The Habits You'll Need to Guarantee Success in Life (& Create Your Own Luck Consistently)

The red pill moment, which this is interesting, before the cerveza sickness, is that, I think that's what you call it on the channel. Yeah. So before the cerveza sickness hit, you know, Neil and I, we would talk on the podcast and we'd say, you know, all we do is we focus on business. We don't care for politics. We don't care about, you know, all this other stuff, right? And then right when it hit, I was like, holy crap, like I need to know what is going on. I have no idea what's going on right now because the last time something like this hit, I was just coming into my first job. So I, Now, I'm like, okay, I gotta prepare. You're constantly seeking growth and you're constantly seeking how to improve and then also improve, you know, the world around you, right? And ultimately, at the end of the day, you know, whatever's going on politically, like, you know, that's how you add value to the world and that's how you become successful. And so, I think that's what it is. I mean, you create your own luck that way. I think it's, you know, as long as you make sure that, you know, you're constantly optimizing yourself and you're iterating, No way you can't level up. I just think there's no like if you have the right habits and you have you're hanging out with the right people, there's no way in my mind that you can't become you know the success that you want to become, right? So I just think you know everything I was told you know growing up in Asian family like you know your fate's kind of determined and all that. I'm just like none of that makes sense. So a lot of the messaging, the way you were programmed growing up, I'm trying to unwind that programming. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget, and this could be a word of wisdom or piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client, or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your younger business. Yeah, I think it's, um, so the Winston Churchill quote that I like is, if you're going through hell, keep going. And I think resilience would be one of the top traits you need, just not even about through business, but through life. And so if you're going through hell, keep going. It's, I think most people, their threshold for psychological pain and also physical pain is, it's too low. I think I don't like physical pain, right? So let's leave that out of the equation. So, but psychological pain is, you know, you're going through distress, Of, you know, your business right now or life. Like, there's a lot of things coming at you and, you know, you can either feel sorry for yourself or you can take some action around it, right? And it's not saying go, go, go all the time. I think you're going to need some time to, you know, wind down as well. But I think when I think about all the things that have worked out for me, it's, you know, when I think of the Leveling Up podcast, after the first year, I was only getting 9 downloads a day. And after the second year, only 30 downloads a day. And I was spending, you know, 6, 7 hours a week on it. while I was trying to save Single Grain. So, you know, but that, you know, that podcast now is about 80,000 to 90,000 downloads a month. And that's led to Marketing School, which gets about 1.6 million downloads a month. And so same thing with our blog. When I first took over, 4,000 visits a month. Now we're at 350,000. And that's good. But that actually led to my other blog, which we took from 0 to 5 million visits a month, right? So it's a lot. You got to think of your life as an investment and you're constantly compounding. And the best investment you can make is in yourself, right? Warren Buffett said that. So it's, you're constantly compounding, you're constantly improving. And Tony Hsieh, late Tony Hsieh said, you're just trying to get 1% better every single day. And, you know, I'll use another quote. I just gave 2 quotes. Here's Bill Gates. Most people underestimate what they can do in a decade. They overestimate what they could do in a year. So I think it's just resilience and sticking to it. In the very beginning, when I used to play games, by the way, I'd get pretty good and I was trying to preserve the the record more so than trying to get better. So I'd go to like 32-0 or whatever. And then all of a sudden I started losing to higher, higher ranked people. And I just go and make another account, right? But I was playing for the wrong reasons. I think if you play for the right reasons, for me, I was optimizing for learning. You just keep playing that way. I'm optimizing for leveling up. The game will never end. And I'm just— the resilience is kind of built into that. So that's what I would say. I want to level up. Tell me what to do. Yeah. Oh man, that's a— that is a broad one. You weren't like— so I think, man, if we're thinking about leveling up on a daily basis, you know, the late Tony Hsieh of Zappos, when I read his book Delivering Happiness when I was about, it's got to be 22 or so, this one thing stuck with me. All you got to do is just get 1% better every single day, right? Yeah. Just one step at a time. I think the worst is when, let's say, I'm starting out and I compare myself to someone like Elon Musk, it's too overwhelming. You know, it's, you can't, your brain can't get over that. Right. So to think about, hey, like, I'm just going to focus on being the best version of myself and getting better every single day, whether it's, you know, I got to create the right habits, the right health habits, the right, um, kind of mindset habits as well. Um, that's how you get there. And that to me, you know, when people used to talk about mindset and like all this, it sounded like fluff to me, right? I don't need this rah-rah stuff. I just, I just want to execute. Right. So that's like when you're younger, you're just like, just let me work. And then you realize all this stuff later when you get a little older. It's like, that's the stuff that matters. And you just got to stay consistent. And the quote that I love is, you know, if you're going through hell, keep going. Winston Churchill, right? So that is a broad answer to your broad question. One thing that's important to me is equal opportunity. So when I think about, when I think about education, right, some people might say, oh, there needs to be equal outcome at the end of the day. I think that's, that's not the best because that's going to disincentivize people from, from working hard. want everyone to have an equal starting line. So that's something I'm very passionate about. Um, and I think, you know, as long as— as long as when I think about all this, when I think about leveling up, people growing, it's about how you're programmed. It's about how, how the information that you're taking in is affecting your actions, right? So I think that's very important, giving people the right, uh, information to act on, and then they can make their own decisions, right? Because even though you are— you are me, Uh, you and me, we have businesses, um, and I think that's certainly the best deal. It's not necessarily the fit for everyone, but to help everyone understand, like, hey, these are the options that you have. So these are the power-ups that you have in front of you, or these are the armor, you know, the armor and weapons that you have in front of you. You can kind of pick your poison. You want to be a sorcerer? You want to be a barbarian? You want to be like a necromancer or whatever, right? I'm just making things up right now from Diablo. Um, but the point is getting people up to that point to understand that, hey, these are all the things you can do and not limiting them, right? Because I think right now what's happening in education is that we're limiting them. We're not teaching them about taxes. We're not teaching them about wealth creation. We're not teaching them about networking. We're not teaching about sales or marketing, that type of stuff, right? These are all very necessary real-world skills that you actually gain from business. And then from there, once you have your tool belt like you're Batman, You can decide what you want to do with it, right? But if you keep, if you keep playing the game, you're going to keep compounding leverage. And, and that's actually a big piece of it. So 4 forms of leverage. You have code, capital, labor, and media, right? So everyone wants to become a YouTuber, a TikToker right now. That's media. That's building leverage. Look at Charli D'Amelio. Look at Logan Paul, MrBeast. Great examples. Labor is hiring people because not necessarily everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. So labor is leverage because then you can go do other stuff. Code, right? The labor can build the code, and the code can you know can work while you're sleeping. And capital—you got to have capital too, right? But you know you can do these in any any way that you want. But a lot of people now what I would say is if you're 14 years old or so, you want to go towards building the media empire, and that typically takes two to three years to start to build. You look at Mr. Beast; he didn't get anything going for the first four years or so, and then he kind of just exploded. But that's 4 years overnight success, right? Right. So anyway, that's a mouthful. Don't forget to check out the next video over there. Okay, over there. And before we go, open a new tab, levelingup.com, to learn more about the book. We may or may not have other goodies tied to this book. All right, levelingup.com in a new tab. You can check out the next video first in a new tab, and we'll see you later.