Watch these 40 minutes if you want to be a millionaire in 2025

Seventeen years of lessons in business that I'm going to teach you guys in 40 minutes. I want you to skip my scars. And if you don't know me, I'm Coty. I run a nine figure holding company. But I promise it didn't start that way. So today we're going to break down the four levels of getting first, your first six figures. Then your first million seven figures. Next your first eight figures, 10 million and above. And then the real hard one. How do you get to nine figures and above? You're going to want to stay for the last lesson. I know that you people want to be rich, but let me tell you what what gets you your first hundred K won't get you your first million. So let's break it down. Live. Rule number one, Never lose money. Rule number two, don't forget rule number one. That's Warren Buffett. So how do we make sure we don't lose money? Here's my process. Don't just quit your job and go all in on the thing you want to do. First you start with a side project. Then you keep your job while you're doing it. Don't be a keep it between the hours of nine to five that you're jobbing. All the other stuff can be outside hours. You use your salary instead of debt debt to fund your side project. And you don't leave your job until you have enough cash flow to cover your expenses. This sounds like a silly thing to do, except nobody does this. Stats show that you are not 1/3 but 2/3 more likely to actually succeed at your startup and make money if you stay at your job. Which is wild. They surveyed thousands of entrepreneurs to do exactly this. And I guess, how would I know this? So when I was first starting my very first side hustle, my very first business, I was at State street. That was in 2009 or 10. I was working 60, 70 hour weeks. But I knew that one day I wanted to do something else. So I did my first side Hustle. That was selling South. It didn't work out. Thank God I didn't leave my job for that. Then I did my second side hustle. That was a cross border acquisition. It was really, really tiny. Then I did my third side Hustle. That was a company called Threads Refined Fashion Styling Marketplace also didn't work out. I lost money on all three of those things. What if I had gone all in? Why does everybody on the Internet tell you that you have to jump on the thing before you can start something else? Unless you have a no compete unless you have a. No conflict of interest. Unless you're really bad at your job during the day because you're doing something else. I think you follow my step. And that is how you make sure you never lose money and you never Forget Rule number one. 1. Rule number two. 99% of people stay stuck because they don't move fast enough. You will not be most people, though. You gotta make sure you actually take risk in life. One of my smartest mentors told me this, and this is how I think about it for you. You have an actual cost to inaction. So for every day that you say one day, next day another 24 hours, you actually are costing yourself future dollars. I did this analysis that is horrifying to do. You guys can do it for me, too. Think about when you made your last big risk. I remember my very first risk for me. I was probably 21 at the time. And I had an option to stay in journalism back then, or I had an option to go to Goldman Sachs and make about 3x more money than I was making in journalism. I was super scared. I didn't want to move to Chicago. I was in Arizona. But I. I took the leap. And I took that leap right about a year after I had started at Vanguard. Because I took that leap, my salary went from looking like it could maybe do this to basically this. So one leap basically doubled the amount of money that I made. The question that you have to ask yourself is, how can you not just take any risk, but smart risk? Let me show you the formula. In order to have what is called smart risk, not just any risk, you need to have skill plus. That's a plus. Preparation times by action. The more that you learn what the things are that you are uniquely skilled to do, the faster you move on it. After you have prepared, the more money you make. And you can do this little game yourself. If I think about, for instance, my very first job back in the day having been taken a year earlier, how much more money would I have made? And then I think about man. I remember when I took my first acquisition and that acquisition stopped this trajectory and made it here. But I waited 10 years for that. So the question you have to ask yourself is, should I wait another moment? Am I procrastinating or am I unprepared? Rule number three, go big. If you focus on big problems, you won't make big money. Let's break down how we do that. Because if you're distracted by the small things, you'll never get the big things. So let me show you what I mean. Do you know 55% of productivity is lost to your cell phone? 