Self-made millionaire shares 3 tricks for raising successful kids

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Season 4 of ABC's 'Doogie Howser M.D.'

With a little work, you can make sure your children are self-confident, self-reliant and built for success.

For starters, you should be talking about success all the time in your home. It has to be a part of daily life.

Always encourage your kids with their dreams, and never discourage them from dreaming big. The more you talk about success, model being successful and encourage them to dream about success, the more you'll place in your kids the hope and drive to make success happen in their lives.

Here are three tips for cultivating success in your home:

1. Decide on the goal

The first and most important thing you have to do as a family is decide that this matters to you, and then reinforce that decision over and over.

Put a stake in the ground. Everything starts with a firm decision with true commitment behind it. Take responsibility for the success of your entire family.

To do this, of course, you need to define what success is to you and your family. Since success really can be almost anything, everyone should be involved in defining your communal idea of success and then buying into it.

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2. Make success important

Regardless of how you define success — whether it is primarily financial, spiritual, physical, mental, emotional, philanthropic, communal or familial — the most important thing you must know about success in order to have success is to make it vital.

Make sure your kids see you win and they derive a lesson from it if you lose. Make sure they understand what happens if you can't get your art sold, or you can't get that great book published, or you have some great idea that will improve the world but can't succeed in bringing it to fruition.

Help them understand the stakes. That will help motivate them.

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3. Help your kids visualize

For kids, the future can be hazy and abstract unless you help them visualize it more clearly. Then, once you've done that, reinforce the visual daily. Encourage your kids to write down plans and ideas.

Make a dream board where you use photos to visualize this future. You can start with what I call the lottery game. This is when you imagine exactly what you would do if you won the lottery. The things that come to mind may not seem "realistic." That doesn't matter.

What you need to realize is that these dreams are big, but they are attainable, and you don't actually have to win the lottery to do them. You need to work hard and become financially free.

Let no dream be labeled as unrealistic.

Once you've made the decision to have a home filled with success and made success important, and after you've helped everyone visualize what they want, then it's time to take action, as I describe in "The 10X Rule." Figure out what the habits of successful people are and study them, for example.

But the most important thing to do is start, and that's what you're doing by setting this goal and working on it with your kids.