Stop Waiting for Clarity | Ep 970

If you're ambitious but not sure what to do, I wanna share 6 principles, really just actions that have helped me get to where I want. These are the same 6 things that allowed me to go from having only $1,000 to my name and sleeping on a gym floor to now having a portfolio of companies that last year did north of $250 million a year. And the reason I'm making this video is because I'm on a mission to get the next generation of men and women to make their first $100,000. And there's a lot of reasons for that. But I think that if you can participate in the economy, you will believe in capitalism. And I think that will set up the next generation for much bigger and better things. So let's just start with principle number 1. Which is build capacity. And so what to do when you're not sure what to do is you build capacity. So for example, if you don't know what you're gonna do tomorrow, you should go and bet on time today when you're not sure what you're gonna do. Still, it might as well be rested. That's building capacity. You can get in shape when you don't have dates lined up. Like you don't have one lined up, but it can help you when the opportunity strikes. You can save money when you're not sure where you're going to invest because at least you'll have the money so that when the investment comes, you'll have the opportunity to take action. And so the thing about opportunities is that they present themselves to everyone, and only people with capacity can both recognize and capitalize on them. So don't be in the bleachers when the fat pitch comes. You wanna be at the plate, you wanna have already practiced your swing, and you wanna be ready to go. And I'll give you a case study that actually can drive this point home. So there was a study they did at Princeton grad school, it was called like the Good Samaritan Study, where they had seminary students who saw themselves as moral people, right? They were studying to become priests. And they asked them to write a paper on being a Good Samaritan and then to present it. All right. And so what was interesting about this is that in the study, they separated them into 3 groups. And so on the way to give the presentation, there was this very narrow hallway into the auditorium. And in the narrow hallway, they put someone who had fallen and clearly needed help. Group 1 was people who were 10 minutes late. Group 2 was people who were on time. And Group 3 was people who were early. All right. Now guess what correlation? How people rated themselves in their essay had to do with the likelihood that they would stop and help the person. You're right. Fucking zero. All right. You know what did have the highest correlation with the likelihood that they stopped and helped the person? How late they were. And so— and let me tell you how big of a difference it was. The difference between the people who were 10 minutes early and 10 minutes late was a 6x difference in who stopped to actually help the person. And the reason I see this is so important is that right now there are opportunities that come to you right now that you cannot even recognize because you do not have capacity to do anything about it. And so here are some of the ways that I recommend building capacity, starting with number 2, money. So if you don't know what to invest in, save money. Money buys time and time buys optionality. And so let's go tactical. So how do I go about actually saving money? So I'm gonna walk through each category very quickly. So food, that means you just don't eat out for anything. It's very straightforward. If you're hungry, you deal with it, right? You only buy from discount grocery stores. It's not that hard. Clothing, whatever you have right now is all you need for the next 2 years. Zero exceptions, right? Reuse what you have, trade, or at the very worst, you can go to Goodwill. All right. From a housing perspective, live as cheaply as you can, ideally with your own family or worst case with another family that's also trying to save money. And if you're like younger and you're like, none of us have families and that's fine, then all 6 of you bunk up in one place, split bedrooms if you have to. And that's what ultimately in the early part of my career, it was like $300 or $400 a month. For me to just keep the lights on. Not hard when you're splitting one bedroom in a six-bedroom house. Now, all of this stuff, we have the last cost, which is time cost. So think about your time like a financial asset. Stop doomscrolling and wasting the 2 to 4-hour window you have outside of work. So your 5 to 9 AM and then your 5 PM to 9 PM, those 8 hours a day, those are the hours where you're gonna have to get ahead because you have to, you have to basically live for today to pay for today, but you have to plan and prepare for tomorrow, which is what those other 8 hours are for. Number 3 on this stack here is add skills and practice them. And the second part is just as important as the first. So now you've got some money, right? It should be saved up. Where do you spend that money? So I recommend spending all excess cash on acquiring skills until you have so much that you can't possibly spend on any more skills. So increase your capacity to earn, which increases the value of your highest cash-producing asset. You know what that is? You, right? And what's relevant today is that skills are inflation-proof. Whether we're trading in Bitcoin or seashells in the future, if you've got value to give, people will exchange for it. So if you're ever worried about all this technology, what am I going to do? The only thing and the only logical step you can do is double down on skills and make yourself more valuable. Now, understand that learning will never hurt you. All right? It's always additive. And even in things that are bad— and listen, I paid for all that stuff that I just said, and not all of it was good. The thing is, is that I believe that winners win no matter what. And so how can you have something that's bad and then you think that you get better from it? Well, if I learn all the things not to do, then I learned. And if it changes my behavior in a way that makes me more likely to succeed, then I got better. And so if you, if you look at the world that way, then everything serves you rather than you serving it. Real quick, I'm gonna show you the exact 10-stage roadmap from zero to $100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish. I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by 8 different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, uh, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this. And it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap, just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you all free. And so I'll give you a basic analogy from a skills perspective, from a stacking angle. I like this example because a lot of people know who he is. So Jay-Z is a rapper, right? And now he's a businessman. I mean, a business man. Little, little, little. If you know, you know. Anyways, in the beginning, maybe he had rhythm, right? Maybe that was what