How Successful People Turn Daily Habits Into Extraordinary Results

The habits that change your life are usually so boring that most people never stick with them. I get 8 hours of sleep. I prioritize it unless I'm traveling in different time zones. Sometimes it's impossible, but I am very focused on it. You can have any, any, any habits, any, any patterns of behavior that you wish. It's simply a question of which you decide. Change doesn't happen overnight. But when you understand the science of habits, what you realize is that Change, little change, it compounds daily. Showing up, focusing, learning, taking care of your energy, and doing the hard thing again tomorrow don't look like extraordinary in the moment. If you're gonna be a real entrepreneur, you're a— you have to be a lifelong learner. I am studying, learning constantly. I never stop. And that's my competitive advantage. Focus has always been A strong part of my personality. If I get interested in something, I get really interested. But if you keep chasing big breakthroughs instead of mastering those small daily actions, you will spend years searching for a shortcut that was sitting in front of you the entire time. So in the next 3 hours, you will learn the daily habits successful people use to stay focused, build momentum, and turn small actions into extraordinary results. 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. Happiness is a skill and the happiest people practice it every single day. Gallup found that only 48.9% of American adults are thriving in their lives right now, which means the other half are just getting through the week. The people in that first half get the same 24 hours that you do. They just spend their first 30 minutes differently. In April 2007, Arianna Huffington was 2 years into building the Huffington Post. She was working 18-hour days. She was on every list of the most successful people in media, and she was proud of how little she slept because that's what winning was supposed to look like, right? Then one morning she was sitting at her desk and she passed out from exhaustion. She hit her head on the way down. She broke her cheekbone and cut open the skin above her eye and woke up in a pool of her own blood on her home office floor. She went to doctor after doctor, heart tests, brain scans, Blood work, the whole thing. And every single test came back clean. There was nothing medically wrong with her. She was just exhausted. And she'd been calling that exhaustion ambition for years. She didn't fix it with a new company or a new city or a new job. She fixed it by fixing her sleep. She started guarding her sleep like it was a meeting on her calendar that she couldn't move. She started walking. She started putting her phone in another room at night. Small stuff, boring stuff, stuff you could start doing tonight without asking anyone else for permission. And 4 years after she collapsed on that floor, AOL bought the Huffington Post for $315 million. In 2016, she walked away from it to start Thrive Global, a company built around the small daily habits that fixed her. She already had the success and the title when she hit that floor, and none of it touched on how she felt. The habits are what changed that. Now you might be thinking, okay, a glass of water in the morning? Your problem is money or the job or the person you live with or the city that you're in. And like, those are real. A morning walk does not pay your rent. But Arianna had the money and the title, and it never touched how she felt. See, the brain imaging on meditation shows measurable change in 2 to 3 weeks at 10 to 20 minutes a day. Not 2 years, 3 weeks. That's less time than you spend deciding whether to start or not. I think all progress begins with telling the truth. So here it is. You're too worn down to fix the big thing, and these habits are how you stop being worn down. Being leads to doing. So Here are the 9. They are small because small is what you'll actually do. They move their body before they check their phone. So the first thing I do every morning is what I call the Believe Walk. I get outside and I walk. That's it. You don't have to worry about an app or gear or 5:00 AM cold plunge. When you wake up and reach for your phone, you spend your first 20 minutes on everybody else's problems, right? Emails, headlines, doom scrolling, somebody else's opinion of you. You're reacting before you've even had a thought of your own for the morning. When you walk first, you get those 20 minutes back and you get them with your heart rate up. A study out of Yale and Oxford looked at over 1.2 million adults in the United States and found that people who exercise had 43% fewer days of poor mental health than the people who didn't. And the biggest gains came from 30 to 60 minutes of activity, 3 to 5 times a week. Not 2 hours, not every day, 30 minutes a few times a week. And walking outside beats walking on a treadmill for how you feel afterwards. Researchers kept finding The same thing, same distance, same effort, but doing it in a park or on a street with trees lifts your mood more than doing it indoors. Now, I'm not telling you to build a 2-hour-long morning routine with 15 steps and a whiteboard, right? Those get abandoned the first time that you miss one day. The best morning routine is the one that you don't have to talk yourself into. So mine is I put my shoes on, I open the door, and I start walking. There's nothing in there that I can fail at. And the reason why the Believe Walk works isn't that it's the perfect workout, it's that it's the one that I'll do every single They drink water before they drink coffee. So you just went 7 or 8 hours without a drop of water. You're mildly dehydrated. Then you drink coffee on an empty stomach and you wonder why you're jittery and brain foggy by 10:00 AM. Coffee's fine. It's just the order that's wrong. So this is the smallest habit on the list that costs you nothing, right? No money, no time, not real willpower. You fill an empty glass at night with water, you put it next to your bed. In the morning, you drink it before you've done anything else. I stack a few other things right there. So, You don't have to think about them. So I put 6,000 IU vitamin D in the morning with the water, never at night because it keeps me up. And I take some omega-3s. Now, of course, you could talk to your doctor before you take any of these. The point is, this is my list. It doesn't have to be yours. The point is that you take the decisions out of your morning so your energy goes up of your actual life instead of you're piling all of these choices on your day before 9:00 AM. They spend 2 minutes on what's already working. So next is you can take a few minutes and just focus on what's going right. You don't necessarily have to schedule this because gratitude comes pretty easily for me. But if it's hard for you, then, then put that in. What's hard for me is belief, so that's what I schedule. But if gratitude is a hard part for you, put on your calendar and treat it like it's a client meeting. Write down 3 things, not 10. 10 things turns into homework, right? And then you stop doing it. 3 things is easy. A meta-analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pulled together gratitude studies from around the world and found a consistent statistically significant lift in well-being. Another review of 64 randomized clinical trials found people doing gratitude practices scored about 6.9% higher on life satisfaction, with roughly a 7.8% drop in anxiety symptoms and a 6.9% drop in depressive symptoms. Those aren't miracle numbers. Nobody's life gets just rebuilt by a journal, but feeling 7% better every day for a whole year, that adds up to a much better year. That's a good start. Now imagine what that does over 10 years. They sit still on purpose. So next we could talk about meditation. Now, you don't need to meditate on a cushion for an hour. It could be a few minutes of just paying attention to your body and what's around you. Your brain has a network that runs when you're not focused on anything, the default mode network. It's what replays that conversation from 3 days ago and rehearses an argument, right, that you're never gonna have. And when it's overactive, you call it overachieving. Brain imaging work, uh, coming out of Harvard Medical School showed experienced mediators dropping activity in those regions by around 30% when they Practiced. Beginners still got a 10 to 15% drop, and you don't need years. Studies point to 10 to 20 minutes of meditation a day, 5 days a week, shows measurable change in 2 to 3 weeks. 2 to 3 weeks at 20 minutes a day is about 5 hours of your life total. You know when the best time to start is? Right now. How about right now? So put the video on pause, sit up, take 10 slow breaths where you actually feel the air. 10 breaths is the whole practice. If sitting makes you too restless, you could do it moving. You could put on a walking meditation and walk slowly outside while it plays. Same benefit, and your body has something to do with it. The goal isn't just to empty your head, it's to notice you've drifted and come back over and over again. That's the whole exercise. They bring their heart rate down before bed. I spent 90 days testing sleep hacks with my Oura Ring here, trying to improve my readiness score up from a baseline of 67.5, which is just fair. It's actually really bad. I tried everything people suggested. The single most effective thing I found was getting my resting heart rate into the 60s before I got to bed. So whether it's meditating or breathing exercises or slow walk outside, every time I got my heart rate down first, my readiness scores came back in the 80s. Every time. Your resting heart rate is on your phone or your watch already, so check it out tonight so you know the number you're trying to get under. The second most effective thing was strange and it worked. Hugging a pillow or my robe in bed. It settles your nervous system down. Try it before you decide it sounds silly. You can't go straight from answering emails into bed and expect to sleep really well. Your body needs time to slow down first. So Pick one of these: breathe for five minutes, walk around the block, squeeze each muscle group tight for five seconds and let go. Toes up to your head. You're not trying to fall asleep. The point isn't to try to fall asleep; it's getting your heart rate low enough so that you can fall asleep. They go to bed at the same time every night, same bedtime every night, and start winding down an hour before it. So when I tested a fixed bedtime, it tied for the second best results of everything that I tried—not because there's magic at eleven p.m., but because your body will start getting ready on its own. Once it can predict what's coming. The wind-down hour is the part that you're going to want to skip, right? Don't do that. That's where you dim the lights and you stop doom scrolling on your phone. Food stops even earlier, right? 