How A True Workaholic Works

Outworking the people around you still works, and it's never been easier to do.

You need to work super hard. And I mean, if you do simple math, say like, okay, if somebody else is working 50 hours and you're working 100, you'll get twice as done— as much done in the course of a year as the other company.

If you don't work hard every single day, you will perish.

Gallup found that full-time American employees worked 42.9 hours a week in 2024, down from 44.1 in 2019.

I begin each morning by doing my highest priority work first. I have a very clear priority list. And I start from the highest priority work first. Before I even get to work, my day is already a success.

If it's not in the calendar, it won't get done. It's not really a priority, right? You have to make sure that it's in your plan, it's in your day.

That gap is 62 hours a year, and that's a new skill, a finished project, or the side business that you keep saying that you're gonna start one day.

You have to prioritize your time really carefully.

The way that I've found to stay focused, be productive, and not get distracted is, one, By auditing my time so that I know, one, what I'm supposed to be working on, and then two, that at the end of any task, I'm going to reflect back on how long it took me, how much time did I spend on task.

So here's how a true workaholic actually works. Jensen Huang runs NVIDIA, and he works 7 days a week. The reason goes back to 1996 when the company came one chip away from dying.

You're getting ready to ship the RIVA 128.

Yeah.

And you guys have about 6 months of cash left.

In 1993, 3 engineers sat in a Denny's in San Jose and started a company with $40,000. Jensen Huang was one of them. Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem were the other 2. They made graphic chips, and for the first 3 years, they made them badly.

At the time that we started the company in 1993, we were the only consumer 3D graphics company ever created. By the time that we realized we had gone down the wrong road, Microsoft had already rolled out DirectX. It was fundamentally incompatible with Nvidia's architecture. 30 competitors have already shown up, even though we were the first company at the time. that we were founded. So the world was a completely different place.

By 1996, the company was nearly dead. Huang laid off about half the company. Everyone left had one chip to bet on and not enough money to build it the normal way.

Our backs were up against the wall. We were running outta time, we're running outta money, and for a lot of the employees, running outta hope.

So here's how building a chip normally goes. You design it, you pay a factory to make a small batch, physical samples come back, you test them, you find the mistakes, you fix the design, and you pay for another batch.

The plan that companies normally go through, which is, you know, You know, build the chip, write the software, fix the bugs, tape out the new chip, so on and so forth.

Every round costs months and money. Nvidia could afford one production run and nothing after that. So Huang made a bet that should have killed the company. He spent a big piece of the money he had left on an emulator, tested the entire chip on that machine, and never held a real sample in his hand.

We also made the decision to use this technology called emulation.

Then he ordered the full production run on a chip that nobody on Earth had even touched. Simul8tor was wrong about one detail. There was no second batch and there was no company.

You decide to do the entire testing in simulation rather than ever receiving a physical prototype. You commission the production run sight unseen with the rest of the company's money. So you're betting it all right here on the RIVA 128.

Yeah, the chip was the RIVA 128, and by the time it shipped, there was enough cash left to cover one more month of salaries. It sold a million units in four months. Nvidia lived.

Was everybody telling you you were crazy? No, everybody was clear we had no shot. Not doing it would be crazy because otherwise you wouldn't get home. You're gonna be out of business anyways.

Well, it worked.

Yeah.

And for years afterward, Huang opened his presentations by telling the room that the company was thirty days from going out of business. He still works like a man who believes that. He has around 60 people reporting directly to him, and he holds no scheduled one-on-ones with any of them.

Nvidia's leadership team is 60 plus, 60 people. Yeah.

And they all report to you?

Yeah, they all report to me.

60 direct reports?

60 direct reports.

Yeah.

I don't do one-on-ones.

I give you feedback right there in front of everybody.

Here's how he describes his week.

I work from the moment I wake up.

To the moment I go to sleep.

And I work 7 days a week.

Now, that's a true workaholic. But he isn't just putting in more hours. He set his whole company up so that those hours count. And right about now you might be thinking, okay, that sounds like the fastest way to burn yourself out. And I hear you. I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to be how you run your company, but when somebody joins me, I ask them a question. How many hours do you want to be working and how many are you working right now? Then I write a contract to match it. Some of the people on my team work 25 hours a week. Some are at 70. Both work fine because the hours aren't what usually breaks people. The wrong work is. Is. Hours on work that matters make you good. Hours on work that doesn't matter will wreck you, whether you're at 25 or 70 hours a week. And Jensen Huang isn't spending his week on boring paperwork. He built a company with no managers between him and the information, so he spends his hours deciding, making important choices. You can set up your week the same way. So here's how a real workaholic spends a day. 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.

