ALL OF LEADERSHIP Explained in 53 Minutes (No BS, No Fluff)

There's a great expression that says, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And I love it because every great thing that you want to create needs people. Almost everything that is going to change the world, solve a problem, improve something, these are usually big efforts and they require, you know, teams, a team working together to really get something important done. And people need leadership. The number one skill of an entrepreneur is people skills and leadership skills. Leadership just means getting a group of people to do something together that none of them would do alone by themselves. As strong as any one individual is, no one person can deal with all the challenges that are going to get thrown at them in anything that you do. The leader is the person that everyone looks at when it's time to decide something, when something goes wrong, and when they know if they're doing a good job or not. What leadership is, is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it, and getting a consensus on a common vision. A title doesn't make you a leader. People choosing to follow you makes you a great leader. Gallup measured 27 million employees and found that managers explained at least 70% of how engaged a team is. Now, I've got over 50 people on my team now. Inc. magazine called me one of the 100 great leadership speakers, but I started as an introvert who never thought of myself as a leader. And the first person I hired was for just 1 hour a day. When people ask me of what my definition of leadership is, I tell them, Wanting people to win as humans more than wanting them to win with you. So I wanted to make this video because I love studying leaders, business leaders, sports leaders, political leaders, all kinds of leaders. When I see them facing an impossible situation, I try to put myself in their shoes and ask myself, what would I do if I was in their shoes? So for example, the decision to turn down my dream job that I thought I wanted and become an entrepreneur instead came from Jeff Bezos's Regret minimization framework. Basically, don't live with regrets. He used it to quit his job on Wall Street and start Amazon. I borrowed his framework, and if I didn't, I probably wouldn't have this YouTube channel today and be making this video here. So if you learn how to be a better leader, you can use it with your team, with your clients, with your kids. The people who work for you will remember you as the leader who changed their life. That big dream of yours isn't going to happen with you doing all the work all by yourself. So there are 10 things that great leaders do that are never taught in school, and I'm going to cover them today through the stories of some of the greatest leaders who ever lived. 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. Rule number 1, make people feel important. Mary Kay Ash spent 25 years working in sales for other people. She watched men get promoted over her time after time. And when she finally quit and started Mary Kay Cosmetics in 1963, she promised to build a completely different kind of company. Her entire business was built on one specific habit. She imagined that every single person she met had a large invisible sign hanging around their neck that said, make me feel important. She practiced this with everyone she met. When a salesperson spoke to her, Mary Kay gave them her complete focus. She remembered the names of their kids. She handwrote thousands of personal birthday cards to her team members every single year. She also created a system that made her workers feel like absolute rock stars. Instead of giving out basic paper certificates, she rewarded her top sellers with brand new pink Cadillacs. She pinned diamond bumblebees on their jackets in front of huge crowds of cheering people. She knew that people need a paycheck, but they will push themselves much harder for true recognition. And by focusing entirely on making her team feel valued, she turned this tiny store into a massive Now, one of the things that I try to do with our team is we have a Slack channel where I try to share a story at least a couple times a week, recognizing somebody on my team and what they did. So a team member goes above and beyond for a client. Another one tries some new editing style or technique that has a massive return, just trying to find the different wins that happened and not keep it so siloed to just some of the people who knew about it, but to expose it to the whole team. So I'll go for my morning Believe Walk, and I'll think about somebody who did something great yesterday on the team that I want to share with the whole team. share, and I'll just make a quick video and share company-wide in our Slack. I'll tag them so that they feel recognized and everybody on the team can see what a rockstar that person is too. Number 2, lead by working harder than anyone else. When the USA basketball team met for a training camp in 2008, they had the best players in the world. So think guys like LeBron James and Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. They were on that team, but Kobe Bryant wanted to show them What true hard work looked like. One morning, Chris Bosh went down to breakfast early at 8 in the morning. He thought he would be the first person to be there. When he walked into the room, he saw Kobe Bryant sitting at a table with ice bags already on his knees. Kobe was completely covered in sweat. He actually had woken up at 4 in the morning. He called his trainer, went to the gym, and did a massive workout before the sun even came up. He wanted to make 800 shots before the official team practice even started. While his teammates were just waking up and yawning and stretching, Kobe was already 3 hours into his workday. Now, he didn't brag about it to the rest of the team. He just let his actions speak for him. Seeing Kobe work that hard completely changed the team. The other players realized they had to push themselves much harder too if they wanted to keep up with him. When I was training Ida on our team to work with our clients to help them build momentum on their YouTube channel, I got sick pretty early into the process and she was talking to clients. She'd made Fathom calls, Zoom call recordings. I'd watch them and give her feedback. And A week or two in while I was struggling to keep pace with what she was creating, I got sick and I went to lie down in my bed while I was traveling and still finished the recording. And it wasn't my best feedback for her, but the fact that I was willing to show up for her while I was sick, while I was stressed, while I was overwhelmed, made her feel even more valued, made her feel even more important part of the team. And those are the things that team remembers because you were truly pouring into them. Number 3, listen before you speak. Simon Sinek often shares this pretty powerful leadership habit that he learned from the legend Nelson Mandela. Mandela is known as one of the greatest leaders in the world, but he also gave credit to his father. So his father was a tribal chief in South Africa, and when his father held a meeting, he followed 2 pretty simple rules. First, they always sat in a circle, and second, his father was always the last person to speak as the chief. Mandela