The Harsh Truth: Why You’ll NEVER Make Money!

We have stagnating wages, but we have increasing productivity, which means we've actually been doing more. We have these big financial institutions like the Fed and banks that are supposed to help us make more money. In my mind, it's don't trust the big institutions. Don't trust Wall street, don't trust the banks. It comes down to trusting yourself. And I want to break that down. Hey, and welcome back to all those who put in the work. It's Cody Sanchez, and this is the Big Deal podcast for those who don't just want to be rich, but want to be free and do what it actually takes to get there. Okay, so today I want to help you get rich through lessons I've learned along my journey. My mission has always been to bring financial freedom to the people who deserve it. Hardworking, high character individuals who want to build for themselves or their families in a world of burden downers. This episode is for you. By the end of this episode, you will be able to walk away with a framework or game plan to building your wealth today. But first, if you're digging this podcast like a raccoon in a dumpster, don't be stingy. Share it with your friends, your ex, or even your weird neighbor. Let's get this thing spread like peanut butter on a hot summer day, huh? All right, let's jump into the episode. I want to start this podcast not with hard tactics and tools, but something even more important that you might not think about often. Your relationship with money. My overall philosophy on money completely changed once I started making it. And then I realized why so many of us live most of our lives never having actually touched money. Let's think about this for just a second here. The average person, so 46% of all Americans die with less than $10,000 to their name. That is so scary. And I think we feel this all around us, right? I mean, today it's like we have stagnating wages. Our money and dollars hasn't gone up over the last 20 years, but we have increasing productivity, which means we've actually been doing more. We have these big financial institutions like the Financial Fed and banks that are supposed to help us make more money, but somehow we are making less. We have less to spend. We can't afford houses. We can't really afford our mortgage. Most often, and increasingly, even things like groceries can be hard. We feel that there's, like, something wrong in society, and a lot of that we could say, is the economy and is other people on high. But I think some of this actually comes down to the way we think about money and the relationship we have with it. And so in my mind, it's don't trust the big institutions, don't trust Wall street, don't trust the banks, don't trust me. It comes down to trusting yourself. And I want to break that down. Let me tell you why I think most people don't make money. Because in order to make money, you actually have to not tell me what you want to do. You have to tell me what you're willing to give up or sacrifice in order to get it. Money is a cruel mistress, and it requires more from you than I think most people are willing to admit. You know, for instance, I think about one of the guys I knew early on in business, and I remember asking him what his goal was for the year, and he wanted to build a $10 million business in the asset management space. And he asked me what I wanted to do. And by comparison, my goal was really small. I was like, you know, I want to make a couple hundred thousand dollars this year. Like, I think that would be really, really big. And I'm not sure if I can do it, and that would change my life forever. And, you know, he kind of looked at me and he said, okay, well, how likely do you think you are to make a couple hundred thousand dollars this year? And I was like, fuck, you know, I wasn't making anything like that at the time. And. And so I was like, I don't know, like, 5%, 10%? And then he said, hmm, imagine that. If you don't, I'm gonna kill you. You're gonna die. Maybe your family dies. Maybe your closest loved ones die. Like, if you don't do this thing, you cease to exist. Now what's your likelihood of success? And I was like, well, it's definitely not fucking 10%. I would tell you that I would be. I would be saying no to some dinners. You know, I'm going to be skipping Netflix. I'm probably going to go after this totally differently. And the reason I bring this up is because I actually think, even with all the truth, of how hard it is out there to get money, which is real. The hardest thing about getting money is that we don't have a why strong enough to overcome the how. That is the truth of how hard making money is. And so when you have a why, that is something like, for instance, when I was younger, when I first started really making money, my why was I want to pour myself into this work. I want to see what is the highest level of execution I can have. I want to see if I stood before God at the end of my days in the next year or two, I could say I poured it all in. I used every drop of talent that you gave me. And I. I'm imagining standing in front of God and him going, but really did you. So for me, that was my why. It was like, I stand before God and I go, I rang it all out. I rang it all out on the table. And because of that, I worked way harder than anybody else. I worked longer than anybody else. I was willing to do what it takes. It's the same thing for you. If you can get deep down to your real true why, you will become unstoppable and making money will become a byproduct of it. And the last example I'll have have of this is, you know, we have a lot of employees and you know, so across all of our businesses, hundreds. And then the underlying businesses, thousands. And you know, even in the main business, I focus on this one, which is contrarian thinking. We