4,500 bucks is what just social media costs you per year. And maybe worse than that. We check our phone 36 times per hour while we're working. All of this means less money for you and more money for the big social media companies. I don't think Zuck needs it. So what do we do? This is my productivity rule. When I start my day, I like to have a to do list already set the night before. So I got a little list out. I use notion you can do what you want to do. But I already know what I'm going to do the next day here. Number two, I set a task timer. I think this will take me 20 minutes, this will take me 30 minutes. And oh, by the way, I'm not allowed to check social media while I'm doing it. Number three, music on. That means I put my headphones in. I'm paying attention to nothing else except little. I like a little binaural beats. You can do you. But they say that you're more productive with that. And I'm rocking and rolling on tasks. Number four, block meetings. This is hard to do when you're a young gun. But I really try to ask people, could this be a phone call for the love of all the tolly? And also could we just make it tighter? Do I have to be there the whole time? Is this really necessary? Block meetings, Stimmies, baby. This means no, I'm not saying do anything crazy. I wasn't financed back in the day though. What I am saying is a little caffeine goes a long way. This is how I like to narrow in. Then we have a rule called the frog first. What does that mean? Mark Twain had a famous line, if you're gonna eat a frog, eat it first thing in the morning. If you're gonna eat two, eat the big boy first. A frog is like your big hairy problem that you don't wanna do. How I typically say it is, if I got this one thing done today, would it make more impact on how much money I'm gonna make than anything else? If so, that's my frog. Number seven. Last one. Do not disturb. I literally put a sign up on my office that says not today. Maybe you can't do that because you're still in a cubicle or you got people harassing you, but put a little period working on a project for the next one hour, I can almost guarantee you 1 you're going to get more done, 2 people are going to respect that. Most people let everybody else have boundaries and have none themselves. So they become this amorphous blog full of everybody else's desires and not theirs. That's not going to be you. Now, if you don't know what your most important task is, what your frog is, I use post it notes. I call this the post it note challenge. Also, ain't she cute? That's me. The post it note challenge is where you basically, for an entire day, write down on a post it note everything you do. You're gonna have four categories. The first one's gonna be $5 an hour work. Then it's gonna be 10, then it's gonna be 25, then it's gonna be 100. You can pick your amounts, but you're gonna determine, is this a $5 an hour task that I'm doing here, or could I make $100 an hour with this task? Do the ones that make you more money first. Rule number four, ten to one rule. You want to give ten times for every one ask you have. Let me show you how. So what's the 10 to 1 rule? Well, that's why we're painting 100 houses. That'll cost me a million bucks in order to turn it into a $100 million company. I own this company called that One Painter. And we are making sure that every dollar we spend is turned into a reciprocal dollar. This is called the rule of reciprocity. So if we go out across the country and we paint a bunch of houses and homes, and this is goodwill in the neighborhood. You know when you go to a car salesman's lot and they annoyingly try to give you a Coca Cola and a hot dog? That's been like sitting there for 42 years. By the way, a moment for my hot dog. The reason that they do that is because when we as a human receive something, we feel a reciprocal pull to give something back. This is like sales 101. And so in our money making mission, we're going to figure out, where can I actually be a giver? The cool part is once you start doing this more, it also feels. Feels good. But it turns out you make a lot more money if you are a giver than you are a taker. And also, I hate to say this, rich people give a lot, poor people don't. So if you want to stay poor, try to just hoard resources all for yourself. You'll never get rich that way. Rule number five, do the dirty work. Anyone who tells you to follow their passion. They're already rich. Here's the rule. The sexier the business, the less money you make. The more boring business, the more money you make. I call this the Clooney rule. Like our buddy George. Everybody wants to be in Hollywood, right? Everybody wants to be an actor. But you want to hear something fascinating? If you go to SAG AFTRA, that's the union for all actors in Hollywood, there's 182,000 of those people. 87% of them don't qualify for health insurance and need help from the government because they don't make enough money. Probably because most of them make $23,000 a year on average to be an actor. Yeah, it's a super sexy industry, but it makes no money. So instead, what do you want to do? You want to go to an industry that has a very high percentage of people who make all of their money from their day job. That's part of the reason why I went to finance. 99% of people in finance, that's where they make all of their income. So even if you are not the top performing George Clooney of finance, you still have a really high likelihood of making a ton of cash. A way to really do this badly these days, guys, is not Clooney. We could think about it instead as Mr. Beast. Everybody wants to be an influencer, right? Everybody wants to make money online. Do you guys think that we make most of our money on YouTube? Every YouTube video that I do costs me money. How do I really make money? I invest in businesses. I use the funnel of YouTube to give me more businesses to invest in, to give me more investors to come alongside me to grow the businesses I already have. That's it. And so we have to be really careful of getting too caught up on the sexy when the sexy doesn't make us any money. Only rich people are going to tell you to go and follow your passion because they want to sound nice. They don't actually want you to make a lot of money. Instead, the guy made all his millions selling sprinkler heads and tells you to go do Etsy. No, I don't think