8 Middle Class Money Habits That Keep You Broke

The 8 habits keeping you broke were taught to you by people who love you.

Your children are learning about the world through you and more through your actions than through your words. You know, from the moment they're born, you're their, you're their natural teacher.

We all unconsciously pick up patterns of behavior from our parents, like how to keep the house clean, how to take a shower, how to empty the dishwasher. We also pick up messages about money. The Federal Reserve just reported that only 63% of adults could cover a surprise $400 expense using cash or savings. Don't spend money on dumb stuff.

This is the time to not waste money as a company or as a human being.

$400 is the smallest emergency life throws at you, and the same habits that decide whether you can cover it decide what you're worth at 60.

As a general matter, as one piece of specific finance— financial advice, I would say, you know, avoid credit cards. Just forget about them. If you start revolving debt on credit cards, you're going to be paying 18 or 20%, and you can't make progress in your financial life going around borrowing money at 18 or 20%.

If you really want to make $100,000 and do it, you know, relatively quickly, basically save 15% of your paycheck and put it into an index in the market. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down, but over time you generally make 6 to 8%. That compounds Within 7 years, you'll get to your $100,000.

Before Mark Cuban was a billionaire, he was 24 years old, sleeping on the floor of a 3-bedroom apartment in Dallas that he shared with 5 other guys. He didn't have a bedroom. He had a couch. And when the couch was taken, he had a carpet.

I'm living in a 3-bedroom apartment with 6 guys, 6 23, 24-year-old guys. However nasty you think it is, it was worse. I didn't have a closet. I didn't have a drawer. I had a pile.

He didn't own a real car until he was 25. The one he drove was a beat-up Fiat with a hole in the floorboard big enough that he could watch the road underneath his feet.

I had a 1977 Fiat X1/9 that literally had a hole in the floorboard.

He found that car abandoned on the side of the road with the loan papers still sitting inside it. He called the bank, offered to take over the loan payments, and drove away.

The way I got my car, because my first car blew up, I'm driving down the side of the road, I saw a car just sitting a Trans Am that looked like it was legit sitting on the side of the road. And I told my guys, stop the car. Somebody abandoned that car, right? That Trans Am door was unlocked. We reached in there. There literally was the loan papers for the car sitting on the front seat. I called the bank and said, look, somebody's not making the payments on this car and they just abandoned it. If you let me take over the payments, 'cause my credit was—

Okay.

Yeah. So then that's how I got my first car.

Mark has said he never owned a car that cost him more than $200. Here's what he was doing with the money he wasn't spending. He was buying software, hardware, books, and his own education. He'd stay up reading every technical manual he can get his hands on so he could sell what nobody else in the room understood yet.

I would just stay up all night, literally teaching myself how to figure all this out, reading stuff, just, okay, whatever it takes, because it was do or die. Whether it was then or now, I just like to just read the manuals, read whatever, because when you know this, you have an edge.

That was The whole plan: live on almost nothing, put the difference in the skills, and wait for the skills to pay. So in 1982, he started a company called MicroSolutions out of that same broke life. In 1990, he sold it to CompuServe for $6 million. 9 years after that, he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion. From a hole in a floorboard to $5.7 billion in 17 years. Mark put it like this: if you can reduce your wants, you can take more risks with your needs. So spend less on the things that don't matter, and you buy yourself the to invest in the things that do. Okay, so right now you might be thinking, okay, Evan, I'm, I'm 38 with 2 kids and a mortgage. I'm not going to go sleep on somebody's floor. And you're right, you're not. And you also don't have to. What matters is the gap between what comes in and what goes out and what you actually do with that gap. Mark's gap was big because his life was small. Yours can be big because your income is bigger. Same math, just different starting line. Someone earning $95,000 who keeps $2,000 a month is winning. Someone who earns a quarter million dollars who keeps nothing is running out of time and just doesn't know it yet. A raise has never once fixed this on its own because the habits ride along with you into every new income bracket that you ever reach. So the only real question for the next few minutes is this: what is eating your gap? And I've got 8 answers and you're going to recognize yourself in at least 3 of them. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time.

Believe.

