13 Rules for Building Wealth Before 40 | Ep 885

Give me the next 40 minutes or so and I'll help you make the most of your 20s and your 30s. So I made my first million when I was 26. A decade later, my portfolio companies generated last year over $250 million in aggregate revenue, and I'm 36 now. And so in this video, I'm going to give you the real-world advice that I wish someone had told me much earlier. So number 1 is you want to take asymmetric bets. If you're under 30, you have no reason not to go 100% all in on your goals. The downside is nothing and the upside is everything. So if you think about life as giving you kind of lottery tickets, right? You can scratch off a ticket. And if you don't win, then what did you lose? The scratch-off ticket. But the thing is, is that when you have nothing to lose, you have nothing to lose and you only have things to gain. And so the objective, when you have as little as you can, is to take as many shots as possible because your downside is zero, right? And so it's the only time in your career where you can take more shots than anyone else. And so the reason, or the fact that people don't take shots, and myself included when I was younger, I was so afraid to take a shot. But the only reason that was holding me back was the belief that other people who I don't even talk to anymore would somehow judge me as a, quote, failure. And so the thing is, is you're never going to have less responsibilities than you have today. But the thing is, is that you never actually start from scratch ever again, because every time after the first time you start from scratch, you start with an experience. So you still always net a positive. And so that's the beautiful thing about taking shots is that you either get the big win or more likely you learn something and then that learning compounds. And so the thing is, is that I had a misunderstanding of how success worked, which is that it's far more stacking many things on top of each other than it is nothing, nothing, nothing, and then something works, right? And so if you imagine success like a bridge, right? So you're over here and you've got this chasm that you have to get across, right? This is, you know, let's say there's alligators here and lava and all sorts of stuff, right? And then there's you over here who's got, you know, your big smiley face and you're happy and you're doing all the stuff you want. The thing is, is that I thought that I just kept wanting to jump over this gap over and over again and think like, if I just jumped hard enough or Or if I had the right opportunity, that's what would do it. But more likely than not, it's really like you install these bricks on the path and you keep walking and it's like, okay, well, I fall here. Okay, well, I'll fix this one later. And then you take a ho— and then you, you start again and then you fall here and then you fix this and you keep going and you fall here and then you fix this. And then all of a sudden you make it all the way across. And that's what it looks like, or what the experience of kind of becoming the overnight success is. And that's why so many people talk about it where it it doesn't happen at all and then it happens all at once. It's not that it happens all at once. The actual outcome of getting a system to work all the way through, that is binary. But the process of building the system is actually very linear. I'm also not saying this from a position of, I, you know, I saw some success early in my career. I also started pretty early. And so I had 9 failed businesses, 9, before I had one that really worked. And so I bring this up to say that like, I don't know what failure you're on right now. Maybe you're on 0 failures, you're on 1 failure or 2 failures, but you have way more failures in you. At the end of the day, like, one of the big realizations I had is that since life is an infinite game, and what that means is that there are, there are games where you have basically a defined time period, and at the end you count the score, right? And then there's infinite games where the only point of the game is to keep playing the game. And so, like, the point of marriage is not to get married, it's to stay married. The point of health is not to get healthy, it's to stay healthy. And the point of business is not to get into business, but to stay in business. And so basically, the only thing that you have to do to stay in business is to choose to continue to fight. And so once you realize that, then you realize that you become a success the moment you decide you are, because being successful is far more about being in the game, about being in the arena. And so when you're in your 20s, what you lack in experience, you have to make up for in effort and hours. And believing otherwise leads to a life of honestly well-deserved mediocrity. So if you're hearing this, you're like, okay, I got it. I need to take more bets and I need to take maybe riskier bets because my downside is nothing. All right, well, which bets do I take? So number 2, don't follow your passion. So I feel very confident about this statement, and I know that this is going to, you know, shock some people or, you know, rub some people the wrong way. And I really think I'm right. And this is not because I want to be right. I want to help because this is something that I fell for for a long time. And it kept me very stuck because I kept thinking like, I'm not passionate about this. I'm not passionate about this. I'm not passionate about this. When the reality is that When you start, your passion is very vague, right? And so you never feel like you have it right because you don't know what it is. Now, some people, sure, if you're Mozart and you're starting to play violin when you're 3, you already know, and you're probably not watching this. But the vast majority of people don't pick up a violin at 3 and start making concertos at 6, right? So many people have no idea. And so it's hard to say whether you like, you know, A more than B, right? You might like both, and maybe you kind of like them both mid, right? And so it's hard to quantify, which makes it hard to decide. And that's the key point is that If you don't