so. So I actually did an entire report for you guys called the SMB report. You can get it here, somewhere around here. And in that report, it has all of the business stats on the best businesses to start, the best businesses to buy, the best businesses to have a job in or to be in. And so we can give you the truth, not just a bunch of things that make you feel good. All right? We've made it to our first million. But how do you stay there and how do you make more? Rule number six, sell things to rich people, they pay more. Also rich people want you to sell something. Let's break down exactly how. You do not have to be rich to sell things to rich people, but you do have to speak their language. What does that mean? It means we are not doing discounts. It means we are not doing buy now, pay later campaigns. It means we are not talking about being the low cost provider and, and the cheapest. Instead we're going to do the things that rich people care about. And there are five of them. First we've got exclusivity, they don't want anybody else to get it. Then we've got timeliness. That's like for this time only you can come in, but then nobody else can. That's things like status. If I buy this, will other rich people see it? Will they like me? That's things like privacy. I don't want to a bunch of you pores Cody like you coming onto my property. So I'm gonna buy this big huge fence around it and it's gonna be really pretty. And so if you could sell me that big huge fence, you're not gonna tell me how cheap it's gonna be or what a discount you're gonna get. You're gonna tell me this is the most expensive, this is the most premium fence. Through this no poor people like Cody and all of us on the Internet will be able to see me. This privacy super, super important for rich people experience especially in today's world where we can find people everywhere. And then lastly, this one's my personal favorite. Why I like to buy is convenience for rich people. They want less friction, right? They want to be able to get the thing that they want right away. And you want more money so you might be willing to do more work, have more friction in your life in order for them to have less friction in their life and thus things go up. For instance, I was with a guy this morning who ran a 80 million dollar company. His name's Eamon. Eamon was telling me he pays $500 every single time he travels. He came to Austin and when he travels he has somebody else pick out his outfits, style them together, pack them, take little pictures of them to tell him what to wear each time and send them off on his little suitcase. She even ships them to location so it costs her some time but she makes money and Eamonn is happy about it. Think about in your Business in your life, where can you do the unscalable things now to make money and scale them up? Also, increasingly with AI, convenience is going to be really, really important. If we have all the world's information at our fingertips, time becomes the commodity, not information. Here's the tactical piece of advice for you right now. If you have a business, I want you to go to your website and I want you to ask yourself, do I have an option for rich people? What does that mean? If right now on your website you have three tiers of pricing, you've got tier number one, which is usually the cheapest. You got tier number two, which is usually what you want people to buy. And then you got tier number three, which is your most expensive option one, just adding all three of those pricing because of sales psychology will mean most often people will pick this one instead. Right now, you might only have a one, but I promise you something out there right now, there is a rich person who wants your most premium service, who actually wants to pay more money. And you're not getting it because you don't believe that you're worth it. You don't believe that your business can. And because of that, they actually might not even do business with you. When I go online and I want to buy an outfit and the outfit's really cheap, I don't buy it. Why? Because I'm like, it's probably cheap and it's probably crappy. But if the outfit's actually expensive, I go, oh, this is probably pretty good quality, I'm going to buy that. So a negative or low price actually could indicate low quality, which means less sales to rich people. This one super important. If you're already thinking about upgrading your offers, adding a high ticket tier, or making your business feel exclusive, here's one thing. 99% of entrepreneurs totally miss your website domain. Everyone talks about offers, funnels, automations, but if your URL Looks like mybrand123.com Biz, you've already lost trust. First impressions matter. You ever searched for theperfect.com and it's always taken. Yeah, me too. But what if you could get the exact name you actually want? Like YourBiz online for less dollars Online is one of the fastest growing domain extensions in the world, used by over 3.5 million brands across literally every industry. Why? Because it's clean, modern and keyword rich. Fun fact, the word online is in keywords searched for over 500 million times a month. That means a domain like your Biznut Online doesn't just look Better. It actually helps with SEO and that does discoverability. So instead of settling for your biz, XYZ2024.com, grab your biz online. While it's still available for a limited time, you can snag it for just 99 cents. Just use my link in the description and you can get it yourself back to the list. Wait until you see this next one. Rule number seven, solve big problems. They pay better. Not just rich people's