Habit number one: You spend money to prove you're not broke. Now this is a big one, and it's the one that nobody wants to admit to. You buy the nicer car, you pick the better restaurant, you upgrade the vacation, you say yes to the wedding that you can't afford, and you do all of it so the people around you don't think that you're struggling. LendingTree found that about 40% of Americans admit that they've overspent specific Typically to impress somebody else. So look at what that actually means. You're paying real money out of your real future to manage a feeling inside someone else's head. And the people that you're performing for, they're not watching. They're busy performing for somebody else too. And they're using your car and your kitchen as the scoreboard the same way that you're using theirs. Everyone in the neighborhood is broke together in beautiful looking clothes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the average American household spends $78,535 in 2024. That's an entire year of earnings just gone. Not stolen, not lost in a crash, spent on purpose, one small yes at a time. So try this. Pick your 3 categories, the 3 things that genuinely make your life better, and go ahead and spend well there. If travel lights you up, travel. If your kids' sports matter, fund it fully and don't apologize. Everything else though drops to just functional. Your car gets you places, your phone makes the calls, your kitchen makes food. You'll feel a little exposed about that for 6 weeks, and then you'll just feel free because you stopped Caring what other people think, who are never really even judging you in the first place. Habit number 2, you save whatever's left at the end of the month. Nothing is ever left, right? That's not a discipline problem, right? That's a, that's by design. That's our challenge. Your expenses will always expand to fill whatever number is sitting in your account. So if savings is last in line, then your savings lose every single time for the rest of your life. Watch what happened to a whole country doing it this way. So Wells Fargo, uh, The Economist tracked it. Average wages climbed 21.4% between January 2020 and January 2024. And over that exact same stretch, the personal savings rate fell from 7.2% down to 4%. So everybody got a raise and everybody saved less. The money showed up and then it evaporated somewhere between the paycheck and the bank. The fix takes 10 minutes and you only have to do it once. You set up automatic transfers for the day you get paid. Start at 10%. If 10% feels impossible this month, start at 3% and raise it by 1% every 3 months until you get there. The percentage matters Way less than the order, so when the money leaves before you can see it, you never build a life around it, and you never have to have that argument with yourself twelve times a year what you're supposed to do. And run the numbers on the small version so you stop dismissing it. Right? Two hundred fifty dollars a month earning eight percent left alone for thirty years turns into three hundred and seventy-two thousand dollars. That's awesome. That's not just getting lucky. That's you setting up an automated transfer once on a Tuesday and then forgetting about it. The reason that this beats willpower is simple: willpower is this monthly exercise you have to do, and you usually lose. The monthly exercise, right? Somebody's getting married, the furnace dies, it's December. When you automate it, you don't face those challenges. You don't have to negotiate with yourself every month. Habit number 3, you finance the things that go down in value. So look at what a car costs right now. Experian reported that in the first quarter of 2026, the average payment on a new vehicle hit an all-time record of $770 a month on an average loan of Almost $44,000 and 6.39% interest. And 19% of new car loans now carry over $1,000 a month payment. That's almost 1 in 5 buyers signing a 4-figure bill every month for something that's worth less the second they pull off the lot. So if we zoom out, it gets even more scary. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the average household spends over $13,000 a year on transportation. That's 70% of everything they spend just on getting places. It's the second biggest line in the American budget behind housing.

Now, you're allowed to love cars.

