ALL OF INVESTING Explained in 55 Minutes (No BS, No Fluff)

You don't need a lot of money or finance degree to become a millionaire. 99% of small businesses you can start with next to no capital. It's more about effort. To get rich in America, I do not need a college degree. I think earning money is one of the simplest things I ever learned, and it's one of the most misunderstood things. The secret to building massive wealth is just understanding a few simple investing rules that the financial industry overcomplicates on purpose. You don't need to be a genius. In what I do. 90% of the people that buy stocks don't think of them the right way. There's 3 basic parts to a financial statement: income statement, balance sheet, statement of cash flow. You can teach a monkey that, but our schools don't teach that. We're told that investing has to be complicated, that you have to be some genius looking at a screen with these numbers like PE ratios running through it all day. That's not true. If you keep waiting for the perfect time or enough money to start, you will miss out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in compound interest and be forced to work decades longer than you want to. If you really want to make $100,000 and do it 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. You got to make money while you sleep. And the only way to do that is understand compounding. So if a child is a young person, 19, 20 years old, puts aside $50 a week, they put it in the market over historical returns, it's $2.2 million. You should get money, take the money, invest in assets. Look at the story of Ronald Read. He worked as a gas station attendant and a janitor for most of his life. He never earned a massive salary and he definitely didn't have a finance degree. But when he died at age 92, his family and friends were shocked to learn he had an $8 million fortune. Ronald didn't find a secret stock tip or trade options all day. He just saved whatever small amounts he could, bought shares in solid companies that paid dividends, and let that money sit there for decades. He let compound interest do the heavy lifting while Wall Street bankers tried to sell everyone complicated day trading systems. Now, you might be telling yourself that Ronald Read is a nice story, but you're barely scraping by and you don't have any extra money to invest. You think you need to wait until your business takes off or you get a promotion before you can open an investment account. But wealth isn't about how much you make. It's about the habits that you build. Waiting until you have a ton of money to start investing is like waiting until you're in shape to go to the gym. And today I'm going to be breaking down the absolute basics of investing so you can start building your fortune with just a few dollars. 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. The mathematical miracle of time. The absolute biggest mistake you can make with investing is thinking that you are too late or too poor to start. You look at your bank account, you see a few hundred dollars, and you tell yourself that investing is only for people who already have millions. That's a lie. The greatest asset you have right now is not your income. It's your time. There's a concept in finance called compound interest. Albert Einstein supposedly called compound interest the 8th wonder of the world, saying that he who understands it earns it and he who does not pays it. Compound interest just means that your money makes more money and then that new money makes even more money. It's a snowball rolling down a hill, getting bigger and faster the longer you let it roll. There's a simple math trick you can use to see this in action. It's called the Rule of 72. You could take the number 72 and divide it by the the percentage return you expect to get on your money? The answer is exactly how many years it will take for your money to double. So let's say you invest in a stock market and get a 10% return. You divide 72 by 10, that equals 7.2. That means every 7.2 years your money doubles without you having to do any extra work. This is exactly like building a business or starting a YouTube channel. When I started making YouTube videos, it took me 5 years to hit a couple thousand subscribers. I had to make 350 videos until I was not completely embarrassed by my content. I had to make 700 videos until I actually inspired myself. The growth at You're getting so slow that it feels like you're getting nowhere. Most people quit right there. But if you are consistent, the momentum eventually takes over. The exact same thing happens with your money. If you invest $100 today and you leave it alone for 40 years at a 10% return, it turns into over $4,500. That's the power of momentum. But to get that momentum, you have to put your money into the right places. So where do you actually put your money to get those returns? I'm going to give you the exact answer right now. Buying the entire haystack. When you think about investing in the stock market, you probably picture guys in these expensive suits screaming on the trading floor, trying to pick the perfect stock. You think you need to find the next Google or Amazon before they hit it big. That is a trap right there, because picking individual stocks is incredibly risky, especially when you don't know what you're doing. Even the smartest professionals in the world, they fail at it. There's a massive report published every year called the SPIVA report. It measures how professional, highly paid fund managers perform compared to the regular stock market over a 15-year period, nearly 90% of active professional fund managers actually lose to the market. So if the guys with the supercomputers and the finance degrees can't pick the right stocks, you should not try to do it either. Instead of trying to find the needle in the haystack, you should just buy the entire haystack. You do this by buying something called an index fund. An index fund is just a single basket that holds small pieces of hundreds of different companies all at the same time. The most famous one is the S&P 500 index. So when you buy the S&P 500 index, you instantly own a tiny piece of the 500 biggest, most successful companies in America. If one company goes bankrupt, you do not lose all your money because you still own 499 other successful businesses. I talk a lot about modeling success. If you want to achieve something great, look at the people who have already done it and model their path. You do not need to invent a brand new system, the most successful long-term investors in history all use simple index funds. It takes away the stress, it takes away the guessing, and it guarantees that you will capture the growth of the greatest businesses in the world. You just buy the fund consistently every single month and ignore the news. But keeping your money in the market is only half the battle. You also have to protect it from the silent thief that is robbing you right now. The silent thief in your bank account. A lot of entrepreneurs, they tell me that they like to keep all their cash in a regular checking account. They say it feels safe. They say they can see the numbers on their screen and they know the stock market goes up and down, so they choose not to participate. If you do this, you are not playing it safe. You are actually guaranteeing that you will lose money. The silent thief that I am talking about is called inflation. Inflation just means the cost of living goes up every single year. The price of your groceries, gas, rent, everything else. It's constantly increasing. Historically, inflation averages around 3% every year. That means of your money is just sitting in a bank account earning zero interest, it is losing 3% of its buying power every 12 months. Over 20 years, your cash will lose more than half of its value. So to beat inflation, your money has to grow faster than the cost of living. We can look at the historical data from 1928 to 2024. Cash returned about 3.31% per year. That barely keeps up with inflation. Bonds returned 4.5%. Real estate was 4.23%. Gold returned 5.12%. But stocks returned 9.9%. 