watched this and used this exact same habit for his entire life, for all of his meetings, because in modern business, the boss usually shares their opinion right away. And when that happens, the team usually just agrees with the boss to stay safe, cuz you don't wanna disagree with the boss. They hide their real ideas. Sinek says that great leaders actually do the opposite. They hold their own opinions back. They ask questions to understand why someone thinks a certain way. And by waiting until the very end to talk, the leader makes a team feel heard and gets the smartest ideas out in the open. One of the things we do internally is when we're having meetings, we'll do a, say, a monthly meeting on a certain topic. Somebody's trying to improve the click-through rate on our videos. So we'll do a monthly meeting looking at all of the thumbnails for the channel, and they have a WinDoc that they present. And I'll talk about that a little bit later on. But basically they're presenting their findings, presenting their ideas, coming up with the solutions and what they want to do for the next month. And they present their ideas, everybody else listens, and then I'm the last one at the end to say, hey, here's what we're gonna go and work on and do. And by having them prepare in advance, having them come with the research, come with the prep, and also think about how they wanna solve the problem as opposed to it just being given to them, gives them more of an ownership mentality. And we also get the best ideas before finally making a decision. Number 4, take the blame and share the credit. Jocko Willink was the commander of a Navy SEAL team in Iraq in 2006. And during a massive fight in the city of Ramadi, a terrible mistake happened for them. There was a lot of fog and confusion American soldiers accidentally fired at each other. One soldier died and several others were badly hurt. Jocko had to stand in front of his commanding officers and explain what went wrong. Now, there are many reasons that he could have used to point the finger and deflect from him. He could have blamed the radio operator. He could have blamed the crazy fighting conditions. He could have talked about the other people involved. But instead, Jocko stood up in the meeting, looked at his bosses, and he told them that he was the only person to blame for the tragic mistake. He said he was the commander, so the failure was entirely his fault. He took the full blame for the worst thing that could happen to his team, right? Somebody died because he took the blame. One, his bosses trusted him to keep his job, and 2, his soldiers trusted him even more because they knew he would never throw them under the bus to save himself. Later on, when the team won huge battles, Jocko refused to take the spotlight. He gave all the credit and praise to the men doing the hard work on the ground. Now, this is something I'm trying to actively do more in my business as well, because I get invited to speak at different events and help people and get the rewards and recognition, et cetera. But it's all the people behind the team. It's the editors we have, the researchers, the people doing the thumbnails and the titles and the split testing. There's so much that goes into making these videos happen that if we didn't have this awesome team, I would probably just be slaving away making videos all day long, trying to figure it out all out myself. And so one of the things that I'm constantly trying to remind myself to do more of is one, recognize team more for the work that they're doing. So when I get praise, hey, that's not just me, there's a lot of people behind this as well. And then trying to show the people on the team the results of their work, because if somebody's working on a thumbnail and then we get this amazing comment on the video, it's like you were part of that, right? Like you, you created the thumbnail that helped reach this person that had this impact on their life. And so I'm consciously trying to do a better job of that internally as well, because I think as entrepreneurs we're spoiled in that we get all the limelight at the front and people don't always see the connection of the work they're doing to the results that clients are getting. 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. You can click the link in the description below to go grab it, and I'll see you there. Rule number 5, focus on just a few things. So when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was losing $1 billion a year. Apple was making dozens of different computers and printers and software programs. The product list was so confusing that even the sales team could not explain the difference between all the models that they have. Jobs decided he had to fix this and fast. So he called his top managers into a meeting room. He walked up to a whiteboard and he drew a simple grid with 4 empty boxes. He wrote consumer and pro at the top. Then he wrote desktop and portable on the side. He told his team that Apple was going to stop making almost everything they were working on. Instead, they would focus entirely on making just one great computer for each of those 4 boxes. Many expensive projects were canceled right away and forces designed and engineers to put all of their daily energy into making just 4 perfect machines. That intense focus saved Apple from going out of the business and built a foundation for the company to later invent the iPod and the iPhone. To help keep things simple for us, we created what we call a WinDoc, and this was inspired by Lee Benson, who has a book called Your Most Important Number. I believe that's what it's called. He built a, I think, $800 million business and he built it off of this framework. We've modified it a little bit around having One win, we call it a wildly important number. So everybody on the team has one most important number that they're shooting for, and then the 3 drivers underneath it. So for example, back to the thumbnail idea, one person on the team is in charge of working on the thumbnails and improving the click-through rate for all the videos on our thumbnails. And we're constantly trying, and she's coming with new ideas and different templates. And every month she'll present her win, and that's the main thing she's focused on. Where are we with our thumbnails and our click-through rate? And then the 3 drivers underneath that make it happen. And so there's 3 things that she's working on every month that hopefully improve our most important number, the, the win doc that she started with. So having clarity and having focus really helps people become a lot more productive and also have clarity on what they should be doing every day in their work. Number 6, keep your plans simple. So Warren Buffett is one of the richest men in the world, but his investment rules are surprisingly simple. He calls it his circle of competence. He only buys companies if he can easily understand exactly how they make money. In 1972, he bought a box chocolate company called See's Candies. It's really good chocolate. He understood that people love buying chocolates for holidays. So in 1988, he started buying massive amounts of stock in Coca-Cola. He drank Cherry Coke every day, and he knew that people all over the world would keep buying Coke. And during the late 1990s, almost every