know what a decision is, decision, like decide, the word itself actually comes from Latin, which is decidere, which means to cut off. And so it makes it very difficult for you to cut off something when you're like kind of lukewarm on each, right? Now, if I use a different frame of rather than which one do I like more, if we said which one am I better at, that tends to be a little bit easier of a frame to make a decision of like, okay, well, I like both these things, but I'm definitely better at math than I am at music. Right? Cool. Well, then that becomes frame 1. Of why you don't follow your passion. So the next reason that you don't follow your passion is that it gets the cause and effect backwards, right? And so often we become passionate about things after we get good at them, not before. Kind of the third sub-reason for this is that liking something doesn't make you good at it, right? And so being passionate doesn't even guarantee that you have the skills for it. And sometimes it's better to have a career and enjoy your passions in your free time. Like, my dad used to tell me this, and honestly, my godfather did too. So like, probably the two biggest male figures in my life growing up. My dad used to say, if I followed my passion, I'd be a bartender at a ski slope. Right? He's like, no, of course not. That's not what I'm going to do. And he's a surgeon now and he likes what he does. Now, my godfather, private wealth management, the advice that he gave was, listen, if you can make enough money in your main job, he's like, if you work 40 hours a week, he's like, that's part-time. He's like, what are you going to do with the other 128 hours a week? He's like, you can do whatever you want. And so I had these mentors early on for me and it was actually very helpful. Now, some people will be like, well, that's terrible advice. Fine. If your advice is working for you, keep following it. But if it's not, maybe consider this. All right. And so the whole idea of following your passion skips the hard work part, right? And so getting good at something means practicing the boring and the hard parts. So like, I remember, like, I like playing ping pong. You could say that I'm passionate about playing ping pong. But once I realized what it would take to become really, really good at ping pong, like win tournaments, it was like, okay, so I have to hit 500 forehands and 500 backhands. And I was like, oh no, I don't, I don't want to do this. Right. And so the thing is, is that You have to embrace the fact that whatever you're going to dedicate to your career is going to have these, these long, boring stretches, right? It's the mundane middle that you have to master. And so this passion idea sets false expectations. It makes you feel like that work should always feel fun and exciting, and it just isn't. And one of my first mentors, different mentor, told me, never try to make money out of something you love because it'll just turn into work. And I always remember that because he was like, he's like, don't ruin something good. I actually think it was very practical advice for me. I'm very grateful that I got that. But the thing is, is that getting good at anything, you have to slog through this period where you're probably not going to be passionate about it because it's very boring. It's very monotonous, very repetitive, right? It's one thing to say, oh, I like ping pong. It's another thing to say, like, I hit 500 forehands and 500 backhands every morning and every night, right? It's a different level of dedication that you have to have to it. And that isn't going to be something you're passionate about. You might like playing the game, but getting good at the game are two very different things, right? And so it sets this false expectation that I think ultimately harms more people. And I think one of the biggest reasons of not following your passion is that your passions will change as you age. I promise you, the things that I was passionate about when I was 20 is not things I'm passionate about now. And I'm sure the things I'm passionate about when I'm in my mid and late 40s are gonna be different than things I am now. Same as 50s and 60s. And so this idea that like I have to find this one thing, it puts a ton of pressure on that thing that it has to be perfect forever. And if it's not gonna be perfect forever, then why don't we be practical now so that we can give ourselves options later? So fundamentally, all we're gonna look for are things that you're good at, that people already spend money on. Because that creates a very high likelihood outcome of you creating something that you can exchange in the marketplace. Once you've decided on something that you want to get better at, you're already good at it, you want to get better at it, which is hopefully, you know, maybe it is your passion, which would be amazing, but a lot of times it's not. The next thing is you have to get good at one thing. So think about the equal opposite of this. How would I get someone to be poor? I would get them to keep starting new things rather than getting good at one thing. And so do you remember that guy who got rich dropshipping, day trading, buying crypto and wholesaling all at the same time? Yeah, me neither. You have to focus. And it's arrogant to think that you can do multiple things at once and beat someone who does one thing with all their effort. You have to pick one thing and go all in, and then you become the one who's hard to beat. So I told you earlier that I had 9 failed businesses. Now, here's the part that a lot of people don't know. 6 of those I had at the same time. And so I like to tell people, oh yeah, I'm a CEO. I've got multiple companies, right? Like kind of the way I do now, but it's very different now because the thing is, is that I actually have CEOs who run those businesses, right? Not me. Because you can only be CEO of one thing. You can only drive one thing. Now I drive acquisition.com, right? But CEOs of each of the divisions of each of the portfolio companies, like those are people who run their own profit and loss statements. And I didn't understand that. And so I had a chiropractor agency, a dental agency, a gym