How Steve Jobs Convinced the World He Was Right

Steve Jobs had a power his own team called the reality distortion field.

He made decisions that made good sense, uh, in terms of vision, but he was not an engineer. And in those days, they used to call it in Silicon Valley the Steve Jobs reality distortion field, and it was because Steve didn't feel bounded by the laws of physics.

It proves something powerful: the person who believes the hardest wins. Even when they're not the smartest one in the room.

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.

He believed in his vision so completely that Apple became the first company in history worth $3 trillion, and today it's worth more than $4 trillion.

There needs to be someone who is sort of the, um, keeper and reiterator of the vision. 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.

This matters for you because the force that built Apple is the one thing standing between your idea and the people you need to believe in it.

One of the things that made Apple great was that in the early days It was built from the heart. Things that Apple believed in at its core are the same things that Apple really stands for today.

Back in 1983, Steve Jobs was just 28 years old, running a young computer company, and he wanted the best CEO in America to come run it with him. He set his sights on John Sculley, the president of PepsiCo, one of the most successful executives in the entire country.

They went to the most famous executive search person at that time, Jerry Roach, on in New York, and he turned up my name. And Steve and I met. At that time, I was running Pepsi. Steve and I spent about 5 months getting to know one another, and we would meet almost every weekend.

Sculley had everything— a massive salary, corner office, the top job at a giant brand that everyone knew. And he kept telling Jobs no.

I said, Steve, thought about it, but I'm not coming to Apple.

Why would he walk away from the top job of the corporate world for a risky little computer company run by a kid? Then Steve Jobs looked him dead in the eye and asked one question: Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world? That one sentence changed everything. Sculley walked away from one of the biggest companies in America to join Apple.

He got about half a meter from me and just stared at me, and there's a long pause, and then he said, do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world? And it's like it knocks the wind out of you. And I didn't give him a different answer at that moment, but a week later I was working at Apple.

Jobs didn't win him with a bigger paycheck or a stack of spreadsheets. He won him with a vision so big that running a soda company suddenly felt small. That's how powerful real belief is. That moment right there is the reality distortion field in action. It looks like magic from the outside, but here's how he really did it. They don't even have to believe in what you're saying. They just have to believe that you believe in what you're saying. That's the whole secret. Jobs believed so hard that other people borrowed his belief until they could grow their own. Years later, he proved it again with the famous Think Different campaign. Jobs personally chased down permission from the families of Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., and Gandhi to put them in an Apple ad. He genuinely believed that if those legends used a computer, they would have used a Mac. That's the level of belief that I'm talking about. He didn't just hope it was true. He knew it in his bones. And that certainty is what pulled the whole world along with him, and it wasn't loud or pushy. A lot of the times Jobs spoke softly and slowly and people leaned in to catch every word. The belief was so inside him that he never had to raise his voice to make you feel it. Now you might be thinking, okay, that's great for Steve Jobs, but I'm no Steve Jobs. I don't have his charisma. I don't have some reality distortion field. I'm just me. And this is for you. Steve Jobs was not born with this. He was a kid who got fired from his own company in 1985 because people stopped believing in him. He spent years in the wilderness building other things before Apple begged him to come back. The conviction that you saw later inside Steve Jobs, it was built brick by brick, choice by choice. So it's not a personality that you either have or you don't. It's a skill, and any skill can be learned. So you already have something. It's something you believe in. You already have an idea, a project, a dream, something that lives inside you. The only thing missing is learning how to carry that belief in a way that other people can feel it too. And once you do that, doors start opening that you didn't even know were there. If you've been here before, put 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.

