Financial Planning

The proof is in the pudding. There are many products and programs that deal with wealth creation, but we don't see a lot of businesswomen who are able to uptake that knowledge and utilize it in the marketplace.

The proof is in the pudding. There are many products and programs that deal with wealth creation, but we don't see a lot of businesswomen who are able to uptake that knowledge and utilize it in the marketplace.

Now, I'm all for people diving in and buying books. But the fact is, the average adult reads only 10 or 11 pages of any success or business book. People buy the books with enthusiasm. They are excited about the end goal they might reach. But when they open the books and realize the actions they will have to take to attain those goals, everything falls apart.

That phenomenon is the reason I began to study adult learning. I was fascinated by the fact it is very normal for people to quit learning, and very exceptional for them to persevere.

To phrase it another way, it is actually normal to fail at learning, and exceptional to achieve. Why is that? I did my Ph.D. to find out, and I discovered something quite simple. More than 95 percent of people report that they are bored or upset when they are trying to learn. That kind of stress is actually the normal reaction to learning. And when your brain determines that you are under stress, what does it do for you? It does what it has to do to get you out of that stress. The fastest way to get you out of distress is to stop trying.

Some programs and books try to tell people that learning can be "fun." Learning can't be fun. If it is fun, that means the content has been watered down to the point where it is useless.

To learn what you need to learn to become rich, you need a mindset that says that being bored, or frustrated, or not understanding concepts right away, is not enough reason to stop. Feeling frustrated is temporary. It is only going to last until you learn what you need to learn.

If you don't have a strategy that makes feeling bad okay, you will abandon almost any learning goal you set. When you look back at the important things you have learned in your life, you will remember that you had a hard time mastering them. But you will probably also recall that there was a teacher there for you at those times, a facilitator who got you to stick with the process long enough to get the result. This is one of the things that impressed me most about Trump University and the approach they took to The Wealth Builder's Blueprint.

Learning to acquire wealth needs to be challenging. It needs to be big. But in order to really make it happen, you need support and a tolerance for learning.

Dr. Stephanie Burns is an authority on goal achievement and adult learning. Trump University is proud to present her insights in The Trump Way to Wealth, Play to Win in Business and in Life and The Wealth Builder's Blueprint, from which this post has been adapted.