launch business where we did turnarounds. And then I also had 5 gyms of my own at the time. It, depending on how you want to describe it, I had 5 locations plus the 3. So I had 8. It's a lot. All right. It was too much. And because of that, I was stressed out of my mind. I was so spread thin. And basically I had lots of things that generated revenue and I didn't make any money. The only thing that it fed was my ego, not my bank account. And so when did this big turnaround happen for me? Layla came into my life and she was like, hey, you're clearly really good at this one thing. Why don't we just cut everything else? And that's exactly what I did. It was the hardest period of my life because I had to shut down all the other businesses but one, which also meant that I had to end partnerships with all these different other people that were relying on me. And that was hard. I'm not gonna lie, like, it was not fun. Like, these are people that I liked, but I had to make this decision. I had to cut off the life that I didn't want to have the life I wanted. If you want to impress people who are poor, talk about how many things you do. If you want to impress people who are rich, talk about how good you are at one thing. Like at the end of the day, your ability to demonstrate excellence is going to be the only thing that someone who is ahead of you will look at. And so you only fool the people who have no idea. And I'll be real. There's a lot of people who have no idea. So the thing is, is that this is where the whole imposter syndrome will start creeping up on you because you're like, man, I, you know, I kind of feel like a little bit of imposter because you are, you're misrepresenting yourself. You know, you're not as successful as you pretend to be. And so if you want to eliminate imposter syndrome, just stop lying. When I say lying, people are like, I don't lie. If you present something in a way that you know is going to be perceived differently than what reality is, posturing, in my opinion, lying. You're misrepresenting. What you want to be able to do is state the facts and tell the truth, period. And then if those facts and truth are not compelling and do not get you status, then change the facts and change the truth. Meaning, not that you lie about them, but you work so hard that the truth is compelling. And sometimes that takes time, but I promise you, the people who are, who are all in on the imposter stuff, the guys that I knew that are, that were, you know, when I was in my 20s who were kind of like hustle bros, whatever, a lot of those guys faded, you know, and, or they're still like jumping from thing to thing to thing, kind of like pretending to be successful. But like, I know that they're barely able to afford their house. And at the end of the day, it's a choice that you have to make. Do I want to pretend to be rich? Do I want to pretend to be successful? Do I want to look like I'm successful? Or do I want to be successful? Which more likely is do the things that success requires, which today do not look like success. It looks like a very long string of failures because you will be rewarded far more in life for your determination than your intelligence. But the problem with determination is, is that in the short term, it looks like a long string of failures until it works. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all 8 functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, you got HR, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com/roadmap. R-O-A-D map. Roadmap. Okay, so you're like, got it, I'm gonna focus. Now let me give you something that's gonna help you stay focused. Number 4, stop networking. All right, now this is a really, really important point. Now, it's not that I even have some big problem with networking overall. That's actually not my point. It's more that there are seasons of life, right? In the beginning, you're in exploration. I grabbed this from Naval and I really love it. Later on, you get into exploitation, which is where you go all in, right? And so the thing is, is that in the beginning, you're tasting lots of stuff. But the idea here is that you're trying to figure out what you are good at or have some proclivity towards. When you have that proclivity, then it becomes very clear. Now is the time to cut everything else so that we can focus and go deep, right? So you go broad in the beginning so that you can figure out what you to go deep on. The broad period that you're in is never the period where you're going to make money. Like, this is the part you have to get. And I like, and I say this with such passion behind it because this was a part, this was a season that took me, I feel like, too long to graduate from. I'd say from the beginning of when I started until I really graduated from it was about 5 years. And so it's, it's less of a binary, more of a continuum. In the beginning, you taste lots of stuff and then you just have to, because in the beginning you have to say yes to things. You have to say yes, because you're so bad. You're so scared. You never want to say yes, but you learn to say yes a little bit. And then you say yes more. And then you say yes more. And then very quickly you learn to say yes and get overwhelmed. And so the only way out of this yes trap is you have to start practicing to say no. And if you're like, wait a second, that means that I have to change what I do. Welcome to entrepreneurship. Like you have to learn, you have to evolve, you have to grow. So let me give you a very tactical example. So if you're debating between going to a networking event, right? Or like a lunch with some dude who's like, hey, we should collaborate. We should synergize. We should maybe trade ideas. Let me pick your brain, whatever. Right? And if you're picking between any of those things and working, choose the work because when the work works out, the people will still be there to take your call. But if you never do the work, No amount of networking will get the work done for you. And the, and the, and the bonus or negative bonus here is that if you don't get the work done, they're not going to take your call in the future. And so they're willing to