So let's get into how you actually do this, starting with the foundation that everything is going to sit on top of. Believe it before they do. In 2007, Steve Jobs walked on stage and showed the world a phone with no keyboard, just glass. Every expert said he was wrong. Phones needed real buttons that you could feel. Every smartphone of the day had a little keyboard and people swore nobody would type on a sheet of glass. Jobs didn't have any proof. He had belief. He bet his whole company on a blank screen because he could already see you swiping and tapping like it was the most natural thing in the world. He believed it before a single customer ever touched one. Here's what most people do. You wait for other people to believe in you first, and then you feel confident. You wait for the customer to say yes, the investor to write the check, the audience to clap and cheer for you, and then you'll finally feel sure of yourself. That's backwards. The belief has to start with you before there's any proof, before anyone else is on board. So when the people in front of you lack self-belief, they borrow yours. That's your real job as a leader, as a founder, as a creator. You have to believe enough for two people because the person across from you is scared and they're watching you to see if it's safe to dream. If you flinch, they flinch. If you are rock solid, they relax and start to lean in. So before you ever walk into that meeting or hit record or send that pitch do the inner work first. Get so clear on why your idea matters that no one can shake you from it. Run the hardest objections at yourself in advance. Answer them on paper. Keep going until there's nothing left. There's no cracks in your presentation. When you become the person who fully believes, the words and the actions start flowing on their own. You stop sounding like you're hoping and you start sounding like you know what you're talking about. And people feel that difference instantly. In their gut, the same way the world felt it watching Steve Jobs hold up a little slab of glass. So before any big conversation, write down in one line what you absolutely know to be true about your idea. Not what you hope, what you know. Read it out loud until your body believes it. Then walk in carrying that one line. Hold their dream bigger than they hold it. When the team was building the first Macintosh, One of the engineers told Steve Jobs the computer couldn't boot up any faster. It was already as fast as it was ever going to get. Steve Jobs didn't accept that. He sat the engineer down and did the math out loud. Millions of people would turn this machine on every single day. If it booted 10 seconds faster, you multiply that by all those people every day for years, and you're saving dozens of human lifetimes. Then he looked at him and asked, so can you make it boot faster? A few weeks later, that engineer had cut the boot time almost in half, something he'd sworn was impossible. That's what holding a bigger dream does. The people you talk to are usually stuck in the day-to-day, buried in the fear of their bills, and they've shrunk their dreams down to something safe. Jobs never did that for the people around him. He held a bigger picture that they could see for themselves, and that's exactly why they did the impossible for him. So when someone shares their goal with you, hold it in your hand and think bigger than they do. If someone tells you they want to make an extra $10,000 this year, Look them in the eye and say, that's a good start. Then show them the version of their life that's 10 times bigger than the one they just described. You're not— you're not trying to flatter them. You're trying to remind them of what's actually possible that they have forgotten inside of themselves. People are drawn to the person who sees more in them than they see in themselves. That's leadership. Do that for the people around you and you become magnetic. They'll follow you not because you pressured them, but because you believe in their future more than they currently do. And I think that's one of the kindest things you can do for another human being. You give them permission to want and be more. Make it so simple they can repeat it. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, the company was a complete mess. They were making dozens of different products, and even Steve Jobs couldn't explain what half of them were for. So in a meeting, he walked up to a whiteboard and drew a simple 2x2 grid, 4 boxes. One question across the top: Are you a regular person or pro? And one question on the side: Do you want a desktop or something portable. He said Apple would make one great product for each box. 4 computers. That's it. Then he killed almost everything else. People thought he was crazy throwing away that many products, but that brutal simplicity is what saved the company. Jobs said something that sounds backwards until you actually sit and reflect on it. Simple is harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean enough to make it simple. The person who can take a giant idea and say it so a 10-year-old understands it That's the person who wins the room. So let's look at the Think Different campaign. Jobs didn't give a 40-page report on company values. He boiled the whole soul of the company down to 2 words. So take your idea, whatever you're trying to get people to believe in, and ask yourself, can I say this in one clean sentence? If you can't, then maybe you don't understand it well enough. Keep cutting it down. Keep carving it out. Remove every word that isn't carrying actual weight. Get rid of the jargon that makes you sound smart, but but corporatey, because when your message is that simple, people can carry it for you. They can repeat it to their friends, their team, their family, and your one clean sentence becomes their words too. That's how an idea travels from one person to the whole world on the back of a message so clear it sticks in someone's head and won't leave. 