PowerGoals™

The Blueprint To Go
From Ordinary to Extraordinary

Dr Hannes Dreyer (PhD)

with Elzet Blaauw
 First Edition.
© 2020 Dr Hannes Dreyer and Elzet Blaauw.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
author.
For information regarding permission, write to [email protected].
 The PowerGoal™ Method

I know this book can change your life – if you read it and if you apply
what you learn.
Well done for starting with the first part – reading the book.
To help you with the second part, the application, we have created the
PowerGoal™ Method.
The PowerGoal™ Method is everything you need to design your
ultimate life and start living it now.
If you purchased this book, you already have access to the PowerGoal™
Method. Start by watching the Quantum Awakening Crash Course
before you read this book.
Also download the following PowerGoal™ Method resources so that
you can apply what you learn as you go:
• The PowerGoal™ Workbook
• The PowerGoal™ Calculator
• The PowerGoal™ Cheatsheet
If you downloaded this ebook for free, keep an eye on your inbox for a
very special offer on the PowerGoal™ Method coming your way in a
day or two. You will only be able to claim it for a limited time, so make
sure you don’t miss it.
If you do not get our email or if you missed the special offer, contact
our office at [email protected] or +27 (12) 542 4560 for more
information.
Table of Contents
Foreword............................................................................................ viii
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................ 1
Chapter 1: The Power of You ............................................................... 3
SECTION 1: SETTING THE GOAL ................................................. 19
Chapter 2: The Purpose of Goals ........................................................ 21
Chapter 3: The Power of PowerGoals™ ............................................ 33
Chapter 4: The Process of Setting Your PowerGoal™ ...................... 59
SECTION 2: ACHIEVING THE GOAL ........................................... 69
Chapter 5: The Five Levels of Transformation .................................. 71
Chapter 6: The Ten Environments of You ......................................... 94
Chapter 7: Perfect Days .................................................................... 121
SECTION 3: THE SCIENCE BEHIND GOALS ........................... 137
Chapter 8: The Formula for Success ................................................ 139
Chapter 9: The Brain and the Body .................................................. 153
Chapter 10: Creating You ................................................................. 167
CONCLUSION ................................................................................ 187
Chapter 11: Make It Happen ............................................................ 189
Afterword ......................................................................................... 193
From the author: share your story..................................................... 195
Acknowledgements .......................................................................... 197
Author Biography – Dr Hannes Dreyer ............................................ 199
Co-author Biography – Elzet Blaauw ............................................... 207
More books and products ................................................................. 209
Foreword
I first met Hannes at one of his famous live (and free) property
workshops in South Africa.
I was amazed at this tall and wiry man with the mop of grey hair
jumping around at the front of the room. My now-husband, then-new-
boyfriend was sitting next to me in the front row, and we were both
taking notes eagerly.
We were young, in our twenties, but we had a shared interest in property
investment. So far, it had been an interest only. For me, it was probably
not even an interest yet. I knew that I should be interested in property
investments. In fact, my dad had retired as a farmer at the age of 50,
mostly because of his property investments. I knew, but I did not really
feel it yet.
That day in August 2014, my feelings changed. And it was not mainly
because of the information that Hannes shared, good that it was. My
dad had been teaching me many of the same things for years – or trying
to, at least.
My feelings changed that day because Hannes called forth a dream that
had been hidden in my heart until then. It is a simple dream maybe, but
it is a powerful one for me – to live a life of freedom with my family.
To have the financial freedom, time freedom and purpose freedom to
be, do and have all that I want for my family.
What? Family? I did not even have my own at that stage.
Petri had only been my boyfriend for about two months. I did not even
know yet whether I wanted him to become my spouse one day. (He
knew right from the start, apparently.) I did know that he had the

viii
potential to possibly be someone with whom I could spend my life, and
that was enough.
In that workshop, listening to Hannes speak about property and hearing
about the life he had lived with his family since he retired at the age of
37, I knew – I want that.
I do not merely want that – it is my dream. It ignited a level of
motivation and purpose in me that I had never experienced.
After that workshop, Petri and I worked through Hannes’ material on
debt, property, mindsets, goals and purpose. Petri paid off his debt in
record time (using the principles in this book, although we did not
realise it at the time). We got married nine months later – debt-free. We
bought our first investment property less than a year later. (If you are a
property student of Hannes already, it had an IRR of close to 80%. And,
yes, it exceeded our financial freedom growth rate.)
We have been going ever since.
As I am writing this, Petri and I are in the last months of a year-long
mentoring programme with Hannes. We have had major breakthroughs.
At the beginning of the mentoring, I was a stay-at-home mom who was
facing (and dreading) having to go back to a full-time job. Within days
of starting the mentoring, I realised that I do not have to do that. I set a
new PowerGoal™, and I started the journey of being a business owner.
But not the type with no time and no energy left for their family. One
who worked for time freedom.
As part of the mentoring, I did Hannes’ Powermorphing™ course. It
teaches many of the principles in this book on a practical level. It gave
me the skills to start smashing through my goals.

ix
And then Hannes phoned me one day out of the blue and started talking
about the editing and writing services that I offer. The conversation
ended where he asked whether I would like to write a book with him.
He did not know at the time that, since long ago, even as a little girl not
yet in school, one of my dreams has been to write books. I have taken
steps to realise that dream. I had even self-published a little children’s
book just before starting the mentoring with Hannes.
But that time, like all the other times, I had put the book writing dream
aside because it seemed to conflict with my other dreams, like family
and financial freedom and time freedom. It was not true. As Hannes
says in this book, we have the dreams that we have for a reason. We
won’t have a dream unless we have it in us to realise that dream.
Co-writing this book with Hannes drove home that point for me very
powerfully.
I am living my dream in ways that many people do not even allow
themselves to dream of. And there are so many more dreams to realise
still.
It is a great journey.
This book can open the door to this same journey for you too.
Or, it can help you recommit to this journey with greater knowledge,
motivation and purpose than ever before.
Do not discount the power of this journey and of this book.
Elzet
April 2020

x
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INTRODUCTION

1
2
Chapter 1: The Power of You
Do you know that you can have it all?
And I really mean it all. You can have all the freedom, abundance, joy,
fulfilment, health, wealth and happiness that you desire.
To most people, it sounds impossible.
But just follow me. In this book, I am going to show you that it is your
birthright.

It starts with you

Having it all begins when you become aware of the greatness that is in
you. That is the moment when the awakening happens.
If you have become aware, really aware, you have to claim your
abundance. You must take action. No one else is going to give it to you.
People suffer because what we know about creating and living a life of
abundance, of wealth and health and happiness, is incomplete. We seek
answers and advice and empowerment and guidance and wisdom
externally, outside of us.
But nobody can tell you what is best for you – what you should do and
how you should live. The only person who truly knows exactly what is
best for you is you.
You already have all the answers. You already possess all the wisdom
that you need to resolve any challenges, problems and issues that you
might be facing today.
You possess the ability to move forward in your life, to grow and to
evolve by living a remarkable life of joy and abundance.

3
The only thing that you need to do more is to communicate with
yourself more often and on a deeper level. That is the trick.
But, unless we understand the process of how to do it, we cannot get
the benefits – the joy and the fulfilment, the success and the abundance
in all the areas of life.

What do you want?

Do you know what you want? Have you thought about it?
What is it?
Do you want a Ferrari or a Bentley or a helicopter? Or do you want your
dream house?
Or maybe you want a million dollars (or pounds or euros) per month.
Maybe you just want to lose weight.
Or you want to find a job – or a better job. Or maybe you want better
relationships.
Maybe you want to get a degree or finish a degree.
Or maybe you want to start a business or grow an existing business.
Or maybe you want to retire early. Maybe you want financial freedom
or time freedom.
Or maybe you want to provide for your parents. Or perhaps send your
children to a certain school or college or university.

Workbook Q1.1: What do you want?

Answer this question in your workbook before you continue.
Unfortunately, most people will never get these things. They will never
make their dreams come true because they do not know how to set goals

4
for the most important things in life, and they know even less about how
to achieve them.
And let me just take a moment here to say: if you hate the word goal
and you do not want to know anything about goal setting, do not worry.
People hate goals and goal setting because we have not been taught how
to do it the right way.
It is not boring. It is not tedious.
It is the most exciting thing you can ever do.
And it works for everyone. Yes, even if you believe that goal setting is
not for you.
I will teach you a better way.
That is why I am writing this book.

An example from my life

Let me give you a recent example of a goal that I set. If you were on my
database on 15 April 2019, you would have received an email from me.
Or if you followed me on social media, you would have seen the video
that I posted.
In it, I said that exactly 365 days from that day, my wife and I were
going to start with an incredible adventure with a group of people. We
were going on a 4x4 trip starting in Cape Town, South Africa, up
through Africa along the eastern side, ferry over to Turkey and go up
all the way to Russia. And then we were going to travel all the way back
through Europe, England, Ireland and then down the western side of
Africa to our home in Pretoria, South Africa.
All in all, the trip would take us through around forty-three countries.

5
At that stage, we had already done a lot of planning. The process had
started a year and four months before that video. We knew it was going
to cost us in the vicinity of US$70,000.
The thing is, on 15 April 2019 when I shot that video, I decided I do not
want to take a cent out of my own pocket for it. I decided the trip was
not going to cost me more than $1.
I decided I would like to play a game.

Some background
If you had been following me before this video, you would have known
that I am well-known in South Africa as a property investor. I retired in
1995 at the age of 37 years, thanks to the property portfolio that I had
built.
After seven years of retirement, I had had enough of it. I was living a
dream life, but life without a purpose and a goal was meaningless to
me. I was depressed. I was unhappy.
In that depressed state, my wife Tanja told me one day that it was
enough now. I needed to do something.
“Go teach people what we did. Teach them how we paid off our debt.
Teach them how we built our property portfolio.”
Like the good husband that I am, I listened to her. It was the best advice
for me at the time (of course).
I found that I love to teach. I love to mentor. I love to coach.
I got a name in South Africa as that crazy property guy who jumps up
and down in his workshops and who gets all excited about “doing the
calculation”.

6
I found that I really love to show my students that what I teach them
works in real life. That is why I teach my students by showing them
what I do and how I do it so that they can do it too.

Back to 15 April 2019

If you had been on my database or had been following me on social
media, you probably would have known these things about me.
You might have known that I like to play these kinds of games to show
people that the impossible is possible.
So, in the video that I posted that day, I said that my next goal was to
invest a maximum of $1 and grow it to a minimum of $70 000 in a
cryptocurrency portfolio on or before 15 April 2020.
But that was only part of the goal. At the end of that year of travel, the
goal was that I would still have more than $70 000 in my
cryptocurrency portfolio.
In other words, I was going to live and pay for my expenses while doing
this entire trip, which to many people is a life-long dream. And then
when I come back, there would be as much money or more than when
I started using the money for the trip.
Now, here’s my question: what is your reaction when you hear that
goal?
I want you to put down this book and think about it. What are your
thoughts?
If you have a journal or a diary, pull it out. Or take a piece of paper or
open a document on your phone or computer. Write down your reaction.
Don’t overthink it. Just write down all the thoughts and feelings that
you have.
Go, do it!

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 Workbook Q1.2: What is your reaction to my goal?
Answer this question in your workbook before you continue.

What is your reaction?

Now, most people will not have put down this book and written down
their reaction. (This is your last chance, by the way, if you are not
catching my hint.)
What was your reaction?
What I’ve found is that the majority of people thinks it sounds so untrue,
so impossible, so too-good-to-be-true that they did not even watch the
whole video or read to the end of the email.
Most people think that there must be a trick or that I am joking.
They think that it is only possible for some people, for the few elite, for
the richest of the rich.
I hear all kinds of excuses.
But, Hannes, it is easy for you to do it.
But, Hannes, you are rich already.
But, Hannes, for you that money is pocket change.
But, Hannes, you have done this type of thing before.
Yes, it is true. I have done this type of thing before.
But there was also a first time for me.
And let me tell you, if I can set and achieve a goal like this, anyone can
– on condition that they believe they can and that they do what is
necessary to get it done.

8
Qualifying for success
My dad died when I was seven years old, and I grew up poor.
I failed Grade 12 the first time around – and only just passed the second
time.
I dropped out of university.
At the age of 25, I was broke, with several failed business ventures to
my name to hammer home the point.
At the age of 27, I was up to my neck in debt. And not even the so-
called “good” debt – consumer debt. I was living a life way beyond
what I could afford.
And, yet, ten years later at the age of 37, I was financially free. I retired.
What happened in those ten years?
I paid off my debt, yes. And it is a crucial thing for you to do too.
I built a property portfolio in seven years that produced enough reliable
monthly income that I could live from it. And I have spent the past 17+
years of my life teaching others to do it too. So, yes, I believe building
a property portfolio is one of the best things you can do.
I started and scaled several million-dollar and multimillion-dollar
businesses. And, yes, starting and building a business is very important
too.
But everyone knows that it is a good idea to pay off debt. Everyone
wants to build a property portfolio. It is everyone’s dream to own not
one but several cashflow-positive, million-dollar businesses that give
them the freedom to live the life they want.
But they don’t have it. They don’t do it.

9
Why did I make my dreams a reality, but most people with my
background do not? In fact, most people with much better backgrounds
and much more opportunity in life do not achieve what I did. And only
a very, very few who achieve what I have do it in the timeframe that I
did.
Why? The reason, my friend, is in this book.

The reason for this book

As I’ve mentioned, from 2002, I have been teaching my students how
to become financially free and to live a life of true wealth.
I realised in my own life, and I saw with my students, that money, what
we think of as wealth, is only a very small part of the picture. It is
important, don’t get me wrong. But it is not the ultimate goal. It is only
an enabler.
Money alone without the rest – physical health, healthy relationships
and life purpose – is pretty empty, as many rich people will tell you.
But I’ve seen that people have it the wrong way around. They think if
they have money, the rest will come: the health and relationships and
purpose.
Money can indeed buy certain things which amplify the health and
relationships and purpose that you have already. That is why it is an
enabler.
But the thing is, it is actually your current lack of physical health and
relationships and purpose that is keeping you from making the money.
As I taught my students, I realised that even if I give them all the
information to do what I did, and yet they are not achieving the results.
Why not?
Well, I thought, they are not applying what I taught them.

10
And, yes, that is definitely the case. Applied knowledge is wisdom. To
know something and not do it means that you actually do not truly know
it at all.
I know some people say that you can only sit there and visualise
something and, Bam! There it is. But everyone who has any of those
things that people visualise and visualise and visualise, well, all of those
people do things that make it possible for them to have those things.
Even the ones who say you must just sit there and visualise.
So, yes, my students will not get my results if they do not act on the
knowledge that they have.
But then I asked myself: why do they not act on that knowledge? Why
do some act and get great results, and others don’t?
And why do some act, and if they don’t get the results they wanted,
they learn, adjust try again? And they keep on going and learning until
they get to success.
But others stop at the first whiff of failure.
Why?
The answer is in this book.
I went back and looked at my own life and why I succeeded or failed. I
looked at my students, my teachers and my mentors. And I saw a
pattern. I found the reason.
I started teaching this reason to my students.
And, now, I am writing this book. Because I want you to be free too. I
want you to have it all.
What I am sharing in this book has the power to let you have all that
you want, and I really mean it all.

11
On condition, of course, as I always say to my students and as I say over
and over in this book, that you do it.

So, what is the answer?

OK, Hannes, you have been teasing us for long enough now, you are
probably saying.
Just spit it out. What is the secret?
Well, first, I have not been teasing you. I have been teaching you.
In fact, I already gave you the answer in the first page or two of this
chapter. But if you are still reading, you probably missed it. Otherwise,
you would have closed the book and said, Aha! Hannes knows it too, I
see.
But my guess is that if you knew the answer, you would not have started
reading this book. You are reading this book because you know there is
more. And you maybe even know that you are more and that you have
more – to do and to experience and to give.
And that is the answer. It all starts with you.
It’s actually quite simple, if not always easy.
You have to become the person who can achieve that goal.
To have a Ferrari, for example, all you have to do is become the person
who can buy the Ferrari cash.
And, just on the side, as a little bonus lesson, watch what I said there:
buy the Ferrari cash. Sure, you can finance the Ferrari if you are a
medical specialist or an engineer who earns heaps of money a month.
But that Ferrari will have you, not the other way around.
The bank, or whoever holds that loan, will have you.

12
Trust me – I have learnt that lesson the hard way. It may seem to others
that you are living the dream. And you might even think that you are
living the dream. But you won’t have it all. You will just appear to be
having it all. And you will be working day in and day out to pay many
times over for that appearance.
At the time of writing this book, you need to have about $300,000 cash
to buy your brand new Ferrari.
But how do you get that money? It’s simple: become the person who
can make an extra $300,000 more than what you need.
In fact, if you have the skills to make an extra $300,000 a month, you
can buy a new Ferrari every month. You can buy 12 Ferraris a year and
give them one away each month – because you have the skills to be able
to do that.
But to get there, you have to transform. You must change and grow to
become the person that makes that dream come true.
And that is where most people get it wrong. They focus on the goal,
what they want, instead of focusing on being the person who can have
that.
And that is the answer.
It is not always easy, even though often it is much, much easier than
what you make it out to be in your head. Because it is actually simple.

Putting the puzzle pieces together

Yes, it is simple. And it can be easy. But for most people, it is not.
For most people, transformation is difficult, if not impossible. So they
stay stuck in their reality. They remain stuck in the reality of their
parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. They stay stuck in the
status quo.

13
Owning a Ferrari is just a daydream for them.
But it doesn’t have to be.
For you, it is probably not a Ferrari. But you know what it is, that thing
that you always come back to and that you wish and hope and pray
could become a reality somehow. Maybe you’ve even started pursuing
it, once or several times, but you had to give up because you were not
making any progress.
I am here today, at this moment as you are reading this book, to tell you:
don’t give up. What you are feeling inside of you is the key, the
doorway, the path into a whole lot more for you.
As I’ve studied this topic and taught my students about it, I have learnt
that there are steps. I am someone who does not like things to be
complicated. So I have broken down everything I have learnt and that I
have been teaching my students and watching them do and achieve. I
have broken it all down into steps, into formulas, into processes.
I have made it simple and, yes, often even easy for you to have all that
you want.
And remember where I came from. If I can do it, you can do too. Just
like so many of my students.

From dreams to goals to reality

This book teaches you how to transform your dreams into
PowerGoals™ and achieve those PowerGoals™ to make your dreams
a reality.
Remember that I said that goalsetting is not boring or tedious? And that
it works for everyone?
Well, traditional goal setting can be a bit boring and tedious. That is
why it works for so few people.

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But a PowerGoal™ is something else. It is founded on principles of
transformation. And you are not at the mercy of your goals. They are
tools in your toolbox. You are the master, and you are using goals to
get you what you want. It is an entirely different ball game.
I attribute all of my success in life so far, financially, yes, but also in all
areas of life, to setting and achieving PowerGoals™ in the way that I
explain in this book.
When I started, I did not even know I was setting goals, and I certainly
did not call them PowerGoals™. But I was beginning to discover these
principles and applying them. As I experienced success, I stacked these
principles on top of each other. The result is the system I teach you in
this book.
At the end of this book, I believe you will agree that anyone who
achieved anything worthwhile followed the principles that I teach here.
And, let me say it again: if you do what you learn in this book, nothing
is holding you back from doing the same and achieving the most
amazing levels of success.
In your own unique, special way, of course.
I believe doing what I teach in this book is part of the very reason for
your existence here in this world. (More about that later.)

The outcome of the goal I set

Let’s backtrack quickly to the goal that I set on 15 April 2019.
You may be reading this book far into the future, but at the time that I
am writing this book, we are about ten months into this challenge, or as
I like to call it, this game that I created for myself.
On 15 January 2020, I recorded another video to report my progress. In
this video, I reported that my cryptocurrency portfolio was already at

15
$97,256.19. With three months to go, I had already surpassed the
$70,000.00 mark!
Aha, you are thinking, cryptos! You were riding one of those crazy
waves that gave you incredible growth. But the next day, or week, or
month, it probably crashed.
Yes, cryptos are unbelievably unstable. But I did not make that money
speculating in cryptos. The value of the coins in my portfolio on average
decreased slightly from when I bought them. It will go up again, and
over time the growth can be tremedous, but it is volatile. Choosing
cryptos did not make this challenge easier. It made it harder.
Cryptos offer fantastic benefits, and I firmly believe in the value of the
decentralisation and potential growth that they offer. They take the
power out of the hands of institutions like countries and banks, and they
put it back into our own hands, which I see as extremely valuable. But
they are volatile.
So, for this challenge, I had to learn how to evaluate and off-set the risks
of cryptos. It was one way in which I had to transform to achieve my
goal. I had to become the person who can make this goal a reality. I had
to change, I had to grow, and I had to learn. I learnt so much that I was
able to launch a course where I teach my students how to do it too.
So, no, I did not “make my money with cryptos”, even though I believe
cryptos are a fantastic investment.
I used the skills that I had and the new skills that I learnt, and I applied
them step by step for nine months to get to my goal.
And not only to get to my goal but to surpass it.
I can’t wait to show you how I did it and how you can do it too.

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How to read this book
Except for the introduction and the conclusion, this book has three
sections: the first on setting goals, the second on achieving goals and
the third on the science behind goals. All three parts fit together and
inform each other.
I left the theory for last because I believe learning must be practical.
Once you know how to do the steps, knowing more about the theory
helps you to do it better. After finishing the book and having the
complete picture, you might want to return to the earlier chapters to
review some of the practical steps.
Setting and achieving a PowerGoal™ is not something you do once-
off. If you do it right, you won’t be able to help yourself but keep on
doing it for the rest of your life. It is somewhat addictive, I must warn
you.
This book is not meant to be a nice read. We made it as enjoyable for
you as possible, but the point is for you to learn rather than be
entertained. This book is not mental candy. It is about the meat and
potatoes (or kale and chickpeas, depending on your diet of choice) of
living a life of abundance and freedom.
That is why we created a workbook that goes along with this book. If
you have not yet, go and download it now.

Download your FREE PowerGoal Workbook before you

continue.
You can keep it open on your computer or device. If you like to write
with pen and paper, print it out. You can even stick the pages into your
journal.

17
However you choose to do it, do not only read this book. Apply what
you learn. Do the exercises. Measure the results and adjust. Wrestle
with the concepts until you understand them.
Do. Not. Give. Up.
I believe in you. I believe in the power that is within you.
This stuff is not just for a few people. It is for all of us. It is our
birthright.
It is only up to us to take hold of it.
Well done for taking up a copy of this book. I am proud of you.
Now do not put it down until you get the results that you want.

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SECTION 1: SETTING
THE GOAL

19
20
Chapter 2: The Purpose of Goals
“I am here for a purpose and that purpose is to grow into a mountain,
not to shrink to a grain of sand. Henceforth will I apply ALL my efforts
to become the highest mountain of all and I will strain my potential until
it cries for mercy.” – Og Mandino

I first read that quote by Og Mandino at the age of 22 – and it made no

sense to me at all.
Two years later, I was in deep financial trouble. I took up his little book
The Greatest Secret in the World again in desperation to find out what
the secret to success was.
It was 1982, and I was sitting in my little room, poor as can be, down
and out, completely desperate.
I have always had a lot of spunk and go, but at that stage, I had had it. I
was ready to give up and throw in the towel.
That little quote changed my life.
When I read it, something jumped inside of me. It was probably more
like an explosion. It was in my heart and in my mind.
Yes! something shouted out inside of me. It’s true! And it’s true for ME.
I had not believed that it was true until then. Sure, I was striving to
achieve many things. But they were external things. They were things
that I felt would prove to other people and, more importantly, to myself
that I had made it.
I thought of myself as that grain of sand, a speck of dirt, nothing. I
desperately did not want to be nothing, nor have other people see and
treat me like nothing.

21
I did not fully understand what that quote meant when I read it that day,
but a few key points clicked for me.
The responsibility is mine. My thoughts and actions have brought me
to where I was. I was fully responsible for the mess I was in.
However, I realised that my past does not equal my future. I could create
a new future for myself.
If I wanted different results, I realised I must take different actions. No
one else was going to do it for me. I must change my mindsets and
actions to change my future.
That day, I made a firm commitment to become the best me that I can
be.
Even though I had no clue what this journey would entail at that point,
inside of me, a seed had sprouted: there is more, and I am more. And
all of this is part of my purpose, the reason for my existence here on
earth.

Your moment
Have you had a moment like that?
Maybe you read something like I did.
Or maybe something happened to you. Many people report a new sense
of purpose and even joy after a near-death experience, for example.
For other people, when something momentous happens like having a
child, they suddenly feel as if their eyes have been opened to a whole
new level of existence and purpose.
Have you had such an experience? A moment when you realised there
is something more, for all of us and you in particular?
Think back to how you felt at that moment. Hold onto that feeling.

22
 Workbook Q2.1: Describe a moment of inspiration and
purpose that you have had.
Such a moment of inspiration and purpose is extremely powerful. I
experienced this power in my life in 1982 and many more times after
that.
Maybe you too have experienced this power already. If you haven’t had
such an experience or you haven’t experienced its power, it’s not too
late for you. The fact that you are reading this book shows that you have
that something inside of you calling out, however dimly, that there is
more.
I believe all of us have it in us.

What goals have to do with it

So what does this moment of inspiration and purpose have to do with
goals?
Remember, we are not talking about just any goals here. We are talking
about PowerGoals™. We are talking about goals that will inspire you,
goals that are infused with that very feeling you had in your moment of
illumination, feelings like those I had back in 1982 in my little room
reading The Greatest Secret in the World by Og Mandino.
This book focuses on PowerGoals™ because a goal gives you direction.
It gives you a target. It gives you something to aim for and, then, more
importantly, a way to measure your progress.
The spark that you feel in that moment of inspiration is important. The
dream that that spark ignites is important.
But many people have moments of inspiration, and many people dream
wonderful dreams for their lives. And yet it is not changing their lives.

23
What you need to do is take the power that lies in the moment of
inspiration and in the dream and make it your reality. A PowerGoal™
is a dream that is actionable.
I am hearing a lot of people talking about “manifesting” things these
days. It sounds very spiritual, very airy-fairy, even spooky to some
people. It is like waving a magic wand and Ta-Da, there it is,
manifested.
But manifest simply means that you must make it visible. According to
one definition, you must make it clear and obvious. In other words, what
was once a dream is now a reality, clear and obvious for everyone to
see.
On 15 April 2019, I had a spark of inspiration, and I had a dream. I
turned that dream into a PowerGoal™, and I started manifesting it –
making it a reality. On 15 January 2020, it was a reality, clear and
obvious for anyone who saw the screenshot of my crypto wallet on that
day.
But people much prefer their airy-fairy version of manifesting. They
keep on looking for magic wands that they can wave to make their
dreams magically appear.
Because actually manifesting your dreams means that there is work to
be done. And guess who is doing it? You are, of course! It is amazing,
fulfilling work, and it does not even have to be hard work, but you are
doing things.
If you have a goal, but there is no action, you will not be able to measure
any progress. If there is consistently no measurable progress, then it
means that you do not have a goal after all. It is going to stay a dream
and never become a reality.

24
The right one?
But, Hannes, you don’t know what my dream is. And you don’t know
where I am in life. It is impossible for me to turn this dream into a goal,
and even more impossible for me to achieve it.
Yes, if you believe that, it will be impossible.
But let me tell you, back in 1982, I would never, ever have dreamt that
I would live the life I did the next 35+ years. I never, ever would have
thought I could achieve what I did.
But I had a dream, and I turned it into a PowerGoal™ (even though I
did not know that that was what I was doing), and I took action on it.
And when I realised it, there was a next one, and then a next one.
I am still dreaming and setting PowerGoals™ today. And it still feels
big and unachievable to me at first. But now I know that in five years,
or three years, or sometimes even less than a year, I will have achieved
it.
I firmly believe that you will never have a dream unless you can make
that dream come true. No matter how crazy your dream may sound to
others, for you, that dream is the spark of inspiration that ignites your
purpose to be all that you can be, to grow into the highest mountain of
them all.
And to make it clear, for me, that quote is not about comparing you to
others. It is comparing you to all the potential versions of yourself. To
be the highest mountain of all the potential mountains that you can be.
To emphasise again: it doesn’t matter how impossible that dream feels.
What matters is that it is important to you, that it is the thing that will
propel you into action.

25
It will be something different for each of us. We are all on our own
journey.
The important thing is that you do not discount the dream that you have.
And if this dream is truly important to you, as I believe it is, otherwise
you would not have had it, you must turn it into your PowerGoal™ and
take action on it.
Too many people feel that it is impossible and that they can’t do it. You
are reading this book so that you do not need to be one of them.
You have the dream that you have because it is possible for you to
realise it. And it will take you on the best and most important journey
of your life.

