Low Risk and High Reward way to Find Ownership

Hey, Cody, It's Mark. Your 9 to 5 isn't as safe as you think it is. You gotta get out of there. Is your 9 to 5 actually keeping you broke? Over the last 10 years, two times the amount of people say that they are feeling like their job is not safe. We've already seen hundreds of thousands of layoffs from big companies. This year, when I was quitting my 9 to 5, I didn't love the advice that was like, just jump off the cliff already. The question is, how do you manage to keep your job and still have a side hustle? This is so important. And where people up royally and the way that they f ck up is that a lot of people. How do you find your side hustle, though? Oddly, I have that right here. Three steps. Proximity, power and profit. What do I mean by that? Proximity is first, what are you closest to? So if you're in advertising, I want you to think about what is right around your zone of genius, your current business that you do right now in advertising. Next, power. What do I mean by power? What are you uniquely skilled at? What is a superpower that you have? What do three friends at least once a month come to you and ask for your advice on? Is that how to organize stuff? Is that how to do notion? Is that how to sell people on something? Is that just how to stay focused or work really hard? What's your power? And then third is profits. If you're super into gardening, I don't know, might be hard to get something super profitable going here. But if you could teach people how to sell more things, your profit is probably really, really obvious. Proximity, power, profit. That's how you find your side hustle. If right now you do not answer. I love this when you talk about what you do, do something about it. I can promise you this. I know it sounds extreme, but in a hundred years, nobody's gonna be alive who knows you now. Nobody's gonna remember your name. Not even your grandkids or great, great grandkids. And so at this point, the only thing that every single breath that you take doing something that you actually want to do. But that said, why is it so important to not just go jump off a cliff immediately? There's a beautiful law of investing called compounding. Your first dollar and every incremental dollar that you invest above and beyond that, when put together and invested continuously grows faster than you can imagine. Compounding is magic when it comes to making money. Your career compounds if you jump in and out of the workforce and you leave your job and your lifeline compounding cannot happen. So that's why it's so important that you don't just jump out. You've worked really hard to get to where you are today. You've probably gone to college. You've probably spent hours and hours trying to get one particular job. And then you've spent hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of hours in that job. Don't let all the compounding go to zero just because somebody on the Internet tells you that you should have a C in front of your title. And unless you have CEO is the title that it's not real. The question is, how do you manage to keep your job and still have a side hustle? This is so important. And where people up royally and the way that they f ck up is that a lot of people end up doing two things. They end up being terrible at their job and terrible at their side hustle. It's just like mediocrity all around. And that's not what I want for you. Instead, I want you to do exceptional at your job when you are doing your job and to do exceptional at your side hustle when you're doing that. How do you do it? You don't multitask. Multitask is the killer of money. You want to have focus during the hours of nine to five or whatever you have to do for your job. Hit your specific metrics in your job and and be a high performer in your job. The worst thing that you could have happen is you're a shitty employee, so you get fired instead. You want to be so good that when you leave, your boss goes, man, I want to give you your first dollars. That is the right way to do it. A lot of people feel like you don't have time to actually do the side hustle while you're working. I want to tell you the law of two hours. Two hours of dedicated work is worth more than most people's. Eight hours for two hours a day, every day, you focus on your side hustle. I can almost guarantee you that you're doing more than most people's eight hours of work. The beautiful word is the F word. Focus. You're very dangerous when you use it. So you don't need 24 hours in a day to do a side hustle. You just need focus. Do the thing now. My friend Noah has this line now, not how. Here's the truth. If you are not currently doing whatever that thing is inside of you, spoiler, you're not going to do it when you Quit. You're not just going to do something that you aren't doing now for free because you have some ability to get paid for it. Do whatever that thing is that you think is your next big step in this moment, in the hours not inside nine to five. That's the secret that nobody wants to tell you. In fact, I was telling my husband this when he was trying to figure out what he wanted to do next. I'm like, what do you spend your time on in this moment right now? What are you doing even when nobody's watching and nobody will pay you because that has some little breadcrumb of truth to the thing that you should actually be doing. But don't kid yourself. I told him, I was like, babe, if you're not doing it right now, you're not going to do it later. Just because you quit your job doesn't mean you're going to be able to magically have all of these hours. You will