4% per year. So you have to take a calculated risk to protect your future. Big decisions made with your heart, small decisions should be made with your head. Your heart tells you that you want to be financially free. I hope you want to provide for your family and fund your dreams. I hope. But your head has to look at the math and realize that hiding your money under a mattress will never get you there. You have to invest. 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 your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description. Go grab it. I'll see you there. Now, even if you do start investing, there is a massive trap that the financial industry uses to steal your wealth. And I'm going to show you how you can avoid it. The hidden fees keeping you broke. So Wall Street makes billions of dollars by making you feel stupid. They use confusing words to convince you that you need to pay them to manage your money. They charge you a percentage of your total wealth every single year just for the privilege of holding your investments. This is called an expense ratio or advisory fee. You might think that paying a 1% or 2% fee is not a big deal. It sounds like it's a tiny number, but over 30 years, a 2% fee will eat up nearly 30% of your total wealth. That is hundreds of thousands of dollars missing from your retirement simply because you paid a guy in a suit to do something that you could easily do yourself. One of the most important rules in business is to eliminate, automate, delegate, right? You want to eliminate useless tasks, automate the repetitive ones, and delegate the rest to talented people. But you should never just blindly delegate delegate your total financial future to a salesman who charges you 2% a year for an expensive mutual fund that's going to lose you money compared to the market. You can bypass the expensive advisors completely. You can open a free account at an online brokerage. Think about Vanguard or Fidelity or Charles Schwab. You can buy low-cost index funds yourself. Some of those funds charge fees as low as 0.03%. That means you keep exactly what you earn. You keep your money working for you instead of you paying for a banker's new sports car. But picking the right index funds with the lowest fees is just one step. You also need to put those funds inside the right accounts so the government does not take all your profits. Building your tax shield. Taxes will be your single biggest expense over the course of your life. As an entrepreneur, you already know how much it hurts to see a huge chunk of your hard-earned income disappear to the government. When it comes to investing, you have the legal right to shield your money from taxes, but you have to use the right accounts. And now every jurisdiction is going to be different, but a regular brokerage account gives you zero tax benefit. You pay taxes on the money before you invest it, and you pay taxes on the profits when you sell it. But the government created special accounts to encourage you to save for your future. You need to use them. I'm going to talk from the American side of things now. The first one is a Roth IRA. A Roth IRA is an individual retirement account. You put money in after you've paid taxes on it today. But the magic is that the money grows completely tax-free forever. When you pull the money out in retirement, you do not pay a single penny in taxes on the massive profits that you made. If you have a 9-to-5 job while you are building your business, you might have access to a 401(k). A lot of companies will match the money you put into your 401(k). If your company offers a match, you must take it. It's literally free money. Then there's the absolute best investing account in existence. It's called a health savings account, HSA. An HSA has a triple tax advantage. The money goes in tax-free, it grows tax-free, and it comes out tax-free if you use it for medical expenses. If you just take a few hours this week to set up these accounts, you will save yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes over your lifetime. But eventually a day will come when you log into these accounts and see a massive negative number. You need to be prepared for that day. Surviving the market roller coaster. If you invest in the stock market, you are going to see market crashes. It is a mathematical guarantee. Every few years the market drops by 10%, 20%, even 30%. When this happens, the news goes crazy. People panic. They log into their accounts, they see their life savings shrinking, and they sell everything in fear. Selling when the market drops is the worst financial mistake that you can make. When you sell during a crash, you lock in your losses permanently. You turn a temporary dip on a screen into real permanent loss of cash. The most successful entrepreneurs in the world have incredible emotional control. They know that growth is hard and that success is hard and entrepreneurship is hard. The highs are very high and the lows are brutally low. Remember, your purpose comes from your pain. The moments when you are tested the most are the moments that define your ultimate success. When the market crashes, you have to train yourself to see it as a massive opportunity, not a financial disaster. Think about it like a sale at your favorite store. If you went to buy a laptop and it was suddenly 30% off, you'd be thrilled. You would buy it immediately. The stock market is the exact same thing. When the market drops, it means the greatest companies in America are suddenly on sale. You are buying the same exact assets for a massive discount. Now, historically, the stock market has recovered from every single crash, every single recession, and every global crisis in history. It always bounces back and goes higher. You just have to believe in the long-term progress of the economy. You hold your investments, you stay calm, and you keep buying. If you can survive the bad days, you will capture the massive rewards of the good days. Funding your mission. Okay, so we've talked a lot about the math, some of the stats, and the strategies you can use. But the real secret to investing is understanding why you are actually doing this. You are not investing just to have a high score in the bank account when you die. You are investing to buy your freedom. If you're an entrepreneur, you have a massive mission. You want to serve people. You want to make an impact. We are all built to serve. If you're not happy, it's because you're not serving. But you can't serve the world at the highest level if you are constantly stressed out about paying your rent. You can't hire a massive team and build an empire if you're living paycheck to paycheck. Money is not a bad thing. It is a completely necessary fuel for your business. Try driving a car without fuel and see how far you get. Money can't be number one on your list. It can't be number 1000 on your list. It has to be in your top 5. It just shouldn't be number one because the mission comes first. But you must learn how to make money, keep money, and multiply money so you can fund the changes that you want to see in the world. When you get your investments automated, you buy back your mental energy. You stop worrying about your financial survival and you start focusing entirely on your creative genius. You get to wake up every day and do work that matters to you. You get to impact lives. You get to take risks on new ideas because you know your financial foundation is solid. That is what true wealth looks like. Your belief is your superpower. The only thing separating you from financial freedom right now is the decision to start. You have the rules, you have the strategies. Now you just have to have the courage to take the first step. You do not need a perfect plan. You just need momentum. Expect to make some mistakes. Expect to learn along the way. But promise yourself that you will not stay stagnant. You are capable of building massive wealth and the world desperately needs what you are going to create with it. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn all of business explained in a few minutes. Business is not complicated. It's just solving a problem for someone else. Most people fail because they overthink the plan instead of falling in love with the person that they are serving. If you don't shift your focus from your fears to who you can serve, you'll stay stuck in analysis paralysis forever. Elon Musk didn't build SpaceX by looking at what NASA was doing. He looked at the physics. When he wanted to go to Mars, people said rockets were too expensive. They said a single rocket cost $65 million. That was the industry standard. But Musk didn't accept that. He asked, what is a rocket made of? He broke it down to aerospace-grade aluminum, titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then he asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turns out the materials were only 2% of the typical price. The rest was inefficiency. By refusing to copy others and reasoning from the ground up, he cut the cost of space travel by a factor of 10. Now I know this feeling because I lived it when I was 19. I had a clear path to a safe, high-paying job at a bank. It was secure, it's what I thought I wanted, is what society said was success. But I also had this crazy idea to join a biotech software company. Everyone told me I was insane to turn down the bank job. I didn't have experience, I didn't have funding, but I used what Jeff Bezos calls the regret minimization framework. I projected myself forward to age 80. I asked, will I regret trying this and failing? No. Will I regret never trying at all? Absolutely yes. I didn't want to be an old man wondering what if. So I turned down the bank, went to join the company, and we eventually grew to customers in 30 countries and got acquired. But you might be thinking, okay, Evan, I don't have a genius idea like Elon Musk, and I don't have the tech skills that you might have had at 19. But the truth is, you don't need to be a genius, and you don't need to have a degree or tons of experience. You just need to stop letting your lack of belief hold you back from seeing the simple truth of how business business actually works. Part 1: The Foundation. First principles thinking. The biggest mistake you're making is reasoning by analogy. Reasoning by analogy means you look at what your competitors are doing and you try to do it slightly better. You see a coffee shop, so you open up a coffee shop. You see a YouTuber, so you copy their thumbnails. This can be a trap. When you copy, you are copying their inefficiencies, their fears, and their mistakes. You need to use first principles thinking. This is physics way of looking at the world and what Elon Musk did. You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, what are we sure is true? And then reason up from there. So if you're starting a business, don't ask, how do I make a product like Apple? Ask, what is the fundamental problem that my customer has? So maybe the problem is that they're tired. The analogy solution is coffee. The first principle solution might be a nap pod or nutritional supplement or a better mattress. When Elon Musk looked at battery packs, people said they would always be expensive because it cost $600 per kilowatt hour in the past. He broke it down to the molecular level— cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon. He realized if you bought those on the London Metal Exchange, it was only $80 per kilowatt hour. The gap between $600 and $80 is where the opportunity lives. Stop looking at your competition. Look at the truth. Part 2: The 5 Elements of Every Business. You don't need an MBA. In fact, most MBAs teach you how to be an employee, not an entrepreneur. According to Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA, every business in the world, from a lemonade stand to Google, is just 5 things. If you are missing one of these, you don't have a business, you have a hobby. So let's go through the 5. Number 1 is value creation. You must discover what people need or want and then create it. This isn't about what you want to make alone. It's about what they need. It needs to satisfy a core human drive, the drive to to acquire, to bond, to learn, defend, or feel. If your product doesn't solve a real problem, nothing else matters. Number 2, marketing. If you build it, they will not come. Marketing is the art of changing beliefs. It is attracting attention and building demand for what you have created. You need to move people from unaware to problem aware to solution aware. Number 3, sales. Marketing attracts them, sales gets them to commit. This is the process of turning a prospective customer into a paying customer. Sales is not about tricking people, It's about trust. It's about helping your prospect understand why your offer is worth paying for. Number 4, value delivery. You have to actually give them what you promise. This is where your reputation is built. If you sell the dream and deliver a nightmare, you're done. You need to exceed expectations. And number 5 is finance. You need to bring in enough money to keep going and make it worthwhile. You don't need to be an accountant, but you need to understand that if more money goes out than comes in, you are out of business. That's it. If you're struggling, One of these 5 things is broken. Diagnose it, fix it, move on. Part 3: Strategy. The 7 Powers. So once you have the basics, you need a strategy. Hard work is not enough. If you work 100 hours a week on a bad strategy, you will still lose to someone working 20 hours a week on a great strategy. Strategy is about power. Power is the set of conditions that create the potential for persistent differential results. So what does that mean? Power is what stops your competitors from stealing your profits. Hamilton Helmer identified 7 powers that build an enduring business. You don't need all of them, but you need at least one. So number one is scale economies. This is where you get cheaper as you get bigger. So think about Netflix. When they started making original content like House of Cards, they spent $100 million. That sounds like a gamble, but because they had millions of subscribers, the cost per subscriber was pretty tiny. A smaller competitor could not afford to spend $100 million on one show. Their size became their shield. Number 2, network economies. The value of the product goes up as more people use it. So think about Facebook or LinkedIn. If you leave Facebook, you lose your connection to