take the call today with whatever small amount of success that you have. But if you lose that success because you get distracted, they're not going to take the call in the future. That door will be open, I promise. And not only will that door be open, 100 other doors will open for you if you win. The reality is that during the season, Losers congregate, winners isolate. If everyone was supposed to win, they would've made podiums bigger. The top of the mountain isn't supposed to fit a lot of people. It's normal. The air is harder to breathe. And the thing is, is if all of this seems antithetical or different than what you've heard or what other people around you are experiencing, ask yourself, do those people have the lives you want? A great way to make a mistake is to ask someone else's idea about your idea who has no idea. When you make this transition from going from the exploration period to the exploitation phase, you go from many looser connections to very few tight ones. And I, I tend to be very transactional as a person, but I think we all are. And some people are just open about it. And so everybody on some level does some sort of math in their head of like the person, this person in my life, I get more benefits than I have costs. But the thing is, is that if you want to raise the standard of your life, you have to raise the standard of the people who you surround yourself with. Because the fastest way to change your life is to change who you're friends with. Because that reference group is ultimately going to be what you compare yourself to. And so if you change who you compare yourself to, all of a sudden you will create deprivation around the difference between where they're at and where you're at. And so if you can find a way into the circles where people are further ahead than you, and here's the thing. If you're hardworking, like the only way that people let you into circles that you don't deserve to be in is work ethic. There is no other way. It is the universal currency of respect across cultures, across time periods, across cohorts, across generations. An old man will respect a young man who hustles, and they will always be willing to give time to somebody who they think will execute. Like, this is— that was my secret, and it still is my secret. Like, I, I network with people who are above, you know, I punch above my weight class in terms of the people that I'm connected with because they know that I'll do the work. And so they don't feel like they're wasting their time by helping. Because the thing is, is a lot of people are actually very happy to help you. What they aren't happy to do is waste their time helping you when you actually don't help yourself. And so I've shed friends at every season of my life, and my close circle has always been very small, like very small, like very, very, very small. The thing is, is that I think of my life in kind of seasons, right? And so you're going to have friends for this season and Maybe you keep them for life, but maybe you don't. And I think giving yourself permission to say like, that was that season and they were amazing friends for the objectives that I had then. And then my objectives change. It's not really fair to them to say, hey, I'm completely changing all the things that I'm doing. You have to still be friends with me. It might not make sense for them. And so not keeping this expectation over them has helped me kind of like free myself of that so that I can reinvest the time that I have in friends that I think will help me get to where I'm trying to go next. Okay. So if we're taking these big bets, And we're, we're following something that we're good at rather than that we're passionate about. And we're not gonna get distracted. We're doubling down on one thing and we're turning off these other things that in the beginning we were exploring, the, the little lunches, the little networking, because we know that if we just succeed at this one thing, all of those doors will be open. What do we do to make money? So let me give you a money rule. Money loves speed. And this will relate back to the asymmetric bets. By the time you have all the information, The opportunity is gone. Sometimes you just have to make your bet. And it's almost always faster to make a decision than make a mistake and then correct that mistake than it is to painstakingly deliberate on the decision. And so if you know how long it would take you to fix something, if you're wrong, then just make your best bet because you can always fix it later. And so said differently, if it takes you 5 minutes to decide and then, you know, 10 minutes to fix something, Don't take 2 hours to decide because you could just do it. And if you're right, you immediately are moving forward 5 minutes later. And if you're wrong, you're moving forward 15 minutes later. But either way, it's gonna take you less time than trying to assume that you're gonna know everything. Cuz you're just not, you have to get a grip with uncertainty. Like uncertainty is the job. Like if you want certainty, don't try and go after your dreams. Because the thing is, is that the only way to go after a certain dream is to go after an old dream. And if you go after an old dream that's already happened, you're trying to fulfill something that will not happen again. And so you're either going to do the work or you're going to sit around wishing you'd done the work. And one of the things that took me a very long time to understand was that the things that dragged me down were not the things that I thought they were, because the heaviest things in life aren't iron or gold, but they're unmade decisions. They're the things that weigh us down. They take up all of our attention, all of our brainpower. And so right now there's probably a handful of decisions that you know you need to make that you're just not. If you want to feel yourself go so much faster than you ever have, just decide. Because so few decisions in life actually are irreversible. Even the ones that people pretend are irreversible. What if I— should I buy this car? Should I buy this car? You could buy it and then flip it. It's not like you can't sell it again. Right? And