investor was buying these complex internet and technology stocks. Many people called Buffett out of touch because he refused to buy them. He simply said he did not understand how those tech companies were going to make real profit. When the technology crash happened in 2000, those complex companies lost billions of dollars. Buffett kept making money because he stuck to simple businesses like candy and soda and insurance. So one thing we try to do is just do one small thing at a time that's inside your circle of competence. So even on this video as an example, I'm trying to share more of my personal stories at the beginning, why I care about this video, why I wanted to do it in the first place. And then sprinkle throughout sharing a little bit of how we do things behind the scenes. And we'll test it and we'll see if you guys like it. If it's awesome and you enjoy it, let me know in the comments. We'll do more. If you hate it and say shut up, maybe I'll do a little bit less. But having one clear idea that you're focusing on at a time makes it so much easier to make real momentum and progress. Number 7, build an unshakable daily routine. David Goggins believes that a tough mindset is built by doing things you hate every single day. Before he became a famous Navy SEAL and a distance runner, He was overweight and he was not happy. To change his life, he created a strict morning schedule that he refused to break. So every morning, Goggins wakes up around 5 o'clock. He doesn't hit the snooze button like most people. Instead, he gets out of bed and runs for at least 12 miles. He does this before he eats breakfast and before most people are even awake or getting up. He openly admits that he hates running. He runs specifically because it is difficult and because it makes him uncomfortable. He calls this practice putting armor on his mind. By forcing himself to suffer through a long run first thing in the morning, he's proving to himself that he is in control, that he's building these mental calluses. And when terrible things happen later in the day, he is already prepared because he won the hardest battle before the sun even came up in the morning. One of the things I love doing is what I call the Believe Walk. And I start every day, 99% of my time with my Believe Walk, and it's It's simple as this. You wake up, you get outside, you go for a, a walk or a run. You, within 15 minutes of being awake, are outside getting sunlight on your face. Even if it's cloudy, even if it's snowy, even if it's raining, you get outside and you spend 15 to 20 minutes listening to something that helps you believe in yourself more. So this morning I was learning about Arthur Blank, who's the founder of Home Depot. And by the time I come home, I have more belief, I have more energy. I've gotten a little bit of movement in. I've gotten some sunlight on my eyes. I've filled my head with some inspiration. I can borrow belief from someone who's done a little bit more than me. And by putting that in part of my morning routine, on the rare days that I miss it, like if I'm traveling and have to catch a morning flight, I feel it. I don't feel as inspired. I don't feel as refreshed. I don't feel as competent. I don't have as much belief. And so find the thing that helps you believe in yourself the most, whether it's the hard run and mental armor like David Goggins, whether it's the believe walk like me, put that in your morning routine, do it consistently. You will become a better leader. Number eight: Take big risks when it matters. In 2002, Elon Musk made over $150 million when he sold his company PayPal. Most people now, what do you do? You take that money and you relax. But instead, not Elon. He put his money into building electric cars with Tesla and rockets with SpaceX. By the end of 2008, both companies were completely out of cash. SpaceX had tried to launch three rockets, and all three of them crashed. Tesla was struggling to build its first car. Musk was almost completely. Broke. He had just enough money left to save one company. If he split the money, both companies might die. Musk decided he could not let either dream fail, so he gave every last dollar he had to keep both SpaceX and Tesla alive. He gave up all of his personal comforts. He even had to borrow money from his friends just to pay his own rent and buy food. Because he risked his entire personal fortune, SpaceX managed to launch its 4th rocket perfectly. That success won them a massive contract with NASA, and a few days later, on Christmas Eve, Tesla secured the exact amount of It needed to survive too. Now, I don't do this enough. I don't think I take enough risks. I admire the leaders who take bigger and bolder risks than I do. I think I play it really safe most of the time, and I think that's where you can borrow belief. I think by me studying leaders and by you studying leaders, it gives you a little more belief, a little more courage, a little more boldness to go and do the thing that's in your mind, that's in your heart, because the world is waiting for you and me to show up. Number nine: Keep moving forward after a failure. Sarah Blakely grew up wanting to be a lawyer just like her father was. She studied for the law school admission test, but she failed it. She studied even harder and took it a second time, and she failed it again. Her dream of becoming a lawyer was getting destroyed here. She needed to make money, so she spent seven years selling fax machines door to door, and most people just they closed the door in her face. But growing up, her father had a special rule at the dinner table. He would ask her what she had failed at that week. If she had said nothing, he would actually be disappointed in her. He taught her that failing just means you are trying. Trying something new because she was not afraid to fail again. She decided to try solving a simple clothing problem. One night she cut off the feet of her pantyhose to wear under a pair of white pants. She didn't know anything about making clothes. She just knew she had a good idea. She used her old failures as proof that she could survive the hard times, and she built a new company called Spanx into a massive billion-dollar-plus company. It's why I make videos every single day, because often they'll fail. Like maybe this video crushes, maybe this video tanks, but there's a new one that I can make again and again and again. Tomorrow. We're constantly trying new ideas. I get something in my head, like, find the fastest way to get it out to the market. And if you put so much pressure on yourself that this has to be the one thing, we tend to overcomplicate. We tend to be paralyzed by fear and insecurities. And so as quickly as you can, get your idea out of your head into the market instead of spending another 6 months waiting and hemming and hawing and delaying. When I make a video every single day, Some win, some don't. We move on and we keep trying. And number ten: Put the needs of the team first. So back to Simon Sinek, who before talked about Nelson Mandela. Next, he was visiting a U.S. Marine Corps base, and he noticed something interesting happening at lunchtime. Everyone was standing in line for food in the cafeteria. The newest and youngest soldiers were at the very front of the line. The senior officers were standing at the very