I'm not here to make you drive something that you hate. Just make the car the reward instead of, uh, the, the default, the standard. Buy the 3-year-old version of the car you want in cash or close to it, and take the $770,000 you're not sending to a lender and put it to work for you instead. Run that difference at 8% for 10 years, and that's $140,000. 20 years, that's $450,000. So the real price of that new car was never $44,000. It was $450,000 and a couple of decades of options that you'll never get offered again. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it, and I'll see you there. Habit number four: You carry a balance you could kill today. So the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that American credit card balances sat at $1.25 trillion in the first quarter of 2026, inside a total household debt load of $18.8 trillion, and 4.8% of all that debt. is already in some stage of delinquency. So the math that's really important, a credit card balance is a guaranteed negative return, right? When you carry $8,000 at 22%, you're handing over almost $1,800 a year for the privilege of having already bought something you probably don't even remember buying. No investment on earth reliably pays you 22%, which means the single highest guaranteed return available to you is sitting on a statement in your kitchen drawer right now and you're stepping over it while you're researching index funds on your phone. Attack the smallest balance first, kill it completely, then roll that entire payment into the next one. Not because it's mathematically perfect, but because you need a win inside the first 30 days or you're going to stop. Momentum beats optimization for anybody who has tried this before and just completely quit. And close the back door while you're at it too. Take the credit card out of your phone's wallet, out of your browser, out of the app that remembers it. You're not weak, right? We're just Making sure that we fill out that checkout form every single time so you make slightly different, slightly smarter decisions. Habit number five: You turn every raise into a new monthly bill. All right, you get the promotion within 90 days. There's a bigger apartment. There's a better car, a gym that you don't go to, and four subscriptions that you forgot that you even bought. Your income went up 20%, and your freedom went down. The Census Bureau numbers. Make this pretty impossible to argue with. The median new American home was under 1,000 square feet in the 1950s. By 2018, it was almost 2,500 square feet. Income roughly doubled over that stretch. Houses got 2.5 times bigger, and the families inside them do not feel 2.5 times more secure. The raise didn't get saved or invested. The raise just got moved into and spent. So put a rule on the next one before it arrives. When your income goes up, Half of it goes straight into savings or investments before it ever touches your checking bank account. You still get to enjoy the other half. You get to feel the promotion. You take the trip, you buy the thing. You just don't hand 100% over it to a landlord or a dealership or an app that you'll cancel in a year anyway. Then do the 20-minute audit tonight. Open your bank app, sort by recurring, and cancel everything that you haven't used in 60 days. Nobody has ever done this and found less than $80 a month. That's almost $1,000 a year that you were paying. How about number six? You keep score with your income instead of what you own. You know your salary to the dollar right now. Tell me your net worth. There's usually a long pause right there, and that pause—that's the problem because income is a scoreboard that your boss controls, and assets is a scoreboard that you control. So you can earn eighty thousand dollars a year and own nine million dollars in real estate. You can earn half a million dollars a year and own a leased car and eleven months of expensive stress. Income is what Shows up every month. And the moment you start tracking the second number, your spending changes on its own because you finally have something to beat. The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances put median American family net worth at almost $200,000, while the average sits at over a million. That gap is what happens when a small group of families spend 30 years buying assets and everybody else spends 30 years buying stuff. Same country, same decades, 2 completely different ways to measure. So open a doc tonight, put 2 columns, everything you own that could put money in your pocket and everything you owe that takes money out of it, and then subtract it. That number is your actual score, and I'd bet real money that you've never written it down. Then set one goal, and that number goes up every single quarter, not by a lot, but just up. It changes what you say yes to at the checkout because you start asking different questions. Does this buy me an asset or does this buy me an evening? Both answers are allowed. You just have to know which one that you're choosing. Habit number seven: You let the government take the first cut. So an employee earns money, gets taxed, and spends what's left. A business earns money, spends on legitimate expenses, and gets taxed on what's left after that. So it's the same dollars coming in, just completely different order, and that order is worth a fortune over a thirty-year career. Now, I'm not telling you go quit your job tomorrow. I'm telling you the side business that you keep putting off. Has a second payoff that people are often not counting. Once you have a real business, a real portion of your phone, your internet, your home office, the travel that you do see to go see clients, and the equipment you buy to do the work moves from money you already pay tax on into a legitimate business expense. So talk to an accountant in your country, find out exactly what applies to you because the rules are different everywhere. And I am not your accountant. Started this month, even at $500 a month in revenue. The first version doesn't need a logo, a website, a studio, or a name that you love. It needs one customer who pays you. Everything else is you just procrastinating. And looking at logos is the most comfortable way to avoid the phone call that could actually change your year. And $500 a month, that's not a small thing, right? That's $6,000 a year of income that your employer doesn't control, built on skills that live in your head and go with you everywhere forever. It's also the only line on your budget with no ceiling on it, right? You can cut expenses down to the bare bones and then you're done cutting. The other side income can go up and run off the page forever. Habit number eight: You try to learn everything yourself. Now this one costs maybe more than all the other ones combined, and it feels like the responsible thing to do at the time, right? You watch forty hours of free videos instead of paying five hundred dollars for the answer. You spend eight months figuring out something a good coach could have fixed for you in a forty-five minute call, and you tell yourself that you're just being smart. With money. Achievers pay for speed. That's the whole difference. Not because they're rich and they're just careless and spend money, but because they worked out early that time is the only thing on all of our lists that you can't earn back. A year lost is a year lost. Nobody refunds it. Nobody gives you a discount on it, and you never find out what that year was supposed to be worth. So we can put a number on it. If somebody can save you 6 months and they charge $2,000 and your business, your salary is worth $60,000 a year, you're making a $30,000 decision to protect $2,000. So buy the course, hire the coach, get in the room with people already doing it, and then actually do the work. Because the fastest way to waste money on speed is to pay for it and then not show up and do the work. You have everything you need to start. None of these 8 habits require more income. Every single one is a decision, and you get to make the first decision right here today. I think your purpose comes from your pain, and if money has been the thing that's been keeping you up at night, then that's the exact thing you're built to go and fix. A bird sitting on a branch isn't afraid to the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, it's in her wings. So trust your wings. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn what 50 failed businesses taught me about why companies die. Almost every business that dies gets killed by the person who started it, not the market, not bad luck, and not by the economy. Unfortunately, one does have to be focused on the short-term and money coming in when creating a company.

Because otherwise the company will die. Apple suffered for several years from lousy engineering management. I have to say it. And there were people that were going off in 18 different directions, doing arguably interesting things in each one of them. Good engineers, lousy management.

Successful businesses have to satisfy a real need, a need that people will actually pay to have fulfilled. Now, you may have an idea, you may love your product, you may love your service, but if that product or service doesn't fix a specific problem, your business will fail.