problems. Let's talk about the difference. Problems are actually a gift in your business. And what's wild is most people think that problems are bad. But in business, I've started to realize one thing. Problems are actually the source of your profits. The more you find the big huge problems or issues in the business, the more money you're going to make. And this is what the smartest people in the world know. For instance, Marc Andreessen, super famous venture capitalist, told the story about Elon Musk. And he said the only thing that Elon Musk does is every single week he goes day to day to each one of his companies and he finds what is the scariest problem that I can find. And if I can find and solve the scariest problem, then I can make the most money in the business. Literally, that's it. He is chief problem Officer. Most people treat problems like biohazards. They like push them off to the side. They don't want to think about them. They want to get to whatever first little item on their checklist they can do as opposed to the big huge issue. But that's not going to be you. So if you realize the same thing that I do, which is you'd make more money if you solved the big problems, then the question becomes, what's the biggest problem? And how do I figure that out? That's where we use something called the Rice model. Here's what it means. You go inside of your business or your life and you say, where do I have a problem that has the most reach? And you number that that has the most impact, the changes that it could make in your business. You number that that you have some degree of confidence on. You put a percentage on that and that you understand how much effort it might take, usually represented by weeks or years. If you do this and you find the varying problems, then you rank them by the order of magnitude. Now, most people use reach. I actually don't like to use reach. I like to use revenue, AKA how much money am I going to make. Look, something like this. Do you see how numerically you can have both reach and then you can have impact and then you can have your confidence percentage and then you can have your amount of time it's going to take you and it actually turns it into a number. If you use this number across all of your problems, you will very easily be able to figure out which ones are going to make me the most money. And if you do that, you're little Elon Musk Jr. Making Billy's rule number eight. I love this one. Build once, sell continuously. This is how you make more money. But you don't have to work so hard. Here's how you go through your business or your life and you multiply yourself without having to clone yourself. This is called a flywheel. So at the top, yours truly, Cody Sanchez. How do I make more money from every single dollar in my business? Well, just take one segment of my businesses. I have a newsletter. It's awesome. You should subscribe to it with that newsletter that has over a million subscribers. Teaching people about making money and buying businesses. I can sell varying things. I have education. This is where we have our communities for people who want to buy businesses. Then we have a fund for all of the investments we make in small businesses. Then we have our holding company where we own businesses outright. And then we have media where we make pennies and shekels off of any of the platforms. But this drives more of this and the holding company and the fund give me more content. So things to talk to you about. It's also, I'm not just up here on YouTube talking about things theoretically. I'm as Chamath said, in the arena, actually building things so that when I come speak to you, I can say, let me tell you why I know how to build a nine figure holding company. Oh, because I just did. Do you guys want to learn? I can say, oh, we just helped this portfolio company in our fund hit their first million dollars in revenue. Let me tell you how. So this flywheel ends up being a virtuous cycle of things that continue to feed one another. This is super important. I didn't come up with this idea of flywheel. I pulled Amazon's for you so we could steal Jeff Bezos's homework. Think about this for a second. So you want to know how Amazon actually supercharged their growth. So in 2006, they created fulfilled by Amazon. This was where third parties are allowed to take their products, give them to Amazon, and Amazon basically does everything for them. This allowed them to expand their inventory without having to buy all of it then they got to test and see see which things on it would be worth them going into huge Unlock 2 content bundling. In 2011, Amazon launched Amazon Prime Video. So now they took all of their prime customers who are shipping things and now they could sell them Netflix style subscriptions. So that created an entire business that had way lower cost of acquisition, instant crossover third price hikes. So Amazon, they became more valuable from these two two things. They went from 99 bucks in 2014 to 139 bucks because they added video, then they added music, then they added photo storage. So all of these features get you higher prices. This is how you build wants to sell continuously. Rule number nine, Humans are contagious. Even if you do all the right things, but you're surrounded by the wrong humans. Not going to work. Let's break it down. Humans are contagious, but so is success. So is failure. So is even trying to. It's all contagious. And the way we know this is because studies actually show us that your friend group predicts how much money you're going to make, how much money you will invest, and way more than we ever