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

Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin, tried to set world records crossing the Atlantic and the Pacific by boat and by balloon to get his new airline noticed. And he wrote that it meant we put a face to our brand early on. People trust a face more than they trust a logo. Your personal brand is what people know you for and trust you for, the person behind the business. 'Cause every startup has one problem. They don't have trust because nobody knows them. But if you're known and you stand in front of your logo instead of behind your logo, then you're gonna have a competitive advantage. That you can't just easily copy.

Personal branding, it's important.

In 2017, Edelman surveyed more than 33,000 people in 28 countries, and they rated a person like yourself as a credible source about a company 60% of the time, compared with just 37% for a company CEO. Now, I opened my YouTube channel in 2008, and I had 25 subscribers in the first year. By year 2, I had about 100 subscribers, and by year 5, I still had only around 2,000 subscribers. I'm Canadian, I'm introverted, and it took me a long time to get used to being on camera. But if you actually want your message out there, your movement needs a face. Today, this channel has millions of subscribers. So I wanted to make this video because I see the same struggle with the business owners that I work with. You know, your story is valuable, but it's hard to put yourself out there and having your own personal brand is going to really help you get more clients. So if you build your personal brand, people will know you, trust you, and come looking for you. If you stay hidden behind your logo, you'll keep competing on price with every other business that looks exactly the same. There are 10 rules of personal branding, no BS and no fluff. I'm going to cover them today in this video. 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. Number 1, know what you stand for. People can only remember a few things about you. If you try to stay stand for everything, they remember nothing. The strongest personal brands pick one idea and repeat it for years, and that idea becomes the filter for every video, every post, and product that you make. It starts with deciding what you believe and who it's for. In September 1997, Steve Jobs had just been named interim CEO of Apple, and the company was in big trouble. That fiscal year, Apple sales fell 20% and it lost $1 billion. Jobs spoke to Apple employees and explained what Apple's marketing would be about from then on. It's one of my favorite videos of all time. To me, For me, marketing is about values. It's a very complicated world. It's a very noisy world, he said. So we have to be really clear on what we want people to know about us. He pointed to Nike, which sells shoes but never talks about shoes in its ads. Then he named Apple's core value. We believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. That idea became the Think Different campaign. So write down the one thing you want people to know about you in one sentence. For me, it comes down to belief. That's what I do. I think lack of belief is the world's number one problem. It's still the number one problem that I face personally, and I try to inject belief into everything that I make, every video I post, every conversation I have. I don't always accomplish it, but it's always the filter through which I see the world that if this thing helps somebody believe in themselves a little bit more, then that is job well done. Number 2, look the same everywhere. Every time people see you, they're learning what you look like and what you're about. So if you look different every single time, they have to start over each time. Wearing the same kind of thing, having consistent branding makes you easy to spot in a crowded field. It also saves you decision every morning. Some of the most powerful people in business wear the same thing almost every day. On November 6th, 2014, Mark Zuckerberg held a public Q&A session at Facebook wearing a simple gray t-shirt. Someone asked him why he wore the same shirt every day. He said he owns multiples of the same shirt and said, I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community. I feel like I'm not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life. He pointed out that Steve Jobs did the same thing. And in January 2016, when he was back from his paternity leave, he posted a photo of his closet full of identical gray t-shirts and hoodies with the caption, what should I wear? So pick one look for your videos and your photos and use it everywhere that you're posting. I always wear my Believe hoodie. I have my hat on most of the time, not always, but I always have my Believe gear on. It's the hoodie, it's a t-shirt, it's, it's all I own. It's like you go to my closet, you look at all of my hoodies, I've got 40 or 50 of these and 3 non-Believe hoodies that are my Spider Athletic But apart from that, I'm wearing this and it makes life easier every day. I know what to wear, but it also creates a consistent brand when I'm showing up making content online. Number 3, show up every single day. Nobody knows who you are when you start. You change that by putting out things until people notice you. Each piece of content is another chance for somebody new to find and discover you. Consistency also shows people that they can count on you, right? Your brand gets built by what you do every week for years. In 1989, at 14 years old, friend of the channel Gary Vaynerchuk started stocking shelves in his family liquor store in New Jersey. He and his dad renamed it Wine Library and started selling wine online. And over his time there, the business grew from about $4 million to $60 million a year in sales. And in February 2006, he started a video show called Wine Library TV, filming the store. I jumped in headfirst and started doing Wine Library TV. I've done 5 episodes every week since, he said in 2008. By then, he had about 75,000 viewers a day and had been on Conan and Ellen. He made about 1,000 episodes Nearly one every day for 5 years. And the show led him to a book deal with HarperCollins and then to VaynerMedia, the ad agency he started with his brother. So pick how often you post and don't miss a week for the next year. So one of the things I struggled with the most was staying consistent on my content too. I uploaded my first video, then months would go by before the next video came up. And it wasn't until I started putting it in my calendar that every Tuesday is my YouTube day. I know I have a day dedicated. I don't always use the full day, but I have a day in my calendar dedicated to making content that I started getting more consistent and the results started showing up as well. Well, we haven't missed an upload in over a decade now on this channel every single day because I have Tuesday blocked off in my calendar every week so I can make YouTube videos for you guys. Number 4, share your struggles. People