Nearly half of new businesses fail within their first 5 years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

22% of business startups fail in the first year, and 50% of new businesses fail within the first 5 years.

And what's really on the line here, it's not It's not just your business, it's the years of your life that you're about to pour into it and whether they add up to something that lasts or disappear like it never happened.

Take a wild success like Airbnb everybody knows about. Well, that company was famously passed on by many smart investors because people thought no one's going to rent out a space in their home to a stranger. Of course, people proved that wrong. But one of the reasons it succeeded, aside from a good business model, a good idea, great execution, Is the timing. That company came out right during the height of the recession when people really needed extra money. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

So I went deep on 50 businesses that died, and I kept coming back to Sam Walton. Before he built the biggest company on the planet, Sam was a nobody running a single Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas, pulling in about $20,000 a year. He worked harder than anyone in town. He obsessed over low prices and treating customers right, and he turned that little rented store into one of the most profitable shops in the whole region. He did everything right, and then he lost it all. Sam didn't own the building. He only rented it. And when his landlord saw how much money that store was making, the man refused to renew the lease to Sam and handed his entire business to his own son. Just like that, the best store in the area was gone, and Sam Walton had nothing to show for years of work except One pretty brutal lesson. You have to own the land, you have to own the building, you have to own your foundation. Anyone else might have walked away right there. Most people do, but Sam didn't. Your purpose comes through your pain, I think, and Sam's purpose got forged the day he lost that store. With his wife Helen pushing him to start over in a new town, he sold what was left, moved to Bentonville, and in 1962, he opened the first Walmart. He built it on everything that taught him. Today, Walmart pulls in $648 billion a year, and about 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart store. Your setbacks do not have to be permanent. It's only permanent if you stop. Sam turned the pain of losing one store into creating 10,000 more. Okay, so here's what you might be thinking. Your business might be different. You know, your idea is better. You care more. You'll outwork everyone around you. So those 50 dead businesses have nothing to do with you. I get it. But here's what hit me when I studied them. Almost all these founders thought the exact same thing. They weren't lazy people. A lot of them were brilliant. A lot of them were working 80-hour weeks. What killed them was not a lack of effort. It was a blind spot. One weakness that they never saw coming. Exactly like Sam Walton not owning his building. Effort doesn't save you from these blind spots. Seeing it does. So let me walk you through the blind spots that killed all 50 businesses so you can find yours before it's too late. Killer number 1, running out of cash. The first killer is running out of cash, and it took down more of these businesses than anything else. Here's the part that scares most people. You can run a business that looks profitable on paper and still go broke because profit and cash are not the same thing. Profit is a number on a spreadsheet at the end of the month. Cash is what's actually in your account on Tuesday when your payment is due. Your expenses show up fast and on time. Your payroll, your rent, your ad spend, your software, they all, they get paid with clockwork. They're showing up. Your customer payments, they show up usually slower, 30 days, 60 days, sometimes 90 days later. That gap in the middle is where businesses often bleed out, and you can be growing the whole time it's happening. It gets worse when a founder hits one good month and treats it like this is the new normal. I've watched people spend tens of thousands of dollars on fancy equipment after a single strong week and then get wiped out the next month because they had a slow month and because they kept zero reserve. I watched a coaching company hit almost $4 million a year in revenue and still have to shut its doors. Almost $4 million. They ran outta cash because they spent too much on ads, paid the team too much. Built a structure that they couldn't sustain, and never looked deeply at their accounting. And if you're trying to build the whole thing on $87 or $99 a month product, listen because the capital burns out before the idea burns out. Low ticket models often need massive scale. They need huge customer service, and they get hammered by refunds and chargebacks. So here's what you can do: watch your cash, not just your profit. Keep at least three to six months of expenses in reserve, so one slow month can't end you. Know your numbers cold. I know it's harvest. Some people every week, not just once a quarter, once a year when it's already too late. And sell something with enough margin to actually fund the business. So I don't like decisions that make me feel weak, and nothing makes you feel weaker than checking your bank account and realizing that the money is already gone. Killer number 2, building something nobody wants. The second killer here is building something that nobody actually wants. This one is pretty sneaky because It feels like progress, right? Your head's down, you're building something, you're quietly creating, and you add another feature and it feels like that you're being productive because you're busy and you're busy and, and you're shipping. And then you take it out to the markets and like nothing happens. And I did this with my very first software company. I spent months building a feature that I thought was incredibly cool, right? We took it to market, like nobody wanted it. Nobody. All that time, all that work was gone because we built in a vacuum and never asked a single customer if they actually needed this thing or not. The fix here is so simple that it's almost embarrassing. It hurts. Go find a customer first, then build around what they actually need. So talk to 10 real people in your market before you build anything. And don't ask them if they like the idea. Ask them the problem that keeps them up at night and what they've already tried to pay to solve. Then sell it before you make it. Take a deposit, pre-sell the spot, get a real credit card payment for the promise of the thing. If real people won't pay you for the promise of it, they won't pay you for the furnished version either. It's a lot harder. And you just saved yourself a year. Get honest about the problem that you solve, because if you don't solve a real problem, you do not have a real business. Entrepreneurship is about solving problems. You have an expensive hobby. And one more addition here: chasing small broke customers and hoping they grow rich with you—they won't. Pick customers who can actually afford you right now, who have the budget to pay you what you're worth today, right now, and build for them. Killer number three: the right things in the wrong order. Okay, the third killer here is doing the right things in the wrong order. A lot of these businesses—they didn't die because the founders were doing. Doing dumb things. They died because they were