Why Entrepreneurs Go BROKE

There's a dirty little secret that most Internet entrepreneurs do not want to tell you. Two words, entrepreneurship. You ever wonder why they're peddling one thing and then three months later they're peddling another thing? You ever wonder why they're so quick to pursue the next cryptocurrency or the next social media platform? It's custom. People say their life is like a movie. Well, my life is a constant monopoly. If you're a guy in your 20s and you don't have a Lamborghini, you should actually sit down and have like a serious discussion with yourself as you don't have a Lambo. Let me show you how to spot a broke entrepreneur. A broke entrepreneur is somebody who pursues this thing for a while, quits, and then goes over here, this thing over for a while, and then they quit and they do this thing over here for a while and they tell you about all the different projects that they got going on. That's because they're all doing zero. But a rich entrepreneur is somebody who is doing the same thing for a very long time. They're probably not talking about it a whole bunch because it's the same as it was four weeks ago. People who are successful on YouTube, successful email marketers, successful Amazon sellers, successful investors are doing the same boring stuff over and over again for a very long period of time. See, the thing about entrepreneurs, especially Internet entrepreneurs, is they miss the most important piece of this entire game. When it comes to making a million dollars, $1 million, there's two steps. Build a business, and then there's invest the profits. Most people only focus on the first part of that two step formula. So they get really good at making money in the short term or starting something new or even spotting opportunities before everybody else sees them. But they never develop any plan to keep and grow their money. And so they make money out of thin air and then they make it disappear back into thin air. If you're at all like me, then you got into this game because you wanted freedom. But freedom will flee from you if you don't get the second part of that equation. Ask me how I know. I spent years hanging out with other Internet entrepreneurs and modeling what some of the most successful people did. And as a result, I made millions of dollars. But I also lost millions of dollars. And today I want to share with you how to avoid that trap so that you're building freedom now. Because if you have a plan to grow your wealth, then we can start putting you on the road to 1 million right now. And you can have real financial freedom in two years or less. Michael Michalowicz wrote the book Profit first, and he tells the story about how when he started building companies, he was building them for the exit. He made the majority of his money selling a couple of companies. And therefore, when he started his next business, he didn't need it to be cash flow positive. He was betting on the exit. And he was putting a little bit of money over here and a little bit of money over there and investing in this startup over here and being an angel investor over here. And one day he was out of money and he knew that he needed to get a hold on this, he needed to do something to control himself, because he no longer saw business as what would give him money. He now saw businesses as cash eating machines. And so what Michael Michalowitz wrote about in Profit first was developing the habit of keeping a portion of your revenue and not touching it. This is a practical application of what some people know as the tithe. The tithe is a common religious practice in which 10% of your income goes to the community. It's also a principle in one of the timeless books of our generation called the Richest man in Babylon. And it talks about how 10% of whatever you make is yours to keep. And the principle there is about developing the habit of carving out a piece of whatever you make and keeping it. Keeping it to me means putting it to work for you. If you are making $65,000 a year and you were to keep 10% of that and you were to store it away long term over 30 years, you would become a millionaire, or you would develop enough dry powder over a few months or a few years to be able to start that business or to be able to place that inventory order. But instead, what most people do is they spend everything that they get and then they become entrepreneurs. And even if they do experience some success in the short term, they that money goes away very quickly because they've never built the habit of keeping a portion of everything that they earn. Okay, so what does it actually mean to keep money? Well, once you have a basic emergency fund of three to six months of your expenses, it means putting your money into something that can grow and compound over a very long time. That's never going to go to 0s and P500 index funds or real estate that you're not going to touch for a very long time. Maybe if you're somewhat established. Gold, Bitcoin, ethereum, as long as you're comfortable holding it for decades. Now, these are Asset classes that are very unlikely to go to zero. So you might not have 20% returns every year, but you're going to have a stable growth over a very long period of time. Legal disclaimer this is not financial advice. I'm an idiot on the Internet who lost millions of dollars to listen to anything that I say. I know that this sounds boring to a lot of people. It's not as sexy as learning how to make $10,000 a month with NFT flipping. It's not as sexy as saying how to make an extra 20 grand passive by investing in this weird cryptocurrency. It's not. But it's the thing that will make you tens of millions of dollars. In fact, if all you did was invest $5,000 a month for 30 years into the S&P 500, that becomes $10 million. That's fun. That's sexy. The point I want to make here is when you start focusing on keeping a portion of whatever I am making, even if it's a little amount, we start to build the habit of rewarding ourselves. We get off the hamster wheel a little bit. If you've been thinking about or trying to be an entrepreneur for more than about two years, you know what I'm talking about. Because you have been pursuing the next short term thing instead of building a very long term strategy. And your way out is to say, no matter what, I'm going to carve out a portion of whatever I do make and I'm going to keep it. I'm going to invest it in the long term. And then when I have built that habit, I will start a business and that business will make things happen faster and I will be in less of a scarcity mode to try and make something happen out of it. I won't be asking that business to feed me. I will have the mindset to feed that business. It will make more cash flow, it will build more value and it will become something that I can scale or sell. And when that happens, I will once again have the habit built of keeping what I make. And then I will have the life that I have been dreaming of having. If you'd like to go through the full road to 1 million course it's free. You can go over to capitalism.com million it's an email series so enter your best email address and you'll get the first lesson right away. I hope you enjoyed today. I know this is a little bit different than our normal talking points here, but this is the way through. This is the way that you start to create the life that you want, regardless of what happens in the economy, regardless of what happens in the short term, wins and losses in your business. And we as entrepreneurs are so focused on the glamour and the short term money that we ignore this and it gets a lot of us in trouble. Don't be like so many of my peers who make a ton of money and keep none of it. Keep your money and then when you start to make a lot more, you'll build the life of freedom that you've always wanted. Hey, if you liked this video, you should watch this video because the comments on it are hilarious. I can't believe how much time people have on their hands.