back. Sinek asked a Marine general why they did this, and the general said that leaders. Now, this isn't a formal rule that's written in the, you know, military rule book. It was just a deeply respected tradition that they had. So in combat, officers are expected to put their own lives at risk to protect their soldiers. They made sure that the team has everything that they need to survive. When they're in danger, the leader steps forward. When there is food or comfort or safety, the leader steps back. The Marines know that true leadership means giving up your own comfort for the good of the people that you lead. And this goes back to my definition of leadership, which is I want people to win as humans more than I want them to win with me. Because sometimes the best thing for them to do is not even be in the company. You sometimes you have to push people out of the business because they have a dream that doesn't fit inside your dream anymore. And them staying with you could be great for your business, but it's actually cheating them of their ability to go actually realize their own potential too. Become the leader the world needs you to be. It's easy to look at all these great leaders and think that they're just so much better than you, that they had more training or more experience, or they're just extroverted, or they have some magical element about them. But the reality is they are just ordinary people who were called to do something extraordinary. And you are too. You've got big ambitions and big dreams, and people are counting on you to choose today to step up as a leader and guide them forward. So make people feel important. Work harder than anyone else. Listen before you speak. Take the blame and share the credit. Focus on just a few things. Keep your plans simple. Build an unbreakable daily routine. Take big risks when it matters. Keep moving forward after failures and put the needs of the team first. These are the leadership principles that have shaped the world but aren't taught in school. And now you know them too. Pick one, apply it this week, and go make yourself and your family proud of the leader. that you are becoming because we need you to step up. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn all of money explained. Nobody ever taught you money, and that's why it causes so much stress in your life. Our school systems teach us nothing about money. Nothing. It's pathetic. Money's just numbers in and numbers out, isn't it? See, that's where people get thrown off, I think. I think that's the root of a lot of financial problems for amateurs and professionals. When the Finra Foundation quizzed more than 25,000 American adults on seven basic money questions, only 27% of them could get five of them right. If you want to be rich, forget rich. If you just want to have basic financial security, you have to pay yourself first. There's three 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. Understanding how How money works decides what you can say yes to, what you get to walk away from, and how much of your life actually belongs to you. Most of us don't speak the language of finance, and I think that's on purpose. I think people in finance do not want you to know the secrets to wealth because that makes it easier for them to keep it. In 1992, Daymond John was living with his mom in Queens. He didn't have investors, no degree in business. He had $40 to his name. His mother had taught him how to sew, so he spent that $40 on fabric and made a few dozen tie-top hats. I go to the store, get $40 worth of fabric. I come home, I give my mother the, the, the stuff to sew the hats, and she says, I'm not sewing this, you're sewing this. I said, oh crap, now I gotta work at this. I sew the hats, and then all of a sudden I have all these hats and only one head. So he took them to a street corner and sold every single one of them in a day for $800. That's when I went out and sold those hats. hats outside on that Good Friday, and I sold $800 worth of hats in 1 hour. The hats worked, so we expanded into shirts and jerseys. Then I would start going to the Black Expos where there was like a basic flea market on the road, and I would try to sell shirts there. His mom believed in it enough to mortgage the house they lived in for $100,000, and they turned half the house into a factory. She said, this is all we have, uh, why don't I go out and I take a loan on the house Then, you know, you manufacture, deliver the clothes, and put the money back in. Then he took samples to the Magic Apparel Show in Las Vegas and walked out with $300,000 in orders. I went to the Magic Trade Show, the trade show of the fashion industry, and I wrote $300,000 worth of orders. But here's how that business actually works. The stores don't hand you money at the show. They order, then they pay you 30, 60, 90 days after you deliver. Meanwhile, you buy the fabric upfront, and you have to pay the people who are sewing it. So Daymond had $300,000 of orders and nothing coming in for months. The $100,000 from the house went into the fabric and the, and the employees. He got around $75,000 of the orders made, and 4 months later, that money was gone, and the store still hadn't paid him yet. So he went to a bank, they said no. He went to another bank, they said no. He went to 27 banks, and every single one of them turned him down. I went to 27 The orders kept coming in the whole time until he had about $1 million of them sitting there and he couldn't fulfill them. His mother took what was left of their money and put an ad in the newspaper. It said, $1 million in orders need financing. 33 people called. And then Mom again comes to the rescue and says, I have an idea. She takes out an ad in the newspaper for, uh, says something like, $1 million in orders Need financing, and 33 people call that ad. One of them was a textile division of Samsung who wanted to test the urban market. One was Samsung's textile division. They agreed to pay to get his orders made, but they had one condition. He had to do $5 million in sales within 3 years. He did $30 million in 3 months. And by 1998, FUBU was doing over $350 million a year in worldwide sales. Orders aren't money. You can have a lot of sales and still have nothing in your bank account. Now, a lot of people think, okay, this doesn't apply to me because I may not have a business or I'm not making enough money yet for any of this to matter. You're thinking money stuff starts once there's money, but you don't need a business for any of this. If you get paid and you pay bills, you're already making these decisions every month. You're just making them without knowing the rules of money and it costs you real money. If you're carrying a credit card balance at 20%, that's costing you today whether or not you ever learn about what compound interest is. All progress begins with telling the truth. So here's the truth: you're not bad with money. You were just never taught about it, and you can learn it. So here's how money actually works start to finish. Money is a skill, not a personality. So you've probably said at some point, "I'm just not a numbers person." Only 27% of adults got five of seven basic money questions right. That's not about who's good with numbers. It's It's about what nobody actually teaches you. So being leads to doing. If you