connect with people who are honest about what's hard. A perfect image makes you look like an advertisement. Sharing a real struggle shows that you are human and it gives people a reason to root for you. It also helps the people in your audience who are going through the same thing as you went through or are going through right now. The struggles that you hide are often the parts of the story that people need the most from you. Let's talk about Oprah Winfrey. In 1988, she lost 67 pounds in 4 months on a liquid diet. At the end of it, she walked onto her show in a pair of size 10 Calvin Klein jeans, pulling a wagon full of fat that represented the 67 pounds. The episode got the highest ratings her show had ever had, but within 10 weeks, she gained 10 pounds back, and by 1990, all of the weight was back on. She kept talking about it in public. She said it's an iconic moment because it was an iconic mistake. In 2008, she wrote in her magazine that she was back up to 200 pounds, I was mad at myself. She said, I'm embarrassed. So share something that you struggled with and have been through and what you have learned from it. In these videos, I talk about the struggles that I am facing, that I have faced. I talk about leaving the corporate job that I thought was my dream job and starting my business and failing at it and being embarrassed by my first videos that I created and still not having enough belief in myself. It's like the more you can bring people into the journey, the foundation story of what you had to overcome so that other people can see themselves in you, that you're not just this perfect person now, I have it all figured And also the struggles that you are continuing to face right now. I still don't believe in myself to do the next big thing. And letting people see that you have chinks in your armor, that you're not perfect, allows them to connect more deeply to you and be inspired by the mission that you're on. 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 is 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it, and I'll see you there. Number 5, Do things people talk about. Nobody shares a press release. People share things that surprise them or make them laugh, right? A bold stunt can get you more attention than a year of just normal marketing. It works best when it's fun and it fits who you actually are. The founder who's willing to look a little silly, they get the front page news. They get a lot of the attention. Richard Branson, back from the start, he learned this from Freddie Laker, who's an airline founder who had taken on British Airways. Laker told him, if you dress up in a captain's outfit when you launch the airline, you'll get on the front page. If you If you turn up in ordinary business clothes, you'll be lucky to get a mention. So Branson took that advice for the rest of his career. In 1996, to launch Virgin Brides, he shaved his beard and showed up in a wedding dress. On May 12th, 1998, to launch Virgin Cola in America, he rode an army tank into Times Square. He said, I drove a tank through Times Square running over stacks of Coca-Cola's cans and firing at the Coke sign until the lights went out. So write down 3 ideas for a launch that people would actually talk about and pick the one that best fits you. This is one of the things that I think I could do a lot better of. I am not typically doing big, bold marketing stunts. Maybe I'm too afraid. Maybe I'm not creative enough. I don't know the reason behind it. But even in putting this together, it's a great reminder of what bigger, bolder things could I be doing for my own brand as well. Number 6, put your face on the business. People trust a person more than they trust a logo. When the founder shows up, customers feel like they know who they are actually buying from. Now, you don't need to be a model. You don't need to be an actor to do this. You just need to be Be yourself. There's a reason why you started this business and you need to keep showing up. Even a hamburger chain can be built on the founder's face. Let's talk about Dave Thomas, who was adopted as a baby, and when he opened his first Wendy's in downtown Columbus, Ohio on November 15th, 1969, he named it after his daughter. In 1989, he started appearing in Wendy's TV commercials himself, always in a white short-sleeve shirt and a red tie. Wendy's own research found that customers believed in his sincere, often funny ads, and Guinness World Records counted 600 and 52 commercial appearances between 1989 and 1999, the most ever by a company founder. And by the time he died in 2002, Wendy's said he had made more than 800. Wendy's had grown to more than 6,000 restaurants. The company's chairman, Jack Schuessler, said, he kept reminding us he was simply a hamburger cook. Put your own face on your website, your videos, and your ads this month. This is one of the biggest things I talk about in our Movement Makers program. Our YouTube mastermind program is you are the face. It's great to have a logo, it's great to have corporate background, etc., but you started You have a deep personal connection, hopefully, to the work that you're doing, and that is the differentiator compared to all the big companies that you're going up against. So make your face the brand. I get it, you might be a little insecure about it. You might not want to be an egomaniac or super famous. I understand. But the more people can connect to you and the story and the reason why you were doing this thing in the first place, the more they will buy from you, the more they will spread the movement, the more your mission gets out to more people. You need to be the face. Number 7, partner with people who make you bigger. You can't reach everyone on your own. The right partner puts you in front of an audience that you could never build alone. It gets you there so much faster. The best partnerships, they help both sides grow. Some of the biggest brands in the world started with one partnership, and it works best when both sides bring something to the table that the other one doesn't. Let's talk about Michael Jordan. 