3 to 4 hours before bed. So around 7 or 7:30 for 11:00 PM bedtime. If your brain spins the second your head hits the pillow, this is my actual hack. I put on something that I care about slightly but won't mind missing, and I set a 60-minute timer to shut it off. Something interesting enough to pull my mind off of my thoughts and problems, but born enough that I don't fight to stay awake for it. So think of some kind of interesting podcast you can listen to. And then naps, 15 to 30 minutes, always before 2 PM. Go past 30 minutes and you wake up groggy and worse off than when you started. They talked to one real human. So Harvard has been running a study on adult development for over 80 years, following the same people through their whole lives, tracking their health and their happiness. It's one of the longest studies of its kind that's ever been done. The key findings The defining factor in longevity isn't money, and it isn't achievement, and it isn't fame. It's relationships. The people who stayed closely connected to other people were happier and physically healthier, and the relationships told you more about how they'd age than their cholesterol did. You can't run an 80-year study yourself, but here's what you can do today. Talk to one real human in an actual back-and-forth conversation every day. A call, not a text. Coffee, not just some comment on their social media. 10 minutes where somebody knows how you're actually doing. If you can't think of who to call, Call the person you'd call if something went badly wrong. That's the relationship the study is measuring. You work so many hours in the business that you stop calling your friends and you promise yourself you'll call them after the launch. There's always another launch. Call somebody today, right now, before you forget. That's the habit. They protect the part that's fun. Fun is ROI. I say that all the time and I mean it as a business number, not just something that you're feeling. If you hate the daily work that you're building, you'll find a really smart sounding reason to quit. It'll look like you got a strategy. It'll sound like you're pivoting to something else, but you quit because it stopped being fun and you didn't want to admit that. So the daily habit is to look at your day and find the piece you're genuinely looking forward to. And if it isn't there, then your day is built wrong. Somebody hates their job, so the highlight of their day is going to lunch at Wendy's. That's the thing they look forward to for 8 hours. And when that's the best part of your day, you'll start drowning the rest of it in fast food and Oreos and pizza, and then you'll be unhappy about that too. The food was never the problem. The food showed up. Because there was nothing else in the day that was worth you wanting for. You need something in your day worth looking forward to that just isn't food, something you're making or somebody that you're helping. Remember, we're built to serve. I built my whole week around this. So Mondays are for mentoring my team. Tuesdays are for making YouTube videos. Entire day is for one thing, because switching between 6 different tasks in a day is how you end up tired and proud of nothing you create. If there's no fun in your day because of the people in it, then you've been avoiding decision about these people for a long time. Real happiness means being willing to end the relationship, the partnership, or the contract that's making you miserable every morning. They know exactly who they're helping today. Your purpose comes from your pain. It's what I wrote about in Built to Serve. Whatever you struggled with the most in your life is exactly what you're built to help other people through right now. That's your big why that I call it. It's big. And on an ordinary Tuesday morning, it can feel too big sometimes to live up to. So you connect it to the little why. One specific person that you're helping today. Sometimes that's a younger version of you. Having somebody to help does more for you than any gratitude exercise because it gives you a reason to get up. So every morning, think of one person, not the audience, not some number, not the market. One person you're gonna make a little bit better today. Then do the thing that actually helps them. And here's one more thing to try. Put yourself back in your lowest moment, that night in the car, the bathroom floor, wherever yours was. Then record a video talking straight to that version of you. And tell them what you know now that you didn't know then. You lived through it, so you're the world's leading expert on getting that specific person out. People spend years scared of the camera, and that exercise takes a fear away in about 4 minutes because you stop trying to just perform and worry about the numbers, and you start helping somebody that you love. You have the ability, so you have the responsibility. If you can, then you must. Start with one. Don't try to do all 9 tomorrow. You'll last 4 days and then decide that you're the kind of person who just can't stick to anything. And that story keeps you stuck in a lot more ways than just some of these habits. So pick one, do it for a week, and another when it stops feeling like work or it's on default. Now remember, the bird sitting on a tree isn't afraid of branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, it's in her wings. Your happiness isn't in the job or in the money or the timing either. It's in what you do every day, and that part has always been yours to control. Being realistic about your goals is the absolute worst advice anyone can give you. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Everything you want as a YouTube creator, every freaking goal you want to hit, whether it be subscribers— you want to hit a million or 10 million or whatever— will come if you just make the best videos possible. So my goal, and this is what it will be till the day I die, is to make the best YouTube videos possible. When we were putting together this tour, I had some really lofty goals I wanted to reach conceptually. When you lower your expectations to match what is normal, you kill the exact vision that makes your ideas special. My family was still mad at me for not going to medical school, and now my wife was divorcing me because I lacked ambition. Once again, I was unable to live up to the expectations of others. Their dreams and my dreams were different. I'm always gonna expect myself to do certain things or surpass certain things. As long as I believe that, then, you know, my road to success is gonna continue to expand. Everybody told me I couldn't have what I was dreaming of. Everybody told me it's not It's not possible. Give it up. Don't have high expectations. Well, the truth is, my entire life I've had monster, monster expectations. And if you keep playing small to make other people comfortable, you'll lose your passion and end up working for someone else's 10-year plan. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. I wrote this over and over and over again. I talked to myself in the mirror. I'd sit on the toilet and say, one day One day, I'm gonna I'm gonna make a million dollars. One day, one day. And people used to tell me that's crazy, dude. Like why do you think so big? This is when people were telling me not to. What do you believe holds people back from just taking action? Other people's opinions. And how do you overcome that? By telling your mom to go fuck themselves. I'm 45 years old right now, but when I was 19, I joined a biotech software company. I worked 15 hours a day. But I only made $300 a month. I owned 30% of the startup, but I was eating beans every single day because that's what I could afford. I almost lost the business multiple times. I was so close to giving up and taking a realistic, safe $100K+ banking job, and my own brain was giving me incredibly smart reasons why I should quit. But I asked myself one question: when I'm an old man at 40 or 45 years old, will I regret not chasing this Unrealistic dream, and the answer was yes. So I decided to stop playing small. I modeled success from Bill Gates and finally saved the business. If I had listened to the people telling me to be realistic, you wouldn't be watching this video right now. But I have bills to pay. You're sitting there thinking it's easy for a 19-year-old to eat beans. You have rent. You have kids. You need a steady paycheck right now. You're absolutely right about your responsibilities, but playing it safe doesn't actually protect your family. It just guarantees that you stay stuck. The risk of failing at a normal job is just as high as in a business, but the upside is zero. You can protect your family and chase a massive dream at the same time. Let me show you the exact steps to build your empire without risking your rent money. Redefine your risk. So most people think of starting a business means risking everything. You think you need to empty your bank account, quit your job, and go completely broke. That is the absolute wrong way to do it. You can start testing your idea right now for exactly $0. A major study shows that 60% of new businesses fail within the first 3 years, and it is almost always because they just run out of cash. Don't be part of that statistic. Keep your day job to pay your rent. Use your evenings to build your real dream. Spend just 1 hour every single night working on your idea. You don't need to be reckless to be successful. You just need to be incredibly consistent. Start small and test what actually works with real customers. If you want to start a marketing agency, don't rent an expensive office. Send 50 emails to local dentists offering to run their ads. When your side income finally matches your job income, then you can quit. Until then, use your job to fund your empire. This keeps the pressure off your creativity. You make terrible decisions when you're stressed out about paying for groceries. So keep the steady paycheck and build your legacy in the dark. You can start reaching out to 10 potential clients today on social media without spending a single dollar on ads. The internet right here gives you free access to the entire world. Use it. Your lack of a budget is an actual advantage because it forces you to be creative. But what is the exact thing you should be building? I'll show you how to figure that out right now. Discover your core value. So you need to figure out your most important core value. I call this your one word. My word