fill it up with extra things. So make sure that, that right now you already have the habit of doing nothing. What's something that you can start that doesn't cost a ton of money, that you don't have to get permission for, where you can experiment and learn for really, really cheap. And it allows you to show yourself, are you willing to do the work or not? Because wouldn't that be awful if you quit your job where you're actually making a bunch of money because you think you want to do this thing and then you go to do the thing and realize you actually hate it. Test drive before you buy. Going from nine to five, just scraping by to owning and building your empire. That's the dream. And I get it. But what they don't tell you about becoming an owner and getting rich is some nights you sit up just thinking, what if I lost it all? And those thoughts are why I got my first life insurance policy at 25 when I worked in finance. Life insurance is one of the best ways to help you protect what matters most. 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So I remember I was talking with one of my colleagues back in the day and she wanted to go start a business and she's like, but first, you know, I need to have like $5,000 in order to do it because I have to get, you know, this license, I have to put together this llc, I've got to get this logo for it, I've got to get a website for it like this, I need to get a certification from this and that. And I was like, or you could just tell people with your mouth that you have a thing that you'd like to sell them and ask them if they'd like to buy it and get pre orders from them before you even create the product. I'm like, the only thing that actually stopping most of us from starting a business is that we think we need a bunch of permissions. When in fact the beautiful part about businesses is they're totally permissionless to start unless you're doing some crazy high tech or crazy hard asset business. So in fact all you need to start a business, you don't even, I mean I'm not the law of the IRS here. You don't even have to have a proper LLC structure and a website and a bunch of certificates to start a business. Like you're tiny. The likelihood that it won't work out is high. So just start, tell people that you want to sell them your consulting services on advertising right now and hey friend, would you buy it for a thousand bucks a month and I give you 10 hours of services and when they say yes, say hey, can you pay me in cash and I'll take it for 750 and use that for 750 bucks to create a website and then connect a stripe account. Like you don't have to do any of this up front. You don't even need a bank account to start. You could transact in cash and then the second that you get one person to buy, you can do the bank account, then you could do the llc, then you could do the website. But in the beginning, just get somebody to give you money for a service that you're going to offer them with a service that's so Good that they would feel dumb not taking you up on that offer. Your hobby is now spelled side hustle. What does that mean? It means you need to make a list right now of all the things you're not going to do in order to focus on the one big thing you should be doing, which is your side hustle. I want you to think about all the Game of Thrones binge watching you're not going to do. I want you to think about the Tuesday nights you're not going to go out with your friends. Because if you tell yourself the expectations that success will necessitate up front, then success will come and it won't be so painful. You will have already preconditioned yourself to be used to what it will take to win. Most people don't think about what they want to sacrifice. They only think about what they want. And so they wonder why their column of wants is so lacking when their sacrifices are also lacking. I have never once in all my years of being in business met somebody who is successful that has never sacrificed for a period of their life. Now, I think there's something called seasons. So you can have a season where you are in build mode that you are sacrificing, and then you can have a season where you are in enjoy mode and your sacrificing goes way down. Just realize which season are you in and then you know what to wear. Building season, you're indoors. Sweatpants, baby enjoying season. Maybe you're getting dolled up and you're allowed to go out. This is something that nobody talks about, but it is the truth. So how do you know which one's a hobby and which one's a side hustle? First, I want to think about a hobby. Hobbies are typically things we do on a weekend, right? That's when you might go and race cars or paint or whatever the case may be. So think about it this way. Instead of just enjoying it on the weekend, can you in one weekend make $1,000 from it? If you can't make a thousand bucks on a weekend, it might just be a hobby and not a side hustle. Another thing that Lindsay brought up, which I really like, is hobbies are often used to unwind. Side hustles is where you want to grind. So you don't want to always turn your passion into a profit. You might just like gardening, but are you going to take all the joy out of gardening if you decide you need to grind on it? We got a list of 28 side hustles I like and how to u them to make some cash. Link below. Spend. Like what do I mean by that? I don't mean on all the fun things that you want to that you might now spend from your salary. What I actually mean is I want you to think about the money in your pocket like a Silicon Valley investor. I want you to think about every single dollar