Breaking the Myths of Business Success | 27 Minutes to a New Mindset

Mr. Buffett, how can I make $30 billion?

Start young. The big thing about it is we started building this little snowball on top of a very long hill. So we started at a very early age in rolling the snowball down, and of course the snowball— the nature of compound interest is it behaves like a snowball of sticky snow. And the trick is to have a very long hill, which means either starting very young or living very— to be very old. I, you know, I would do it exactly the same way if I were doing it in the investment world. I mean, if I were getting out of school today and I had $10,000 to invest, I'd start with the A's. I would start going right through companies. And I probably would focus on smaller companies because I would be working with smaller sums and there's more chance that something is overlooked. But I mean, you have to buy businesses and you— or little pieces of businesses called stocks— and you have to buy them at attractive prices and you have to buy into good businesses. And that advice will be the same 100 years from now in terms of investing. That's, that's what it's all about. And you can't expect anybody else to do it for you. You've got to learn what you, what you know and what you don't know. And within the arena of what you know, you have to just pursue it very vigorously and, and act on it when you find You can't look around for people to agree with you. You know, you have to think for yourself.

Do something you're very passionate about and don't try to chase what is kind of the hot passion of the day. I think we saw it in the internet world quite a bit where, you know, at sort of peak of the internet in say 1999, found people who were very passionate, suddenly they kind of left that job and decided I'm gonna, you know, do something in the internet because it's It was almost like the 1849 Gold Rush in a way. At that time, everybody who was within shouting distance of California was, you know, they might have been a doctor, but they quit being a doctor and they started panning for gold. And that almost never works. And even if it does work, you know, according to some metric, financial success or whatever it might be, I suspect it leaves you ultimately unsatisfied. So you really need to be very clear with yourself. And I think one of the best ways to do that is this notion of projecting yourself forward to age 80, looking back on your life and trying to make sure you've minimized the number of regrets you have. That works for career decisions, it works for family decisions.

Yeah, I mean, you can fake it till you make it in a lot of areas, particularly if you're working for somebody else. But at the end of the day, if you're going to be great at something, you've got to make the effort to be great at something. Whether it's sports, whether it's physics, math, science, business, whatever it may be, you know, it's not just a natural skill. You've got to, to learn. And particularly if you're in the technology industry, because it changes every day. You know, when I got started, I was bartender when I first came to Dallas, got into the PC industry, got fired, started my own company. But I learned early on that there was always something new, and most people didn't put in the time to learn it. It's like now with artificial intelligence. Lots of people talk about artificial intelligence, lots of people talk about machine learning and neural networks. Not a lot of people are putting in the time to take classes or do the tutorials or to learn how to apply it to business, and that's what it takes. And, you know, that's just something I've always enjoyed, so I've been fortunate.

For me, it's if you're spending money on marketing, are you constantly experimenting with new ideas? So I've always said to my companies, I want a third of marketing to be experimental every quarter. Because if you're just sitting on your laurels doing the same old crap, you're missing out and your competitors are going to do something else. So start experimenting, because the value of something that works that you find through just creative chaos is extremely higher than what you've already been doing, because you start losing yields right away. Whatever your strategy is, and let's say you're getting a 2% response on it, watch, 6 months from now it'll be 1.7% or 1.5%. What's the next thing?

What's the next idea?

What's the next What's new? Because it's so noisy out there, as you all know, you've got to keep creating and everybody has the tools to do that.

Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight all the lessons learned in this video, as well as pull out our 3 favorite learnings and quotes that will inspire you to actually do something. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, there's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business. I'll see you there.

Hard work will not make you rich. I get driven nuts by the amount of gurus and influencers and whatever who want to brag and say, no one can outwork me. I'm the best in the world. So many people outwork me. I still make more money than them. There has to be something else. One of the things that grinds my gears about a lot of the people that I see on Instagram that you probably see too is this whole like, no one can outwork me mantra. First off, it's objectively false because many people A, outwork you today, B, outwork you in the past, C, you haven't met everyone, and D, it doesn't fucking matter anyways. It's the same thing when someone's like, I'm the best, and you have to say you're the best because if you don't think you're the best, it shows that you're not confident. To me, I don't take that at all. If someone's like, I'm the best, then why aren't you on billboards. That's what the best would look like. Absolutely, you need to do the work. You need to put volume in. It's the only way you get better. But if you start claiming that you are the best, you cannot be outworked, you are making statements that you know are not true. Why are we bragging about work? Because work has very little to do with the highest levels of the game. Warren Buffett talks about if he makes 2 good decisions a year, he's had a good year. And so how is it that one of the best investors, one of the best business people in terms of measuring it by money, which is how you measure business, talks about how he does basically nothing, reads 5 or 6 hours a day, eats McDonald's, and makes a couple good decisions a year. How is it that that guy is making so much more money than the people who are bragging about the fact that they work so hard?