is belief. Every single decision I run through this exact filter: does this project spread belief? If yes, I try to do it. If no, then I skip it. Research from the Harvard Business Review shows that companies with a clear purpose have 400% more growth than companies without one. This applies to you too. I recently analyzed data from 50 different billionaires to find their common success frameworks. Every single one of them had a massive, undeniable core value that drove their decisions. So think about the hardest moments of your life. How did you pull yourself out of the darkness? The specific lesson you learned in that pain is your core value. You want to teach other people how to avoid the exact pain that you went through. Once you know your word, your entire business plan becomes incredibly easy. You stop copying other people and you start building something that only you can build. So look at your favorite movies, your favorite songs, your favorite teachers. They all share a common theme. That theme is your core value. When you align your business with your deepest value, you stop feeling exhausted and burnt out. You wake up with energy because you feel like your work actually matters to you because it does. You aren't just selling a product or service anymore. You're leading a movement, even if it's a small one. But what happens when you wake up feeling completely crushed by doubt? I have a specific system to fix that immediately. Borrow belief from giants. So you'll have days where you completely doubt yourself. Your environment will try to drag you down. The people around you might tell you to just be normal and play it safe, man. You need to change exactly who is in your ear. When I started my channel, nobody in my real life really understood what I was doing, so I borrowed belief from people who are already massively successful. I listened to Steve Jobs and Les Brown in my ear every morning. It's called my believe walk. Get outside, put something in your ear that helps you believe in yourself more. A study by the American Society of Training and Development found that having a mentor increases your chance of success by 65%. If you don't have a mentor in real life, find one online. Listen to their interviews while you brush your teeth. Watch their speeches when you commute to work. Fill your brain with the voices of people who absolutely refuse to play small, and their extreme confidence will slowly become your confidence. You'll start thinking bigger because you're surrounded by giant thinkers. You have to aggressively guard your mind. Turn off the negative news, turn on the people who make you want to win. Your daily habits dictate your future. So if you spend 2 hours a day watching mindless entertainment, you'll stay exactly where you are. If you spend 2 hours a day though listening to successful leaders, your entire mindset shifts. But watching videos isn't enough. You actually have to put in the reps. I'll tell you exactly how many reps you need to do next. Commit to 350 reps. Now you're probably judging your first attempt against everyone else's 10th year, right? That's the big mistake. When I started making YouTube videos, I was terrible. I hated watching myself on camera. It took me 350 public videos before I stopped feeling just completely embarrassed by my own work, and it took me 700 videos until I actually inspired myself for once. A study from the University College London showed that it takes an average of 66 days to form a new habit, but mastering a complex skill takes thousands of repetitions. So you can't expect to be great on day one. You have to be willing to completely suck at the beginning. If you want to grow a massive audience, you have to constantly test what works. You need to spend time completely optimizing your titles, maximizing your click-through rates. You test cinematic, you test text-free thumbnails. Your first product is going to be ugly. Your first video will get zero views. Put it out anyway. The only way to get the skills you need is to actually do the work. If you refuse to release anything until it's 100% perfect, you'll stay stuck forever. So stop overthinking and start producing. Buy cash flow instead of building it. You don't always have to start a brand new company from scratch. Sometimes the absolute smartest move is to buy an existing business that already works. You look for completely boring business models that print money every single day. So think about buying a local laundromat or a waste management company. The current owners are getting ready to retire and their kids don't want to run a boring company. According to the Exit Planning Institute, 75% of business owners plan to transition their business over the next 10 years. That is a massive opportunity for you to step in and acquire wealth. You can buy a highly profitable asset instead of spending 5 years trying to build one. You step into a company that already has high-paying customers trained staff, and consistent revenue. You just apply your maybe modern marketing skills to a very traditional business and the profits could explode. You don't need to invent a brand new tech software to be incredibly rich. You just need to find a solid, boring business and run it much better than the previous owner. Buying an existing business gives you immediate momentum from day one. It completely removes the high risk of a brand new startup failing. But once you own the business, You need to tightly manage your time. If you do every single daily task yourself, you'll burn out fast. Here's exactly how to fix your schedule today. Eliminate what does not matter. The obsession with being extremely busy destroys people's potential. Working 15 hours a day on the absolute wrong tasks will keep you broke forever. You need to look at your daily schedule and instantly cut out the garbage. Apply a 3-step process to your life. Eliminate, automate, and delegate. First, eliminate everything that doesn't directly bring in revenue or build your brand. Second, aggressively automate your repetitive tasks. Use advanced AI tools, custom prompts, and integrations to handle most of the boring work for you. And then third, delegate the remaining tasks that you aren't an expert at to other people. A study by Stanford University found that knowledge workers spend up to 41% of their time on discretionary activities that could easily be handled by others. You should only be doing the specific tasks that only you can do. If you hate editing audio for your videos, hire someone else to do it. If you need a cheap, scalable solution, use open source alternatives to get some of the heavy lifting off your plate. Protect your daily energy at all costs. You need your brain to be totally fresh for the bigger strategic decisions. You can't be a visionary leader if you're completely exhausted from doing basic data entry. So taking control of your time becomes the ultimate business flex. Now you have the perfect strategy, but you still need one final push. Create massive momentum today. The only thing you're truly missing right now is momentum. You have the great ideas, you have the burning desire, but you keep waiting for the perfect moment to start. The perfect moment simply doesn't exist. You just need to take the very first messy step today. According to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Making visible progress on a goal drastically increases your motivation to keep going. It's called the progress principle. Don't worry about step 100 right now. Just focus entirely on step 1. Build a system to track your daily progress. Use a simple spreadsheet to monitor your daily habits or your nutrition goals. High protein foods, Greek yogurt, salmon, eggs. It gives your brain the energy to focus, but your tracking sheet gives you the discipline to execute. So register your domain. Name tonight. Film your first rough video today. Send that one terrifying email that you've been avoiding. Do something physical that makes your dreams slightly more real. When you look back at your life as an old person, you won't regret the times you failed. You'll only regret the times that you never even tried. So don't let fear control your entire future. You're fully capable of achieving incredibly impossible things if you just refuse to stop stopping. Every single massive empire started with one single uncomfortable decision. So make that decision right now. You are absolutely ready. Your next step to greatness. You have everything you need right inside of you right now. So stop listening to the people telling you to play it safe, to be realistic. Step up and claim the life you actually want. The 8 habits keeping you broke were taught to you by people who love you. Your children are learning about the world through You, and more through your actions than through your words. You know, from the moment they're born, you're their— you're their natural teacher. We all unconsciously pick up patterns of behavior from our parents, like how to keep the house clean, how to take a shower, how to empty the dishwasher. We also pick up messages about money. The Federal Reserve just reported that only 63% of adults could cover a surprise $400 expense using cash or savings. Don't spend money on dumb stuff. This is the time to not waste money as a company or as a human being. $400 is the smallest emergency life throws at you, and the same habits that decide whether you can cover it decide what you're worth at 60. As a general matter, as one piece of specific finance— financial advice, I would say, you know, avoid credit cards. Just forget about them. If you start revolving debt on credit cards, You're going to be paying 18 or 20%, and you can't make progress in your financial life going around borrowing money at 18 or 20%. If you really want to make $100,000 and do it, you know, relatively quickly, basically save 15% of your paycheck and put it into an index in the market. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down, but over time you generally make 6 to 8%. That Before Mark Cuban was a billionaire, he was 24 years old, sleeping on the floor of a 3-bedroom apartment in Dallas that he shared with 5 other guys. He didn't have a bedroom. He had a couch. And when the couch was taken, he had a carpet. I'm living in, in a 3-bedroom apartment with 6 guys, 6 23, 24-year-old guys. However nasty you think it is, it was worse. I didn't have a closet. I didn't have a drawer. I had a pile. He didn't own a real car until he was 25. The one he drove was a beat-up Fiat with a hole in the floorboard big enough that he could watch the road underneath his feet. I had a 1977 Fiat X1/9 that literally had a hole in the floorboard. He found that car abandoned on the side of the road with the loan papers still sitting inside it. He called the bank, offered to take over the loan payments, and drove away. The way I got my car, because my first car blew up, I'm driving down the side of the road. I saw a car just sitting, a Trans Am that looked like it was legit, sitting on the side of the road. And I told my guys, stop the car. Somebody abandoned that car, right? That Trans Am door was unlocked. We reached in there. There literally was the loan papers for the car sitting on the front seat. I called the bank and said, look, somebody's not making If you let me take over the payments, 'cause my credit was— Okay. Yeah. So then that's how I got my first car. Mark has said he never owned a car that cost him more than $200. Here's what he was doing with the money he wasn't spending. He was buying software, hardware, books, and his own education. He'd stay up reading every technical manual he can get his hands on so he could sell what nobody else in the room understood yet. I would just stay up all night reading. Night, literally teaching myself how to figure all this out, reading stuff, just, okay, whatever it takes, because it was do or die. Whether it was then or now, I just like to just read the manuals, read whatever, because when you know this, you have an edge. That was the whole plan: live on almost nothing, put the difference in the skills, and wait for the skills to pay. So in 1982, he started a company called Micro Solutions out of that same broke life. In 1990, he sold 9 years after that, he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion. From a hole in a floorboard to $5.7 billion in 17 years. Mark put it like this: if you can reduce your wants, you can take more risks with your needs. So spend less on the things that don't matter, and you buy yourself the freedom to invest in the things that do. Okay, so right now you might be thinking, okay, Evan, I'm, I'm 38 with 2 kids. I'm 2 not going to be able to kids retire at 40. and a mortgage. I'm not gonna go sleep on somebody's floor. And you're right, you're not. And you also don't have to. What matters is the gap between what comes in and what goes out and what you actually do with that gap. Mark's gap was big because his life was small. Yours can be big because your income is bigger. Same math, just different starting line. Someone earning $95,000 who keeps $2,000 a month is winning. Someone who earns a quarter million dollars who keeps nothing is running out of time and just doesn't know it yet. A raise has never once fixed this on its own because the habits ride along with you into every new income bracket that you ever reach. So the only real question for the next few minutes is this: what is eating your gap? And I've got 8 answers, and you're going to recognize yourself in at least 3 of them. Habit number 1: you spend money to prove you're not broke. Now, this is a big one, and it's the one that nobody wants to admit to. You buy the nicer car, you pick the better restaurant, You upgrade the vacation, you say yes to the wedding that you can't afford, and you do all of it so the people around you don't think that you're struggling. LendingTree found that about 40% of Americans admit that they've overspent specifically to impress somebody else. So look at what that actually means. You're paying real money out of your real future to manage a feeling inside someone else's head. And the people that you're performing for, they're not watching. They're They're busy performing for somebody else too, and they're using your car and your kitchen as the scoreboard the same way that you're using theirs. Everyone in the neighborhood is broke together in beautiful looking clothes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the average American household spends $78,535 in 2024. That's an entire year of earnings just gone. Not stolen, not lost in a crash, spent on purpose, one small yes at a time. So So try this. Pick your 3 categories, the 3 things that genuinely make your life better, and go ahead and spend well there. If travel lights you up, travel. If your kids' sports matter, fund it fully and don't apologize. Everything else though drops to just functional. Your car gets you places, your phone makes the calls, your kitchen makes food. You'll feel a little exposed about that for 6 weeks, and then you'll just feel free because you stopped caring what other people think who were never really even judging you in the first place. Habit number 2. You save whatever's left at the end of the month. Nothing is ever left, right? That's not a discipline problem, right? That's a, that's by design. That's our challenge. Your expenses will always expand to fill whatever number is sitting in your account. So if savings is last in line, then your savings lose every single time for the rest of your life. Watch what happened to a whole country doing it this way. So Wells Fargo, uh, The Economist tracked it. Average wages climbed 21.4% between January 2020 and January 2024. And over that exact same stretch, The personal savings rate fell from 7.2% down to 4%. So everybody got a raise and everybody saved less. The money showed up and then it evaporated somewhere between the paycheck and the bank. The fix takes 10 minutes and you only have to do it once. You set up automatic transfers for the day you get paid. Start at 10%. If 10% feels impossible this month, start at 3% and raise it by 1% every 3 months until you get there. The percentage matters way less than the order. So when the money leaves before you can see it, you never build a life around it and you never have to. Have that argument with yourself 12 times a year what you're supposed to do and run the numbers on the small version so you stop dismissing it, right? $250 a month earning 8%, left alone for 30 years, turns into $372,000. That's awesome. That's not just getting lucky. That's you setting up an automated transfer once on a Tuesday and then forgetting about it. The reason that this beats willpower is simple. Willpower is this monthly exercise you have to do, and you usually lose the monthly exercise, right? Somebody's Getting married, the furnace dies. It's December. When you automate it, you don't face those challenges. You don't have to negotiate with yourself every month. Habit number three: You finance the things that go down in value. So look at what a car costs right now. Experian reported that in the first quarter of 2026, the average payment on a new vehicle hit an all-time record of $770 a month on an average loan of almost $44,000 and 6.39% interest. And 19% of new car loans now carry over. $1,000 a month payment. That's almost 1 in 5 buyers signing a 4-figure bill every month for something that's worth less the second they pull off the lot. So if we zoom out, it gets even more scary. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the average household spends over $13,000 a year on transportation. That's 70% of everything they spend just on getting places. It's the second biggest line in the American budget behind housing. Now, you're allowed to love cars. I'm not here to make you drive something that you hate. Just make the car the reward instead of the default, the standard. Buy the 3-year-old version of the car you want in cash or close to it and take the $770,000 you're not sending to a lender and put it to work for you instead. Run that difference at 8% for 10 years and that's $140,000. 20 years, that's $450,000. So the real price of that new car was never $44,000. It was $450,000 and a couple of decades of options that you'll never get offered again. Habit number four: You carry a balance you could kill today. So the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that American credit card balances sat at $1.25 trillion in the first quarter of 2026, inside a total household debt load of $18.8 trillion, and 4.8% of all that debt is already in some stage of delinquency. So the math that's really important: A credit card balance is a guaranteed negative return, right? When you carry $8,000 at 22%, you're handing over almost eight. $1,800 a year for the privilege of having already bought something you probably don't even remember buying. No investment on earth reliably pays you 22%, which means the single highest guaranteed return available to you is sitting on a statement in your kitchen drawer right now, and you're stepping over it while you're researching index funds on your phone. Attack the smallest balance first, kill it completely, then roll that entire payment into the next one. Not because it's mathematically perfect, but because you need a win inside the first 30 days or you're gonna stop. Momentum beats optimization for anybody who has tried this 4 and just completely quit and close the back door while you're at it too. Take the credit card outta your phone's wallet, outta your browser, out of the app that remembers it. You're not weak, right? We're just making sure that we fill out that checkout form every single time so you make slightly different, slightly smarter decisions. Habit number 5, you turn every raise into a new monthly bill. All right, you get the promotion within 90 days. There's a bigger apartment, there's a better car, a gym that you don't go to, and 4 subscriptions that you forgot that you even bought. Your income went up 20% and your freedom went down. The Census Bureau numbers make this pretty impossible to argue with. The median new American home was under 1,000 square feet in the 1950s. By 2018, it was almost 2,500 square feet. Income roughly doubled over that stretch. Houses got 2.5 times bigger, and the families inside them do not feel 2.5 times more secure. The raise didn't get saved or invested. The raise just got moved into and spent. So put a rule on the next one before it arrives. When your income goes up, half of it goes straight into savings or investments before it ever touches your checking bank account. You still get to enjoy the other half. You get to feel the promotion, you take the trip, you buy the thing. You just don't hand 100% over it to a landlord or a dealership or an app that you'll cancel in a year anyway. Then do the 20-minute audit tonight. Open your bank app, sort by recurring, and cancel everything that you haven't used in 60 days. Nobody has ever done this and found less than $80 a month. That's almost $1,000 a year that you were paying. Habit number 6, you keep score with your income instead of what you own. You know your salary to the dollar right now. Tell me your net worth. There's usually a long pause right there, and that pause—that's the problem because income is a scoreboard that your boss controls, and assets is a scoreboard that you control. So you can earn $80,000 a year and own $9 million in real estate. You can earn half a million dollars a year and own a leased car and 11 months of expensive stress. Income is what shows up every month, and the moment you start tracking the second number, your spending changes on its own because you finally have something to beat. The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances put median American family net worth at almost $200,000 while the average sits at over a million. That gap is what happens when a small group of families spend 30 years buying assets and everybody else spends 30 years buying stuff. Same country, same decades. Different outcomes. 