Your goal is not the goal

I have news for you, if you have not already gathered it between the
lines. This type of goal that we are talking about, this PowerGoal™ that
you are going to set and achieve, is not actually the goal. In other words,
it is not the ultimate target or aim.
Sure, it gives you something to shoot at. Unlike dreams, goals are
tangible.
But a worthy goal, a PowerGoal™, is about much more than itself. (And
by the way, if you are reading this book, I am willing to bet that your
goal has the makings of a worthy goal, or a PowerGoal™, in it. Just
hold on. We will get there.)
The purpose of a PowerGoal™ is that we transform into becoming the
person who can make all our dreams come true. It is about becoming a
person who can make that goal and therefore any other goal a reality.
Goals are there to transform us.

26
Remember, unless you become the person who can do what you want,
you will never have what you want. Setting your goal means that you
have to become the person that can make that goal a reality.
That is why you can set and achieve any goal. You can lose weight,
build wealth, have a great marriage, go on an excursion to Moscow with
4x4s – or whatever it is that you want.
It is yours on condition that you set the goal in the right way.
And whatever your goal is, if you set it in the right way, as I am teaching
you here in this book, it will make you go through a transformation.
It is a transformation because the person who is going to reach that goal
is going to be a different person, a better person than what they were
when they set it.
Earl Nightingale defined success as the progressive realisation of a
worthy goal. By setting and achieving PowerGoals™, you are living a
life of success. A life of success means that you are living a life where
you are constantly transformed, constantly evolving, constantly
becoming better.
That is the actual goal of life, I believe.

The wrong way #1

I mention above that there is a right way to set goals. You might wonder
what this wrong way of setting goals is.
The biggest mistake people make when they set a goal is that they want
something. In other words, their mindset is that if I have the goal, I will
be able to do the things I must do to be the kind of person that I want to
be. They have a mindset of have, do, be.

27
Let me explain it with an example. If I have a property portfolio that
gives me passive income, I will have time to do what I love and be
fulfilled – have, do, be.
If I get that increase (have), I will be able to buy x (do) and enjoy life
more (be).
Here’s another one: if I weigh x (have), I will be able to wear y (do) and
be attractive (be).
Here is another one that often follows on the previous one: if I can only
meet “the one” (have), I will love him/her (do) and be happy.
We want to have the result because we believe that it will ultimately
make us fulfilled and happy.
Many people make this mistake. They want things very badly. I see it
in how many of my students phrase their goals at the beginning, for
example, I want to make a million dollars by the end of this year.
And then the end of the year comes, and they haven’t achieved the goal.
But actually, they got exactly what they focused on: they wanted the
thing. Their focus was on the want more than on the thing.
And by the way, these are the people who tend to lose motivation and
stop doing what is necessary to achieve the goal that they so badly want.
At the end of the year, they get exactly what they focused on: more
wanting. And then they believe that goal setting does not work.
But the thing is, they simply did it the wrong way. They wanted things
and focused on that. They did not focus on transformation.
So, don’t focus on what you don’t have and want. That is the wrong
way.

28
The wrong way #2
Another wrong way in which many people approach goalsetting is
doing a lot of things to get things and thinking that those things will
make them happy. This way of doing things is do, have, be.
Many people unconsciously fall into the trap of wrong way #1, in other
words, have do be, as we discussed above. But if we consciously think
about it, most of us will admit that we need to do some things before
we can have an outcome. We must eat less and exercise more to lose
weight. We must make more money to have more money.
For this reason, many people fall into the trap of do, have, be.
If I can just exercise more, I will have a great body and be attractive.
If I can work harder, I will get an increase and have more money.
If I can buy another property, I will have more passive income, and I
will be content.
People who fall into the trap of do, have, be are always doing more,
working harder, chasing after things. And they often get the things that
they are chasing. But they are never satisfied, or they are only satisfied
for a short time. They always need more, more, more. They do not have
peace, they do not feel fulfilled, and they are not happy.
In the end, after apparently achieving all their goals, life is meaningless
for them.
That is not the type of goal setting that I am talking about in this book.
I do not want you to run harder, work more, and sleep less – and keep
on going and going until one day you drop down dead from exhaustion.
That is not having it all.

29
The right way of setting goals
Both wrong ways that I discuss above are ultimately very disappointing.
You either don’t get what you want, or you get what you thought you
wanted, but it does not satisfy you the way that you thought it would.
I am very happy to be able to tell you that, yes, there is a better way, the
right way.
The right order of setting goals is be, do, have. You first become the
person who can do the things needed to have what you are aiming at.
If you have been doing a lot of self-improvement, there is a good chance
that I am not the first person to tell you about be, do, have. Many
speakers and coaches teach it. However, how to practice it is spoken
about a bit less, so we will dive deeper into it when we talk about the
transformational process in later chapters.
What I want to point out here in this chapter is that it starts with a change
in focus. Instead of focusing on what you want or in doing more and
more and more, ask yourself: who do I need to be as a person to have
that goal? It always starts with you becoming that person. The principle
of be, do, have is why goal setting is about transformation.

Workbook Q2.2: Have you fallen into the trap of have, do,
be or do, have, be?
Write down what comes to mind in your workbook.

A spiritual journey
Because goal setting is about transformation, I see it as an incredible
spiritual journey

30
Our goals help us through the process of evolving and transforming to
become the person that we should be, the person that we are on this
earth to be.
That is why I believe whatever dreams are inside of us have a spiritual
purpose. The purpose of our dreams is to motivate us to become all we
can be. The purpose of the particular dream that you have is to start you
on your unique transformational journey, your spiritual journey. In the
process of making your dream come true, you become all you can be,
and that will be the fulfilment of the true purpose of that dream, the
purpose that is bigger than the dream itself.
And then it happens again and again, as many times as you are willing
to say yes! to that dream and allow it to transform you.
We are all inspired by worthy dreams. We all admire people who make
their dreams a reality. We read books about them. We make and watch
movies about them. We follow them on the media.
Think about Martin Luther King Jr, who said, “I have a dream!” He
made his dream so visible and obvious to so many other people that
they brought it into reality even after he died.
Think about Steve Jobs who dreamt about and brought into reality so
much technology which changed the lives of everyday people. The
technology that he dreamt about outlives him in the same way Martin
Luther King Jr’s ideals outlive him.
And think about Elon Musk. At the time of writing this book, he is
working on taking mankind to Mars. Maybe by the time you read this
book, he will have achieved his dream, or maybe not. Whether people
like him or not, or whether they agree with his dream or not, they almost
cannot help themselves from being interested in knowing about what he
does.

31
We are inspired by dreams.
The question that is facing you now is whether you will feed on other
people’s dreams, or whether you will take hold of the dreams that are
within you.
I believe we can all be a Martin Luther King Jr or a Steve Jobs or
whatever person you find inspiring. You will not do it in the same way
as they did. You might not be famous, except if it is part of your dream’s
journey.
But you can take hold of your dreams, turn them into powerful, worthy
goals and live your life in pursuit of them.
The thing is, we like to focus on the dream. But the difference between
those people whom you find so inspiring and you is not that they had a
dream or that they had a better dream than you. The difference is that
they focused on becoming the person who can achieve that goal – and
they became that person.
And that is the incredible spiritual journey of transformation that we
can all embark on.

32
Chapter 3: The Power of PowerGoals™
Now that you know why we need goals if we are going to live the life
of our dreams, let us delve a bit more into what a PowerGoals™ is and
why it is so powerful.

But first
Before I discuss PowerGoals™ in any more detail, there is something
you need to do.
By now, I am sure that you have thought quite a bit about your own
goals as you read the previous chapters. What things have you been
thinking of? What are some of the dreams and goals that you have been
reminded of?
If you were an obedient reader, during the first chapter, you started
writing down the things that you want. Whether you did it or not, I want
you to write down those things now before you read the rest of this
chapter.
It is important that you put down a raw, unfiltered list of the things that
you want before we go into the details of PowerGoals™. That way, after
we have covered the criteria, you can come back to your raw list of
wants to craft your PowerGoal™.
If you do not write down your list of wants now, you might start
censoring them as we go. We do not want that. We want it raw. I do not
want you to get stuck in analysis paralysis.
So, before you read anything else, write down those wants.
Sometimes, we get confused when we hear loaded terms like the word
goal. So, to stop you from overanalysing whether you are writing down

33
a dream or a goal or whether it is right or wrong, just ask yourself: what
do I want?
What do you want in life?
Do not overthink it. Just write down everything that comes to mind.
Do not censor your thoughts. Do not scratch out or delete anything that
you wrote because you think it is not valid or important. Just get it all
out. Do what is called a “brain dump”.
If you think, But is this even a goal? Or is this the type of dream that
Hannes is writing about? write them down anyway.
There is no right or wrong here. Your dreams and your goals are
different from other people’s because you are different.
Do not think about me or any other person in your life reading what you
wrote. Because, you know what, no one is going to see what you write
down. If you ever share any of it, it will only be because you want to.
(More about that later.)
This is about you. What do you want – not your mom or your spouse or
your children or your cat or your dog or your boss. Not your mentor or
your coach or anyone else.
Before you read any further, I want you to put down this book and start
writing them down

Workbook Q3.1: Return to question 1.1 in the workbook

and do a brain dump of all your wants.

Write it down
Did you do it? Did you write it out down?

34
How did it feel? Did it feel good? Did it inspire you? Was it a bit hard?
Did it challenge you? Do not feel overwhelmed or discouraged at this
stage. We are taking things step-by-step, remember.
I have good news for you: you have just completed one step that takes
you closer to turning what you want into a PowerGoal™ – you wrote it
down.
Writing down something you want or something you want to achieve
does not automatically make it a PowerGoal™. But one of the things
that makes a PowerGoal™ so powerful is that it is written down.
Studies show that by merely writing down your goals, you are 42%
more likely to achieve them than people who don’t. Writing down and
reading what you wrote helps to rewire the brain to help you achieve
your goals.
It is also important to state it positively. For example, instead of “lose
weight”, say “healthy body fat percentage” or, even better, state the
specific weight, e.g. 87kg. (I explain why it must be specific later in this
chapter.) When you read your goal, you want your brain to focus on
where you are going, for example, your goal weight, instead of what
you are leaving behind, which is implied in something like “lose
weight”.

Desirability
I asked you to write down what you want and not what other people
want or what you think you should want because a PowerGoal™ must
be personally significant to you. It must be something that you want. It
must be based on your dreams. It must come from that spark of
inspiration that I mentioned in the previous chapter, something that is
very personal to you.
It must be something that you really, really want.

35
Desirability is not something that comes from analytical thinking. It is
an emotional response. Your PowerGoal™ must have deep and
powerful emotions behind it to work.
I always tell my students that your PowerGoal™ must have a
desirability level of 10/10. On a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is not
desirable at all and 10 is extremely desirable, there must be no doubt in
your mind that your PowerGoal™ is a 10/10.
That desirability level will be different for different people.
For one person, it might be extremely important to lose weight. It is a
10/10 for that person.
For another person, it might be extremely important to start a cashflow-
positive business. For that person, that business is a 10/10.
One of my PowerGoals™ was to fly my own helicopter. Now, for you,
flying your own helicopter might not have a desirability level of 10/10.
But I really wanted it.
When I was a young man in the police force, I heard a helicopter pilot
describe the art of hovering a helicopter. Among pilots, there is a
saying: to fly is heavenly, to hover is divine. When I heard that pilot
describe his experience, I thought to myself, I want to do that!
At the time, it was a completely unrealistic dream for me. With my poor
academic background, there was no way I could get transferred from
the police to the air force.
However, years later, when I was financially free, I found an old journal
that reminded me of my dream from many years ago. The idea of it
captured me again. It was a new challenge, something which would
push me beyond myself. I imagined taking Tanja for flips into the
mountains – a romantic picnic for two in some isolated spot.

36
I got fired up all over again. That spark motivated me to get my
helicopter licence and to start and build a new business which paid for
my helicopter.
For one person, it might be a helicopter or a Ferrari. For someone else,
it might be something completely different.
One of my students really wanted to lose weight. It was very important
to him. He was not obese, but he was overweight. He only wanted to
lose 10kg, or 22 pounds, but he battled to do it.
While doing one of my mentoring programmes, he went through a
process to ask himself why he wanted it. He realised that even though
he was not yet 30 years old, he had been diagnosed with high blood
pressure. Having a healthy weight is a very important part of having
normal blood pressure.
But his blood pressure was not the real reason why he wanted to lose
weight. He wanted to lose weight to lower his blood pressure so that he
can be healthy and live a long life to see his children and grandchildren
and greatgrandchildren grow up.
That was his real reason – family. Family was personally significant to
him, so when he made the connection between his goal of losing weight
and his dream of growing old and seeing his future generations grow
up, he was much more motivated to lose the weight.
The person who wanted to start a cashflow-positive business was his
wife. Her deepest reason was also family. A cashflow positive business
would have enabled her to spend more time with her young children in
a very special time in their lives. Because this goal was personally
significant to her, it propelled her to action to overcome her limiting
beliefs about being a business owner and to start and grow her business.

37
That is why Chapter 2 calls a PowerGoal™ a worthy goal. It is a worthy
goal for you. For someone else, losing weight might be very shallow.
Another person might see focusing on your business as focusing on the
lesser important things in life. But to those two people, their goals
brought them closer to their dream life, and in the process, they became
better people.
On the other hand, be careful of goals that you are doing for other
people or that you are doing to impress other people. Remember be, do,
have.
Do not fall into the trap of thinking you will be more successful and
important if your friends or in-laws or whoever you are trying to
impress think more of you because you have that Ferrari, for example.
Trying to impress others is not a strong enough motivation. It is not
linked to a deeply personal dream irrespective of others.
On the other hand, if having a Ferrari is what motivates you to transform
and grow, that is perfect. If flying your own helicopter gets you excited
like it gets me excited and motivated, go for it!
Or maybe you want to give your wife a game farm for her birthday, like
I did. I really like to make my wife happy by giving her things.
Sometimes they are small things, but once I gave her a game farm. It
was not about the game farm, really. It was not about trying to win her
favour or make her love me more.
Tanja grew up on a farm, and she had many fond memories of her
childhood. She always told me many stories about the openness of
nature, being present in the moment and having lots of open space all
around.
Being able to make one of her dreams come true was the spark that got
me fired up. And it was the inspiration that led me to start my own

38
university, the Wealth Creators University, where we taught classes on
that very game farm.
Because of the criteria of desirability, it is important to know yourself,
to know what is important to you and to know why it is important to
you.

Workbook Q3.2: How much are you influenced by others?

Do the exercise and read the extra material in the workbook
before you continue.
Finding those goals that are truly significant for you is extremely
powerful. It is one of the reasons why PowerGoals™ allow you to live
a remarkable life of joy, fulfilment, happiness, success and abundance
in all areas of life.

The seven areas of wealth

I need to interrupt myself here to explain the meaning of the word
wealth.
When people hear the word wealth, they usually associate it with
financial wealth. But when you look at the root word of wealth, which
is the Old English word weal, it means well-being.
And that is what we want. We want to have well-being in all areas of
our lives. That is ultimately what we want to achieve, the identity that
we want to have. Who we want to become is someone who has well-
being.
So, when I refer to wealth, I refer to a state of well-being. It refers to
this joy, fulfilment, happiness, success and abundance that we are
talking about.

39
That is why I refer to the seven areas of wealth, or the seven areas of
well-being. They are:
• Spiritual
• Mental
• Physical
• Family & close friends
• Social
• Financial
• Vocational
Vocational covers your profession, your job or even your business, in
other words, what you do to generate income.
You can have different levels of well-being, or wealth, in the different
areas of wealth. However, they do influence each other. Take the
example I used earlier of my student who wanted to lose weight. His
PowerGoal™ was in the area of the physical. However, it had an impact
on the area of family.
The seven areas of wealth are important because your PowerGoal™
must increase your wealth, or well-being, in at least one of these areas.
Many people focus on financial and physical goals. They want to make
more money and be healthier. However, if you only focus on those two
areas of life and never on the rest, you won’t have total well-being.
So, yes, make more money. But it is no use you keep on making more
money, and you do not have time freedom to spend it with your loved
ones. Or if you focus on your physical health but not on your mental
and spiritual well-being, your total well-being will also not be complete.
At a specific time, you might have a reason to focus on one area more
than another. But over the course of your life, you want wealth in all
seven areas of life.

40
Difficulty
A PowerGoal™ is not just any goal. It is not even any personally
significant, desirable goal. A PowerGoal™ is a big goal. It is one that
will stretch you to your limits and then some. It must scare you. It is
what Jim Collins, in another context, calls a BHAG – a big, hairy,
audacious goal.
The difficulty level of a PowerGoal™ must be a 10/10. We are again
working with a scale from 1 to 10 where 1 is not difficult at all with
your skills and experience, and 10 is basically impossible. A difficulty
level of 10/10 is only possible if you become the person with the
necessary skills to do that thing.
The levels of difficulty and desirability go hand in hand. If a goal has a
difficulty level of 10/10 but the desirability is anything less than 10/10,
you will not be able to achieve it. In other words, you must want this
thing so badly that you are willing to become the person who can
achieve it to get it.
But why can’t it be an 8/10, Hannes? you might be thinking. Why set
yourself up for failure?
Your PowerGoal™ must have a difficulty level of 10/10 for two
reasons. The one reason we have discussed already: a PowerGoal™
must lie far enough out of your current abilities that it requires you to
transform. If your goal only requires you to do that which you are very
comfortable doing, you will not have to transform.
For example, on 15 April 2019, I could have said that I want to make
an additional $70,000 or more in a year. But for me, that would not have
been a PowerGoal™. I have made that much money in a year before,
several times. Even using only $1 or less to make that amount is not a
big stretch for me. I know how to make money with nothing. In one of

41
my courses, I teach my students how to start and grow a business with
no money at all – which is an infinite investment.
For most people, those two aspects would be entirely outside their
ability. Many people do not believe it is possible at all, and of course,
for them, it is then impossible. But for me, those things are very
possible. Of course, I wanted those things, but to turn it into a
PowerGoal™, I had to stretch myself. So, I added components to push
me outside of my limits: the portfolio must be in cryptocurrencies, it
must support my trip, and it must be worth the same as when I started
the trip when we are home again.
Why was it important for me to turn my goal into a PowerGoal™?
Firstly, I want to grow. I want to stretch. I want to transform. It is the
most important thing in life to me. I use what I want in life to enable me
to do what I believe is most important. Many people think that personal
transformation is hard and unpleasant, but let me share a little secret
with you: it is the most fulfilling and most fun thing you can ever do.
You will never feel as free as when you realise that you can be and do
and have anything you want in life. It is amazing. So, I push myself
again and again because it is a spiritual practice for me.
But there is another reason. And if you are not yet convinced that you
want to transform (even though I believe deep down you want to), this
reason will hopefully convince you.
You are much less likely to achieve a goal if you think it is easy than if
it is hard.
Of course, it cannot only be a hard goal. If I tell you you must climb
Mount Everest, you are probably not going to achieve it because, yes,
it is hard, but it is probably not personally significant to you. But if you
have a goal that is very significant to you, if it is the most significant or

42
one of the most significant things to you, your best chance to achieve it
is not to make it easy for yourself.
You must be captivated by your PowerGoal™. You must obsess about
it. You must think about it all day and wake up in the middle of the
night because of it.
It must be big. It must be audacious. It must be scary even.
But it must inspire you and compel you to action.

Unrealistic
When I explain a PowerGoal™ to my students, I often call it unrealistic.
I do not mean that it must be completely beyond what you can even
imagine. It must be possible for you to imagine you could achieve it.
However, when people say something is unrealistic, they usually mean
that it is unrealistic for the general person to achieve. They do not take
into consideration how desirable that thing is to the person who must
do it. They often also do not consider that person’s skill level.
Many people who hear about the challenges that I set myself, which of
course are my PowerGoals™, say that they are impossible and
unrealistic. Even if I went to an expert like a fund manager or a financial
manager and told them about the PowerGoal™ I set on 15 April 2019,
they would tell me I am crazy and that it is impossible. It requires me
to have a growth of more than 7,000,000%. A realistic growth in South
Africa at that time was around 10%.
But what people mean when they say that my challenges are impossible
and unrealistic is that they are impossible and unrealistic for them. Of
course it would be – these are my PowerGoals™, not theirs. Their
PowerGoals™ would not be unrealistic for them.

43
People do not only use the words impossible or unrealistic to describe
other people’s goals and dreams. They also use it for their own. When
they do use those words about their own goals and dreams, they do so
to convince themselves that they should give up on their dreams. But
deep down something in you believes it is possible, or you would not
have dreamt that dream or have thought of that goal.
People use words like unrealistic when they think and talk about their
own goals because they are scared. The thing is, you should be a little
bit scared by your PowerGoal™. However, people let themselves get
paralysed by that fear, and then they cover their fear by saying that that
goal is impossible and unrealistic.
But you know what? Somewhere someone is probably doing what you
think is impossible. To someone else, it is very possible, easy even. And
even if no one has ever done something before, it does not mean that it
cannot be done. Before Roger Bannister completed the four-minute
mile, scientists actually “proved” that it could not be done. But deep
down, he knew it could. So he proved it to himself and the world.
And the amazing thing is that in a very short time after he did it, others
were doing it too.
So do not let fear hold you back. Do not let other’s opinions and ideas
and what the majority of people are doing keep you from living your
life the way you were meant to.
You are not the majority of people. No one is. That is why your
PowerGoal™ must inspire only you, and it must stretch only you. It
may sound unrealistic to everyone that’s listening to you. But for you,
it is not unrealistic because it is part of dream. And that is what is going
to motivate you to tackle it. Deep down, you know that you can achieve
it.

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Therefore, I recommend that you do not share your PowerGoal™ with
too many other people, in fact, maybe not with anyone at all. When you
tell most people about your PowerGoal™, they will say that it is
impossible. Some may even ridicule you and tell you that you should
not dream so big. Often, it is the people who love us the most who do it
– our family, our spouse, our parents. They do not want to see us get
hurt. And remember, for them and from their perspective, this
PowerGoal™ of yours is impossible.
Deep down you might know that unless you are going to chase that
dream, unless you are going to make that dream that is within you a
reality by turning it into a PowerGoal™, you are never going to live
your purpose and experience a life of abundance.
But the people around you, even the ones who love you dearly, do not
feel those things. Simply because they are not you. So be very careful
when and with whom you share your PowerGoal™.
But you are sharing your PowerGoals™ with the world, Hannes, you
say.
Yes, I do. But I have had years and years of success in achieving such
PowerGoals™ to back me up. I have systems in place to protect me
from negative feedback at times when I might be vulnerable to it. And
I have a few wonderful people close to me who share my dreams and
my goals.
Tanja, my wife, was extremely sceptical of some of my PowerGoals™
when we were newly married. But now, after more than 37 years of
marriage, her belief system has changed. So even if she does not
understand or get my goals from her perspective, she supports me in
them.

45
She has come to realise that what is unrealistic for her is not necessarily
unrealistic for me. And she loves me enough to see me grow and stretch
and transform and even sometimes to fail. Because she knows that that
is actually what life is about.

Workbook Q3.3: Have you allowed fear to rob you from the
life of your dreams?
Do the exercise and read the extra material in the workbook
before you continue.

The greater good

A PowerGoal™ must always be good for you, good for everyone
involved and good for the greater good. Contrary to what many people
think, true wealth creation is always for the good of all and not at the
expense of anyone, whether it relates to money or any other area of life.
It is very difficult and impossible even to take money, love, respect or
good health from another person. Stealing is hard work if you want to
do it successfully. It is much better and easier to receive something
willingly.
I must clarify that what is good and what feels good is not the same
thing. There are four classes of experience:
Feels good Does not feel good
Good for all Class 1 Class 2
Not good for all Class 3 Class 4

A PowerGoal™ should not be a class 3 or class 4 experience. Stealing

money, for example, might be a class 3 or a class 4 experience for you,

46
depending on who you are. Starting a business that adds value to its
customers, on the other hand, is a class 1 or class 2 experience,
depending on your perspective of whether it is fun to start a business or
not.
Most PowerGoals™ start as a class 2 experience. If it was fun to do and
you truly wanted it, you would have probably achieved it already. Most
people do not like to do things with a high difficulty rating because it
stretches them outside of their comfort zone. Part of the art of achieving
PowerGoals™ is to turn that class 2 experience into a class 1 experience
as soon as possible by reframing how you think about the journey of
achieving it.

Measuring progress
OK, so if you have a goal with a desirability rating of 10/10 and a
difficulty rating of 10/10. It scares you, but it also makes you excited,
as excited as you haven’t been in a long time.
Is there anything else?
Yes. You need to make sure that you are working with a goal and not a
dream. Napoleon Hill said that a goal is a dream with a deadline. You
must turn your dream into a PowerGoal™ because you must have
something to aim for and, more importantly, a way to measure your
progress. The reason dreams stay dreams is because people do not take
action to make them a reality. That is why you need to turn your dream
into something that allows you to measure whether you are making
progress to make it a reality. It keeps you accountable for your actions,
and it makes it possible to achieve your PowerGoal™.
Let me give you an example. My dream is for my wife and me to travel
to Russia and back with 4x4s. It inspires me. It excites me. It is big and
audacious – we have never done something like it – and we will love it.

47
But I can keep on dreaming that dream for the rest of my life, and it will
never happen. So, in 2018 we said, we are going to do it! And we
decided that we are going to do it in 2020.
Now our dream had a deadline. But how do I measure the progress?
Well, the part of the trip that I am responsible for, the part that will make
or break this dream, is the finances. So I took that dream and that
deadline, and I turned it into a PowerGoal™ so that I can measure my
progress.
And by the way, it is no use if you can measure your progress, but you
don’t. Every week I tracked my progress on an Excel spreadsheet so
that I can see how I am doing. If the graph went up, I knew I was doing
things right so that I could do more of it. If the graph went down, I knew
I was doing things wrong, or I was not doing things that I needed to do
to off-set the things that are beyond my control. And then I needed to
adjust and grow and learn.
Negative feedback is never bad, by the way. They are the greatest
opportunities for growth. I believe they are worth much more than
positive feedback.

A clear target
To make your progress measurable, you need to have a target. What are
you aiming at?
As the saying goes, if you shoot at nothing, you will hit it every time.
You want to set a target which allows you to measure your progress.
Your target cannot be “I want to lose weight” because it is not a clear
one. Be specific: for example, to decide on a goal weight of 87kg.
Not “I want to make more money” but “a cryptocurrency portfolio of
$70,000”.

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You want to know what you are shooting at.
Make it clear, but you do not want to limit yourself. Open it up. For
example, on 15 April 2019, I said that I would use less than $1 to make
more than $70,000. And when I did it, I did invest less than $1 and, on
15 January 2020, I had already exceeded my goal.
To go back to the previous two examples, rather than “weigh 87kg”, I
could say “weigh 87kg or less”. Rather than “a cryptocurrency portfolio
of $70,000”, I said “a cryptocurrency portfolio of $70,000 or more”.
If you know what you are shooting at, you know on what to focus your
actions.
If I want to go from weighing 96kg to 87kg, I know I need to focus on
those things that will get me to lose weight. For me, that is exercising
daily and making sure I do not eat too much.
And I will be able to monitor whether my actions are helping me get to
my results. I might be doing a lot of heavy weights. It is exercise, but I
may find that it makes me pick up weight because I am building muscle.
There is nothing wrong with doing weights and building muscle. But if
it will not bring me closer to my goal, I need to adjust my actions to get
to my goal. I might therefore decide to start using lighter weights and
doing more repetitions. Or I might swop some weightlifting days for
cardio days.
There is no right and wrong here, but if I have a clear target, I can
measure daily and weekly whether my actions are helping me get to my
goal or not. Being able to measure my progress towards a clear target
enables me to shift my actions so that I can get to my goal.
My reality might be the opposite in my previous example. If my goal is
to weigh 87kg but I am currently weighing 80kg, I know I need to pick

49
up weight. Doing heavy weights might be a good strategy in that case.
And I will want to focus on increasing my calorie intake.
So you can see that knowing where you are and where you want to go
allows you to choose the right actions to get you there – and, very
importantly, to monitor whether you are moving in the right direction.