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, and I'll see you there. Speak their words, not yours. When Apple launched the first iPod in 2001, the other companies selling music players were all bragging about gigabytes— 5 gigabytes of storage. Technically impressive and totally meaningless to a normal human being. Steve Jobs didn't say 5 gigabytes. He held up the iPod and said, "A thousand songs in your pocket." Same exact device, same storage. One of those is engineer language and the other is human language. And that one little phrase is a big reason the iPod took over the world. That's the lesson. When you want someone to believe in your idea, the fastest way to build trust is to make them feel understood. And you do that by speaking their language, not yours. Listen to how they describe their own problem, then say it back to them in their exact words. If a customer says, "I'm tired of feeling invisible," you don't translate that into a line about Brand Visibility Solutions, you say you felt invisible and you're done with that. Instantly, that person feels like you get them. And here's another piece. Never tell someone they're wrong, even when they are. The second you say you're wrong, a wall comes up and they stop listening. So agree first and then gently guide and improve. Start with, I totally hear you, and then walk them towards the new way of seeing it and stop framing your offer as some giant, big, scary leap. Frame it as just the next logical step. People are afraid of big jumps, but they'll happily take one small step that's reasonable as a step forward. You lower the fear, you raise the trust, and you make it easy for them to say yes. Belief grows when people feel safe, and people feel safe when they feel heard. So do this enough and people stop arguing with you and start asking you what to do next. And the moment someone truly feels understood by you, they stop defending their old position and they open up to a new way. Stand up for your idea when it gets tested. In 1985, at just 30 years old, Steve Jobs, he got pushed out of Apple, the company he had built in his parents' garage. The board sided with John Sculley, the same CEO that Jobs had recruited, and stripped Steve of all of his power. He could have crawled away and given up on his ideas. He didn't. He went and he started NeXT. He bought a tiny computer company that became Pixar, and he kept building on the exact vision people had just rejected him for. 12 years later, with Apple sliding towards bankruptcy without him, they came back and begged him to return. And that same vision turned Apple into the giant that it is today. So the principle here is believing in your idea quietly isn't enough. At some point, someone bigger, louder, more successful is gonna push on your idea. And unless you stand up for it, the most dominant people in the room will never respect you. They're testing you. They wanna see if you actually believe what you're saying or if you're gonna fold. The second that there's some pressure. So when someone challenges you, don't cave. Don't get defensive. Calmly hold your ground and explain why you see it the way you do. Ask some questions back. Make them defend their doubt the same way they're asking you to defend your belief. And if the fear of failing is what's stopping you from standing your ground, remember the bird. A bird sitting on a branch isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch. Her trust is in her wings. So put your trust in your own ability to figure things out no matter what happens. That's where real conviction comes from. Not from knowing nothing will go wrong, but from knowing that you can handle it if it does. When you stand on that, then no challenge can knock you off your idea. Obsess over the parts no one sees. Now, there's one more thing that made people believe Steve Jobs, and it might be the most subtle one. When Steve Jobs was a boy, his father Paul, who built furniture out in their garage, taught him something that stuck with him for life. A real craftsman makes the back of the cabinet just as beautiful as the front, even though it's against the wall and nobody will ever see it because you know it's there. Jobs took that to heart when they built the Macintosh. He insisted the inside of the computer, the circuit board hidden behind the case where no customer would ever look, had to be beautiful too. The engineers thought he was nuts. Who cares what the inside looks like? Steve Jobs cared. He approved every word of marketing copy and everything that went on the website down to the last detail. People called it extreme, but that obsession is exactly why the world came to trust Apple. When you care that deeply about the things no one sees, it shows up in the things they do see. People can feel when something was made with love. So whatever you're building, pour yourself into the corners that nobody's gonna check. Make the hidden parts excellent too. Answer the email better than you have to. Fix the small thing that only you are gonna notice. That level of care is impossible to fake, and people will sense it. Your conviction is not just in your words, it's in how you do the work when no one is watching. Every hidden detail you get right is one more reason a customer tells a friend, one more reason a skeptic will give you a second look, one more brick in the wall of trust that you are building with people. None of it is visible on day one, but over time it stacks into something that people cannot argue with. And if you have the ability to do it right, then you have the responsibility to do it too. If you can, then you must. That's the standard that makes people believe that you are the real thing. Okay, so here's what I want to leave you with. With Steve— Steve Jobs wasn't magic. He was a person who believed in something so deeply that the whole world eventually believed it too. You have that exact same ability inside you right now, starting today. Start by believing before there's any proof. Hold the dream for the people around you. Make your message simple. Speak their language. Stand up for what you see and care about the details. Do that and watch how people start to lean in. Don't wait for permission. Don't wait to feel ready because ready isn't real. You get to decide today that your idea is worth believing in. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn the exact steps that I would take to start a new business. If I lost everything tomorrow and had to start a brand new business this year with no audience and no savings, I wouldn't panic. Because starting a business has never been simpler or cheaper than it is right now. There's never been a better time to be an inventor and a pioneer than right now because the world is on fire with new ideas and with AI and space opportunities. We're in the middle of multiple golden ages right now. This is the best time ever in the history of technology ever, period, to start a company. 99% of small businesses you can start with next to no capital. It's more about effort. Americans filed a record 5.67 million business applications in 2025, the most in history according to the US Census Bureau. So while everyone online keeps telling you the dream is dead and the economy is rigged, more people are quietly betting on themselves than at any point ever. The US is marking Small Business Week, and new data finds more Americans are jumping on the small business bandwagon. Data is showing us that last year, a record number of people applied to be small business owners. This isn't just about business. It's about taking back control of your time, your income, your life. And I'm gonna walk you through the exact steps I'd follow in order to do it from scratch. Where are you gonna spend your time? Your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life. I am in control of everything that happens to me. Everything, everything that will happen in my life, I will be the master of. One of the most important things you have in your life time. It's one of your greatest assets, or it's your liability. When