some of your friends. If you start a new social network, it has zero value because there's no one there. This is why it's so hard to kill a network once it takes off. Number 3, counter positioning. This is my favorite for new entrepreneurs. This is where you adopt a new business model that your competitor cannot copy because it would hurt their existing business. So example, you can look at Kodak, right? They invented the digital camera in 1975. They knew it was the future, but they made all their money selling film. If they pushed digital, they would kill their own film profits. They were stuck. They couldn't move. Or you can look at Vanguard. They introduced low-cost index funds. The big banks couldn't copy them because the banks made their money on high fees. If the banks lowered their fees to match Vanguard, they would lose all their revenue. So find a way to do business that makes your competitor afraid to copy you. Number 4, switching costs. Make it painful for your customer to leave, not by trapping them, but by integrating so deeply into their life that leaving is a hassle. So think about Apple. Once you have an iPhone, a Mac, iPad, iCloud, switching to Android becomes a nightmare. You stay because staying is easier. Number 5, branding. Branding is not just a logo. It is the attribution of higher value to an objectively identical offer. So example, Good Morning America did a test. They bought a diamond ring from Costco for $6,600 and a similar ring from Tiffany for $16,600. An expert appraiser actually said the Costco diamond was better quality, but people still pay $10,000 more for the Tiffany blue box. Why? Because the brand reduces uncertainty. You trust Tiffany. You don't trust Costco for romance. That trust is power. Number 6 is a cornered resource. This is having something no one else can get. It could be a patent, a location, or a team. Pixar had a brain trust of the best storytellers and animators in the world. Disney couldn't replicate it, so they had to buy them. If you have the best of something, you've cornered a resource. And number 7, process power. This is doing something so efficiently that no one can match you. So Toyota developed the Toyota Production System. They were so confident in it that they actually gave tours to their competitors. They showed GM exactly how they built cars, and GM still couldn't copy them. Why? Because the process was embedded in the culture, not just the machines. It was learned by osmosis over decades. Part 4: The psychology, belief, and the who. You can have the first principles, you can know the 5 parts, you now have the 7 powers, but if you don't believe in yourself, none of it matters. Belief is the world's biggest problem. I believe everyone has Michael Jordan level genius at something, but we don't do it because we're afraid. We're afraid to fail, we're afraid of judgment, we're afraid to be seen starting small, starting over. You have to realize that your purpose comes from your pain. Whatever you struggled with the most is what you are best equipped to help others with right now. I make videos for entrepreneurs because I was the struggling 19-year-old entrepreneur who needed help. I'm serving my younger self. When you focus on serving, the fear goes away. You stop worrying about how you look and you start worrying about how you can help and stop obsessing about the how. How do I build the website? Say, how do I get the funding? The how will always change. The how is flexible. You need to be stubborn on the why and the who. Who are you serving? Why does it matter? If you know who you're serving and why it matters, the how will present itself. You will figure it out. You will learn. You will partner. And money— money is a tool. It's important. You need oxygen to breathe, but you don't live to breathe. You need money to run your business, but you don't live for money. If money is your number one goal, you will quit when it gets hard, and it will get hard. If your goal is service, you'll keep going. You will find a way. Part 5: Execution. Getting started. So where do you start? You start by doing. You start by failing. You have to give yourself permission to produce garbage. My first videos were terrible. I was shy, I was sweating, I looked nervous, but I posted them anyway. If I waited until I was perfect I would never have started. People say that good is the enemy of great. So if you stay in your comfort zone doing what you're good at, you will never find what you could be great at. You don't need to quit your job today. You don't need to mortgage your house. You can start with 30 minutes a day. You can start by solving one problem for one person. Start small, but start. The only difference between you and the people you look up to is that they started and they kept going when everyone else quit. Do it. You have a genius inside of you. You have a problem that you can solve for the world. Don't let the how stop you. Don't let the fear stop you. Use the principles. Build the 5 parts. Find your power. And most importantly, believe. If you're feeling bold, if you're feeling powerful right now, that's a signal. Follow that feeling. Take the next step. Now let's learn how to stop falling behind and become a learning machine. Your ability to learn faster than everyone else will make or break your success. If you're not deliberately training yourself to learn quicker every day, you're falling behind. Most people coast on outdated study habits and it's costing them opportunities. If you don't fix how you learn, you'll keep forgetting critical lessons, repeating mistakes, and watching hungrier competitors speed past you. There's a famous story. Two lumberjacks have a contest to chop down trees. One hacks away nonstop, sweating buckets. The other stops every so often to sharpen his ax. By the day's end, the one who sharpened his blade blade easily outcuts the other. The lesson: sharpen your tools, sharpen your mind, and multiply your results. Even Abraham Lincoln supposedly said, "Give me 6 hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first 4 sharpening the ax." Learning smarter is how you sharpen your ax as an entrepreneur. For me, this lesson hit early. I was a kid hiding under his desk in school because I couldn't understand what was going on. I had an undiagnosed hearing problem. I literally couldn't hear the teacher, but I thought I was a problem. I thought I was stupid. My grades were terrible next to my straight-A sisters. My parents even sent me to a child psychologist at age 8. Eventually, doctors discovered I had fluid in my ears. They put tubes in, and suddenly I could hear clearly. And in my final year of high school, with the encouragement of an amazing French teacher who finally made me believe in myself, I transformed. I went from Bs and Cs to graduating with straight A+ pluses. Sometimes it really is just one little change, one mentor, one strategy that makes all the difference. I wasn't dumb. I just needed the right fix and someone to show me what was possible. Now you might be thinking, this sounds great, Evan, but I'm running a business here. I don't have time to play around with fancy learning techniques. I just get things done. Or maybe you're thinking, I've never been a good learner. I'm too I'm too old to change now, or this stuff might work for students but not for me. And I hear you, and you're wrong. If you don't have time to learn how to learn, then you're guaranteed to waste 10 times more time down the road fixing avoidable mistakes and struggling to keep up. As an entrepreneur, you