Control
Another important aspect that allows you to measure your progress to
inform your actions is that you must have control over the outcome of
your goal.
For example, you cannot set a goal that you want your spouse to weigh
a certain amount. It might seem like a silly example, but many people
feel that if their spouse will do or not do something, or achieve
something specific, it will contribute to their dream. But it is futile to
set a goal over which you do not have control.
Later in this book, I discuss the Formula for Riches©, which is also
called the Formula for Success. I go into much more depth here, but, in
short, the Formula can be summed up in three questions:
• Is it possible/legal?
• Can I make it happen?
• Do I have control over it happening?
If you do not have control, you are breaking this formula. And if a
formula is broken, you are not guaranteed success. In fact, your chance
of not having success is bigger than your chance of success.
To use the example of wanting your spouse to lose weight – your spouse
might end up losing weight, and it will seem as if you were successful,
or they might not. Whether they achieve success or not is not up to you,

50
though, so it is not that your goal was achieved or not, it is whether it
was their goal and whether they did what was necessary to achieve it.
If you set goals over which you do not have control, you set yourself up
for failure, or at least potential failure. This potential failure
immediately eats away at your motivation, which makes you even less
likely to succeed. In the end, you feel as if goals do not work, but you
were setting the wrong goals.
Here is another example: you want to increase your income with
$20,000 a year. For you, that is personally significant because it will
bring your dream into reality. It is big and audacious because you
currently only earn $20,000 a year, so you will be doubling your
income.
But then you formulate your PowerGoal™ to be that you want to
receive a promotion at work. Is it possible and legal? Certainly it is. Can
you make it happen and do you have control over it happening? No, you
don’t.
You can certainly work harder. You can go above and beyond your
current role and job description to show your worth to your employer.
You can even apply for the promotion. But you do not have control over
that final decision of whether you get the promotion or not. Your boss
might have something against you and not want to give you your
promotion. Your company might not need someone in that higher
position. Your company might be battling financially, and they might
even decide to retrench some people or shut down completely.
You have no control over any of those things.
So how would you set your PowerGoal™ to achieve your intent?
Well, if you are currently earning $20,000 a year, you could say that
you want to earn a salary of $40,000 or more a year. Immediately it

51
opens up possibilities. Instead of only focusing on getting an increase
at your current company, you can now also apply for jobs at other
companies.
You can do research to see which skills you need to learn to qualify for
such jobs. You can start applying for jobs weekly and even daily. You
do not have control over who decides to employ you, but you can take
responsibility for the outcome by identifying jobs with skills shortages,
learning those skills and keeping on applying until you get one. You
have more control over the outcome.
But there is a way to have even more control over the outcome. What if
you phrased it as “earn $40,000 or more a year.” It opens even more
possibilities. For example, you can start your own business on the side.
If you have your own business, you get to decide which products to sell
in what way how often and to whom. You have much more control than
as an employee. Sure, there is a whole lot more to learn, and you might
have to overcome some limiting beliefs that you have about business
too. But the reason almost all of the richest people in the world have
their own businesses and why they are not employees is because you
have control over the outcome.
If you are the person in our example and you can build a business on
the side that produces a profit of $20,000, you would reach your goal.
It also means that you can quit your job and start focusing only on your
business. It means that you can build up that business and other
businesses as far as you want to take them.
I do not say that you have to start a business. However, when I realised
how important control is in setting and achieving my goals and making
my dreams a reality, starting my own business was a no brainer. That is
why I encourage all my students, as I do you, to reconsider your limiting
beliefs about business and to see it for the powerful tool that it is to

52
realise your life of freedom. It is not the only tool, but it is an important
one.
The most important thing is always to remember how important control
is in whichever PowerGoal™ you decide to set.

Timeframe
The last thing you need to include in your PowerGoal™ to make your
progress measurable is a timeframe.
And let me be clear, I say timeframe because I do not only mean a
deadline.
Yes, a deadline is important. There must be a cut-off point. I like to be
very specific about my cut-off point. I always use a date instead of just
“this year”. It is easy to let “this year” slip into the next “this year”. Set
yourself a date. Many people choose the end of the year, or 31
December of that year, as their deadline. But you can also use another
significant date. I often use my birthday, for example.
But be careful to fixate on your deadline. Like with your target, you
want to leave the possibility open that you can achieve your results
quicker than possible. I like to use the word “before” to phrase my
goals. For example, I said I want to achieve my PowerGoal™ for the
Russia expedition before 15 April 2020. Why would I want to achieve
it by then if I can do it earlier? Which I did. By 15 January 2020, I had
already passed $70,000.
Here is another example from my life. In 1994, I was part of the court
of the table in the financial industry. Court of the Table (COT) means
that I was in the top 1% in the world in that industry.
In January that year, I sat down and set a PowerGoal™ to be in the Top
of the Table (TOT) for that year. The Top of the Table means that you

53
are in the top 1% of the top 1% in that industry in the world. You qualify
for that accolade starting from 1 January up to 31 December of a
specific year.
I had no idea how I was going to achieve it. It would have required me
to stretch and grow and transform.
In the last week of January, just a few weeks after setting my
PowerGoal™, I had a breakthrough. I suddenly realised a whole new
way in which I could deliver my services. Everything changed, and by
the end of the first week of February, on that Friday, I achieved this
goal. I was part of the top 1% of the top 1% in the world in my industry.
I teach my students the Wealth Creators Strategy™, which of course is
not only about money but about all the areas of life. The Wealth
Creators Strategy™ is the intelligent use of limited resources to go from
where you are to where you want to be in the shortest amount of time
with the least amount of risk.
So set a deadline but open up the possibility to achieve it in a much
shorter time. Why wait a year if the universe opens up and gives it to
you in two weeks?
A last note about the timeframe of your PowerGoal™: do not make it
too long. I generally recommend 3-5 years for your main, overarching
PowerGoal™, the thing that will substantially bring your dream into
reality. However, there will be many contributing goals that contribute
to and build up to that main PowerGoal™.
If you are starting, work with shorter amounts of time. A year is often
long enough to stretch you but short enough to stay in focus if you are
beginning.
If you are starting, also do not make the timeframe too short. Most
people won’t be able to transform within a week or a month, or even

54
three months. It is possible, and I am at the moment experimenting with
techniques to shorten the timeframes of my PowerGoals™. But,
remember, I have been doing it for many years.
As I always tell my students: it is your game that you are playing. You
get to make the rules. So make the rules in such a way that it is fun and
challenging, but also that you can win.

What it is not
By now, it is clear that a PowerGoal™ is not just another version of
your new year’s resolutions.
Sure, many of your new year’s resolutions might have the seeds of
PowerGoals™ in them. But you will need to tap into the dream that lies
underneath that resolution to turn it into a PowerGoal™.
The statistics for new year’s resolutions are dismal. As many as 77% of
people give up on their resolutions by the first week. One study found
that the second Friday of January is when most people decide to give
up – or it just fizzles out.
Only between 4% and 8% of people felt that they achieved their
resolutions.
You don’t want such a small chance of success.
The alternative to new year’s resolutions is the SMART goal – specific,
measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. While PowerGoals™
seem to have many things in common with SMART goals, they are not
nearly the same.
When people try to set specific and timely goals, they tend to limit
themselves. They don’t set goals that open up the possibility in their
minds that they can achieve more and in a shorter time than that goal.

55
And when they set achievable and realistic goals, they generally set
easy goals, goals which any person would be able to achieve and which
all people, especially the experts, believe is possible. But if you only set
goals that are easily possible, you will never realise your dream. You
won’t push yourself to grow and transform. You won’t be inspired and
motivated and captivated by your goal.
The most crucial distinction between a SMART goal and a
PowerGoal™ is just that – that a SMART goal does not tap into your
dreams. It is very easy to set many goals which are good goals. They
are nice and acceptable and the right thing to do. But they are not
aligned with the dream deep inside of you, the dream that is dying a
little bit more every day, the dream that so desperately wants to be
brought to life by you.
It is because of this reason that many people set their SMART goals,
but they fizzle out.
There is one last thing which is not needed for a PowerGoal™. It is very
important that you take notice of it when you set your PowerGoal™
because it is something that holds many people back from achieving
really powerful results.
Let me share this very important secret with you: you do not need to
know how you are going to achieve your goal when you set it.
This point feels very counterintuitive to many people, but I believe it is
only because we have been conditioned to always focus on how. For
example, most business schools will teach you that you need to
formulate your business model and your business strategy – in other
words, how your business will work – in detail before you start.
But in life, I have learnt that 99% of the time, that way does not work.
You start a business, and as you grow it step by step, you experiment

56
and test to come up with your business model and your strategy. Your
model and your strategy can even change with time.
Think of the weight loss example again: you want to weigh 87kg or less
before a certain date. When you set the goal, you might have the idea
that you will exercise and eat healthier, but I will show you why it is
not essential to know those things.
When you set the goal, the exercises that you know might be
weightlifting and healthy eating to you might be eating six small meals
a day. So, you start doing it. But it is not giving you results.
Because most people do not set a goal without a strategy, a how, if their
strategy does not work, they give up on their goal. (The same with
business, by the way.) But if you only set the goal, you can change your
strategy until it gives you the results you want.
In our weight loss example, it will be much better if you experiment
with different strategies. Sure, start with weightlifting and six small
meals. But measure to see if it is giving you results. In the end, you
might find that walking 10,000 steps a day and doing intermittent
fasting gives you the results you are after.
So do not get too hung up about the how when you set your goal. You
will get to it, as I explain in a later chapter, but you do not need to know
how you will achieve your goal when you set it.
If you know for a fact exactly how you will achieve your goal, it is
probably because you have done it before, perhaps more than once. That
means that the difficulty level is not a 10/10, which means that it is not
a PowerGoal™.

57
 Workbook 3.4. Where do you fall on the spectrum of
control?
Both extremes will keep you from the life of your dreams. Do
the exercise in the workbook and read the extra material to
find out how to avoid both.
A PowerGoal™ is so powerful because its desirability and difficulty are
both 10/10. You do not need to know how you will achieve it when you
set it. The PowerGoal™ will direct you and attract that outcome to you.
A PowerGoal™ moves you to transform to become the person who can
make the dream behind it a reality.
In Section 2, we will get to how you achieve your PowerGoal™. For
now, it is important to set it in the right way.

58
Chapter 4: The Process of Setting Your
PowerGoal™
Now that you know the purpose of goals and what makes a
PowerGoal™ so powerful, it is time to get practical. It is time for you
to set your PowerGoal™.
This chapter explains the process step by step.

Open your PowerGoal™ Workbook

If you have not yet downloaded or used yours, now is the time
to do so. Use it with this chapter for the best results.

Step one: Create your list

I have great news for you – you have already completed this step in the
previous chapters. (If not, go back and complete Questions 1.1 and 3.1
in the PowerGoal™ Workbook.)
This step is simply about listing all the things that you want. It is the
raw, unfiltered material.
Do not only write down those things which you think can become a
PowerGoal™. Sometimes there are other goals which can become
milestones toward your PowerGoal™, or which will become future
PowerGoals™. The process also sometimes surprises you. You might
start thinking that a particular goal will be your PowerGoal™ and end
up discovering your PowerGoal™ should be something else.
To prepare for the rest of the steps, transfer all your wants to an Excel
spreadsheet. You can download the PowerGoal™ Calculator or create
your own. You can use paper too, but the process will be a bit more
cumbersome.

59
 Workbook Q4.1: Transfer your list of wants to a
spreadsheet/the PowerGoal™ Calculator.
See detailed instructions in the PowerGoal™ Workbook.
After transferring your list of wants, ask yourself if those wants cover
all the different areas of life. Use the seven areas of wealth that we
discussed in Chapter 3 as a guideline.

Step 2: Assign desirability ratings

Once you have a complete list of wants, give each item a desirability
rating. The desirability rating quantifies how much you want that thing.
There is no right or wrong here. You simply decide how much you want
something.
Use a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is not desirable at all and 10 is extremely
desirable.
Remember that desirability is not about what other people want for you
or what you should be wanting. It is personal, and it is emotional. You
must want it, and you must want it powerfully on an emotional level.
During this step, you want to switch off your analytical mind and
connect with your emotions.
Start by going down the list of items and giving each one the first rating
that comes to you. Because desirability is an emotional rating, the last
thing you want to do is overthink it. Go with your gut. Tap into your
emotions.
You might know that you should want something, but if you are honest
with yourself, you do not truly feel that want. Save yourself much effort
by connecting with the things on your list that have some powerful

60
emotions behind them, even if you do not even understand those
emotions or know what they are. Those things can come later. But if
you end up with a PowerGoal™ that is a chore to you with no powerful
emotions behind it, this entire exercise will be a waste of your time.
Once you have assigned a desirability rating for each want, arrange the
items from highest to lowest desirability, in other words, with all the
10s at the top and the 1s (or the smallest number you used) at the
bottom. The PowerGoal™ Calculator helps you to do it with a click of
a button, as explained in the PowerGoal™ Workbook.
Work through the sorted list and check whether you agree with your
ratings. You might find that you gave one item a 6 and another a 7, but
you want the one with the 6 more than the one with the 7. Change the
ratings and keep on sorting until you are happy with the rating for each
item.
A quick note: you can have more than one item with the same rating. It
means that the desirability level for those two items are the same or, in
other words, that you want those two things equally.
Remember that this list is entirely subjective. As I said already, there is
no right and wrong here. It is about how much you (and no one else)
wants each of those items. It is your list of wants after all.

Workbook Q4.2: Give each item a desirability rating.

Step 3: Assign difficulty ratings

After desirability, assign a difficulty rating for each of your wants. Use
a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is very easy with your current skills and
experience and 10 is impossible unless you become the person with the
skills to achieve that thing.

61
As with step 2, go down the list of wants and assign a number for each
item. After assigning a number for each item, sort the list from most
difficult (10) to least difficult (1 or the highest number you used).
Review the list in this order. Make changes and sort the list again until
you are happy with the difficulty ratings that you assigned.
For this step, do not pay any attention to the desirability rating of an
item. You can even hide that column for the time being if it will distract
you.
The difficulty rating you give each item is just as subjective as the
desirability rating. This rating is based on your current skills and
experience as well as which skills you see as difficult or easy to learn.
If I have learnt other languages in my life before, learning a new one
might be a 7 or an 8 for me. However, if I have never learnt a new
language since I was a baby and I think of myself as someone who is
“bad” with language, I might rate learning a new language as a 9 or
even a 10. It is your difficulty rating based on the person that you are
now.

Workbook Q4.3: Give each item a difficulty rating.

Step 4: Assign goal types

Now that you have the desirability and difficulty for each item, you can
class them into one of four types of goals: list, goal, PowerGoal™ and
dream. The PowerGoal™ cheatsheet gives a summary of the difference
between these four types of goals.

Download your FREE PowerGoal Cheatsheet if you have not

yet done so.

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A list is anything that you want that you wrote down. Some people
would call such a list a list of goals. However, if the desirability and/or
the difficulty rating is 5/10 or less, I do not classify it as a goal.
A goal is a want that is written down (as you have done already) with a
desirability and a difficulty rating of 6 or higher.
A PowerGoal™ is the highest level of goal. It has a desirability and a
difficulty rating of 10/10. As I explained in the previous chapter, it must
be difficult enough and you must want it enough that you are captured
and moved to transform by this type of goal.
A dream has a desirability of 10/10. You really want it. However, its
difficulty rating is not only a 10/10, it is beyond that – 10+/10. It is so
difficult that you cannot imagine becoming the person with the
necessary skills to achieve it in the next three to five years. In other
words, anything which will take longer than five years to achieve is a
dream.
For such a difficult item, you can’t set a clear, measurable target with a
clear timeframe that is within your control. Because a dream is so
vague, very few people can write theirs down. Even if they do, it
remains vague. Because the target is vague, you do not know and cannot
even start imagining who the person must be who can achieve this thing.
You don’t have to discount your dreams. In time, they become your
next PowerGoals™, often much sooner than you think. But it is
important to distinguish between a dream and a PowerGoal™. If you
think you are setting a PowerGoal™ but it is actually a dream, you will
not be able to take powerful action towards it.

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 Workbook Q4.4: Determine the goal type of each item.
On step 4, you might have several potential PowerGoals™ on your list,
or you may have none. Do not worry about it at this stage. Just follow
the process.

Step 5: Choose and refine your PowerGoal™

After you have assigned the goal type of each item, it is time to identify
and refine your one PowerGoal™. It is possible to have more than one
PowerGoal™, but I will not recommend it unless you have years of
experience. For this exercise, definitely only stick with one.
The shortened definition of a PowerGoal™ is the one goal that will
make all or most of your other goals come true if you achieve it. This
definition makes it clear why PowerGoals™ are often financial.
Because money is an enabler, it can make many of your other goals
come true. Tanja and I wanted to go on a 4x4 trip to Russia. The key
enabler for making such a trip was money. But your PowerGoal™ does
not have to be about money. It must only adhere to all the requirements
of a PowerGoal™ that we discussed in Chapter 3.
If you have several potential PowerGoals™ at this stage, run each of
them through the questions below (also on the PowerGoal™
Calculator). One of them might clearly be your PowerGoal™.
If you have no potential PowerGoals™, or if these questions
disqualified all your potential PowerGoals™, remember that your
dreams and your goals with the ratings closest to a PowerGoal™ are
also potential PowerGoals™. Go through each one and try to rewrite it
so that it adheres to as many of the questions below as possible.
A true PowerGoal™ must pass the test of each of the following
questions:

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 • Do I really want this?
• Is this in conflict with any of my other goals?
• Is this goal in conflict with my personal beliefs or situation?
• Do I have full control over it happening?
• Is the goal stated positively (as opposed to negatively)?
• Is it specific and expressed in detail?
• Is it good for me, good for others and good for the greater
good?
• Is it measurable? (Open up possibilities – use "or more/less".)
• Does it have a clear deadline? (Open up possibilities – use
"before x".)
• Will I know if/when I achieved it? (How?)
• Is it related to timeframes?
Many times you can turn a dream or a goal into a PowerGoal™ by
changing the timeframe or the specific target. You might want a passive
income of $10,000, which you cannot imagine achieving in five years
or less. What if you change it to $5,000 or even $1,000? Maybe you can
then imagine doing it in a shorter period.
The converse is also true. Maybe you have a goal to buy your first
investment property. It is not a PowerGoal™ because you can imagine
doing it in the next year. But if you were to change it to buy five
properties that meet specific criteria? Or property to the value of a
certain amount? That would change the timeframe and the difficulty.
Work on your potential PowerGoals™ until you find the one that meets
all the requirements. When you find the right one, you will feel that it
is right. If you find that one and it does not meet all the criteria, keep on
rewording it until it does.

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If you get stuck at this step, take a break. Go for a walk. Do something
else. Sometimes you need a night’s rest to wake up with the
breakthrough.
Do not give up until you have your PowerGoal™.

Workbook Q4.5: Choose and refine your PowerGoal™.

Step 6: Select supporting goals

You have set your PowerGoal™! Congratulations!
But what about those other goals? It is useful to select supporting goals
which will help move you closer to your PowerGoal™. In Chapter 7, I
explain the 91 Perfect Day Challenge and how you can use a 91-day
cycle to move towards your PowerGoal™ every day. Your list of goals
can inform it. It is useful to set goals for shorter periods, like 91 days
but also a year.
To use the property example again: if your PowerGoal™ is $10,000
passive income before 31 December 2022 (that would be about three
years from the time of writing this book), your 91-day goal might be to
make an offer on a property that meets your investment criteria (be
specific!), and your one-year goal might be to buy a property that meets
your investment criteria.
These supporting goals are not cast in stone. They are there to help you
along the way, as I discuss in more detail when I talk about the 91
Perfect Day Challenge in Chapter 7.

Workbook Q4.6: Select supporting goals from your list.

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Step 7: Make it visible
Now that you have a PowerGoal™ and supporting goals, it is time to
move from the spreadsheet to real life. You have a written
PowerGoal™, but you want to make that goal visible in your daily life.
You want to see it every day.
If you journal, which I highly recommend, write your PowerGoal™ out
at the start and end of every day or journal session. Stick your
PowerGoal™ on your fridge, behind the door of the bathroom or put it
up on your bedroom wall.
You want to make it impossible for yourself to go through any day
without being reminded of your PowerGoal™. You want to activate
your brain to consciously and subconsciously find new paths to that
goal.
In my Powermorphing™ course, one of the things I teach my students
is how to come up with a subconscious symbol that is linked to their
PowerGoal™ and to entangle that symbol with their subconscious.
Powermorphing™ is the process of consciously programming your
subconscious to unconsciously give you whaever t you consciously
want. In this course, I teach my students how to use their subconscious
to realise their PowerGoals™ much faster and with less effort.
The Powermorphing™ process is the topic of an entire book by itself,
and you need a firm foundation in the theory and practice of
PowerGoals™ before you can get there. I cannot go into that depth here.
However, if you have a powerful emotional connection with your
PowerGoal™ and if you have worked and reworked your PowerGoal™
wording until it feels 100% correct, you can start tapping into the power
of your subconscious by reminding yourself of the words of your
PowerGoal™ as often as possible.
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Some people even go so far as finding pictures that represent their
PowerGoal™ and using it as backgrounds on their computers or putting
it up in places where they can see it.
Let me be clear: that picture of a Ferrari is not what is going to give you
the Ferrari. You need to follow the right process to determine whether
that Ferrari is your PowerGoal™, and you need to follow the right
process to go from where you are to where you are the person who can
buy that Ferrari cash.
The wording of your PowerGoal™ and any symbols or pictures which
you attach to it are the beacons which guide you along the process.

Workbook Q4.7: Make your PowerGoal™ visible.

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 SECTION 2:
ACHIEVING THE
GOAL

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70
Chapter 5: The Five Levels of
Transformation
Now that you have a PowerGoal™, it is time to delve into how to
achieve that goal. It is great that you have set your goal. But if you set
a goal and never taking any action towards it, it is not going to realise.
The PowerGoal™ process is not a once-off goalsetting exercise. It is a
process which you follow until you reach your destination.
Earl Nightengale defined success as the progressive realisation of a
worthy goal. When we have a PowerGoal™ and we take action each
and every day to get just a little bit closer to our goal, we are becoming
better. According to this definition of success, it means that we are
becoming more successful.
We know that success breeds success. The thing is, to become
successful is actually very easy. All you must do is to get the right
information or the right skills in the right order for the level of the game
that you are at and then you must do it. That is what is going to make
your PowerGoal™ and your dreams a reality.
But how does this process work?
Well, it works according to the five levels of transformation.
This chapter explains the five levels of transformation and why you
must follow them in the right order. Each of the levels by itself is
important, but if you follow them in the incorrect order, as most people
do, you will not see powerful results. We need the right information in
the right order for the level of the game that we are at (and then do it)
to be successful.
In this chapter, I explain the five levels and the order in which you must
follow them to get powerful results. It is not even rocket science. If you
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think about it, the process I explain is quite logical. However, very few
people do it this way, so very few get the right results. I want you to get
results, and to get powerful results, so let me show you what very few
people know and do.

The five levels at a glance

Any PowerGoal™ requires five levels of transformation:
1. Environment (where)
2. Action steps (what)
3. Blueprint (how)
4. Values & beliefs (why)
5. Identity (who)
Another way to explain the five levels is with these questions:
1. Where are you now and where do you want to be?
2: What must you do to get there?
3. How are you going to do it?
4. Why do you want it?
5. Who do you need to become?
Your current environment is the most accurate reflection of where you
are right now. You must become aware and identify where you are right
now to be able to take your first step forward. In other words, you must
transform your environment to move up the levels of transformation.
The next level is about the action steps – what must you do. Your
current set of behaviours and habits will not get you to where you want
to be, otherwise you would have been there already. You therefore need
to remove the ones that are holding you back and cultivate ones that

72
will get you to where you want to be. You must take the right steps in
the rights order that will move you towards your PowerGoal™.
The next level is about the how that will get you to your PowerGoal™.
The how is the blueprint, or the strategy, that you will follow. It is an
outline that gives you the big picture. Many people get stuck on the how
because they want to know every exact step they need to take to get to
their endpoint. However, that strategy does not allow you to develop
and grow as you go. Instead, you only need to have a big picture
blueprint and then take the next right step for where you are at any point
in time.
The deeply held values and beliefs that you have about life are your
why, the reason behind your PowerGoal™. You need to know your why
to stay motivated. Sometimes you also need to examine your current
values and beliefs to see if they are helping you reach your goal. If you
are not the person that you want to be (level 5) or if you do not have
what you want in life (your PowerGoal™ and dreams), some of your
values and beliefs are probably keeping you from being who and having
what you want. It is only when you become aware of what these are and
when you replace them with values and beliefs that do serve you that
you can get to your PowerGoal™. To achieve your PowerGoal™, you
need to re-examine and transform your values and beliefs.
Lastly, you must transform your identity. As I have explained in the
previous chapters, you will not be able to have what you want if you do
not become the person who can have that. The fifth level is about
finding out what your identity needs to be to realise your PowerGoal™.
The quickest way to your goal is to be the person who can realise it.

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The power of reverse engineering
The five levels of transformation are not complicated. They should not
be difficult to understand. Sure, most people find transformation
difficult. Some people choose to think that some types of transformation
are impossible rather than attempt it.
But the previous few paragraphs should make sense.
For example, your goal may be to lose weight. You see that currently
you are eating way too much. So you start doing things to eat less –
which are actions – and those actions will be determined by the
blueprint you use – e.g. limiting certain food types, quantities and/or
frequency of eating. Somewhere you might discover that you are falling
back into bad habits of overeating because you see food as a form of
comfort, and not only as a source of energy, which has to do about your
deeply-held beliefs about food (whether you were aware of those beliefs
before or not). In the end, if you want to lose that weight, you need to
become the person who eats less to lose the weight.
Even if you have not thought about it in terms of the five levels as I
explain them here, most people know instinctively that they must do all
of those things to change.
But why don’t they do it? And if they do it, why is it so hard?
I have found that it is because we approach the five levels of
transformation in the wrong order. The five levels work, but in the
wrong order, it is ineffective.
The best way to transform is to reverse engineer the process. In other
words, we start with level 5 and work backwards to level 1.
If you think about it, the approach that I have explained so far already
follows that order. In a sense, you do start with level 1, because the

74
reason for our goals right at the beginning is that we are not happy with
where we are right now. We want something more.
But from that point, we jump to our dreams. We skip right to the end.
What do we want? That is our dreams. They are the very end of our
transformational journey – the by-product of becoming that person on
level 5.
And because dreams are so far out there into the future that we cannot
fully grasp them, we start reverse engineering. We take the dream that
is most important to us right now at this point in our lives, and we turn
it into a target that we can aim at and focus on, that we can work towards
and measure our progress. That is our PowerGoal™. We have started
the process of reverse engineering what we want in life to bring it into
existence.
But having a PowerGoal™ is not enough. We must move towards it.
And that is where the transformational process comes into play. We
need to transform on all these levels to get to our PowerGoal™.
But the mistake we make is that we start with where we are (our
environment), and we start doing things (action steps) that we think will
get us to our goals. It is good, but it is not effective. We do the wrong
things, and we only realise that they are wrong after weeks or months –
or even years or decades. Or we self-sabotage ourselves because we
have not examined our values and beliefs. And we only realise that we
have been self-sabotaging ourselves years into the process, if ever.
By that time, we are often so despondent that we give up on our goals.
We tell ourselves that everyone was right and that we must just settle
for a normal life.
But deep inside, if you do that, it feels as if you are suffocating the very
reason for life inside you.

75
There is a better way. That approach does not work because you have
not followed the reverse engineering process all the way.
So, how do you go about reverse engineering this process? Well, you
start with level 5 and work your way backwards, in other words:
5. Identity (who)
4. Value/beliefs (why)
3. Blueprint (how)
2. Action steps (what)
1. Environment (where)

Identity
After you have set your PowerGoal™, the first thing you need to do is
to become aware and identify where you are right now. Who you are at
this moment is the result of all the other levels – your environment, your
behaviours and habits, your skills and capabilities, your values and
beliefs. All of those things over all the previous years of your life has
culminated into who you are today.
Honestly identifying who you are is a very difficult exercise for most
people. Your identity is not who you think you are. It is not your
profession or the people that you associate or identify with. Identifying
who you really are is a spiritual exercise. Deep down on a spiritual level,
who are you really?
Now, many people believe that their identity is fixed and that they
cannot change.
This is my personality, they say. This is just who I am.
Well, I have very good news for you: your identity is not fixed. It has
been shaped and is still being shaped by many things around you. And

76
the good news is that you can take responsibility and start shaping
yourself into the person that you want to be.
This process is not superficial. It is deeply spiritual. It is transformative
on the deepest level.
You can even say that you are not changing your identity, but only
becoming who you truly are on the deepest level. Or you can say that
you are becoming who you were meant to be.
You are getting rid of those things that your past and your teachers and
your parents and your circumstances have made you to be – but which
are not part of the best you. Instead, you become who you know deep
down on the inside you can be and who you were meant to be. You are
transforming.
We all want to do that. We want to become happier, healthier, more
joyful, more peaceful, more fun, more patient, more loving. We all want
those things. But the things is, those are not things that you have. They
are part of who you are. They are part of your identity.
You need to get rid of the things that are holding you back from being
the best you – the anger, the fear, the guilt, the shame. If those are things
that are part of your life, I have excellent news for you – you do not
have to be an angry person, or a worrying person, or an insecure person.
You can let it go and embrace a much better you.
Identifying who you are right now is not a once-off exercise. It is a
spiritual journey that continues your whole life. As I’ve explained in
Chapter 2, you will never really have what you are after if you do not
embark on this spiritual journey. But the other side is also true: having
a PowerGoal™ helps us with this spiritual journey.
If you are reading this book, there is a chance that you have decided to
start this transformational journey already. Or, maybe you have not.

