9 Middle Class Habits Keeping You Broke In 2024

Sorry, I can't go out. It's a school night, man. You know that. Here's what I learned. If you actually want to make eight figures a year. So I run a $100 million holding company and worked at Goldman Sachs on Wall Street. But I started out as a public school kid making 37k a year or something like that in my first job. I have a rule now called the no school nights rule. And the reason is because once you want to make a bunch of money, you have to say no to everything. And it actually gets harder. The more money that you start making, the more things you get off offered. But right now, one night a week.

I get to go out on a.

School night, even though I'm 37 years old. So school is not really an option anymore. But prior to that, it was because I needed to pretend like every single night was going to be exam night. The night before an exam, you stay in, you focus, you obsess on what's going to happen the next day because you know that that day matters more than anything else. And if you want to get to the eight figure realm, what nobody tells you is how many things you're going to have to say no to. And that superpower of saying thanks next time, thanks, Friday night. Thanks, not now is huge. Sometimes it's hard for you to actually say no. And so I don't always say no. I just say, not right now. I'm in build mode. And nobody can really argue with that idea of build mode. You know, some guy on the Internet made famous this idea of monk mode. Right now I'm not trying to be a monk, so I never really understood that one, but the idea of build mode makes sense to me. When you are building something, you are focused. You don't go back and forth and left and right and all these things. You stay sort of focused on the one thing that you, you need to seriously accomplish. And so no school nights. Build mode. Not right now. Maybe later. Thanks for the invite. Is kind of all you need. And it's a little bit of a secret power. Do you like that noise? I thought being an 8 and 9 figure entrepreneur would look a lot more like, I don't know this, but it turns out it looks a lot more like this. Which I call stress. And spreadsheets is more of the actuality. Tell them about your feedback method. Oh, you mean being a bossy. The truth of it is, is that I don't want to be liked. I want to be respected and I want to win. And that is A methodology you have to take on if you want to win this game. And the game of business is a competitive one. I mean, man, I think the most competitive thing that I've realized in business is that you. Your biggest competitor is going to be future, younger you. And there's one of those being born just about every second of every day. So if you focus on trying to have everybody like you, you'll never accomplish anything. If you want to be the CEO, you have to hold the standard. The level at which you hold the standard is going to be the highest it is held at any company at any time, no matter what. And it's also the highest you're going to hold it for your bank account and your body and your life. And so if you let the standard slip, then everything slips. So when I get feedback, it's intense. I was talking to the team the other day, right? And I was like, you guys, when have I ever been on a phone call and not given feedback things we should be doing differently, not piped in, not pushed. And like, Lindsay, what's the answer to that?

You're always pushing.

It's never. I've never just been quiet on an entire phone call. And that's the way you have to live your life if you want to win. It's the same thing if you're on a team and you never once contribute. I don't want to hear this bullshit about I'm an introvert versus an extrovert. Do you want to win? Do you want to win no matter what you are or whatever label you want to apply to yourself? If that's the answer, then be a bossy. It doesn't mean you have to be mean about it. I'm not mean, and I'm often wrong, but I am going to hold the standard super high. And it turns out winners like pressure, so other winners are going to want to be around you, and you're the one holding that line. Dude, Lindsey, you should totally tell them that story. You can tell them.

Okay, so in my first week that I was working for Kody, I was messing around in our database, and I had moved things around, and I think the first piece of feedback Kody gave me was, hey, Lindsay, where the Is my. So it was.