thought. There's a study that shows if you have just a 10% increase in friends worth over $100,000, then you have a 10% increase in your net worth. Simultaneously you have a 2.9 to 5% higher likelihood of investing more. This is kind of wild because it doesn't necessarily mean you have to do more things. There is just real contagion among humans. I think about it like this. So when I wanted to become more fit, what did I do? Did I get on a new program and create a diet plan and hire a nutritionist? No, I actually didn't. You know what I did? I got a gym membership and I started only hanging out with friends who are really obsessed with being fit, who didn't drink a lot, who ate really healthy. Why? Because it's weird. If you're hammered by yourself with a group of friends that all don't drink, that would be weird, right? And so you take the habit that you want to have and you just get around other humans who do it every single day. I call it making your dream day somebody else's Tuesday. The way that we do this in money is a little bit different. So the first time that I started making my first millions, I remember explicitly I was at a mastermind. I kind of thought masterminds were gross back then. I didn't really understand the word. And this mastermind that I got into I asked to help, and it was only for people who had a million dollars in net worth or above, and they let me help this mastermind. So I went in. I wasn't entered into the club yet, and I started networking. And I remember two things explicitly. One, a guy sat down next to me and he had way more zeros than I was. And he was like, when you tell me your problems, and I have already lived them 1, 3, 10 years ago, can kind of predict your future. And so tell me the problems that you have today. And wouldn't it be nice if somebody had already been there and they could tell you how to solve them? And I was like, yeah, that'd be cool. And he was like, yeah, that's what we do here. So I was like, oh, okay, let's do more of that. So get in rooms for other people's. Tuesday is your dream day. Okay, now we're on to eight figures. What does it take to get here and stay here? Rule number 10, the Pygmalion effect, which means you are not failing. You are exactly where most people give up. Let's get into it. The thing that helps if you feel like quitting or if things are hard as you're getting to this next level of wealth, I like to go back to the Pygmalion effect. What does this mean? It means that we have our beliefs which influence our actions, and our actions then influence other people's beliefs and thus influences their actions. We can also flip the other way. A famous study basically talked about how there was a group of kids in school and the kids were separated into two groups. Group one, they were told the kids are normal. There's nothing different about them. Control group, control two, they were told these kids are brilliant, like little mini IQ geniuses. That's all that changed. Everything was exactly the same, except teachers for group one were told they were normal. Teachers for group two were told they're geniuses. What happened? Well, over the course of the next year, the second group, the control group, they were the same. The first group, the non control group of many geniuses, they actually increased their Percentage points in IQ from anywhere from 20 to almost 50%. What's crazy about that is it was just because other people's beliefs changed their actions, which changed their belief in themselves. So how do you impact this in your life? Well, if you're at a job right now where people are telling you you're dumb all the time, where people are telling you that you're not going to grow, you should probably leave that job. If you right now have other people on your team that have a negative attitude and say negative things, you shouldn't wait for the boss to say something about it. You should. If somebody on your team is a toxic leader, you guys, the truth is that B players, they never hire A players because an A player won't work for a B player. So B players only hire C players. Which means that if you let one toxic person in your company, even somebody who's just a little bit toxic, like a B minus, that means you're only going to get C level players and below. So the things that we believe in ourselves become real. If we let other people tell us negative things, then we start to have negative attributes. This is the Pomegalian effect and this is what you are not going to do. Rule number 11, it's never too late. So start where you are with what you got. It's never too late. But regret is real. I didn't get married until I was 33. I didn't start making content until I was 35. I didn't start a podcast until I was 37. At 30, I thought I'd peaked at 37. I know it's just getting started. And this isn't just a me thing. This is an all of you thing. I mean, we could throw up all the heads here of owners who didn't actually start their businesses until 40. For instance, there's a guy by the name of Chris, not to be confused with my husband Chris. His last name is de Lanier. He's an amazing guy, but he owned zero businesses until he was 40 years old. Then he came into our community. We taught him acquisitions, and by 41, he owned three businesses. Now he has an M and A advisory group, too. So the moral of the story is, wherever you are, you just start. Rule number 12, sell more and never apologize for it. Your job as CEO is really chief salesperson. Let's talk about how to do that. This is one of the biggest mistakes CEOs make, and leaders make in general. They stop realizing what the real job of a CEO is. Here's