Split your week into building days and meeting days. So my week splits into building days, maker days, and manager days, which are meeting days. So Wednesday and Fridays, those are my maker days. Wednesday is my creator day and Friday is my CEO day. And on both days I don't have anything booked. Monday and Thursday, Those are my manager days. I stack them with calls. Tuesday is a maker day on paper as well. It's my YouTube day, so nothing gets booked on it either. Here's why I'm strict about it. One 60-minute call dropped in the middle of a building day does not cost you 60 minutes. It costs you almost a whole day. You spend the morning knowing that it's coming, so you don't start any deep work. Then you spend the hour on the call doing the thing. Then you spend the afternoon getting your head back, and by the time you're thinking clearly again, it's already 4:00 PM. I mean, you've built nothing. A meeting day and a building day are 2 different jobs. On a meeting day, you're reacting. You're answering, you're trying to make decisions quickly with people. On a building day, you go down into one thing and stay there for 4 hours. Try to do both in the same morning and you'll be wiped out by Friday with nothing finished. So pick one day this week and close it. Start with whatever you can book off and then grow it to a whole day. Move every call off it, even the good ones. Then take everything you moved and jam it into one other day. So I use 2 meeting days for meetings because of the size of my team and what I'm working on. But start with one. And on that day, you might get through 6, 7 conversations in a row and you'll still have the next whole day free to actually go build something. Even half a day is Give every day one job. So inside those days, I give each one a single theme. So Monday is my team day and I spend the whole day mentoring and talking to the people on my team. Tuesday is my YouTube day. I'm filming this video on a Tuesday. Wednesday is my creator day, my project day. Thursday mornings I do my group trainings and Thursday afternoons I save for friends and friends of friends and podcasts. Friday is my CEO day. The reason why I have different days for different things is switching. Every time you jump from a sales call to editing a video, to a hiring decision, to support emails, to a podcast, to a podcast, to a video, It takes a while to get your head into the new thing every single time, so you feel busy all day and you finish your week with like four and a half things finished. A theme day means you never have to catch up. So on Tuesday, I'm not taking calls, I'm not taking meetings, I'm just locked in on my YouTube. My tools are open, my camera's ready to go, my head is already there, and I'll film a stack of videos one Tuesday that keeps my channel fed for at least a week. I can only do that because I'm not bouncing between things, and the bouncing is what creates most of the chaos and mental fatigue. So look at last week and count how many different kinds. How many different kinds of work you touched on your worst day? If it's more than 3, that's your problem. You're not lazy. The problem is you're just switching too much between different kinds of tasks.

Then name your own day.

So for me, Monday's people, Tuesday is making YouTube videos, like whatever fits your business, write it somewhere where you will see it. And when somebody asks for a Tuesday sales call, tell them Thursday works better. They will almost never be offended. That's the part that most people worry about and it hardly ever happens. So they book on the Thursday and they start treating your calendar like it's worth something because you treated it that way to begin with. The people who take your protected days Almost always they're not doing it on purpose. They take it because it's available. So stop making it available.

You made it available.

And listen, you're going to have real emergencies. So you can decide right now what the rule is going to be for emergencies. For me, I'm training my team so they know if you are calling me on a Tuesday, if you are interrupting me, you're sending me something, I'm in the middle of making videos, so it better be important. And people respect that boundary. And there are almost no emergencies that ever pop up. So the first few weeks, that's going to be a little bit harder. People are used to your old calendar. They might test a new one a handful of times. The more you hold steady, this is my calendar, the more they respect it. Shrink the block and move it off your morning. Every meeting I run is scheduled to end 5 minutes early. So a 25-minute call instead of 30, a 55-minute instead of an hour. That gives me 5 minutes to go to the bathroom, to get some water, to get my head straight before the next thing starts. So you never know when you're going to have to go pee. And a day with no gaps is also where you can feel frazzled at the end. That's the smaller version. And here's the bigger one. I used to check a whole list of websites every morning and it would It did take me a while to get through all of them. It felt very productive. It also was the first thing I did every day, which my best hours went to reading other people's work. So I ran an experiment. I condensed it into half an hour at 1 o'clock every day, and in that half hour I have to get it done. And look at that, I get it done in half an hour instead of 90 minutes in the morning. If you give a task 2 hours, it usually takes 2 hours. So you could start doing this today. You could take the task that is eating your mornings. You can cut the time by 2/3, move it to the afternoon, set a timer. When the timer goes off, you're done, whether you are finished or The first 2 days, it'll feel a little bit rushed. By day 3, you'll notice the work was never actually filling that whole block anyway. Your mornings are your best hours, so don't spend them on small stuff. Kill the work before you speed it up. So I have a formula I use for this, and the order is the whole thing. It's eliminate, automate, delegate. That is the order. It's a particular order. Eliminate comes first, and almost nobody starts there. You'll buy software to speed up a task that you should have just deleted. Now you're paying every month to do something that doesn't actually matter, or you'll You'll hand it to a person, which is worse because now somebody's week is filled with work that was never worth doing in the first place. So eliminate first, then automate what's left. A tool can automate whether it's a software, whether it's AI, et cetera. This isn't only a business framework, it's a framework for anything in life. Anytime you're feeling stressed out or overwhelmed, that feeling is a signal that you need to go eliminate a few things from your life, not to work faster, to have and do less. All progress begins, I think, with telling the truth. And the truth is usually that a third of your calendar is there because it was just So here is the assignment. Open last week's calendar and find the recurring thing that you'd be a little embarrassed to defend, right? The report, the check-in, the updates that people are not replying to. Skip it on purpose. Say nothing. If a week goes by and nobody notices, skip it again. Do that for a month and it's gone for good. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it.

