Do you want to be a millionaire?

Ummm, duh, who doesn’t? Fantasies of financial freedom and all the juicy goodness of living the seven-figure life pervade my daily musings.

Living in New York City, I’m immersed in millionairedom.

I peer creepily  curiously into the windows of Park Avenue apartments, hopeful to get a glimpse of how the other half lives. I study the executives who hurriedly rush into their Wall Street offices. I day dream the life stories of men and women dining in five star restaurants as I sit behind the cash register and swipe their black AmExes.

Even sharing the same city, the same streets, the same conversation – these millionaires are so seemingly far away.

The two feet, from behind the cash register to the front, are the longest distance I’ve ever sought to conquer.

A Millionaire Bridges the Gap

 

This weekend I had the opportunity to pull back the curtain on the mystique of millionairedom.

At a conference for bloggers – yes, some bloggers are indeed millionaires (and I have every intention of becoming one myself) – I got to spend time with the best and brightest in the field.

So what does it look like behind the magic of those seven figures?

Turns out it’s not that much different than the view from behind my cash register.

Sure, these high net worth successes now have significantly more resources, flexibility and freedom than me and my zillion side hustles just scraping by, but as keynote conference speaker Jeff Goins noted, the dream doesn’t end.

Hitting a major milestone doesn’t mean that dreams simply stop. As much as I aspire to having a million dollars of my own, I know that when I do, I certainly won’t be done dreaming, about money, financial freedom or anything else.

Similarly, these millionaires, while celebrating what they have, are still looking forward, assessing their own two feet of seemingly impossible distance to conquer.

“Living the dream” is a process, and everyone, regardless of where they are in that process, can benefit from building the bridges from where they are to where they want to be – millionaires, thousandaires, hundredaires, even me.

 

 

A Millionaire Closes the Gap

 

While I may be more like the millionaires I met than I give myself credit for, there is also something truly outstanding about them.

They are able to build relationships and connect with people in a way that creates remarkable value. But more importantly, they are finishers.

As Goins also noted, many of us are addicted to the idea of starting – a business, a diet, a goal, etc- but few of us have the discipline to finish.

A dream is built gradually over time with daily discipline and habits.

Success doesn’t come from leaping over the gap of where you are to where you want to be, it comes from slowly and consistently building a bridge to cross.

 

A Millionaire Finishes the Bridge

 

A couple of weeks ago I gave a webinar on Budgeting for Actors at Backstage University. The head of Backstage U, Tom, secured his position there by starting a website called Audition Update, a valuable resource where actors can share all the latest audition information in an online community forum.

Being an actress and entrepreneur myself, I so enjoyed talking to Tom about his journey to success. During our conversation, Tom shared how often people came up to him saying they had had the idea of creating a similar business themselves at some point.

Even I, as a low-profile blogger have found that there’s a lot of, “I had that idea too” going around. In fact, everyone I know has some kind of million-dollar idea, but obviously, we’re not all millionaires.

In his keynote, Goins spoke at length about how we have a tendency to wait for some “big moment” in order to pursue and finish our million dollar ideas, rather than building bridges with daily discipline to get them done.

For Tom, in creating Audition Update, it meant pushing past all of the excuses not to bring his idea to fruition, learning how to set up a website from scratch, and investing his limited resources of time and money gradually but consistently over time.

Sure, there are some “big moments” during that pursuit, like getting the corporate offer to sell the site you created, but it’s the in between that’s hard, and the reason many don’t finish.

In order to make sure I finish my own bridge to millionairedom, I’ve been practicing my bridge building by making the tasks that need to get done in the hard “in between” scheduled and habitual.

I found that I started to gain serious momentum while training for my first full marathon. Getting grounded in the reality of a physical task that required daily discipline in order to achieve the end goal by a target date taught me, quite literally, how to build and finish my bridges.

I now apply that discipline to my income producing endeavors with the hope that I can go from peering in at millionaire lifestyles with curiosity and awe, to being one myself.