5 Things I Wish I Learned About Money In My 20s

I started my first business when I was 18 years old, and I was an entrepreneur for my entire twenties. And I once had a mentor tell me that you should just see your 20s as an opportunity to learn, because you learn in your 20s and then you earn in your 30s. But I put so much attention into earning in my 20s because I would say, well, I want to be paid to learn all these lessons along the way. I realize now that I'm in my 30s, how many lessons I wish I had gotten earlier in the process, because had I really got them and started to implement them, then my 30s could have been earning way more than they have been. And so what happened for me was that I learned some tremendous lessons in my 20s. Very valuable, profitable lessons that will make me very rich. But I had to start them in my 30s. I wish I had gotten these lessons in my 20s. And so I'm going to share them with you in this video.

Number one, any project will take at least two years to hit pay dirt, and probably three. So don't play for today's results or even six months. Months of results, play for three years of results. Play for having the game nailed three years from now. And that's what it's going to take. Now, there's a couple reasons why this is important. First, it sets your focus to only on the things that you're willing to go all in for four or three years. And what I would do in my 20s was I would look for what's working right now, what's going to give me the result right now, what's going to get me in a different financial position or a different business position in six months. And then I'd get frustrated when I didn't see the results that I wanted in that short window of time. But when you know that something is going to take two to three years to hit pay dirt, then you more consciously choose what you're going to spend two to three years focusing on. And had I done that, then over three years, I would have committed to something that would have really built roots and grown. I think I might have only had one project in my 20s that I spent at least three years cultivating. And that is the project that I took from $600 to $16 million and is still responsible for 60 to 70% of my wealth to this day. And had I known that every project was going to take that amount, that time, that length of focus, then all those projects that I let go too early, I either would have stuck with or I never would have begin them. In the first place. So if you know that something is going to take that amount of time in order to hit pay dirt, then you'll only choose the things that you really want to do for three years. And at the end of that three years, you'll be way further ahead financially and personally than everybody else.

Number two, the people that you surround yourself with will determine your results. Now, most of us have heard something like that before, but here's how I heard it in my 20s. What I heard in my 20s was that I should surround myself with the people who had the results that I wanted and get into their circle. But that wasn't the best advice. No. When I surrounded myself with people based on their results, then I surrounded myself with people that I was just building relationships with for ego purposes. I saw someone who had a lot of money or they had had a big exit, or they had a lot of status and I tried to get into their circle. And what that did was, was it just put me in a position where I was always thinking about the surface level things. And so there was really no connection at all. But it's the connection with those people that end up opening the opportunities for you to expand. So when you are networking or when you are building your personal relationships and you're doing it strategically in a way that will determine your results, do it based on values. Do it based on what they consider to be most important. Do it based on their character of that person. Do it based on the way that that person thinks. You don't do it on the results that you perceive that they have. I'm thinking of somebody in my mind actually, that I met in my 20s that I built a relationship with because in my mind I was like, oh, they're having a lot of results, a lot of success. I want to have a lot more success, so I should surround myself with this person. And then I came to disc that that person did not have those results. It was all him putting up a show to impress other people who would be impressed with that kind of show. And that's what happens in your 20s when you are making decisions for relationships based on egoic metrics like money and status. You don't know anything about them. And if you surround yourself with those people, you end up getting those short term empty results rather than building something deep. So make your personal network based on things like character and vision and mindset and process. Those are the relationships that will determine the results that you get. Because results come from values and character and vision and all of those things. Prioritize that and you will win.

Number three. This is a big one. The best how to is service. Man, I spent so much energy in my 20s trying to figure out the how, trying to find out the best way, trying to figure out what the system looked like, trying to figure out how so and so got to where they are so I could reverse engineer the process and build my life to be on that path. I spent so much time and energy thinking about that. But the truth is that everybody who made it, everybody who got to a certain level, got there through some level of service to other people. They got it by creating value or being of service to a large enough number of people to where they got to where they wanted to go. I spent all this time reverse engineering people's marketing strategy and looking at their sales copy and looking at their product line and looking at the fancy system that they had put together. And none of that matters if there is not a service behind the business, if there is not a very clear person behind the business. It's why in the book that I wrote, one of the first steps is not choose your product, choose your person. It's just the person that you want to be in business to serve. Because then you can choose what products you want to sell to them, but it comes first from deciding who it is that you are of value to and committing to be of service to that person for a very long time and in better and better, more and more innovative ways. And when you do that, then everybody else starts looking at you saying, how did you do that? And you can tell them all the cool strategies that you used and it won't increase your competition because strategies don't matter if there's no service behind the business.

