The Truth Nobody Tells You On How Build Wealth In Your 30s

They say that your 20s are the best time in your life. But there's a truth no one told me. This video is about the lessons that completely changed my 30s that I wish I learned earlier. I always die on the inside when I see these 19 year old YouTubers talking about when they made their first and then 50th million. Like, come on, it's unnecessary. First of all, when you're in your 20s, I had a blast and I thought I was rich as when I made $37,000 in my very first job. You can have all the fun you want in the world without having a ton of money. Now when you get older and a little crotchety and your back starts to hurt, the Four Seasons bed is kind of nice and we can help you get there. But you don't need it when you're young. Most people don't make it when they're young. And in fact we have this totally false reality where people tell you how rich they are, but they don't tell you that they got it from daddy. People tell you how young they are when they were rich, but they don't tell you that they were a total outlier. No matter where you're at, it doesn't have to be where you end up. Average age of a first time millionaire, 37. How about the average age of a first time billionaire? 51. Don't stress dude, you've got nothing but time. How do you do, fellow kids do work the rewards out outcome, not hours. And here's a way to think about that. You basically take your annual income and you divide it by I think it's 1903 hours, which equals the hourly rate that you would pay yourself based on a 40 hour week with 52 weeks a year and a little bit of vacation time. The problem is that studies show that most people obsess on one thing. They obsess on their salary, not the ability to earn more or potentially earn less. And I want you guys to do the opposite of that. Actually it's what I did. I want you to obsess on your ability to to continue to earn, even if that means giving up a little bit of the downside protection early on in your career. You're really optimizing for two things. You want to learn and you want to figure out how to earn more. And the way to earn more is actually to determine what outcomes lead to dollars. If instead you're just negotiating salary with employees, you don't actually know how you drive revenue to the company, what action leads to an Additional dollar for you. That's why I love people starting out with. With sales or something where you have a KPI, a key performance indicator that is specifically related to you. Everybody obsesses on whatever this hourly number is. This is the wrong number. I want you to obsess on outcomes instead. First of all, bosses love it. And whenever a boss likes something like this, that means you're gonna make more money. Buy the coffee. Saving is not going to make you rich. I always hated when people said this to me. Doesn't mean you can't have coffee at the house if you're into that. But if you think that you can save your way to millions, don't. You can't. I've never seen it happen once. Instead, maybe you get the coffee and you go meet a person who could actually be a huge center of gravity in your life that could give you the next job, the next opportunity, the next deal. But listening to somebody tell you that you are going to be able to save your way to your first hundred thousand dollars. I'm just not buying it. If you lived on beans and rice and stayed out of a restaurant, you could be debt free in a year. Buy the coffee, man. Another thing I kind of wish I did in my 20s. Start a simple service business. Like this guy who started with 12 bucks and scaled a painting company into a franchise. Or this guy who replaced his day job's income with paint striping. Or even this girl who paid off her student loans by flipping furniture. I also wish I spent more time learning from people with way more money than me and that I read more about all of these. But then again, contrarian thinking wasn't around when I was 20. This is the newsletter I built in my 30s. By the way, if you enjoy my YouTube videos but you're not getting these emails, what are you doing? It's free. 99 every week. Sign up at the link in the description the Pygmalion effect or you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with. What does this mean? Our beliefs influence our actions. We can only do the things that we believe we are capable of doing. Our actions often get influenced by other people's beliefs. They tell us what they think we're capable of. Other people's beliefs influence their actions and their actions influence our beliefs. We are a human compilation of what we think about ourselves, what other people think about ourselves, and what other people do. That's why it's so important who your buddies are and why it's so important what companies you work for and why it's so important who you decide to surround yourself with. Because it turns out, the science, the science tells us the people you surround yourself with rub off on you. There's a fascinating phenomenon where if you sit within 25ft of a high performer, you are likely to be 15% more productive. Cool, right? Downside, if you sit within 25ft of an underperformer, you are likely to underperform or be less productive or by 30%. Wait, Cody, look at this. Cat video Personality hire. So the people that you surround yourself with actually are helping you win more or lose more in every sense of the word. That's why in your 20s, you should go wide. In your 30s, you should narrow the field. Cause you'll know what those types of humans look like. It's also where this old school quote from Jim Rohn originally stems from. You are the average of the five people that you surround yourself with. Whether you like it or not. Your 20s are so tumultuous. You're like broke, you're dating idiots. You're kind of an idiot yourself. You're out way too late. You don't actually know what you want to do for a living. This is when you embrace the suck right around when you hit your first 30s. At that point you're starting to make a little bit of money. You know who you are. You're probably in a job that's not completely insufferable. You're starting to date people who are not 21 year old idiots and the suck starts to lift. Nobody told me that. Now you're way hotter. Maybe you got more energy and spryness when you're in your 20s, but your 30s, you start to normalize and that actually feels amazing. I remember like middle aged white women telling me this when I was younger and thinking, yeah, sure, whatever, 40 is awesome. But now that I'm in my 30s, I'm like, wow, maybe they were actually right. Never buy to impress. Here's what we want to do. Being always better than looking. Which is not the case for most Americans. 41% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck because they treat their paychecks like playchecks. Get it? Problem with most Americans is they have a higher level of expenses than they have income. And that is not going to be you. Because we are going to earn and then we're going to invest and then we're gonna spend. For instance, Chanel. Nope. Amazon for my budget. Girlies. Good artists borrow, great artists steal. This is a famous line attributed to Picasso. I think that it's deeper than this. I think you have to steal from multiple different types of people. You don't have to be a genius. You don't have to come up with the next Tesla. All you have to do is take a series of other people's idea and try to strum them together into a carpet that looks like one that only you could have made. I was in finance and I was doing okay, not great. I wasn't the smartest person. I wasn't the best at math. I was kind of a little peon analyst. If I'm not going to be the smartest, I have to find my unfair advantage. And at that time, it was Latin America. I think I could take this process and this type of product that I was selling at the time and I think I could translate it to Latin America, where nobody else is doing this at the moment. And because nobody else really speaks Spanish or knows the region like I do, I might be able to just take this model, apply it to Latin America, specifically Chile to start, see if that works. And if that works, then I'm going to copy that same model in three or four other markets. And I did that again and again until we had raised almost a billion dollars in assets under management at a company called First Trust. And then I took that exact same copying process and I did it at a company called EEC in the cannabis space. I was like, I buy and invest in these small businesses, but it's pretty competitive right now to do it. Where could I find an industry that's not as competitive because people don't want to play in it? Oh, how about one that's federally regulated, really aggressively and still considered kind of illegal? I bet all the really smart good players aren't in it yet. And so I went into that market and competed with people who just weren't as smart. And so you can do the same thing. Great artists don't just borrow, they steal. You should watch this other video about the books. I think that will take you to your first million easiest. You should steal my homework too, and subscribe to the channel. Everything I do is so that you guys can steal my 10,000 hours and not have to go through all the pain. I did. I a little wrong is sometimes a little right. But there is a limit. I call this the diminishing marginal fun framework. We have your fun levels and then we have something like the number of drinks that you have. At some point, there is a point when the two meet where the two of those things come together. And it is no longer more fun to have more drinks. Actually, your fun level starts to go down when you're younger. You don't actually realize that this. That's the beautiful point of hangovers at a young age. But as you get older, once you can start realizing this number is two and this number is two more. You change just about everything in life because you see decisions have compounding and cascading effects, which basically mean that you decide to go out too late one day and that sucks the next. Decide that you need a really greasy burger Sundays to set up Mondays. You use Sunday as another. You're tired and you're like, got a little morning. You wake up to Monday. You kind of feel entire workday in front of you. And it's all because of a decision you made on Saturday. I don't want you to have no fun. There's probably only so many years of your life you can randomly spirit off to Ibiza for a season. So I wrote this to myself to remember. Don't never drink. Some magical nights are made of whiskey. Don't skip every carb young, you always wanted cake for breakfast. Don't never break routine. The universe might have something better for you. A little wrong is sometimes right. So it doesn't mean you have to skip all the whiskey. The best business school is actually being in business. You don't need three degrees to get rich. In fact, in the future, I think people are not going to be recruiting from Harvard and Yale. The best CEOs and the best companies are going to be recruiting from your Twitter and your Instagram account because they're going to want to see receipts, not resumes. They want to hear about actions, not theories. And they want to know, can you actually do the thing? And what have you done? Not what have you thought about with an academic who's probably never done the thing too? Probably don't even do what I did. I mean, I later on, after I had already had a job in finance, went to Georgetown, but my company paid for it entirely. Shout out State street, you're my boy blue. Then I kept building. Also, the only reason that I got into a school like Georgetown after being a public school kid at ASU prior to that was probably because I was working a pretty sick job at the time. I had sort of climbed all the rungs of the ladder just from doing the rarest of things, the things I say I'm going to do, working a little bit harder and longer than anybody else, asking for expectations of what I can do to beat them. God, nobody does that. If you're in your 20s, you actually have a world of humans who want things and expect things. And if you instead are the type of person that wants to earn it, you are going to be leaps and bounds ahead of them. Back when I was at State Street, I remember this girl came up to me. I went to ASU at the time, who was young. I was like, one of the youngest people to have the job that I had. She was an administrator while I was an executive running a portion of the business. And she came up to me. We were about the same age. I think maybe she was a year or two older than I was. And she's like, how'd you get this job? I'm not really like, I applied for it. I didn't really know how to answer the question. And she's like, well, where'd you go to school? And I was like, arizona State. Well, who do you know here? I didn't know anybody when I applied. Who the to sleep with? Nobody. I'm actually married. And then she kind of laughed. She's like, guess Harvard doesn't get you far. She was a Harvard grad. And guess what? I don't think it actually does. You guys like my Boston accent? Give favors. Don't take them. I call this the law of reciprocity. When you give something to somebody else, what do they feel like they should do? Give something back to you. Pros pay up front, because nothing is actually for free now. Really good advice. Be a great f ing human at all times. Be giving because you can't ever create community later, but pay for it up front so you don't fall into the law of reciprocity. Final life hack. I wish I knew earlier. Try to keep things for longer. Ask yourself if it really brings you joy. Keep the same house, partner, car for longer than you think you need. Why do we keep running on this societal treadmill of thinking we need to keep up with the hypothetical Joneses when it in fact, even reaching what they have won't make you happy and neither will beating them. In fact, there's, like, fascinating studies, really quick to summarize this bad boy about how happy we are and win as a society. So this is from the World Economic Forum, and they basically tell you that at 18, you're at peak happiness for a youngster, right? Then you start really declining. 26, 30, you're hitting your really. You're down. You're most down in the dumps around 42. And then it starts to sort of turn around and at which point at 98 apparently you're decrepit but you're super happy. And the interesting part about this is I'm not sure I'm buying all of this maybe. But what I think is really interesting is look at this point right here you are on a decline for all of your 20s, in your 30s you're starting to like normalize and cycle back around and I felt this personally and nobody told me and I don't get why. Second thing that's kind of interesting to summarize this bad boy turns out we're happier when we're working. Look at this graph basically shows you that the people who are unemployed both by choice and not by choice are unhappy motherf ers and that's not going to be you. So think about what brings you joy some things that are naturally not going to bring you joy and if something brings you joy, do more of it. Like I don't know if this channel brings you joy. Subscribe.