Awesome.

And I'll see you there. One number, 3 drivers, and nothing else. So I have a brain that wants to chase everything, right? Left alone, I'll start 6 projects on a Sunday. So I keep one Google Sheet and I have what I call my wildly important number. At the top, there's one number. It's not a feeling, it's not a theme, it's a number. And under it, there are exactly 3 drivers, and each one is also a number, something I can count at the end of the week to see my progress. That's the whole document. 3 is the limit and it matters. 2, when you're not really running a business, you're running a project. 4 or more and you just have no priorities at all. You just have a list of to-dos that almost never get done. So to put it in a rhythm that makes it work, every time I'm checking in with my team, that number gets updated before the check-in. So you can see in a glance whether it's moving, but the number itself and the 3 drivers underneath it, they don't get swapped out because some shiny ideas showed up on a Tuesday afternoon. The numbers hold for months. So if a driver turns out to be wrong, you change it deliberately, not because you're just in a mood to change things. That saved me more time than any app I've ever bought. The new project isn't the problem. The problem is the old one sitting half finished for six weeks while you play with this new idea. So write your number down tonight. Write your three drivers underneath it. Then look at tomorrow and find the block that doesn't move your number or any of your three drivers. There's always one. That's the block that goes away. Do three a day while they do one a week. So here's where your extra hours now should go. When I was young and part of an agency, I was the least skilled person on the team. That's not me being humble. I was measurably the worst. So I did homework. Everyone else was putting out a video a week. I made three a day every day, including weekends—one in the morning, one at lunch, one at dinner—and my agent was looking at them, giving me feedback. So if we count what that does in a single week, I got twenty-one reps and a piece of feedback on each video I made. The person next to me got only one rep over a month. That's eighty-four corrections against their four. I didn't catch. I didn't catch up to them because I was smarter. I wasn't. I was not naturally more gifted. I caught up because I'd been wrong 84 more times than they had, and every one of those got fixed. So that's what the extra hours are for— more attempts at the thing that you're trying to get better at. And after every attempt, somebody tells you what you did wrong. So find your rep. If it's a salesperson and you're taking calls, if you're making videos, then it's videos. If you write, then it's pages. Count how many you did last week, then do that many in a day and let the quality drop a little while you do it. You'll be embarrassed by attempt number 7 and you'll get better by attempt number 15. And find out how it went as fast as you can. If nobody tells you what you got wrong, then you're not getting better. You're just practicing the wrong things. You're just staying busy. Start your day before the work starts. So every workaholic I admire protects the first stretch of the day and spends it with intention on purpose. So back to Jensen Huang from NVIDIA. He gives his time to his email stack. I give mine to a walk. So I call it the Believe Walk. It's, it's one word hashtag and it's 3 steps. Step 1, wake up and get outside. Fast. Put a stopwatch on. I'm out the door within 15 minutes. That part matters more than the walking because the alternative is picking up your phone. And the second you do that, you're starting to hand your life, your day to whoever happens to be overwhelming you with email or Instagram. Step 2 is the walk, right? Fresh air. Move for 20 to 30 minutes. Some mornings I'll throw a rucksack on, extra weight, but that's, that's an extra point. You don't have to do that. You just have to get outside. And then step 3, listen to somebody who's already done what you're trying to do. So I'll put on Steve Jobs or Howard Schultz, you're borrowing their belief until yours show up. So this is not about trying to have some productivity hack. It's about who you are when you sit down. I think being leads to doing. So do your believe walk. Get outside, walk, put something in your ears. It helps you believe in yourself more. And if you're tight on time, 10 to 15 minutes is enough. That's the baseline. And it's more than enough to change your life. You have 15 minutes. Make the information come to you. So working hard only pays off if you hear about problems quickly. Huang has about 60 people reporting straight to him. Like I said, no scheduled one-on-ones, nobody filtering what reaches him. When he gives feedback, he does it in front of the group. So everyone hears the same reasoning at the same time, and he never has to say it 60 times. And every morning he reads a stack of short emails from people all over the company, each one listing the 5 things that matter most to them right now. He gets through about 100 of them. So look at what that design does. A normal CEO waits 2 weeks and sits through 4 meetings to hear the same thing. He reads it first thing in the morning in 5 lines. So he spends his day deciding and not just chasing people all day for updates. You can build that at any size. If you have a team, you can cancel your next status meeting and ask for 5 lines instead. If you work alone, you're still losing time just hunting for information. It's spread across all of your different apps. Every extra app you have to open is another place to go looking and lose time. One inbox, one task list, one document where the plan lives. If you have to check 4 apps to find out what you're supposed to do today, you'll spend your best hour just finding it out and get nothing done. A bird sitting on a branch isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, but it's in her wings. So build the system so the information reaches you and then trust yourself to decide. You have more room than you think. So nobody gets more hours in a day than you do, right? The people who beat you work the hours everyone else gave up and they spend them on fewer things. So close one day, name your days, cut a block by 2/3, delete the reports nobody reads. Pick your number. If you can do that, then you must. Where you are next year comes down to what you do with this week. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn the psychology of men who succeed later in life.