can't afford not to sharpen your axe, and you absolutely can become a better, faster learner. Your brain is not fixed. It's a muscle grows with practice. So we're going to lose the excuses, at least for this video. I'm going to show you exactly how to revolutionize your learning. And by the end of this video, you won't just be learning faster, you'll start seeing yourself as a learning machine. So let's do it. Today, I'm going to break down the 7 science-backed strategies that will help you learn faster and retain more, starting now. Strategy number 1: Test yourself. Don't just reread. The first strategy is this. Active recall. So test yourself instead of passively rereading or listening. This one change will skyrocket how fast you learn. Here's some science behind it. When researchers compared passive review to active recall, the difference was staggering. Students who quiz themselves on materials remembered about 57% of it, while those who just reread and highlighted remembered only 29%. That's almost double the retention by testing yourself. Active recall can literally boost your performance by around 20% or more. So that's not It's not some tiny tweak. It's a huge leap. Most people feel busy when they're just reading notes or watching videos, but feeling busy is not learning. Highlighting the page or nodding along to a podcast gives you the illusion of knowledge without the actual substance, right? You've done this. You've read something 3 times and think, "Yeah, sure, I've got this." Then a day later, you barely recall a thing. It's because recognition feels like understanding, but it's not. Your brain only truly learns when it has to retrieve information with no hints. So think of your memory like a muscle. Reading is watching someone else lift, but active recall is you lifting the weights. It hurts more, it's harder, and that's exactly why it works. So every time you struggle to remember something, you're strengthening that neural connection. So how do you do it practically? After you consume any learning material, a book, an article, a course, YouTube video, pause and close it. Quiz yourself. What were the key points? How would I explain this to a friend? Write down everything you remember from memory. That struggle you feel trying to recall is real learning happening. You can use techniques like the blurting method. You just jot down all you can remember on a blank page or the Feynman technique where where you explain the idea as if teaching a total newbie. When I prepare a speech or video, I don't just read my notes silently. I practice out loud and test myself. I'll literally recite key ideas in the shower or quiz myself during a walk. And if I stumble, that's good. It shows me what I haven't learned yet when the stakes are low. You need to embrace the stumbles during practice so you don't stumble when it counts. And remember, input is not the same as output. If you can't output the knowledge by recalling it or teaching it, you haven't really learned it. So start testing yourself and you'll cut your learning time because you'll know exactly what you know and what you still need to work on. No more fooling yourself by saying, yeah, I read that chapter, I'm good. Prove it to yourself. It might be humbling at first, but it will make you learn way faster. Strategy number 2: space out your learning. No more cramming. The second strategy is to space out your learning. So don't cram all at once. Spread it over multiple sessions or This is called spaced repetition, and it's one of the most powerful learning phenomenon ever discovered. Here's why it works. When you first learn something, your brain starts forgetting it almost immediately. In fact, almost 100 years ago, psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus mapped out the forgetting curve. It shows that memory of new information drops off steeply in the first 20 minutes and continues falling within hours. That sounds depressing, but here's the key. Every time you review or practice that information again, especially after some time has passed, you interrupt the forgetting and reinforce the memory. Repeated spaced exposure essentially bends that forgetting curve so you retain far more over the long term. So think of it like you're planting seeds. If you dump a gallon of water on a plant and then ignore it, it'll drown and then dry out. But if you water it a little bit every day, it grows strong. Your memory works basically the same way. In one example, a learning expert noted that in just 4 months practicing 30 minutes a day with spaced repetition, you could learn and retain 3,600 flashcards worth of content with 90 to 95% accuracy. That's an insane amount of knowledge locked in, and it's because of consistent spaced practice. Meanwhile, cramming might give you a short-term rush, but a week later, poof, poof, it's all gone. And we've all crammed for a test and then forgotten everything. Spaced learning might not have that all-nighter adrenaline vibe, but the results last a lifetime. Now, as an entrepreneur, spaced repetition can be your secret weapon. You need to remember what you learn from your books and your courses, your own experiences, even your mistakes, the YouTube videos you watch. So build a simple system to revisit knowledge. This can mean reviewing your notes weekly, using a flashcard app for key concepts, or deliberately scheduling practice of a skill throughout the month. When I learn something, say a new strategy for social media or a speaking technique, I'll circle back to it regularly. I don't just use it once and then forget it. I'll revisit that lesson next week, next month, and each time I find I understand it deeper and it sticks even more. So let me give you a quick story. A few years ago, my wife Nina and her friends invited me on a snowboarding trip. I had never snowboarded. I was a decent skier as a kid, but snowboarding was totally new to me. Me. The first time down the hill, I was terrible. I was embarrassed. I kept falling. I couldn't carve. My legs were burning from the effort of just not tumbling over. I felt like I was holding everyone back. Now, I could have done what most people do and spend one exhausting day on the slopes, maybe take a lesson and then give up until the next trip months later. And predictably, I would suck again. Instead, I decided to apply spaced practice. After that humiliating day, I went home and for the next several weeks, I practiced every morning on a tiny local hill near my house. No big crowds, no pressure. Just me and this one other older guy who was there every morning, both of us quietly doing our thing. I fell 30 times a run trying to get the turns right, but each day I fell a little less. I trained my muscle memory day by day. After weeks of daily practice, I went back to the mountain with my wife and this time I could keep up with them. They were shocked at how much I'd improved. That's the power of spacing your practice and persistence. So whatever you're trying to learn, whether it's mastering sales calls, you're learning coding, you're trying to speak a new language, Don't binge once and drop it. Schedule it in chunks. Even 15 to 30 minutes a day of focused learning will crush a 7-hour cram session in effectiveness. Trust the science on this. Your brain will thank you and you'll actually remember what you learn. Strategy number 3: Prioritize sleep. Seriously, sleep on it. This one might surprise the hustle culture crowd, but sleep is non-negotiable for learning. If you want to learn faster and remember more, you must