5 Things You Need to Become a Millionaire in One Year

Most people want to be millionaires, but they don’t necessarily know how to get there. You can become a millionaire in one year, provided that you have all the stuff needed, very good strategies, and indomitable spirit to achieve.

I’m using term “goal” instead of “dream” because a goal is a “dream with deadline.” A “goal” is measurable and quantifiable, like finishing professional technical writing certificate within three months with an excellent grade (at least 3.6 GPA) or selling 1000 copies of ebook within one month.

A “dream” is when you said that you wanted to shop for expensive clothes and jewelry someday, not knowing for sure how and when you’d come up with the money.

Goal setting is oftentimes overlooked when planning the future. Being “rich” or “happy” is too vague a statement. Your goals must be measurable and executable in logical steps. Only this way, a “dream” becomes a “goal” and, eventually, becomes reality. You need to have more than “can-do” attitude. You need a very strong drive to make things happen because you know exactly how.

So, let’s start.

First: Be Clear about Your Goals

Now, what did I mean by “being clear” about financial goal? You must calculate your expenses every month plus savings. In San Francisco Bay Area, a family of four would require approximately $8000 per month to pay for housing, utilities, food, insurance, entertainment, school tuition, special diet, clothing, and other necessities. Add $2000 for savings. It means you’d need approximately $10,000 in nett income or $15,000 in gross income more or less.

How much do you need to afford every day? Assuming you receive optimized income in 25 days out of 30 days every month, you’d need to make $600 per day to make $15,000 gross income per month. Break $600 down in 24 work hours, you’d need to earn by selling products totaling $25 per hour. Earning $25 per hour is definitely achievable.

Now, you said you want to make $1,000,000 in one year? This translates to $1,666 in gross income per day (assuming 300 workdays as we’d need to include “slow days” within the year). Is earning this much possible? Definitely. It’s just slightly less than three times your optimized daily income.

With today’s tremendously scalable Internet and mobile technologies, with the right startegies, you should be able to earn a few thousands of dollars per day. However, before you can triple your income (from your optimized approximate of earning $15,000 per month gross income), it’d be better to earn your optimized income first. Be super clear about what you can produce and how much you can actually earn with specific marketing and lead generation strategies.

The proven path to earning $1,000,000 per year quickly is by selling highly scalable products and have them strategically marketed with multiplying factors. Here is the formula:

$1,000,000 per year = Scalable Products x Multiplying Factors
$1,666 per day = Scalable Products x Multiplying Factors
$70 per hour = Scalable Products x Multiplying Factors

“A scalable product” can be anything that sells really quick with minimal cost (or even “free”) to the customer or a high-priced product that would sell really well if you find the right type of customer. In the former, a strong traffic would help in selling quickly, like 10,000 visitors that each purchase $1 value of your product. In the latter, a laser-sharp focused pool of visitors would eventually bring the one customer who is willing to pay $1000 for your product.

I’d prefer a highly scalable product that can be produced once, like books, ebooks, videos, audios, images, texts, and others and be sold thousands or even millions of times. You only work one time and reap the profits multiple times. You can sell an ebook that’s priced $1 far sooner and in a lot more quantity, for instance, than selling a mansion in the suburb that sells for $15 million.

Second: Reframe Your Identity as An Entrepreneur

You’re not just a (fill in the blank). You are an entrepreneur whose goal is achieving one million dollar in nett profit annually. And this means you’re wearing two hats interchangeably: a CEO hat and a worker bee hat. A CEO strategizes and a worker bee executes the strategies by actually doing the tasks from A to Z as required by the CEO.

Undoubtedly, being both a CEO and a worker bee can be quite challenging, but you must wear both hats equally well. If you’re a better worker bee, you can learn more about strategizing and marketing. If you’re a better CEO, learn about the technicalities of writing, publishing, coding, and other “hard” skills. Whatever hard skills are required in your chosen business.

Many people think that they’re “good CEOs” because they have so many ideas. They even say to themselves (and others), “If I have a partner or an assistant who can make things happen, I’ll be successful already!” Hold on.

Ideas are just ideas without execution. Before you have a partner or hire an employee, you’d need to be a “worker-bee dash CEO” yourself, so you’d know first hand what the challenges are of each task.

You need to commit to executing ideas completely from the start to the end, rather just “daydreaming” about ideas but do nothing to execute them. That’s the true essence of being successful. A successful person is an excellent executor of ideas. Focus and grit distinguish successful individuals from others who aren’t successful.

Third: Create Scalable Products

Create products based on things that you can do well and effortlessly. Start with listing your skills, hobbies, and other passions other than hobbies. Make them strong candidates for your “primary” scalable products. It means that you must be passionate about them. You can’t live without them, not even when you’re completely broke and have no one around.