The most dangerous idea living in your head right now is that it's too late for you.

It's too late. I'm too old. I'm not— it's never too late. Obviously, you know that.

I know that.

You cannot allow yourself to say that I'm too old ever again. I don't care if you're 98 and you know that you have 15 seconds left to live. Don't buy into the myth that you're too old because that is going to slow you down.

The founders behind the most successful startups in America aren't 25 years old. They're 45 on average, according to a study from MIT and the US Census Bureau. Census Bureau that tracked 2.7 million company founders.

The moral to my life: don't quit at age 65. Maybe your boat hasn't come in yet. Mine hasn't.

There are absolutely a ton of entrepreneurs that started their companies in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s when it was difficult to do such a thing. Sidney Frank, who created Grey Goose, didn't invent his big thing until the '70s.

So this was never really about business or about your age. It's about whether you quit on yourself in the exact chapter The most powerful decision we make—

most of us don't make it consciously— is what are we going to focus on? Don't have a quitting mind. Repetition every day. Stay hard.

Let me tell you about a man named Harland Sanders. At 65 years old, he was broke. A new highway had rerouted the traffic away from the little roadside restaurant that he'd spent years building. And just like that, the thing that he had worked so hard for was gone. he'd poured his life into was gone.

Nothing come along, should have made this interstate system. That went 7 miles back of me, left me something behind, right?

He was living on a Social Security check of $105 a month. So picture that for a second, right? 65 years old, a failed business behind him, $105 to his name. He was carrying around all of this doubt. He had every reason in the world to sink into a chair and decide that that was it, his shot is gone. But what he had instead was a chicken recipe and a decision to make.

I was 66 years old. I couldn't afford to quit.

He climbed into his old car and he started driving. He'd pull up to a restaurant, walk into the back, and offer to cook his chicken right there for the owner and the staff. If they liked it, they could use his recipe and his name, and he'd take a few cents of royalty on every piece of chicken they sold.

I only got a nickel on every chicken that they sold. They got 3 dinners out of But I got one nickel for the whole meal. But you'd be surprised how fast those nickels add up.

Door after door, kitchen after kitchen, he got no more times than any person should ever have to hear it. He slept in his car and he kept going at 66, at 67, at 68. Then one day, a single restaurant said yes. Then another said yes. Then hundreds.

When you started with this franchise, how long before the real break came And it began to take off across the country.

It began to do pretty good after about 2 years.

By the time he was 73, Colonel Harland Sanders had franchised more than 600 Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, and he sold that company for $2 million, which is worth more than $20 million in today's money.

After 7 and a half years, this franchise business, I sold out for $2 million. Not a lot of money. I see in the paper yesterday the same company that I sold for $2 million sold for $240 million.