2 completely different ways to measure. So open a doc tonight, put 2 columns, everything you own that could put money in your pocket and everything you owe that takes money out of it, and then subtract it. That number is your actual score, and I'd bet real money that you've never written it down. Then set one goal, and that number goes up every single quarter, not by a lot, but just up. It changes what you say yes to at the checkout because you start asking different questions. Does this buy me an asset or does this buy me an evening? Both answers are allowed. You just You just have to know which one that you're choosing. Habit number 7, you let the government take the first cut. So an employee earns money, uh, gets taxed and spends what's left. A business earns money, spends on legitimate expenses and gets taxed on what's left after that. So it's the same dollars coming in, just completely different order. And that order is worth a fortune over a 30-year career. Now, I'm not telling you go quit your job tomorrow. I'm telling you, The side business that you keep putting off has a second payoff that people are often not counting. Once you have a real business, a real portion of your phone, your internet, your home office, the travel that you do see to go see clients, and the equipment you buy to do the work moves from money you already pay tax on into a legitimate business expense. So talk to an accountant in your country, find out exactly what applies to you because the rules are different everywhere. And I am not your accountant. Started this month, even at $500 a month in revenue, the first version doesn't need a logo, a website, a studio, or a name that you love. It needs one customer who pays you. Everything else is you just procrastinating. And looking at logos is the most comfortable way to avoid the phone call that could actually change your year. And $500 a month, it's not a small thing, right? That's $6,000 a year of income that your employer doesn't control. Built on skills that live in your head and go with you everywhere forever. It's also the only line on your budget with no ceiling on it, right? You can cut expenses down to the bare bones and then you're done cutting. The other side, income, can go up and run off the page forever. Habit number 8, you try to learn everything yourself. Now, this one costs maybe more than all the other ones combined, and it feels like the responsible thing to do at the time, right? You watch 40 hours of free videos instead of paying $500 for the answer. You spend You spend 8 months figuring out something a good coach could have fixed for you in a 45-minute call, and you tell yourself that you're just being smart with money. Achievers pay for speed. That's the whole difference. Not because they're rich and they're just careless and spend money, but because they worked out early that time is the only thing on all of our lists that you can't earn back. A year lost is a year lost. Nobody refunds it. Nobody gives you a discount on it, and you never find out what that year was supposed to be worth. So we can put a number on it. If somebody can save you 6 months and they charge $2,000 and your business, your salary is worth $60,000 a year, you're making a $30,000 decision to protect $2,000. So buy the course, hire the coach, get in the room with people already doing it, and then actually do the work because the fastest way to waste money on speed is to pay for it and then not show up and do the work. You have everything you need to None of these 8 habits require more income. Every single one is a decision, and you get to make the first decision right here today. I think your purpose comes from your pain, and if money has been the thing that's been keeping you up at night, then that's the exact thing you're built to go and fix. A bird sitting on a branch isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, it's in her wings. So trust your wings. Almost every business that dies gets killed by the person who started it, not the market, Unfortunately, one does have to be focused on the short-term and money coming in when creating a company, because otherwise the company will die. Apple suffered for several years from lousy engineering management. I have to say it. And there were people that were going off in 18 different directions, doing arguably interesting things in each one of them. Good engineering is not about the end result. Successful businesses have to satisfy a real need, a need that people will actually pay to have fulfilled. Now, you may have an idea, you may love your product, you may love your service, but if that product or service doesn't fix a specific problem, your business will fail. Nearly half of new businesses fail within their first 5 years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 90% of business startups fail in the first year, and 50% of new businesses fail within the first 5 years. And what's really on the line here, it's not just your business, it's the years of your life that you're about to pour into it and whether they add up to something that lasts or disappear like it never happened. Take a wild success like Airbnb everybody knows about. Well, that company was famously passed on by many smart investors because people thought no one's going to rent out a space in their home to a stranger. Of course, people proved that wrong. But one of the reasons it succeeded, aside from a good business model, a good idea, great execution, is the timing. That company came out right during the height of the recession when people really needed extra money. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. So I went deep on 50 businesses that died, and I kept coming back to Sam Walton. Before he built the biggest Sam was a nobody running a single Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas, pulling in about $20,000 a year. He worked harder than anyone in town. He obsessed over low prices and treating customers right, and he turned that little rented store into one of the most profitable shops in the whole region. He did everything right, and then he lost it all. Sam didn't own the building, he only rented it, and when his landlord saw how much money that store was making, the man said, The man refused to renew the lease to Sam and handed his entire business to his own son. Just like that, the best store in the area was gone, and Sam Walton had nothing to show for years of work except one pretty brutal lesson. You have to own the land. You have to own the building. You have to own your foundation. Anyone else might have walked away right there. Most people do, but Sam didn't. Your purpose comes through your pain, I think, and Sam's purpose got forged the day he lost that store. With his wife Helen pushing him to start over in a new town, he sold what was left, moved to Bentonville, and in 1962, he opened the first Walmart. He built it on everything that loss taught him. Today, Walmart pulls in $648 billion a year, and about 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart store. Your setbacks do not have to be permanent. It's only permanent if you stop. Sam turned the pain of losing one store into creating 10,000 more. Okay, so here's what you might be thinking. Your business might be different. You know, your idea is better. You care more. You'll outwork everyone around you. So those 50 dead businesses have nothing to do with you. I get it. But here's what hit me when I studied them. Almost all these founders thought the exact same thing. They weren't lazy people. A lot of them were brilliant. A lot of them were working 80-hour weeks. What killed them was not a lack of effort. It was a blind spot. One weakness that they never saw coming. Exactly like Sam Walton not owning his building. Effort doesn't save you from these blind spots. Seeing it does. So let me walk you through the blind spots that killed all 50 businesses so you can find yours before it's too late. Killer number 1, running out of cash. The first killer is running out of cash, and it took down more of these businesses than anything else. Here's the part that scares most people. You can run a business that looks profitable on paper and still go broke because profit and cash are not the same thing. Profit is a number on a spreadsheet at the end of the month. Cash is what's actually in your account on Tuesday when your payment is due. Your expenses show up fast and on time. Your payroll, your rent, your ad spend, your software, they all, they get paid with clockwork. They're showing up. Your customer payments, they show up usually slower, 30 days, 60 days, sometimes 90 days later. That gap in the middle is where businesses often bleed out and you can be growing the whole time it's happening. It gets worse when a founder hits one good month and treats it like this is the new normal. I've watched people spend tens of thousands of dollars on fancy equipment after a single strong week and then get wiped out the next month because they had a slow month and because they kept zero reserve. I watched a coaching company hit almost $4 million a year in revenue and still have to shut its doors. Almost $4 million. They ran out of cash because they spent too much on ads, paid the team too much, built a structure that they couldn't sustain, and never looked deeply at their accounting. And if you're trying to build the whole thing on $87 or $99 a month product, Listen, because the capital burns out before the idea burns out. Low-ticket models often need massive scale. They need huge customer service and they get hammered by refunds and chargebacks. So here's what you can do. Watch your cash, not just your profit. Keep at least 3 to 6 months of expenses in reserve so one slow month can't end you. Know your numbers cold. I know it's hard for some people every week, not just once a quarter, once a year when it's already too late. And sell something with enough margin to actually fund the business. So I don't like decisions that make me feel weak, and nothing makes you feel weaker than checking your bank account and realizing