what a good company looks like. The CEO is spending most of his time selling things. It's not that he's one on one with individual customers, but he's selling partnerships, he's selling brand deals, he's selling acquisitions. He's even selling people who want to come to the companies. Sometimes I think hiring is mostly sales. Then the CEO is diagnosing problems and figuring out what decisions to make to solve those problems. This is a healthy company, a non healthy company. Looks like this Crisis mode. The CEOs like firefight, firefight, firefight. But even in this situation, they should be spending most of their time on selling, some on diagnosing and some on decision making. We had a workshop the other day for builders. And one of the builders there, her name is Mary, she has an accounting business that now does $2 million a year. She couldn't figure out why her business couldn't grow. And she was like, I just need to sell more things. And so as we started talking to her more, we realized that somebody had told her that she should be selling less. Well, here's the trick for Mary. She is in what's called enterprise level sales, which means she's not selling $50 products. Her assignments for her business that is only doing $2 million a year. Well, every single new client is $100,000 to her business. So instead, Mary was spending a bunch of time actually hiring people to do the selling. What should she have been doing instead? Well, she probably should have been doing more selling of 100k things. And what should she outsource instead? All of the accounting. But because she didn't properly diagnose what was going on and make the right decision, she made less money. So if you want to get to that eight figures, you have to figure out what is your highest leverage activity. And I can almost promise you some part of it is selling. Rule number 13, fear should never stop you. Never let the fear of failure stop you from doing the thing that you need to do. This is where most people fail. You know what I realized early on, guys? The world is actually run by C students, failed employees, and people who are probably less smart than you. So everybody who says you're going to fail, ah, that's just a bunch of noise. And we totally ignore the noise here. So the question becomes, if we know that fear is going to get in our way, how do we make the right decision on which thing to move forward on? Well, I had one really great mentor of mine. His name was Bill Perkins. And Bill Perkins famously said he lost 10 million on an El Salvadoranian energy plant. Now, I probably could have predicted that Bill, that didn't seem like a great move. But he has hundreds of millions of dollars under management as a hedge fund manager. When he told me, yeah, last week I lost 10 million bucks on a, you know, energy plan, it was kind of silly. What happened is, and I remember him saying that word silly to a $10 million loss, I stopped him. I was like, why would that be silly? Isn't that like traumatizing? What are you going to do? Are you going to get the money back? And he said, if I was scared of failure, I never would have made the first couple hundred million. So I can't keep being scared by the thing that led to my first hundred million. Which means that you need what is called a risk budget, by the way. How fun is this? Okay, anyway, so this is a risk budget. And here's how I want you to think about it. In life, most risks that you can take are low level, that will present itself naturally in front of you in order for you to get the really outsized returns. Though, it doesn't always mean that you have to go all the way to high risk. High risk. El Salvadoranian energy plan plants, for instance, those things typically are going to lose you money. So instead what we're trying to find is what is our zone of genius, our risk budget, in which we're comfortable with the level of risk, but we're really comfortable with the dollar amount that we could potentially win. And your entire life should be kind of like a bowling lane where you are figuring out how to put the bumpers in just the right spot to keep you in line while still allowing you to play the game. Guys, we're on to almost the highest level here. We got nine figures. What does it take to get there? Well, the first rule is really important. Your most expensive investment is actually the people around you, the network you have in order to get to the next level. So how do we get you in a room with winners? The most expensive thing that you pay for will actually be a human. Let me tell you why. Because as you hit this eight figure, you cannot do it with an individual. An eight figure business all by yourself is highly unlikely, which means that you're going to have to bring other people along with you and you're going to make more money for every person that you can bring along with you that has a bigger network, more nodes connecting. You want humans who are hyper connected because you want more people on your team. Because the more people on your team you have when they're high performers, the more money that you're going to make. Most of my businesses, we have a rule which is the 1 mil per employee rule. In my business. I want to make a million dollars for every single person that I employ at my business. That means that I have big margins. It also means that I can afford contractors and overhead and staff, et cetera. This is increasingly really possible with technology and AI now it's not just about making money too. There's a famous science experiment about train commuting. Two groups, one sat in a train commute. Perfect silence. Nobody talked