He became the white-suited face of one of the most recognizable brands on the entire planet, KFC. And remember, he started all of this at 65. Now you might be thinking, okay, that's a nice story, Evan, but that was a different time. Sanders got lucky. It's harder now, and I've already burned too many years. And that thinking and that objection is the one thing that's standing between you and everything that I'm about to give you here in this video. You feel behind because you're measuring the years that you've lived against some imaginary schedule that somebody else handed to you, right? That schedule is not real. The pressure that you have to have your life figured out by a certain age is just a myth, and it creates unnecessary weight on your shoulders that has nothing to do with what you're actually capable of building. The years you think that you wasted weren't wasted at all. They were reps. They were you stacking up the exact experience that, that research we talked about says makes a 50-year-old nearly twice as likely to build a runaway success as a 30-year-old. So we're not too late. You are loaded with experience, and what you choose to do in the next few minutes decides whether all of that experience becomes your actual next breakthrough or you let it stay your excuse to stay stuck. Your timeline belongs to you and nobody else. So the first thing you have to understand about people who win late is they just stopped racing against somebody else's clock. So there's no deadline for finding your purpose. Zero. Life isn't a straight line where you're just supposed to arrive at some fixed point by some certain birthday of yours, right? It says winding path full of tons of detours and setbacks, and the detours are exactly where you need to pick up everything that eventually makes you dangerous. So Henry Ford's first company, it completely fell apart, and then the second one did too. He didn't found Ford Motor Company until he was 39 years old, and the Model T that changed the world didn't arrive until he was 44. 2 failures behind him, and his real work hadn't even started yet. If he had accepted that, that was it. His shot was gone. He'd had never known the name Henry Ford, and he's not some rare exception. Taichihiro Mori was a economics professor who didn't start building his real estate business until he was 55 years old. By the time he was in his 80s, he was the richest man in the entire world. Ray Kroc was 52 years old. He was a milk machine salesman. He was sick and tired of driving from town to town selling milkshake machines when he walked into a little burger stand and turned McDonald's into this global empire. These are not lucky freaks of nature. These are men. Who refused to believe that their birthday, their age was gonna decide how far they can go. And so it's a shift that happens in your psychology, and it's the whole reason why 45 keeps showing up in the data. Carl Jung talked about how a 16-year-old's mind is aimed at conquering the world out there, the money, the status, the proving to everyone that you matter. But somewhere around 45, you wake up to a deeper truth. The only thing you actually needed to conquer this whole time wasn't the world, it's yourself. And that's actually the most powerful upgrade that a human being I think can go through. The man who spent 45 years learning How his own mind works, learning where he panics, learning where he's willing to sacrifice, what he refuses to do, where his values at. That person is holding a weapon that a 25-year-old can't even picture yet. So you have that weapon right now. You've been sharpening it for years without even noticing. So the goal is to stop asking, "Hey, am I too old for this?" And start asking, "What have these years actually taught me that I can finally put to work?" Every hard job that you hated taught you something. Every relationship that ended, it taught you something. Every business that didn't make it taught you something that you can't put in a text. The bird sitting on a branch isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust was never in the branch. It's in her wings. So your circumstances, they're the branch. They'll shake, they'll break, they'll get rerouted by some new highway like Colonel Sanders that you never saw coming. Your wings are everything that you've learned about yourself over all of these years. Trust those. That's a psychology that wins late and you already own it.

Turn your insecurity into a mission.

So here's something that almost nobody says. Out loud about high achievers, and it's especially true for the ones who break through later in life. A lot of them are running on a dangerous cocktail of massive insecurity mixed with massive ambition, right? You feel deep down like you're not enough, so you work harder and reach higher and chase more, all to cover up that hollow feeling of not being good enough. And when you're older, that insecurity gets bigger because now there's a second voice on top of it that's also saying, "Hey, and you should have done this already. You should be further ahead than where you are right now." So this is really important. That insecurity doesn't mean that you are a broken human. It is just energy sitting in your chest waiting for you at some point to feel something worthy. The way you point that is at service. So when you get nervous, when the doubt floods in, when you feel like an imposter for trying something at your age, shift the focus to the person that you're here to try to help. Service. The second you stop asking, do I look stupid for doing this? And start asking, who is not getting health because I'm sitting on the projects? Protecting my pride, the fear starts to go away. It has to because you physically cannot be self-conscious and of service at the same moment. Your brain has only room for one of those. So choose service and watch the nerves quiet down. And this is the part that I believe with everything in me: your purpose comes from your pain. Whatever you struggled with the most in your life, whatever cost you all of those years that you kept grieving, that is the exact thing that you're meant to help other people through.

