The key ideas

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind

T. Harv Eker, 2005

Why does a raise sometimes melt away within six months, and why doesn't winning the lottery always make a person richer? Harv Eker believes everyone has an inner financial thermostat, set back in childhood. This book is a model and a coach's experience, not research: it's about how to notice your money programming and what you can do with it.

Who it is for

For anyone whose raises seem to vanish somewhere, and for everyone who wants to understand where their own money habits come from.

Your income can grow only to the extent that you do.

What the book is about

Why can two people with similar incomes end up with completely different lives ten years later? One saves a little at a time and builds something. For the other, every raise vanishes somewhere, and once again the money lasts exactly until the end of the month.

T. Harv Eker answers this with one idea. Everyone carries an inner money program, which he calls a financial blueprint. In the author's view, it's written back in childhood, and later it quietly steers decisions about money.

Eker says he started businesses several times and lost everything. Then he opened a fitness equipment store, grew it into a chain and became a millionaire. The book grew out of his seminars on money.

An honest caveat right away. This is a model and a coach's experience, not research. Ahead of you: a thermostat that brings money back to its usual level, three sources of your money program, and a way to divide income into “jars”.

Idea 1. Roots and fruits

Picture a fruit tree. If the fruit is small and sour, you can pick it and polish it as much as you like. The next harvest will most likely be the same.

Eker opens the book with this image. The fruits are your results: income, debts, savings. The roots are what can't be seen: your thoughts, feelings and beliefs about money. As he puts it, what's under the ground creates what's above the ground.

From this comes his chain. Programming leads to thoughts, thoughts lead to feelings, feelings lead to actions, and actions lead to results. That's why, the author believes, new knowledge about money may not work as long as everything inside stays the same.

Someone is already on their third investing course, and by the end of the month their account is at zero again.

In Eker's model, it's sometimes useful to start working on money with the roots: with what you think and feel at the moment of a money decision.

Read in Livria

About the author

T. Harv Eker is a businessman and coach who has run seminars on money and mindset for many years. By his own account in the book, he lost everything in business several times before he built a chain of fitness equipment stores and became a millionaire.

All books by this author: T. Harv Eker

Terms from the book

  • Financial blueprint: An image from the book, not a scientific term. In Eker's view, it's a money program made of beliefs and habits that forms in childhood and can influence decisions about money.
  • Financial thermostat: The author's metaphor, not a scientific concept: an inner level of income and savings that, in Eker's model, a person may keep returning to after sudden changes.
  • Verbal programming: The author's term for the phrases about money a person heard in childhood. According to Eker, one of the three ways a money program forms.
  • Declaration: The author's practice from his seminars: a short statement about money that is said out loud. The book offers no data on its effect on income.
  • Wealth files: The author's scheme, not a scientific classification: seventeen attitudes in which Eker contrasts “rich” and “poor” people. These are his generalizations.
  • Jar system: The author's way of dividing income into separate accounts with different purposes, from financial freedom to fun. A framework for a habit, not financial advice.

All terms

Similar books