I was 20 years old, I had a little software company and I was making $300 a month. I was so broke and so ashamed of it that I lied to my own friends and pretended I was living the hustle lifestyle when the truth is I couldn't even afford $20 for a night out and beer. One night I was sitting there crying, ready to quit, completely convinced that I just wasn't smart enough to pull this off. And then something hit me that changed the whole direction of my life and my company. Company. Somebody had already figured this out. I don't have to be a genius. I don't have to have the skills or information yet, and I can model someone who has already done it. So I went and studied how Bill Gates built Microsoft. He had a software company. I had a software company. Everyone assumes Microsoft blew up because of some genius piece of code, but it didn't. It blew up because Gates made a deal with IBM, the number one computer maker in the entire world at the time, so that every single computer they shipped came with Microsoft software already loaded on But here's the part that almost nobody talks about. Microsoft was already a $7 million company before that famous IBM deal ever happened. And when I dug into how Gates got from zero to that first $7 million, the answer was the exact same word: partnerships. He did not work everyone, although he worked very hard. He partnered with people who already had what he needed. So I went back to work the very next morning, copied that one single idea, stopped trying to do everything alone, and closed my first deal for $13,500. Bill Gates kept me in business and I never once met the man. Right now you're probably thinking it's easy for me to say all this because I have a big audience today. But if you took every single follower away from me tomorrow, I promise you I would not start by trying to go viral on YouTube. Building an audience from scratch, it takes 3, 5 more years and most people run out of motivation and money and quit long before it ever pays them anything. So forget about followers at the start. Forget about the perfect logo. Forget about waiting until you feel ready, because ready is not the truth. And so here's exactly what I would do instead, starting from absolute zero, step by step. Get to $96,000 with just 4 clients. So the first thing I do is ignore almost everything you think a business needs. I would not build a website. I've personally helped launch multimillion-dollar companies that didn't even have a website when they signed their first client. So website is not the thing standing between you and your money. It's just a comfortable thing to hide behind, feeling like you have to get this thing done. Instead, I'd lock onto one piece of dead simple math and let it run my entire life. I need to get 4 people paying me $2,000 a month. That is the whole goal. Not 400 customers, not some giant viral launch, not a warehouse full of inventory. Just 4 people who get enough value for you that they will pay you $2,000 every single month. 4 clients at $2,000 a month is $96,000 a year, which means you have an almost 6-figure business built on just 4 relationships, and it gives you the survivable cash flow you need to build everything else on top of it. So the only question that matters on day 1 is simple: What can you do that's worth $2,000 a month to somebody else? And this year, that list is huge. You can set up AI systems and automations for companies that they're drowning in their busywork. You can run ads on their social media. You can consult in a skill that you already have. Pick the one thing that you're best at and can start delivering this week and price it at $2,000 a month or more. So the math works fast and you're not grinding to make 100 tiny little sales. You do not need 1,000 customers. You need 4 yeses. And when you stop thinking that you need to build some massive company and you realize you just need 4 people to say yes, the whole thing stops feeling impossible and starts feeling like something you could go and do this week. Mind the network you already have. Here's where almost everybody freezes. They think they have to go find total strangers and somehow convince them out of thin air to buy from you, right? You don't. To land those first 4 clients, I would start by auditing the resources and the people already sitting in my phone, in my contacts right now. I don't want you throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, answering fake questions in your own head about whether you're qualified or whether you're ready. I want you to go out to the people you already know. If your brother and your sister run chiropractic clinics or your friend owns a med spa, you go straight to them first. You don't reinvent the wheel. You offer to run their ads or handle the service for them, even cheap or free at the start, so you can learn the industry from the inside and walk away with your very first real testimonials and case studies to share. Those early wins are absolutely everything because proof is the thing that lets you walk into the next conversation and charge full price with total confidence. Being leads to doing here. The moment you decide that you you are the person who solves this problem, you stop researching and you start reaching out to the people who already know you, already like you, and already pick up the phone when you call them. So you're not starting from zero connections right now, even if it feels that way. Your network, not your wallet, is your real startup capital. And the good news is you already have one. You just never asked it for anything. Make your first offer impossible to turn down. So when you reach out to those first few people, the worst thing you can do is show up sounding desperate or trying to sell some big, vague, expensive package. Instead, I would lead with a clear result and almost no risk for them at all. So pick one specific painful problem that you already know how to fix and offer to fix just that one thing. Tell them you'll do it at a low starter rate or even tie your pay to the result that you get them. So the only way they lose is if you don't deliver. That one move, it melts their fear away because now they aren't gambling on you. They're just saying yes to an outcome that they already want anyway. So don't pitch them a long list of features and deliverables because features confuse people, and a confused person, they don't buy from you. So pitch them the after, paint a clear picture of exactly where their business will be once their problem is finally gone, and let them feel it for a second, right? Then the very second you get them a real result, you ask for two simple things. You ask for a short testimonial in their own words, and you ask them who else they know that has that exact same problem. That becomes a flywheel for you. That one happy client instantly becomes both your proof and your next referral source, and you use that momentum to raise your price a little bit and go land the next one. You're not trying to close 1,000 deals or be