The struggle.

wasn't your punishment. The struggle was your preparation. The messy divorce, the bankruptcy, the addiction that you beat, the years of feeling invisible. All of it handed you a map that people who haven't walked that road, they simply don't have. And now you have it. Colonel Sanders spent decades cooking in a roadside kitchen before that recipe was worth anything. The pain came first. The purpose grew out of it. And if you have the ability to help somebody through the thing that you survived, then you have the responsibility to do so. If you can, then you must. That's how you take the insecurity that might've been eaten at you for years. and turn it into a mission that finally pulls you forward every morning to do something. Hit the same spot until the wall breaks. Okay, so now let's talk about why late bloomers actually break through, because it often comes down to a very specific and repeatable way of working that you can start copying today. So just imagine this giant brick wall in front of you and a sledgehammer in your hand. If you swing that hammer at 15 different spots in the wall, you're going to exhaust yourself and the wall is still just going to be standing there. But if you hit the exact same spot for 15 or 20 times in a row, that wall cracks and starts to come crashing down. Same amount of effort, just completely different results. Difference is focus and repetition landing on one single point. That's what the years of struggle are really for when you put them to use. People never break through because every few months they get discouraged and they swing at a brand new spot. New business idea, new business plan, new spot over and over and over. They spread their swings across the entire wall and then wonder why nothing ever cracks. The person who wins late is usually just the one who kept pounding. Grounding on the same spot after everyone else kind of wandered off to swing somewhere else. Focus is a competitive advantage because it's rare. If your idea is genuinely ahead of its time, you might have to hit the same spot 40 times instead of 20. So what? You built the arm for it. You've got the patience the 25-year-old version of you never had. There's this picture that I'd love for you to, you know, burn it here into your mind, especially when it all feels pointless. Think of a combination lock with 6 numbers on it. You have 5 of the 6 numbers already dialed in correctly and the lock still won't open from the outside. Even from the inside, it looks completely stuck. It feels like nothing you're doing is working, but you are one single click on that final wheel away from the whole thing springing wide open. This is exactly where a huge number of people are standing at the exact moment that they quit. They're 5 clicks in, one click away. Sanders was one restaurant away from KFC for years, and it looked like total failure the entire time, right up until the second that it didn't. So on the day it feels hopeless, don't read that feeling as a stop sign. It's a it's an idea that you need to keep going, to keep turning the wheel until you get that last click. Get rich slow, then get rich fast. One of the most freeing things that you can accept is how the timeline of real success actually works. So there's a saying that I love that you get rich really slow, and then you get rich really fast. The slow part is what scares people away because for a long time it looks like nothing is actually happening. But that slow part is where you're pouring the foundation of your empire. You're making your product genuinely great. You're taking care of the people you serve. So well that they can't stop telling their friends about you. You're building your launchpad so solid that when it's finally time to scale, you go up like a rocket ship instead of something that explodes in the sky. Building anything real that lasts is usually a five to seven year haul before it looks like an overnight success to everybody else watching from the outside, and that length of time is the exact reason people burn out and walk away around year two or three. They just don't see the money show up fast enough. They get discouraged, and they decide, "Hey, this isn't working," and so they quit right. Right before the fast part was about to begin. But if you know going in that it's a multi-year climb, you stop panicking and freaking out when month 6 doesn't make you rich. You expected month 6 to be quiet. You're playing a longer, calmer game than most people who are trying to sprint past you and be gone by next spring. So this is a way to look at the slow years without going broke or also losing your mind and confidence. Split your focus 80/20. Put 80% of your energy on the work that brings in real revenue right now, the stuff that keeps the lights on and pays the bills. So, you know, You're not operating just from pure desperation. And then put the other 20% on the bigger creative vision, the long-term thing that you're truly building towards. That 20% is your future. The 80% is what buys you enough time to actually reach it. So many people go all in on the dream with zero income and they flame out inside of a year. And plenty of others play it so safe on the income side that they never once touch the actual dream. The 80/20 split lets you do both at the same time, and it's how you stay standing in the game. game long enough for slow to finally turn into fast. Borrow their belief until you build your own. Okay, so the hardest part about winning late— some days you will not believe in yourself. There will be this giant doubt that'll be louder than your faith, and everything I've said will feel like it was written for somebody else, somebody younger, somebody stronger, somebody who didn't make all the mistakes that you made. I've been there more times than I can So here's what you do on those days. You borrow belief. When you do not have the belief in yourself, you lean on someone else's belief in you until you can rebuild your own. You borrow it from the stories of people who walk through the same fires before you. You read about Colonel Sanders or watch this video again in that car, and you let his stubbornness pour into your morning. You study how Steve Jobs got kicked out of the very company that he founded, wandered for years, and came back to build it into the most valuable company in the world. You surround yourself with a community that believes in the mission on the exact mornings where you can't find the belief anywhere in yourself. That is strategy. It's not just some weakness. Every strong person that you admire has borrowed belief from someone at their lowest point. This whole game is simply refusing to quit during this stretch of time where you're still building up your belief in yourself to do the thing that you don't think you're capable of doing yet. But you don't rebuild belief by sitting around just trying to think positive thoughts. You rebuild it through action. So confidence is not something that you just think your way into. It's something that you earn one scary small action at a time. You take the step, you survive it, and your brain updates its files here on who you are and what you're capable of doing. Being leads to doing. You decide to be the kind of person who shows up. You act like that person today, even before you feel ready, and the actions slowly make it real, makes it the truth. So don't sit and get ready to feel ready. Ready is not real. Nobody who ever did anything great felt ready the moment before they started.