so the real cost of the decision is the delta between what I could buy for, what I could sell for. Okay, well, how much does it cost me waiting 6 months to do this? Probably a lot. And if I need that car to, to, to, you know, or truck so that I can like go to job sites or pick up clients or whatever it is, then like I am losing all of the time that I'm waiting to decide. And I'm telling you where people slow down is at the decision process more than at the doing process. Doing usually takes very little time. It's the deciding that, that bogs people down in, in quagmire, right? They just get stuck. They, they feel like they're trudging through mud. Because they just hit these walls and all of a sudden there's no action because they're just thinking, they're planning. And I think I had to get comfortable with the idea that there are so many variables that I do not know that I actually have to get comfortable with the idea that I just should test and learn and I'll learn way faster than if I try and deliberate. And that has happened more times in my life than not. And I would say that approach has served me with bigger and bigger decisions in life. Like I have, I've made monster mistakes, but the bigger mistake that I would've made is just not being able to make decisions to begin with. And so you can move through life at 7 times the rate of other people by simply changing when you say you're going to make a decision from the end of the week to the end of the day. And if you wanna move even faster than that, you can decide at the end of the hour. And if you wanna move any faster than that, guess what you could do? Decide now. And so sometimes, like, my team has seen me do this. Well, we're like, okay, so, um, you know, we've gotta, we gotta make this decision. And people are always like, Yeah, let's kick that to next, you know, meeting or let's, let's circle back. Let's, let's go offline for that. It's like, no, let's confront. Let's just choose. Let's pick which vendor we going with, which website design do we like? Like what, what headline are we going to use? What's the ad hook that we're going to go with? Just pick. And that's why all of this stuff comes down to bets. If you want to have a future that you want, you have to get comfortable with risk. So if money loves speed, where are some of the money potholes? So number 6, pay off your debt. Now I'm gonna hit you with something you probably haven't thought of before, which is there are many kinds of debt. There's obviously financial debt, but the biggest and most expensive debt is ignorance debt. It's the cost of what you do not know, but should. And to be clear, I still pay off ignorance debt every day. It's the debt in skills and knowledge that I should know to get faster and further to where I'm trying to go, but I don't. And so I have to just fail until I get this knowledge. But the thing is, is that if I don't fail, I will never get it. And so I will be, I am willing to pay in, in looking bad, in money lost, in time lost, in people judging me to make bets. I like this definition, which I think I heard this from Naval, was an expert is just somebody who's made all the mistakes you can make in a very narrow field. And so you have to learn how to lose before you can learn how to win. And the first rule of losing is that you didn't lose, you just learned. You paid down the most expensive debt. So then the question is, if you know that you have to pay this debt off, why aren't you? And I think it's because you don't realize how expensive not paying it off really is. Know the price of inaction. So let me ask you a question. Do you think that the reason that you're in the situation you're in right now is because you struggled to decide in the past? That you've gotten all the way up to the edge, you've gotten all the way up to the precipice, all the way to the front of the line, and then like, and then you choose not to. And so the question is, how many times have you run that cycle? How many times have you thought through this decision and then not done something about it? And is the life you have, you want as a result of those actions? Because maybe the best thing you can possibly do is maybe see this and then just choose to make that call because not making that call has gotten you where you're at. If you genuinely believe that you're going to do this sooner or later, right? Make this bet, make this call, whatever, sooner or later, then you might as well do it sooner. So you can start enjoying the benefits now. Because you're going to enjoy the benefits either way, but why would you want to delay the benefits of taking action? The real real is because you want to delay the costs of potential failure. I want to hypothesize something with you. Let's say you have a reason, right? You have a reason why you haven't taken action, whatever that is, right? Just imagine in your mind like it's a visual thing. Realistically, it's probably one or two voices in your head. And you can probably think about whose voice that is. It might not be yours. And so who is the person that you're choosing to not live your entire life for? Whose judgment do you care that much about? And so I will tell you the story. I almost didn't sell Gym Launch because I thought that $46 million was not enough to impress a specific colleague of mine. Real talk. I was very, very hesitant to sell the company. And the main reason is because I thought that they would think that that wasn't that impressive. And when I thought about that, I was like, wow. I was like, and this, this wasn't family. This wasn't friends. This was just kind of a colleague that I respected. And when I was able to really listen to the voice, whose voice does this belong to? And what are they saying? And most importantly, is that the person who I wanna give control over my entire life? And once I saw that, I was like, well, that's ridiculous. I don't care about this. But the thing is, is that they're, they're usually subconscious. Like you don't notice them unless you listen for the voice, unless you name the voice. Am I really gonna let John be the reason that I don't get married to this girl? Is Joe really gonna be the reason