everywhere at once. You are just trying to make your very first client so ridiculously happy that getting your second, third, and fourth starts to feel almost easy. So get that first yes this week, overdeliver like your life depends on it, and from there you let the proof do the selling for you. Build your Money 50. So once you get that first bit of cash flow coming in, you stop hunting one client at a time. And you start scaling through relationships instead of ads. I would build what I call my Money 50 list. This is what we teach inside our Movement Makers program. Here's how it works. You pick 5 different categories of people and then you go 10 people deep in each category. So you end up with a written list of 50 names. These are people who, if they did know you, if they did like you, if they did trust you, could each be worth 6 figures or even 7 figures to your business every single year. And here's the key that most people miss. These usually are not your current customers. Their referral partners. They might be CPAs or lawyers or property managers, agency owners, the people who already have a deep, trusted relationship with the exact audience that you're trying to reach. One single CPA can send you 30 clients without you even spending a dollar on advertising because their clients already do whatever they recommend. So write those 50 names down on one page. You put it where you see it every day and you treat that list like, like it's made of gold because getting in front of those 50 people is the entire game.. You don't need a million customers. You need a handful of powerful relationships. The person with the best relationships wins every single time, and relationships are completely free to build if you're simply willing to give first before you ever ask for anything. Start a biz dev show. Now, how do you actually get in front of your Money 50 list when these are busy, important, successful people? Here's the mistake most people make. If you email them and ask to grab a coffee and pick their brain, They will ignore you every time because everybody on earth wants their time and attention. So you flip the whole thing around. You start a simple interview show, what I call a biz dev show, and you invite those exact 50 people to come on as your guests. Almost nobody ever asked them for an interview before, so they say yes because everybody loves being treated like the expert. And here's the beautiful part. You don't need a fancy studio. You don't need expensive gear. You don't need a big audience. Because going viral is not the point. And the view count doesn't matter at all here because they're telling their story and they don't get a lot of attention typically. The only metric you care about is the relationship. You spend a full hour, you make them look great, you tell their story, you're genuinely curious about their work. And somewhere in the middle of the conversation, you ask one strategic question connected to what you do just to quietly plant a seed in their mind. And then the moment you stop recording, you make your move. You tell them that you'd love to be their second opinion or their go-to person in case any of their clients have an issue that that obviously you know how to deal with. In 1 hour, you just turn a complete stranger into a warm potential partner who wants to help you, and it costs you exactly $0. There is no faster way on this planet to earn someone's trust than to put them in the spotlight and champion them before you ever ask for a single thing back. Trade your time for a piece of the upside. The next move is the one that truly changes everything, and it's the one that I'd be the most aggressive about this year if I'm trying to build my business. When you're first starting out, it's totally fine to charge a flat monthly fee, but the real wealth is never in trading just your hours for dollars. It's in owning a piece of what you help actually build. So the second I had proof of what I could actually get for results for people, I would stop just being, um, a hired hand. I would walk into an established business that's already making money and say, hey, give me a percentage of the company and I'll come in and be your growth person and your sales engine. If you really want to scale your upside, you take X% of a business in exchange for driving their growth instead of just giving them a flat rate every month. I did this exact same thing with a bunch of agencies I started. I taught them everything I knew about YouTube. I took a 25% split. They had the other 75%, and today they've built up and run 7-figure businesses. I didn't need money to make that deal. I needed a skill that got results and the guts to ask for a percentage instead of just a paycheck. Most people, they're too scared to ask, so they stay employees of their own business forever. If you can deliver real results for someone, then you have the responsibility, I think, to ask for some real upside. If you can, then you must. Let AI be the team you can't afford yet. The last thing I do, and honestly the biggest reason there has never been a better time in human history to start a business than right now, is to lean on AI like it's an entire team working you for free. When I started out, I couldn't afford a designer, I couldn't afford a writer, an assistant, or a developer. So I did a lot of it myself— badly, painfully, slowly— and it held me back for years. You don't have that excuse anymore. Do you need your offer written, your emails drafted, your brand design, your research done, a simple tool built for a client? AI can do a strong first draft of every single one of these things in minutes, and your only job is to add your judgment and your taste on top of it. That's exactly why setting up AI systems for other businesses is one of the best $2,000 a month offers you can possibly sell right now. Because every business owner on earth knows they need this, and almost none of them have any idea how to actually do it. So don't use AI to replace your thinking, use it to delete your excuses, right? Every single time you catch yourself saying, I can't afford to do that part, stop and ask whether AI can do that part for for you. And, and this year, the honest answer is almost always going to be yes. The person who wins today is not the one with the biggest budget or the fanciest university degree. It's the one who's actually willing to roll up their sleeves and use the tools that are already there in your pocket. Your first move is the one that matters. So that's the entire plan, and I want you to notice that not one single step required money, a degree, or permission from anybody. It just required you deciding to start and being willing to model the people who have already done it instead of trying to be a genius all on your own. You don't have to figure it all out today. You just have to take that first step before you feel ready. Now let's learn the 7 behaviors you must master to get wealthy. Your financial situation has absolutely nothing to do with how smart you are.