doing smart things in the wrong sequence. And I see it all the time. A founder with no steady revenue decides to build a massive global brand or launch a low-ticket online course before they've ever built a simple high-ticket engine that brings in real money every single month. So they spend a year on logos and funnels and fancy websites and content while your bank account slowly drains and not one of those things is actually paying your bills. The order matters more than the effort. So phase 1 is something higher ticket. That generates steady cash. One offer, a clear customer, enough money per sale that a handful of clients keeps your lights on. That cash funds the team and the systems you need to survive everything that comes next. Only once that engine is steady do you earn the right to go to phase two: the lower ticket courses, the products that end up scaling, and then only after that you build phase three: the big brand, the global audience. Get steady money coming in first, and everything you build on top of it gets so much easier because now you're building with money in the bank instead of running on your savings and. investment. When you try to skip that first step, it's like you're, you're building a house and you're trying to create the second floor before you've even built a foundation. And you know how that ends. Killer number 4, no systems, no scale. The 4th killer is having no system. A friend of mine, Nick Peterson, likes to say, nail it, then scale it. And this is also a powerful idea in the book, The E-Myth Revisited, which is that most small businesses fail and most franchises can succeed. And so think about why is that? A franchise runs on documented Repeatable recipe that almost anyone can follow. Walking into any location of a big franchise, and you get the same result because the magic is written down in a playbook that anyone can run instead of just locked inside one person's head. The average founder does the opposite, right? You keep shooting from the hip. You keep trying to do the entire business inside your own head. And if you never write it down, your killer recipe, then two things happen, and both of them can be completely fatal. First, you can't scale because you are the bottleneck for everything, right? Ever ever feel that you're the bottleneck? Every decision, every fire, every customer. And second, anyone you hire operates at a lower level because they're guessing at what you do instead of following a proven process. And then you decide hiring doesn't work when really you just never gave people the recipe to follow. So I think being leads to doing. So start being the kind of owner who builds the systems, even when it's just you. Write down exactly how you get a customer step by step, how you deliver the work step by step, how you keep them happy and get them to refer to you step by step. Step by step. Turn the magic in your head into a checklist your team can run without you standing over them. The day your business can win without you in every single room is the day it stops being this fragile little egg and starts being worth something. Killer number 5, keeping the wrong people. The 5th killer is keeping the wrong people. This is tough. This one is hard because it's personal and it costs you twice. Founders hold on to underperformers, the team members who are barely treading water, the friends you had from high school, the people that you might have started with, Yeah. You hold onto them long after you should have let them go because firing usually feels cruel and hiring again feels pretty exhausting. But every single day you hold onto someone who's just okay, you give up the chance to bring in somebody great because A players are in limited supply and you've got a seat filled with someone who's just the wrong person. A B player doesn't just do B-level work, they block the A player who could have had that seat. And the other side of this is maybe even worse, putting good people in the wrong roles. If you take someone whose gift is starting new creative projects and Bury them in monotonous, boring, repetitive grind work, they're going to burn out and fail, and it's not their fault. You put them in the wrong seat and then blame the person. So match the work to the person's natural strengths. Give the starters the new projects and the finishers the systems, and be brutally honest with yourself about what's actually moving the business forward and who's just kind of still being busy. That's a good start, but now I want you to go further than good. We build a team where every single seat is filled by someone who is excellent at that exact job, and watch how much lighter the whole thing gets carried. Killer number 6, the best kept secret. The 6th killer is just being the best kept secret in your industry. You can have the highest quality product in your entire market and still lose to a mediocre competitor who just simply cracked the content code because best known beats best every time. If nobody knows you exist, your quality literally does not matter because they can't buy what they can't find. And this might be a little uncomfortable. A lot of founders hide behind their branding, their funnels, the logos, the pretty websites, because all that work feels like work. While letting them avoid the one thing that actually pays the bills, asking for the sale and collecting the payment. It's so much more comfortable to redesign your homepage for the 80th time than to look someone in the eye and ask for their credit card. I watched a friend of mine spend $70,000 in a single year on polished thought leadership content and get basically zero results to the point where he almost quit creating content completely. The content alone didn't save him because without a clear ask, it's It's just, it's just expensive time that you're putting out every week. So put yourself out there every single day. Tell people exactly what you do and who you help, and then make the ask. The money is on the other side of the ask, and the only way you get good at asking is to ask more often. Killer number 7, built on rented land. So the 7th killer is building your whole business on land that you don't own. So remember, uh, Sam Walton losing that store because he only rented the building? The modern version of his mistake, it's everywhere. And is it is deadly. You build your entire business on top of one thing that you don't actually own, like one social media algorithm, one marketplace, one big client who makes up 80% of your revenue. When I looked at those 50 failures, more than half of them were dangerously concentrated on a single platform or a single customer. And the day that the algorithm changed or the terms changed or that one client walked away or went under, the business that took years to build was gone in a week. It feels completely fine when it's working. Right? You're on top of the world, which is exactly why so many smart founders miss it until it's too late. The platform giveth and the platform taketh away, and you don't get a vote, right? So own your foundation, own your email list, because that's an audience nobody can just delete or take out from under you. Own the direct relationship with your customers, not just the followers on a page that you've rented. Spread your revenue so no single-channel platform or client can end you by changing their mind on a Tuesday. Build on ground you actually control the way Sam Walton Walton swore he would do the day he lost that first store. Killer number 8: quitting right before it works.