have like 30 employees, let's say. And I can often tell who really is going to make a ton of money, if that's what matters to them. But who's going to make a ton of money by this one thing? When I ask them, why do you do what you do every day? And if they tell me, well, you know, I'm like trying to figure it out. I don't really know say, well, why? If you could make a decision between putting in an extra hour or two at work or going to do something else, why would you do one thing versus the other? The more clear your answer is to that question, the bigger your bank account will be. So let me give you an example of good answer and a bad answer. And then I think you could put in the comments or tag me in your Instagram stories and how your chart shakes out so I can give you feedback live. So on the left hand side, a good answer sounds like something like this. I just got married. I want to buy a house for me and my wife. I want to be a provider for her. Like, it is so important to me that she sees me as somebody who can take care of her. And so my goal is to go above and beyond and my why is my wife okay, strong. Let me tell you what a bad why sounds like. Well, like I kind of want this because I think that's like market rate for my talents. And you know, I think going forward, like, I work really hard and so I should get this, you Know, I should be able to make this. I mean, I'm good at my job, I work really hard, so that's why I want it. Your life will change the second that you realize money is attracted to strong stories and strong whys and not attracted to loose probabilities and maybes. The reason most people don't reach financial freedom is they don't have a why strong enough to compel anyhow. And then the second reason is they don't actually speak the language of money. And so, you know, how can you expect to become fluent, AKA have money all around you have massive abundance of money if you don't actually even speak the language at all? That would be ridiculous if you were like, hey, I want to go become fluent in Spanish. Are you practicing? Do you know the language? Are you talking about it frequently? Oh, you're not? Well, you're probably not going to become fluent. That makes sense to me. And it's the same thing with money, which is fascinating, right? Why did nobody ever tell us that? Like, why did they tell us how to save dollars and cents? Why did they tell us how to maybe fill out a 401k? But nobody taught us the language of money. Oh, they crammed calculus and amoebas down our throat, but nothing about the one thing that will give you more freedom than anything else in the world. Money. And so when I realized this, I thought, okay, I wonder how big this language is. You know, when you think about, like, learning a language, you're like, oh, German, that seems tough. Like, you know, they say the German's really hard to understand, but Chinese, that's probably totally tougher. There's like, levels to the game of languages, right? And I wanted to understand how big this language of money was. Like, how much studying do we have to do to become fluent in it, to make more of it? And what I realized pretty quickly is, is the language is shallow, which means there's not many levels to the game of you becoming at least financially free. Now you becoming the master, the top 1%, the 10%, a billionaire. That language is deep. That is Mandarin. But in order for you to start making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year to provide for your family, to have a house for yourself, to build a nice little business, to get ownership, to decrease risk. The language is not that deep. And so if you want to become really, really rich, you need to learn the language of money. And there's many ways you do this. One of the ways that I think is strongest is you learn deal making. That's why I teach people negotiations and business buying. And the reason I do is because deal making is really just saying, can I transfer dollars and cents from me to you or you to me? So all you're doing is it's your exchange. So when you think about speaking a language, what do you do? You wanna go talk to another person often, right. In order for you to practice your language. That is the same thing with deal making. So I think one of the smartest spots to start with learning the language of money is actually learning the language of deals. Because then you get to see in practice the words that you would just learn in theory. You know how in America, for instance, most of us in America, we were not taught Spanish by speaking. We like. We're on a little, you know, we had our workbooks, we filled out Spanish cards. And for that reason, Americans, by and large, are not really proficient in Spanish at all. It's why there's like sort of memes about gringos and how we pronounce things. The difference between you becoming fluent in money and you knowing a few things about money is use. Is do you actually use it and engage with it. And so if I was you, I would be playing the game of becoming a deal maker. I would take courses on how do I do deals. I would start negotiating in real life. And that will be the difference between the mini whole who think they know about money and the few who actually play with money, speak the language, and communicate fluently. One of the ways that you make more money is you avoid losing money and bad mistakes. This is called inversion thinking, and it is a principle that is used by some of the richest investors in the world. So let me break it down for you here. Charlie Munger, who is Warren Buffett's partner, was very famous for saying, instead of thinking about what I do want, can I think about what I do not want? I. I will get more clearly to my wants if I understand very clearly my do not desires the things that are bad for me. And so when