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Either way, I challenge you to decide and commit right now that you
are not settling for being anything less than the person who you want to
be and who you know you can be.
Level 5 is also about identifying who you are going to be when you
have reached your PowerGoal™. Again, I am not talking about your
profession or your station in life. I am talking about who you will be on
the inside, who you will be spiritually.
It is much easier to do it than what you think. Simply use your
imagination. Imagine yourself in a situation where you have achieved
your goal. Imagine and feel who you are at that moment that you have
achieved your goal. Think about all the feelings that you have at that
moment. You maybe feel happy, or you have peace, or you feel so
powerful that you feel as if you can do anything. That is the person that
you need to be to achieve your goal.
I want you to take some time right now to do what I describe here. Get
quiet on the inside and think about who you are. Who are you on the
deepest spiritual level? Are you happy and joyful? Or are you sad and
depressed? Are you at peace, or are you fearful and worried? Are you
loving, or are your judgemental? Identify the things that you want more
of and the things that you want less of.
Then think of yourself as if you have just achieved your PowerGoal™.
You are sitting in that Ferrari. You are driving your 4x4 into Moscow.
You weigh whatever it is that you want to weigh. Imagine it. Feel it.
Taste it. Smell it. Hear it. Who are you in that moment? Are you happy?
Are you at peace? Are you loving? Are you free? Are you powerful?
Every day, from this day onward, you are going to become more of this
person, until you are the person who can make that goal a reality.

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Workbook Q5.1: Determine who you are and who you need
to be.

Values & beliefs

There is a reason why you have done what you have done to bring you
to where you are. The reason you are the person you are today with
what you have in life is your values and beliefs – your why.
After thinking about who you are and who you are when you have
achieved your PowerGoal™, the next question to ask yourself is, Why
do I want to achieve this goal?
This question is all about our beliefs and values.
If you have identified who you are and who you need to become to
make your goal a reality, you will see that there is a gap between the
two. Unless you know why you want to become that person, you are
not going to go through the process to become that person. Your why is
the energy, the fuel that propels you to do those things that normal
people would never do.
Like your PowerGoal™, your why is unique to you. Two people with
the same goal might have very different reasons for their goal. For
example, many people have the goal to be financially free. But the
reason for their goal, the why behind it, is very different for each person.
For one person, being financially free means that they have freedom.
They get to choose what they do, when they do it, with whom they do
it and where they do it. They are independent. They do not rely on any
other person or thing. They value freedom and independence and self-
sufficiency. They want this freedom for themselves and for the people
whom they care most about in life. They believe that freedom is one of
the most precious gifts that we have as human beings, and they want to

79
live their lives as free as possible. Being financially free allows them to
be free on so many other levels too.
For another person, being financially free means that they can travel the
world. They are not tied to one place or one job or one way of living
their life for the rest of their life. They are explorers. They are curious.
They want to expand their minds and their experience of life. They
crave novelty and diversity. They value exploration, novelty, growth
and change. They believe that experiences are worth more than things.
Being financially free is a means for them to live life according to these
values and beliefs.
For another person, being financially free means that they have security.
They know that they own their home and that they will always have a
roof over their head. They know that they will always have food on the
table and that their children will never go to bed hungry. They know
that they can provide for themselves and their family without fear of the
future. They value certainty. They value security. They value peace of
mind. They believe that when your physical needs are met, you can
flourish and be the best that you can be. Being financially free means
that they have a solid foundation under their feet to face whatever
uncertainties life brings them.
For another person, being financially free means that they can spend
time with their family. They do not simply have a family, they spend
time with their family, lots of time. They are there for their children’s
first step and first word. Travelling the world only holds appeal if they
can experience it with their family. Time is the most valuable gift that
they can give themselves and those that they love so dearly. They value
quality and quantity time spent with their loved ones, and they value
those loved ones. They believe that the most important thing in this
world is the relationships with the people closest to you. Being

80
financially free allows them to buy back their time for the thing that is
most important to them.
You might identify with none, one or several of those scenarios. We
certainly do not only value only one thing in life. And we hold many
beliefs about life, even conflicting ones.
Our values and beliefs often conflict with each other because we did not
sit down and pick a nice set of values and beliefs and will serve us very
well. Our values and beliefs have been deeply ingrained into us by our
past, most of it before the age of seven.
If you suffered financial lack as a child, you might have said to yourself,
My children will never go to bed hungry, or I will always know where
my next meal comes from. If you lost a parent at a young age, you might
want to spend as much time as possible with your children when they
are young. Our parents and teachers influenced us, either in terms of
what we want or in terms of what we do not want. We might value
family above all else because we had a very loving family or because
we had a very dysfunctional one. It is often not even that drastic.
Sometimes what seems like a very insignificant event shapes us
dramatically.
However, knowing why you value and believe what you do is less
important than knowing what you value and believe. It seems as if it
should be easy and obvious even to know what we value and believe,
but that is not the case. Our values and beliefs are hidden deep down
inside, and some of the strongest ones never show themselves for what
they are. They present as other things.
You can certainly start by asking yourself why your PowerGoal™ is
important to you. Take the answer that you come up with and ask
yourself again, why is that thing important to me? Continue asking

81
yourself that question until you find your deepest reason, whatever it
might be – peace, freedom, security, family, or whatever you come up
with.
Remember, there is no right and wrong here. When some people read
the scenarios that I describe above, they might feel that it is wrong or
that that reason is not noble or good. Your reason is your reason.
Become aware of it.
And be willing to face some of the less noble values and beliefs that
you might have but do not want to admit that you have. Sure, you might
tell yourself that you want to be financially free because you love your
family and want to spend time with them, but actually you want to be
financially free because you are afraid of being poor.
Let go of your ideas about right and wrong and identify what is. Once
you know what you do believe, you can examine whether it is serving
you or not, and take action from there.
Like our identities, our values and beliefs are not fixed. Most people’s
values and beliefs are fixed, but only because they believe they are
fixed. You can grow, and you can change.
I believe that negative outcomes, what most people call failure, are one
of the best things in life. Sure, positive outcomes feel good, but negative
outcomes make us aware of those things that we were unaware of
before. One of the things we are often unaware of is the values and
beliefs that are not serving us. Our subconscious mind hides them from
our conscious minds because we are uncomfortable facing those things.
However, if you scrape together enough courage to examine your
values and beliefs when you experience a negative outcome, my friend,
you can experience phenomenal transformation and results beyond your

82
wildest dreams. Your limiting beliefs and values are the things that are
going to keep you where you are at instead of transforming.
So ask yourself why, not only about your PowerGoal™ but also about
the results that you experience on the journey towards it. Transforming
your values and beliefs into ones that serve that best version of you
opens whole new pathways to your PowerGoal™.

Workbook Q5.2: Determine the why behind your

PowerGoal™.

Blueprint
Only once you have examined the who and the why of your
PowerGoal™ do you get to the how. The how is all about the blueprint,
or the strategy, that will get you to your PowerGoal™. It is the
framework or the big picture.
Most people get stuck with the how. They confuse the how with the next
step, which is what you need to do. But, remember, the blueprint is the
outline of the road from here to there. It is the big picture, not the step-
by-step process.
In essence, there is only one strategy, or blueprint, that will get you to
your PowerGoal™. It is what I have called the Wealth Creators
Strategy™. The Wealth Creators Strategy™ is the intelligent use of
limited resources to go from where you are to where you want to be in
the shortest amount of time with the least amount of risk. Applying the
Wealth Creators Strategy™ means that we rely on our capabilities,
skills and capacity. We rely on being resourceful and not necessarily on
the resources.
Most people associate the how with what resources they are going to
use. As wealth creators, we rely on our resourcefulness. We know that

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deep down inside of us, we already have everything we need to get to
our goals. We dig down deep to find it and make use of it.
I have told you that you do not have to know how you will get to your
PowerGoal™ when you set it. Most people set goals that are too small
because they only set goals that they know how to achieve. But those
are not transformational goals. If you only set goals that you know how
to achieve, you do not have to change, you do not have to become a
better person, you do not have to dig into your why and examine it and
wrestle with it until it burns inside of you.
We only work with the how so late in the process because we must first
know who we need to be and why we want what we want. Those two
things result in a very different how than if we try to determine it when
we set our PowerGoal™.
Einstein famously said that we cannot solve our problems with the same
thinking we used when we created them. That is why transforming our
identity as well as our values and beliefs before we focus on the
blueprint gives us much more powerful results. It is also why we need
to follow a blueprint which allows for and even requires us to transform.
We cannot only rely on the skills and capabilities that we have at the
moment.
It is much easier to identify the shortest path to your PowerGoal™ when
you know that your identity is not fixed and that your values and beliefs
do not have to hold you back. That is why we only look at the how after
the who and the why.
I delve much deeper into the Wealth Creators Strategy™ in Chapter 8.
For now, ask yourself: How am I going to become this new me? How
am I going to achieve my goal?

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At this point, you might not know how you will get there. That is fine.
You do not want to get stuck in the planning phase. You want to set a
direction and then act immediately. The best way to start figuring out
the direction you should take is to ask yourself what the next step is that
you can take to become the new you that can achieve your PowerGoal™
and by when must you do it. Write it down. Tick it off when you have
done it. Then ask that question again and follow through.
Remember that the Wealth Creators Strategy™ is the intelligent use of
limited resources to go from where you are to where you want to be in
the shortest amount of time with the least amount of risk. By
determining your next step and doing it, you are intelligently using the
limited resources that you have at that moment (where you are) to get
to your PowerGoal (where you want to be). As you take action, you get
feedback. Did it work? Didn’t it work? This feedback allows you to
adjust your next step to shorten the time to get to your goal and to lower
your risk.
The best way to set your blueprint is by taking your next step, evaluating
the outcome, readjusting and doing it again and again until you get to
your PowerGoal™.

Workbook Q5.3: Start your blueprint.

Action steps
In level two, we get down to the nitty-gritty. If we don’t take action, we
won’t get anywhere.
The question we ask at this level is, What do I need to do? In terms of
where you are right now, what are the steps that you need to take in
which order to turn your blueprint into reality? And then, of course, you
must do it. It ties in very closely with the Wealth Creators Strategy™ –

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you only use your resources when you take action. That action leads to
feedback which allows you to find the quickest, surest path to your
PowerGoal™.
Level two is not only about action but also about turning those actions
into habits. A habit that I have formed over the years is to ask myself at
least once a day is, What is the most important thing that I can do right
now to reach my PowerGoal™? Based on what I did and learnt the
previous day, the answer is usually different every day. It can even
differ at different times of the day. At 5 am, it might be that I should
spend some time in meditation. At 10 am, it might be that I should do
marketing. At 7 pm, it might be that I should spend time with my wife.
While I had to be working at 10 am, at 10 pm it might be that I should
stop working and go to bed. For you, it might be that you should stop
sleeping and go to work because that is what makes sense in your
context.
Can you see now why I say you should not worry about the details of
what you need to do when you set your PowerGoal™ or even when you
set your strategy? Your what evolves over time and in every moment.
However, that does not mean that you should not hold yourself
accountable for what you are doing and what you are not doing. One of
the most important things to do is to monitor your actions and
behaviours. Are you doing what you know you should be doing? And
are you doing it consistently enough to get the results that you want?
Are you not doing the things that you know are keeping you from your
goals? And are you breaking those bad habits and not falling back into
them?
At this point in the process, many of the dreamers fall off the wagon.
They may do the right things for a day or a week. But pretty soon, they

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give up, like those people who set New Year’s resolutions and give up
by the second Friday of the month.
At this level, it is extremely important to remind yourself of your why.
Your why must be so strong that it pulls you out of your complacency
and bad habits. If your desirability is less than anything but a 10/10, you
will not stick it through. Your limiting beliefs and values will also hold
you back here. If you cannot stay motivated to take action towards your
PowerGoal™ every single day or if you start feeling stuck, it is most
probably time to examine your limiting beliefs and values.
I call such limiting beliefs and values resistors. They resist your
progress. They hold you back from achieving your PowerGoal™ and,
more importantly, from being the best you that you can be. Removing
resistors is one of the best personal development exercises. It makes
you a better, happier, more successful person. I discuss how to remove
your limiting beliefs in more detail in Chapter 9, which is about your
brain and your body.
If your motivation is falling and you face some resistance, it is easy to
start letting things slip and drift off course. Most people do not
consciously decide to give up on their dreams and goals. It just fizzles
out slowly over time.
Monitoring your actions and your behaviours keeps you on track. It
keeps you accountable. I like to keep an Excel spreadsheet. I list all the
actions I need to do daily to get to my goals, and every day I mark off
whether I did it or not. I also keep track of my results. If I did marketing
for weeks in a row, but I am not getting the sales I want, I know that I
need to change my marketing strategy, in other words, how I am doing
marketing. But if I had not been diligent in doing marketing and I am
not getting sales, the problem is probably not with my marketing
strategy. I am not doing what is necessary to get the results that I want.

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If I want to lose weight but I never exercise and I eat too much, I should
not be surprised if I do not lose weight. I will track how much I
exercised on which days and maybe even what kinds of exercise I do. I
will track how much I eat of what foods to know what actions and
behaviours I need to change.
Or let us use an example of a completely different goal. If my
PowerGoal™ is about improving my relationship with my wife, I
cannot expect my relationship with her to improve if I never spend any
time with her. So maybe that is something that I will want to track.
It is even better if you report what you monitored to other people. In my
mentoring courses, I ask my students to report daily on each of their
most important things to do that day to reach their PowerGoal™, to set
a deadline by when to do it and then to tell us whether they did it.
Weekly, all of us give feedback on those actions that we decide we will
do daily to reach our PowerGoals™. It raises the stakes, and others can
help point out our blind spots.
It is also why I created a course called the 91 Perfect Day Challenge. I
encourage all my students and my team members to follow it daily. The
91 Perfect Day Challenge breaks your year into four 91-day cycles. For
each 91-day cycle, you have a goal to focus on, and you decide on those
things you need to do every day to get to your 91-day goal which will
get you to your PowerGoal™. The challenge is that at the end of each
of those 91 days, you need to be able to say that for you and your
PowerGoal™, you have had a perfect day. Every day you become a
little better, and you move one step closer to your goal.
Because success is the progressive realisation of a worthy goal, if you
take a step closer to your goal every day, you can say that every day is
a success. At the end of every day, you’ve got a perfect day, and you

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are one step closer to your PowerGoal™. However you decide to do it,
make sure that you get into the habit and the routine to do the right
things every single day.
There is a concept called kaizen, which means constant and never-
ending improvement. It ties in with the definition of success as the
progressive realisation of a worthy goal. You achieve your goal by
taking the steps on a day-to-day basis.
Right now, ask yourself: What is the first and easiest step for me to start
moving towards my PowerGoal™ and by when will I take that step?
Write it down to keep yourself accountable. Go back and tick it off
when you have done it. Instil a sense of success by moving one step
closer to your goal today – and then every day after.

Workbook Q5.4: Start your habit of action right now.

Environment
The last level is your environment. In Chapter 6, I go into much more
detail about all ten of your environments. However, in essence, this
level is about where you are now. Your current environment is what it
is because of what you are doing and have been doing until now. Those
things gave you the environment that you have.
The car that you drive you drive for a reason. It did not magically appear
one day. You followed this whole transformational process until now
so that it lines up with your identity. There was a reason why you bought
the car. There was a specific strategy that you implemented. For
example, you bought the car on a lease or cash, which are two different
strategies. What steps did you take to buy the car? For example, you
had to save, or you had to go to the bank. Those were the actions you

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took to get the car. You maybe had to have a certain job to be able to
afford a certain car.
The same thing is true about relationships. If you are in a relationship
or if you are married, this same process applies to the person with whom
you are in a relationship. Because of the person that you are and the
things you value and believe, you followed (and still follow) certain
strategies to meet people. For example, if you think of yourself as a shy
person and you value your privacy, you are not going to go to every
possible place in the world where you can meet different people and
where you have to interact with people all the time. But you maybe have
a job, and for that, you have to go to work every day and interact with
the people at work. Then it makes sense that you would have met your
spouse at work.
The same applies to your friends, and even to your job. You took that
job or chose that career because of who you are at that time, what you
value and belief and then the strategies and behaviours you choose in
line with your identity, value and beliefs.
Your environment reflects what you have done and this process that you
have followed, whether you knew it or not.
The opposite is also true: your environment often keeps you stuck in
your current reality. Your environment has become a habit. You do the
same things in the same way every day, every week and every month.
Research has shown that an average person has between 60,000 and
70,000 thoughts a day. The problem is that 95% of those thoughts are
exactly the same every day.
Even if you have set your PowerGoal™, the moment that you get back
into your environment, it is going to be very difficult to go through with
the transformational process.

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Many people do not achieve their goals because they are not willing to
let go of their comfort zone, their current environment. They are not
willing to transform their current reality.
Even if you identify the actions that you need to take to be successful,
it will be very hard and impossible even to do those things if your
environment does not support it. Your environment always trumps your
willpower.
You may decide you are not going to eat sugar, but if your desk is next
to the doughnut station at work, by 3 pm you will be hungry and cranky,
and your willpower reserves will be low. You will probably grab one
of those doughnuts like you have always done in the past. That evening
when you mark your accountability sheet, you beat yourself up. I could
not do it again. I was too weak. But most if not all of us will be too weak
to break that habit when our environment triggers it every time.
But what if you decide to set up your environment for success? In the
doughnut example, you might ask them to move the doughnut station
away from your desk, or you might ask another person to swop desks
with you. Immediately you have a higher chance of breaking that habit
just by changing your environment.
That is why we need to change our environment. We need to create a
new environment with our imagination and then make it our reality. We
need to examine our environment to understand it. Ask yourself: What
is good about my environment? What is keeping me in my environment?
What environment do I want to create for myself and by when?

Workbook Q5.5: Audit your environment.

The great thing is that we are the creators of our own lives. Even if we
created our current reality without being aware of it consciously, we
can change it again consciously into whatever we wish.

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It is your environment that will keep you stuck. And you do not want to
be stuck. You want to be moving towards your PowerGoal™ and taking
the shortest route possible.
Do not hold on to those things which are keeping you back. Get rid of
them. If you were going to climb Mount Everest, you would not take a
whole bunch of things with you which you don’t need. Take what you
need and leave the rest behind. You want to enjoy the journey, not suffer
needlessly or, even worse, have to give up because of something that
was within your control.
This is your game, and your game only. Set it up so that you can win.

Assess and act

If you have not yet taken time to work through the questions for each
level of transformation, do it now before you continue reading. Doing
these activities is what will separate you as a doer rather than a reader,
as someone who will get results rather than an information gatherer who
can give all the right answers but who does not have the results to back
it up.
Seriously engaging with these questions will not take only a few
minutes. Take an hour, at least. If you can, give yourself as much time
as you need. You can also give yourself two timeslots so that you can
finish and review what you started. If you can, go somewhere where
there are no distractions. Preferably, it should be a different
environment, so that your home or office environment does not keep
you stuck in your current way of thinking.
Turn the answers to those questions into actions that you can do as soon
as possible. The next chapters delve deeper into each of these levels of
transformation. However, you do not need to read those chapters before
you get going. Start doing what you have set out to do immediately and

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keep on going. The next chapters simply give you more information and
more tools to use on this journey.
As I’ve said before, going through each of the levels of transformation
is not a once-off activity. You do not do an identity exercise once and
then never have to think about who you are again. You do not become
clear on your why and then never have to examine your values and
beliefs again. The how and what of your journey will constantly be
changing, by definition. And as you change, your environment will be
changing too, and you want to be in control of it. This book helps you
with that journey. These are resources to take note of, use and come
back to when you might get stuck.
This transformational journey of achieving your PowerGoal™ is a
glorious one, but there is a reason that not many people embark on it
and fewer still complete it. I want to give you the advantage to be one
of those who make it to the end, to the very top of your mountain, to be
the highest of them all.

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Chapter 6: The Ten Environments of
You
Even though it is important to reverse-engineer the transformational
process, as I explain in the previous chapter, you start acting from your
present reality, in other words, your environment. If you are not
consciously creating an environment that aligns with your
PowerGoal™ and the other levels of transformation, your environment
will keep you stuck. Many people get tripped up by their environment.
They do not understand how powerful the influence of their
environment is, and they do not recognise all the environments that
influence them. So they stay stuck.
However, the opposite is also true: there is immense power in taking
control of your environment. Changing one small area of your life
changes everything else.

The ten environments

I learnt the framework in this chapter from the late Thomas Leonard.
He is widely recognised as the founding father of the life coaching
industry. Thomas Leonard taught about the nine environments of you.
Because I recognised the major role that technology is playing in my
life and those of others, I took the liberty to add it to those of Thomas
Leonard. These ten environments – the nine originals plus technology
– provide a framework for you to think about all the areas of your life
and how they influence you.
Working with these ten environments also allows you to focus on the
specific ones that you need to change to set you up for success.
The picture below shows the ten environments.

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Everything starts with you right in the centre. When I am referring to
you, I am not referring to your body. Most people associate themselves
with their body. They think it is who they are, which is not the truth.
When I say you, I am talking about the energetic you, your soul, the part
that continues after death.
Part of that you is your memetics. Your memetics is your inner world:
your metaprograms, thoughts, feelings, emotions, habits, and so forth.
In other words, it is everything that happens within you, most of it
unconsciously.
Then you get the outer world – the spokes in the graphic above that
touch your memetics.

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The outer world consists of the rest of the ten environments: the self,
the spiritual, the relational, networks, the financial, the physical, nature,
technology and the body.

Key principles
Before we dive deeper into each environment, there are five key
principles which govern our environments which we need to
understand.
The first principle is that everything is an environment.
The word environment is used in different ways by different people in
different contexts. It is often used to refer to nature. For example, we
say that the environment, meaning nature, is suffering because of
pollution.
We also use it to refer to physical space. For example, you might speak
about your home environment or your work environment. It is not wrong
to do so, but there is some ambiguity when you use it this way. You
might be referring to the physical space, like the desks and couches and
coffee cups and so forth. You might also be referring to the relationships
that you have there, and even to your thoughts and feelings about what
happens there. You might, therefore, think of it as a positive or a
negative environment.
None of these uses is wrong. But in the context of how we are using the
word here, an environment refers to one of the areas of the current
reality of your life. There are ten environments so that we can isolate
and talk about each one.
In the example of your office, there are different environments at play.
The physical environment at your office is the desks and the chairs and
the building. Your memetics, or your thoughts and inner dialogue, about
the office is another environment. Then there are the relationships and
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networks at your office, two more environments. We use the word
environment to refer to one of these things so that we can isolate them.
Because everything is an environment, everything is part of one of the
ten environments.
The second principle is that everything is energy. I go into more detail
about the science that has proven this principle in Chapter 10, but, in
short, science shows that all matter is essentially energy. Applied to our
lives, this principle means that something is either giving you energy
and moving you closer to your goals, or it is draining your energy and
keeping you further away from your goals.
The third principle is that all environments are connected. Another
way to put it is that they are intertwined. We are only labelling our
environments to make it easier for us to think about them and take
action to change them. In reality, everything is energy and therefore
connected. If you walk into your physical office space, you are in that
physical environment, but you are also in that relational and network
environment at the same time. And, of course, you have thoughts and
feelings about all of those things. They are interconnected. The great
thing about this principle is that if you change just one aspect of an
environment, it affects all the other nine environments.
The fourth principle is that your environment is always stronger than
your willpower. I have touched on this principle in the previous chapter,
and I explain the science behind it in Chapter 9. If your environments
are not aligned with your PowerGoal™, you will be swimming
upstream, and you will get tired. You cannot swim upstream every
moment through willpower. Your environments will override your
willpower. Eventually, you will grow tired and give up. One of the
major reasons why people do not achieve their goals is because they
rely on their willpower to do it.

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But some of you can experience a significant breakthrough right now if
you take hold of this principle. You have been relying on your
willpower, and it has been letting you down. Instead of relying on your
willpower, find the stumbling blocks in your environments and remove
them.

Workbook Q6.1: Have you been trying to reach your goals

through willpower?
Follow the prompts in the PowerGoal™ Workbook to reflect.

The fifth principle is that if the outside world is not in alignment with
the inner world or vice versa, it causes friction or conflict. Many
people do not achieve their goals because they self-sabotage
themselves, often subconsciously. I have seen it many, many times.
Self-sabotage happens because you are trying to achieve something in
the outer world, but it does not align with what you actually believe on
the inside. Your mind subconsciously comes up with ways to protect
you from what it sees as bad or undesirable and keeps you from
reaching your goal.
The opposite can also happen. You firmly believe something, for
example, that debt is bad and that you never want to make any debt. But
in the environments of your outer world, you are constantly being told
that debt is good and normal. The people closest to you have debt. You
walk into their houses, and most of their possessions were acquired
using debt. The financial systems which you rely on are built on debt.
The friction between what you believe in the inner world and your outer
environment will cause one of two things. Your inner world will
conform to your outer world. You will start telling yourself that debt is
not so bad, or that there are certain types of debt which are good, or that

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this one specific reason for making debt is good and noble even. You
will make debt and believe that it is the right thing to do.
The second thing which might happen is that you start distancing
yourself from those environments. You will visit those friends less often
and make new ones. You will tell the bank not to phone you again to
sell you their latest credit card. You will pay cash for your purchases,
and every time you look at them, you will know that you did so and that
it is possible.
If you are experiencing inner conflict, it is likely that your inner and
outer worlds are not aligned. You need to ask yourself whether you are
trying to achieve something which is conflicting with what you believe
deep down inside. You might need to work on your inner world, your
memetics. You might hold some beliefs which are holding you back.
It could also mean that your outer world is in conflict with what you
value and that you need to make some changes there. Perhaps you need
to spend less time with certain people and more time with others.
Perhaps you need to go so far as to change jobs or careers. This fifth
principle is a great gift which allows us to recognise and remove
obstacles in our path to achieving our PowerGoal™.

Workbook Q6.2: Are you experiencing inner conflict?

Follow the prompts in the PowerGoal™ Workbook.
Now that you know these five principles, let us look closer at each of
the ten environments of you.

Memetics
The word memetics comes from the Latin word meme. A meme refers
to a unit of social information that identifies beliefs and ideas and that
is transmitted from one person or group of people to others. Your
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memetics includes your beliefs, values, ideas, thoughts and cultural
norms. It is the lens through which you view the world. It is the way
through which you change your outer world into your inner world.
Our senses allow us to see, feel, taste, hear and smell. Through those
senses, we convert the outer world into thoughts. Those thoughts lead
to feelings and to emotions which, in turn, lead to our actions which
become habits. Our actions and habits lead to our results. In the
diagram, all the other environments touch our memetics because our
memetics is linked the closest to each of those environments. Our inner
world relates to each of the environments that make up our outer world.
Many people think that they are their thoughts and feelings. Like they
think they are their body, they think they are their memetics. The great
news is that that is not the case. If your memetics is the programs that
you run about life, you are the programmer. You are the creator. You
get to choose. You can change your beliefs and design the life that you
want.
The fact is, your memetic environment, in other words, your ideas,
value, thoughts, beliefs, paradigms and habits have been passed down
from generation to generation. Unless you step up as the programmer
and start changing your memetics, you will probably have the same
kind of life as our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.
Some years ago, I wanted to do a second PhD. I felt very strongly that
poverty is a man-made creation and that, if it is manmade, we can
unmake it. But I ran into a serious problem, so big that I decided to let
go of the PhD. I realised that I could not help the majority of people
because of these belief systems that are passed on. The sad thing is that
the poorest of the poor have been poor for generations. Unless a person
is willing to let go of that belief system of poverty which has been
ingrained into them by their environment their whole life, they will not

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get out of poverty. It is certainly possible to get out of poverty, but it
depends on the person. And very few people are willing to let go of
these ingrained belief systems because all their environments work
against them.
Your memetic environment also includes information like your
knowledge, the books and magazines you read, the websites you visit,
and the movies and television that you watch. One thing I would love
you to do is to give up television completely, especially news. If you
watch it, you are allowing yourself to be programmed, mostly with
negative propaganda. Almost all television is based on beliefs about life
that I do not want. The media industry wants you in a negative state of
mind because then they can control you. If they can get you in a state
of fear about some catastrophe that has no or very little impact on your
life, you will keep on buying their products to keep informed about this
thing that you think is so important.
You don’t have to give up television. It is your choice. But one of the
first things I would do to improve my memetic environment is cut out
television completely. Instead of the time that you spend watching these
things, do courses or read positive books. Put knowledge and thoughts
into you that are aligned with who you want to be. It is part of being the
programmer, the designer of your own life. Watching television is also
an act of design, but you are giving the programming rights over to
someone else, and you need to think about what they are programming
into you.
This life that you’ve got is by design. It is not by default, except if you
give up your right to design and hand it over to others. That is where
the problem lies for many people. You have to take responsibility. We
are conditioned not to take responsibility. The financial and political
powers do not want us to take responsibility. They want us to be

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dependent on them so that they can profit from us. But one of the traits
of a true wealth creator is to take full responsibility for all our actions.
Then you do not have to accept the status quo of most people’s lives.
You can design your own, as long as you take up the responsibility.
My passion is to show people that they have the power to make all their
dreams come true simply by taking that responsibility. I therefore want
you to take some time to meditate and think about this environment.
Ask yourself, What is my memetics? What do I believe? How do these
ideas impact my PowerGoal™? Is it helping me move forward or not?
How can I programme myself? How can I stop allowing outside forces
to programme me for their good rather than mine?
Take responsibility to create a memetic environment that will serve you.