The 8th killer—

ah, this is so tough— it's quitting right before it works. When sales slow down, founders panic and fall straight into a scarcity mindset. They start slashing prices, offering payment plans they can't afford, chasing any customer with a pulse, and making desperate decisions that dig the hole deeper instead of actually helping them climb out. And a huge number of them give up the exact moment that success was just around the corner. MrBeast, Jimmy Donaldson, made 130 videos before he ever cracked 10,000 views. 130 videos. Imagine a version of him who quit on video 129, one away from the breakthrough, convinced that it's just never gonna work. That person never becomes MrBeast. It shows up in small ways too. You send one email, you don't hear back, and you decide, oh, they're not interested. When the truth is the win was 3 follow-ups away with just a busy person who doesn't hate you. They're just busy. Success lives in the consistent repeated effort, the boring follow-ups that everyone else is Too proud or too scared to do. I think if you have the ability, then you have the responsibility. If you can, then you must. So when that voice shows up and is telling you, "Hey, you should quit," treat it as a signal that you're close and push for just one more time. So just build a little momentum and protect your belief like it's the most valuable asset that you own. So here's what I really want you to hear: every one of these fifty businesses died from something the founder could control. That's not bad news; that's actually awesome news. It's the best news that you'll get all day because it means survival is in your hands—not not the market, not the government. government, not the president. I love this quote about a bird on a branch isn't scared of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, it's in her wings. So trust your wings. Go find your blind spot and fix it before it finds you. I analyzed 50 billionaires and here's what they have in common. You will never become a billionaire or even a millionaire by following the advice of the middle class. Most people think that extreme wealth comes from luck or inheritance or being in the right place at the right time, but the truth is that comes from having the guts to concentrate your bets when everyone else is diversifying to protect their ignorance. If you keep spreading your focus, your energy, and your money across a dozen different safe options because you are afraid of losing, you will guarantee that you end up with a life of mediocrity and never reach the massive potential that you were built for. In 2008, Elon Musk was facing the worst year of his life. He had made $180 million from selling PayPal, a fortune that would set most people up for life on a private island. But Musk isn't most people. He had poured almost all of that money into 2 companies that looked like they were about to die: Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX had 3 failed rocket launches in a row. Tesla was running out of cash and couldn't make payroll. Musk had about $40 million left. He had a choice. He could put all the money into one company to save it, but that would mean the other would definitely die, or he could split the money between them to try to keep both alive but risk running out of cash for both and losing absolutely everything. Most people would have walked away. They would have kept the $40 million and lived like a king. Musk chose the hardest path. He split the money. He went all in on both. He literally had to borrow money from friends to pay his rent because he had zero liquid cash left. On Christmas Eve 2008, at the very last Last hour, a financing round came through for Tesla. Days later, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract. He risked $180 million to get to zero just to have a shot at changing the world. Today, he's the richest man on the planet. So right now you're probably telling yourself, but Evan, I don't have $180 million like Elon Musk. And that's not the point. It's not about the amount of money, it's about the habit of your mind. You're playing small with the $1,000 The same way you'd play small with $10 million. If you cannot bet on yourself when you have nothing to lose, you will never bet on yourself when you have everything to lose. So today we're going to break down the actual blueprint. I analyzed 50 billionaires to find out what they actually have in common, and it's not what you think. The trap of diversification. The first thing you need to understand is that billionaires do not get rich rich by diversifying. You have been told your whole life, don't put all your eggs in one basket. That is great advice if your goal is to preserve wealth. It's terrible advice if your goal is to create wealth and build an empire. Warren Buffett, one of the greatest investors of all time, calls diversification protection against ignorance. He says it makes very little sense for anyone who knows what they are doing. If you know how to analyze a business, if you know your market, if you know your Why would you put your money into your 20th best idea instead of your top idea? When you look at the portfolios of the ultra wealthy, you see extreme concentration. They find one thing they believe in, usually a company they built themselves or an investment they know inside and out, and they push all their chips into the middle of the table. Bill Gates didn't diversify into real estate and gold when he was starting Microsoft. He was 100% Microsoft. Jeff Bezos wasn't