that I don't raise my prices? Is Sarah really the reason why I'm not gonna sell this thing? Ridiculous. But people do it, myself included, every day. And look, this isn't going to be easy, right? Building these skills, losing friends, taking bets, taking losses. You might find yourself stuck and then blaming your previous experiences, which is why number 8, get over Yourself. Everyone's childhood was difficult. Get over it. And if you want to win the award for hardest childhood, congratulations. I'll give it to you. You have the hardest childhood. You win. Feel better? Right. No one cares about what happened to you then. Only what you can make happen now. And so the only person that's satisfied with whatever that reason is, is you. Everyone else calls that reason an excuse. And at the end of the day, do you want to get to your life and have everyone be like, you know what? He wasn't successful, but he had a lot of really good reasons. Wouldn't it be so much more powerful to say he had all these reasons he shouldn't have been successful, but was anyways? Like those reasons actually give you even more fuel because you become a stronger story to everyone else. Like no one cares when the silver spoon kid succeeds. And so all of the reasons that you can normally tell yourself of why you shouldn't do it are sometimes the best reasons of why you should. If you had disadvantages, I agree with you. Like you're right. It's hard to be successful if this thing happened to you, or if you're born with X or you're in this gender or this race or you have this birth deformity, or you speak a different language, or you're born in a different country, or you had abuse, whatever. The main point is that the longer the conversation is— so the main point is, despite the disadvantage, you only have one choice. What are you going to do? You can take action anyway and become proof to other people like you, your people, who are also born into your situation, whether it was abuse, whether it was your gender, whether it was your, your race, whatever, your country. And you can prove to them or prove to yourself that you can overcome it and that they can overcome it too. Or you can do what the vast majority of people do, is that they protect their ego and blame and complain. And to be clear, this is not a pulpit. You can do whatever you want. I support your choice. Go you. But only one of those decisions is going to make you better. And likely only one of those decisions is going to get you closer to where you want to go. Because at the end of the day, here's the TL;DR. Losers define themselves by what has happened to them. Winners define themselves by what they can make happen despite what's happened to them. And so where some person sees an excuse, another person sees an origin story. Like you look at every champion, every hero, every comic book, they all have hard pasts. And so you having a hard past, whatever that is for you, or some disadvantage just makes you like every other superhero who ends up, you know, changing their lives. What's really crazy is that every single one of us can today wake up like it's the first day of a video game. Like you just like got transported into this body and you're like, okay, look around. I have a wife, I have some kids, I have a job I hate, or I have a business I don't like, or I have some bet that I, I have this thing inside of me that I know I can do more, but I'm not. You have all this stuff that's around you and now you can choose like everything else behind you. You could just have today be your spawn point. And so when you're in a video game, it's easy to just forsake all that stuff because you don't have this emotional connection to it. But the thing is, is that like, The action needs to be taken either way. So whatever frame of mind you need to be in in order to do it, then do that. All right. So once we have this head trash out of the way, then we have to get back to business, if you will. So what's the next thing that we have to do? We have to solve bigger problems. If you want to make more money in your 20s and 30s, solve bigger problems, right? If you want to make $1 million, you have to be willing to endure $1 million worth of pain. If you want to make $10 million, you have to endure $10 million worth of pain. And here's the thing is that most people have never endured that. And so when they start getting into it, the thing is, is the nature of the pain changes. And so in the beginning, the pain is, I don't know what I'm doing. Later, the pain is people judging me, and later the pain is lawsuits. And a lot of the pain is just not knowing what the hell you're doing at whatever stage of business you're at, because that never goes away. And so not knowing is a constant. So trying to solve for not knowing is silly because it's never going to happen. And so this is why you have to get comfortable with uncertainty. You have to make uncertainty your friend. If we're going to solve problems, right, we might as well pick big ones. And I'll give you a great analogy that I got from Stephen Schwarzman. He's the founder of Blackstone. He said, big goals and small goals are usually just about as hard. And so a common VC saying is that having a really successful restaurant, you might have to work 80 hours a week and manage all these different people to have a really successful local restaurant. and you might also have to manage all these people and do all this other stuff if you want to build a billion-dollar unicorn. Both those things are hard. And so if it's going to be hard regardless, you might as well go big. And actually it's been a very, like, that is a very helpful frame for me because one of the beliefs that I have about business and life is that suffering is a constant, right? Like I have to remind myself this on a regular basis, which is that if we are growing, I am in pain. If we are plateaued, I am in pain. And if we're declining, I'm in pain, which means that I am pretty much always in pain. And so to think that there's something wrong with pain misses the point of how this works. It is a constant. And if it's a constant, we even need to think about it. It shouldn't be a reason to do something