it comes to thinking about making money and when it comes to think about growth, I would play inversion thinking. So it would go something like this. I do not want to be poor, right? Well, what is poor? Well, I do not want to make less than $20,000 a year, because I don't think I can live off of that. I do not want to have to work 70 hours a week in order to make 50,000 only. I would work maybe 70 hours a week if I could make $300,000 a year. I do not want to have to work for somebody else for the rest of my life. I do not want to have to get into debt and take on big risk to make money. So I want you to create a list of all the things you do not want. Then you can juxtapose that against the things that you do want, which is mirrored thinking, I want to make X amount of money. And if one of your do not wants is I don't want to work 70 hours a week, well then you've got to decide which one wins the seesaw contest. Which one will you put at the top of the seesaw as your top priority? Allow the other to slide down lower because you know if you want this X thing at the top, sometimes some of your other desires have to go by the way, the wayside. This is called inversion thinking and it'll change the way you think about money. So I talk a lot about business buying and I get a lot of questions right about it. One of the most common ones is where do you find a business to buy? My answer is sad because the worst deals are oversaturated marketplace sites, but the best deals are off market or curated deals. Either way, finding a business to buy usually kind of sucks. I think it should suck less actually. So that's why we invested millions in this company. It's called Biz Scout, a business buying marketplace full of the best deals for both on and off market businesses. It's new, brand brand new, it's built different and we've got verified buyers. So what does that mean? That means the best sellers that are actually interested in listing will get responses. We've got scout sites, AKA at a glance. What's the quick analysis of this deal? We've got off market data so you can get all the info you need to do direct outreach efficiently. We've got embedded lending so you can get your own financing for the business right where you buy it. Biscout is brand new, so go check it out because we're gonna be adding so many features over the coming years and I hope that in the future with you guys and your feedback, we change the face of main street buying and selling and turn a few thousand more people into owners while we do it. Because you're a big deal listener, you actually get some goodies. So go to the link in the show notes if you want to see Biz Scout and if you want to think about buying or selling a small business, let's talk about the Pareto principle, otherwise known as the 8020 rule, which basically means in life there's this fascinating phenomenon that is true in almost all aspects of nature. 20% of the actions drive 80% of the results. It originally started, interestingly enough, in peas. So they were looking at pea plants, you know, the little green things you, ha ha, chomp. And in the pea plants, they found that the pods, which the peas come into, about 20% of the pods held 80% of the peas. They realized this and thought, well, that's interesting. I thought there would be what's called an even distribution. I thought there'd just be like peas in all the pods, right? And it would be evenly distributed with. Well, it turns out nature is not like that. This is one of those weird glitches maybe that shows we're in the matrix. And it turns out in life, most of this is true too. It is a very key thing to know if you want to build a business or become more wealthy. Here's how you break it down in business. If I know that 80% of my results, the things I want, will be driven only by 20% of the things I do, it's probably really important that I focus on that top 20% and get rid of the rest in my teams. I would ask the question of okay, what are you doing right now? Is this in your 20%? Meaning, is it one of the top things that you're focusing on consistently that will drive the most results? Another way to talk about this is what Peter Thiel famously characterized as the one thing, the one thing that if you do, everything else becomes irrelevant when you're thinking about this for making money yourself. And it might go something like this if I work longer hours.

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Keep looking for a job that has higher pay consistently try to increase my skill stack. Well, those three things make me more money. And you want to ask yourself the likelihood you could write down a list of all your actions you could take and then say which of those probably won't? If I watch a ton of YouTube videos on every different subject, will that help my 20%? Probably not. If I obsess on one or two things deeply, will that help me make more money? Probably. So if I go out and spend time with my friends during the week and then I'm tired for the next day, is that going to help my results? No. In life, I think we often have a massive to do list of actions and we get a dopamine reaction every time we check something off the list. This is measurable and true. What does that mean? It means that our little lizard brain cannot tell the difference between checking off a Did I get up at 5:45am instead of 6:00am off the list? As different from Did I close a $10,000 client today? Literally. Our little lizard brains can't tell the difference between the two. So we fill up our days with a bunch of tasks that actually do not matter at all because they are easy. It is why Mark Twain famously said if you need to eat a frog, eat it first thing in the morning and if you have to eat two, eat the big one first. He's basically saying choose the hardest, the meatiest, the most