Workbook Q6.3: Take stock of your memetics.

Follow the prompts in the PowerGoal™ Workbook.

Self
The second environment is the self. It includes your strengths, talents,
personality, passions and skills.
One aspect of this environment is about truly knowing yourself. If you
know yourself, you can redesign the rest of your environments with this
knowledge to be in alignment with our goals. If you are a skilled
copywriter, you can use this skill to make money in your financial
environment to get closer to your goals. If you are an extrovert who
loves people, you can use that characteristic to build your network in
the areas that are important to you. If you are passionate about problem-
solving, you can use it to solve technical problems that you and those
you know have and even build a business around it.

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If you do not know yourself, you are much more likely to set yourself
up for failure. If you start a business selling copywriting services, but
you do not know a thing about copywriting, and you do not take
responsibility to learn about it, you are probably setting yourself up for
failure – no matter if someone else made money with their copywriting
business.
The great thing about the self environment is that you were not born
with all the skills and passions or even personality traits that you will
ever have. You can develop yourself. You can learn new skills and
become passionate about things that previously bored you. You can
even develop your personality.
For example, many of my students start with no interested in having
their own business. They tell themselves that it is not their strength, that
it goes against their personality, and that they do not have the ability to
learn the skills of sales or finances or whatever it is that they see as a
stumbling block. But on their journey to their goals, they start seeing
that business can be a powerful tool to get them there, not only
financially but also to have freedom. So, they begin learning the skills.
As they apply the skills and see results, they become more passionate
about business. Someone who was a timid, introverted person becomes
much more confident as they see what they are capable of.
Never limit yourself to what you can currently do and who you think
you currently are. Yes, be honest about what you can do and who you
are now, but also challenge yourself to grow and be more.

Workbook Q6.4: What do you bring to the table to get to

your PowerGoal™?

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Spiritual
The next environment, the spiritual, is very important to me. Because
of negative connotations, many people do not pay a lot of attention to
it.
The spiritual environment includes our connection to a higher power –
God or Spirit or the Universe. It is that invisible connection that we feel
towards other people and the universe. It is where all our energy comes
from. It also includes our spiritual practices. Because we are, in essence,
spiritual energy first and foremost, we can tap into low spiritual energy
or higher spiritual energy. The effect makes all the difference.
The emotions we experience are generated by our spirituality. In the
same physical environment, you can experience overwhelm, clutter or
fear. Or you can experience peace, calm and joy. Your state of being is
not dependent on your physical environment or any of the other
environments. It is dependent on your spirituality.
Religions form to help us with our spirituality. Many people think that
spirituality is a religion and vice versa, or that it is the specific religion
that they have been exposed to. But religion is not spirituality. It is there
to help you in the process. You might follow a certain religion or
spiritual practices already, or you might not. If you do, become aware
of what those practices are and what their effects are.
Also become aware of your connection to a higher power in life,
however you think of it. Many people are completely numbed to this
reality in their life, so they find it hard. Use some of the other
environments to get you started – spend time in nature and become
aware of what you feel inside of you. Talk to someone who you see as
a spiritually aware person and check what is stirring inside of you. A
spiritual practice which I find extremely valuable is meditation. There

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are many kinds of meditation and different ways to do it. If you want to
explore it, find one which resonates with you. Over time, your
meditation, like many of your spiritual practices, might change. That is
normal and good.
Do not neglect the spiritual. It is a powerful transformation source to
tap into.

Workbook Q6.5: Grow your spirituality.

Follow the prompts in the PowerGoal™ Workbook.

Relational
The fourth environment is the relational. The relational includes those
people in our lives that are closest to us and with whom we have
intimate connections. These might be our family, close friends, close
colleagues, mentors and neighbours. They are people with whom we
spend our time and with whom we share our lives.
The people in your life act as mirrors to some part of yourself. We
become like the people whom we spend time. It is a powerful revelation
if we are willing to accept it. You might be spending a lot of time with
negative people, those whom I sometimes call energy vampires. Simply
by removing yourself from that environment, that is, by spending less
time with those people or breaking the relationships completely,
everything can change in your life. Immediately your life will start to
change for the better. The converse is also true: spend time with people
who you admire. Make friends with people who have already achieved
what you want to.
This principle is the reason why I believe in the power of a mentor and
why I offer mentoring courses to my students. Yes, you can achieve
results if you do a course where I teach you how to do something in six

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weeks. But if you do a year-long mentoring course with me, you will
experience what and how I do it daily.
Do you want to have a great marriage? Identify a couple that you think
have a great marriage and take them out for dinner. Spend time with
them. Learn from them. Ask them questions, but also observe them.
Become friends with them. Surround yourself with such people. And
you will become like them.
But, Hannes, what about my family? I can’t choose them.
Yes, that is true. Many adults experience that when they spend time
with their parents and siblings, they fall back into the habits and the
thinking that they had when they were children living at home. But,
remember, you can take responsibility. You can choose when, where
and how you spend time with your family, even your immediate family.
You can choose what your mindset will be when you spend time with
them. There might be some family members whom you choose to spend
less time with or only at certain times. In extreme circumstances, you
might even cut ties completely with some family members.
But you might also be surprised what happens in certain relationships
when you take responsibility. You might become the one who
influences them rather than the other way around.

Workbook Q6.6: Determine the influence of your

relationships on your PowerGoal™.
Do the exercises in the PowerGoal™ Workbook.

Network
The next environment is your network. Your network is an extension of
your relationship environment. It consists of people with whom you are
on a first-name basis, yet you do not have a deep or intimate connection
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with them. It includes business associations, community organisations
and support groups.
The purpose of a network is usually to provide an exchange of
information or to build bridges to people who can support you or whom
you can support. Such networks are often found in the business or
personal development space. Networks can be a great place for
relationships to start. I have seen that some of my students use the
network that they built through doing courses and programmes together
to start friendships and business partnerships.
Networks can propel you forward, but they can also hold you back. You
might have joined a network to learn something or to get experience in
something. When you are ready to move to the next level and your
network is not, or if your network is focused on a specific level, you
need to let go and move on. You are not doing anyone else a service to
stay put. We sometimes have a misplaced sense of loyalty to a group or
organisation which we belong to. It is a fine balance. Do not leave
because you are being challenged and required to grow. But sometimes
it might be time to leave if you are being held back from growth. Your
departure might enable those who stay behind to be better off than if
you were to stay.
The purpose of networks is to build bridges, so be careful of burning
bridges when you leave. Just because this network is no longer serving
a purpose for you does not mean it will not ever serve a purpose for
someone else. You might even benefit from it again. But always be
aware of where you are in your journey and the influence of a network
on you.

Workbook Q6.7: Determine the influence of your networks

on your PowerGoal™.

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Financial
The financial environment includes your money, bills, credit cards,
investments, stocks, bonds, properties, and so forth and the people who
support your financial well-being – accountants, brokers, financial
planners, etc. It also includes the tools and support services or systems
you use to achieve your financial goals, which could be computer
programs, systems, budgets and/or banks.
Money makes the world go round, the saying goes. “Money isn’t
everything, but it ranks right up there with oxygen,” Zig Ziglar said.
The reason money and all the other aspects of the financial environment
is so important is because the way that our society functions does not
allow us to do the most basic things without it involving money. For
99% of us, our most basic necessities like food, water, shelter and basic
clothing must be bought. Even if you grow your own food, you need to
buy or rent the soil in which you plant your seeds – that you also paid
for. Even if you get something as a gift, it means that someone else is
paying for it.
The same applies to the higher pursuits of life. Because we need money
to pay for our basic necessities, most people trade their time for money,
leaving them with very little time to spend on relationships, spirituality,
looking after their body, enjoying nature and knowing and growing
themselves. One of the big reasons financial freedom is so desirable to
so many people is because it gives them time freedom.
I could write an entire book about what money is and how it works. For
this book, I will limit myself to defining money as a method through
which we exchange value. If you want to improve the way that you
think about money, think about it as an exchange of value. Value is
relative because it is a perception. Because the value of money is based

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on a perception, we can trade. I can give the Ferrari company my dollars
in exchange for a car because that Ferrari has more value to me than my
money and that money has more value to them than the Ferrari that they
manufactured.
When exploring the financial environment, it is important to look
closely at the relationship that you have with money. Your belief
systems around money and financial wealth have a profound influence
on your relationship with all the things which form part of this
environment. Money has energy, the energy that you assign to it
through your belief systems. If you have any problems that relate to the
financial environment, there is a good chance that it relates to your
beliefs about money. So always be open to examine these beliefs if you
want to experience financial breakthrough.
All environments affect each other, but the financial environment might
be the one that does so the most because it is one of the environments
that we understand the least. Let’s take relationships. Statistics show
that as much as 65% of all divorces are caused by financial problems.
Almost all couples have had a fight about money or about something
that relates to it. One of the reasons for these fights is because of the
relative value of money. What one person sees as financially important
is not important to the other one. Most likely, both people do not know
how to manage their money effectively, causing stress and strain.
When you examine your financial environment, ask yourself first what
you believe about this environment. Along your journey, you might also
discover that what you told yourself you believe and what you actually
believe is not the same thing. Be willing to own up to it, and be willing
to change those beliefs which are not serving you.
Also ask yourself whether all the aspects of this environment are
serving you and your goal. Think of your investments, your service

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providers, your tools and the people who work with you. Are they
adding energy to you and your goal, or draining energy from you? Are
there any changes you can make that will help you along your journey?

Workbook Q6.8: How can you optimise your financial

environment?
Do the exercises in the PowerGoal™ Workbook.
Learning more about this environment is one of the most powerful ways
to make a positive impact in your life and to get you to your
PowerGoal™ faster, even if your PowerGoal itself is not financial. If
you have the opportunity to do so, go for it. If you do not have such
opportunities, look for the right ones.
A note of caution: many advisers, gurus and experts want to teach you
about money. Be wary. Just because someone has a qualification or
presents a course does not mean they know what they are talking about.
The way that I determine whether I can learn anything from someone is
to ask whether they have successfully done what they teach. It is
especially true when it comes to the financial environment.

Physical
The seventh environment is the physical. It includes the tangible aspects
of your life, such as your home, office, car, furniture, art, toys, boats
and accessories. The physical also includes clutter, noise and broken
equipment.
Your physical environment provides visual clues of what is going on in
your inner world. If you walk into a person’s office and see a lot of
clutter, it could indicate that there are other problems in the person’s
life. The same with a person’s car or the clothes that they wear. Clues
are not always correct, but they give you a good indication. Your

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physical environment provides visual clues which allow you and others
to discover more about your beliefs, thoughts, energy and behaviours.
The same as with everything else in your life, your physical
environment is what it is for a reason, and that reason is you. Whatever
excuses you might give others or yourself, you are responsible for your
physical environment. The great part about taking responsibility is that
you can change your physical environment. Simply changing your
clothes gives you a different experience and puts you in a different
situation. You feel different, and other people look at you differently. It
is why we wear certain clothes in certain situations. Most people do not
wear the same clothes on the beach as they do in a client meeting.
Your physical environment includes things that are under your control
and things which are not under your control. For example, the items in
your home are under your control because you own them. If you are an
employee, most of the items at your office are not under your control.
The road that you drive on and the neighbourhood in which you live are
not primarily controlled by you.
Many people tend to make the mistake to think that because they are
not primarily in control of something, they have no control or influence
over that thing. That is not true. You have complete control over
yourself and therefore over everything which you come into contact
with. If you do not like the physical space in which you work, you can
do something about it. If you cannot change the minds of those who do
have control, you can change jobs or start your own business. If you do
not like your neighbourhood, you can move.
Most importantly, you have control over the thoughts and feelings that
you have about those things. If you do not like a certain outfit that your
spouse wears, you can tell them that you do not like it and offer to buy
another one to replace it. It might be a good strategy for some people,

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but definitely not for everyone. But what everyone can do is to change
the thoughts and feelings they have about it. Instead of thinking, There
is that ugly outfit again, you can think, There is the outfit that (s)he likes
so much. You are in control, and through the energy of your thoughts
and feelings, you have much more control than you think.
Even those things that you own might end up controlling you instead of
you controlling it if you are not aware. Acquiring anything – your
house, your car, your clothes, your boat, whatever it is – required you
to go through a process, the same transformational process we have
been speaking about. It changed you, and it often causes people to
attach to that thing. It makes them feel as if a part of their identity is
tied up with that thing.
Allowing that to happen can hold you back. Being attached to a thing
means that that thing controls you instead of you controlling it. It keeps
you locked into being the person that you had to become to acquire it.
It might have been a great transformation at the time, but you cannot
become stuck and stay that person forever.
When you examine your physical environment, ask yourself what clues
it is giving you about those beliefs about life that you might not be
owning up to. Ask yourself what clues it is giving others about the
person you are and the one you want to be to reach your PowerGoal™.
Making changes in your physical environment to line up with the person
who is able to achieve your PowerGoal™ can be very powerful. I am
not talking about buying things on debt so that you can feel successful.
It is usually much smaller and much more subtle. It is about using small
things to signal to yourself and others that you are becoming the person
that can achieve your PowerGoal™. Always remember that you are
responsible and that you are in control. You have more control over
changing those things in the physical than you think, and if you cannot

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change those things, you can always change your thoughts and feelings
about them.
Designing your physical environment often involves getting rid of
things rather than acquiring things. It is great to enjoy the things in your
life – the houses, cars, boats, helicopters and clothes. But always make
sure that you have them and that they do not have you.

Workbook Q6.9: How can you set up your physical

environment for success?

Nature
The eighth environment is nature. It includes the natural world, its
beauty and seasons.
I get immense energy from nature. The moment I am in nature, I am a
different person. I immediately relax. I can just be. It fills me up on
many different levels.
For that reason, my wife and I love to camp. We have a camping vehicle
with solar panels that allow us to be totally off the grid. From where we
currently stay in Pretoria, South Africa, we can go on trips to many
wonderful and beautiful nature sites in our country and neighbouring
countries. We often stay in these remote places a couple of weeks at a
time. It is where we charge and from where we get our energy. We love
the silence and the sounds of nature. We love the smells and the
atmosphere.
I do not only spend time in nature when I go camping. An aerial photo
of my house shows that our house is surrounded by green trees and
bushes. I have set up my home and my office to be as close to nature as
possible. Even though we live in a city, we bought a piece of property
large enough that you cannot hear the sounds of the street at our house.

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We planted trees and keep a large garden. I have some of my best ideas
walking around outside on our property.
A few years ago, I bought my wife a game farm for her birthday. We
set up our Wealth Creators University campus on it, and I presented
many courses there for years. It was only about a two-hour drive from
our home, so we could go there at any time to experience nature on a
completely different level. I also knew that putting my students in that
environment allowed them to have powerful transformational
experiences. Being so close to nature soothed their souls and caused
their minds to calm down so that they could experience breakthroughs.
Your relationship with nature will look different than mine. I am not
saying you should have a large garden or buy a game farm. When
circumstances changes, we sold our game farm. As much as we loved
it, we needed to transform again. It was no longer aligned with our
journey. We let it go with happy hearts and much gratefulness for what
it meant to us.
What I can tell you is that your life will be poorer if you do not
incorporate elements of nature into it. For you, it might be to take time
to go to the beach if you live close to it. Or you might choose a route to
work that takes you along lanes of beautiful trees in bloom during
spring. Or you might choose to live somewhere close to a park so that
it is easy to get away from the concrete world of your daily life.
Choose those things which will add energy to your life.

Workbook Q6.10: Is nature adding energy to your life?

Do the exercises in the PowerGoal™ Workbook.

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Technology
The ninth environment is technology. This environment also includes
electronics, virtual spaces, software, hardware and networks.
Electronics refer to computers, tablets, phones, music players,
televisions, game consoles and GPS systems. Virtual networks include
social networks, video conferences and online networking.
I added this environment to Thomas Leonard’s nine environments
because of the profound and ever-increasing impact that technology has
on all of us and the other environments. We build and maintain
relationships and networks via technology. We bank online rather than
in person. Our businesses run on the internet. Even our physical
environment is arranged according to elements of technology. Your
desk has a computer on it, and your living room has a television, all of
it connected to the internet, even some kitchen appliances these days.
Technology is an enabler, but it can also be a stumbling block. We have
gotten to the point that if our technological systems do not work, we
cannot be productive. Yesterday when I sat down to work, we had some
major problems with our electricity, internet and office network. In the
end, irrespective of those challenges, we got done what we set out to do
that day. But it impacts other areas of life.
Technology can also be a distraction. Technology is wonderful, but we
can mindlessly give away much of our time to it. Do you know how
much time you spend on social media, watching online videos or
playing games per day? How does it add up per week, especially if you
take weekends into consideration? I deserve some entertainment, you
might be telling yourself. But are you consciously assigning time to it,
or are you mindlessly losing yourself in it? What else could you have

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spent that time on – your business, your loved ones, your spirituality or
knowing and developing yourself?
Looking at screens too much is also not good for your physical health.
Your posture is compromised by sitting at a desk typing for too long
periods or looking down at your phone in your hands all the time. Your
sleep is affected by the blue light that emits from most screens.
Technology is great. It has propelled my life and my businesses forward
momentously. We have endless possibilities in our day and age that
previous generations did not have all thanks to technology. But
technology is what you make of it. It can be a powerful tool in your
hand that brings you closer to your PowerGoal™, or it can keep you
from ever reaching it. Be conscious of what it is in your life, and make
the necessary adjustments to ensure that it is propelling you forward
instead of holding you back.

Workbook Q6.11: Is technology propelling you forward or

holding you back?

Body
The tenth environment is the body. This environment includes your
body, hair, nails, skin, health and, the most important part, your energy
levels.
Your physical energy depends on the nutrition that you give your body,
in other words, what you put into the body. It is therefore very important
that you look at what you eat. What is the energetic value of what you
eat and drink? Like with everything else, what you consume either adds
energy to you, or it takes energy from you. We put many things into our
bodies simply because it is part of our society and because it feels good.
But what feels good is not necessarily good for you.

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For many years now, I have not been consuming any sugar. It might be
a very drastic step for some people, but, for me, it was clear that sugar
does not add any substantial energy to my life, and it takes a lot from
me. So I stopped taking it completely.
I recently did an experiment and stopped drinking coffee too. I am not
a coffee connoisseur, so I do not drink my coffee very strong. But I like
to have a few cups a day. I heard that coffee’s effect on certain parts of
the brain can negatively influence certain meditation practices. Because
I am working on my meditation, I decided to test it. For a few weeks, I
gave up coffee completely. However, I did not experience any benefits
to my meditation, so I started drinking coffee again after a few weeks.
For you, giving up coffee might have many benefits. For me, it did not.
But I felt great knowing that coffee does not have any hold on me. I can
let it go if it serves me.
One of my mentoring students this past year decided to give up alcohol.
He was not an alcoholic, but he felt that all his social interactions were
always based around alcohol, and he wanted to change that. He
experienced a very positive effect on his physical body. Even though he
had been exercising regularly and eating well, he battled to lose about
10kg, which he felt would put him in a healthier bracket. When he gave
up alcohol, he lost that weight without even trying. He was very chuffed
with himself. The whole exercise gave him much more confidence in
his abilities, which had a very positive effect on his PowerGoal™ of
becoming financially free through property investment. After a while,
he started drinking alcohol again on occasion. But like me with sugar,
it was not hard for him to say no to alcohol knowing how much better
his body does without it.
I am not saying you should give up sugar, coffee or alcohol. I am saying
you should be aware of the effect of whatever you put into your body.

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You are not your body. Many people fixate on their body because they
find their identity in what their body looks like. Other people feel
trapped in a body that they do not like. Your body is not you. It is
something that you have. Therefore, you can design it.
The same applies to your brain. It is part of your body, and you can
design it. Many people think that they are their brains. They think so
because their brains and their bodies dictate what they feel and how they
react. They have given control over to their body, which includes the
brain. But you are not your brain, and you are not your body. It is an
environment. The real you is a spiritual being. You are energy. Your
brain and your body are physical manifestations of your spiritual
energy.
I go into more detail on the brain and the body and how they work in
Chapter 9. However, if you have ever meditated, or even just spent time
reflecting, you would have experienced what I am describing here. In
that state, you are on a spiritual plane. In that state of meditation or deep
reflection, you can observe your brain and your body. You can observe
that you are feeling and thinking certain things. You can feel certain
sensations in your body.
You are not those thoughts, feelings and sensations. You are spiritual
energy observing those things. Those things are manifestations of you,
and you can take up control and change them. You can control your
brain, and you can control your body. You can decide whether you are
going to eat a piece of cake or not. You are in control. You can also
choose whether you are going to feel sad or whether you are going to
feel happy. You are in control. Controlling your brain and your body is
a skill we do not often learn much about. Because it is a skill, you learn
it, and you become better at it. It is one of the reasons why I like to
meditate. It helps me to grow this skill.

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However you decide to do it, remember that you are in charge of your
body. And the good news about that is that you can design your body
the way you want it to be.

Workbook Q6.12: What body are you creating?

Where you are

Now that you know more about each of the environments, your
assignment is to apply this knowledge to your life. If you need to,
review the environments, and even memorise them. For your
transformational journey, you need to become aware of where you are.
The ten environments give you a framework to plot where you are at
the moment. It gives you a way to know where to start this
transformation.
You need to identify what is positive and what is negative in each
environment. You need to take responsibility for the fact that you are in
control of all of it and that you are able to change it. If you have not
done the exercises for each environment, go back and do them now.
The exercises ask you to identify changes and implement them. If you
are feeling overwhelmed by all of it, identify one to three environments
where change is needed the most or where change will have the biggest
impact on your PowerGoal™. You cannot neglect any of the
environments forever, or it will cost you in the long run. However, it
helps to focus on one to three of them at a time.
Go through the exercises of those three environments again. From the
exercises, choose one to three actions which will have the highest
impact on you and your PowerGoal™. They could all be from the same
environment or from three different environments. Some of them might
be once-off actions. Do them immediately. Once you have done them,

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identify one to three actions which you need to repeat to see the
necessary results. In other words, you need to create a new habit. As
you read the next chapter about Perfect Days, set up your own 91
Perfect Day Challenge around those habits. Do them each day for the
next 91 days. If you do it, your life will change.

Workbook Q6.13: Prioritise your actions.

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Chapter 7: Perfect Days
Now that you know about the ten environments of you and how to use
them to identify where you are, you need to know how to translate that
into action. It is no use knowing something is bad and that you need to
change it but not doing it. For most things in life, it is not enough to do
something once either. You must do it over and over again.
You can’t view one property and the next day have a property portfolio
that is worth millions. You can’t exercise for one day and have six-pack
abs the next day. You need to keep on doing those things, stack other
actions on top of those things and keep on doing those until you get to
your goal.
That is what this chapter is about. Once you know where you are, you
need to take certain steps to move forward. This chapter shows you a
step-by-step process of how to do the right behaviours and turn them
into habits. It is about action and accountability. This chapter is about
the nitty-gritty stuff that you need to do every day.
Some of you are doers. You are getting excited now. You love to-do
lists. You love action. You can’t wait to start with this chapter. You
probably got started even before you got to this chapter. That is great,
but I want to remind you that behaviours and habits are only one of the
five levels of transformation. Doers can get lost in doing a lot, but doing
the wrong things for the wrong reasons. You end up doing a lot but
never getting to your PowerGoal™. So don’t neglect any of the other
steps because you are only doing.
There are some of you who are dreamers. You are the thinkers, the
reflectors and some of you are perfectionists too. You do not want to
read this chapter. To-do lists do not work for you. You have maybe
beaten yourself up in the past because you know you should be doing
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all of these things, but you get overwhelmed. You freeze. You get stuck
in analysis-paralysis. Do not worry. This book is not about productivity
or efficiency. It is not about getting more and more done. It is about
getting results. Doing nothing will never get you results. Getting results
is about doing the right things, and only the right things. And you know
best what those things are. You know it already – you don’t even have
to spend a lot of time to figure it out.
I make it very simple for anyone to succeed. As I like to say, this is your
game, so set it up so that you can win. It starts with the smallest of
victories every day, and before you know it, you cannot believe what
you are doing. Let me show you how you can make every day a perfect
day, right until you reach your PowerGoal™.

The story behind perfect days

I came up with the idea of having perfect days when I was an insurance
salesman in the 1980s. Being an insurance salesman at that time was
one of the easiest jobs you could start doing. You did not need any
qualifications, and you did not need any experience. The snag was that
you did not earn a salary either. You only earned commission on what
you sold.
At that time in my life, I had tried and failed at many other jobs. But I
had had an epiphany when I read Og Mandino’s little book. I was not
going to fail again. I was also motivated by the fact that if I did not sell,
I would not make any money. So I applied myself to figuring out what
I needed to do to succeed at this game.
Even though it was very easy to become an insurance salesman at the
time, it was very hard to become a good one. Very few people made a
lot of money, and very few lasted more than a few years in the

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profession. I had many examples of failures, but not so many of
successes.
One reason it is easy to fail as an insurance salesman is because you can
be terribly busy but not have any results to show for it. I guess it is like
that with most things in life, but the problem with being an insurance
salesman is if you do not have results, you do not get money. I wanted
the money, so I needed the results. To do that, I needed to figure out
what gave me results and what not.
I discovered that it is very simple. I need to get leads, that is, contacts
of people who might be interested in buying insurance. Then I needed
to contact those leads to make appointments with them, turning them
into prospects. I needed to see those prospects and pitch my products to
them. If they bought my products, I needed to make sure that their
paperwork got done and submitted.
In essence, those were the important things I needed to do to get sales.
I needed to get all of those steps done. I could not only see prospects all
day because then I would run out of them. I could not only get leads and
never make appointments because then I would not sell.
It was very simple, as you can see. The more I could do of all of those
activities, the more products I sold. Even if one person did not buy my
product, if I went to see another ten prospects, my chances of a sale
increased.
My problem was that I did not like to use a telephone. I liked talking to
people in person, but I did not like to pick up the telephone to speak to
them. I knew it was not a good use of my time or money to drive to
people’s homes to ask them for appointments. I needed to pick up the
telephone to make appointments. But I always found an excuse not to

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do it. I realised I needed to make a plan. So I decided to play a little
game with myself.

Design your own game

I made up a game that I played at work every day that motivated me to
do enough of the right things to get to my results. It started with the
telephone calls that I hated to make. I worked out a points system where
I assigned a certain number of points for each activity that I had to do.
If I reached, for example, ten or twenty points for the day, it was a
successful day, what I called a perfect day.
Most people would think that I would need to do all of the things –
generate leads, make appointments, have meetings, make sales and do
the paperwork – to have a successful day.
Others, especially salespeople, think that they need to make a sale to
have a perfect day. They do not see the days on which they do
paperwork or generate leads as successful days.
I realised that those ideas are wrong. As long as I do enough of all of
those activities consistently, I would have great success.
I set up the game with my weaknesses in mind. Remember, I did not
like to use the telephone. I gave a disproportionate amount of points to
myself if I made telephone calls. For example, I always got discouraged
if I finally motivated myself to make a call, and the person did not
answer. So I decided I would give myself one point for making a call,
even if no one answered. If I made a call and gave my pitch, I got two
points, one for making the call and one for making the pitch. If I made
a call and it ended in an appointment, I got three points, one for making
the call, one for the pitch and one for the appointment. I was
incentivising myself to get to the outcome that I wanted, but I also made
it possible to have success if I did not get that outcome.

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Sure, I could improve my pitch to get more appointments, but
sometimes the person simply was not interested. I did not have control
over that person’s response, only over myself. If I happened to get ten
people in a row who were dead set against meeting with an insurance
salesman, I would get discouraged.
I found out that my feelings of confidence and discouragement had huge
effects on my results. I realised that I had to design my game so that I
do not get discouraged. If, for example, I needed ten points to have a
perfect day, I could make ten phone calls and, even if no one answered,
I would have a successful day. Designing my game like that kept me
motivated. It kept me in the habit of taking action, even if it was only
small actions. All those actions over time culminated into big results. I
built up confidence, and I built up momentum.

