7 Weird Money Habits That Will ACTUALLY Make You Rich

Is this you? You're working every day, trying to keep up with the bills, never quite breaking free of them. That was actually me too. I was right there with you. But now I've escaped the rat race. It really comes down to 7 very easy habits that they never teach you. And some of them are weird. Number 3 might even piss some people off. But I'm not just going to tell you about these habits. I actually am going to help you visually remember them to make change. This is all based on neuroscience. So we will actually, by the end of this video, change the way you think about money. All I can do is talk from experience. Experience, and these are the ones that made a difference for me, starting with the lizard brain trick. So, do I lift him like this? I don't know, I'm so freaked out to squish him. Your brain is actively working against you getting rich, and most people have no idea it's happening. You know, you wake up, you crush a morning routine, you send 40 emails, you sit in 3 Zoom calls, and you color code your calendar, but you feel like a machine at the end of the day. Then you look at your bank account, it's exactly where it was yesterday, and that feeling sucks. There are 2 problems, and both of them come from what I call your lizard brain. So firstly, I like lizards. I like turtles. But I don't like your lizard brain because it can't tell the difference between sending an email and closing a $10,000 deal. Neurologically, it registers as task completed and fires the same dopamine hit whether you reorganize your desktop for 2 hours or signed a contract. So it's this like chemical good feeling that isn't really productive at all. The other problem with your lizard brain is that it's lazy. Sorry, little guy. You see, it pulls you towards the easier thing because the easier task gets completed faster, which means more dopamine sooner. So your lizard brain is trying to make you feel good right now, not make you rich. So my first habit every morning before you pick up your phone, I want you to write one line. The one task that if done and done only, it actually makes you money. Peter Thiel calls this the one thing. The single action that if you do it makes everything else irrelevant. And whether you like the guy or not, He's worth billions. So I want you to do that before touching anything else, because once you have beaten this little guy, the next problem is that most of what you're chasing is entirely wrong. And so I think we should break down the next habit that'll make you throw your vision board in the trash, but it might actually be a good thing. Anti-goals before goals. So most goal setting advice tells you to get clear on what you want, but Charlie Munger thought that was the wrong place to start. And I think he was right. Every time I'm setting financial targets for something, whether this is my year, a new business, a new investment, I write the anti-goals first before putting a single goal on the page. Like, I don't want to make less than $20,000 a year. You know, I don't want to work for 70 hours a week, although I actually do. I don't want to be financially dependent on another person. I don't want to go into debt to look wealthy. That's true. And then I write what I do want. Munger calls this inversion, and he used it for everything. So instead of asking what you do want, ask what you do not want. You probably skip this and you go straight to the dream board. But writing down the don't want list forces you to see something. Your wants and your don't wants are on a seesaw. Both can't sit at the top. If you don't want to work 70 hours a week and you want to make $500,000 a year, those are going to be in direct tension. So you might have to pick which one wins, at least for a period, and let the other one slide down. Most people never make that choice. So here's your second habit. I want you 2, take a piece of paper, line down the middle. Left, what you want. Right, what you don't want. Rank each side and see where they conflict, and then choose your seesaw winner. That one decision tells you more about your financial future than any business plan you've written. Think about this. I wanna make over $500K a year. I don't wanna work more than 70 hours. Well, one of these is gonna have to go for a first period, and that's okay. People, you know, have lots of feelings about this, but I think that if you choose the things you don't want, it makes really clear what you are willing to do to get there. Now, the next habit is the one I get the most pushback on. Some people call it elitist, but from my personal experience, it's damn hard to argue with. I call it fire your friends. I'm from Phoenix, right? And I bet your hometown has this too. There's a great bar there called Paddy's. But every time I go back, the same characters are there, the same conversations. It's kind of like a record on repeat. Do you have a place like that? If I had stayed, I'd still probably be there. This is like an anchor, your city. It becomes something that holds you back. When you're in your hometown, everyone who knows you, they knew you when you were 17, and so they love you. But that love is your 17-year-old self, and they've anchored to it. These people around