impactful task you can to execute first one because our brain can't tell the difference between the two. So it will trick you into thinking you've done a lot when you've just been busy, not productive. Then lastly, because if you do the hard things first, you have a lot of built up willpower at the beginning of the day. Arguably, it's one of the times of the day where you are the least fatigued. You have the most stamina throughout the day. From a series of things often attributed to decision fatigue, which is like I made so many decisions during the day I can't make anymore. My brain sort of my willpower goes down. The later on you get in the day, the more likely you are to not be able to make the hard decision. So obsess on the 8020 rule. What is the 20% that will drive 80% of my result? What are the hard things I can do first? While I still have a lot of willpower, what things am I just doing because I want to feel good instead of be productive? There's a theory called Occam's Razor which is a framework that's really helpful in figuring out how do I make more money with. Without making this too overly complex. So Occam's Razor basically says this. The simplest explanation is usually the best explanation. So this is often a way to debunk conspiracy theorists. It's like, did the entire government architecture all come together in order to create a massive X that will destroy the world? And then you meet a bunch of government employees. You're like, those fuckers, they could barely tie their shoelaces. They're not orchestrating a world takeover. Right. What's the simpler explanation? Well, a bunch of these guys who can't tie shoelaces basically couldn't fix anything, created this huge byproduct, and now we're stuck with this mess. That's a lot simpler than the coordination and the, you know, pins all pulled together on the wall to create lizard people. Probably, probably unlikely. I don't know. Maybe. Now Occam's Razor is really useful when you're thinking about making money, because one of the biggest reasons we don't get rich is, is we overcomplicate things. And overcomplicating leads to what? Procrastination. When you're like, I don't know what to do, what do you do? You wait. When you know what to do, it's much easier to go take the next steps. So how I think about this in life is back in the day, I was in a job that I didn't really like and I couldn't figure out how to get promoted. When I am telling you, you guys, I applied for like six open roles. I put together three different business plans for open roles. I hit all of my metrics consultants consistently at the company. I, I, I felt like I was doing everything and I was getting passed up for the job. Passed up for the job, passed up for the job. And I felt pretty hopeless. And I went and talked to my boss and had the, the tough conversation. I was like, man, I've done all these things. I still don't feel like I'm progressing. What else could I do? What else could I show you to show you that I'm ready for this next stage? And his answer was basically, wait. You know, something will come up. You just wait. And in the meantime, like, you have to compete against these other people and if you're better, you'll win. I didn't like that answer. And I could have just waited for something to eventually come up. And I could have taken his sort of touchy feely, esoteric answer. But instead I was like, you know what? I can't find the answer here. It's too complicated. So what will I do instead? Let me apply the same practice I was doing internally. And I'm just going to apply it externally. I think the actions that I was taking were right. So let me just get with a recruiter and I'm going to show them all of this stuff and I'm going to apply for 10 external jobs. And if I couldn't get the internal jobs, let's see how many of the external jobs I might get. And what do you think happened? I got a new job and an ability to make more money because I couldn't do it internally. That was too complicated. And so oftentimes, if we're running against a wall, there's a great saying, which is it's sort of business 101. I remember learning it back in Georgetown when I was getting my mba. One of my favorite teachers there had had multiple exits of small, of varying size software businesses and came to teach for us as a visiting professor. And he said something that stuck with me. He said, when it's easy, to do more, when it's hard, do something totally different. And I loved this principle. Easy run, keep going, apply pressure. When it's hard, stop, think, change your frame. And so Occam's razor will allow you to look at what's happening that seems hard in front of you and say, what if this was easy? What if this was easy? Another thing that I apply to my team often is I'll say that, I'll say, okay, we have a goal of a million subscribers on an email list. And the team will be like, that feels so big. I'm so overwhelmed. I don't think we can get there. And I'll ask them one question. What if it was easy? What would that look like? Instead of you immediately going to tackle the problem from a fear frame, can you tackle it from an abundance frame? If it was easy, how could we do this? And then they started coming up with incredible ideas. It was like, well, why don't we do some newsletter swaps with your big friends? Like, I don't know how to create content that gets 10,000 subscribers, but I bet if you talk to someone, some of your other big newsletter fans or friends, and you guys switched newsletters, I bet we could get it. So ask yourself, what if it was easy? Where is the easy button? Your life? Where's the person you can talk to directly who already is looking for you as an employee that you can Talk to and maybe they'll hire you. Where is the investor who you don't even realize it, but he's right in front of your face