Play to win
I always tell my students that it is their game and that they must play to
win.
To play to win, however, you must know that you can win. It is good to
have a big, audacious goal to inspire you, but you can stretch yourself
to the point of breaking. That is why your PowerGoal™ should be the
big, audacious goal that inspires you, but, daily, you need to know that
you can succeed every single day.
I see many people make this mistake. They set so-called realistic goals
of what they want to achieve in a year or five years or ten years, but
they place impossible demands on themselves in terms of what they
want to do every day and every week. Placing unrealistic or
unsustainable demands on yourself daily is a sure way to get to failure.
If you do not get to everything on your to-do list each day or even on
most days, you will start thinking of yourself as someone who does not

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get things done and who does not reach their goals. You will become
demotivated. You will lose momentum. You will lose motivation, and
your dream will fizzle away because of your feeling that you can never
reach it.
Instead, do the opposite. At first, decide on the smallest, easiest, least
amount of things that you can do every day that will move you towards
your PowerGoal™. That is why I ask myself what the most important
thing that I can do today to reach my PowerGoal™ is. Even if I only
did that one thing, it would be a successful day. Start with that one thing
and build up from there. As your confidence grows, you can add more
to the list. What was hard before has now become easy, so you add
something else to the list. What was easy has now become a habit.
For example, not eating sugar or exercising are things which I have been
doing so long that they are habits. I do them almost without thinking,
like most people brush their teeth. They are part of my daily routine.
But for you, doing only one of those things might be major. So start
with only one, and break it into the smallest, easiest task possible. If
you were playing my game of points, perhaps you would give yourself
a point for a whole day of not buying anything with sugar in it. Or
maybe you would get a point for taking the stairs instead of the elevator.
As you gain confidence and success, you ramp it up.
The important thing is to move forward every day in whatever way
makes sense for you and your PowerGoal™.

Track yourself
It is very important to do things and to keep on moving, but you want
to make sure that you move in the right direction. I therefore started
tracking myself. I tracked two things – the actions I took and the results
I got.

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I broke the actions that I had to take down into the smallest possible
components, as I explained to you. I got points for doing them, so I
needed to keep record of what I did. I kept a simple log of all the things
I had to do and the days of each week, and I would tick off or write in
how many I did.
These days, I use a simple Excel spreadsheet. Some people like to use
pen and paper, for example, in their journal. Do what is easiest for you.
Do not make it overcomplicated. But whatever you do, track what you
do.
The other thing that I realised I need to track is the result. For me in that
context, it was the number of sales and the value of those sales. By
tracking both input and results, I could start picking up trends. For
example, I saw that there were certain ratios that I had to adhere to. For
example, every hundred leads would generally turn into ten prospects
resulting in one sale. Therefore, increasing my leads and prospects
increased my sales.
But I also asked myself how I could increase those ratios. I would try
different things and see what their results are. With half of my leads, I
would use one type of pitch to get an appointment, and with the other,
I would use another type of pitch. Tracking my input and results
allowed me to finetune my process to get better results. Tracking kept
me accountable, kept me moving in the right direction and enabled me
to improve my process to get better results faster.
I was doing all of these things, but I was taking time to observe myself
too. Many times people get so busy doing many things that they do not
allow themselves time to observe whether their actions are moving
them in the right direction. Tracking yourself forces you to make time
to evaluate whether you are doing the right things in the right quantities
to move towards your goal.

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But, Hannes, you might say, it is easy to track sales. My goal is not so
easy to measure.
Yes, certain things are easier to measure than others, like sales and
financial goals. In some cases, you might be able to convert your other
goal into a financial goal. However, in most if not all cases, it is possible
to find some metric which gives you an accurate enough indication of
how you are progressing towards your goal. And it is always possible
to break down what is required to get there into daily actions.
For example, many people want to lose weight. They exercise and eat
healthily. They are doing things, but very few people track what they
are doing. I like to wear a smartwatch so that I have a record of how
long I kept my heart rate above a certain level. Using this method, I now
know if I keep my heart rate on average above 130 beats per minute for
more than 30 minutes a day, I get the results I want.
Research has made it clear that calories consumed have a much bigger
impact on weight loss than how much exercise you do. Diet accounts
for roughly 80% of weight loss and exercise only for 20%. Yet very few
people who want to lose weight keep a food log to track their intake. If
you want to lose weight, but your exercise and healthy eating are not
getting you the results you want, the best way to get better results is to
follow the same type of tracking system I used as an insurance
salesman.
Here is another example: many people want to improve their
relationships. For example, let us say you want to improve your
marriage. It is very difficult to measure, right? Well, actually, some
excellent research has been done that defines what a happy marriage is
and what actions have the highest likelihood of ensuring that your
marriage is happy. Dr John Gottman’s extensive research led to six
predictors of divorce with a 93.6% accuracy rate. The biggest predictor

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of divorce was found to be contempt for your partner. He also found an
antidote – showing fondness and admiration. If you know that contempt
has snuck into your marriage, you can measure the number of acts of
fondness and admiration you do a day to improve it.
One of my students wanted to track the state of her marriage. They were
happily married, but they were going through a lot of change which put
pressure on their marriage. Her PowerGoal™ was very closely tied to
her marriage, so she knew she had to measure the state of her marriage
and how her actions influenced it. At the end of every day, she gave her
marriage a rating out of ten. It was a subjective rating, but it was the
right metric for her because the state of your marriage is tied to how
you feel about it. She identified various things she could do or not do
that would improve it. One of the things she found had a positive impact
on her marriage was to prioritise spending some time by herself
journaling. Reflecting on her own life gave her perspective and made
her experience her marriage more positively. Another thing that had a
positive impact was doing a gratitude exercise with her husband before
bed.
One of my favourite mottos is velle est posse, which is Latin for to be
willing is to be able. We know this saying as where there’s a will,
there’s a way. If you have a will to achieve your PowerGoal™, you will
find a way. Tracking yourself makes finding the way much quicker and
easier. It allows you to eliminate the things which are not moving your
forward and to focus on the ones that are. If you have a will to achieve
your PowerGoal™, whatever it may be, you can find a way to track it
too.

Enjoying success
It is important to have success, and it is important to celebrate success.

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As I built momentum with my game as insurance salesman, I started
seeing results. I did not dread picking up the phone as much anymore.
At least I got a point for it. I got more and more leads, appointments
and sales. It felt good. Success feels good.
As you experience success, you can and should raise the standard for
yourself. I started with having to get ten points a day, but later I raised
it to fifteen and later to twenty points.
You also need to know when to stop chasing success and when to enjoy
it. As I hit my targets day in and day out, there were weeks when I
achieved my entire target for the week well before Friday. It made me
wonder – could I achieve the same results that others do in five days in
four days a week or less? At the time, I was achieving way more than
what most other insurance salesmen do. I wanted to raise the bar for
myself, but not in terms of outcome, in terms of time.
As I improved, I found it was completely possible. If I did what I knew
I could do every day, I could achieve my weekly targets by Thursday. I
designed my own game, I played it to win, and I enjoyed the success of
my labour. From then on, I only worked four days a week. I had a whole
extra day each week to spend on whatever I wanted. I could spend more
time with my family. I could work on improving myself. I could start
new businesses. I could do whatever I wanted to.
It is very important to define what success is for you. Yes, success is
the progressive realisation of a worthy goal, but what is that goal for
you? If you are chasing financial freedom but what you actually want
is time freedom, maybe you can have that time freedom with much less
money than you think. Many property investors are proud of the size of
their portfolio. It is so many millions, they will tell you proudly. I do
not teach my property students to build big portfolios. I teach them how
to build a portfolio that will give them financial freedom. The number

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is different for every person. The time it will take them to get there is
different for each person. What is important is that you know what your
number is, or what the goal is that defines success for you.
In 1995, I was at the top of my game. I was in the Top Of The Table for
the financial industry globally. I could have kept on going. I could have
pushed myself to pursue the next thing. But I knew that I had reached
my goal. I could use my surplus for that year and the profit from selling
some of my properties to pay off the rest of my portfolio to become
financially free. I was 37 years old. I did it, and it was one of the best
things I ever did.
My children were still young at that stage. I had the prime of my life
ahead of me. I could spend those precious years with my children,
travelling the world. Seven years later, I could start the first of a long
line of businesses where I teach others what I did.
It is important to play the game, but it is even more important to know
when you have won.

Stacking up success cycles

I have shown you many tools already that you can use to keep you doing
the right things to get to your PowerGoal™. But there is one more
which will give you the framework in which to slot all the rest. It is
using 91-day cycles. I have already mentioned the 91 Perfect Day
Challenge briefly. It is a course which I developed for my students, but
my team and I also follow it daily.
The principle behind the 91 Perfect Day Challenge is based on what I
have been sharing in this chapter. You break up your PowerGoal™ into
the smallest daily actions, and you ensure that you do them,
consistently, for 91 days. You end up with perfect days, perfect weeks

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and perfect months until you get to 91 consecutive perfect days to
complete the challenge.
Why 91 days? you may wonder.
A PowerGoal™ usually takes three to five years to achieve. Some
PowerGoals™ may be a year, but if it is truly a 10/10 for difficulty, it
will not be something which you achieve overnight. But three to five
years are too far into the future to work with today. You need to break
that PowerGoal™ into chunks which you can handle. You need to have
something tangible and measurable to work towards now. Your
PowerGoal™ is your dream come true, and it is very inspiring. But most
people feel overwhelmed when they think about how to reach it. In fact,
if it is truly a PowerGoal™, you should feel overwhelmed. It should be
bigger than you.
But a feeling of overwhelm does not get you moving. It paralyses you.
So after you set your PowerGoal™ and reverse-engineered the five
levels of transformation, you come right back to the here and now –
level one. What is the most important thing you can do right now to
reach your PowerGoal™?
As helpful as that question is, if you measure your progress against your
PowerGoal™, it will feel as if you are not making any progress, even
though you might be making incredible progress compared to where
you were yesterday. For this reason, it is helpful to work towards your
PowerGoal™ using shorter timeframes. I have found 91-day cycles to
be the best. It is long enough for you to achieve substantial results. It is
also long enough for you to learn a new skill or two and cement them
into habits. But a 91-day cycle is not so long that it allows you to
become complacent. A year is too long. Six months also give you too
much rope. You need to be working on a tight timeframe to stay focused
and motivated. Completing four rounds of 91 days gives you 364 days

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with one day to spare for that year (two if it is a leap year.) It keeps you
focused, round after round, until you reach your PowerGoal™.
It also forces you to switch focus often enough. During one 91-day
cycle, you might focus on building your business prototype and making
your first sales. In the next 91-day cycle, you focus on scaling that
business through marketing. Instead of trying to focus on everything at
the same time, you focus on one important thing, get it done and move
to the next thing.
You do not need to plan all your 91-day cycles for the year at one go.
You do not even need to plan your days or your weeks ahead of time.
As you take action, new things come to your attention. You can focus
on the right thing for that moment by taking it day by day. Your focus
for your next 91-day cycle is probably going to be very different than
what you thought it was going to be at the start of your current 91-day
cycle.
Breaking it up into smaller, manageable chunks allows you to achieve
success in the here in now while staying aligned with your
PowerGoal™. Day by day and cycle by cycle, you are stacking up your
success to get there.

Trigger success
Success breeds success, so when it comes to your actions and
behaviours, you want to trigger and sustain patterns of success.
One trick that I have is to change up the way I do some of my regular
activities to remind me of my goals. I am right-handed, but I shave and
brush my teeth with my left hand. Because I have to pay attention to do
those things with my left hand, I need to do those activities consciously.
When I do them consciously, I remind myself of my goals. It reinforces
the meaning that I attach to it. You can build such triggers into your

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own life. Set up reminders and reinforcements of your goal and the
person you are becoming in as many places and as often as possible.
One of my students set five alarms on his phone during the day to
remind him of the person he is becoming.
How you start your day is especially important. For many years, I have
been waking up at around 3 am. It is the best part of my day. I meditate,
I exercise, I do my most important and creative work. By the time I take
Tanja her coffee at 8 am, I usually already have completed my perfect
day. Maybe 3 am is not the best time for you to rise, but many people
find benefit in dedicating the first part of their day to what is most
important. It triggers success for the rest of their day.
I have been talking about success a lot, and in case you might get the
wrong impression, I want to remind you of the definition of success. It
is the progressive realisation of a worthy goal. Many people frame an
unwanted outcome as failure. It is not. I do not even use the word failure
to refer to it. I call it negative feedback. If you do something and you
get the outcome you expected, it is positive feedback. If you do not get
the outcome you expected, it is negative feedback. It is not about good
or bad. It just is.
Negative feedback is often much more useful than positive feedback.
Negative feedback allows you to learn and to grow. The changes that
you make after negative feedback can give you much greater results
than what you would have had if you got the outcome you expected. Be
careful of defining negative feedback as failure. Sure, the scale might
show that you weigh a bit heavier instead of weighing lighter, but that
does not mean failure – as long as you learn from it, adjust your actions
and keep on going. Such negative feedback is what will lead you to your
goal, if you allow it to. It is part of the progressive realisation of your
worthy goal, so it is part of success.

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Workbook Q7.1: Create your own 91 Perfect Day Challenge.
Do the exercises in the PowerGoal™ Workbook.

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136
 SECTION 3:
THE SCIENCE BEHIND
GOALS

A note about the PowerGoal™ Workbook:

This section discusses a large amount of information which inform all
the practical steps we have covered so far. All of it is actionable, but not
necessarily in a step-by-step way like the workbook has prompted you
to do so far.
For the next three chapters, I suggest that you keep your workbook open
and write down any insights you might have. As you have learnt to do,
immediately ask yourself how you can action that insight – phrase it as
an action, give it a deadline and mark it off when you are done.
At the end of each chapter or part of a chapter, there will be prompts to
remind you to reflect in your workbook. However, please do not wait
for those prompts.

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Chapter 8: The Formula for Success
Back in 2005, I wrote my first book called The Formula for Riches. The
book is based on my PhD study of wealth. As part of my PhD, I
developed a formula called The Formula for Riches. My studies and
much of my work has been focused on financial wealth. But wealth and
riches do not only refer to money, as I have explained already. They
refer to well-being, and they apply to all areas of life. Another name for
this formula is therefore The Formula for Success. It is a formula which
applies to having well-being in all areas of life.
I have written an entire book on this formula, but the book you are
reading now will not be complete if I do not touch on it again. The
formula explains the Wealth Creators Strategy™, and as I explained
already, this strategy is the only blueprint that will get you to your
PowerGoal™.

The Wealth Creators Strategy™

I have mentioned the Wealth Creators Strategy™ before but let us
review it again using all the concepts this book has covered so far. The
Wealth Creators Strategy™ is:
the intelligent use of limited resources to get from where you
are to where you want to be in the shortest amount of time with
the least amount of risk
Intelligent means that you have to think for yourself. You cannot simply
believe what people say. You have to look at what they do and the
results that they are getting and weigh up whether their way will get you
to where you want to be.
Secondly, you have to use your limited resources. Use means that you
have to take action. Limited resources refer to what you have available
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to you right now – your time, your skills, your money, your
relationships, your spirituality, whatever is in your environments at the
moment. Where you are also refers to your environments. You need to
take into account where you are at the moment. Not where you think
you are or where you want to be, but where you are. Being honest with
yourself about where you are allows you to take effective action. This
strategy depends entirely on your point of view. Where are you now?
Where do you want to be? Your PowerGoal™ must be a clear target as
much as you need to have clarity on where you are now.
The strategy is about finding the shortest way. The shortest way is also
relative. What is the shortest way for one person will not be the shortest
way for another. It depends on the skills and the capabilities that you
have, your set of limited resources at any point in time. For me, building
a property portfolio is a very short way to financial goals, because I
have done it many times over. For Bill Gates, however, the shorter way
is to roll out a new Microsoft product. For Warren Buffet, it is to acquire
a company. For you, it will be unique to where you are now.
As you grow your skills and capabilities, the shortest way can become
shorter. That is why you should not set your strategy right at the
beginning based on the person that you are at that point in time. You
will grow and evolve. You will find new and better ways to get to where
you want to be as you go – as long as you keep on growing and
transforming. Your PowerGoal™ is a transformational goal, after all.
I have skills in building a property portfolio in South Africa. But my
transformational goal as I am writing this book is about building a
cryptocurrency portfolio so that my wealth is not tied to any country. It
means that I have to learn new skills and capabilities. When Bill and
Melinda Gates decided to start a non-profit foundation, they only knew
about running a for-profit company. But they could not cure diseases or

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feed people only by developing and selling new Microsoft products.
They had to learn new skills and capabilities. The same is true for you.
Lastly, you want to operate with the least amount of risk. Risk refers to
the possibility that you can lose all your progress thus far because of
things that are beyond your control. Risk is in the eye of the beholder.
If you think about it, the only real risk is the financial risk of losing your
capital. Everything else is simply a learning experience if you choose
to treat it like that. If you learn from the negative feedback that you are
receiving, you can use that learning to move forward much faster than
ever before.
Learning new skills and growing your capabilities are some of the best
ways to lower risk. With more skill and capability, you can take control
of things that you were not able to before. If I invest in cryptocurrencies
without knowing anything about them, my risk is much higher than if I
invest in it knowing much more. My knowledge gives me insight into
when to buy and when to sell. I learn how to read white papers. I learn
how to analyse the value of each crypto in which I invest. It all lowers
my risk.
Another way to lower my risk is to invest the smallest amount possible
to get to my goal. You do not start a romantic relationship by meeting
a person and marrying him or her straight away. That is investing
everything that you have. You start by investing in one coffee date. If
that goes well, you see returns. You reinvest the returns by eating a meal
together. Eventually, you end up like me, happily married to the same
person for more than 37 years. But it all started with a small initial
investment that I grew over time.
Applying all of these aspects together means that you are following the
Wealth Creators Strategy™.

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The science
When I did my PhD, I challenged myself to turn the Wealth Creators
Strategy™ into a formula. A strategy gives you some wiggle room. A
formula must be much more precise. A formula means that if you do
certain things in a certain way, you will always get a certain outcome.
It is predictable. If I do not get the result the formula predicts, it means
that I am breaking the formula. If I am following the formula, I will get
the results.
This predictability allows me to learn from negative feedback and to
scale when I receive positive feedback. It also allows me to improve my
results. For example, if I get on the scale and I have lost 2 pounds, or
1kg, and I know what I’ve done, I can replicate it to get the same results.
But when I lose weight and I do not know what I have done to get that
outcome, I cannot determine what the formula is that I can follow to
keep on getting those results. If you can get predictable by doing the
right things in the right order for the level of the game that you are at,
you are going to be successful.
Many people do not like the science. They do not want things to be
exact because it means that they are being held accountable. They prefer
it to be airy-fairy. I am the first one to embrace things that science has
not yet been able to prove. I am willing to be the guinea pig to test the
airy-fairy things. For example, many people see spirituality as airy-
fairy. It is not science. But the great thing is that science is starting to
prove many things which before we only understood in an airy-fairy
way through our spiritual practices. So it is not that those things have
no scientific grounding. It is just that we have not yet discovered what
it is.

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Science also underpins art. You can turn science into an art the moment
that the science has become part of you so much that you can apply it
without even thinking about it. In goal setting, you get to the level of
art the moment that you can manifest whatever you want in a very short
time. But to get there takes practice. Knowing the science helps you to
apply the right things in the right order much better so that you can get
to the point of turning science into art.
The Formula for Success takes the principles of goal setting and puts it
into exact scientific terms.

The formula
In essence, the formula is very simple. It says that what you focus on is
what you are going to get. The formula also works in reverse. In other
words, what I have is what I have been focussing on. Your life right
here and now is a perfect reflection of your past beliefs, thoughts and
actions. You know that already from what we have covered in this book
so far. The formula takes that core principle and gives you more insight
into where you are going wrong and what you need to do to get the
results that you want.
The Formula for Success is:
= (S x (G/R)Re)
It looks complicated but let me explain each symbol to show you how
it all fits together very logically.

Intent
The first symbol, , is the symbol for intent.
When I did my PhD, I had to come up with a symbol for intent. Because
everything is energy, as you have learnt as part of the ten environments,
and energy moves in waves, I decided to use a sine wave. I turned the
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sine wave right side up so that it looks something like an S with a line
down the middle.
The shape of this symbol has a specific meaning. If you were to flip the
bottom part over to the top, it would make a full circle. In other words,
the upright sine wave is the intent to get to the result, which is the full
circle. The possibility is there, but it requires movement to get there.
The symbol for intent has three points where the wave touches the
straight line. These points each have a specific meaning. The point at
the bottom where the wave touches the line relates to who I am. The
second point in the middle is where I am. At what level of the game am
I at. The point at the top is where I want to be, in other words, my goal.
To get to my goal, in other words, to close this circle, I need to move
who I am, the point at the bottom, to where I want to be, the point at the
top, which is my goal. I need to transform who I am currently, my
identity, to a higher identity. I have to evolve. I must focus on becoming
the person that has what I want.
Intent equals focus. Expressed as a formula, it is:

We often bluff ourselves. We tell ourselves that we want something,

but we are not serious. Your goal, in truth, is not that important to you.
The desirability is not truly a 10/10. You are not willing to put in the
time and the effort to get to it. You can test your intent by checking your
focus. Remember, simply put, the formula says that you get what you
focus on. It is important to know the details of the formula to pinpoint
where the problem is. However, in the end, it all comes down to your
results.
You need to have a very clear intent to get you to your goal. You must
be convinced that it is what you want and that you are prepared to do

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whatever it takes to get it. You must be serious and committed. Because
you can be sure that your intent will be tested. The universe is working
in perfect synchronisation to check if you are serious. It will give you
what you focus on because that is how life works. So you want to ensure
that you get this part right.

Belief systems
Next is the equal sign. The equal sign is the pivotal point. It refers to
your belief systems. If my belief systems clash or are out of
synchronisation with my intent, that equal sign falls away, and nothing
can happen. Your intent does not translate into action.
Your deeply-held subconscious beliefs will always trump the goals that
you consciously set if they are in conflict. That is why we say that you
subconsciously sabotage yourself. The converse is also true, however.
If your deeply-held beliefs are in line with your intent, you will see
powerful results. If you are clear on why you want to achieve your goal
and why you are prepared to put in the time and effort and to change
your mindsets to get to your goal, you will get there. Your pivotal point
is balanced.
As much as your current reality depends on your intent and your focus,
it also hinges on your belief systems. All your environments are a
reflection of your belief systems. Your belief systems translated your
intent into behaviours that produced those results.
If you want different results, it not only means that you have to change
your intent and thus your focus, you must also ensure that your belief
systems are aligned with that intent to get to the results that you want.

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Surplus
The next symbol is the S, which stand for your surplus. Once you know
what you want, where you are and who you need to be, and if your
belief systems are aligned with that, you are ready to take action. But
what do you take action on?
You take action on your surplus. Your surplus comes from your
environments. It is the things that you already have. Your first step is
dependent on where you are now and what you can use at that point. In
the Wealth Creators Strategy™, your surplus is called your limited
resources – those things you have at your disposal in your environments
at the moment. You tap into your memetics, which is your belief
systems, value systems and thinking. You tap into your spiritual energy.
You tap into your relationships and networks. You tap into your
financial resources and structures. You tap into yourself. You tap into
your body’s strength and resilience. You use everything to your
availability.
In scientific terms, I express these resources at your disposal as TEM$.
So,
S = TEM$
TEMS simply stands for your limited resources of time, effort, mindsets
and currency. I can use one, several or all these limited resources to get
going. Each of these resources can move you forward or hold you back.
However, you can compensate for a lack in one by using more of
another. One person might have a lot of time (T) but not make as much
effort (E) in the time that they have. Another might not have much time
but apply much more effort. Your mindsets (M) can be limiting you or
enabling you to see opportunities where others see none.

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Your currency ($) can be hard or soft. Hard currency is money. Soft
currency is your skills, know-how, capacity and capabilities. Even if
you do not have any money, you can use your soft currency to create
something out of nothing. You can turn your soft currency into hard
currency, for example, by selling your services, or you can leverage
your soft currency straight towards your goal. On the other hand, if you
do not yet have soft currency, you can use your hard currency to source
the necessary skills or to learn new skills. The important part is that you
must identify some form of surplus on which to take action. If you do
not have a surplus, as a wealth creator, you should create it.
When I teach my students how to start a new business without any
money, they cannot use hard currency to do so. They have to find
another form of surplus. I challenge them: why don’t they give up a few
hours of television a week to create a surplus of time. The same applies
to everything else. If you cannot create the time to exercise, for
example, you will not be able to have that six-pack. Once you have a
surplus, you can work on it and grow it.
I started my challenge on 15 April 2019 with only a dollar surplus. I
added my time, effort, mindsets and soft currencies and turned it into a
$70,000 cryptocurrency portfolio in less than a year. Unless you have a
surplus, you cannot start. And the great things is, we all have a surplus.
We must just look for it and convert it into something more or better.

Action
The multiplication sign that comes next is the action we need to take on
the surplus we have created. You can have all the intent and be focused,
your belief systems can be aligned, and you can have a surplus without
seeing any results. If you do not take action, nothing will happen.
However, because we are working with a formula, if you take action

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and you do not see results, you can examine the rest of the formula to
see where you went wrong.
I can take massive, massive action and achieve absolutely nothing
because I have wrong belief systems. For example, if I believe that I am
going to become rich by using retirement annuities, but I only have ten
years left, and I only have a 100 dollars to invest a month, I will not get
there. Even at a great growth rate of 20%, it will never put me in a
position to be financially free. That is why the Wealth Creators
Strategy™ speaks about the intelligent use of limited resources. You
cannot simply use your resources; you must do so intelligently.
I always tell my students that they must do the calculation. If you do the
calculation for the retirement annuity example above, you will see that
it will not give you the results that you want. So take intelligent action.
I have coined the term confokulation™, which is a state of mind when
we do not know what we are supposed to know. The majority of people
set goals in a state of confokulation™. Know what you are doing so that
you can do it intelligently. That is why we are using a formula: if you
do certain things in a certain way, you will always get the same
outcome. Take the right actions that will give you your desired results.
If you do not get the desired results, change until you do.

Leverage
The next two symbols in the formula, G/R, are growth over risk. It refers
to your leverage. You leverage your results by increasing your growth
and lowering your risk.
The words growth and risk are most often used in the financial sense. I
chose them because I originally only applied the Formula for Success
in a financial sense. However, the principles of growth and risk apply
to all of life and therefore any goal you might set. Growth refers to your

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progress and risk to your control. If you make more progress quicker,
you will get to your result quicker. If you gain more control over your
outcome, you increase the likelihood that you will get there.
Let me explain growth and risk using your skill levels as an example.
As you will remember, your skills are part of your surplus. It is part of
the soft currency in the $ in TEM$. The same principle that I explain
below therefore applies to any of the other elements in your surplus –
time, effort, mindsets and hard currency, or money.
If you have absolutely zero skills, you will not see any results and
therefore no progress, or growth. You need to start with something
which you have some skill at, even the lowest level of skill. You can
then grow it from there. Remember, we start with where we are at. As
you increase your skill levels, your growth increases. Because you
know what you are doing, you see better results. Based on that outcome,
you can improve your skills, and also improve your results. Your
growth increases. The principle applies to finances, but also to
relationships, health, personal development or any other area of life.
Increased skills also help you to take control over more things to offset
your risk. The things that are outside of your control are your risk
factors. They are the things which can set you back or cause you not to
reach your goal at all. One of the criteria of a PowerGoal™ is that the
final outcome must be within your control. That criteria lowers your
risk of things happening that can wipe out all the results you have seen
so far or set you back considerably. We can never get rid of all the
uncertainties or things outside of our control. But we can bring more
things in our control to lower the risk. Again, this principle applies not
only to finances but also to all the other areas of life. In all areas of life,
there are things outside of our control. The more we take control of the
things we can, the lower the impact of the things outside our control.

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Growth over risk helps you identify which new skills you need to
master. Which new skills will give you increase growth? If you have a
business, maybe you need to learn more about marketing or about
working with other people. If you are in a relationship, you might want
to grow in your ability to say encouraging things to your partner. You
can also identify which skills will help offset your risk the best. Maybe
you need to learn more about contracts in business or choosing your
customers. In a marriage, if you identify any of Dr John Gottman’s
markers of divorce that I mentioned previously in your relationship, you
might want to learn more about the actions which he found mitigates
those risks.
The measures of growth and risk will differ depending on your
PowerGoal™. It is your responsibility to find out what the best ones are
for the level of the game where you are at. The area of life that your
PowerGoal™ focuses on gives you a good indication of where to start
finding measures. I have mentioned Dr Gottman’s research – if your
PowerGoal™ relates to marriage or romantic relationships, his research
might be a good place to start.
If your PowerGoal™ is financial, I strongly suggest that you read my
book The Formula for Riches. Based on my years in the financial
industry, my research and my own wealth creation journey as well as
those of my clients and students over the years, I go into great depth on
how to measure financial growth and risk as well as how to increase
your growth and lower your risk. For example, I recommend the
internal rate of return (IRR) as the most comparable measure of
financial growth over all asset classes. If you do not know what an IRR
is, how to calculate it and how to use it correctly, I recommend the book.
I also explain why lowering your risk increases your growth, a truth that
goes against conventional business and financial wisdom.