For instance, if you’re an English teacher, your skills are likely teaching, preparing lesson plans, grammars, reading, writing, speaking in front of the classroom, and other teaching and English-related. You love swimming, reading romance novels, and bowling after teaching hours, so those are your hobbies. You’re also known as the best-dressed teacher in the school, so apparently fashion is your passion. Recognize them and start the list right away, so you have a clear view of what products you can create.

What kind of scalable products can you create, then? Carefully take note of them. Every idea is valuable, but the most valuable idea is the one that can be executed extremely well.

Your “primary” scalable products should be the easiest to create and market. For instance, even though you think you’re more skilled as an English teacher than an amateur fashion designer, your memberships in a dozen fashion clubs might prove that you’re more familiar with marketing to fashionistas than to aspiring English teachers.

Find within you which markets you’re more familiar with and what products you can create that they would love to buy. I personally prefer creating products based on my skills, hobbies, and passions than merely following trending search keywords as you’d be more driven to be present everyday and maintain long-term passion.

Find a great coach who has talked the talk and walked the walk.

Fourth: Keep Focused and Upgrade Skills and Knowledge Continuously

Starting a business is hard enough, yet keeping focused and continuously upgrading yours skills and knowledge is key to success. Start with a learning community, where you can learn almost everything about starting an online business, writing brush-ups, new coding and marketing skills, and be extremely successful. Some great learning communities include Udemy and Treehouse.

Your CEO brain is probably filled with gazillion business and product ideas. Aim at coming up with 100 ideas per month or approximately 3 to 4 ideas per day. Write them down freely without doubts nor any mental blocks.

Fifth: Break Down of 12-Month Activities

Before start counting the first day of the 12 months in your calendar, give yourself three full months to prepare. If three months is too little, give yourself six months or even 12 full months.

Why do you need to prepare? You want to have a smooth sailing of the ship within the next year, you want the ship is ready and you’re fit and proper to sail it. You want a ship captain who has mastered how to navigate a ship, not a newbie who is still learning how to sail. Of course, you’ll also learn a lot along the way.

You learn the strategies by doing, but you learn about the hard and soft skills long before executing them with measurable goals.

What do you need to prepare?

First, ruthless focus, unshaken grit, and indomitable spirit to succeed. Focus and persevere whenever distractions and failures appear. Re-learn and re-do things to better understand how you can make things better this time around.

Second, hard skills to master up to 80 percent mastery. “Hard skills” include any technical skills, like writing, editing, designing layout, coding, WordPress development, and others. Master every hard skill up to upper intermediate level (80 percent mastery). This “80 percent mastery” is a lifelong learning mindset, because it means that you know you need to keep learning.

Third, soft skills to master up to 80 percent mastery. “Soft skills” include strategizing, networking, marketing, listening to others, communications, project management, time management, and others. Master every soft skill as much as possible. Observe how successful individuals strategize and communicate. You’re also a lifelong learner of soft skills, not only hard skills.

Fourth, nurturing, peaceful, and positive environment. Find a physical, a psychological, and an emotional place that’s positive, peaceful, and full of nurturing and encouraging individuals. No interruptions and distracting background noises. In a conducive environment, you’re already 50 percent done with your tasks. You can focus and do your thing.

Fifth, ability, humility, and willingness to reboot. Sometimes we don’t achieve the goals we’ve set for ourselves. It’s OK. Re-learn and re-do, so mistakes get fixed. But when your fixing attempts failed, be willing and humble enough to reboot and restart. Start over your projects and be happy for the learning experiences the mistake/failure provided.

12 Months Break Down (create your own monthly goals):

Month 1: Create products with specifications based on what you learned about the market and yourself. Have them ready to be sold by the end of the month at the most. Crystallize marketing strategies. Walk the first step with confidence. Believe and doors will open.

Month 2: Make $1 per day. Start small and confidently, When your goal is only $1, you’d be confident to achieve it. So, make sure to do your very best to achieve this small goal in the first month.

Month 3: Make $10 per day. Achieve this goal confidently and repeat it in the following months.

Month 4: Make $100 per day
Month 5: Make $500 per day
Month 6: Make $1000 per day
Month 7: Make $1500 per day
Month 8: Make $1700 per day
Month 9: Make $1700 to $2000 per day
Month 10: Make $1700 to $2000 per day
Month 11: Make $1700 to $2000 per day
Month 12: Make $1700 to $2000 per day
Month 13 to 24: Repeat month 1 to 12 with increased goals as you see fit.

Conclusion

Master both hard and soft skills. Be goal-oriented. Manage your projects well. Master time management. A nurturing, peaceful, and positive environment would greatly help. Be willing and humble enough to reboot/restart/start over whenever failures/mistakes are too great to fix.