No, money that you have is not the issue. It doesn't actually take money to make money. It takes courage to make money. It takes contacts to make money. Money is a contact sport. I need to make contact with people, okay? It's not about skills. It's not about education. It's not about personality. It's about contacts. The more contacts I make, the more chances I have. Somebody asked me recently, said, hey, would you rather a billion friends or a billion dollars? I said, dude, give me a billion friends. A billion friends is worth at least 5 or 10 billion A billion dollars is only a billion dollars. And if I can actually go make contact with a billion people and get them to trade money with me, just 5% of those people, just 5% of those people gave me $100 because I traded some service that was worth $1,000, I'd be worth $5 billion. So see, most people don't understand the math of money. Money is not about numbers. Money is about people.

So the fortunate thing was I had a rich dad and I learned about money early. And, you know, so I keep asking people, what does school teach you about money?

Nothing.

That's why so many guys aren't rich. But my poor dad was a PhD in education and no money at all. And I didn't want to follow in his footsteps. So I started off with Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and my rich dad was the one teaching me how to be successful. I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but rich dad said to me, he says, you got to learn how to sell. Now, my poor dad thought salesmen were scum. So I had that going in my head. So my rich dad says, learn to sell.

I can hear my poor dad, salesmen are scum, they're crooks, they'll tell you they're liars.

And that was in my head. So I said to my rich dad, but I don't want to sell. I went to work for Xerox because they had the best sales training. So I was flown from Hawaii to Leesburg, Virginia, and learned how to sell and all this. And I realized then is that sales equals income, but in all areas of life, you cannot sell, you cannot communicate, cannot market toast.

When you've managed doubt and you jump, and you jump with the intention to fly, and you fail, be willing to fail, but don't fail and just fall. 'Cause if you fail and just fall, all you're gonna do from that point is collect evidence why you should never leap again. Oh no, the last time I leaped, this happened. But if you leap and you fall and you call it a failure, just be committed to do what I do. I fail. I fail more than most. Failure says so many things. Number 1, failure says I took a leap. So first, congratulate yourself. We tend to only focus on what didn't work. So in my company, We always fail forward. That's our commitment. We're going to fail, guys, because we're playing big enough. And oh, by the way, the bigger you play, the more you fail because you're doing more things. You're up to more things. I don't want to live a safe life. I want my life to be threaded with failures because if it's threaded with failures, then it's threaded even with even more places where I played big. I took a leap. I risked. I took a chance on myself. Take a chance on yourself at the risk of failing. Just always be committed to fail forward because when you fail forward, your failure has context.

An abundance mindset is the belief that there is nothing truly scarce. So we grew up as a human species in scarcity, and our physiology and our— the way our brain is wired for scarcity. If I have an orange tree, I'm, I'm 5'5", I grab the oranges from the lowest hanging branches, all of a sudden orange tree oranges are scarce again until I invent a piece of technology called a ladder that gives me higher reach. Now I've got access to oranges again. If you've got a pie and you've got a family of 4 coming over for dinner, but then all your neighbors hear about it and they all come for dinner, you have to slice the pie into thinner and thinner slices. In an abundance mindset, it's like, "Bullshit, we're gonna go bake more pies." The realization is technology is turning whatever used to be scarce into abundance. The realization is there is nothing truly scarce. You know, an exponential mindset is we evolved in a local and linear world. Nothing changed. The life of your great-great-great-great-grandparents and the life of your great-great-great-great-grandchildren was the same, right, over millennia. That was it. But today we're living in a world where technology is growing exponentially. Things are not changing century to century or decade to decade, they're changing year to year. And so an exponential mindset is understanding how computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology, Augmented virtual reality, Web3, all these technologies are just transforming what each of us can do in our lives.

How do you balance your life? I mean, with this stress, with so many different, you know, you're on so many different companies, but how do you balance it?