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Responsibility
The superscript Re refers to your responsibility to manage the growth
and the risk. You increase your results exponentially according to the
level of responsibility you take. The only way to measure your level of
responsibility is against your results. You must take responsibility for
whatever results you are getting, learn from it, adapt and keep on acting
to get the results you are after.
If the results are positive, you can continue and accelerate it.
Accelerating your results will move you to the next level, which I call
the accelerator principle. Remember the concept called kaizen? It
means constant and never-ending improvement. When you get positive
results, you kaizen the process to get to the next level faster, with fewer
resources and action, increasing your effectiveness.
However, what if the result is not what you want? Such negative
feedback is also great news because it allows you to change what is not
working and to grow. You can work through the rest of the formula to
see what is wrong. Could it be your intent and focus, or your belief
systems? Maybe you are not optimising your limited resources. Maybe
you are not taking big enough action, or you need to work on your skills
to increase your growth or decrease your risk.
Whether your results are positive or negative, the important part is that
you take responsibility to either accelerate positive results or to change
negative results. Remember, you are in control. You are the
programmer, the creator, the designer of your own life.

Closing the circle

Consistenly applying this formula will produce results. You will close
the circle of the sine wave of your intent. Your intent will start

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becoming your reality as you become that person who can do the things
to have what you want. When you have closed that circle and you are
that person, the Formula for Success is complete. You have put yourself
in the next identity – there where you want to be.
If you understand this whole process, you see why it is so simple. You
get what you focus on. And the best way to get what you want, which
ultimately is to close that circle of intent, is to focus on being the person
who can have what you want. That is why the key to achieving your
PowerGoals™ is your transformational journey.

Workbook Q8.1: Reflect on and write down the insights you

had during this chapter.

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Chapter 9: The Brain and the Body
Now that you understand the scientific formula that underpins
PowerGoals™, let us look a bit more at the science of how your brain
and body works and how it impacts your transformational journey. In
other words, how does the transformation to become the person that you
should be to reach your goal work in your physical body?
Let me start by saying that I am not an expert on the brain or the body.
I completed my MSc in economics and my PhD in entrepreneurship.
However, through my experience, in my own life and those of my
students, I saw that the things which I write about in this book work. I
can even express it in a formula. I know that these are not just my ideas.
Science backs me up. Along the line, I became curious about how it all
plays out in the brain and the body. I knew my thinking is important,
and my feelings and emotions two. Those things happen in my brain,
and they have effects in the rest of my body too. So I did some research.
What I found was fascinating. What I share in this chapter is how I have
figured it out for myself. Most likely, you are not a brain expert or a
physiologist, so I am sure that you are going to find this information
very helpful. If anything seems odd to you or it does not line up with
how you thought our brains and our bodies work, you can check the
facts for yourself. There is fantastic research happening as I am writing
this book that is opening whole new worlds to how we understand
ourselves.
I am sure you will love how everything comes together in this chapter.

The brain as a computer

Before I dive in, let me explain my analogy of the brain as a computer
to you. For us who are not neuroscientists, it is a very helpful framework

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to think of things. When we talk about the physical organ in our bodies
which we call the brain, we can think of it as the hardware. Like a
computer that has a motherboard, a memory card, random-access
memory and many other components, your brain also has many
physical parts which function together to make up the brain. It is easy
for us to name the different parts of a computer because we as humans
made it. We did not make our brains, so it is not so easy to name them
and to know exactly what they do and how they work together.
Scientists probe, research and question to determine what parts do what
things. They have agreed on names for the different parts, but they are
still figuring out what exactly each part does and how it does it. They
are still making discoveries about the brain every day.
Back to my computer analogy, we all know that a computer without any
software on it is useless. It cannot accomplish anything. The same with
the brain. The brain is the organ, but it is useless if no impulses are
running through it. These impulses are thoughts, emotions and feelings.
They consist of chemicals, energy and electromagnetic fields. I call
these impulses the software, or the programs, that we run, because it is
what brings the brain to life. It is what makes it possible to function.
Most of neuroscience is devoted to studying the hardware and the
software of the brain. But what about the programmer? Who gets to
decide which software you run and how you use that software?
The hardware does not decide. Many people believe that their genetics
and their brain chemistry was determined at conception and that their
lives are at the mercy of their biology. Well, as we will get into a bit
later, science is beginning to prove that that is not true. It is showing
that we can choose not only our software but also our hardware.
We do not need science to prove things to us if we can prove that it is
true in our own lives. Scientists are discovering new things every day,

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and it is great that they do because it means that we get to understand
ourselves better so that we can do things better. But we do not have to
wait for science to uncover it all. We can start living it now.
In my analogy, I say that we are the programmers. We not only choose
how to use our software, we also write our own software. We are in
control of our thoughts, feelings and emotions. We can take charge of
our instincts and urges. But we have to take the responsibility to do it.
If we are the programmers, it means that we must program.

The three parts of the brain

Let us start with the hardware of the brain then, this organ in our heads
that we talk about so often but understand so little. The brain is a very
complex organ, and scientists of all sorts are still doing research to
understand it fully. As humans, we have only begun to scratch the
surface of understanding our brains. As I mentioned already, new
research continually appears that sheds a different light on older
theories based on previous findings. When you read this book, new
research might have resulted in further, more nuanced findings.
In the 1960s, the neuroscientist Paul MacLean formulated what he
called the Triune Brain model. This model divides the brain into three
sections, each responsible for specific functions. He theorised that each
section of the brain evolved on top of each other to give us our human
brain. Later research found that this three-part model is too simplistic.
No one part of the brain is solely responsible for any one function.
Different parts of the brain work together. Scientists also started
distinguishing between more than three parts of the brain to include
many smaller, nuanced sections.
Even if the nuances of MacLean’s model proved not to be 100%
accurate, his model is still widely used today. It allows us to understand

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the functions of the parts of the brain and how brain activity works
without having to become a neuroscientist who understands all the
nuances.
Here is a picture of this three-part model of the brain.

The neocortex is on the outside, the limbic brain is below it, and the
brain stem is right at the bottom.
The neocortex, also called the prefrontal cortex, is the new brain or the
higher brain. It is the part of the brain that is responsible for rational
thinking. It does what most of us think the brain should do – think and
process input logically. It is sometimes called the human brain because
these functions are what separates us from other life forms.
Next is the limbic brain, which is also called the emotional or mammal
brain. As the name implies, it is your emotional centre. It secretes
chemicals so that you can get feelings and emotions. The chemicals

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from the emotional brain are sent as signals to the rest of the body. That
is why you feel your emotions in your body. If you are fearful, you feel
it in your body. If you are hungry, you feel it in your body.
Have you ever paid attention to the sensations in your body when you
feel a certain way? We all know what it feels like to be hungry, but do
you know what fear, anger, joy and peace feel like in your body? Does
it feel light or heavy, tight or open, warm or cold? Where do you feel it
– in your legs, your stomach, your chest or your throat?
These sensations in our body are registered back to the brain, this time
to the brain stem. The brain stem is also known as the reptilian,
primitive or survival brain. It is seen as the oldest part of the brain, that
part responsible for our instincts and urges which work to ensure that
we stay alive.
It is not important that you remember the names of the three parts of the
brain. Scientists use many more nuanced terms to refer to the different
areas of the brain and their functions. What is important is that you
become aware of these different functions of the brain and how they
relate to your PowerGoal™, as I explain in the rest of this chapter.

Cybernetic loop
The basic input on which the brain operates are our five senses: what
we can see, hear, feel, taste and smell. They are the sensory inputs.
These sensory inputs enter the brain as energy. If you see an apple, the
actual apple does not go into your brain. Your senses convey the energy
to the brain as energy waves. In itself, the brain can do nothing.
Remember, it is the hardware. These energetic vibrations cause the
brain to function, like your computer software causes your brain to use
its different components.

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The brain processes these sensory inputs in what I call internal dialogue.
Internal dialogue has nothing to do with what has happened on the
outside. It is on the inside of you, relative to you. This internal dialogue
converts into a virtual experience or a virtual reality. Two people may
see, smell or hear the same thing, but their brains process these inputs
very differently. They therefore have different virtual experiences of
these inputs.
I might smell one kind of food, for example, tinned tuna when you open
it up, and think that it is a delicious smell and that I cannot wait to eat
it. Another person might smell it and feel nauseous because they do not
like tuna. It is the same smell, but the internal dialogue and the virtual
experiences are very different. One person stands on the edge of a cliff
and feels excitement; another person stands on the cliff and feels dread.
The second person’s head is spinning, and they feel faint, while the first
person’s senses are at their peak. One person sees a cup of coffee, smells
its aroma and thinks it is delicious, but another feels sick on their
stomach. It all depends on how the brain interprets the sensory input.
You, as the programmer, choose your internal dialogue. You choose
how to interpret the sensory input. The moment that the programming
happens, the sensory input is sent to the emotional brain. The emotional
brain defines it is a good or a bad feeling. Based on that feeling, good
or bad, positive or negative, it secretes a whole concoction of chemicals.
This cocktail of chemicals we experience as an emotion with all the
feelings in the body that go along with that emotion. When the body
feels those things, it sends signals back to the brain. The sensory input
that the brain receives reinforces its interpretation of the input that it
first received. The neural pathway is strengthened. Yes, my
interpretation was right, the brain thinks.

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If you stand on the edge of a cliff, you see that you are high above the
ground. You feel the breeze coming up that edge. You smell and hear
things. These sensory inputs go to your brain. You get to decide – are
you afraid, or are you excited? What do those inputs that you experience
mean?
If you decide that you are afraid, that is your internal dialogue. The
emotional brain interprets that it is a bad feeling. It secretes the cocktail
of chemicals that you know as fear. Your hands and feet start to sweat,
your stomach feels hollow, your mouth goes dry, your head spins, and
your legs feel numb. All of these bodily sensations are more sensory
input for the brain. Yes, my interpretation was right, the brain thinks.
But what if you had decided that you were excited? Your emotional
brain would have decided it is a good feeling and secreted a different
set of chemicals. Your heart would have raced, and your body would
feel energised. You would not feel numb and light-headed. You might
look around to see whether you can see a foothold to climb down
further. You might move a bit closer to the edge to get a better view.
These sensations return to the brain as sensory input. And what does the
brain think? Yes, I was right! It is exciting!
Our emotions result in our bodily experiences which result in
behaviours. You step away from the cliff’s edge, or you step closer to
it. Over time, these behaviours become habits. You liked the smell of
the coffee, so you drank the coffee. You keep on drinking the coffee
because you like it.
You know by now that your continual actions and behaviours produce
your results, which show in the ten areas of your life. My body expects
its coffee first thing in the morning. I bring my wife a cup of coffee in
bed. My friends love to drink coffee, and I spend time drinking coffee
with them in all the physical spaces where people drink coffee. It all

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started when I smelled that first cup of coffee and decided that it is a
positive sensory input. Coming full circle, it produces more and more
sensory experiences which reinforce that pathway.
This whole process – from sensory input to internal dialogue to feeling
to emotion to experience to behaviour to habit to result which produces
further sensory input – is called a cybernetic loop.

Metaprograms
We all run cybernetic loops all the time. If that were all there is to it, it
would have been simple. The brain gets sensory input, you decide how
to program it, and the loop runs. However, it is not that simple. One
person stands on the top of the cliff and decides that it is bad. Another
person decides that it is good. Neither is right or wrong. It is their
perception. But why do they differ?
It is because of their metaprograms. A metaprogram refers to the
programming that has already taken place in your life so far. Our brains
default to metaprograms because it makes life easier for us. We receive
thousands of sensory inputs every day. We cannot think about what we
are going to do with it every single time. Instead, we decide once, and
then our body uses that choice to run a metaprogram. When you receive
a sensory input for the first time, you have a choice of how to react. You
have a choice of how to program. You are the programmer, after all.
You choose the internal dialogue.
But the thing is, the first time you stand next to a cliff is probably not
the first time you experienced looking down from a height. You were
probably a small child, a baby even, when your brain received the first
sensory inputs regarding height. Your brain received all the input, but
before you could decide whether it is good or bad, someone probably
intervened.

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Your mom came and grabbed you away. Watch out! It is dangerous!
Her reaction was part of the input you received about the situation. It is
bad, you decided, and your metaprogram was written.
Most of our metaprograms and therefore most of our experience of life
were formed before the age of seven. In those earliest years when we
have our first experiences, our belief systems are formed, and they run
as metaprograms for the rest of our lives, unless we consciously decide
to rewrite them.
Because we are so dependent on our caregivers during those first few
years of our lives, our metaprograms are very strongly influenced by
our parents and others who look after us or with whom we spend a lot
of time when we are young. We do not know whether something is good
or bad, but the reactions of our caregivers and all the other things in our
environments at that point form part of our sensory input, shaping how
we view the world.
Our programming even starts in the womb. Babies whose mothers ate
spicy food was found to be able to eat spicier food than those whose
mothers did not. One study had half of a group of pregnant women drink
carrot juice daily, and the other half did not. The babies of the mothers
who drank carrot juice showed a much higher preference for pureed
carrots when they started eating solids than those who did not.
For this reason, a child born in China will grow up to be different than
one born in Britain. Their languages, their perceptions of religion and
their cultures are going to be different. Everything is going to be
different because their metaprograms were shaped by their parents,
religions, languages and peers – in other words, by their environments.
When they were born, the two children had exactly the same hard
drives. But between the age of seven and ten, 95% of their software was
already programmed.

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These metaprograms are your memetics. They are your beliefs and
values. Because they were formed at such a young age, when you could
not consciously decide or know what was happening, you are often not
consciously aware of what these beliefs and values are. However, they
are going to show up in your results. They will show up in what you see
and perceive in the world, because, remember, they are the screen
through which you view the world.

The dilemma
A metaprogram is not bad in and of itself. We cannot possibly make
sense of every single input we receive every moment. We need to start
making sense of the world at a young age so that we can start
functioning independently. Who else would we learn from if not our
primary caregivers? Metaprograms are there to protect us and to make
life easy for us.
The problem with metaprograms in terms of our goals is that they keep
us in our comfort zone. If we are in our comfort zone, we cannot grow.
We are bombarded with thousands upon thousands of sensory inputs
every day. The part of the brain that helps us navigate all these inputs
is called the reticular activating system, RAS for short. The RAS filters
through all this data and lets through the parts that are important to you.
But how does it decide which parts are important to you? Through your
metaprograms, of course. A baby with very few metaprograms gets
bombarded with all this information all the time. It is why they need to
sleep so much – to process and recover. But you have your
metaprograms in place already. So your RAS selects only that
information which is in line with your metaprograms to present to you.
It deletes, distorts, adds and generalises information from the outer
world so that it fits with your metaprograms.

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That is why two people can be in the same situation and experience it
completely differently. They did not consciously decide to experience
it differently. Their conscious brains received different sets of
information to work with based on how their RAS interpreted the raw
inputs using their metaprograms. Because of the RAS, many things are
happening around us of which we are not even aware. We ignore these
things simply because we do not pick them up.
Most of these metaprograms which your RAS is using were
programmed by someone else before you were seven years old. It keeps
you living in the past the whole time, not only your own past but the
past of your parents, their parents and generations before them. Your
metaprograms and your RAS are the reasons it is so difficult to
transform.
Almost everything in your world and environments are tied to your
metaprograms, that is, your memetics, or your beliefs about life. It is
your reality because of your metaprograms. You have those things
because you did certain things because you believed certain things. And
you see your current reality and everything in life the way you do
because of your metaprograms.
Our internal representation becomes our environments. And the
cybernetic loop is extremely difficult to break. For example, I have
thoughts and emotions tied to even the clothes that I wear. Every time I
put on the shirt that I am wearing, those connotations are triggered in
my brain. If I had a bad experience while wearing it, those emotions are
transferred to me now. By the way, this is why many people dislike
public speaking so much. Because of a previous bad experience,
whenever they are in that situation, a metaprogram runs and
immediately they experience it the same way again.

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Those habits of being are extremely hard to break because the moment
there is a metaprogram, there is no choice anymore. We do what we do
automatically. We don’t think about it. Because of our RAS, we are
blind to that thing that we do that hinders us. We do not even recognise
if we are doing it again, no matter how many times we said we would
not do it again. It is why our willpower is so ineffective in
transformation. Our willpower comes from our neocortex, our logical
brain. But our metaprograms and our RAS bypass our neocortex and
functions straight out of the emotional and survival parts of the brain.

The solution
There is light at the end of this dark tunnel. If we can change anything
in the cybernetic loop, we know that the results will be different. And
that is what we want – a different result. We do not want our current
reality. We want a different reality, that of our goal. But to get there, we
need to transform ourselves. We need to reprogram our brain’s
software. We need to rewire that cybernetic loop. Now you understand
why Einstein said that the consciousness that created the problem
cannot find the solution. You have to change the consciousness.
The first thing that you need to do is become aware. If you know what
is happening, you know what to look for. That is why I believe in
studying the science. It helps us know what is happening so that we can
be more aware. For example, reading this book is making you aware.
Next, you must take responsibility. You can know about all of this and
still sit back and let it play out as it always has. You can blame your
parents, your past and the things people did to you. Yes, those things in
your past did create your metaprograms, and those metaprograms are
creating your current reality. But blaming is not going to get you
different results.

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A wealth creator is someone who takes responsibility. It is why the
Formula for Success includes responsibility as one of its key
ingredients. As wealth creators, we take back our power of choice. We
step into our role as the programmer again. We create our own realities.
Wealth creators take responsibility by finding out what programs they
run.
As one of the final steps in my Powermorphing™ course, I teach my
students how to use the power of their subconscious to identify and
collapse their self-limiting metaprograms with a single exercise called
the resistor removal technique. Resistors are those metaprograms which
keep you from achieving your PowerGoal™. If you are following the
Formula for Success but not seeing results, you probably have a resistor
of which you are unaware. Do not give up if that is the case for you.
Even without the resistor removal technique, you can uncover that
resistor and remove it if you persist. You owe it to yourself and your
PowerGoal™ to keep at it. Once you have removed it, you step out on
the other side a transformed person.
Take responsibility by putting yourself in the observer’s place. The
observer’s place can also be called the witness’s place or the soul’s
place. It is the place from where we can observe ourselves. We witness
ourselves. In this position, we are not our brain, and we are not our
body. It is the position of you, the real you, that lies in the centre of the
diagram of the ten environments. It is what I call the energetic you, the
part that is more than your brain or your body, the part that continues
after death. From this position, you can look at your current realities
and at your past to observe yourself. You can ask yourself questions
about yourself.
Why did I do that? What was the real reason I felt that way? Become
curious. Questions are excellent ways to unearth those metaprograms

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that you are unaware of. Do not judge yourself. Allow things to come
up, whatever they are.
Meditation is a great way to practice this kind of observation. Through
meditation, you quiet the body and the mind to see those things that
your metaprograms are hiding from your conscious thought.
Sometimes, simply noticing that something is there is enough to change
it. Naming it for what it is also helps. Sometimes you must dig a bit
deeper. You must ask more questions and remain curious and non-
judgemental to peel back the layers. As you remove those
metaprograms that are not serving you, you can consciously replace
them with new ones that do until you end up with the outcomes in your
life that you want.
It is why negative or unwanted feedback is as good and sometimes
better than positive feedback. If we do not get the results that we want,
it means that it is an opportunity to find one of those metaprograms that
are holding you back. And getting rid of them is one of the best ways
to get to the results that you want. With those metaprograms out of the
way, suddenly you see opportunities that you never saw before.
Situations that previously scared you, now makes you excited. Whole
new worlds of possibility open up.
The transformational journey is about so much more than getting that
Ferrari. It is about becoming the best you, the highest mountain. If the
Ferrari will get you climbing, use it. But know that there is also an
endless range of possibilities beyond it which is waiting for you.

Workbook Q9.1: Reflect on and write down the insights you

had during this chapter.

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Chapter 10: Creating You
I want to share a few last concepts about who you are with you that I
believe will help you on your transformational journey. Many of these
concepts come from the latest scientific discoveries. We are continually
finding out more about how our world works, and this new-found
knowledge is very helpful for us as wealth creators to create the lives
that we want. We do not have to try again and again until we get it right.
We can use scientific knowledge, which is knowledge that comes from
rigorous experimentation.
Much of this scientific knowledge aligns with ancient wisdom too.
What I find exciting about many of the latest scientific discoveries is
that they are starting to build bridges to what we previously could only
conceptualise in religious or cultural terms. Our knowledge still has
many gaps, and many scientists interpret these newest findings in
conflicting ways.
What I want you to get from this chapter is not undisputed facts but
tools which will help you achieve your goals. Think about what I share
critically, yes. But do not dismiss anything unless you have tried it for
yourself.

Brain waves
I already told you many things about the brain in the previous chapter,
but I also want to share with you what scientists know about our brain
waves.
All the activity in your brain is electrochemical. In other words, it
happens because of chemicals that are secreted and electrical charges
that are sent between the neurons of the brain. Brainwaves are produced
by the synchronised electrical pulses of all the neurons communicating

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with each other. These electrical waves carry voltage, and their
frequency can be measured by different forms of medical technology,
like the electroencephalography (EEG).
Brainwave frequencies refer to how many waves of electric energy is
produced in a set period, or, in other words, how quickly or slowly the
waves follow on each other. Research shows that different frequencies
of brainwaves are present during different types of mental activity.
Based on their findings, scientists divided brainwaves into bandwidths
to describe their functions. Brainwaves range from slow, loud and
functional to fast, subtle, and complex.
Brainwaves can be compared to sounds. Low-frequency brainwaves are
like deeply penetrating drumbeats. They make us feel sluggish and
dreamy. High-frequency brainwaves are more like a subtle, high-
pitched flute, and they make us feel wired and hyper-alert. We need a
proper balance of all of them to function properly. As wealth creators,
knowing about our brainwaves enables us to use them to function
optimally to get to our goals.
Below is an image of the five types of brainwaves – gamma, beta, alpha,
theta and delta, ranging from high frequency to low frequency.

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Gamma brainwaves are the fastest brain waves, in other words, they
have the highest frequency. They occur when information is being
rapidly processed during moments of insight and peak focus. They are
also associated with expanded consciousness and spirituality.
Interestingly, your mind has to be quiet to access this level of frequency.
The high frequency is not about being busy but about being quietly
focused. Master musicians experience gamma brainwaves when they
perform, for example.
Slightly slower, or with a lower frequency, are beta brainwaves. Beta
brainwaves are what we mostly experience when we are awake. It is
present when we are alert, attentive, engaged in problem-solving or
decision-making. During beta, we are focused on the outer world, not

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the inward world. Beta brainwaves range from musing (lower beta) to
highly complex thought, excitement and high anxiety (high beta).
Beta brainwaves allow us to focus on the task at hand. However, they
also drain us, making us less creative and emotionally aware. Continual
high-frequency processing, present during excitement or anxiety, is not
a very efficient way to run the brain because it takes a tremendous
amount of energy. In our always-on society, people often get stuck in
beta, leading to insomnia, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorders and
burn out.
It is therefore crucial that our brains slow down to alpha brainwaves
after a period of more intense brainwave frequency. During alpha, we
are relaxed and calm. We are present in the moment. Alpha is a resting
state for the brain. It happens when we daydream or read a book. Alpha
is also the best state in which to learn. It is crucial to move into alpha to
be able to fall asleep and have a good night’s rest. Light meditation or
creative activities help us move into alpha.
When you sleep, the frequencies in your brain slow down, and you
experience theta brainwaves. Deep meditation and hypnosis also lead
to theta. During theta, our senses are not focused on the external world
but on signals from within. In theta, we experience vivid imagery,
intuition and information beyond our ordinary conscious awareness. It
is also where we have access to our suppressed fears, troubled history
and nightmares.
We also experience theta in those moments when we are busy waking
up or drifting off to sleep. Another way we sometimes slip into theta is
when we do something on autopilot or in a state of flow. Theta
brainwaves are the reason why people sometimes have a burst of
creativity just when they fall asleep or wake up, or while they are in the

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shower. Their minds slowed down to a level of simply being, allowing
that inner creativity to come out.
Accessing theta is extremely important to our transformational journey.
It allows us to tap into our deepest values and beliefs. During theta, we
unearth those things which are holding us back. We also access our
greatest creativity. Our society attaches a lot of value to our conscious,
analytical thinking and dismisses our intuition. We lose out if we do
that. The imagery and intuition that come to us during theta are
powerful tools we can use to set and pursue our PowerGoals™.
Having moved through theta, we experience delta brainwaves. Delta
brainwaves are generated during deep, restorative, dreamless sleep and
the deepest meditation. During delta, we have no awareness of the
external world. Healing and regeneration happen in this state, which is
why deep sleep is so essential to living a healthy life.
Brainwaves are the reason why children are so impressionable and why
most of our values and beliefs are programmed before the age of seven.
From the womb until roughly the age of two, the human brain functions
primarily in delta, the lowest frequency. Babies of this age simply
download programs with very little critical thinking or judgement.
Between the ages of two and six, children operate mainly in theta. They
are very connected to their inner world. Imagination and daydreams are
as real to them as the outer world. They are in a super learning state and
are very open to suggestion, like an adult would be during hypnosis.
Between the ages of five and eight, children’s brains start operating
mainly in alpha. Their analytical mind begins to form, and they begin
to interpret their environment. However, their inner world of
imagination is still as real as the outer world. It is an excellent time for
learning. Somewhere between the ages of eight and twelve, children

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move into beta brainwaves, like those adults experience most of the
time.
But I had so little control over my life until the age when I moved into
beta, you might be thinking. Well, I have great news for you. As adults,
we can recreate this state that we were in when we were children, this
time on our terms. We can reprogram our minds. We do it by learning
to regulate our brainwaves and choosing what we expose ourselves to
when we are in different states.
Meditation is one of the best ways to learn to regulate your brainwaves.
As you progress in your meditation practice, you learn how to enter
theta through meditation. In that state, you can uproot those beliefs and
values that are not serving you and replace them with ones that do. You
can also unlock all the power of creative insight and intuition of that
state.
Interestingly, regular meditation also promotes gamma brainwaves,
those highest-frequency waves of utter focus and concentration.
Meditation is not only about slowing down your brainwaves. It is about
focus and silencing your mind and your body, prerequisites for gamma.

Heart rhythms
Creating the new you is not only about your brain but also about your
heart.
All of us have heard about our heartbeats. Your heartbeat refers to how
fast your heart is beating or how many times it beats per period. It is
what doctors and nurses measure when they take your pulse. Your heart
rate varies. If you get excited, it beats faster, and it beats slower again
when you calm down. Heart rate variability is the word used to refer to
the normal changes in the amount of time between heartbeats. These
beat-to-beat changes make up your heart rhythm, something which

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most of us know far less than our heartbeat, but it is just as important,
maybe more so.
Our heart rhythms, in other words, the rhythm of the changes in our
heartbeat, is affected by physical activity, thoughts, feelings and
breathing patterns. We experience heart coherence when there is an
orderly and harmonious synchronisation among the various systems in
the body such as the heart, the respiratory system and blood-pressure
rhythms. Heart rhythm coherence can be measured by scientific
instruments, as you can see in the graph (www.heartmath.org) below.

The Heart Math Institute (www.heartmath.org), a non-profit

organisation, is doing fantastic research on heart rhythms and how they
affect our well-being. They have found that thoughts and emotions
change heart-rhythm patterns, and these changes affect the rest of our
body, including the brain and its ability to function. Heart rhythms
affect how we feel, and how we feel affects our heart rhythms. Most
significantly, research has shown that we can intentionally experience

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positive feelings such as care, compassion, courage and love to impact
our heart rhythms and our well-being positively.
Here are some further facts from the Heart Math Institute’s research
which I find fascinating:
• The heart has a system of neurons that have both short and
long-term memory, and their signals sent to the brain can
affect our emotional experiences.
• In fetal development, the heart forms and starts beating before
the brain is developed.
• The heart sends more information to the brain than vice versa.
• Positive emotions can increase the brain’s ability to make
good decisions.
• Positive emotions help the brain in creativity and innovative
problem-solving.
• Your heart emits electromagnetic fields that change according
to your emotions.
• The human heart’s magnetic field can be measured up to
several feet away from the body.
• The heart radiates an electromagnetic field that energetically
affects each other’s moods, attitudes and feelings.
• Negative emotions can create nervous system chaos, but
positive emotions do the opposite.
• A mother’s brainwaves can synchronise to her baby’s
heartbeats.
• You can boost your immune system by conjuring positive
emotions.
• Positive emotions create physiological benefits in your body.

