The Book That Changed My Life: 4 Lessons from ‘The One Minute Millionaire’ - 1:1 with James Laughlin

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life nail your goals. I'll see you there.

Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now executive coach to global leaders and high performers. Each week I'll publish a solo cast where I'll share my top high performance habits and methodologies to supercharge your life and career. If you enjoy the show, please take a short moment to subscribe and leave a rating and review. I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show. A very special thanks to NZ Mortgages for sponsoring this episode of the Lead On Purpose Podcast. You can check them out at nzmortgages co NZ for years I thought financial success was something I would never achieve. It was beyond my means, beyond my mindset, beyond my skills. Then I read a book that changed everything. I'm about to share that with you. I want to share exactly what I learned in the hopes that if you were stuck like I was around money, around money mindset that this will help you to unlock it and get towards where you want to get to financially a lot quicker. Welcome to One to One with James Lachlan. I'm here to share with you insights, tips, coaching strategies that I use with some of the best athletes on the planet, the top CEOs in the world, and some of the best winning teams there is around. I just want to share those with you to help you in your pursuit of of excellence. Look, the book I want to share with you is a game changer. I'm going to lift it up and for those that are watching, you're going to see it. For those that are listening, you got to search it up. It's the One Minute Millionaire by Mark Victor Hansen. I read this when I was 18. I'm now a lot older than that. So this is 20 years ago. I lifted this book and I was earning minimum wage. I was spending most of my money at the pub. I had no aspirations. I'd left school, didn't go to university, working at a hotel and life wasn't really that good at all. And I didn't see any options for living in any other way. I didn't think I could achieve anything above minimum wage or much above that. But reading this book truly changed my mind. I remember the exact cafe I was sitting in in Belfast, Northern Ireland, reading this. And as I'm reading it, I'm thinking, I can do this. I can actually do this. So I'm going to share with you some of the principles. Please write them down. Please take note, you may be doing lots of them already. You're absolutely smashing it. But if you're not, wherever you are in your financial journey, I promise you, this book is incredibly valuable and the strategies in it are timeless. So first things first, there's power in leverage. What do I mean by that? Well, the whole idea is that success comes from leveraging time, money, maybe even relationships. In fact, if you can leverage all of them, you're going to get towards your financial outcomes much quicker. And one of the, I guess, key action steps was around focusing on scalable income streams, things that you can scale without having to show up. So, for example, I was showing up and getting paid, literally minimum wage. So for every hour that I worked, I would get paid an hourly wage or rate. And for a long time, that's how I lived. And the downside of that is that when you're sleeping, you're not getting paid. When you're sick, you're not getting paid. When you have to take a day off for childcare or to go to an appointment, you're not getting paid. So rather than trading time for money, create value in the marketplace that you can scale. And you might go, right, right now I've got five ideas. Or you might go, I have no ideas. That's okay. Get pen and paper, get out of your head and think, what am I good at? What do I do? How could I turn this into a product that I could scale? So as soon as I read this, I was a drummer then I thought, there's very few drumming books. In fact, there's no digital drumming books in the field of drumming that I was in at the time. I could create an ebook and a physical book, but the ebook could sell like hotcakes. And I only needed to create it once. And it's a button and away we go. And I sold tens of thousands of copies of that. Took me, you know, a month or two to create it. And then it sold and it still continues to sell. And that's what we're talking about leveraging time, money and relationships. Okay, the second big takeaway is that you've got to shift to an abundance mindset. What's that? Well, I don't know about you, but my relationship with money and I guess my belief about money was that it doesn't grow on trees, it's scarce. You know, be a penny pincher, put your money away safe if you can. That was my belief. That's not going to serve any of us in terms of reaching financial freedom or financial abundance. So an abundance mindset is there's so much out there, there's so much to go around, there's so much for all of us. We don't need to be scarce in our thinking. So a big actionable step that the book taught me was around reframing this limiting belief. It was limiting me in terms of accessing more wealth, in terms of accessing a better job, in terms of accessing ideas around investing and letting my money make more money. So I would often then take this tool of hey, how can I reframe and make it more positive, focusing on solutions, not problems. And so I started to think, well, money is abundant and it literally is everywhere and there's way too much of it. How about I add more value, become more skilled, learn more and see where I can then add value to the market, any market, doesn't matter whether it's in that case, for me it was drumming. Now it's something very different. But for you it might be in wealth, in brokering, in teaching, whatever your thing is, it's about going, okay, where can I add more value? Maybe you're a board member and you're going, how do I add more value and a better board and better paid board? Well, it comes down to starting with an abundant mindset. I had a massive company, but two years ago, a real estate company that wanted me to come in and work with 300 of their team over a number of weeks, months. And it was all around, how do we get them to think abundantly? Why? Because this real estate team understood that when they think abundantly, they're going to act differently. They're going to find solutions, make more money, find better solutions for clients. It's an amazing upward cycle. I geek out on working with teams around. How do we unlock this possibilitarian mindset where we look around and all we see is possibilities. Okay, the third lesson was that multiple streams of income are non