It’s Boring, But This One Habit Will Make You a Millionaire

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Super hard truth: almost nobody gets rich doing something exciting. They get rich doing this one thing, and it's really boring. You see, most people quit to chase the next shiny thing, but sticking with something is actually the difficulty. Because for most people, every new idea feels like it could be their next lottery ticket. But that's the problem. The people who build real wealth, they aren't chasing the next thing. They're still doing the last thing long after it stopped being exciting. Today we're going to talk about how boring things can win and why sticking with something almost always beats starting something. I'm Codie Sanchez. This is The Big Deal Podcast. Let's jump in. Really quick before we get into this, if this show has ever saved you an hour or made you a dollar, will you do me a favor? Hit subscribe. It tells YouTube and Spotify to show this to more operators who need it. It's genuinely the biggest thing you can do to help us keep making it. Okay, let's get into it. You know what's crazy? People don't quit because they fail. They quit because Tuesday looked exactly like Monday. And since something stops being exciting, you stop entirely. And the second you stop, compounding stops with you. What compounding actually looks like is the same business, the same marriage, the same friendship, the same work for years. But your brain doesn't care about what's profitable. It likes what's new. That's why a brand new anything feels exciting, even when the old one is finally starting to work. And so your brain is working against you as it craves that dopamine hit. So your brain keeps pushing you towards the shiny thing and keeps telling you to start over. Every nudge resets your compounding clock to zero. Most people, they obey it. You start over and over and over and call that motion progress. The people who actually build wealth don't. They feel this exact same itch, but they don't scratch it. Here's the truth: everyone wants to be the best. Very few people are willing to do what it takes because what it takes is boring, which is exactly right. Everybody wants the outcome, but are you really willing to do the same thing over and over and over again? So one of my friends is Amjad. He built the company Replit, and what's wild about it is for almost 8 years it looked like it was failing, like nothing happened. Revenue was basically nothing. He couldn't move to get past that. They tried selling it to a bigger competitor. They They tried selling it to schools. They had new pricing models, subscription tiers. Like, literally nothing worked. And it got bad enough that he laid off half the company. Then AI coding showed up and Replit shipped its agent product and revenue jumped from basically nothing to over $150 million. The company raised a $3 billion valuation, then tripled it to $9 billion a few months later. Suddenly Amjad's a billionaire. But we only ever see the explosion. What we miss is the 8 boring years of looking that stupid thing in the face and continuing to do the things you don't want to do. So, you know, AI didn't just come in and fix Replit. He spent 8 years doing the miserable thing to finally get to the profitable thing. Now, most people never make it to year 8. Like, you see a plateau and you think you've picked wrong, so you reset your compounding clock. Amjad didn't. The plateau actually wasn't that he picked wrong. It was basically the price of just winning the game eventually. And this isn't new. You know, Steve Jobs lived the exact same story. After Apple Apple pushed Steve Jobs out in like 1985. He started a company called NeXT. You probably have never even heard of it and you've never touched a NeXT computer, which tells you everything you need to know about how that business went in the beginning. So he gets kicked out of Apple. He puts like $12 million of his own money, which is a ton of money for him, into that company. The first computer did not ship for 3 years. When it finally did, it was too expensive, barely sold, and by almost every measure, NeXT was a total flop. So Jobs spent years grinding on something that looked like a giant mistake. What was fascinating is the technology underneath it was the actual real thing. So much so that Apple bought NeXT for $129 million. The interesting part is it was a part of the business software that he didn't even think was real. You know, Jobs came back to Apple then, and the software he'd been building all those years became the foundation for the modern Mac computers. Everybody talks about Jobs, the comeback story, the whatever, but almost nobody remembers the journey of next because sometimes the thing that looks like your biggest failure becomes the foundation for your next success. If the most famous operator alive had to survive a long, unsexy middle, how are you supposed to know if your own boring stretch is working? It actually isn't revenue either. An investor asked me recently if one of our companies was performing to plan. You guys, I had to try to not