ready to give you money. There is a magical word in finance called compounding, which sounds super boring, but often the boring is where all the money is made. What does compounding mean? It is a thing that allows you, if you invest a little bit all throughout your career in life, in the stock market, by the time you retire, you can become a millionaire. There's many different frameworks you can use to see these. There are projections and models that will show you if I put in $10 today and I continue to put in a dollar like $365 for the rest of my career, that I will have somehow, magically, hundreds of thousands of dollars at the end of my retirement. The way that we do this is something called compounding, which basically means that 1 +1 +1 +1 +1 does not actually equal the numerical amount. When you compound, 1 plus 1 doesn't equal 2. Oftentimes it equals 3, 5, 7, 10, 12. Now why, if you think about it this way, 1% growth every single day is 37x growth in one year. So we know this. With money, you can literally do a mathematical framework to show if you grow 1% every year and then the thing that is growing next continues to grow 1%, then the next 1% continues to grow 1%. You compound. It's like this stacked amount of dirt on top of it. What's fascinating is I don't think a lot of people think about this in their skill set with money. So one of the best ways to make money is to increase the value of the skills that you have. A hard truth is, if you don't like your bank account, your bank account is a reflection of how valuable you are currently in your skill set. Now you might say, cody, I'm a teacher. This is so rude. How could you say something like that? And I would say, easy. My mom was a 30 year special education teacher. I totally understand that there are some careers that have limits on how much you can make. But guess what? We don't have in this country anymore. We don't have mandated continual employment in any profession. What we do have is trade offs that seesaw that I was talking about. So if you're a teacher right now and you only make 30, 40, $50,000 a year, what benefits do you have that can allow you to compound 1% every day outside of your salary? So my mom, for instance, during the summers would get another job. And so during the summer months when she was completely off, she would help my father in real estate until my father and her in real estate ended up building a big company. She helped me in one of my businesses during those times off and her skill set started to compound. And so I would ask yourself, do you have a practice where every single day you are trying to become a little bit better of a human? This day and age there's a lot of comments out there that are like, you're perfect the way you are. You don't have to do anything else. You're enough. That's true. You as a human being were created perfectly, in my opinion, in the image of God. You yourself right now are perfect. There's nothing you can do in the material plane that's going to make you, quote, unquote, better as a soul. However, if you have a goal that is financial freedom and you are not reaching that goal, you are not perfect. You haven't done what it takes. You might have done what you wanted, but not what is required. That is just honesty and reality and somebody needs to tell you the harsh facts on that. So I have a process every single day where I work to get 1% better. And each year that process changes. So this year I have the three Bs, which is business, book, baby, I want to have a baby. This year I want to launch a best selling book and I want to grow this particular business to its next milestone. So because I have those three things, I go back to them constantly and any action I take, I go, is it helping one of those three things? So this year with baby, I'm really getting my health under control. So every single day I'm making sure that I have a checklist to get 1% better. That might be, am I working out? Am I making sure to go see my physical therapist? You know, am I doing some cleanses that I need to do? Turns out there's lots of bacteria and stuff. Women are having a harder time getting pregnant. I'm older, so it's harder getting pregnant too. So the baby is front and center for me. I don't sacrifice for that. Second is book. @ which point I know every single day I want to take one action that I think is meaningful. Going back to Pareto's principle, one action that I think is meaningful in progressing the book. So that might be today, for instance. This morning I got up really early and I created three pieces of content that I think are really good to express why this book is so amazing and Everybody should buy Main Street Millionaire. I created those three pieces of content and I got it to the team. So I'm like, okay, I did 1% more today. And then when it comes to business, it's not so much my actions. I take every day in business. I realized I need to be a better leader if I want my business to get to the next level. We're so big now and it's not the Cody show anymore. If it's just me making myself individually better and doing tasks, I'll never hit a billion dollar business, which is what I want to hit. And so I am obsessing 1% every day on am I learning about leadership? Because the real way to make a ton of money is to get other people to help you do it. That's one of the biggest secrets out there. And so every day I'm reading a book on leadership or I'm listening to a podcast and then not just listening to it, but applying it, which is what I hope you do with this podcast too. I hope you sit down and go, okay, all these things Cody listened to, here are the three things I took away that I'm going to do right now and that will change your life. If you take this magic word of 1% better every day, compounding and apply it to your life. Also, one