You know when the best time to start is now.

How about right now?

The best years are the ones you haven't lived yet. Here's what I would love for you to walk away with. You are not behind.

You're right on time. You're carrying an arsenal of experience your younger self could only have dreamed about. Sanders started at 65. Crocs started at 52. The best founders in the country are 45+. Your timeline becomes your own. So keep hitting the same spot. Keep serving people through your pain and keep turning that final wheel even when it looks stuck, because you are so much closer than it feels right now. The chapter you're most proud of hasn't even been written yet. The man you're becoming is standing just on the other side of the discomfort that you are feeling right now. So trust in your wings, not the branch. The impossible is exactly what you were here on this earth to do.

Now let's learn how Elon Musk learns so You do not need to be a genius to learn as fast as Elon Musk.

You can learn anything you want for free. It is not a question of learning.

I think just kind of throwing yourself into different situations to learn new things is— I don't know, I think that that's just a big part of life.

You don't need to be a genius in what I do.

The ability to master any new skill in record time is just a simple framework that anyone can copy.

First principles analysis, I think, is something that can be applied to really any walk of life, anything really. It's really just saying, let's boil something down to the most fundamental principles, the things that we are most confident are true at a foundational level.

If you keep trying to memorize information the traditional way, you will fall so far behind your competitors that your business will fail.

I think a lot of things people learn, probably there's no point in learning them. Colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores. But they're not for learning.

When Elon Musk decided to build a rocket, people laughed at him. He did not have a degree in aerospace engineering. He was a software guy, but he did not let that stop him. In a Reddit Ask Me Anything, Elon revealed his secret. He said most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. He views knowledge as a tree. He makes sure he understands the fundamental principles first. He learns the trunk and big branches before he gets into the leaves.

Leaves and details.