that you give to your startup, just like an investor would if they were going to invest in it. So your little business is going to be funded by you and that funding is going to mean that you track that bad boy. I want you to have what's called a P and L, a profit and loss statement in which you say every single dollar that you put into the business, every single the dollar that you make in the business. And then you figure out at the end of the day, is there money left on the table between the money that you spend and the money that you make even before you have a real business? This is a thing that a lot of people don't realize and why most startups and small businesses don't make money for the first three to four years. The problem is that a lot of us don't realize what we're spending in our business as opposed to what is coming out of the business. And so our P and L is actually just us bleeding assets into a business for years and years and years. You're not going to do that because you watch this video and you subscribe to this channel. I saw this statistic the other day that shocked me. And the statistic was that most small businesses that are startups never sell $1 worth of services. Really? You guys don't have one friend you could ask to buy something from you? I got to get some friends. And the reason why is the biggest mistake that I see people make when they are side hustling their way to a business and that is asking friends for money, asking people to pay you things for the services or the products that you provide. You are not as CEO of your own little small business, really CEO. You are chief sales officer, you are cso. And the difference between most businesses that win and startups that just bleed money and make you feel slightly better about yourself living in a totally miserable job is that that person or the founder actually asks for cash. So I had a friend and this friend had a consulting business and she was saying, I'm doing all of these hours, I'm like taking phone calls and helping people with their business and I'm helping people search for businesses. I was like, that's awesome. She's like, yeah, I have like more people than I can handle. I'm like, that's incredible. I'm like, how much money are you making? She's like, well we're actually like really not making money yet. I'm like, come again? She's like, well, I'm doing a lot of this stuff for free. I said, that's not a business, that's a charity. And if you want to run a charity, that's great, but you have to still go fundraise from people to actually pay for the charity too. So the moral of the story is anything you do, you have to ask for cash. So do me a solid right now in this exact moment. You could pause this video, you could write it down to do later. I want you to think about the small thing you're going to do on the side. And the first step is not writing your mission and vision. The first step is not determining what products you're going to offer and creating a beautiful landing page. The first step is you thinking of one person that you could sell your thing to and calling them up on the phone, walking over to them, sending them a text and saying, hey man, would you buy this? Don't let your mouth write a check you can't cash. This is a famous line about debt, in my opinion, the ultimate four letter word. Use debt for your startup or side hustle. If you are into bankruptcy or getting your house taken from you or your car repossessed like this, I don't want you to use the highest risk version of capital because somebody at the end of the day is going to come to you and they're going to ask for their money back. At least with equity you have reputational risk. But nobody comes and says, you better pay me back for that failed startup. That is not how banks operate, my friend. They are like that cousin Vinnie of yours that gives you a little cash in a suitcase and says, I'm going to need it back in three months and you better have it back in three months. That is what debt means. And most people don't understand that. The only way that I would ever use debt is if I was going to buy a business. And we use debt all the time for that. But that's because I already know what the business is making, if it's profitable or not. And it's not really a brand new business or startup. I think it's a mistake to use debt for anything else besides that. So let's say that your salary isn't big enough for you to Start your business. Yeah, of course it's not, because nobody ever thinks that you have enough money to go and do the next thing. That's a totally blatant lie that you are telling yourself. That I told myself, you do not need a set amount of money to start a business. Today more than ever. I've never seen a phenomenon the same. There are more businesses that have been started in the past year than the past decade entirely if you start pre2020. So think about that for a second. It's actually never been easier to start a business. You have so few excuses. Actually, I think the real question you're asking here is when should I feel comfortable enough to make the move? That's not actually about money. So let's not kid ourselves on that one. Don't quit. At which point you might be like, wait, what? And what I mean by that is not quite yet. What I mean is quit when you have enough cash flow to go all in. I don't know about you guys, but I don't want to live off of ramen and sleep on futons. And I don't think you actually have to do that to win in business over the long term. So I want you guys to have a metric that I use, which is my cash flow to needs ratio. I only want you to quit once you have