I've been reading an interesting book lately.

It's called 'Identity Economics. How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, And Well Being'.
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It raises some pertinent points for anyone who wants to achieve great wealth in their life.

The authors show that how you see yourself plays a huge part in how much you earn, and indeed how much wealth you believe you deserve.

Identity affects how you dress.  What wages you ask for, or what prices you charge your clients.

Even how much money you save or spend.

With self identity being so critical to financial success, it is truly amazing that people don't spend time daily developing their self image so that it supports them, rather than pulls them down.

Do you do anything at all to maintain a healthy self identity?

Most people don’t, for two reasons:

1. They have no idea that their identity is affecting how much they earn.

2. Even if they do know, they don't know what they can do to change their identity.

In fact, changing your identity is relatively easy, although it takes some months to do it.

You just use the same technique taught to Olympic athletes to enhance their performance.

Mental rehearsal.

That is, every day for at least ten minutes, close your eyes and mentally 'see' yourself performing superbly at work. Earning large amounts of money.  Being happy and healthy. Enjoying your ideal lifestyle.

At first it seems implausible that something so simple could affect your performance. But there are literally thousands of scientific studies that show that, over time, it does.

And remember this:

You're visualising how things will go anyway, all day long. It's just how the brain works. So you might as well take control of the process and visualise exactly what you want.

With regular daily practice you'll find you will be more confident, more at ease, more effective.

You'll also find your economic identity will have changed.

And soon after, your wealth.

I am amazed at how hard it is sometimes to get a waiter’s attention at a restaurant.

You call to them, wave your hands, do anything to get noticed.

And still they walk on past you, oblivious.

Why does this phenomenon occur?

The same reason you don’t succeed at the level you'd like.

Lack of focus.

Not being service oriented.

Mistaking busyness for progress.

Forgetting who’s paying the bills.

Yes, in so many ways, life is like a restaurant.

We all have customers, yet so often we walk right on by, without noticing their needs.

Have a think about it.

In life, are you a good waiter or a bad one?

Here's an amazing, yet true story.

I knew a guy who owned a company that sold burglar alarms.

His sales people started out selling them door to door for around $600.

Then one day, he asked himself whether he could stretch that price.

So he moved it up to $700.

The result? He sold just as many alarms, but was making much more profit.

So then he did what almost no business owner ever does.

He kept lifting his prices.

First to $800.

Then $900, then $1000, $1100, $1200.

And still the customers kept on buying.

What price did he eventually stop at?

$1600!

So think about that.

He was selling a product for $600, then ended up making $1000 EXTRA PROFIT on every sale.

With no loss of customers!

There's a lesson in that for all of us.

The price of our product or service probably has a lot more stretch in it than we think.

Maybe it's time to lift your prices.

Hey, you can always bring them back down if it doesn't work.

But you'll never know if you don't give it a go.

We are drowned in paperwork.

Overwhelmed with To Do Lists.

Loaded with obligations.

But underneath all the requests, emails, data and urgency, there is always The One Thing.

It's that single thing we could do today to transform our situation, our business and even our life.

We need to get into the habit of looking for it. Then focusing on it. Daily.

Yet 95% of people can't even tell you what it is.

Instead they immerse themselves in busyness, mistaking movement for progress.

As the great author and philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote: "It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?"

The fact is, you could work only one hour a day and still achieve enormous things, if you just focused on doing The One Thing that really matters.

Or you could work for 12 hours a day (and many do) and make little progress, if you were unaware of what The One Thing is for you.

Every morning before you start work, spend 10 minutes thinking about what your One Thing is. Then do it first.

It's a simple, yet life changing discipline.

I'll never forget having a meeting with the prominent agent to celebrities, Harry M Miller, years ago.

On his notice board he had a sign with just three words of advice.

'Prune The Tree.'

I was intrigued, as Harry lived in an apartment 30 stories above street level, with not a tree around.

"Oh that's my philosophy of life," he remarked, as I questioned him about it.

"It's there to remind me to always make sure I prune my life of clients and business relationships that are no longer ripe with opportunity.

I find that if I’m not careful, I end up being slowed down by situations that I really should have evolved away from."

Pruning the tree of life is an intriguing notion, and well worth considering at least once a year.

What should we all prune from our trees?

Clients who don't respect us.

One way friendships.

Beliefs about ourselves that no longer serve us.

Plans that no longer fit our desires.

When you pause to think about it, there's a lot to prune on the tree of life.

How's your tree looking?

It's true, pruning will temporarily make your life smaller.

But soon after, it will grow stronger, healthier and far more beautiful.

Most people think that top entrepreneurs are obsessed by money.

While it's certainly up there on their list of priorities, I don't think it's the lead driver for many of them.

A recent book by British economist John Kay, entitled 'Obliquity. Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly' shows that many of the best performing businesses were built by people who didn't pursue wealth as their holy grail.

It was purely a bi-product of their need to achieve, to change the world, to feel better about themselves, or to leave a legacy.

Kay shows that companies like Boeing, Ford and Microsoft were driven by much loftier goals than filthy lucre. And ironically that is precisely why they ended up making so much of it.