Number four, please, Ryan, in his 20s, get this one. Someone please invent something that allows me to communicate this one to my younger self.

Number four, marketing is really easy when you have an amazing fricking product. Marketing should be the icing on the cake, not the main attraction. I grew up in the marketing world. I grew up in the world that was doing direct response, copywriting and advertising. Even before Facebook. Ads were a thing. And so all of the conversations in that world were about marketing products, but products were secondary. It was, how do you make marketing the business? How do you make marketing profitable? How do you make marketing really work? How do you create copy that really stands out? None of that matters if your product and your business sucks. None of, none of that should happen if your business and your product sucks. Because the purpose of marketing is to get the word out to the right customers that you got something real good. But so few business owners put the attention on making the product, the experience, and the business really freaking good. When you do that, marketing is so easy. It's the icing on the cake. It's the cherry on top. And that is when your ads go viral and your videos get shared and you get all the followers and you get all the customers and you get all the profit because other people are compelled to your really good product, not just your really good ad. If people are attracted by your ad and then they're disappointed by your product, you are in for a world of hurt. That is the worst business to be in. Because now you're scaling a broken business, you're scaling unhappiness, you're scaling bad products, and there is no faster way to lose a lot of money than to scale a broken business. Marketing should be the nice icing on the cake, not the main attraction. Your service to customers is the main attraction.

And number five, when it comes to making decisions, especially hard decisions, your emotions are smarter than your brain. We're all in this game because we want a better experience of life, because we want to enjoy our expansion, because we want to enjoy this shot that we have. And our brain makes decisions based on fear and survival, whereas our emotions make decisions based on how good they'll feel. And when it comes to making really hard decisions, our brains are usually thinking about it from a fear or a survival perspective. So when you overthink things, it's why you get so stuck. It's why you feel so tense. It's why you can't make a decision. It's why you fear making a decision, because you're worried about cutting off one of the decisions. But when you pay attention to how you feel about something, you usually have a clear indication about which one feels better. Sometimes we override that with our brains. Man, I made so many decisions from my head in my 20s, and that made it more difficult for me to have a business that I enjoyed. Have you ever experienced that feeling where you know what the right thing is to do, but you just can't get yourself to do it? Or you know what the right strategy is, but you just don't have the energy to do it? That's a conflict between your emotions and your brain. Had I prioritized the things that I felt easy, then I would have taken faster action. This is so counterintuitive to what most people will tell you, but it's what I believe to be true. I put so much emphasis on my brain and I fed my brain and let logic and reason make my decisions. And that actually made me feel stuck, made me feel paralyzed. Because now I felt like I knew what to do to build the right business. But it wasn't the business that I wanted. It wasn't the life I wanted, it wasn't the lifestyle I wanted, it wasn't the people I wanted to be serving. It wasn't the activities that I wanted to be doing. I want to feel effortless in my business. I want to feel free in my business. I want to feel fun in my business. And it just so happens that when you are doing a fun, effortless business that is in service to other people, you get rich and you get customers and people share your stuff. I want that. I don't want the heady business that I have to hustle in, that I have to force myself and I have to effort in. And so now in my 30s I get to build that, which is really exciting. But I wish I had done it in my 20s. I would have been a lot happier and a lot less emotionally erratic in my twenties had I listened to my emotions rather than my brain. This is the sad fact. If you are in your 20s, if you listen to these lessons, you'll probably ignore them because most lessons have to be learned through life experience in order to be ingrained in us. So if you're in your 20s, I'd really appreciate hearing your thoughts in the comments of this video. Because the truth is, had I given myself these lessons in my 20s, I probably wouldn't have been in a position to hear them. I probably wouldn't have been able to implement them because I had to learn the lessons on my own. The way that I learn is by making mistakes and I run that way until I hit a wall and I say that hurts and I run the other way and I hit a wall and say that hurts. And I calibrate along the way and I think a lot of us make decisions that way. So I'd appreciate it if you gave me your thoughts in the comments of this video. Subscribe so they can see what landed and what didn't landed. If you're new to my work, I help entrepreneurs build businesses and invest the profits because I believe that entrepreneurship and capitalism is the way that we create change in this world. So if you're going on a path of entrepreneurship, I'd love to serve you on that path. Hit subscribe on this video and I'll be a part of your journey as an entrepreneur. If you're wanting to start your journey, you can download our free resources over@capitalism.com start. Thanks so much for watching this video. I appreciate it. And I'll see you guys in the next video. And don't forget to smash the like button.

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