buying stocks in other retailers in 1999. He was 100% Amazon, and the data backs us up. There's a study by Acadian Asset Management that looked at concentrated portfolio managers versus diversified ones. They found that the managers who had the courage to bet big on their best ideas, their top five to ten stocks, significantly outperformed the ones who spread their bets thin. The managers who concentrated their portfolios generated higher returns because they were betting on their conviction, not their fear. You are hurting your own growth by trying to do too many things at once. You have a side hustle and a main job, and you're thinking about crypto, and you're trying to start a YouTube channel, and you're learning Spanish. You are diversifying your energy because you are afraid that if you pick just one thing, it might fail. But by doing 5 things at 20% effort, you are guaranteeing that all 5 of them fail. You need to find your wonderful business. Buffett says if you can find just 3 wonderful businesses in your life, you will get very rich. You don't You don't need 50. You need one. You need to become an expert in one area. You need to know more about your specific niche than anyone else in the room. When you have that level of knowledge, you don't need to diversify to protect yourself. Your knowledge is your protection. So stop trying to be okay at everything and give yourself permission to be a genius at one thing. Put your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket very closely, like Andrew Carnegie used to say. The power of disagreeableness. If you want to be a billionaire, you have to stop caring what other people think. I don't mean you should be a jerk. I mean you must possess a psychological trait known as low agreeableness. Researchers from the Socioeconomic Panel in Germany analyzed the personality traits of millionaires and billionaires. They used the Big Five personality model. They found a consistent pattern. Wealthy people score very high on conscientiousness. They are disciplined and they're organized. They score high in openness. They like new ideas, but they score significantly lower than the average person on agreeableness. This means they are not afraid of conflict. They're not afraid to swim against the tide. They do not need social harmony to feel good about themselves. When you are building something massive, people are going to tell you that you are crazy. They are going to tell you that it cannot be done. They are going to tell you that You are wrong. If you have high agreeableness, you will listen to them. You will try to fit in. You will compromise your vision to make everyone feel comfortable. Billionaires don't do that. They are nonconformists. Look at Steve Jobs. He was famous for his reality distortion field. He would demand things that his engineers said were impossible. He wasn't trying to be their friend. He wasn't trying to be agreeable. He was trying to change the world. world. He didn't care if people thought that he was difficult. He cared about the vision. You have to be willing to be misunderstood. You have to fight for your idea when no one else sees it. You have to be the one who says yes when the whole world says no. This is why so many billionaires are entrepreneurs. You cannot climb the corporate ladder if you are highly disagreeable. The corporate world rewards people who follow the rules and play nice. The entrepreneurial world rewards people who break the rules and create new realities. So you can ask yourself today, where are you compromising your dream just to avoid an awkward conversation? Where are you saying okay when you want to scream no? Stop trying to please everyone. You are not pizza. You are a leader. Lead. The obsession with speed. Speed is the ultimate weapon. If you look at the daily habits of billionaires, they do not waste time. They understand that time is the only asset that they can never buy back. There is a concept called Return on time investment, or ROTI. Billionaires are obsessed with this. They aggressively use leverage— other people's money, other people's time, systems, and technology— to make sure that their personal time is spent only on the highest value tasks. When I analyze successful people on my channel, I see this pattern over and over. They don't just work hard, they work fast. Tom Bilyeu, friend of the channel, has a strict routine. He gets up, he works out to build discipline. He meditates to clear his mind, and then he attacks his most important tasks immediately. He doesn't check email first. He doesn't scroll social media. He calls it thinkitating, using his brainpower to solve complex problems before the world can distract him. Most people are moving too slow. You have an idea for a business. You spend 6 months researching a logo. You want to start a podcast, and you spend 3 weeks looking for the perfect microphone to buy. Right? You're using preparation as an excuse to hide. If you wait until you feel ready, you will be waiting for the rest of your life. Billionaires act on information immediately. When Elon Musk faced that crisis in 2008, he didn't take a month off to think about it. He was on the phone, flying around the world, negotiating deals, moving money, literally working 20 hours a day to save his companies. The speed of his decisions saved him. You need to shorten the gap between the idea and the execution. If you have an idea right now, Now, do something about it. In the next ten minutes, send the email, buy the domain, post a video, call the