or not do something, cuz it's just always there. And so what's interesting is that competition for big goals, believe it or not, is actually much rarer. It's thinner air. People believe that It's so unrealistic that they don't shoot for it, which actually makes fewer people there to compete against. And so it is probably harder in some ways to have a local restaurant that is really successful than it is to have a big business. And what I found is that most problems are solvable, which means that most things are knowable. And the reason that you probably haven't gotten to where you want to go is because you haven't actually started trying it. And so you're going to have to be obsessive about it. And I think one of the big things that I didn't understand was just how obsessive I was going to have to be. And it is normal to not be like your other normal friends if you want to have abnormal or extraordinary outcomes. If you think about the reverse, it wouldn't make sense if we do the same things as our normal friends and somehow get something different. Like it is actually a, it's a, it's a positive indicator. It's a green flag that you're living a different life than everyone around you. Like I had a conversation with my EAs this morning. They were like, man, could you, I feel like if you were a normal person, that's what they said to me. They're like, I feel like if you were a normal person, you would drive this kind of car. And I like looked at them and I was like, so basically if I were not me, I would do things that not me would do. And so right now it would make sense that you're going to do things that normal people won't do because you're trying to not have the same outcome as them. 10, Obsession is the ticket of entry. It's the price of entry. And the thing is, is that obsession isn't really obsession. It's actually just trying and no one else tries. Like that's the real, real is that normal people call what I consider sane people to be obsessed, but sane people, which is what I consider myself, consider everyone else insane because they do nothing. And waste their lives. And so we have to be comfortable with reasoning from first principles of like, I am only gonna live here for not that long, and I'm only gonna have a certain amount of hours to do the stuff that I wanna do. Why on earth would I not do it because of some face noise that some person, some other, you know, advanced ape is gonna say to me about them having a preference about how I'm living my life. And so you can boil almost all insults or judgments down to this statement. And I think, like, I hear this, I translate it when I hear hate. You do not live your life in a way that I would prefer. That's it. You do not live your life in a way that I would prefer. So they're like, you know, you shouldn't. I do not live my life in a way that you would prefer. And that's okay because that's why you live a life that you prefer and not a life that I would prefer. And that's why you live your life and I live my life. And so people just get so triggered by this. I wrote this down for myself. So when people hate on you, it usually means that they're jealous and believe that you are undeserving of some part of your life. And so to be clear, it's not that they're jealous of your whole life. They might be jealous of the attention you get. They might be jealous of maybe just the money you make, but not the way you look. Or they might be jealous of the body you have, right? And they're going to be like, ah, you're too into that food, right? Or, you know, you work too much or whatever the, whatever the little snide remark is, right? But what they basically think is that life has unjustly given you the benefits that they believe they rightfully deserve. And they might be right, but life isn't fair. So here's the thing. People who obsess about work-life balance are typically mediocre at both. And so obsessed people apply their obsession to everything and just call it life. And they also don't consider themselves obsessed. They just consider everyone else unobsessed. And so I get criticized all the time for work-life balance. People say like, Alex, you don't have any hobbies, right? I don't want any. I don't want any. They're basically saying yet again, you live your life in a way that I would not prefer. If I were in your position, I would live life differently. Right. And that's why you're not in my position. So why should I sacrifice the things that I prefer to do in order to do the things that I don't want to do? Right. Just to make your definition of work-life balance happy, which I don't accept. So like work-life balance is a wonderful goal. I have no hate for it. It's not going to happen if you want to be the best. Right. Like think about it like this. If you have, like, you've probably heard the, you know, work smart, not hard, right? That only works when you're competing against people who are not smart. If you compete against other smart people, the only thing you will have left is to work hard. And so if you work smart, not hard, you will get beaten by someone who works smart and hard. And if I don't know about you, I would rather be that person because at the end of the day, I would like to just win. And that is point 11, which is work hard and smart. Like if you, if you extrapolate out what a normal life is like, right? Maybe someone makes, you know, $1 million or $2 million over the span of their entire career, right? 