Pay yourself before you pay your mortgage. Even if it's only $10 a month. Whether you earn a paycheck or own a business, this habit separates people who build wealth from people who just earn money. Here's how it works:

Make it automatic. Set up an automatic transfer so you never have to decide each month, and you never forget. Over time, aim for 10 percent of your income. The government takes its bite out of every paycheck, and you manage to live with that. Take one more bite and give it to your own assets.

The memory of those words is still vivid. But the situation was the situation. I wasn't going to change my goal, and I was going to have my baby. So I asked myself the only question that mattered: So what, now what?

Then it got hard again. My nanny fell through. My bookkeeper, my assistant, and I all pitched in, and I nursed every two hours while we kept building the business from my home office. Then a couple next door, whose twin sons were grown, offered to help with my son. They became two of the most important people in my life.

"I am so sick of people talking about time management." A woman said that to me at one of my seminars in Calgary, and she was right. Whether you run a business or work a job, you can't fit 25 hours of life into a 24-hour day. Here's what I tell people to manage instead:

And compartmentalize. If your 9 a.m. meeting excites you or makes you angry, don't carry it into your 11 a.m. Write it down, hand it off, or call someone you trust, then walk into the next thing clean.

Before you go into business with anyone, plan how it ends. Whether you're partnering on a side venture or bringing an investor into your company, life is unpredictable, and so are people. Here's what I learned the hard way:

Break-ups, personal or professional, are not when people are at their most rational. That's why you design your divorce while you're still in love. Everyone is excited and reasonable at the start. That's exactly when to agree on how it ends.