decide you're the person who understands money, you'll start opening the bank app instead of avoiding it. You'll start reading the statements instead of just the total. You've been waiting until you feel ready to look at your money. It doesn't work that way. It works the other way around. You look at it and then it stops being scary every time. So once a week for 20 minutes, you look at 3 things: what came in, what went out, and what is actually left. That's it. Don't worry yet about budgeting or giant spreadsheets with 400 rows. Just looking on purpose every week until it stops scaring you. And you know when the best time to start is? Right now. How about right now? Open the app while I keep talking. The number in there is the number whether you look at it or not. Looking doesn't cost you anything. Learn your 3 numbers before anything else. Almost every money disaster comes from mixing up revenue, profit, and cash flow. So revenue is what comes in, profit is what's left over, and mixing those 2 up is how somebody with a busy business ends up with an empty bank account. The The third one is cash flow, and this is about timing, and this is the one that actually kills a lot of businesses. You can run a profitable business and still go broke because the money you're owed arrives later than the bills you have to pay. Let's look at a real example. Let's look at a dance studio. On the year, the business was profitable. Looks great, but I pulled in his last 3 months, month by month. October was negative $5,300. November was positive $2,500. December was negative $900. So across the quarter, he was down $3,700 while believing he was doing fine. His fixed costs were about $20,000 a month. Before anything else happened, $11,000 of rent, $2,000 of insurance, instructor pay, software, cleaning. So the only question that matters is how much he has to bring in that month to cover it. $20,000 keeps the door open. So he set his target at $25,000. So there's something left at the end. Now he's not guessing anymore. He has a number to target. You have that number too, whether you're running a company or just your household. Add up what has to go out every month, no matter what. That's the floor. Once you know that, you know exactly what the month has to bring in. And if that number scares you, that's exactly why you need to know what it is. You can't cut a cost that you've never written down. So put every expense on one page before you decide anything. Then take what's actually in the account and divide that by your monthly floor. So if you got $30,000 sitting there and you need $10,000 a month, you have 3 months. That's your runway. With runway, you can say no. Without it, you say yes to anything because you need the cash. Somebody with 6 months of runway can walk away from a bad client. Somebody with 3 weeks says yes to everything, including the work that's going to make the next 3 weeks worse for you. If your runway is under 3 months, that's the number to fix before Anything else in this video. Your income problem is usually a price problem. If you want more money and you're an owner, the fastest change isn't cutting your expenses, it's what you charge. And I'll show you my own numbers so this isn't just some theory. So my mastermind is $50,000 a year. My growth strategy coaching program is $15,000 for 4 months. If somebody can't do that, we have smaller versions that people can join. I said those in that order on purpose. It's called price anchoring. When the first number somebody hears is $50,000 and the $15,000 sounds reasonable and one's After that sound like a bargain. If I started with the lowest price first, nobody would ever pay me more than that. And when you do raise your price, raise it on the next new client, not the ones you already have. You get the new number without a single awkward conversation with existing clients, and you don't get paid for the hours. You get paid for the result. Somebody selling 6 coaching sessions is selling time. Somebody selling, I'm gonna add $200,000 to your revenue this year, is selling an outcome. And an outcome can be worth 10 times the price of the time. Selling to a smaller number of people at a serious price is also just easier to run. Low-ticket offers at $50 a month needs thousands of customers, a marketing machine, and a support team. That's real business, but it's a much harder one to build first. Make a list of 50 people. So here's what I'd do if I had to rebuild my income starting Monday with no ads and no audience. I'd write down 50 names, not 5,000 followers, 50 specific people who could each spend $50,000 with me in a year or send me 3 people who will. Real names, real companies, real people who already have the money and a problem that I know how to solve. Then I wouldn't pitch a single one of them. I'd start a show and invite them on as a guest. An invite is the easiest yes in business because you're offering somebody 45 minutes to talk about their own work. You're leading with a give instead of an ask. And after the recording, when the relationship is warm and real, you offer them a second opinion on something they're working on at no cost. You look at it, you tell them the truth, you give them your actual thinking from your expert opinion. And some of those turn into clients. Some send you 3 clients each. One of my clients works with home service businesses doing $10 million or more, where a normal client is worth $40,000 to $100,000 a year, and one platform-level deal is worth $1 million a year. At that size, you don't need 50 wins, you need 2. And if you don't have a business yet, this still works. Write down 50 people who could hire you, who could promote you, or who could hand you the opportunity that changes your entire year. You're not asking any of them for anything upfront. You're making yourself useful. to 50 people who could hire you one conversation at a time. Your 50 will look different than mine. Cool. Write it anyway. It's the single highest value document in your business, and it costs you an afternoon of work. Start with 10 names tonight. 10 is enough to tell you whether this list is something that can be real or not, or whether you've been just guessing about who your customer actually is. Pay yourself like an owner. So a job pays you, takes a tax, and hands you what's left over. Right? A company earns, pays its costs, and then you choose how the money reaches you. That choice is worth a lot of money. So in Canada, where I am, money left inside a corporation is taxed at roughly 19 to 20%, while a big personal salary can hit at around 50%. So pulling out every dollar the second it comes in is one of the most expensive habits an owner can have. I pay myself a small, steady salary, so I have a clean personal record for things like the mortgage, and the rest stays inside working in the business. There are legitimate costs a business can carry too. If you work from home, I should share of the mortgage interest, the utilities, the internet can be a business expense because that's generally where the work happens. It usually gets worked out by space. So if your office is 1 room out of 8, that's about 12% of your house. So about 12% of those bills is a business cost. Keep the receipts, let your accountant run the actual numbers. Your country's rules are going to be different than