of the biggest hacks out there when it comes to making money, categorically, number one thing I think you can do to make more money today is pre order the Main Street Millionaire book. It's like 30 bucks. It's the cheapest thing we have ever created to help people learn about making money. And I think it will have the highest return on investment that you can have. So if you haven't already pre ordered it, I would highly recommend it. You don't hear me pushing a lot of our stuff on our channels. This, my friends, is worth every single penny. So let's say right now you have $0, you have nothing, you are broke. You're listening to this, going 1% better of zero is still zero if that's you right now. Today, there are two things I want you to think about. One is every single human has some type of capital. Capital is also a word, often that's interchangeable with money. Right? Might say, I'm raising capital. What do they mean, I'm raising money? They just want to sound fancy about it. You right now may be broke. Monetarily, you are not broke from a capital perspective. What do I mean by that? If you have no money, you have very little to lose. You haven't maybe built up a big business, which means you don't have a ton of demands on your time potentially. So one type of capital that you have is that you're more willing to take risk, lean into risk. Then if you are broke today, don't play it safe, don't go be a grocery store clerk, go do everything humanly possible to get in with a startup that you think is going to grow rapidly. Take a much lower wage to do whatever grunt work is required and try to grow inside of a risky business. If right now you can't take a ton of risk but you have more time, well, time is an incredible form of capital, which means that you right now can help somebody else who already has money and resources achieve what they want faster. So where can you go out and apply your idea of time? So that might look like reaching out to somebody like me and saying, hey, I, I don't have the skillset you need yet, but I have this one unique skillset. Can I come work for you for free? Can I go work at a company right now for very little capital? Or it might say, I have a ton of time, I'm really good at marketing. I'm going to go find somebody to partner with to market their product on Etsy, I'm going to market the shit out of it, I'm going to spend a ton of time on it. And until I figure out how to monetize properly, I'm going to pour the amount of capital I have into it just like dollars. I'm going to pour capital into it and, and hope the capital comes back to me. The other thing that you might have is expertise or experience. So let's say you are a teacher, maybe you're a professor, or maybe you are really good at social media. Do you have an expertise that is really useful to somebody else? You just haven't figured out one leg of the stool which is how to make money yet. Well, if you're great at social media, go partner up with some businesses that are not great at social media and say I want a percentage of whatever income and revenue I drive you from social media today. I won't take anything that you are already making. It's only net new business. That is how if you are broke, you start to focus on okay, do I have time? Can I take risk? Do I have expertise and experience? Do I have network? So for instance, maybe you have no money, but for some reason you work at a golf country club and you're the caddy, but all those motherfuckers are rich. Could you make introductions between them? In order for you to be a connector, there's connections as the ability. That's how you make money if you have none. Now here's the cold hard truth. There's a five step process to making money. And in the beginning it's going to be very different for you. First, you have to work harder than you think. Harder means longer hours. Harder means more intense application. Harder means incredibly focused. You're not fucking around. You not just staying in the office a long time, you're obsessed with learning. Two, you're going to have to work longer than you think. So you can't just work hard. But you are going to have to take more time doing this than seems reasonable for most people. Why do you think so many people who are investment bankers? That's what I did. I was in banking and asset management back in the day. Why do you think so many of us make money today? It's because we normalized 70 hour work days with incredible amounts of output required. It sucks. I remember doing it. But you are much more likely to win if you are willing to do that. Third, you've got to value your skill stack and then grow the value of your skill stack. If right now your only value is that you are a grocery store clerk. I love you. I was a waiter for many years. I've done all level of jobs. That is not a high value skill stack. You need to have a number one priority of not just working harder and longer, but increasing your skill stack value. Because what you're going to work harder and longer as a grocery store clerk, that's not going to be enough for you to make your hundreds of thousands or millions. But if you work harder and longer than any other grocery store clerk, plus you increase your skill stack from executing the priorities, maybe creating systems and processes around it, maybe doing better in customer service than anybody else, maybe doing additional jobs, maybe learning about leadership. Then your skill stack can increase in value and you can go up the chain. Four is take more risk than seems reasonable. Most people don't succeed because they might work hard hours, they might work long hours, they might have a skill set that's valuable which would be something like let's say a pipe welder. That's a very valuable skill set. But they never take risk, they work for somebody