prioritize sleep as part of your strategy. Think of sleep as the time when your brain hits save on what you learned. Pulling all-nighters or burning the candle at both ends doesn't make you a hero. It makes you slower. Neuroscience is super clear on this. When you learn something new, your brain needs sleep to properly encode and retain that information. Dr. Matthew Walker, he's a leading sleep scientist, says sleep after learning is essential to help save and cement that new information into the brain. Brain. Without sleep, those new memories are like wet concrete that never gets to set. They remain fragile and easily wiped away. In fact, if you try to learn on no sleep, your ability to absorb new information can drop by up to 40%. Imagine losing almost half your learning potential just because you skimped on sleep. That's huge. You can't brute force your way through that. So no amount of willpower or coffee can overcome a 40% deficit in brain power. As Dr. Walker or bluntly puts it, you can't pull an all-nighter and still learn effectively. And it's not just about memory. Sleep helps you make creative connections and find solutions too. You ever heard the phrase sleep on it? It's real. While you're snoozing, your brain is busy replaying and organizing the day's information, linking new ideas to existing knowledge, and even improving skills that you practiced. Studies show that your performance on tasks like playing a melody on piano can actually improve after sleep without further practice. Skip sleep and you skip that whole process. Now, I know as an entrepreneur it's tempting to cut sleep when you have a million things to do each day. And early in my career, I tried that grind of late nights and early mornings thinking I was getting ahead. What I got was foggy brain and the habit of forgetting important details. Now I guard my sleep like my life depends on it because my business brain definitely does. I aim for 7 to 8 hours sleep. I'll choose sleep over answering a few extra emails at midnight because I know tomorrow my brain will operate at 100%. Instead of 60%, and I get more done in less time because I'm well-rested. So action item: treat sleep as a part of your learning protocol. Schedule your learning or practice sessions around a good night's sleep. So for example, if you want to retain something, study in the evening and then get to bed on time. You'll remember it far better in the morning. Likewise, if you have a big day of learning ahead, make sure you slept well the night before. This isn't being lazy, it's actually being smart. The science says that memory consolidation— that's process of solidifying what actually happened happens during deep sleep. And if you consistently cheat yourself on sleep, you're consistently shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to growing yourself and your business. And one more thing on sleep. Lack of sleep doesn't just hurt new learning. It can also erase what you thought you knew. Have you ever felt brain dead in a meeting after too little sleep? It's real. You literally can't access some of the knowledge in your brain when you're exhausted. So do not wear sleep deprivation as a badge of honor. High performers in any field— sports, business, creative work— they know the value of recovery. Your brain is your number one asset. Give it the rest it needs to perform. Strategy number 4: Do one thing at a time. Kill multitasking. So here we want to laser focus on one thing at a time. If you're trying to learn while multitasking, you're checking emails, you're bouncing between tasks, you're letting notifications interrupt you. You, you are sabotaging your learning. And I know entrepreneurs, we love to think we can juggle 12 things at once, but science is crystal clear on this. Multitasking is a myth, and doing it makes you dumber and less effective. So this is a slap in the face statistic: rapidly switching between tasks, what most people call multitasking, can cost you up to 40% of your productive time. Imagine 40% of your day, poof, gone, wasted because you kept context switching. Even crazier, in tests, this kind of behavior temporarily dropped people's IQ by 10 points. That's more than the cognitive knock you take from smoking some marijuana. So if you pride yourself on being a great multitasker, I hate to break it to you, you're really priding yourself on being 40% less effective than you could be. And when it comes to learning, the toll is even worse. One expert in cognitive psychology, Dr. Tomasz Chamorro-Premuzic, noted that one of the biggest pitfalls of multitasking is lower retention of knowledge. Of course it is, because if your attention is split input, nothing fully sinks in. Your brain needs focus to transfer information from short-term memory into long-term memory. Distractions reset that process. So if you ever read a page of a book while also half listening to a conversation, then realize you had no idea what you just read, that's what we're talking about. You were physically looking at the words, but your brain wasn't encoding any of it because it was toggling between different inputs. I had to learn this the hard way too in my early days of building my business. I would try to learn new skills or work on important problems while also keeping my email open constantly. My phone was buzzing, 20 browser tabs open. I felt like I was being productive. After all, I was doing a lot, but I was doing everything poorly. I read the same paragraphs over and over because I wasn't fully there. I'd watch a tutorial video while also answering messages and later wonder why I couldn't remember the steps from that video. Now I've adopted what I call monotasking. So if I'm learning or working on something critical, everything else is off. Phone is on do not disturb, emails are closed. Team knows not to interrupt me during my learning block unless the building is on fire. I literally schedule deep focus time on my calendar. And you know what? In 1 hour of true focused work or study, I accomplish what used to take me 3 hours of scatterbrain multitasking. So here's what you can do. Create a distraction-free zone for your learning, even if it's just 20 minutes of reading or practicing a skill. Deal. Make it 20 minutes of pure focus. That's it. Put your phone in another room or use an app to block social media. Close all your unrelated tabs. If you're at home, tell your family or roommates, hey, I'm offline for the next half hour. It might feel weird at first because you're so used to being constantly available to everyone, but guard that focus time fiercely. It is sacred time for your brain. In that focus state, you'll enter a flow and actually absorb the material or master the skill much faster. Researchers say that even a brief interruption like ping can derail your train of thought enough so that it takes several minutes to get back on track. So imagine what constantly glancing at your phone is doing. Don't do that to yourself. Single-tasking, monotasking, it's a superpower in a world of constant distraction. If you do this, not only will you learn faster, you'll also produce higher quality work. And bonus, you'll feel less mentally exhausted because switching tasks drains your energy. When you focus on one thing, you actually end the day less tired with more accomplished. Quality over quantity. Focus over frenzy. It's a game changer. Strategy number 5: Embrace the suck. Adopt a growth mindset. So let's talk mindset quickly. To accelerate your learning, you need to embrace the suck and see yourself as a work in