1984, he was a rookie and he wanted to sign with Adidas. His agent, David Falk, wanted him to sign with Nike, then a smaller company, and Jordan didn't even want to get on a plane to go meet Nike. His mother made him go, though. He said, she made me get on that plane and go listen. On October 26th, 1984, he signed with Nike for $2.5 million over 5 years, 3 times more than any NBA endorsement before it. Nike hoped to sell $3 million worth of Air Jordans in the first 3 years. In the first year alone, the shoes made $126 million. When the NBA banned the pair of his red and black Nike shoes that year, Nike turned the ban into an ad and they said, fortunately, the NBA can't stop you from wearing them. So make a list of 5 people whose audience you'd love to reach out to and find the time this week to reach out to them. One of the things that helped me early on in my YouTube career was doing partnerships and doing guest spots on other people's channels. At the time, I didn't know a lot about YouTube, so I appeared on other people's channels and talked about the thing that I did know, which was venture capital, which was speaking, which was entrepreneurship. And I made guest appearances on Tim Schmoyer's channel and Derral Eves' channel and other people who are in the YouTube space. And it helps to start to build up some connections for me, some brand awareness for me. And since I've done a lot of different interviews, but I reached out at the beginning to people whose channels I was watching and I had an angle that I thought I could contribute and add to, and it was hopefully beneficial for them as well as for me. And so you could think about for yourself, what are the, the channels, the partnerships, the people that if they knew you, like you, trust you, could be good for everybody, good for you, good for them, as well as good for the audience and your customers. Number 8, protect your name. So your name is your most valuable asset. If someone else owns the rights to your work, they can make money from it without you. Protecting your brand means owning your name, your content and all the contracts that you have. It also means telling your audience what you stand for when someone tries to take it. Fans will defend a brand that they trust. In June 2019, Scooter Braun's company bought Big Red Machine, the label that owns the master recordings of Taylor Swift's first 6 albums. Swift wrote that she was sad and grossed out, and she called it my worst-case scenario. Braun then sold the masters to a company called Shamrock, so Swift started Rerecording her old albums and releasing them as Taylor's Versions. Fearless, which was Taylor's Versions, came out in April 2021 and debuted at number 1 with the biggest week of any album that year. She said artists should own their work for so many reasons. She released 4 rerecorded albums, and in May 2025, she announced that she bought back all of her music. She said, all of the music I've ever made now belongs to me. So check who owns your name, your website, the social media handles, and your content today. Number 9, let your personality sell. People buy from people that they like. If your personality comes through in your content, your marketing stops looking like everyone else's. It could be humor, it could be honesty. It makes people want to share what you post. Your personality is the one thing a company, a competitor, they cannot copy. The more you let it show, the more people feel like they know who you actually are. And 2018 is an awesome story. The actor Ryan Reynolds became an owner of Aviation Gin and he started making funny ads for it himself. He said, a little over 2 years ago, I became an owner of Aviation Gin because I love the taste of Aviation more than any other spirit. And then in August 2020, the company Aviation got acquired for $610 million. He did the same thing with Mint Mobile, which is a cell phone company that he owned. In 2023, T-Mobile agreed to buy Mint in a deal worth up to $1.35 billion. Reynolds announced it with a joke. He said, we're so happy T-Mobile beat out an aggressive last-minute bid from my mom, Tammy Reynolds. So let your sense of humor, let your style, let your personality come out a little bit more in your next pieces of content. Tell me why you started what you're doing. Tell me why you care so much. Give me an example of what you went through and why you do what you do right now. Tell me about the first person that you hired and whether it was great or not and what happened. Tell me about the clients that you serve and why you love them. Just bring a little bit more of you into the content instead of always trying to be perfect, because that's the thing that people will connect with. And number 10, turn your brand into a business. Attention is only worth something if you turn it into a business. Business. A personal brand gives you an audience that already trusts you. When you launch something, that audience becomes your first customers. The product though you create has to also stand on its own, and the brand gets people to try it. The biggest personal brands end up owning companies. On September 8th, 2017, Rihanna launched Fenty Beauty online and at Sephora as a 50/50 partnership with the luxury company LVMH. She launched with 40 shades of foundation. She said Fenty Beauty by Rihanna was created for For women of all shades, personalities, attitudes, cultures, and races. I wanted everyone to feel included. That's the real reason I made this line. And in August 2021, Forbes named her a billionaire worth $1.7 billion, and about $1.4 billion of that came from Fenty Beauty, much more than her music. Forbes called her the wealthiest female musician in the world. So write down one product your audience is already asking you for and start thinking about building it. This is one of the things that I built inside my business. I make this content for free. I'm trying to solve the world's biggest problem. People don't believe in themselves enough. As a result of doing that, we had a lot of people on the show that I interviewed that then they were asking, hey, how do I build my channel? How do I build my brand? And we created agencies to help people do that. We created Movement Makers and our YouTube Mastermind to help people do that. If you're interested, join us. It's awesome. It's not for most of my audience. Most of my audience just want to believe message and build their channel and build their company and go spread spread awesomeness to the world. And for the people who want to take it more seriously, we have programs to help people do that as well. So for your audience, what are they asking for? What are they curious about? What do you love doing? You can bring even more value and go even deeper with your community and the audience that you are building up. And then think about the product or service that you would love to make, that you would love to launch, that would solve real problems for them. So then you can launch it, make more money, and serve more people. Put yourself out there. So it's easy to look at Oprah and Rihanna and Richard Branson and think personal branding only works if you're already famous. But all of them started as a person with no audience. Dave Thomas was a hamburger cook in a white shirt and a red tie, and that was enough. So know what you stand for. Look the same everywhere. Show up every single day. Share your struggles and do things people talk about. Put your own face on the business. Partner with people who make you bigger. Protect your name. Let your personality sell and turn the brand into a business. Those are the 10 rules of personal branding, and now you know them too. The hardest part is putting yourself out there, and I know because I'm still an introvert who had 25 subscribers in my first year. So pick one of the 10, use it this week, and let people see the person behind your business. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be.