that the money is already gone. Killer number two: building something nobody wants. The second killer here is building something that nobody actually wants. This one is pretty sneaky because it feels like progress, right? Your head's down, you're building something, you're quietly creating, and you add another feature, and it feels. Like that you're being productive because you're busy and you're busy and, and you're shipping, and then you take it out to the markets and like nothing happens. And I did this with my very first software company. I spent months building a feature that I thought was incredibly cool, right? We took it to market, like nobody wanted it. Nobody. All that time, all that work was gone because we built in a vacuum and never asked a single customer if they actually needed this thing or not. The fix here is so simple that it's almost embarrassing. It hurts. Go find a customer first, then build around what they actually need. So talk to 10 real people in your market before you build anything, and don't ask them if they like the idea. Ask them the problem that keeps them up at night and what they've already tried to pay to solve. Then sell it before you make it. Take a deposit, pre-sell the spot, get a real credit card payment for the promise of the thing. If real people won't pay you for the promise of it, they won't pay you for the finished version either. It's a lot harder, and you just saved yourself a year. Get honest about the problem that you solve, because if you don't solve a real problem, you do not have a real business. Entrepreneurship is about solving problems. You have an expensive hobby. And one more addition here: chasing small broke customers and hoping they grow rich with you—they won't. Pick customers who can actually afford you right now, who have the budget to pay you what you're worth today, right now, and build for them. Killer number three: the right things in the wrong order. Okay, the third killer here is doing the right things in the wrong order. A lot of these businesses—they didn't die because the founders. Were doing dumb things. They died because they were doing smart things in the wrong sequence. And I see it all the time. A founder with no steady revenue decides to build a massive global brand or launch a low-ticket online course before they've ever built a simple high-ticket engine that brings in real money every single month. So they spend a year on logos and funnels and fancy websites and content while your bank account slowly drains and not one of those things is actually paying your bills. The order matters more than the effort. So phase 1 is something higher ticket that generates steady cash. One offer, a clear customer, enough money per sale that a handful of clients keeps your lights on. That cash funds the team and the systems you need to survive everything that comes next. Only once that engine is steady do you earn the right to go to phase 2, the lower ticket courses, the products that end up scaling. And then only after that you build phase 3, the big brand, the global audience. Get steady money coming in first and everything you build on top of it gets so much easier because now you're building with money in the bank instead of running on your savings and investments. When you try to skip that first step, it's like you're, you're building a house and you're trying to create the second floor before you've even built a foundation. And you know how that ends. Killer number 4, no systems, no scale. The 4th killer is having no system. A friend of mine, Nick Peterson, likes to say, nail it, then scale it. And this is also a powerful idea in the book, The E-Myth Revisited, which is that most small businesses fail and most franchises can succeed. And so think about why is that? A franchise runs on documented repeatable recipe that almost anyone can follow. Walking into any location of a big franchise and you get the same result because the magic is written down in a playbook that anyone can run instead of just locked inside one person's head. The average founder does the opposite, right? You keep shooting from the hip, you keep trying to do the entire business inside your own head, and if you never write it down, your killer recipe, then 2 things happen and both of them can be completely fatal. First, you can't scale because you are the bottleneck for everything, right? Ever, ever feel that you're the bottleneck? Every decision you make, Every fire, uh, every customer waits on you. And second, anyone you hire operates at a lower level because they're guessing at what you do instead of following a proven process. And then you decide hiring doesn't work when really you just never gave people the recipe to follow. So I think being leads to doing. So start being the kind of owner who builds the systems, even when it's just you. Write down exactly how you get a customer step by step, how you deliver the work step by step, how you keep them happy and get them to refer to you step by step. Turn the magic in your head into a checklist your team can run without you standing over them. The day your business can win without you in every single room is the day it stops being this fragile little egg and starts being worth something. Killer number 5, keeping the wrong people. The 5th killer is keeping the wrong people. This is tough. This one is hard because it's personal and it costs you twice. Founders hold on to underperformers, the team members who are barely treading water, the friends you you had from high school, the people that you might've started with, you hold onto them long after you should have let them go because firing usually feels cruel and hiring again feels pretty exhausting. But every single day you hold onto someone who's just okay, you give up the chance to bring in somebody great because A players are in limited supply and you've got a seat filled with someone who's just the wrong person. A B player doesn't just do B-level work, they block the A player who could have had that seat. And the other side of this is maybe even worse. Putting good people in the wrong roles. If you take someone whose gift is starting new creative projects and bury them in, uh, monotonous, boring, repetitive grind work, they're gonna burn out and fail, and it's not their fault. You put them in the wrong seat and then blame the person. So match the work to the person's natural strengths. Give the starters the new projects and the finishers the systems, and be brutally honest with yourself about what's actually moving the business forward. Forward and who's just kind of still being busy. That's a good start, but now I want you to go further than good. We build a team where every single seat is filled by someone who is excellent at that exact job, and watch how much lighter the whole thing gets carried. Killer number 6, the best-kept secret. The 6th killer is just being the best-kept secret in your industry. You can have the highest quality product in your entire market and still lose to a mediocre competitor who just simply cracked the content code, because Best known beats best every time. If nobody knows you exist, your quality literally does not matter because they can't buy what they can't find. And this might be a little uncomfortable. A lot of founders hide behind their branding, their funnels, the logos, the pretty websites, because all that work feels like work while letting them avoid the one thing that actually pays the bills: asking for the sale and collecting the payment. It's so much more comfortable to redesign your homepage for the 80th time. than to look someone in the eye and ask for their credit card. I watched a friend of mine spend $70,000 in a single year on polished thought leadership content and get basically zero results to the point where he almost quit creating content completely. The content alone didn't save him because without a clear ask, it's just expensive time that you're putting out every week. So put yourself out there every single day, tell people exactly what you do and who you help, and then make the ask. The money is on the other side of the And the only way you get good at asking is to ask more often. Killer number seven: built on rented land. So the seventh killer is building your whole business on land that you don't own. So remember Sam Walton losing that store because he only rented the building? The modern version of his mistake—it's everywhere and is it is deadly. You build your entire business on top of one thing that you don't actually own, like one social media algorithm, one marketplace, one big client who makes up 80% of your revenue. When I looked at those 50 failures. More than half of them were dangerously concentrated on a single platform or a single customer. And the day that the algorithm changed or the terms changed or that one client walked away or went under, the business that took years to build was gone in a week. It feels completely fine when it's working, right? You're on top of the world, which is exactly why so many smart founders miss it until it's too late. The platform giveth and the platform taketh away, and you don't get a vote, right? Right? So own your foundation, own your email list, because that's an audience nobody can just delete or take out from under you. Own the direct relationship with your customers, not just the followers on a page that you've rented. Spread your revenue so no single channel platform or client can end you by changing their mind on a Tuesday. Build on ground you actually control the way Sam Walton swore he would do the day he lost that first store. Killer number 8, quitting right before it works. The 8th killer Oh, this is so tough. It's quitting right before it works. When sales slow down, founders panic and fall straight into a scarcity mindset. They start slashing prices, offering payment plans they can't afford, uh, chasing any customer with a pulse and making desperate decisions that dig the hole deeper instead of actually helping them climb out. And a huge number of them give up the exact moment that success was just around the corner. MrBeast, Jimmy Donaldson, made 130 videos before he ever cracked 10,000 views. 