40 years plus. I think there's just a certain amount of work that must be done to generate income. Right? And so what I would rather do is just take that 40 years and just cram it into 4 and then have the other 36 years of my life to do whatever I want with resources far beyond what I would be able to do there. And so I remember Layla had this very early conversation with me. It was actually, I think it was our first date. She said, she's like, I just want to help people. Right? It was like, that was her whole thing. And I was like, do you think it'd be possible for you to help people and to make money? And she was like, well, yeah. And I was like, okay. Do you think you could help more people if you made more money? And she was like, yeah. And in that conversation, she shifted from being what I would consider a bleeding heart of just like doing everything, like just trying to just, just help every single person. The thing is, is your limit, your resources are so limited. You can't do much. And so if you want to help a lot of people, it's like, you got to learn the game. And the thing is to win that game, it's like, you probably have to outwork people, a lot of people, and you have to be called names by people who live lives that you don't like. I want to be very clear about this. When I say work hard and smart, it doesn't mean it's going to be exciting. So 12 here is accept boredom. Like, if you want to be creative, you must first learn to be bored. If you want to achieve a goal, you'll either have to accept boredom or pain. And the bigger the goal, the more of both you're going to get. I have this great visual in my head about how, how winning works. Right? And so you imagine you have this, this marathon, right, that you're running. So I'll even, I'll even draw this out. So you've got the starting line here, right? Start. And then you've got this big race, right? And then you've got a finish line over here. Ta-da! Finish. Now, when you've seen a race, where do people gather? They gather here and they gather here. So here's the question. Where does the winning happen? On your own. Because no one cheers for you not drinking for a day or not smoking on a long drive if you're trying to quit or not overeating for one night or skipping out on going to the club with the boys. Right? No one cheers for that. No workout or meal is ever impressive on its own. And so the reason so few people understand success, or at least achieve it, in my opinion, is that consistency never looks impressive in the moment, only at the end. Because if you think about how consistent, like, it's very difficult to visualize consistency because you can only see someone do something once, right? You see a snapshot of someone take a shot or hit a backhand. The only way that you can actually witness consistency is working with people who are consistent. Because the thing that you have to see is that person show up every single day. Like, someone could show a workout of me working out, and someone else might be like, okay, well, I mean, that's a workout. Maybe I should kind of work out like that. And sure, there's a level of intensity that might be there, or form and things like that, whatever. But the thing that people won't see is it's very hard to witness 20 years because you have to be there for 20 years. And this is why I think so few people are able to internalize consistency, which is the most important success best trait because it's very hard to lose if you show up every day. It's very hard. And showing up every day is boring. And so if we're willing to accept boredom, the next thing that we're going to have to be willing to accept is sacrifice. We have to give up some things to get others. And so like at the end of the day, like all we have are trade-offs. We have what we have and what we want. And the question is, what are the things that you currently have? Are you willing to trade for the things you want? And I think there's such a perfect way of thinking about it. Like, You have everything in your life right now that you're going to have to trade. Like everyone trades, everyone starts, even when you had zero, at zero, you have things in your life and you have to trade those things for things that you currently want, but don't have. And so there's no perfect way to live your 20s or your 30s, right? You either live them up and become an underskilled 30 or 40-year-old, or you work them up and become an underlived 30 or 40-year-old, right? You just have to figure out which you'd rather be and accept the trade-offs and know that there are no do-overs. And that's okay. And when we're really thinking about sacrifice, is it actually a sacrifice to trade things that we want less of for things that we want more of? To me, that's a great trade. So it's a question of priorities, not sacrifice. Right now, no human will ever get more than 24 hours per day. We all have that. And so fundamentally, everything that you spend your time on that is not you pursuing your goal, you are determining is more important than your goal. And so if you look at what you did every single one of these hours, and then you actually surface it and say, you know what, watching Netflix, you know, doom scrolling TikTok and Instagram, you know, hanging around, do nothing, surfing the web or whatever it is that people do these days, that is what's actually more important to you based on your behavior. And so is it really a sacrifice to give that up? For what you want. Because the thing is, is that a year from now, you're not going to look back on today and be like, man, I'm so glad, like, those clips that I watched really changed things for me. They, you probably won't even remember any of the clips that you saw. They did a great research study on this where they did short form versus long form even. And people remember like 11%, like 24 hours later, it was a tiny percentage. And so we have to accept that the things that we are quote spending our time on most of the time is just wasting our time on. And so I think Seneca said this, it's not that we don't have enough time, it's that we waste the time we have. I come back to this, which is like, is it really a sacrifice? Or are you finally just saying, I believe this is my priority. And therefore all of these things that are not helping you pursue that, I'm now going to trade out for things that will help me get this priority. That's it. And to me, if you like what you're going to get, why would you not make the trade? And so I had this clip that went super viral from a podcast that I did yesterday. And the host asked me if all my books and all my tweets and all my emails and all my YouTube videos were all deleted and I had to compress all of my stuff into 60 seconds, what would I say for somebody who's in their 20s and 30s? Figure out what you want, ignore the opinions of others, and do so much volume that it would be unreasonable to not be successful.