Believe.

Now let's learn all of leadership explained in one video. There's a great expression that says, if you want to go 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. Number one skill of an entrepreneur is people skills and leadership. 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 one 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 gonna 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 gonna cover them today through the stories of some of the greatest leaders who ever lived. 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. today on the team that I wanna 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 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 client 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. 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 the 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 going to 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 want to 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. 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, and 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 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 two, 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 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. 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. Rule number 5, focus on just a few things. So when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, The company was losing a billion dollars 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 differences 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 four 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 all. 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 designers 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 Windock, 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 come 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 a 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 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 distance runner, he was overweight and he was not happy. To change his life, he created a 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 can handle the pain. 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 simple as this. You wake up, you get outside, you go for 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. 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 8, take big risks when it matters. In 2002, Elon Musk made over $150 million when 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 outta cash. SpaceX had tried to launch 3 rockets and all 3 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 fourth 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 money 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 9, 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 7 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 something new. Because she was not afraid to fail, Again, she decided to try solving a simple clothing problem. One night she cut off, uh, 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 six months waiting and hemming and hawing and. Lane. 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 eat last. 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. Now let's learn all of money explained in one video. 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 what 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. Balance sheet, statement of cash flow. You can teach a monkey that, but our schools don't teach that. Understanding 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 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 person wants them.

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 outside on that Good Friday, and I sold $800 worth of hats in 1 hour.

The hats worked, so he expanded into shirts and jerseys.

Then I would start going to the Black Expos where there was like basically a 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 warehouse.

She said, this is all we have, uh, why don't I go out and I take a loan on the house, and, 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. 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 Damon 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 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 banks, I got turned down.

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, million dollars 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, uh, 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 5 of 7 basic money questions right. That's not about who's good with numbers. 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 three 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 two up is how somebody with a busy business ends up with an empty bank account. 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've 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 ones 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 going to 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 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 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 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 a 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 rent. stays inside working in the business. There are legitimate costs a business can carry too. If you work from home, a 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 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 my meeting. It took me real time. And one day 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 a level 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. 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 strategic boring.

and careful.

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 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. 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 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. wings. So if you have the ability, then you have the responsibility, and you have the ability. To learn everything you need to know to reinvent your life, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. 6 months is enough time to change your entire life, and you're wasting it waiting to feel ready. Take action. So many people talk about doing something or say, what if? They don't actually get up and do it.