Well, I mean, I should point out that a 20-hour workday is relatively unusual and rather painful, but I do sleep 6 hours a night. So, and if I sleep less than 6 hours a night, I find that I am I might be awake longer, but I get less done. I'm not suggesting this is good for everyone, and I think frankly I would like to work a bit less than that. Tesla went through some very difficult times where it was on the ragged edge of survival, and if I didn't give it everything I got, the company could have easily gone bankrupt. It was really on the verge of bankruptcy for quite a while. I don't mean to suggest complacency at this point, but, uh, you know, it does require much less work to operate Tesla now versus say in the 2017 to 2019 timeframe. Twitter is still somewhat of a startup in reverse, and so there's a lot of work required here to get Twitter to a sort of a stable position. And like I said, to really build the engine of engineering, of software engineering at Twitter, and have it, you know, really have a great product roadmap and the people in place to implement that product roadmap. Roadmap. And so it is not my intention to work like crazy.

In the mid-1980s, a philosopher and theologian by the name of Dr. James Karse defined these two types of games: finite games and infinite games. A finite game is defined as known players, fixed rules, and an agreed-upon objective. Football, baseball— there's always a beginning, middle, and an end. And if there is a winner, then necessarily there have to be losers. Then you have infinite games. Infinite games are defined as known and unknown 1 players, which means you don't necessarily know who all the other players are, and new players can join at any time. The rules are changeable, which means every player can play however they want, and the objective is to perpetuate the game, to stay in the game as long as possible. We are players in infinite games every day of our lives, whether we know it or not. There's no such thing as winning education. You can come in first for the finite amount of time you're at school, where we agree upon the time frame and the metrics—grades—but nobody wins education. Nobody wins healthcare. Nobody wins politics, and there's definitely no such thing as winning business.

The process of doing something you actually like is my great addiction. The fact that I am able to actually wake up day in and day out, sleep easily for 7, 8 hours a night, and wake up genuinely excited while always being prepared to grab my phone and know that I have a problem in my 300-person Singapore office, or something happened in LA, or one of the other 17 businesses that I'm associated with are in trouble. I sit on top of almost 3,000 employees and two very large businesses actively as the CEO, and then on the board of four others and heavily invested in others and many other things I'm involved with. I have plenty going on, but the fact that I do what I want to do enables all of it to work. This is grounded in something that is the absolute answer for this entire arena. The one thing I can absolutely speak on fundamentally touches every person here is the relationship between self-esteem and insecurity. All of the things that you do are based on this. If you look at what's really been going on with people for a very long time— why when one is sold fear that they believe it versus when they're sold fear that they don't? Why so few people have a framework of believing in optimism versus protecting themselves with cynicism, why people lack patience. I can tell you right now that for the majority of people in this room that want something to happen, the biggest flaw in their mental framework and perspective is their lack of patience. It is why I make so much content around people that are 22, 25, 35, 40, and laughing and joking and trying to some way, somehow communicate to them that they are extremely young.