laugh hard. This is— this was a pre-revenue, pre-product, pre-team idea that we raised for. What early-stage idea that you have goes exactly according to your spreadsheet plan? Early-stage companies don't know. Neither do investors. You're all guessing. Anyone that says they know is selling you something. And so early on, you shouldn't care if you hit the forecast. The forecast is like Basically nothing. You are measuring grit, you're measuring progress, and you're measuring will you continue to hit your head against the wall longer than is reasonable, longer than anyone else will, until you break that wall. Investors aren't measuring forecasts. They're measuring who keeps the clock running entirely. I mean, if you take the GOAT, Elon Musk and SpaceX, he has said that he gave his company less than a 10% chance of even working at all. He didn't start because the odds were actually good. He started because he thought it mattered and he was going to keep doing it until he died or really nothing else. And I don't know if you guys remember, but do you remember those first 3 launches failing? He literally said a 4th failure would have killed his company. They launched anyway. The founder who makes it— well, it's not usually you with the best forecast. It's you standing after everything else falls apart because quitting isn't in your nature. And it reminds me of an essay I recently saw that was called Always Go to the Funeral. This is really good. The whole point is that your life isn't defined by big heroic moments. It's defined by the small things you do when you don't feel like doing them. Showing up no matter what. It's actually my biggest annoyance in the world. I had an employee recently who was like, I'm a little bit bored about this. I don't know about what I wanna do next. I go, you're not bored. You're just finally becoming competent. Up until now you were treading water. You were kind of decent. Then you got good. You're about to become great and you're gonna give up on it. You're not bored, you're just not fire hosing it every day. And you're confusing the two things for a negative cycle when in fact this is exactly how it should be. And it makes me really sad when I see competent people do this 'cause I think this is the single biggest reason why you will not make money over time and you will not be successful in marriage or friendships or business or anything else. Because could you imagine if you're like, well, I got a little bored in my marriage, so I'm out. Okay, you'll never stay in. And so I cannot think of a single company where I wasn't bored at some point because boredom is really just grit, which doesn't show up until it pays off, which means you have to be willing to look wrong in public for years to lock in even when you're kind of miserable. And I don't think people win because you predict the future. You win because you survive long enough to actually reach it. I got to talk to Cliff Asness recently. He's the co-founder of AQR, which is like one of the biggest investment companies in the world. And he's become closer with my husband and he's been running AQR since like 1998. So 28 years in the same game. All he does focuses on value momentum and quant investing. He did not become a billionaire by chasing a shiny new strategy every few years. He kept getting better at the ones he already had. Even in like 2018, like I remember Reading everything kind of broke. Value investing was getting crushed. Headlines said that his type of investing was dead. Clients started pulling their money. AQR went from managing more than $220 billion to under $100 billion. Their business got cut in half. But what did Cliff do? He didn't pivot to crypto. He didn't become an AI influencer. He didn't launch a creator business. He kept publishing research, kept refining the same models, kept hiring researchers and investing. Then value snapped back and AQR put up some of the best years ever. You know, most people let public opinion make their decisions. Cliff didn't. He didn't reset the clock just because everyone else thought he should. And that's usually where the money is. Nobody gets excited doing the same thing for 10 years. You just understand that's what freedom costs you. The next time you're ready to quit something, ask yourself one question. Am I making a smart pivot or am I just resetting my compounding clock? I like to run something called the B.O.R.D. test. B: Do I actually have better information or do I just want to change? O: Has the opportunity actually changed? R: Have the results changed? I'm not making as much money. I'm not growing as much anymore. E: Or am I just exhausted? It's like, are you burnt out or do you need a nap? D: Does this move get me closer to my long-term destination? If those answers all point to a real change, okay, fine, pivot. If they point to boredom, stay, because that's where all the money is. You know, the people who make a bunch of money aren't the people who never got bored. So you are going to be the type of person who doesn't let boredom make your decisions.

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