progress. So you adopt a growth mindset, the belief that you can improve through effort, mistakes, and feedback. This isn't meant to be a motivational talk. It's backed by decades of research. Dr. Carol Dweck at Stanford proved that mindset about learning literally affects how much you learn. If you think your abilities are fixed, like, I'm just not good at X, you'll avoid challenges, you'll give up easily and basically stay bad. But if you believe you can grow, you will embrace new challenges. You will persist longer and ultimately achieve much, much, much more. It sounds almost obvious, but so many of us secretly carry limiting beliefs about our own potential. Every master was once a disaster, right? The people who learn the fastest are usually the ones who are willing to look stupid for a while. They're okay with being the worst in the room because they know that's the price of admission for growth. I try to live this. In fact, one of my personal mottos is expect to suck at the start. So when I try something new, I assume I'll be terrible in the beginning and that's okay. It frees me to actually focus on learning instead of of protecting my ego. So personal story that I hope drives this home for you. When I started my YouTube channel, I was not a natural on camera, far from it. I was an introvert who didn't even like being on camera, and here I was trying to make videos to help entrepreneurs. My early videos, let's just say they sucked. I could barely watch them without cringing. In the interview I did, I talked about this, that it took me 350 videos until I wasn't completely embarrassed for myself. And 700 videos until I inspired myself. That's not a typo, right? 350 videos before I felt even halfway okay about my skills. And by the time I hit 700, I finally made something I thought, hey, that was actually pretty good. Most people would quit after 5 videos that got no views or 50 videos that felt awkward. Like, I felt like quitting plenty of times. I used to beat myself up in those early days. I wanted to be great out of the gate. I thought I could be a B-minus level YouTuber immediately, but reality was I was F-level at the start. And because I expected to be at least B-, every video that turned out F made me question myself. At one point, I mentally quit thinking, I'll never be good on camera. But then I realized, no, this is just part of the process. I decided to expect to suck. I literally told myself, okay, you're terrible right now. So what? That just means you have a big opportunity to improve. Let's keep going. I stopped demanding perfection from myself and started demanding persistence. So if 40 people watched a video, I told myself maybe one person's life was changed by that video. So it was worth it and I'll get better next time. This mindset saved my YouTube career and allowed me to eventually reach millions of people. It will save you in whatever you're trying to learn too. When you catch yourself saying, I'm just not good at this, add one word yet. I'm not good at this yet. Replace I can't do this with I can't do this yet. It sounds like a small tweak, but it changes everything. Suddenly your brain goes from a brick wall to now it's a door. It's open. We can go through it. Neuroscience backs this up. When you believe effort will make you better, you actually engage more deeply and learn more each attempt. So when you think you're just innately bad, you don't even try as hard. Like, why bother? You just suck at it and you learn less. It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle. So break the cycle. Feel, give yourself permission to be a beginner. Seek out challenges that make you feel clumsy or dumb. Those are the ones that will actually create the most growth for you. So quick example, I once took a hot yoga class with my wife. I was the worst student in the room. I was falling over. I could barely do the poses while these yoga veterans around me are like graceful swans. I don't know how they're doing what they're doing. And I loved it. I'd rather be the absolute worst in a class of experts than the best in a class of beginners. Why? Because when you're the worst, you have the most to gain. So adopt that mentality. Don't avoid the stuff that you suck at. Seek it out and attack it with curiosity. Every failure, it's just data. It's feedback telling you what to improve on. As long as you learn from it, it's not really failure at all. It's just a stepping stone. So ask yourself, where are you holding yourself back because you're afraid of being bad? Decide to embrace being bad. You will accelerate your learning like never before. And ironically, you'll become good at that thing faster than you thought possible. Sucking at something is the first step to being sort of good at something. So keep going. Strategy number 6: Teach what you learn. Turn knowledge into belief. So the 6th strategy here is to teach it as soon as you learn it. This is one of my favorites. If you want to truly understand and remember something, turn around and explain it to someone else. Or if no one's around, explain it to an imaginary audience, to your pet, to the mirror. I don't care. Just teach it. Why? Because teaching forces you to consolidate and organize your knowledge in a way that that passive learning never will. Research has a name for this. It's called the Protégé Effect. When you expect to teach something, you learn it more effectively. In one study, students who were told they would have to teach the material to others recalled more information, organized it better, and remembered the important points more than the students who were just told to take a test on it. And here's what I love the most: none of them actually ended up teaching. The mere expectation changed how their brain absorbed the information. So think about that. If you approach learning something as if you'll have to teach it, you'll automatically go into a higher gear. You look for key points, you seek understanding instead of just rote memory, you fill in the gaps proactively, you engage in what scientists call deep processing. So by teaching, you're basically tricking your brain into learning more deeply and quickly. On top of that, when you teach, you will quickly find out where you are confused. You've probably experienced You think you get something, but when you try to explain it, you go, um, well, actually, I'm not sure how to put this. Teaching shines a spotlight on the fuzzy parts in your understanding. That becomes gold because then you know exactly what you need to review or clarify. It's like having a built-in knowledge scanner that highlights the missing pieces for you. This has been a huge part of my life. People often ask why I share so many videos with advice and lessons from others. Do I do it just to help the audience? And absolutely. I love helping Believe Nation. You guys are awesome. Them. But here's a secret: I'm helping myself too. By teaching ideas from videos I watch or books I read or interviews I do, I'm reinforcing those lessons in my own mind too. When I profile a famous entrepreneur or talk about 10 rules of success from Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, I'm effectively reteaching those principles to myself. And that means I'm absorbing them on a much deeper level than if I just read them or watched them and moved on. Explaining their rules to millions of people means those rules now become a part of me. And that daily input and output built my belief and knowledge base. So every video I I make. And it's not only helpful to you, hopefully it