130 videos. Imagine a version of him who quit on video 129, one away from the breakthrough, convinced that it's just never gonna work. That person never becomes MrBeast. It shows up in small ways too. You send one email, you don't hear back, and you decide, oh, they're not interested, when the truth is the win was 3 follow-ups away with just a busy person who doesn't hate you. They're just busy. Success lives in the consistent repeated effort, the boring follow-ups that everyone else is Too proud or too scared to do. I think if you have the ability, then you have the responsibility. If you can, then you must. So when that voice shows up and it's telling you, hey, you should quit, treat it as a signal that you're close and push for just one more time. So just build a little momentum and protect your belief like it's the most valuable asset that you own. So here's what I really want you to hear. Every one of these 50 businesses died from something the founder could control. That's not bad news. That's actually awesome news. It's the best news that you'll get all day, because it means survival is in your hands, not, not the market, not the government, not the president. I love this quote about a bird on a branch isn't scared of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, it's in her wings. So trust your wings. Go find your blind spot and fix it before it finds you. You will never become a billionaire or even a millionaire by following the advice of the middle class. Most people think that extreme wealth comes from luck or inheritance or being in a right place at the right time. But the truth is, it comes from having the guts to concentrate your bets when everyone else is diversifying to protect their ignorance. If you keep spreading your focus, your energy, and your money across a dozen different safe options because you are afraid of losing, you will guarantee that you end up with a life of mediocrity and never reach the massive potential that you were built for. In 2008, Elon Musk was facing the worst year of his life. He had made $180 million from selling PayPal, a fortune that would set most people up for life on a private island. But Musk isn't most people. He had poured almost all of that money into 2 companies that looked like they were about to die: Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX had 3 failed rocket launches in a row. Tesla was running out of cash and couldn't make payroll. Musk had about $40 million left. He had a choice. He could put all the money into one company to save it, but that would mean the other would definitely die. Or he could split the money between them to try to keep both alive, but risk running out of cash for both and losing absolutely everything. Most people would have walked away. They would have kept the $40 million and lived like a king. Musk chose the hardest path. He split the money. He went all in on both. He literally had to borrow money from friends to pay his rent because he had zero liquid cash left. On Christmas Eve 2008, at the very last hour, a financing round came through for Tesla. Days later, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract. He risked $180 million to get to zero just to have a shot at changing the world. Today, he's the richest man on the planet. So right now you're probably telling yourself, but Evan, I don't have $180 million like Elon Musk. And that's not the point. It's not about the It's about the habit of your mind. You're playing small with the $1,000 the same way you'd play small with $10 million. If you cannot bet on yourself when you have nothing to lose, you will never bet on yourself when you have everything to lose. So today we're going to break down the actual blueprint. I analyzed 50 billionaires to find out what they actually have in common, and it's not what you think. The trap of diversification. The first thing you need to understand is that billionaires do not get rich by diversifying. You have been told your whole life, don't put all your eggs in one basket. That is great advice if your goal is to preserve wealth. It's terrible advice if your goal is to create wealth and build an empire. Warren Buffett, one of the greatest investors of all time, calls diversification protection against ignorance. He says it makes very little sense for anyone who knows what they doing. If you know how to analyze a business, if you know your market, if you know your value, why would you put your money into your 20th best idea instead of your top idea? When you look at the portfolios of the ultra-wealthy, you see extreme concentration. They find one thing they believe in, usually a company they built themselves or an investment they know inside and out, and they push all their chips into the middle of the table. Bill Gates didn't diversify into real estate and gold when he was starting Microsoft. He was 100% Microsoft. Jeff Bezos wasn't buying stocks in other retailers in 1999. He was 100% Amazon. And the data backs this up. There's a study by Acadian Asset Management that looked at concentrated portfolio managers versus diversified ones. They found that the managers who had the courage to bet big on their best ideas, their top 5 to 10 stocks, significantly outperformed the ones who spread their bets thin. The managers who concentrated their portfolios generated higher returns because they were betting on their convictions. Not their fear. You are hurting your own growth by trying to do too many things at once. You have a side hustle and a main job, and you're thinking about crypto, and you're trying to start a YouTube channel, and you're learning Spanish. You are diversifying your energy because you are afraid that if you pick just one thing, it might fail. But by doing 5 things at 20% effort, you are guaranteeing that all 5 of them fail. You You need to find your wonderful business. Buffett says if you can find just 3 wonderful businesses in your life, you will get very rich. You don't need 50, you need one. You need to become an expert in one area. You need to know more about your specific niche than anyone else in the room. When you have that level of knowledge, you don't need to diversify to protect yourself. Your knowledge is your protection. So stop trying to be okay at everything and give yourself permission to be a genius at thing. Put your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket very closely, like Andrew Carnegie used to say. The power of disagreeableness. If you want to be a billionaire, you have to stop caring what other people think. I don't mean you should be a jerk. I mean you must possess a psychological trait known as low agreeableness. Researchers from the Socioeconomic Panel in Germany analyzed the personality traits of millionaires and billionaires. They use the Big Five personality model. They found a consistent pattern. Wealthy people score very high on conscientiousness. They are disciplined and they're organized. They score high in openness. They like new ideas, but they score significantly lower than the average person on agreeableness. This means they are not afraid of conflict. They are not afraid to swim against the tide. They do not need social harmony. Harmony to feel good about themselves. When you are building something massive, people are going to tell you that you are crazy. They are going to tell you that it cannot be done. They are going to tell you that you are wrong. If you have high agreeableness, you will listen to them. You will try to fit in. You will compromise your vision to make everyone feel comfortable. Billionaires don't do that. They are non-conformists. Look at Steve He was famous for his reality distortion field. He would demand things that his engineers said were impossible. He wasn't trying to be their friend. He wasn't trying to be agreeable. He was trying to change the world. He didn't care if people thought that he was difficult. He cared about the vision. You have to be willing to be misunderstood. You have to fight for your idea when no one else sees it. You have to be the one who says yes when the whole world says no. No, this is why so many billionaires are entrepreneurs. You cannot climb the corporate ladder if you are highly disagreeable. The corporate world rewards people who follow the rules and play nice. The entrepreneurial world rewards people who break the rules and create new realities. So you can ask yourself today, where are you compromising your dream just to avoid an awkward conversation? Where are you saying okay when you want to scream no? Stop trying to please everyone. You are not pizza. You are a leader. Lead. The obsession with speed. Speed is the ultimate weapon. If you look at the daily habits of billionaires, they do not waste time. They understand that time is the only asset that they can never buy back. There is a concept called return on time investment, or ROTI. Billionaires are obsessed with this. They aggressively use leverage— other people's money, other people's time, systems, and technology— to make sure that their personal time is spent only on the highest value tasks. When I analyze successful people on my channel, I see this pattern over and over. They don't just work hard, they work fast. Tom Bilyeu, friend of the channel, has a strict routine. He gets up, he works out to build discipline, he meditates to clear his mind, and then he attacks his most important tasks immediately. He doesn't check email first. He doesn't scroll social media. He calls it thinkitating, using his brainpower to solve complex problems before the world can distract him. Most people are moving too slow. You have an idea for a business, you spend 6 months researching a logo. You want to start a podcast and you spend 3 weeks looking for the perfect microphone to buy, right? You're using preparation as an excuse to hide. If you wait until you feel ready, you'll be waiting for the rest of your life. Billionaires act on information immediately. When Elon Musk faced that crisis in 2008, he didn't take a month off to think about it. He was on the phone, flying around the world, negotiating deals, moving money, literally working 20 hours a day to save his companies. The speed of his decisions saved him. You need to shorten the gap between the idea and the execution. If you have an idea right now, do something about it. In the next 10 minutes, send the email, Buy the domain, post a video, call the client. Stop overthinking. Your brain is designed to keep you safe, not to make you rich. Safety is slow. Wealth is fast. The billionaire mindset is about shrinking timelines. If you think a goal will take you 10 years, ask yourself, how can I achieve this in 6 months? Even if you fail, you will be further ahead than if you stuck to the 10-year plan. So a lot of you're waiting for permission. You're waiting for someone to tell you that you are good enough. You're waiting for the perfect time. There is no perfect time. The perfect time was yesterday. The second best time is right now. The ability to handle crisis. You will never reach the top without facing a moment that threatens to destroy everything that you have built. This is the existential crisis phase. Every single billionaire that I've studied has gone through a moment where it looked like it was all over. We talk about Elon Musk in 2008, but look at Jeff Bezos in In the dot-com crash of 2001, Amazon lost 90% of its value. 