client. Stop overthinking. Your brain is designed to keep you safe, not to make you rich. Safety is slow; wealth is fast. The billionaire mindset is about shrinking timelines. If you think a goal will take you ten years, ask yourself: How can I achieve this in six months? Even if you fail, you will be further ahead than if you. Stuck to the 10-year plan. So a lot of you are waiting for permission. You're waiting for someone to tell you that you are good enough. You're waiting for the perfect time. There is no perfect time. The perfect time was yesterday. The second best time is right now. The ability to handle crisis. You will never reach the top without facing a moment that threatens to destroy everything that you have built. This is the existential crisis phase. Every single billionaire that I've studied has gone through a moment where it looked like it was all over. We talked about Elon Musk in 2008, but look at Jeff Bezos. In a dot-com crash of 2001, Amazon lost 90% of its value. 90%! Imagine looking at your net worth and seeing it drop by 90%. Most CEOs panicked. They folded. They went bankrupt. Bezos didn't panic. He focused on the math. He focused on one single metric: the cash conversion cycle. He realized that if he could get cash from customers Before he had to pay his suppliers, he could fund his own growth without needing banks or investors. He turned Amazon into a cash-generating machine during the worst crash in the history of the internet. He didn't just survive the crisis; he used the crisis to become stronger. This is what Nassim Taleb calls being anti-fragile. It's not just about resilience, which is bouncing back to where you were; it's about getting better because of the stress. When you are building your business, you are going to. Get hit. You are going to lose a big client. Your star employee is going to quit on you. The economy is going to tank. Pandemic is gonna shut down the world. If you crumble when things get hard, you are not ready for this level of success yet. Billionaires look at crisis as a puzzle to be solved, not a sign that they need to stop. They maintain an internal locus of control. They believe that no matter how bad the external situation is, they have the power to fix it. They don't blame the economy. They don't blame the government. They don't blame their team. They take extreme ownership. So when bad things happen to you, do you play the victim or do you become the architect of your own rescue? Your pain is your training ground. The struggles that you're facing right now are not there to stop you. They are there to prepare you for the weight of the success you are asking for. If you can't handle the pressure of a $10,000 problem, life will never trust you with a $10 million problem. So embrace the crisis. It is the fire that forges the steel. They solve the biggest problems. Perhaps the most important thing billionaires have in common is the scale of the problems that they solve. So you are paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems that you solve. If you solve a small problem for a few people, you make a little bit of money. If you solve a massive for millions of people, you become a billionaire. So look at the billionaires that we've talked about. Elon Musk is trying to solve the problem of fossil fuels with Tesla and the problem of human extinction with SpaceX. Pretty big problems. Bill Gates solved the problem of putting a computer on every desk in every home. Jeff Bezos solved the problem of getting anything that you want delivered to your door in 2 days. These are not small problems. Most entrepreneurs aim too low. They start a business just to make money. They want to just pay their bills. They want a nice car. And there's nothing wrong with that. With that, but it won't make you a billionaire. You have to fall in love with the problem. And to go to the next level, you have to expand your vision. You have to ask, how can I help more people? How can I serve deeper? You need to find your one word. You need to find the core value that drives you, because when things get hard, and they will get hard, money will not be enough motivation to keep you going. You need a mission. If you're just chasing paper, you will burn out. If you are chasing a purpose, you will be unstoppable. So the billionaires I know, the ones I study, they're not sitting around counting their Their money. They are working harder than you and me. Why? Because they're obsessed with the problem they are solving. They are built to serve. So if you want to join their ranks, stop asking how can I make a billion dollars and start asking how can I help a billion people. The money is just a byproduct of the value that you create. Focus on the value. Focus on the service. Focus on the impact. You have Michael Jordan level talent at something. You have a genius inside of you that is waiting to be. Unlocked, but you are keeping it small because you don't believe in yourself enough to tackle the big problems. The world is waiting for you to step up. The world has huge problems that need your specific genius to solve. So don't deprive us of your contribution because you're afraid to fail. Go bigger. To learn more about SpaceX and the largest IPO in history, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. SpaceX is about to go public in what could be the biggest money-raising event in all of human history, and most are going to completely miss what it actually means. SpaceX is going public this month, and it could be the largest ever stock