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

The big secret behind disruption is not having any idea how it's supposed to be done. I had no idea how it was supposed to be done. There's literally one thing, like one trait that you want that's going to allow you to accumulate wealth. It's the lack of FOMO. Research shows that poorer households that believe they control their own choices build 40 to 60% more wealth than those who blame their situation on outside forces. Watch and read high-performance people, and you will see that they always take responsibility. When their life goes to, to garbage, it's when they quit taking responsibility. The best thing we can do for ourselves is to focus on what we can control. We can't rewrite the past, we can't predict the future, but we can take ownership of our actions today so we create a culture of progress, of just moving forward at your pace. Mastering this mindset is not just about buying a nicer house, it's about finally getting the freedom to spend your time in exactly how you want. When you actually realize everything's your fault, it gets really good out here. Because when you think your boss's boss controls your shit, when you think somebody down the street in a building controls your shit, then you get real sad because you feel helpless. When you realize you control your shit, things go. Delaying gratification is an absolute superpower.

You have to put yourself in a state of perpetual discomfort in order to manifest your greatness. You've got to reach outside of your comfort zone.

When I was 19, I had a massive choice to make. I had a 6-figure investment banking job offer on the table. That was the smart choice to take, that it was the safe choice. But instead, I chose to own 30% of a startup company and made $300 a month. My friends thought I was crazy, and logically it didn't make sense, but I knew that true wealth and freedom, they don't come from playing it safe in some cubicle. I had to rewire my brain to take the risk, and it led me to building and selling a biotech software company. The psychology of taking that leap is exactly what gets you from $0 to living on your own terms. Look at Sara Blakely. She was selling fax machines door-to-door and kept getting the door slammed in her face. She had absolutely $0 in business funding and no background in fashion, but growing up, her dad used to ask her at the dinner table, what did you fail at today? He completely rewired her psychology. Instead Instead of fearing failure, she feared not trying. She used $5,000 in savings and that unstoppable mindset to build Spanx into a billion-dollar brand. She didn't have more knowledge than the competition. She just had that bulletproof psychology that you can build too. Then there's Ronald Reed. He spent his life fixing cars and sweeping floors at JCPenney. He wasn't a Wall Street genius, but when he died, he left behind an $8 million fortune. On the flip side, Richard Fusconi was a Harvard-educated executive at Merrill Lynch. He had all the smarts and connections in the world, but he went completely bankrupt. Why? Because Reed mastered the psychology of money, patience, and delayed gratification, while Falcone let his ego destroy his bank account. Wealth is a behavior. You just have to learn the right behavior. Now you might be shaking your head saying, Evan, this is just motivational talk. My problem isn't my mindset. My problem is my empty bank account and the terrible economy. You can blame the economy or your boss all you want, but that won't put any more money in your pocket. People are getting rich right now in the exact same economy, starting with the exact same $0 that you might have. The only difference is what's happening here inside their heads. So here are the exact mindset strategies you need to stop playing small and start building real lasting wealth from nothing. Take control of your results. Getting Rich from $0 starts with a psychological concept called your locus of control. This is the exact belief system that dictates how you view your own power in the world. People with an external locus of control believe that outside forces determine their success. They blame the economy, their boss, the algorithm, their bad luck. They think wealth is something that happens to lucky people. But self-made millionaires have a fiercely internal locus of control. They believe their actions and only their actions dictate their financial reality. So if you want to make millions, you have to adopt this exact same mindset today. You have to take 100% responsibility for your empty bank account right now. It isn't your parents' fault. It isn't the government's fault. It's your responsibility to change it. When you take full ownership, your brain stops looking for excuses and starts looking for solutions. A major study found that people with a strong internal locus of control save significantly more money and accumulate more wealth over time because they actually believe that their actions matter. So I want to hit 40 million subscribers on YouTube. I can't reach that massive number by hoping the algorithm magically favors my videos. I have the power to control the process. I have to make better content. I have to test new ideas. I can take extreme ownership of the results. You need to do the same thing with your finances. If you want to get rich, stop giving your power away to outside circumstances. Decide right now that your future is in your own hands entirely. You are the director of your life. When you face a setback, don't ask why the world is being unfair to you. Ask yourself what you can do differently next time to get a better outcome. It's a psychological shift that changes everything. It turns you from a victim into a creator. It forces you to look at your daily habits and realize that every single choice you make is either building your empire or taking you down. You have to look in the mirror and accept that nobody's coming to help you, right? Nobody is going to hand you a check for a million dollars. You have to go out into the marketplace and you earn gaining it through your own value and your hard work. Start small today. Take ownership of your morning routine. Take ownership of your spending habits. Prove to yourself that you control your destiny. This internal belief is the absolute foundation of all self-made wealth. Until you believe that you are in control, you'll always find a reason to quit when things get hard. Embrace total control and watch how quickly your financial world begins to transform. Master the art of waiting. The next psychological trait that you must develop is delayed gratification. This is your hidden financial superpower. When you start with $0, the urge to spend your first bit of profit is incredibly strong, right? You finally make $1,000 and you want to buy some nice clothes, or you want to upgrade something on your car to show people that you're succeeding. This is exactly how people stay broke forever. People who get rich from zero master the ability to delay their reward. They choose their future self over their present desires. They take that first $1,000 and invest it right back into their skills or their business. They understand that waiting is part of the price that you pay for massive abundance later. Right now I'm developing a software. It's called Brainlytics. We'll link it up below. It requires a massive amount of time, energy, resources upfront. I could easily take that money and spend it on immediate comforts, but I'm delaying my gratification because I know building a real