negotiable, right? So the whole idea here is when you rely on a single income source, super risky, you Are at major risk. You've been in a job for 10 years, 15 years. You're comfortable, you get paid. Okay? What if they decide to make you redundant and you've got no other skills? You don't know how to transfer your current skills, you're stuffed. We don't want that. Super important that you diversify your income streams. I learned this when the Christchurch earthquake slammed into Christchurch. I realized all I do is teach drums. If this place I teach drums decides it's a luxury, we don't need a band anymore at this educational institute, well, hey, maybe I'm out of a job. What do I do? I have no idea. Living 12,000 miles from where I grew up, All I've ever done was play drums, teach drums. So right then, at that point, I thought, I need to diversify. So I started a retail shop selling drums. I doubled down on digital products, education products, so that they could sell globally. I started going, could I do workshops outside of New Zealand in different countries. So if something happened in New Zealand, another earthquake hit, I could go and teach in different places. I started reading a lot more. I started going and getting more education. And that allowed me to diversify my income streams. I even set up a drumming membership where hundreds of drummers from around the world would join me on a zoom or a skype at the time, and they'd all pay a monthly fee. Super simple, super easy. But again, it diversified and it de risked my income. Where are you at with your income and your investments? Are you diversified or are you stuck on one form of income? And if you're a company owner, I want you to think about your key client base. Is it in one city or one island or one region? If it is, my challenge to you is how can you diversify that? So explore investments, look at side businesses or passive income opportunities. Okay, the fourth lesson is take immediate and consistent action. Procrastination forces us to step backwards. Procrastination holds us back. Look, small, consistent efforts compound over time. I always think about the smallest tiny steps perform daily, consistently over time, lead to sublime results. So the first step here is, you know, set daily financial goals or weekly financial goals and actually track them. So it could be $2 a day, $5 a day, whatever it is you can afford, actually track it, automate it. If you know financial freedom is something you're working towards, get someone who has more knowledge than you. And if you think, oh, I can't afford a financial advisor, well, well, many mortgage brokers are free. They don't cost you anything. They will give you great ideas about structure. If you're looking at home loans or refinancing, a couple of books, Girls that Invest. Amazing book. Unshakable by Tony Robbins. The Psychology of Money, Right? Read those three books. I promise you, you will have a lot of ideas around how the 1% rule works, how we can let it compound, how we can build something quite phenomenal over time. You've got time. Start slow, but be consistent. Today's the best day to start. Okay, the next big lesson was that you got to find a mentor. Success leaves clues. Find someone, learn from them. If they're successful at what you want to do, they've already done it. Go and learn from them. Ask them questions, be curious, read their books, listen to their podcasts, get around great people. That's something for me that fast tracked my success. You know, as a kid learning to play drums, I was fortunate to have an incredible teacher. In fact, I had multiple teachers help me with different aspects of my drumming. That's why, at 13, I was fortunate enough to win the World Solo Drumming Championship for the first time. Why people had invested in me, helped me avoid errors and issues, and helped me elevate my playing. I've done the same in finance. Find someone who knows way more than me to help me level up in that to move toward financial freedom. Done the same in my health. Same with business. It's always, to me, very important to find people who can coach us, mentor us, and always look for the best that you can find. Don't settle. Look for the very best mentors. Whether you're in real estate, finance, education, health, whatever you're in. Find people that can fast track your success, because success always leaves clues. Look for those breadcrumbs. Seek out mentors, coaches, advisors, mastermind groups. I was just down in Queenstown this week with my own mastermind group. I call it Roundtable. And we generally sit at a roundtable. There's people from all different backgrounds. Some are CEOs, board members, some people just starting out in business. We've got entrepreneurs in there, but the one thing in common is they're all wanting to get better. They all want to share ideas, resources. They all want to be challenged by one another. Get yourself in to your mastermind group that will help you, that will fast track your success massively. The accountability with that as well is huge. Okay? And the very last thing I want to share with you is be grateful. And that wasn't a chapter in the book, but that's just, to me, common sense. Be grateful for what you've got. Don't be needy. Don't go out there and be needy to get more dollars. Be grateful for what you've got. The bed that you sleep in, this device that you're watching or listening to this on the people that you have in your life, the weather that's surrounding you right now, the shoes that you've got on your feet. Be genuinely grateful. Because when you come from a place of gratitude, you attract others. When you come from a place of scarcity and neediness and protectiveness, I promise you, you will repel people that can help you move towards your dreams and your aspirations. So please go and buy this book. I'll put a link in the show notes. I'm sure there'll be the team will be able to find somewhere on Amazon or maybe even your local bookstore might have this but the one minute Millionaire game changing book. Very simple. It's a mindset book. It will give you the tools and they're timeless tools to level up in whatever way you want to with money mindset. So please get out there and lead your life on purpose. A very special thanks to NZ Mortgages for sponsoring this episode of the Lead on Purpose podcast. You can check them out at nzmortgages co nz. Thanks for tuning in today and investing in your own personal leadership. Please hit that subscribe button and I'd love if you'd leave me a rating and review you. I've got some amazing guests lined up for you in the coming weeks and leaders. It's that time to get out there and lead your life on purpose.