I'm going to teach you the entrepreneur success formula. This is the formula. It's very simple. It's easy to apply that when you actually execute it, it will change the course of your life and your business. The entrepreneur success formula. Are you ready? You need to, if you want to have success as an entrepreneur, combine what you love doing with what brings value to other people. People mess this up. What you love doing with what brings value to other people. In that intersection is your next great genius, amazing business idea. Here's what most people do. Most people just pick one. Most people either pick what they love doing, but they can't figure out how to bring value to other people. So you've got a hobby. If you love doing something, it just fills you up. It's amazing. But it never brings value to other people, then you never get paid. You've got a really fulfilling hobby and that could be great. And your hobby can be something you do in the evenings and weekends and it fills up your soul, but you'll never turn that into a business if you don't figure out how to bring value to other people. So you're stuck always having to have a job or go work for somebody else while you're doing your hobby on the weekends, evenings, on the side, etc. So those are the people who just chase what they love doing, right? Chase your passion. Amazing. There's other people, a lot of entrepreneurs who just go after the money, just try to bring value, just go after opportunity, right? That's the only focus. Like, I'll do whatever it takes. I need to be a millionaire by the time I'm X years old. I'll do whatever it takes. But you won't. You will not do whatever it takes because as soon as it gets hard, you're going to lose. And the problem is you're going up against people who love it. Pick whatever industry. You open up a magazine or website, it shows you the hottest businesses for next year. These are the industries that will take off and you have to get into it. It's like, oh wow, that's hot. I'm going to go off and do those things. If you don't absolutely love it, right? This part here, if you don't actually love it, what you love doing, what brings value to other people, if you don't absolutely love it, you're going to lose because you're going up against people who do love it. If it's just a strategy for you, but for other people, they love it, you're going to lose every time. You're going to lose every time because while you're counting the hours and while you're trying to figure out, oh my gosh, when is this going to pay off? You're going up against people who aren't even tracking it, who get lost in it, who 12 hours later, they're still doing the thing because they love it so much and they can't believe that, like, where is the time gone? So it has to be in that combination. So many entrepreneurs start a business because they think they're going to make a lot of money and they end up going broke. And it wasn't because the idea was bad. The idea could have been fantastic. The problem was you didn't love it enough. You didn't care about it enough. It was just a strategy. It was just an opportunity for you instead of being actually something that you love. So the entrepreneur success formula: you start with doing what you love, and then you figure out how to bring value to other people doing it. Another way I like to explain it is your heart and your head. So you make the big decisions in life with your heart and the small ones with your head. What you work on, what you do, what you're spending your time on day in, day out has to be heart-driven. It's got to be something that fills you up with so much joy. But then your head needs to be part of the equation too, to say, okay, okay, heart, that's great that you love doing this thing, but how are we going to make money? How are we going to bring value to other people? So you make the big decisions with your heart and then you use your head to figure out how to make it actually practical. So you're not just daydreaming constantly in la-la land. We're actually turning it into something that can have a massive impact on the world. The entrepreneur success formula: you got to do what you love and figure out a way to bring value to other people doing it. When I started making my YouTube channel, I never thought I was going to make money. I did it because I love doing it. I did it because I wanted visual content. I'm a visual learner. I struggled in reading books. It took me a long time when I read a book unless it's really short chapters and really spaced out well. I would find myself reading 5 pages of the book and then realizing I read 5 pages and I have no idea what I just read. So I had to go back and read those 5 pages again. I would look how long a chapter was and see, oh my gosh, it's 40 pages. This chapter is going to kill me. I read because I needed to because I wanted knowledge, but it was a really inefficient way for me to learn. I'm a visual learner. I like to see things. And so I said, well, why hasn't somebody made this? And I wanted to be around successful, famous entrepreneurs. Because I didn't have anybody in my life who had achieved what I wanted to achieve. And so that was the root of why I started making my, my videos and my content. And before YouTube, I had my website, which was similar idea of sharing the stories of famous entrepreneurs and what you can learn from their success. So I did it for myself and then figured out how can I do this so that I can make money doing it so that I can do this as my full-time thing so that I can recruit a team of people to help me do this. So now we've got a team of people who are all building these channels with me so I can create even more impact and make even more videos. The combination led first with what I love doing. I want to create content that speaks to 19-year-old Evan who was struggling, who doesn't know what to do, who was making $300 a month, was broke, who wanted to do something big but had very little belief in himself and didn't have a plan for what to do next. I still make my videos for 19-year-old Evan. And I had to figure out a way to turn it into a profitable business so that I can have a bigger reach and be able to do this full-time plus and have a team to help me do it. Entrepreneur success formula: what you love doing with what brings value to other people. Okay, so how do we do it? How do we start to figure out that process? That's an easy formula, but underneath it, let's, let's dive a little deeper to give you even more value. Step number 1 is embrace the and. Most people are thinking or. Most people are thinking, do I do this or do I do this? Do I do this business or do this business? If you think about your passions and your interests, right? What do you love doing? What's your heart-centered thing that you could do all day? You probably have a couple things and you feel like you have to pick. This is the mistake. People feel like you have to pick. You don't have to pick. The actual selection is in doing both of those things combined. A lot of people have said some amazing things of me is very humbling. I think of Ed Mylett and Gary Vee, where Gary Vee called me the DJ that likes to watch so much content and then spin it to inspire people. And Ed Mylett said that I'm the modern-day Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill is the biggest influence of all time in personal development, and I'm the modern-day Napoleon Hill. First off, that's extremely humbling, but why are they saying that? This is how I'm unique, because I love I love consuming all of this stuff and I love spinning it and mixing it