That money is somewhat down the priority list for many billionaires may shock a lot of people, but it won't surprise those who have made a heap of dollars.

All the research shows that we quickly become used to living on a larger amount, and it then does virtually nothing to increase our happiness.

For example, in a study done by the king of happiness psychology, Ed Diener, members of the Forbes 400 Rich List reported only 1% greater happiness than the average American wage earner.

And what delights the rich, long term, if it isn't money?

Well, in a piece in Fortune magazine recently, Warren Buffett wrote, “The asset I most value, aside from health, is interesting, diverse, long standing friends."

A good reminder to those of us who may be slowly destroying our friendships as we desperately chase a few more dollars.

I had an interesting, but painful experience recently.

I spent 6 months using a business consultant for a commercial issue I was involved in.

After spending over 100 grand, I still had no clear resolution in sight, or even clarity over the next steps to finalizing it.

Then I went to another one who charged vastly more, yet in 3 hours he had worked out how to finish it once and for all.

What a lesson.

Here I was thinking I was being cost efficient by going with somebody cheaper, but the opposite was actually the case.

When we look at the total cost (in time, effectiveness and money) the expensive guy turned out to be incredibly cheap.

And the less expensive consultant ended up being outrageously expensive.

In a free market economy, the best people almost always charge more, because they can.

Don't make my mistake. If you can possibly afford it, choose the best upfront and save yourself the angst and cost of dealing with the average performers.

Now here's the tricky bit.

Some of the more wily average performers charge a fortune too. So who you choose can't be purely based on price.

You need to check with other senior people working in their industry.

In most industries, the customer often has no idea who the elite performers are.

But people working in that industry always do.

I'm currently receiving instructions on how to live a great life.

Not from a philosopher, a self-help guru or shrink, but from our new kitten, who arrived 3 days ago.

I've been amazed at how this little furry one takes the time to play around throughout the day.

He's not unusual. Almost all of the creatures in the animal kingdom are the same.

It got me thinking, is play not a natural state for humans?

Well I think that it's reasonable to assume it is, simply because as children our attitude is highly playful.

Only as we get conditioned by the heaviness of modern daily life, does our playful mode of thought diminish.

There seems to be a collective belief amongst adults that being playful means that we are not serious about our work.

Yet I've seen no research that shows that being playful reduces work effectiveness. To the contrary, I've seen several books that show persuasively that it improves it.

And every so often, we all meet an executive who performs superbly, yet remains light, fun and happy.

These people inevitably become linchpins in society, centres of influence in their workplace, their very playfulness adding to their mastery.

Intelligently playful people are highly magnetic to those who work with them.

So I think it's time we consciously developed a sense of play at work. It's not easy in a culture that for some reason admires stressed, busy people, but if we can do it, then we'll not only enhance our own lives, but the lives of those who both live and work with us.

I believe we will end up wealthier too. Not just in money, but in something far more precious.

Well being.

Every day we are hit with articles about people who have built huge businesses almost instantly.

Facebook. Red Bull. Amazon. Google. The entrepreneur is the new rock star.

The examples seem so plentiful they give the impression that these rags to riches scenarios are the norm.

The stats, however, show they are anything but.

Almost every great business started slowly.

Walmart had only 2 stores for its first 7 years. Now it's the third biggest company in the world.

Marriott has thousands of hotels worldwide. But it started with just one root beer stand.

Merck is valued at over $50 billion. But it struggled initially with just a single small pharmacy.

Starbucks has over 16,000 stores, but for the first 13 years it only had 5.

Nike took years before it exceeded $1m in revenue.

So please remember this as you try to build something great.

If you're doing it slow and tough, you just may be doing it right.

Keep persisting. Keep refining. Keep visioning. But most of all keep moving forward.

For almost everyone, the road to greatness is long.

Despite what the media may say.

How did Japan recover so quickly after World War II?

They were assisted greatly by Americans teaching them modern manufacturing and management techniques.

One of the most renowned of these was William Edwards Deming, who pushed both the concept of Quality and Continuous Improvement.

The Japanese embraced the concept of continuous improvement so much they even invented a term for it, 'Kaizen'.

It works for manufacturing, but Kaizen is also a highly effective tool for personal performance excellence too.

Tiny improvements can have astronomical benefits over time.

Take, for instance, achievement expert Brian Tracy's Continuous Improvement Formula.

Tracy postulates that if we want to advance in any area, all we need to do is get better at doing it by one tenth of one percent a week.

It seems a ridiculously small amount to make a difference, but if we did improve by such a miniscule percentage, there would be some stunning results.

After one month we'd have improved 2%.

After a year, 24%

Allowing for compounding, we would actually double our effectiveness in 2.7 years. We would literally be twice as good as we currently are!

And after a decade we would be a massive 1004% better at whatever we chose to focus on.

Now that is staggering progress, especially when you consider that many people don't improve at all, most years.

It's surely worth taking 3 minutes to decide an area that you would like to get better at, and committing to one tenth of one percent improvement each week.

By simply aiming to get a little bit better, consistently, and measuring your progress as best you can, you will soon leave your competitors behind.

It's a tiny effort, for a massive reward.