asset will create infinitely more value in the long run. You have to approach your wealth the exact same way. If you can't resist the urge to buy things that you don't need right now, you'll never have the capital required to build real wealth. Experts point out that financial success rarely comes from a single dramatic decision. It comes from hundreds of small decisions made consistently, like a ship that's guiding you, the rudder, right? It's guiding your ultimate direction, making improvements all the time. Mastering this requires completely changing how you view money so you stop seeing money as a tool to buy status. And start seeing money as a tool to buy freedom. Every day you delay a purchase, you're buying a piece of your future independence. You're giving yourself options. You're building a fortress around your life so you never have to take a job that you hate just to pay the bills. It's deeply psychological. It requires you to sit with the discomfort of wanting something and actively choosing to say later. You have to fall in love with the process of building, not just the rewards. Of spending. When you train your brain to wait, you develop an incredible level of discipline that bleeds into every other area of your business. You'll have the patience to stick with a marketing strategy when it doesn't work on day one. You'll have the patience to build a loyal audience over 5 years instead of just chasing a viral trend. Now, we're not trying to deprive ourselves of any joy. We're just trying to have strategic patience. The people who make millions from zero, they don't have magical willpower. They just have a clear vision of their future so that it's exciting, that it makes ignoring the short-term distractions easier. So build your vision, make it so powerful that skipping that expensive dinner today feels like a step in you building your big financial empire. Break your familiar patterns. Your brain is literally wired to keep you poor. This is because of a psychological concept called status quo bias. Human beings vastly prefer to stay exactly where they are, even if their current situation is The known struggle is always more comfortable to your brain than the unknown possibility. So you might hate being broke, but you know exactly how to survive being broke. It's familiar. Building wealth from zero requires stepping into the complete unknown, and that terrifies your nervous system. So you have to violently break your familiar patterns if you ever want to reach the next level of success. Wharton Executive Education explains that people resist change because they fear losing what they have more than they value gaining something new. So you have to fight this natural instinct every single day. You have to become comfortable with the deeply uncomfortable. If your daily routine, it feels safe and easy, then you're not growing. You aren't pushing the boundaries of what your potential actually is. I'm currently working on a project to dub my 8,000 videos into 75 languages. Like, it's a massive massive leap into the unknown. It breaks every pattern of how I usually run my channel, but I know that sticking to my comfortable English-only strategy will eventually cap my growth, and I want to serve the world. I have to shatter the status quo to reach a global audience. So look at your life and identify where you're playing it safe. Are you staying in a dead-end job because it provides a predictable paycheck? Are you avoiding launching your business because you're afraid of looking stupid to Everybody realize that playing it safe is the most dangerous thing that you can do, right? The world is moving too fast. If you stay still, you will get completely left behind. You have to train yourself to aggressively seek out change. Make it a habit to disrupt your own life before the market completely comes after you. So it means trying new marketing channels. It means pitching bigger deals and bigger clients. It means investing in new skills even if you feel completely unqualified for it. Rich people don't wait for the perfect safe moment to make They act despite uncertainty. They know that the only way to transform their financial reality is to break the mold of their current existence. So you need to stop defending your limitations. Stop protecting your comfortable little box that you built for yourself. Break down the walls. Expose yourself to the risk of failure, because that's the exact same place where massive financial success lives. Your future millions are hiding right behind the changes you're most afraid to make today. Heal your hidden money wounds. This is a big one. Sometimes the reason you can't get rich has nothing to do with your business strategy, has everything to do with your deep hidden money wounds. Many aspiring entrepreneurs carry financial trauma from their childhood without even realizing it. If you grew up in a house where money was always a source of stress and arguments or fear, your nervous system learned to view money as a massive threat. You might subconsciously sabotage your own success because getting rich feels fundamentally unsafe to your brain. So we have to heal these hidden psychological wounds before you can ever hold on to any kind of real wealth. Therapists explain that financial anxiety is often a nervous system response, not just a budgeting problem. When you view money through the lens of trauma, you either hoard every single penny in absolute terror or you blow it all immediately because your brain wants to get rid of the stress. Neither of these behaviors will make you a millionaire. So you have to rewire your psychological response to money. You got to move from a mindset of deep scarcity to a mindset of abundance with money. Scarcity tells you there's never enough, so you have to fight everyone for a tiny piece of the pie. While abundance will tell you that money is simply a— it's an infinite resource that flows to people who give immense value. So you have to start telling yourself a new story about what you deserve You aren't destined to struggle because you saw your parents struggle. You don't have to carry their financial anxiety into your own future. So start paying attention to the words that you use when you talk about finances. Do you constantly say that you can't afford things? Do you feel intense guilt when you spend money on yourself? These are symptoms of a broken money mindset. And so it's actively challenging these thoughts, replace them with the belief that you're highly capable. Of generating more income. When you finally heal these wounds, making money stops feeling like a battle for survival and becomes more fun. It becomes a creative game. You stop making decisions because you're afraid and you start making decisions because of opportunity. You'll easily pitch to high-ticket clients because you actually believe your service is worth it. You'll invest in your business because you trust in your ability to generate a return. Healing your psychology becomes a key to unlocking the potential of your finances. Follow your curiosity instead of a plan. There's a massive myth in the business world that you need a flawless 10-year master plan to get rich. Most people stay at zero because they overthink every single detail before they even take the first step. They want guarantees. They want the perfect map. But the truth is, self-made millionaires rarely start with a perfect plan. They just follow what makes them intensely curious. They lean into their interests. They take messy action. They figure out the rest along the way. You