Yeah, dude, if we had hr, they'd be calling right now. All right, y' all know those are fake notifications, because I would never have those turned on. The rule is actually that you need to protect your time if you want to be successful. You know, I was looking up the stats, the Other day, the average person gets 41 texts, 100 emails, and 5 calls a day. I'm like 3x that. So the best time management advice I ever got was you have to be easy to find and hard to reach. So that's why I'm all over the Internet, easy to find, but you can't call me and have me answer. And that's super, super important because either you get to set your schedule and attention, or somebody else does it for you. One of the earliest things my favorite managers taught me was something called the Pomodoro technique, which has now been normalized. It's basically like you stay sick, set on a task for 20 minutes. That task made me start to obsess on this idea of, holy hell, look what I can get done in 20 minutes. If in 20 minutes of dedicated attention, I can get an entire spreadsheet done, I can get an entire analysis of a deal done. I can get like five or seven emails sent. Then every time somebody steals, quote, unquote, steals 20 minutes from me, that's really valuable. And so if you haven't tried the Pomodoro technique, you might just want to check it out, because basically what it does is it helps you make every single second that you do something precious. And when you start treating your time as precious, you start making other people treat your time as precious. Most people, they let go of their most precious commodity like it doesn't matter. You're not going to do that. Oh, circling back to that idea, earlier I talked to you about, school's in session, and so we don't go out on a school night, which my friends think is lame, by the way. And also, I don't care. You have to say no more in general, because every time you say no to something that isn't part of your goals, you are saying yes to your bigger vision. Every time you say no to something small, something that is not aligned, it's like this little coin that goes into the piggy bank of the universe, and that piggy bank of the universe compounds over time. It fills up every single time. You're giving these signals that the thing that you care about is going to all your attention and everything else is not. And in a world where attention is under attack, those tiny no's accumulate up to your big, huge yes. So turn off the notifications. Stay focused. I can't tell you how many dollars I attribute to the fact that people are pissed they can't reach me. Speaking of no, there's a lot of things you gotta say no to. But a natural progression of protecting your time, space, and energy. It gets hard. I can't count how many times I've felt alone and on an island while building my businesses. But the nice part is you don't actually have to do it alone. This is something really important. It's a huge yes in my book. Therapy. So I've partnered with BetterHelp, the sponsor of today's video, to help you take care of your mind. I know when you have a lot of demands on your time, it can be hard to say yes to taking care of yourself. But betterhelp makes it easy. You can do therapy sessions on a phone call, as a video chat. That's how I do it. Or even messaging. Whatever's the most comfortable for you once you make that decision. To start, BetterHelp matches you to a therapist within 48 hours in most cases, after you answer just a brief questionnaire. And if the first match doesn't work, that's okay because There are over 30,000 therapists in their network that you could switch to, no additional cost, anytime. So you can find the right fit for you. If you want to get started on fortifying your mind while you build your bank account, click the link in the description to get started. So this one's going to. This one's going to piss a bunch of people off. I think solopreneurship is a total myth. If you're going to make a million dollars a year, you got people working for you. Contractors, vas, accountants, sales, somebody. You're going to hit eight figures. You have a lot of people working for you. So there's this whole methodology now that people talk about where there'll be a bunch of humans that are individuals that are making millions of dollars a year without anybody else involved. Solopreneurship. Solopreneur.

Solopreneur.

How much solopreneur? I just don't think so. Until AI is smarter than all of us, that's probably not going to be the case. Then let's say that it is the case. So let's say that you could build a business all by yourself. Drop shipping you 17 years old, two hours a week, eight figures a year. All right, let's pretend that that's reasonable, which I don't think it is. It's shallow and lonely. If you've ever built a company, it is one of the hardest things you will ever do in your life. You will feel like you're failing. Often people will tell you you suck to your face. It is a massively Negative feedback loop where you can make a bunch of money and it's also awesome in some ways, but you want other people around. That's the fun. Like I. Why do you think so many YouTubers quit? Emma Chamberlain I'm giving up, you know, no more YouTube. And everybody's got one of those videos. I don't just shoot me in the neck if I ever put one of those out. And I'm not actually quitting. I've always hated that. The reason why I think so many of them quit is because they don't have a team to continue to push for. If I quit, I don't know, 20 people, 30, 40 people would be unemployed and they'd have to go do something else just because, like I didn't feel like filling being youtubes or Tiki Talkies anymore. Cause it's really that tough. But I actually get it. Cause when you're staring into a camera by yourself, looking at your own face, editing your own stuff, doing it all by yourself, I'm miserable of looking even at my clips on Instagram. Could you imagine if you have to edit your own face year after year, day after day, it's probably not very much fun. So I think solopreneurship is not only a lie. I think it is setting you up for being super sad and lonely. Sad, lonely. And you don't seem like you want to be that. If you actually want to figure out what you're going to make, how much money gets in your pockets from seven or eight figures? This is really important. Nobody talks about this. People think that business owners are rolling in cash and we have too much money. We don't know what to do with it. And I'm going to show you why that's not true. And then you can plan a little bit easier yourself. I think school's now in session. When you have a business, you have two numbers that matter. Revenue, the money that you make in total profit, the number that you actually take home and put in your pocket. What? What's crazy is most people think that small businesses make a ton of money. And the truth is they don't actually. Look at this Walmart, for instance. You know what their Profit margin is? 3%. The average small business profit margin, 6.5%. Here's the kicker. Most people think the businesses make somewhere around 36%. This is super, super important because as you're thinking about, wow, I want to make eight figures a year in revenue, right? Real different than eight figures a year in profit. Most people confuse the two. You're not going to be most. It's also really interesting to think about once you get making all that money. How do you explain this to employees? Because the second you go, we made $5 million in revenue this year, and you have an employee making $30,000 a year, they're like, what the. And you have to go, oh, wait a second. Here's how much money we actually made. When we think about paying the IRS and your salary and the office and. And chargebacks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So important to note, money in your pocket is not revenue.