mine, and I am not your accountant. So take this to a good one, but go with the right question. Don't walk in asking, how do I just pay less tax? Walk in asking how to structure what you pay yourself. That's now an owner's question and mindset, and it's worth thousands or tens of thousands a year. Buy your time back. Eliminate, automate, delegate. So buying your time back is how you make more money. So do it in this order: eliminate, automate, delegate. Eliminate first because it's free. So go through your week and find what nobody actually needs. So I used to write up minutes after every mastermind meeting. It took me real time. And one day I realized And then I realized nobody was reading them, not one person. So I stopped. And what happened? Nothing happened. Nobody cared. You've got something in your week right now that nobody is reading either. So write down everything that you did last week. The parts that nobody would miss are the parts that you cut out. Automate is second. So anything repeatable that follows the same steps every time should be handled by software or AI instead of you and can be done at 11:00 PM. Delegate last and start much smaller than you think. You can hire somebody for an hour a day. That, that's it. That's how I started. It's cheap enough that it won't hurt you If it goes badly, and it teaches you the real skill. The skill isn't hiring, it's handing work off and then letting somebody do it their way. So do it in that order. You'll want to jump straight to delegate, and then you're paying somebody to do work that you should have deleted or should be handed off to automation. And there's a number underneath all of this that you can actually calculate. Take what you want to earn in a year and then divide it by about 2,000 working hours. So if you want $200,000, your time is worth roughly $100 an hour. Now look at what you filled your last week. If you spent 6 hours on something you could hand off for $25 an hour, you spent $600 of your own time to avoid paying $150. So you lost $450 and it felt like you were being strategic and careful. Then make the rest of it boring. So once you're earning money and keeping money, growing it should be the most boring part. For the first 10 years, compounding barely does anything. Then it does almost everything. So take $10,000 growing at 5% a year. After 10 years, it's worth about $16,000. Give it 30 years, it's worth $43,000. The $10,000 earned around $6,000 in its first decade and around $27,000 in the last 20 years. The extra 20 years did that, not a bigger return. That's why waiting is so costly. The last 20 years are where the money actually grows. If you wait to start, those are the years that you're giving up. Put it in an index fund that holds the whole market and just leave it there. You don't have to go and research individual stocks, not because you couldn't learn, but because those hours are hours you're not putting into your own business or career. And that's what actually changes your income. And leaving it all in cash isn't actually safe. Prices in America are roughly 22.5% higher than before 2020. So money sitting still has been losing real value this entire time. One more thing, compounding works against you too, and it works a lot faster. So credit card rates are sitting around 20%, and new card offers are often higher than that. Compounding works on debt as well, and at 20%, it grows faster than any investment you're going to own. There is no investment you're going to find that Reliably beats paying off a balance at 20%. So if you have a balance on your credit card, clear it before you invest a dollar. It's the best guaranteed return you'll ever get. You can learn this faster than you think. Nobody taught you any of this, and it isn't your fault. What you do now, though, is, is up to you. Daymond John didn't have a finance degree when he took those hats out to that street corner. He learned it the hard way. And the worst of it came after the mortgage money ran out with about $1 million in orders that he just couldn't fill and 27 banks saying no. A bird sitting on a tree isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch; it's in her wings. So if you have the ability, then you have the responsibility, and you have the ability. Now let's learn all of the stock market explained. The stock market isn't a casino, and believing that it is might be the most expensive mistake you ever make. Stocks are not lottery tickets. There's a company behind every stock. If a company does well, the stock does. Well, it's not that complicated. I have never had less than 80% of my money in American business. You can call them stocks. I don't want to own anything else. 62% of Americans already own stock, according to Gallup in 2025. Yet most of them couldn't explain what they actually own or how it really works. The single, single most important thing to me in the stock market for anyone is to know what you own. I'm amazed how many people own stocks They would not be able to tell you why they own it. If you can't explain— I'm serious— you can't explain to a 10-year-old in 2 minutes or less why you own a stock, you shouldn't own it. 90% of the people that buy stocks don't think of them the right way. They think about something that they hope goes up next week, and they think about the market as something they hope goes up. And if it's down, they feel worse. I feel better. So it's not even about stocks at all. It's about whether you spend an next 40 years trading your time for a paycheck or you finally get your money working harder than you do. Can't wait till you have a ton of money to start investing and think, I'm not an investor. What you got to do is say, rather than my Apple phone, let me own Apple stock. Let me own a piece of all the best companies, not just Apple. I've got to become an owner or I'll always be in scarcity. Longer-term, stock market's been the best place to be last 10 years, last 30 years, last 130 years. But if you need the money in 1 or 2 years, You shouldn't be buying stocks. The first rule in investment is don't lose, and the second rule in investment is don't forget the first rule. And that's all the rules there are. I mean, that, uh, if you buy things for far below what they're worth and you buy a group of them, you basically don't lose money. Let me tell you about a man named Ronald Read. He wasn't a tech founder. He didn't invent an app. He wasn't born into money. Ronald pumped gas and fixed cars at a service station in Vermont for 25 years, and then he worked as a janitor at a JCPenney store for another 17 years. He wore old flannel shirts and a worn coat he held together with a safety pin. He drove a secondhand car. He gathered fallen branches for his own firewood and ate simple breakfasts at the local diner. Everyone in his small town assumed he was just barely getting by. Then in 2014, Ronald passed away at 92 years old, and the entire town was stunned because this quiet janitor left behind an estate worth almost $8 million. He gave $1.2 million to the local library, library and $4.8 million to the local hospital. People could not believe it. How does a gas station attendant die with $8 million in the bank? He didn't win the lottery. He didn't have some secret inheritance. Here's what he did. He read the Wall Street Journal every single