else, they never ask for ownership, they never put skills skin in the game themselves, they never invest anywhere else. And so even with these three, without risk, you'll never make a ton of money. And then lastly is you have to have an ability to connect other humans in this society today, your network is not necessarily your net worth, but it will severely limit your ability to win. And so if you don't have anybody who's winning around you, if you don't know who to go to when you have difficult problems, and if you're not valuable enough to other people for them to want to be valuable enough back to you, then you're much less likely to win. So we got hard work, long work, a valuable skill set, taking risk and building up a network. If you have those five things, even if you are broke today, you can become unbroke. Now let me do inversion thinking. What don't we have here? We don't have trust funds. We don't have rich husbands or wives. We don't have crazy startup ideas that are brilliant. We don't have investors with a ton of capital for us. We don't have Harvard or Stanford MBAs. We have five things that are completely in your control. And that is the truth. So I've given you a set of skills that you can use to grow your wealth that have been tried and true and tested from me and thousands of other people. We steal their homework, we use their data. But a lot of times at this point, people will say there's something else holding me back. I'm applying these skills, I'm applying these processes and frameworks, but my friends and family kind of don't agree with what I'm doing. That, you know, they want to hang out, but they don't actually want to get better. They loved the old version of me, they're not loving the new version of me. And so the last piece of advice I'll have for you is that I don't ever believe any one of us is better than another human. I don't believe that. I think that if I had your experiences and your background, I would probably be you. That if you had my experiences and background, you would probably be b. That we're like this amalgamation of experiences that become who we are today. Sure, I work hard and I give myself some credit, but for the most part, I think we are a product of what's happening in the world around us. That said, if you do not change your surroundings, it's really hard to become changed. If you want to be something different, you gotta go somewhere different. If you want to achieve really high level things, you have to be around others who have already achieved those things. So I often talk about this idea of you need to leave your hometown to Grow. We did this study and we surveyed thousands of people on Twitter and on Instagram, and we ask, have any of you never left your hometown for college, work anything for longer than six months and become very monetarily successful? Define monetarily successful. Multiple millions of dollars in net worth. Has anybody done that? We found two. I have one friend who has become that. Nathan Barry. Created a company called Convertkit, never left his hometown in Iowa, never went to school outside of Iowa, built his business in Iowa is worth millions. But what did we find everywhere else that almost everyone else had at some point, at least left for college, at least left for six months. And I think this is really important because it allows you to become a brand new human and to see that it's possible to change who you are, to become something new where nobody else around you is anchoring you to the human that you are. Have you guys ever gone home, like, for Christmas or the holidays? For instance, when I go home to Phoenix for Thanksgiving or Christmas, they're like things that my friends do there from high school. You know, everybody goes to this one dive bar or two dive bars. One's called Patties and the other one's called the Roadhouse. They look the same. They haven't changed since I went to high school there years ago. Kind of the same characters are there every time. You know, there's Ted, I'm making up names. There's Ted, who's, like, always a little drunk, you know, there's like, Ryan, who, like, used to be really hot back in the day in high school, now doesn't look so great. Also kind of drunk every time you see him. There's like the few that, like, keep dating each other somehow, like even all these years later, you know, it's like this, this, this record on repeat, right? And so for years I used to go back and it's fun, right? Like, I love a lot of those people. And. And you go and you have nostalgia and you talk to them about old times, and that's lovely. But then you kind of look around and you're like, ooh, have we moved? Have we really made change in our life? Maybe they don't want to make change, which is good for them. They're probably happier than I am in many aspects. But for me, as a person who wants to do something completely unreasonable, who wants to have complete financial freedom, who wants to build something giant, who wants money to become so abundant it becomes meaningless, where I can help so many other people become financially free, that it's not even about me. Anymore. It's about like, how can I impact millions? Well, if I'm going to do this, I'm not going to do it from Patty's, I'm not going to do it from the dive bar. I'm not going to be able to do it. Being the person that they all remember. And I see it there sometimes they're like, oh, remember when you did this? And I'm like, not really. That's not me anymore. You know, I'm not that same human. And it is perfectly okay for you to be a completely different human in one year from now than you are today. So never be afraid to leave your hometown to grow. Thanks for being builders in a world of consumers. I see you guys, you are a big deal to me. 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