How do you respond to an employee that says, I want a raise because they think you've got the cash?

Well, first of all, I would never respond that somebody gets a raise just because I have a cash. Just because I took a bunch of risk and spent millions of dollars and hundreds of hours and years of my life building this business doesn't mean you get to profit of it. Any employee. And it's really important, going back to that little bossy inside of you, it's important for you to recognize this up front because people will do this and not because people are greedy and not because you're paying people not a lot of money. It's because they forgot to teach us about this in school. So we don't even know what is right for us to ask for and what is not right. When I was young, Cody, working in varying companies, I asked for ridiculous things because I had no idea what I was doing. So I would first of all say, hey, by the way, just so you know, I pay people based on the value that they drive to the business. You, your job right now is this valuable to the business. It has this dollar amount associated with it. Now, if you bring me a plan for your value to increase to the business above and beyond what you're being paid right now, I will absolutely pay you more money if you hit that plan. But just because I make more money but you provide the same amount of value doesn't mean that you get more money. I say things like, now when I re explain that to you, does that make sense to you? Or you could have a snarky comment and go, did that sound as ridiculous coming out of my mouth as it did yours? Really depends on what kind of leader you're going for here. The last thing that I would say to people is give them a roadmap. Because a lot of times people don't know what their value is. So when I was a young employee, if my boss said to me, fine, show Me a path for you to become more valuable to me. I'd be like, I don't really know, like, do I work longer? Do I work on this thing more? Maybe instead, show your employee and say, you know what, Right now you're doing this, and this is the output. And look, here's the industry average about what somebody like you is paid. But if you did this other thing instead, look how much more you'd be worth. Like you were making 35,000 here. But if you get these couple of skills, you'd be worth 65,000. Lots of different ways for either you to show your employee what they should be doing differently, or you as the boss, to show your employee what they could be doing differently. Two sides, Schools out. This is a fascinating clip I'm going to have you listen to here in a second from my friend Chris Williamson. There's a wild phenomenon that happens when you win. You get more negative criticism than you do positive over time than a normal human would because you just get a mountain of feedback. Moral of the story, our little pea brain, African savannah created brains can't handle that. You know, one of the things that's most important if you want to hit seven and eight figures is you've got to find a way to like, sauna your brain. What do I mean by that? Everybody likes saunas these days because they detox your body, right? They get rid of all of these metals and they get rid of toxins inside of your body. It's a detox. Well, how do you do that for your mind? If you're trying to be really successful and you're hearing all this negative feedback, do you have a way to cleanse it? There's lots of ways people do it. You can do meditation, you can do workouts. But I want you to listen to this little clip because once you get some success, you will wish that you had listened to this and thought about it.

The best companies and their founders, they do this one thing. They say, here's the action I want to take and here's our company. I'd love you to poke holes in it and tell me the things you think I'm missing. And they are actively looking for disagreement because they don't want to be right. They want to win. And most people who want to win, all we care about is we want to information gather. We want to always be connecting dots. And we can only connect dots if we see more of them. And so the winners are usually the ones that will ask you, tell me what I'm doing wrong. And tell me what I'm missing here. I think this. But I am open to persuasion one.