day. He spent far less than he earned, and he quietly invested the difference into blue-chip stocks, household names that you already know. Then he reinvested every dividend they paid him, and he waited for decades while his neighbors bought the shiny new cars to look successful to friends, Ronald was busy actually becoming wealthy. He understood something most people never figure out their entire lives: looking rich and being rich are 2 completely different things. And the stock market was the simple tool that turned a janitor's small paycheck into a fortune. Now, maybe you think this only works for other people, right? You might be thinking you don't earn enough to invest, or that the market is just way too risky right now and you'll lose whatever you put in. Because honestly, it feels like rolling the dice in a casino in a game that you don't understand, right? I hear you, and I think all progress begins with telling the truth. So here's the truth: Ronald Read was never rich when he started. He was pumping gas. He never once earned a big salary in his life. What he had wasn't money; it was understanding. The only reason the market might feel like a casino to you is that nobody ever sat down and explained the rules of the game, and you can't win a game when you don't even know how. How it's played. So give me the next few minutes, forget everything that's ever confused you about the stock market, and I'm going to explain the entire stock market to you like you're brand new but very smart. And by the end, you'll see it the exact same way Ronald did. A share of stock is a real piece of a real business. So let's start at the very beginning, because this is where most people get lost. When you buy a share of a stock, you are not buying a lottery ticket or a magic number on some screen. You're buying a tiny piece of an actual company. You become a part owner of that business. If you own one share of Apple, you own a real slice of every iPhone they sell, every store they run, every dollar of profit they make. That's it. That's the whole idea. And it's simpler than anyone makes it sound. Now here's a quick way to see how big a company really is. You take the price of one share and you multiply it by the total number of shares that exist. That number is called the Market capitalization, and it's just what the public has decided the entire company is worth right now. So when you hear that a company is worth two trillion dollars, all that means is it has a lot of shares, each one owned by people just like you. Understand this, and everything else starts to click into place. You are not just gambling on numbers; you're buying ownership in real businesses that make real things and earn real money. And as those businesses grow over the years, the value. Value of your little piece grows right alongside them. That's the entire engine of building wealth in the stock market. How a company even gets on the market. So how does a company's stock end up sitting in your app available to buy? It goes through something called an IPO, which stands for initial public offering. That's the day a private company decides to sell pieces of itself to the public for the very first time. And to pull it off, the company hires an investment banker that studies the business. They set a starting price, and then they offer those shares to investors. It's not quick and it's not cheap. A typical IPO takes 6 to 9 months from start to finish, and it can cost the company around 10% of all the money it raises just in legal, accounting, and banking fees. That's how big a deal going public really is. And once the company is public, its stock trades on a stock exchange. An exchange is just a giant, heavily regulated marketplace that connects people who want to buy with people who want to sell. So in the US, 2 giants run the show. It's the New York Stock Exchange, was founded all the way back in 1792 and has more than 2,800 mostly large established blue-chip companies. And then the NASDAQ came along in 1971 as the world's first fully electronic market and lists over 3,300 companies packed with tech names like Apple and Microsoft. So when you tap that buy button, your order shoots over to one of these exchanges and gets matched with a seller in a fraction of a second. You don't need to yell on a trading floor to buy it. What actually makes a price go up and down? So here's the part that confuses almost everyone, so stay with me. A stock's price is not set by some boss sitting in the back room deciding what it should be. It's set by supply and demand, by real people deciding to buy and sell the share. Every exchange keeps a running list called an order book. The highest price a buyer is willing to pay is called the bid, and the lowest price a seller is willing to accept is called the ask. When more people want to buy than sell, those eager buyers snap up the available shares and have to offer a little more to win them, so the price goes up. When more people want to sell, sellers start accepting lower and lower offers just to get out, and the price slides down. That's it. That's the whole machine. So What gets people excited to buy or scared to sell? News and numbers. Strong company earnings, good economic reports, and exciting new products—those bring buyers running in. A weak quarter, scary headlines, bad economy—those sends people rushing for the exits. You'll hear three nicknames for this mood: a bull market is when prices keep rising and everyone feels optimistic; a bear market is when prices keep falling. Falling and fear takes over. And a flat or sideways market is when price just drifts and nothing dramatic happens. But here is the one sentence that you can tattoo on your brain: in the short term, prices swing on emotion, but in the long term, prices follow how much money the business actually earns. Remember that and you'll stay calm when everyone else is panicking. Investing is not the same is gambling. So let me clear up the biggest myth of all, because it's the one that keeps a lot of people stuck on the sidelines. There is a huge difference between investing and gambling, even though they can look similar when you look at it from the outside. Gambling is betting on a quick outcome that you can't control, like a coin flip or a hot tip that your cousin swears by. The day trader glued to his screen, buying and selling in minutes, trying to guess what the next little bit of wiggle room is that person is much closer to a gambler, and the research shows the vast majority of them actually lose money over time. Investing is the complete opposite. Investing is buying real ownership in great businesses and then giving them years to grow. One is a sprint based on luck, the other is a marathon based on patience. Ronald Read never day traded a single time in his life. He bought, he held, and he let the years do the heavy lifting. So the next time someone tells you the market is just gambling, now you know the real truth. It's only gambling if you choose to treat it that way. Treat it like ownership, give it time, and the odds swing massively in your favor. Why you keep hearing about the S&P 500. Now, there are thousands of stocks out there, and trying to watch every single one would drive anybody absolutely crazy. So years ago, smart people built indexes, which are really just scoreboards