have to stop planning and start actually exploring. Experts highlight that greatness can't be rigidly planned, and the best opportunities come from meandering, curiosity-driven steps. When you follow your genuine curiosity, you naturally work harder and longer than anyone else. You don't need some artificial motivation when you're deeply obsessed with the problem that you're trying to solve. This obsession is what pushes you past the early rough stages of entrepreneurship when you're making absolutely no money. If you just chase a trend because you think it's going to make you quick cash, then what happens is you, you burn out and you quit as soon as things are difficult. But if you follow your genuine interests, you create unique expertise that nobody else can easily replicate. You spot connections and opportunities that the purely profit-driven people are going to completely miss. Your weird passions are actually your biggest competitive advantage. So you have to give yourself permission to experiment, to try, to taste. Try new projects that might fail. Launch the weird service you've been dreaming about. You don't need to see the whole staircase, as they say. You just have to take the first step. You just need to follow the immediate spark of excitement. One small curious action naturally leads you to the next. Before you know it, you have a completely unique business model that fits your complete unique strengths. So stop letting the pressure of this perfect plan paralyze you, right? People are, are just procrastinating because they're afraid. The market changes too fast for a 10-year plan to be accurate anyway. So speed and curiosity are infinitely more valuable than perfect preparation. Start pursuing those interesting ideas in your head right now. Embrace that it's going to be messy and that you're going to fail. The path from zero to millions is never this straight line. It's this wild, crazy, unpredictable journey that is fueled entirely by your willingness to explore the unknown. Build your margin of safety. When you're trying to escape $0, a single bad decision can completely wipe you out. This is why mastering the psychology of risk is so important. People who build lasting wealth understand that they are not perfect. They know they're going to make bad investments. They're going to hire the wrong people. They're going to launch products that completely fail because they expect to fail. They build a massive margin of safety into their lives. You have to plan for disaster if you want to survive long enough to experience your future incredible success. In the book The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel explains that leaving room for error is the most underappreciated part of wealth building. If your entire financial strategy relies on everything going exactly right, you are guaranteed to fail. You have to assume that projects will take twice as long and cost twice as much as you initially expect, or triple or 10x. You need to build a buffer. This isn't about being negative. It's not pessimism. It's about extreme psychological resilience. When you have a margin of safety, a business failure just becomes an expensive lesson, right? It's not the end of your entire company. You don't panic when a client drops you or a marketing campaign doesn't do well. You've already built in the cushion to potentially absorb it. This creates emotional calmness and allows you to think clearly and make rational decisions while your competitors are freaking out and making desperate mistakes. So you build a margin of error. How do you do it? By living below your means, by keeping some cash reserves and not risking everything on one single unproven idea. So you have to protect your downside. It's not just about making money. It's about making sure that you never get forced to close down your business. Survival is the foundation of compounding wealth. You have to be around long enough for the money to be coming in. When you know that you have room for error, you actually have a lot more freedom to take risks. You can swing for the fences because you know that one strikeout, right, it's not going to destroy your entire business. It switches you from not playing to lose, and now you're actually trying to play to win. So embrace that reality that you're going to mess up, you're going to screw up. It's not going to be perfect. Build the financial and emotional shock absorbers that you need. And that's a psychological shift that gives you a lot more power to outlast the hard times. Times and ride the waves to massive wealth. Master the art of consistency. The final psychological key to getting rich from zero is the most boring but also the most powerful. It is relentless, unbreakable consistency. You can't build a multimillion-dollar empire in one just big, giant, dramatic leap. Wealth is built through tiny, unsexy, daily repeated actions over years. Most people fail because they want the overnight success. They put in intense effort for 3 weeks, see no results, and then quit. Self-made millionaires understand that intensity is useless without consistency. Experts confirm that wealth isn't built through perfection, but through consistency and how you respond when things don't go as planned. So you fall in love with showing up every single day, especially when you don't feel like it. You don't need to be the smartest person in your industry. You just need to be the person person who absolutely refuses to go away. You separate your daily actions from the immediate emotional feedback. You can't judge the success of your day by the money that immediately hits your bank account today. You judge your success by whether or not you executed the daily habits that you set for yourself. Did you make the sales calls? Did you create the content in the videos? Did you improve your product? If you did the work, it was a good the financial results eventually follow, but they're— it's always a lagging indicator. They fall behind the effort. Effort comes first, then the money. It requires an immense amount of mental toughness. It means pushing through boredom. It means ignoring shiny object syndrome that distracts you from your core mission. I want to do all these things. You have to put your head down and do the repetitive work that actually moves the needle forward. So build a routine that is so simple and powerful that you can execute it even on your worst days. Designed for your worst day, not your best. So look at your life right now. What's the one daily habit that if repeated for 5 years would completely guarantee your financial success? Identify it, protect it, do it every day. Your future millions won't come, uh, from a magical lottery ticket, right? You build them brick by brick, habit by habit, every day. So let your consistency become your competitive advantage in a world full of people who quit. Quit too soon. Step into your greatness. You have everything it takes to build an incredible life from absolutely nothing. It all starts with a simple choice to change your mindset today. So stop waiting for permission and start proving to yourself that you're truly capable of achieving. I believe in you. To learn why success is hard until you build systems like this, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue continue to believe, and I'll see you there. You do not lack discipline, you just have a terrible daily environment.

They say we're creatures of our environment.

You believe that, post?

Yes, I am a creature of my environment.

You're the boss in your apartment, right?