to them. Sounds like a dream. I don't know about you, but for me, second group sat next to somebody else on the train and talked to them every single day on their commute. Who do you think was happier? It was the people who talked to somebody else. There's actually a huge tax on isolation, which is why right now in our country, we're more unhappy than ever. We're more disconnected than ever, we're having less sex than ever, we're getting married less often than ever. And that is because we're isolated. We're trying to make friends with chatgpt and that dude sucks. The same thing is true with making money. I kind of think that money likes other people in the mix and that the more cool people you bring along on your team, the more money you are going to make. One more rule for you business builders, I call this the 3T. So for every leader at your company, if they are going to be a real leader, not a manager, when you ask them this question about them coming over to your business, they need to have a three person answer. Who else should I bring over to the company that you wouldn't want to run a business or team without? At which point they should go, Brad, Sarah, Larry, we need those three. If they're like, oh, there's nobody, or we don't need anybody or it'll be fine, great sign that they actually suck as a leader. So if you guys hate your boss, don't worry. The boss probably won't go very far because if they can't lead people, they're really a manager, not just a boss. Rule 15, be likable. You underestimate how much more money you can make in your career. So when people like you, that becomes even more true. When you're at the top and your title is CEO, I actually have a formula for this as a leader. It's called open door policy number one. What does that mean? It doesn't mean you have to be available for people all the time, but you do need to be available. Being likable isn't about being smiley, it's about being there. Think about that. You could have the nicest dad in the world, but if he's not around at all, does that make you like him? Absolutely not. At some point we actually need quality time, especially with our employees. I like to dedicate sometimes each week that I call office hours or sometimes we call it walking the floor. So in a business you're like walking around kind of checking the dust, checking in on people. The second way that I do this is also not just quality time, it is actual pull in versus drive by. What does that mean? I want to do at least once a day I want to do some drive bys. Hey Sally, how are you? What's the going on? Tell me about you. And I want to remember that and be sincerely interested. And at least once a day I want to do a pull in which means take somebody on a walk with me, take somebody into my office, talk to them, make it have more intensity than just a hey, how's it going neighbor? Right. This is open door policy. Second, you want to be kind. You actually don't want to be nice as a leader, which is going to make me really happy on the Internet. I'm sure there will be some comments. You don't want to be nice because your employees need you to set the bar. You're not going to win in business by being smiley all the time and just telling them the things they want to hear. Now you can be kind, AKA respect them, tell them the things that they need to hear. Need not want. Kind, not nice. And the third is your employees and the people around you who will lead you to making your nine figures. They want to be heard more than they want to be spoken to. I have seen a lot of of low level leaders, new leaders, amateur leaders who spend a lot of time speaking. They're listening to a lot of self help videos that say that CEOs need to do rallying cries. They need to talk about the mission. No, actually your employees, they just want you to hear them. They want you to think that you care about them one way or the other. I like the two in one rule, which is you got two ears, one mouth. So we want to listen more than we speak. That's the game. This kill me. Early in my career, I remember when I first started out, I was a new leader. I was at a company called Vanguard and I was drowning. I didn't know what I was doing. I felt it over my head. I thought I was failing course. I put on like a good veneer to everybody else around me, but I was not doing so hot. Lo and behold, we did a thing called 360 reviews. Back then, your counterparts and your employees give you feedback. And so I sat down with my leader to get my feedback and he was like, do you know your people think you would leave dead bodies behind them to get ahead. And I was like mentally or physically. He got feedback from my team that I was not an open door policy, that I was always working, that I didn't have time to do pull ins or drive bys, that I actually wasn't hearing them. I might have been speaking nice things to them, but I wasn't taking actual time to get to know my humans. My natural default is actually this. I like to work a lot, I like to be in it. I don't really like small talk very much. It actually drives me kind of crazy. I really care about my human's progression in their career. Like I want everybody at contrarian thinking to make more money, to grow bigger and to get better. I want that badly. But I actually really don't give a fuck about the soccer games and like what's going on on the weekend or whatever. I don't think we have to be best buds with everything for me to want you to really win. Like that's what I care about. But that's not right for everybody. Not everybody likes that. And so back in my day when he told me dead bodies would be my little trail behind