that track a big group of stocks all at once. The most famous one in the world is the S&P 500. It follows 500 of the largest companies in America, and it's weighted by size, which means the bigger the company, the more it pushes the score up or down. In fact, just the 10 biggest companies now make up about 38% of the entire S&P 500. So when a news anchor says the market was up Today, they almost always mean this one index moved up. You probably also heard of the Dow Jones. It tracks just 30 big blue chip companies, and it's older and a little quirky because it's weighted by share price instead of company size. But here is why indexes matter so much to you personally, and this might be the most important point in this entire video. Instead of trying to guess which single company is going to win, you can simply own a tiny piece of all of them at the same time. Same time. When the American economy grows over the years, and historically it has, you grow right along with it. You stop betting on one horse and you start owning the whole race. When you understand it that way, it changes everything you think about investing. Getting paid just for holding. Now here's a simple piece that almost nobody explains to beginners, and it's, I think, genuinely beautiful. Some companies will actually you just for owning their stock. When a strong, mature company makes more cash than it needs to keep growing, its board of directors can send that extra money straight back to you, the shareholder. That payment is called a dividend, and it lands in your bank account whether the stock went up that day or not. There's a number called the dividend yield, which is just the yearly dividend divided by the share price, and it tells you how much you're going to get paid just to hold the stock. That's exactly how Ronald Read, the quiet janitor, built his $8 million fortune. He bought companies that paid dividends, and instead of spending that money, he used it to buy even more shares. Those new shares then paid him even more dividends, which bought him even more shares again. That snowball effect is called compounding, and it's the closest thing to magic that money has ever offered. A small snowball pushed down a long enough hill becomes an avalanche. You do not need to be a genius to use it. You just need to be patient and let time do the heavy lifting for you. That's a great start for anyone, no matter how small that very first dollar feels. Why the market keeps climbing over the years. Now you might be wondering, if prices bounce around on emotion every single day, how does anybody actually make money? So here's an honest answer that hopefully changes changes everything. Zoom out far enough and the stock market has marched steadily upward for its entire history. Over the long run, the S&P 500 has returned about 10% per year on average. Not every year, some years are scary and deep in the red, but on average, decade after decade after decade. Now, think about what that really means. There's been a Great Depression, there's been 2 world wars, there's been oil shocks, the dot-com crash, the 2008 financial meltdown. Global pandemics, and through every single one of those disasters, the market eventually climbed all the way back to brand new highs. Every crash in history so far has turned out to be temporary. Every new high has turned out to be permanent. Why? Because the whole thing is powered by human beings waking up every morning trying to build, create, sell, and grow. As long as people keep innovating, the businesses you own keep getting more valuable. Valuable. So when you own a piece of the entire market, you are betting that humanity keeps moving forward. And I think that's the safest bet I know of. And it's paid off well for over 100 years. The simplest way to actually start today. Okay, now you know all this. What do you do with it without having a finance degree? It comes down to 3 simple steps, and they're easier today than they've ever been in history. Step 1 is you open a brokerage account. So think of it like a bank account, except this one is built for buying investments. And most of them now charge you $0 in trading fees with no minimum balance to begin. You can open one right now on your phone in about 10 minutes. Step 2, do not try to pick the next hot stock. Instead, buy a simple index fund or ETF that holds the entire S&P 500. With one single purchase, you instantly own a little piece of the 500 biggest companies in America. If one of them stumbles, the other 499 carry you forward. That's real diversification with one click, and it's exactly what protects regular people from disaster. And step 3, use something called dollar-cost averaging. That fancy term just means you invest the same set amount on a regular schedule, like $100 every month, no matter what the market is doing that week. When prices are high, your $100 buys a little less. When prices drop, your $100 automatically buys more shares when they're on sale. You stop trying to perfectly time the market, which nobody on earth can do anyway, and you simply start owning more of it every single month. And here's the part that hopefully will get you fired up. If you invested just $200 a month for the next 30 years at the market's long-term average, you could end up with more than $400,000, even though you only put up around $72,000 of your own money. The rest is the market doing the heavy lifting while So don't wait until you feel ready. Now's the time to learn. You already know when the best time to start is right now. How about right now? The one thing that separates winners from quitters. This last one has nothing to do with numbers. The number one reason people lose money in the stock market isn't a bad pick or bad luck; it's their own emotions. They get greedy and buy when everyone's excited and prices are sky high. Then they get scared and sell when prices drop and the headlines. Turn all ugly. They do the exact opposite of what builds wealth over and over again. There's an image I love: a bird sitting on a branch is never afraid of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch; the trust is in her own wings. The market will shake; it always has and always will. But if your trust is in your own understanding and your long-term plan, those scary drops stop frightening you and starts looking like a sale. While everyone else runs for the door, the calm. Owner quietly buys more. Being the kind of investor who stays steady is what leads to actually doing the steady things that make you rich. So stop chasing, stop panicking, and start owning. You now have the ability to understand this game. And if you can, then you must put it to work. You already understand more than most investors alive. Here's what I really need you to hear before you go. In just a few minutes, you learn what keeps most people scared, confused, and broke their entire lives. You are not behind. You're early. And a quiet janitor from Vermont already proved that an ordinary paycheck plus patience can quietly beat almost anyone. To learn the Japanese art of becoming rich on a small salary, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. How rich you become has almost nothing to do with how much you earn. The Federal Reserve found that nearly 4 in 10 American adults couldn't cover a surprise $400 expense with cash