you.

You’re right. There are many, many, many great books out there. You do a great job of summarizing them. Mani, tell our listeners how they can find you and get more information?

I have a podcast as well where I interview top authors and I summarize a lot of the great ideas for entrepreneurs. They can find it just by searching for the podcast. It’s called 2000 Books. If they want to get animation video of Think and Grow Rich or a bunch of other summaries for free, they can just go to 2000Books.com/summary. I have around 40 great summaries there sitting for them to grab.

Mani, thanks for being on the show. This has been enlightening and I’m sure our audience have gained some interesting insight into the book and how they can achieve their goals.

I’m really grateful, Marco, for being here. I hope your audiences are going to apply these principles in their life and find great success.

I hope so too. Thanks for being on, Mani. It’s been great.

Thank you, Marco.

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