He mastered rocket science by focusing on the core ideas first. Now, you might be thinking that Elon Musk is a billionaire genius with a photographic memory, and you are just a regular person trying to build a business. You think this method only works if you already have a massive brain, but that is completely wrong. The truth is that Elon uses this method to organize his brain because human memory is deeply flawed. When you use this exact knowledge tree method, you level the playing field and unlock your true potential. So today I'm going to show you exactly how to build your own knowledge tree step by step. Identify first principles. You cannot learn fast if you are blinded by what other people are doing. The biggest mistake you make when trying to learn a new business is copying your competitors. This is called reasoning by analogy. You look at what is already out there and you try to make a slightly better version. This is a trap that keeps you slow and average. Elon Musk does not reason by analogy. He uses first principles thinking. So when he wanted to send a rocket to Mars, he found out that buying a rocket would cost $65 million. Most people would just accept that price and give up. Elon did not give up. He broke the rocket down to its fundamental truths. He looked at the raw materials of the rocket. He found out that the aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, titanium, copper, and carbon fiber only cost 2% of the typical rocket price. He learned how to build rockets by focusing only on the raw materials. You must do the exact same thing in your business. So when I was 19 years old, I walked away from a 6-figure finance job. I decided to join a software startup where I was making $300 a month. I was struggling. I was completely isolated and alone. I did not know how to sell anything, let alone scientific software. Instead of looking at my local competitors, I looked at the biggest success that I can find. I studied Bill Gates. I broke down his early strategies to their absolute core truths. I applied his exact raw materials for success to build up my tiny company. Because I stopped copying average people and broke the problem down to its first principles, I landed my first deal for $13,500. So if you want to learn a new skill right now, stop looking at the surface level. Write down the absolute facts of problem. Strip away the opinions, the assumptions, and the industry traditions. Those are usually the worst. Once you have the raw materials, you can then build a completely new and faster way to learn. But identifying the raw materials is only the first step. You still need a place to put them inside your brain. Plant your semantic tree. Most people try to memorize random facts, tips, tricks. This is why you forget everything that you read. Your brain is not a filing cabinet for random data. Elon Musk explained his secret in that famous Reddit interview. He said you must view knowledge as a semantic tree. You have to understand the trunk and the big branches first. If you do not understand the trunk, the leaves and the tiny details have nothing to hang on to. There is a proven scientific reason why this works. It is called schema theory. A schema is a mental slot in your long-term memory. It acts like a cognitive shortcut. So when you learn the core trunk of a subject, you create a permanent schema in your brain. When you learn a new tiny detail later, your brain instantly knows exactly where to put it. So think about this in real life. So I'm a big salsa dancer, right? I met my wife Nina at the salsa studio that I then later bought and now own. But when I was first starting dancing, I was terrible. I wanted to look cool immediately. I wanted to learn the advanced spins, the dips, the crazy hand tricks. But those moves are the leaves of the tree. Tree. If you try to learn the leaves first, you'll fall flat on your face. You have to learn the basic step first— forward and back, side to side. That basic step is the trunk. Once your brain understands the trunk, every single advanced spin becomes incredibly easy to learn. So we can apply this to your business. If you want to master marketing, do not start by learning the latest social media algorithm hacks. Those are the leaves. They will change next week anyway. Learn human psychology. Learn why people buy things. Build your trunk first. And once you have a strong trunk, you need a system that actually forces that information into your daily schedule. Chunk your time and knowledge. You cannot learn a massive subject all at once. Your working memory, it has a strict limit. In psychology, there is a famous concept called the magical number 7. It proves that the human brain can only hold a few pieces of information at a time before it starts to get completely overwhelmed. To get around this, you must use a process called chunking. You break massive amounts of data into tiny bite-sized chunks. Elon Musk uses chunking to manage his entire life. He runs multiple billion-dollar companies by breaking his day into tiny five-minute blocks.

He focuses completely on one single problem for five minutes, solves it, moves on to the next chunk.

He uses techniques similar to the Pomodoro method to maintain his intense. Razor-sharp focus. And I use this exact same mental strategy when I'm playing games. When I play League of Legends or Minecraft, I don't sit down and just try to win the entire game in one giant move. I break the game down into tiny quests. I focus on finding one resource. I focus on winning my lane in trades. You need to treat your learning the exact same way. Do not sit down and say you're going to learn everything about sales today. You will just get frustrated and quit. Block off 20 minutes, focus on learning how to write one single cold email. Email. Master that one chunk, then move on to the next. But even if you chunk your time perfectly, nothing matters if you refuse to take messy action. Force your brain to change. You cannot train your brain just by reading books. You have to actually perform the skill. Your brain is a physical muscle. It uses a biological process called neuroplasticity to adapt to new challenges. Neuroplasticity means that your brain. Brain literally reorganizes itself and creates new neural pathways based on your experiences. To force these new pathways to grow, you have to put yourself in uncomfortable situations, new situations. You have to expect to suck at the beginning. When I decided to start my YouTube channel, I was a massive introvert. I still am. I was terrified of getting in front of the camera. I did not know what I was doing. My first videos were terrible, but I didn't quit. I forced my brain to adapt through just sheer volume and It took me 350 videos before I could even watch my own content back without being completely embarrassed by myself when I was doing it. It took me 700 videos before I finally watched a video and thought, oh my God, I'm starting to get good at this. I built my entire business because I was willing to be bad at something long enough to let my brain learn how to be good at it, right? You can see my whole YouTube journey. Go back and watch all the videos on my channel. They're all still there. You can see all the mistakes that I made early on, and you can do the exact same thing. Same thing. If you want to learn a skill like Elon Musk, you have to embrace the pain of being a beginner. Your purpose comes from your pain. The struggle you feel when you are learning something new is just your brain physically upgrading itself. So stop waiting for the perfect time. Stop researching. Start doing the actual work. Trust that great ideas flow through you and take the first step because you have the raw materials. You have the semantic tree. You have the focus to master anything. Anything. Now you just need to believe. Your next step to greatness. Everything you want out of life is possible if you just believe in it more. You are entirely capable of mastering any skill you need to build your dream business. Do not let fear or slow learning stop you from serving the world. Take your new knowledge tree and go make something happen today. To learn why the rich obsess over cash flow, not net worth, check the video right there next to me. I think you're You love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

You've been chasing the wrong number your whole life.

The poorest people on Earth always are going after this stuff versus cash flow.

When you learn as an investor over multiple decades is