me, I had to change my career entirely. I left Vanguard, I went to Goldman Sachs and I found a culture that fit for me which was more hard charging. So don't forget that I was highly competent. I was actually doing really well. I was top ranked in my group. But people didn't like me and that cost me a lot of money. So don't make it cost you money. Rule number 16 Avoid middle class wealth traps. This is so important because most people don't have this kind of money. So the advice they give you is awful. We're not going to do that. There are some middle class wealth traps where everybody gets stuck. I think one of them is compound interest. They think that if you just take your money, you keep investing it over time that you'll have enough. I think that's wrong. You got to increase earnings and then you can increase investing. I think about it like this. The way to actually break out is you pair your resources, your labor, your knowledge and your ideas in order to increase your income level. Most people get stuck somewhere here. The money that they already have plus the labor that they're doing, they don't increase their knowledge base, they don't take action on ideas. And so they are stuck in a middle class wealth trap. That's not going to be you. I want you to be thinking about consistently. If there is a framework which is resources, that's the money that you have plus labor, plus knowledge that you have plus idea equals money. I want every single day to you to be asking yourself, how am I increasing at least one one of these? If I'm increasing at least one a day, then I have the highest form of compound interest, which is my mind. It is the only thing that can grow asymmetrically upside the stock market can't. An example, I was talking with an AI expert, his name's Dara and he runs a nine figure AI company that we actually invested in called Delphi. It's cool. But Dara's point was essentially this, that in the age of AI you're going to have much more people who have knowledge at their fingertips, right? You guys already feel it. ChatGPT mess buttons, right? But if all we have is knowledge and we don't actually add ideas and action on top of it, then we will be in a world in which more and more people will have mid level execution and you will have to be super high performing to outperform. So right now, today is the moment that you need to think about where am I? Stuck in the middle. I didn't get out, you guys. We've hit level one or make it 100k. We've gone all the way to 10 million and $100 million. But this last one is the difference between people who are going to lose and people who are going to win. And what is it? It's not very PC psychopath behavior. Remember that you are going to win because you are an absolute psychopath unwilling to lose. And that psycho behavior is the difference between everybody else and humans who get to the absolute top. You are going to win because you are an absolute, absolute psychopath. Nobody can keep up with that is the type of attitude we have to have. And I think you might if you're here. Most people in life are curious. They dabble around with information. They watch a YouTube video here or there. They don't really go deep into anything. Then there's a few more people who are serious. Let's call this 50% of the population, let's call this 30% of the population. They kind of go deeper into subjects, but they're picking up new areas to develop. They're doing more Netflix and chilling and kindling. Then you've got psychopaths. This is 20% of the population. You, the few, the fucking crazy. Now why you guys are so great is because it's really hard to keep up with somebody who isn't dabbling in lots of things. But Every single day is learning more and more and more and more and obsessing, obsessing, obsessing, obsessing. And nobody's having to pay them to obsess. They're just doing it. So the obsessed person will almost always pick the really high IQ person who is just curious. This is compound learning. I always loved this story that I wanna share with you guys. So in December 2022, Musk diverted his jet. Must be nice to have a jet. But we'll continue to personally dismantle the Twitter servers with a pocket knife after employees warned about migration risks. This caused widespread outages. But the man was a psychopath. He was willing to do absolutely whatever it took. And that wasn't the only thing that he did. He also did something wild, which is he is maybe one of the most over levered individuals in the country. He put up $44 billion of his own personal wealth to buy Twitter. And within one month of buying Twitter had laid off. Want to get the number right? 80% of employees. Now, I've never had to lay off employees in my life and I don't ever want to. But in this instance, I think he was trying to save Twitter. And so the question is, where can you be an absolute psychopath? Because over time, that's what wins. You know, Napoleon Bonaparte has a quote that I love which is, in war, men don't matter. One man matters. Which you might be like, that's literally the opposite. Like, try one man fighting everybody. But what he's saying is that one human, one psychopathic human can, can change the stem of any tide. And I think you might underestimate how much you are individually capable of. If you're not curious, if you're not just serious, but you're obsessed. And because you guys are obsessed, I know you're gonna subscribe to this channel and you're gonna make sure that you do what the few do, which is move fast. Because your bank account is a direct reflection of your speed, especially doing things like subscribing. Thanks, guys.