you, they'll pull you without realizing it toward the old version of yourself, the one that feels safe and normal to them. And so when you leave, something different happens. Kind of magical. Nobody there knows your old story. You get to be someone your hometown hasn't ever met before. And that blank slate lets you build a different story before anyone can correct you back to the old one. If you want to do high-level things in life, if you want to make a ton of money, you have to be around people who have already done those things. People who have done it, not people thinking about it, or people who almost did it, or people who want to talk shit about the people even trying. This is almost never located in the same zip code where you grew up. And so I want you to constantly do one thing. If you haven't moved from your hometown, it's about time, even for a few months. I want you to look around you and say, where are my anchors today? Do I live in a place that doesn't have opportunity? Am I hanging out with people who really haven't tried to achieve much of anything? If they're pushing you towards your goals, great. If not, it's time to go. It's time to go somewhere new, you know, just long enough that you have time to become someone different, right? Maybe the person that you actually want to become, because you are allowed to be a totally different human one year from now. This is actually what we are supposed to do, but nobody wants you to do it. And if you think about this mentality when you apply it to money, it actually cuts through more noise than any other framework because you don't have to do more things. You have to cut off the things that are holding you back. This next lesson I learned on Wall Street, and I never would have if I hadn't been behind the curtain. So I'm going to share it with you. I call it killing complexity. The financial industry actually makes more money selling you things that are complex than it ever will selling you things that are simple. Someone wants to sell you a crypto trading system that takes 3 hours a day for a year to master, a 32-step financial freedom blueprint, or more than that, a 50-page legal contract that goes with your mutual fund report that you can't even read. And inside of it, they're slowly stealing all your money with something called basis points. Why? Because when something is complex, it feels like it's smart, like you're getting the real thing. And complexity is profitable to sell to people searching for a shortcut or who want to give the reins to somebody else. So every time I'm looking at making money, I sort of apply one filter to it, which is, what's the simplest version of this that could work? Like, and I ask myself this question, which is, what if it was easy? And it comes from kind of a famous idea called Occam's Razor, which says the simplest explanation is the most likely. And so philosophers use it to dismantle conspiracy theories, right? Birds are CIA agents. I don't know. People think that the entire global government is secretly coordinating a world takeover. But have you ever met a government employee? I mean, most of these people, they could barely keep their own lights on. You think they're going to orchestrate a global takeover? I don't know. They're probably just really inefficient, highly uncapable, overwhelmed people stuck in a broken system. And so if you apply the same razor to money and you want to make more of it, well, then you negotiate a raise, you get a better paying job, you make more offers, you buy a small local business. Those 4 things done by someone with average intelligence like me, maybe like you, those people, as long as you show up, it turns out they've produced more millionaires than every complicated strategy combined. And certainly way more than if you just do what people on Wall Street tell you to do. You finally found a broker on Wall Street that you can trust. So what's the habit there? At least for myself, every time you're tempted by something complex, ask yourself, what is the boring, obvious version of this? Then do that instead, because simplicity actually removes a lot of your excuses. So when you don't know what to do, you know, you wait, you consume, you plan, and then your bank account doesn't actually move. So I think you want to actually simplify to move forward. The thing is, you got to practice the language of money every week. Most people who want to get rich are completely fluent in the theory and completely illiterate in the practice. And that gap is going to be your issue. The language of money, this right here is actually really simple. You're going to make offers, you're going to negotiate the offers, then you're going to close the offers, and then you're going to repeat it. Learning this language is where most people lose all their money. So you could study French for years, take classes, use— I don't know, what do the kids use these days? A bunch of flashcards to do it and still be useless in Paris if you've never tried to have a real conversation with a French person. Je m'appelle Claude. Je découpe plats. Which is probably why most Americans, after going through Spanish for like a decade, can't speak anything. Sí, correcto. Because most people spend years learning about