cements the lessons in me too. And you can do the same thing without having a YouTube channel. Make a habit of sharing what you learn. Did you read a great book? Teach a core idea to a friend over coffee, or record a voice note to yourself summarizing it. You're learning a new technique? Explain it to your team at work. Even better is teach it as if you're teaching a complete beginner. Simplify complex ideas into easy language. That's the Feynman technique in action, and it's magic for solidifying knowledge. If you can't break it down simply, you probably don't get it yet. So go back and fill in those gaps, and then try teaching it again. And one more quick hack: you can start a journal or blog or YouTube series where you teach your future self. After you learn something, write a quick entry as if you're instructing someone else on it. And I like to do this on a smaller scale. I write notes for my videos or speeches in a way that I'm talking to someone about it, not just bullet points. It makes a difference in recall. So remember, um, the old saying about the learning pyramid, that we retain 90% of what we teach and only 10% of what we read? Now, the exact percentages on that pyramid are debated, but the concept holds. Active learning methods— teaching, doing— beat passive ones— reading, listening— by a mile. When you teach, you're not only transferring knowledge, you're transforming it into something that lives in your own words and your experience. And the most beautiful part, when you teach, you also start to embody the identity of a knowledgeable person on that topic for yourself. You're not just someone trying to learn marketing, you're someone who can teach marketing. See how that boosts your confidence and belief? You carry yourself differently, and that motivates you to learn even more. So from now on, every time you learn something useful, ask, who can I share this with? How would I explain it so that they really get it? And it might feel awkward at first, but do it anyway. Share on social media, Share it in a group. Share it with one friend. Don't hoard knowledge. Use it and spread it. In the act of teaching, you'll find the lessons sticking to you like glue as well. And strategy number 7, take action. Learn by doing fast. Taking action immediately on what you learn is critical. And so in entrepreneurship especially, learning by doing is the fastest way to go from theory ideas into reality. You've got to move from the abstract to the concrete as soon as as possible. This not only reinforces what you learned, but it also exposes you to nuances and lessons that you'd never get just by sitting and studying. So there's an old Chinese proverb: I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand. And so research backs this up. When scientists look at people learning a new skill, they found that the group who actually practiced the task had way more brain activity in regions related to skill and performance with fewer errors compared to the group that only watched the task being done. So the observers barely activated key parts of the brain and made more mistakes when they finally tried the task themselves. So observation alone was not enough. Physical practice was required for the brain to really encode the skill. To quote the lead researcher, observation cannot replace physical practice in learning learning a new skill. So you can watch all the tutorial videos in the world or read all the articles and books, but until you get your hands dirty, your retention and understanding will be very limited. And I see this all the time with new entrepreneurs. They'll read 50 books on starting the business, but they haven't actually started anything. They have tons of knowledge that isn't quite real to them because it's not yet applied. The first time they try to implement, they realize, oh, this is harder than it looked on paper, or I didn't fully get that concept until I had to actually use it. So here's how you can start to implement this. Whenever you learn a new concept or skill, ask yourself, how can I use this today? Even if something that theoretically you won't need until later, find a way to practice it or experiment with it right now in a small way. If you're learning a new marketing strategy, pick one of your products and spend an hour applying that strategy in a mini campaign. Or you're studying a programming concept. Awesome. Write a tiny program that uses it. If you're watching this video about learning strategies, As soon as the video ends, pick one strategy and do something with it. So for example, take the worksheet that I talked about, right? And actually write down an action plan there. That's two strategies in one: action and teaching by writing. The longer you wait to apply knowledge, the more it fades and becomes theoretical again. Motion creates emotion and it creates long-term memory. So when I read a great business book or I get advice from a mentor, I immediately look for opportunities to apply it in my business or life that week. If I learn a better way to communicate with my team, I'll try it in our next meeting. If I pick up a tip for productivity, I'll experiment with it the very next morning. It does two things. One, it solidifies the lesson in my mind because I've now experienced it and not just read about it. And two, I get feedback. I see what works. I see what doesn't work, and I learn even more from doing it. So it becomes this virtuous cycle. You learn, you do, you get feedback, and you learn deeper. By taking action, you also create momentum. You overcome the inertia. Inertia that plagues so many people who know but don't do. Knowledge sitting in your head with no use is actually a burden. It makes you feel guilty, overwhelmed. But knowledge put into practice immediately turns into results and confidence. You start to trust yourself as someone who applies things, not just stores things. And guess what? That identity motivates you to learn even more because you know it's going somewhere. So don't be afraid of doing it wrong. This loops back to embracing the suck. Your first attempt implementing something new will be clunky. That's fine. You will learn way more from a sloppy first try than from endless perfect planning. I like to say version 1 is better than version none. Get a version out there, whatever it is— a first draft, a pilot test, an awkward trial run. You can iterate and improve it, but only if it exists in the real world. Action is where theory becomes tangible and where true mastery is born. So those are 7 strategies. But remember, knowledge alone is not power until it is applied. We just talked about that. Learning how to learn is the ultimate meta skill. It makes every other skill easier. Imagine the advantage you have in business if you can pick up new technologies, new market insights, new skills twice as fast as your competition. It's massive. As Darwin said, it's not the strongest or the smartest who survive. It's the ones most adaptable to change. Learning is adapting. Bet on yourself and invest the time to sharpen your axe, because when you do, nothing can stop you from cutting through whatever obstacles stand in your way. If you want to learn the only 20 rules you need to become rich, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe and I'll see you there. Law number 1: Money follows value. Money isn't random. It's the reward Third, for solving problems. Wealth is built not on what just excites you, but on what you create that serves others. The more value you deliver, the more dollars will chase you.