he was naturally born with or inclined with, right? And then he learned how to rap, and then he learned how to write lyrics, and then he learned how to market. Or rather, he probably learned how to sell first, and then he learned how to market. And with each of these, he became more and more successful. And then he learned how to get other artists and market them. So he learned how to make a label. And then he learned how to get Beyoncé. Okay? But you could see here how with each of these skills, that person who has all of these skills— somebody just has rhythm, not that valuable. Someone who can just rap, a little bit more value than someone who has rhythm. Somebody who can rap and write lyrics, more valuable. Somebody who can do that and then sell, they can sell their way into, you know, getting shows, they can sell people on the street. All of a sudden they can sell their CDs, they can— CDs, Jesus. They could sell— And so he has this, which makes all of these other things more valuable. And then he learned how to promote, which made all of these other skills more valuable. 'Cause now he's not just selling out 1 or 2, you know, small venues, he can promote and go national. But then there's still a limit to the amount that he can do here. So that's when he starts recruiting other people to his labels, to his brands. And this is what continues to stack skills. I'll give you a financial example of this. Maybe in the beginning you're somebody who's really good at math. Okay, being good at math is not that valuable of a skill. Then all of a sudden you're like, okay, well, I'll learn how to do bookkeeping. All right, well, that's more valuable than just math, but you need math in order to have bookkeeping. And then you learn how accounting works. Okay, and then you learn how taxes work, and all of a sudden you can start saving a business money. Now, do you need to know math in order to do taxes? Yes. Do you not understand how accounting works in order to do taxes? Yes. Right. All of these things stack. Now let's say that you start learning about insurance, and then you start learning about M&A, right? All of these things, you still need to know math, but these, when taken together, become significantly more valuable as a person. About your second grade math teacher as an idiot. As soon as you learn calculus, you needed arithmetic in order to learn calculus. And so wherever you're at in this journey right now, it's not like, oh my God, I can't— why can't I do this? It's like you still have to move through the steps. Now, how fast you do that depends on how quickly you change your behavior. And so hopefully this video at least nudges you in that direction. Start changing what you do. So the fourth example of kind of building capacity before you know what to do is to build an audience without a product, right? So what does that mean? So you don't need a product to start. You need attention because attention gives you leverage. And so if you have a group of people who know, like, and trust you, even when you don't have a product, you're basically building potential energy, right? If you were the number one most followed person on the planet, the day you start whatever you start, it's going to be a smashing, probably $100 million success. Literally, if you were the most person known person on the planet and you charged any amount of money for anything, you could then make, basically you'd pretty much be set for life. All right? And so from the building of a quote audience is you just talk about the things that you're doing. 'Cause right now you're like, well, I don't have any proof. Of course you don't have proof. You haven't done anything yet. But what you can do is do work and document the work you do. And so what you wanna do is like either you have epic proof or epic effort. In the fitness world, there's people who are like, okay, I'm, I'm 6 months out from my first fitness competition. Doesn't matter where you start. If you do something epic, document all the volume of work you do along the way and people will follow you. Now, a version of this, like the next step here would be build a waitlist. So this is kind of step 5. So in other words, before you build the thing, build the list of people who want the thing. So a person who pays with their time now is more likely to pay with their money later. And this is what an audience does. You provide value them with your time, they pay back with their time. They say they're willing to wait for the thing, all of these things are indicators that they're likely or more likely to make a purchase with you. So number 6 is you can build capacity by building your network potential by meeting people. So think about 2 people, one person who stays in and watches Netflix or somebody who goes out to a coffee shop or someone who goes to the gym. In either of those scenarios, your luck surface area expands. You're more likely for sure in each of those scenarios. And if you do this every single day, you continue to expand that luck exposure. And so if you wanna be successful in something, in anything, spend time with the people who are already doing it because the fastest way to change your life is to change the people who are around you who affect your life. And so being willing to move to where the opportunity is is one of the biggest kind of hacks out there. I think Chamath talked about this in a video, but like, if you wanna be in finance, you gotta be in New York, right? If you wanna be in film, it's like you probably gotta be in Hollywood. If you wanna be in politics, you gotta be in DC. Now, if you don't wanna be in those kind of like more traditional paths, there's a lot more places that you could be. But the idea is like there are hubs and if you want to get into a space, the best way to do it is get to the hub. And so if you are not sure what to do right now, you should know exactly what to do, which is that you build capacity and you wait for the pitches that you can swing at to come. And so maybe you're getting ball after ball after ball, but what do you do to make sure that when the fat pitch comes, you're ready? It's like you practice your swing, you start doing your sprints so that like, you can actually get around the bases faster, right? You start working on coordination drills, you start working on your hip, your power, you start going to the gym, right? Like all of these things would be things that when that pitch comes, you'll maximize the likelihood that you smash it outta the park. But so many of you're waiting for this fat pitch to then begin and getting lapped by people who already were prepared. And so the key word here, in order to build capacity, you build by preparing. So if you're a business owner over a million bucks a year, I'd like to invite you out to come to our headquarters in Vegas to see how we scale using what we call the Value Acceleration Method. Which is a compilation of all the stuff that I've done across all the different industries. And if that sounds at all interesting, you can click below and book a call, and we'd love to potentially meet you and see you in person.