it, writing it down, and never actually speaking it. So say you actually want to learn how to close businesses and make a practice out of this. I'm going to actually do something really different for you. Let me give you somewhere to practice. It's called Main Street Millionaire Live. It's a 3-day virtual event where my team and I hand you the actual reps, how to find these businesses, how to negotiate them, how to close them, and how to finance the deal creatively so you don't have to have a bunch of money. And you can even use AI to make the business you bought better than before you owned it. Let's say you want to make an offer. We'll show you what a real acquisition offer looks like. You want to close a deal? I'm going to walk you through the entire thing, the actual process. Maybe you bring your deal and I'll look at it live because the person who knows about money and the person who makes a deal and an offer, well, those are the two things that separate winners from losers. So this event is my gift to you. It's where you go to do exactly that. If you show up for these 72 hours, we are going to make you a dealmaker. That's my promise to you. This one's a little funny, but I like to treat my money like I treat my dog. You know, 46% of Americans die with less than $10K, and most of them had worked their entire life, but they treated money like a reward waiting at the end, something that happens to you if you earn it. Money, like relationships, does not respond to passive attention. You know how a lot of people have dog monitors now? Like, you can actually see what your dog is doing while you're at work, you know, or when you're out of town and somebody's watching your dog, you send pictures of the dog to them. You're like, My husband and I call it proof of life. The whole point is, why do we do this with things like dogs, but not with things like money? We just, we kind of let money come and go. We're totally not caring about it at all. And I think there's an energy to everything that you care about. Why do our dogs love us so much? Because we pay attention to them. Like, can you make money love you too? Doesn't mean you have to love money, but you need to care for it. So the habit is, I want you to hang out with your money like you do your dog. I want you to open your bank account, not to stress, but to look at it, to understand where your money went last month and then the next month to decide where it goes before it leaves. You know, the people I know who have built financial freedom, they, they built it. They didn't inherit it. They treated money the way you treat something you really care for. So I want you to talk about it, study it, pay attention to it. If you want to make a lot of money, you engage with it before it leaves you. You probably spend more attention on your Netflix queue than on where your next $3,800 goes every month. And I'm not judging you. I've been there. But that's the gap. That's exactly why 46% of people die with nothing. And I really don't want you to be like them. So as much as you love your furry friends, I want you to love your green friends. And then you can buy more dogs and the world gets better and we can protect all the doggos. And like, that's where I'd go with this. This last habit, it's what makes every other habit on this list actually stick. So I call this one the God test. And I think most people's reason for wanting money is actually weak, so you never get any because you don't realize that your first real failure, well, it's not going to be your last. And so it ends up stopping you. When I first started making real money, not dabbling, my why wasn't I want a fancy house or, you know, I want to have a couple of cars. Those are losing whys. They're not strong enough. They're not going to get you up at 5 a.m. They're not going to carry you through a terrible month or make you hold through real crippling failure. That's going to happen. So my why was simple. At the end of my life, I want to stand before God and say that I am wrung dry. I have not one drop left, which is one of my favorite lines from Emma Bombach. And, you know, I want to be able to say that I have every drop of talent I had, I used it. And because of that, I outworked everybody else around me. And so the stakes felt real and I had something to answer for. Not that I was smarter, but I was so disciplined in pursuit of that one goal. Before any major money move, you know, a new business, an investment, I ask myself one question. So I'm going to have you ask yourself: if you're standing before God at the end of your days and he asks you, did you pour it all out? Did you use everything I gave you? Will you be able to say yes? That's the test. So you run it. Here's the thing: none of these 7 habits are about working harder. All are about changing the conversation you're having with yourself and kind of like, what's possible? What you're allowed to want, what game you're playing. The people who go from broke to financially free, they're not smarter than you. They don't have a secret. They just started doing the weird things, like the uncomfortable things, the things that felt wrong the first time. After a while, you'll look back and you won't remember what it felt like to think any other way.