determined that no matter what, this business can handle my absolute needs, which for me might be a latte that's nice and frothy and might also be the ability to, I don't know, take a vacation sometimes and never have to live with my parents again. Sorry, mom and dad, everybody has their own cash needs. But I basically want you to put two things, two numbers up on a spreadsheet or word doc. Your first number is going to be what your monthly expenses are of the things that you absolutely have to have. And then the second one is I want you to put up a number of the cost of the business so what it runs for you to build this thing each month. And I want you to combine those two numbers. And you are allowed to quit when your business covers that amount. Now, what'll actually happen is once your business starts rolling a little bit, you can feel somewhere in your gut. The second that a side hustle becomes a business, there is something that happens there. And once that moment happens and it has momentum and you realize you have what's called product market fit, then you can leave. But I don't want you leaving before that because a universe of dreams have died at the altar of I'm going to jump and go all in. The thing is we actually never hear about the those guys. We only hear from the people who have won continuously. If I had gone all in on my I actually never thought about this. My first side hustle selling south basically bombed. My second business that I bought and build threads refined made basically no money. If I had left my corporate 9 to 5, I would have left tens of millions of dollars in both money made and also skills and experiences learned on the table. I would have left millions of dollars. But we only hear from the people who it worked out for. For every Jeff Bezos in his garage, Steve Jobs in his garage, there's 5,000 people who yes, they lived in their mother's basement and they actually never left because 45% of our generation is still living in their parents basement. So don't feel bad and pressured by the winners because they have winners bias. They forget what it's like when you're losing or you haven't quite hit it yet. Ignore that. Don't quit. I actually mean it this time. I mean most people probably should not be an owner. I want you to make sure you're not just watching too many people like me, the hormozies MFM on the Internet and deciding that you need to be in charge. Because here's what in charge means. It means sleepless nights. It means a lot of risk. It means missing out on things. It means failing. And that is just not for everybody at every stage in your life. And that is perfectly fucking okay. So maybe don't quit. And unless you feel that deep need inside of your gut to do your own thing no matter what, it's pretty painful. So be careful what you wish for. Because honestly, jobs are kind of awesome. I had one for 15 years. I got to leave all my work at the table. If anything was going on, if anybody was getting sued, it wasn't me. I was just there kind of raking in a paycheck and complaining when it wasn't big enough. I mean, unless you're an accountant, if you're an accountant, just categorically quit. Accounting is the worst. But anything besides that, I think there is a reason why a lot of people stay in jobs because it's awesome if you don't have an insufferable boss, if you like your team, if you believe in the mission, and if you are building something bigger than yourself. I think too many people quit too fast. It's almost like how you need to go lift weights because then you get calluses on Your palms so you're not like a little marshmallow, right? You can lift heavier and heavier because you build up tolerance. That's why the best jobs that you can have actually are ones with really tough, really hard and high standard bosses. For instance, One of the CEOs I hired, his name's Bobby, and he was telling me about a story that he experienced when he was at American Express and he was presenting out doing a huge partnership deal between, like American Express or Stripe or something. Billion dollar transaction. And he thought he killed the presentation. And his boss, when they went out of the room, said, you really up that deal. And he was like, what are you talking about? And he's like, they couldn't tell how nervous you were, but I could. Because underneath the table, you were shaking your foot like this the entire time, even though up you were like this. He goes, now imagine they could see your foot shaking like that. What a tell would you have? And you know, when I heard that story first, I thought, that's a little ridiculous. That's like a tiny little thing that he did wrong. But having a boss that is that exacting in standards means that you get better because they pay attention. So maybe you shouldn't actually quit. Whatever you do next should terrify you. Small idea. Stay employed. Big idea. Go take a risk. But you don't have to jump off of a cliff to do it. Oh, watch this next video. It'll help you. I kind of hate the word side hustle. If you're gonna do it, do it. Side piece, side hustle. Nobody likes either of those words, especially if you're the person that they're talking about. You're calling your business little. Do you think your business is gonna get big while you do that? If you say it's a small blog. If you say it's a small side hustle, you think all of a sudden that's gonna turn into something that makes you millions? Probably not. You have to change your mind about what it's gonna be before it changes its mind to be that thing. So give it some words of affirmation, call it your business. It's not a side hustle.