up as well as adding my own message to things. This is how I'm different. There's a lot of people who are just sharing their message and there's a lot of people who are also mixing things together, but there's nobody who's really mixing things together and sharing their own message. Right? So instead of looking at those two things as different, right? Like I have to pick, I got to pick this or this, like I'm going to combine them and that's how I'm going to be unique. So think about your different interests. What do you love doing? What are, what are your top 2, 3 things that you can get lost in and they feel completely different? Your genius is going to be in actually mixing those things together in a way that's never been done before and then using that to bring value to people. Stop thinking or and instead embrace the and. Step number 2 is try to get as close to customers as possible. So it's great to be making, it's great to It's great to be creating. It's great to be, you know, engineering of where you could go. When you start to solve the problem for yourself, that's a great step one, because there's probably a lot of people who currently are who you used to be and seeing how you solved it for yourself, sharing the videos. I need the videos for myself and then I share them and it helps other people, right? So I solve the problem for me first. You solve the problem for you first. I know there's lots of people like you, but you need to start talking to customers. You need to start getting their feedback. You need to start seeing what they interact with, and that can help guide a lot of your future product or service creation. You need to get out of just sitting by yourself on your couch researching and into actually talking to people. So a quick example from my channel: the whole top 10 rules for success thing came because I just made one video on Kanye West. That's why he's, you know, on the wall behind me. I made one video on him, and then people started requesting more. Hey, can you do Dame Dash? Hey, can you do Jay-Z? Hey, can you do Jeff Bezos? Hey, can you do Steve Jobs? Hey, can you do these people? And it's like, well, that's a cool idea. Sure, why not? I could do that. I never thought of it as being a whole series. I just was wanting to give a tribute to Kanye West, and it was a one-off video. And then in the videos that people were suggesting, can you do this person, this person, this person, this person, I still get final say. We ended up having over 2,000 different requests for people to profile, I still get final say as to who we profile because I have to feel connected to the message. And when I'm pulling out the content, if we're doing Kanye West or Steve Jobs, it's always something positive. It's always through the lens of belief because that's what I want to put out. I don't want to put out Kanye West's biggest attacks or insults or negativity. I want to put out negativity in the world. I could easily done top 10, top 10 Kanye West stupidest best things you've ever done. I'm not interested in putting that out. So it's that combination of what people are asking for— hey, can you do this? Can you do that? Can you do this?— plus what I love doing, right? What I want to put my stake in the ground to say I made this, right? This is the contribution that I'm trying to make to the world. Back to the Entrepreneur Success Formula, right? What you love doing with what brings value to other people. So how to figure out what brings value to other people? You have to get as close to the customer as possible, understand their business, understand what they're going through, understand their mindset. You solving the problem for yourself is a good first step. And then going into, okay, what are you struggling with? So number 1 is embrace the end. Number 2 is get as close as possible to the customer. And then number 3 is solve a problem. Solve a problem. As you're talking to customers, as you're talking to people who will be using your product or your service, who will be engaging with your content, as you're talking to these people, what is the problem that they're facing? What is the struggle? What is the challenge that they're facing? And then help them accomplish it. If I apply it to myself and the YouTube channels for context, one of the biggest challenges I think people have is a very poor environment. You've got people in your life who keep you where you are. Some people may be telling you that you can't do things, uh, that's the worst case scenario. Some people might be cheering you on, but they can't guide you. You're not inspired by them. The people around you are not inspiring enough for you. And that's why you're stuck, because the environment is keeping you small. Where if you are around higher achievers, if you're around Tom Bilyeu and Oprah Winfrey and Elon Musk and these people, they would pull you to be better. And so that's the biggest problem that I see the entrepreneurs that I love helping is, you know, you're capable of more. You've got this big mission inside you. You've got the heart and the care and the willingness to serve. You've got everything. But you're not being pulled forward by anybody. And so I want to try to create that through content because you may not be able to hang out with Tom Bilyeu and Elon Musk and Oprah Winfrey, but every day on YouTube you can hang out with Tom Bilyeu, Elon Musk, and Oprah Winfrey from the content that I'm going to make and create. Right? So that's the problem that I'm trying to solve. And I get that because it was me who struggled with it, but also the people that I see who I connect with who are watching the videos, they're leaving feedback. For me. And I'm talking to them and I realize you've got everything. You've got everything. You, you've got everything. You're just missing that environment to push you forward. So that's a problem that I solve. What is the problem that you solve? When you can combine your passions, right? Step number 1, you're combining your passions. Step number 2 is we're talking to customers, people who are going to use potentially what we can create. And then you're understanding what their problem is and you solve it for them, that's how we start to build a successful business. Back to the Entrepreneur Success Formula. If you get this formula, if you apply it, it's simple, it's basic, and it's one of the most powerful things you can ever do. And it's one of the biggest reasons why entrepreneurs don't win despite having the heart and the care and the service. You have to combine the thing that you love doing with all your heart with something that brings value to other people. Bring those things together and you're on to your next successful business career. Good luck. Because you made it this far in the video, I want to celebrate you. Most people start and don't finish. Most people never actually follow through. Most people say they want something, but they don't ever do the work to actually get it. But you are different. You are special. Believe Nation, you made it here all the way to the end, and I love you. So as a special celebration, if you put a hashtag #believe down in the comments below on this video, I will showcase you and celebrate you somewhere on the screen in a future video because you are awesome. To learn how to set goals and make them happen, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

This is the hard part for most people. Can you teach your body emotionally?

What the future will feel like before it happens. That means you're not waiting for your wealth to feel abundant. You're not waiting for your success