Way or the other.

And it was funny cause we actually did a little mini podcast the other day and I was so irritated because I had this person on because they had an incredible tweet that I was like, ooh, spiky point of view, I wanna talk about that. And then they came on and they just soft softened it and they waffled it and they didn't at all stick by what they had said.

And I was poking.

I'm like, did you change your mind on this? Do you think something differently? And they're like, no. Well, what I meant to say was like, no, what you mean meant to.

Say is that you got kind of.

Called out for this and your strengths and beliefs were overcome by other people's opinions and likes and those type of people. Once that happens to me once with.

Somebody, I realize, hey, those can be.

An acquaintance, but they'll never be in the inner circle.

Really good podcast, I think, talking about stuff I never usually talk about. Relationships, mental health, dudes versus chicks, how to be happy. Not about zeros. There's a certain point in my life where I realized that other people will project their desires onto you. And you have to have a clear understanding of what you want out of life. Once you figure that out, it's the most magical gift that can ever happen to you. But your entire life will be spent in ensuring that you follow that path. And you don't let anybody else derail you because they're going to try. Like for instance, when I wanted to leave Goldman Sachs, I feel like my mom was going to cry. Like that was the pinnacle that a Latina daughter could achieve. If I had listened to her and my father, I never would have left. They say that now. They're like, you did the right thing. The only way to truly win long term and to make an unreasonable amount of money is to have a vision so big it blocks out everybody else's feedback. How do you know you're going to win? You never know you're going to win one way or the other, but that actually doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is that you know what you want. Because if you know what you want, you just continue after the thing until it feels almost unreasonable. And because most humans will not be unreasonable in life, your likelihood of succeeding is higher. As long as you learn as you're doing it. You iterate, you give to other people and you continue to progress and get better. I mean, pending That I don't want to be an NBA basketball player for obvious reasons. Athlete. Most things in life are achievable to us, two or three shades of them. So if you want to be a best selling author, maybe that's not in the cards for you, but could you be an agent? If you want to be a YouTuber, maybe that's not actually in the cards for you, but could you be somebody's head of content or production? You don't always have to win exactly, but you do have to try until it seems completely unreasonable. I think at least those chairs are comfy as. Oh, also, this is an interesting one. Tanner, you're going to hate this because the lighting's bad, but I learned from my friend Andy Frisella that how you do anything is how you do everything. So one of our rules in this studio, which is where we're in right now, is that we clean up after ourselves. I actually learned that Andy in his place has zero cleaning staff. And so I was inspired about that. I'm like, you're right. If we are the ones that take care of the small, dirty, shitty things and we do it in real life, then we'll do that when it matters too. So do the dishes. Doot, doot, doot. The fastest way to get to eight figures is just to get a ton of work done. Head down, doing the work. These are all the things that I have to get done normally in a day. And it's a lot. So that's probably why if you want the secret hack, like the only 1, 1, 1 hack is this. Waking up at 5:45 solves about 99.9% of problems. And that's probably why I'm not the only one that says it. When you wake up early and you get a jump on the day, it's an actual win. I'm up about 5, 5:30. So every morning starts with a run and when the option comes to hit the snooze button, don't do it. It's a heck of a lot easier to get it done if you do it early. There's something beautiful about before the rest of the world has risen, you are already half a day's work in. I know these days it's not very PC to be into hustle culture and we're all feeling burned out and it's feeling like a lot of. But there's no faster hack than having more time than somebody else. I don't know a faster way to get a bigger brain or a smarter product, but I certainly know an easy way to get more time and that is the Average person works 8 to 5. What if you work 6 to 7? You're probably gonna do a little better. I hope you guys liked this video today. This was different. It's like actually what I do all day. We're just telling you the lessons that we've learned from seven, eight figures. Stuff I wish other people have told me. If you like this, let me know in the comments. Also, hit subscribe and we'll see you on the next video. Search for you. What? Driving, Leaving the car Driving with me while I'm attempting to think can barely drive normally.