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All these findings are fascinating and empowering to us as wealth
creators. You might have experienced the emotional drain that negative
people have on you. For years I have taught my students to remove
themselves from such energy vampires. Now research backs it up. The
emotional drain we feel around negative people is caused by the
electromagnetic field radiating from their heart because of the
incoherence of their negative emotions.
But none of us has to be the victims of such negative emotions, whether
they are our own or others’. We can consciously create positive
emotions, with a domino effect on our body, brain and overall well-
being.
The Heart Math Institute has several techniques to tap into the power of
your heart. Their Quick Coherence Technique, for example, consists of
three easy steps:
• Heart focus: Focus your attention in the area of your heart, in
the centre of your chest.
• Heart breathing: As you focus on the area of your heart,
imagine your breath flowing in and out through that area.
• Heart feeling: As you continue to breathe through the area of
your heart, recall a positive feeling, a time when you felt good
inside, and try to re-experience it. It could be feeling
appreciation for the good things in your life, or the love and
care you feel for someone.
You can build this one-minute exercise into your day at least once or
more. Gratitude exercises are another great way to increase your heart
coherence. These exercises might seem insignificant, but over time,
habits like these can make a significant impact on the person you are
becoming and thus the goals you are achieving.

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Genetic expression
We have all heard about genes, and we know that our genes determine
who we are. What most of us do not know is that it is not that simple.
Epigenetics is the study of how genes are expressed differently because
of external factors. In scientific terms, it is the study of changes in
organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than
alteration of the genetic code itself. It refers to the science that studies
how the development, functioning and evolution of biological systems
are influenced by forces operating outside their DNA sequence,
including intracellular, environmental and energetic influences.
Our genes are found in our DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, which is
found in all the cells of our bodies. Our DNA gives the instructions for
various functional proteins to be produced inside the cell. The
interesting part is that the DNA in each cell is the same, whether that
cell is part of our heart or lungs or brain. The difference lies in how that
DNA is expressed, read and transcribed
If you think of a DNA strand as a long zipper, some things cause parts
of that zipper to zip open or to close in specific combinations to produce
certain cells. This zipper effect is called DNA expression, and it is
caused by chemicals that attach to the genomes in the DNA. These
chemicals are called epigenomes. The epigenomes basically switch
certain genes on and off. Such epigenetic action causes us to develop
the different cells of our body – our heart, lungs, bones, etc. However,
external factors also cause epigenetic action. What we eat, where we
live, whom we interact with, when we sleep, how we exercise – all these
things affect our genetic expression.
Genetic determinism – thinking that our genes determine who we are –
is therefore not true. Our physical and emotional traits are not controlled

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by our genetic code. Genetic determinism turns us into victims – our
lives are controlled by things outside our control. This victimisation
leads to illnesses and diseases that are passed down in the genes of
families for generations.
The great news that comes with a knowledge of epigenetics is that we
can influence our bodies even down to the cellular level by what we
focus on. If we think different thoughts and feel different feelings, we
change the chemicals in our body and change our genetic expression.
Researchers Glen Rein and Rollin McCraty found the following in one
of their studies:
Individuals trained in deep love and appreciation were able to
intentionally change the shape of DNA.... Human emotion produces
effects which defy conventional laws of physics. (“Structural
changes in water and DNA associated with new physiologically
measurable states”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 8, No. 3
(1994), pp. 438-439.)
You are not your genes. Whatever genes you received, you have power
over how they are expressed in your life.

Energetic vibration
One of the principles of the ten environments of you is that everything
is energy. If everything is energy, it includes you, of course. When I say
that everything is energy, I do not mean it metaphorically. Let me
explain the science which backs up that statement, and why it is so
exciting for us as wealth creators pursuing our PowerGoals™.
During most of the previous few centuries, scientists held a Newtonian
view of physics. Isaac Newton, the father of Newtonian physics,
famously sat underneath an apple tree when an apple fell on his head.
He became curious about why the apple fell downward, the force which
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we now know as gravity. According to Newtonian physics, also known
as classical physics, matter consists of particles, and they behave
according to laws.
During the late 1800s and early 1900s, some scientists began to
question this view of the world. Some phenomenon could not be
explained by Newtonian physics. One of these scientists was Albert
Einstein. These scientists set out to propose new theories of how the
world works. The result was quantum physics. In the more than hundred
years that followed, scientists not only proved those quantum theories
mathematically, as they only did at first. With more advanced
technology, they were also able to prove it physically. One of the things
that they found is that matter does not consist of particles. At the most
basic level, it consists of waves – waves of energy.
My statement that everything is energy is therefore scientifically
correct. What scientists found is that everything is both waves of energy
and particles of matter at the same time. Another way to put it is that
waves of energy are potential that is collapsed into particles of matter.
But what does it have to do with us as wealth creators? If everything is
energy, we are energy too. We are energetic beings. Waves of energy
are vibrations. Because everything is energy, everything is vibration.
When this vibration is changed, it is a different type of energy.
We all vibrate at a very specific vibration which is what makes us
unique. If we change our vibrations, we change our energetic level, and
we become a different person.
Unlike particles that are separate, energy is connected. There are not
different energies but only different levels of energy. We do not have
to become something completely new. We only have to change our
energetic vibration to a different level. If we change our level of

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vibration, we change the way that we collapse energy into matter. We
are different, so our outcome is different.
Energy contains endless possibilities. We get to choose which
possibility becomes our reality. Through our brain waves, our heart
rhythms and even our genetic expression, we create our reality to be
what we want it to be by changing the vibration of who we are.
Another consequence of reality that is both waves and particles is that
matter is changed through observation. Scientists are still trying to
figure out how it works, but they know that whether matter acts as a
wave or a particle is influenced by observation. Remember that I said
in the previous chapter that we have to step into the observer’s role? It
means that you have to influence how matter – your body, your brain,
your heart, your genes – act based on your observation. You can
observe if something is happening that you do not want, and you can
choose to let something else happen. Conversely, whatever is
happening in your life at the moment or, in other words, whatever your
current reality is, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy of who you have been
so far. But it does not have to stay that way if you do not want it to.
Another phenomenon which scientists are only beginning to understand
is quantum entanglement. Two subatomic particles can become linked
in a process that is currently not understood by scientists. What they do
know is that it happens. When two such entangled particles become
separated, no matter the distance, they remain linked. If something
about one particle changes, instantaneously the other particle also
changes. Einstein called this phenomenon “spooky action at a distance”.
For us as wealth creators, quantum entanglement means that we can
entangle ourselves with the reality that is part of our goal. On a spiritual
level, in our thinking and in our feelings, you can identify as the person
who is who you need to be to have what you want. You can then operate

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from the position of this “future” you. That “future you” can cause the
“present you” to change instantaneously because you no longer
experience life the same once you have been that person on a spiritual
level, in your mind and in your heart.

Map of consciousness
This last tool that I share with you has been of tremendous value to me
in my transformational journey. It is the map of consciousness
developed by Dr David R Hawkins.
Dr Hawkins, who passed away in 2012 at age 85, was a psychiatrist
who became gravely ill as a middle-aged man. There was no
physiological cause for his sickness, and he had lived a healthy life up
to that point. Suddenly, he was no longer the doctor but the patient.
However, he applied his knowledge of his body and his psyche in search
of a cure for himself. He found that he had internalised the emotional
states of his patients, leading to physical illness. His search led him out
of sickness to health, and to greater emotional and spiritual freedom that
he had ever known. He started teaching his discovery to his patients. He
also researched it and wrote several books.
Dr Hawkins’ discoveries happened in the 1970s at a time when
scientists did not know as much about the link between body and mind.
Most of the scientific community turned their back on him and the
methods that he used. However, now, after his death, the latest scientific
discoveries, some which I shared with you already, is starting to
corroborate Dr Hawkins’ findings and methods. Whether you agree
with his methods or not, I find the map of consciousness that Dr
Hawkins produced of immense value in gauging where I am on an
energetic level. It also gives me a map to show how to increase my
energetic vibrations.

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The method that Dr Hawkins used to determine the energy level, or log,
of each state of being has caused much controversy around his work.
Scientists saw it as too subjective to be used as a unit of measure.
Whether you agree with the way he got to the numbers he used or not,
you can intuitively agree with the sequence of the different levels.
Right at the bottom, we find our lowest states of being: shame, guilt,
apathy and grief. As we move up the scale, the states are still negative,
but the energy they tap from us is less: fear, desire, anger and pride.
Dr Hawkins saw courage as the point of separation between the
contracting states, those states of being which take energy from us, and

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the expanding states, those states of being which give energy to us. As
you move up from courage, your energetic vibration increases:
neutrality, willingness, acceptance, reason. At the upper end of the scale
are love, joy, peace and finally enlightenment.
How can you use this map of consciousness in your transformational
journey? Firstly, you can identify where you are. You might be able to
identify a dominant state which you generally operate in, but you might
also have a different state for each of your environments. Certain
situations or people might evoke a certain state in you too. You can also
identify which contracting state, or negative emotions, you tend to
revert to under pressure. If something goes wrong, what is your default
response? Use the map of consciousness to identify your state of being
so that you can examine and remove the values and beliefs which are
the underlying cause for your response.
Secondly, you can use the map of consciousness to help you move to a
higher state. We do not always follow those levels exactly. Sometimes
we can jump between levels, but in most situations, it is easier to move
up only one level than through several levels. If you feel apathy, it is
better to move up to grief that to stay at a lower level. From grief, you
might move up to anger. When you are angry, you immediately have
more energy. You can use this anger to decide to do something, which
moves you into courage – you are doing something, and you are taking
control of the situation.
Also look for clues of the states in the way that you use language. Our
words become our reality because they give us a glimpse into our actual
deeply-held beliefs and values. I often see how people set themselves
up for failure by using the phrase “I want” for their PowerGoals™. I
want a passive income of ten thousand dollars per month before the end
of this year. The word want is linked to the state of desire, another word

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for greed or covetousness. It is a state of being characterised by
insatiable wanting – desiring. The words I want signal the state of desire
to your brain. The emotions and the thoughts that go with it is I do not
have. What is the end result? At the end of the year, you will still be
wanting that thing. Your PowerGoal™ was phrased in your current
state of being instead of at a higher state of being.
It is not impossible to attain your goals in the lower states which take
energy from us, those states which Dr Hawkins called the contracting
states. However, it is much more difficult. In these states, you have to
use force to get to your goal. And when you get there, it will not be
enough. Your reason for that Ferrari was pride, desire or fear. And no
Ferrari or any other thing is enough to fill the void of those states of
being.
Achieving your goals from the expanding states is much easier and
more fulfilling. In these states, you have more energy, and you use
power to attract your goals to you. You are the person, and the results
follow from that state of being. The higher you move on the map of
consciousness, the easier it becomes. Interestingly, in these higher
states, the results matter less to us. The true goal has become the
transformation. The results are motivators, or simply nice-to-haves. In
those states, we know that we are powerful. We are wealth creators. We
are not arrogant or self-seeking. We are simply in harmony with
ourselves and the universe. It is bliss. It is perfect. It is complete. It is.
Your first PowerGoal™ might not take you to such a level of
enlightenment. It is the journey of a lifetime (and maybe then some) to
get there. But, my friend, if you let your PowerGoal™ take you on this
journey of transformation, you will never regret it.

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A note on Powermorphing™
I have referred to the Powermorphing™ process a few times during this
book. As I explained before, Powermorphing™ is the structured
process of consciously programming your subconscious to
unconsciously give you what you consciously want.
The Powermorphing™ process is built on the principles in this book
and specifically the cutting edge of what we know about how we work
as humans that I shared in this last chapter. However, it does not focus
on the theory. It is a practical process, and you can apply it whether you
are interested in the science behind it or not.
As I have said earlier in the book, Powermorphing™ is the topic of a
whole book by itself. It starts with a solid foundation in setting and
achieving PowerGoals™, which is what this book is all about. For many
people, that is enough. In other words, everything I share in this book
will get them to all that they ever want in life.
However, some people want to accelerate their results exponentially.
They do not want to go through the route of trial and error. They want
tremendous results in absolutely impossible timeframes – because deep
down they know it is possible. They might feel that way because of their
past – they might have to overcome an enormous setback or
disadvantage to reach what they absolutely know is their purpose in life.
Most often, they might simply have an enormous dream for their life.
If that is you, Powermorphing™ could be a very powerful tool to help
you do that. After the final chapter in this book, there is a section where
you can contact me. Use those details and simply tell me you want more
information on Powermorphing™.
Maybe you are reading this now and you have no idea whether
Powermorphing™ is for you or not. You might not have applied

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anything that you have read so far. Do not worry. Take it step by step.
What is the most important thing you can do right now to get to the life
of your dreams? Read the next chapter, the last one of the book, and
make sure that you answer and action that question for yourself.
In the end, it is not primarily about how fast you go, but that you keep
on going. So do whatever you need to do to keep on going for the life
of your dreams.

Workbook Q10.1: Reflect on and write down the insights

you had during this chapter.

185
186
CONCLUSION

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188
Chapter 11: Make It Happen
We have come a long way through this book. I have challenged you to
do some challenging exercises and to consider some thoughts which
might go against what you have believed about life so far.

Your response
You might agree with what I said, and you might not. That is your right,
and I respect it. I shared with you my perspective and what I have found
to work. Of course, it is more than that too. It is what I have been
teaching my students and what I have seen work in their lives too.
You have a choice now. What are you going to do?
You might disagree with me and disregard what you read in this book.
It would be sad, because it would mean you have been wasting your
time reading this book. I sincerely hope that there is something that you
read here which you can take with you and which will make your life
better.
If you disagree with something that I said, or if certain things do not
make sense to you, I challenge you to go back to those portions of the
book. Reread them. Do your own research. Try it for yourself. Do not
give up on your goal and your dream. Fight for it.
However, the opposite can also be true: you can agree with me and be
excited about what you learnt – and still do nothing with it. In some
ways, it would be an even sadder scenario. How can you learn
something and not do anything with it?
If you agree with most of what I said and if you are excited about what
you learnt, I challenge you to do the same. Go back to those portions of
the book that you do not fully understand. Now that you have the full

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picture, many things which were unclear before might open up to you.
I tried to present all the information to you in a logical order, but all of
it is intertwined. One bit of knowledge affects the other, and together
they make up the whole. Moreover, we process things differently.
Knowing something from the last chapter might help you understand
something in the first.
Whatever your takeaway is, please, please, apply it in your life.

Final takeaways from my journey

I am going to let you in on a little secret that I have not shared until
now. In my 35+ years’ experience of setting and achieving
PowerGoals™, I have discovered the following: achieving your
PowerGoal™ is usually an anti-climax. The reason is very simple. As
you change and become the person that can achieve that thing, the
difficulty ratio decreases. You get to a point where you know it is
simply a matter of time for you to get there.
Does that mean you should not pursue your PowerGoal™ anymore? Or
that you should never start the process in the first place? Of course not!
The end goal is simply much less glamourous than we think it will be
when we set out goal. The real joy is in the journey. The joy comes from
being that person who is happier and more fulfilled, not having that
thing.
Once your PowerGoal™ is realised, or even before it is realised but the
difficulty ratio has gone down, new dreams will surface. New horizons
will open up to you.
The journey is never finished.
Another secret I can share with you is that the journey changes over
time. Whether it changes with age or whether it changes as you develop,
I cannot say for sure. It is probably a combination of the two. But the
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thing that fired me up 30 years ago is not that important to me anymore.
There are other things, and the fire which drives me is different too.
These changes do not mean that the journey is over, simply that it has
changed.
As I am writing this book, I am 62 years old. This morning, I did 62
push-ups. The journey is far from over for me. One of my mentors, even
though I have never met him, is Warren Buffet. As I am writing this, he
is 89 years old – and still running Berkshire Hathaway.
On the other hand, one of my greatest inspirations and examples at this
point in my life is my grandchildren. They are one and two years old at
this point – and it is incredible to see how they are embarking on their
journey of life with enormous zest and enthusiasm. You are never too
old or too young.

Your next step

I never want to write a book that only gives you information. I want to
write a book that transforms you. So take this book and use it to set your
PowerGoal™ – and then go out and achieve it.
I firmly believe that if you apply what you have learnt in this book, you
are going to achieve your goals a lot easier and a lot faster than any
other method that is available – and you will be achieving goals which
you previously did not even think was possible.

Workbook Q7.1: What is the most important thing you can

do right now to reach your PowerGoal™?
Write it down, set a deadline and mark it off when you are done.

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Afterword
As I write the final words of this book, the coronavirus disease
(COVID-19) is spreading across the globe at an alarming speed. In
many countries, including many developed ones, normal life has
stopped overnight. We practice social distancing. Large meetings of
people are cancelled or postponed, including most sports and thus the
2020 Summer Olympics. Certain businesses, like restaurants, stopped
operating in several countries under government orders. Here in South
Africa, we are under a 21-day lockdown. Most businesses are not
trading, and you are only allowed outside for essentials, like food and
medicine.
Like everyone else in the world, I have been profoundly affected by this
disease. On 15 April 2020, in less than three weeks from the time of this
writing, Tanja and I would have started our 4x4 trip to Russia with a
group of fellow travellers. As I described in the last chapter of the book,
that goal was not really a PowerGoal™ any longer. Barring a few last
visas, we had everything in place to leave. It was hardly a 10/10 in terms
of difficulty any more.
However, all of that changes when countless countries decided to close
their borders in the last few weeks. At this moment, we are not even
allowed to leave our home, never mind the country.
The great thing is that I have already achieved the financial part of my
PowerGoal™. I made the money which will enable me to go on this trip
as soon as those things which are beyond my control allow it to happen.
When our travelling group had to decide on the matter, it was a simple
thing to me. We simply postpone the trip to next year, which the group
agreed on. The journey of this past year was not in vain. Our dream of
a 4x4 trip to Russia is going to realise, just not this year.

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Like I shared in the previous chapter, the journey of pursuing this
PowerGoal™ is now of far greater value to me than the actual goal of
the 4x4 trip. Through the process of realising my dream, I have built a
cryptocurrency portfolio and several businesses that are protecting me
from the financial turmoil that most of the world is facing at this
moment. It has also put me in an even better position to help others in
this dire time.
I believe in this book and its message even more than when I started
writing it. I could never have guessed what the world would look like
now that it is ready to be published. But I believe the Infinite
Intelligence knew and was orchestrating it all for all of our greater good.
I am eternally grateful that I had the idea to write a book a few months
ago and that I did what was necessary to realise that idea. I know this
book can have an immensely powerful impact on everyone that reads
it, now during this time of crisis in the world and when we have gone
through it too.
I want to implore you one last time: if you have read this book right
until the end, do not stop now. Apply what you learnt and build the life
of your dreams. You will never be sorry that you have embarked on this
journey.

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From the author: share your story
Your life matters to me. Your story is important. I want to hear about
your wins and your challenges.
Have you applied what I teach here and seen results? Great! I want to
hear from you.
Are you struggling? I want to help you.
If you are part of the PowerGoal™ Method, you already have access
to the PowerGoal™ Method Community. Share your testimonial or
ask if you have any questions. The community also has some great
resources to help you along the way.
You can also share your story or ask questions on the PowerGoals
Facebook page.
The best part about writing and teaching to me is hearing about how
your life has been transformed – and helping you get there if you are
stuck.
I can’t wait to hear from you.

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196
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank:
• The staff at the Wealth Creators Method who have supported
us and the process of writing, publishing and marketing this
book. Lara, Lilo and Netta, you are the cornerstones on which
we build.
• The Wealth Creators Method mentoring students of 2019/2020
who shared this book-writing journey and their PowerGoal™
journeys with us, specifically Andre Kotze, Arno Lamprecht,
Bertus Basson, Clinton Meyer, Corne Nothnagel, Dean Abro,
Deston le Roux, Emil Jansen, Francois Dekker, Francois van
Huyssteen, Hannes Jordaan, Hannes Naudé, Ian Boggon, Ian
Opperman, Jackie Ward, Jan Olivier, Johan Stroh, Johannes
Marx, John Redman, JP Terblanche, Justino Ferreira, Luke
Wollenschlaeger, Marile Landman, Merigen van Staden,
Micky Lamprecht, Ockert Vermeulen, Riaan Loots, Rudi
Kruger, Stuart Birch, Sudhir Mohan, Tesfaya Andargie, Thea
le Roux, Thomas van Schalkwyk, Tiaan du Toit, Werner
Tenten and Wolfgang Kirsh.
• Our spouses, Tanja and Petri, for believing in us and in this
message. You enable us to be the best versions of ourselves.

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Author Biography – Dr Hannes Dreyer
Qualifications: PhD, MSc (Econ), CFP® MDRT, COT, TOT, CEA,
IQA, CBBR, HPPL, FIWC. HFIWC, MFIWC
Born in Pretoria, in the beautiful country of South Africa, Dr Dreyer
started his first business at the tender age of ten and made his first
million by thirty. He failed his matric and had to redo it to get accepted
to the University of Pretoria, where he dropped out a couple of
semesters later. He began his professional career as a financial advisor
in 1982 and has been honoured with prestigious awards such as the
Million Dollar Round Table (only the top 6% of financial brokers in the
world receive this award), the Court of the Table (only the top 1% of
financial brokers in the world receive this accolade) and the Top of the
Table (only the top 1% of the top 1% of financial brokers in the world
receive this prestigious accolade).
Dr Dreyer holds numerous international quality awards and has
received top production and quality awards as a broker with companies
such as Old Mutual, Sanlam, Momentum, Liberty and Fedsure Life, to
name but a few. He was also in the Top 25 insurance brokers in South
Africa for several years. Dr Dreyer has qualified as a Certified Financial
Planner (not practising) Independent, Creative Risk Manager (not
practising) and a Business Consultant and Coach (not practising). He
has developed several software programs on property investment,
financial planning, unit trust investments and cryptocurrency
investment.
1982 - Started career as an insurance agent for Old Mutual
1987 - Joined Volkskas as a broker
1988 - Top 10 Volkskas broker two years in a row

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1989 - Fellow of the Institute of Life and Pension Advisors (FILPA)
1990 - Initiated the Volkskas Corporate Brokers concept
1991 - Independent Broker
1994 - 1998 Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT)
1995 - Accredited Life Underwriter of South Africa (ALSA)
1995 - Court of the Table (COT)
1995 - Top of the Table (TOT)

Biggest business learning experience

Dr Dreyer started two financial services businesses that ran a loss of
more than $571,000 in the first eighteen months, and he turned those
businesses, single-handedly, into profitable businesses after all
"experts" advised that it would be better to liquidate the businesses
because there was no chance of reviving them. It was the realisation, as
a CFP, that more than 95% of the world population would not be
financially secure at retirement age and that he was on his way to
staying part of that 95%, that was a major turning point in his life.
From that day on, he endeavoured to find out why conventional
investments and investment advice simply don’t work. In the process,
he discovered and developed the true secrets, strategies and formulae
for wealth creation, the ones that have genuine potential to set people
free. Dr Dreyer has dedicated his life to helping ordinary people learn
and apply these strategies, so that they too can have real wealth. All his
strategies are based on universal principles and laws. In this way, it is
possible for anyone to build wealth in all seven areas of life with the
emphasis on creating, preserving and enjoying financial wealth.

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Best-selling author
Developed by Dr Dreyer, the Formula For Riches® is a breakthrough
in strategic wealth creation, enabling ordinary people from all walks of
life to systematically achieve their goals in a focused, results-centred
fashion. The Formula for Riches® is integral to Dr Dreyer’s Wealth
Creation approach and can be applied in every area of wealth. The
Formula for Riches® has been used by his students over the past 25
years as a fail-safe approach to building wealth, fulfilment, happy
relationships, greater security, increased peace of mind, bountiful
leisure time and much, much more. To date, the book Formula for
Riches® has sold more than 20 000 copies worldwide.

Milestones as an author
Property: The Road to Riches
Wealth: A Technical Approach
The Art of Selling Is Never to Sell
The Basics of Property Investments
Trusts for the Entrepreneur and Investor

Property investor
Dr Dreyer’s approach includes property investments, a much-
misunderstood wealth creation tool that, correctly used, has incredible
potential for financial freedom. Dr Dreyer developed his prestige
Property Pro Investment Analysis Software™ in 1987, which has
enabled him to retire from financial planning at the age of 37. In 2002,
he made the Property Pro Investment Analysis Software™ available to
the general public through his best-selling course: The Property Pro
Investment Course™ to help people understand and apply strategic

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reasoning to make the right choices when investing in property for
financial freedom.
He has enabled his students, with these tools, to combine property and
the Formula for Riches® with spectacular and fail-safe investment
results. Dr Dreyer completed his master’s degree dissertation on
“Residential Property as an Investment Instrument”. To prove his
system, he bought 48 properties in 94 days without using a cent of his
own capital. The property portfolio was cash flow positive from the first
day.

Milestones as a property investor

1982 - Bought his first residential property.
1987 - Bought his first commercial (retail and offices) property.
1991 - Bought his first block of flats.
1994 - Bought his first township development.
1995 - Bought his first commercial property development.
2002 - Developed the Property Pro: Property Investment Course.
2002 - Certified Estate Agent (not practising).
2002 - Certified Business Broker Realtor (not practising).
2004 - Developed Property Pro Basic Course.
2004 - Bought 48 properties in 94 days for FREE.
2004 – Master’s dissertation on "Residential Property as an Investment
Instrument".
2005 - Developed the Advanced Property Investors Course.

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Debt eradication strategist
Developed with the mission to free himself and his family from the
proverbial rat race, the Warriors Against Debt: Debt Eradication
System™ has proved invaluable in all phases of the economic cycle, to
allow people trapped in the rat race to take those first crucial steps to
realise their financial goals no matter how bleak their financial
situations. Today more than 20 years after its initial conception, the
Warriors Against Debt program is still the best system on the market to
reduce financial stress and to help set people free to take back control
of their finances.

Leading wealth creator

Witnessing the effect the Formula for Riches® has had on people from
differing countries, genders and educational levels inspired him to
complete his PhD on “Applying The Formula For Wealth Creation To
Develop Entrepreneurs And Investors”. He took on a personal
challenge to use the Formula for Riches® to liberate people from
pervasive myths like “you must have money to make money”; “you
must make use of financial institutions, because you can’t do it on your
own” and “you have to be lucky, well-connected, well-educated, or
exceptionally talented to become wealthy”.
To disprove these damaging myths, Dr Dreyer took less than 12 cents
and turned it into an investment of over $1,400.000 in less than two and
a half years. The entire process was documented for his students
through his Mentoring Course. Dr Hannes Dreyer is the founder and
CEO of the Wealth Creators Method™, a private, outcome-based
learning institute, based on the culmination of 33+ years of knowledge,
experience, research and study into finance, economics, psychology
and philosophy.

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Milestones as a wealth creator entrepreneur
1967 - Starts first business at age 10.
1987 – First-time millionaire.
2002 - Wrote an advertisement in less than 30 minutes that made more
than $2,570,000.
2002 - Started a business with less than $100 that generates more than
$1.5 million per year in income.
2004 - Started a business with $0 and made more than $7,100 net profit
on the first day of trading.
2004 - The first business in the "Wealth Creators Mentor Program"
made more than $36,570 net profit the first day of trading.
2004 - Turned 11 cents into more than $1,400,000 in less than two and
a half years.
2005 - Developed the Retire Quickly Program™.
2007 – First-time "virtual millionaire" in less than 24 hours.
2010 - Founded the Wealth Creators University™.

Family man
Dr Dreyer accredits his success in life to his wife, Tanja. They have
been happily married for more than 37 years. They have two daughters
who are actively involved in the Wealth Creators University. Hannes
enjoys spending time with his family and educating his daughters in the
art of wealth creation. He has a long list of hobbies that he pursues
which includes flying helicopters, travelling, scuba diving, fire walking,
bungee jumping, reading and research, game farming and growing
cycads. He is to be found, on most days, walking around his tennis
court, devising new ways of developing wealth creators.

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Disclaimer
Dr Hannes Dreyer is not a personal or professional, financial, business
or legal consultant.

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206
Co-author Biography – Elzet Blaauw
Elzet is passionate about helping people make their ideas and dreams a
reality.
One way in which she lives out this passion is through her love for
words. Elzet wrote and illustrated her first book at the age of six, shortly
after teaching herself how to read. As an adult, she helps others find the
right words to communicate their message.
Elzet is also a wealth creator, residential real estate investor and
entrepreneur – thanks in no small part to the mentorship of Dr Hannes
Dreyer.
Elzet lives in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa, with her husband and
young son.
For more about Elzet, visit www.linkedin.com/in/elzet-kirsten-blaauw/.

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More books and products
With over 40 unique programs and hundreds of hours of content, our
programs are designed to give you the skills you need so that you can
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For more than ten years, Dr Hannes Dreyer’s information products have
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Our strategies and systems are based on more than 30 years of
experience, research and study into self-development, finance, business
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Disclaimer: We are serious about helping people who are serious about
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If you are looking for a "get rich quick", "I don't want to spend any time
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209
You can learn how to create wealth either through your investments or
by building a successful, stable and personally fulfilling business that
gives you time and freedom and money, but both will take work. We
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For more information on our free e-courses, introduction seminars,
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