90%! Imagine looking at your net worth and seeing it drop by 90%. Most CEOs panicked. They folded. They went bankrupt. Bezos didn't panic. He focused on the math. He focused on one single metric, the cash conversion cycle. He realized that if he could get cash from customers before he had to pay his suppliers, he could fund his own growth without needing banks or investors. He turned Amazon into a cash-generating machine during the worst crash in the history of the internet. He didn't just survive the crisis, he used the crisis to become stronger. This is what Nassim Taleb calls being antifragile. It's not just about resilience, which is bouncing back to where you were. It's about getting better because of the stress. When you are building your business, you are going to get hit. You are going to lose a big client. Your star employee is going to quit on you. On you. The economy is going to tank. A pandemic is going to shut down the world. If you crumble when things get hard, you are not ready for this level of success yet. Billionaires look at crisis as a puzzle to be solved, not a sign that they need to stop. They maintain an internal locus of control. They believe that no matter how bad the external situation is, they have the power to fix it. They don't blame the economy. They don't blame the government. They don't blame their team. They take extreme ownership. So when bad things happen to you, do you play the victim or do you become the architect of your own rescue? Your pain is your training ground. The struggles that you are facing right now are not there to stop you. They are there to prepare you for the weight of the success you are asking for. If you can't handle the pressure of a $10,000 problem, life will never trust you with a $10 million problem. problem. So embrace the crisis. It is the fire that forges the steel. They solve the biggest problems. Perhaps the most important thing billionaires have in common is the scale of the problems that they solve. So you are paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems that you solve. If you solve a small problem for a few people, you make a little bit of money. If you solve a massive problem for millions of people, you become a billionaire. So look at the billionaires that we've talked about. Elon Musk is trying to solve the problem of fossil fuels with Tesla and the problem of human extinction with SpaceX. Pretty big problems. Bill Gates solved the problem of putting a computer on every desk in every home. Jeff Bezos solved the problem of getting anything that you want delivered to your door in 2 days. These are not small problems. Most entrepreneurs aim too low. They start a business just to make money. They want to just pay their bills. They want a nice car. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it won't make you a billionaire. You have to fall in love with the problem. And to go to the next level, you have to expand your vision. You have to ask, how can I help more people? How can I serve deeper? You need to find your one word. You need to find the core value that drives you, because when things get hard, and they will get hard, money will not be enough motivation to keep you going. You need a mission. If you're just chasing paper, you will burn out. If you are chasing a purpose, you will be unstoppable. So the billionaires I know, the ones I studied, they're not sitting around counting money. They are working harder than you and me. Why? Because they're obsessed with the problem they are solving. They are built to serve. So if you want to join their ranks, stop asking, how can I make a billion dollars? And start asking, how can I help a billion people? The money is just a byproduct of the value that you create. Focus on the value. Focus on the service. Focus on the impact. You have Michael Jordan-level talent at something. You have a genius inside of you That is waiting to be unlocked, but you are keeping it small because you don't believe in yourself enough to tackle the big problems. The world is waiting for you to step up. The world has huge problems that need your specific genius to solve. So don't deprive us of your contribution because you're afraid to fail. Go bigger. 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 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, not regret. Mastering this mindset is not just about buying a nicer house. It's about finally getting the freedom to spend your time 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 that everything is your fault, 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. It 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 $300,000. 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 zero dollars 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 of fearing failure, she feared not trying. She used five thousand dollars 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. Built too. Then there's Ronald Read. 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 Fuscone was a Harvard-educated executive of Merrill Lynch. He had all the smarts and connections in the world, but he went completely bankrupt. Why? Because Read mastered the psychology of money, patience, and delayed gratification while Fisconi 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 could 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 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. 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. 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 $1 million. You have to go out into the marketplace and you earn 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 rewards. 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 Brandlytics. 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 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 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 seek out familiar patterns. 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 terrible. 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 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 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 somebody? 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 out. Have to 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 a move. 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 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 onto any kind of real wealth. Therapists explain that financial anxiety is often a nervous system response. 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 mindset of abundance with money. Scarcity tells you there's never enough, so you have to fight everyone for a tiny piece of the 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 the high-ticket clients because you actually believe. 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 get 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 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 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 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 the 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 it's 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 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 three 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. You don't need to be the smartest person in your industry. You just need to be the 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 and the videos? Did you improve your product? If you did the work, it was a good day. 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. 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 is not your best. So look at your life right now. What's the one daily habit that if repeated for five years would completely guarantee your financial success? Identify it, protect it, do it every day. Your future millions won't come 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 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. You do not need a million-dollar tech idea to build massive wealth And finally quit your day job. The fastest shortcut to hitting your financial goals is buying an unsexy business like a laundromat or plumbing company that already makes real money. Ironically, the businesses that don't crash are the ones built on trash. They solve real problems, they get paid, and they last. Something that most people overlook. The less exciting the business, the less competition there is, and the more reliable the— Right, so it's, it's a foolproof business. Biggest factor into going into boring businesses is the fact that it's recession-proof, it is not seasonal, and it's something with recurring revenue. If you keep telling yourself you are not ready to be an owner until you invent the next big app, you will completely miss the greatest wealth transfer in history and stay broke. Sometimes you don't need to upgrade the business idea. The boring version already works. You're not just Running the boring businesses, you are building a modern empire. Warren Buffett is the greatest investor of all time, but he does not build tech startups. He buys boring companies. He bought a candy company, a furniture store, and a paint business. We look at them if somebody came in and offered us the entire business, and then we try to think: What is this place going to look like in five or ten years, and how sure are we of it? He realized early on that buying. Buying a business with a proven track record is the easiest way to guarantee a massive return on your money. You skip the risky startup phase and go straight to collecting the profits. And we go and somebody comes to us with a business that's done phenomenally for 10 or 15 or 20 years, or maybe for 50 years, and we've seen how— what their batting average is. We've actually seen they bat at .350 or whatever it may be, and we just make the assumption that we won't screw it up by hiring them and we buy the business. That's far easier to tell great baseball batters after you've seen a couple seasons of their batting than it is to, to go to even college baseball teams or high school baseball teams and pick out the superstars. Now, right now you're probably thinking you need millions of dollars to buy a company. That's exactly what the startup world wants you to believe so you stay stuck working your day job. The truth is retiring owners are desperate to sell and you can buy their profitable business using seller financing or small business loans with almost zero down. I'm going to show you the exact types of boring businesses you can look for right now. The $10 trillion generational wealth transfer. A massive 90% of all startups fail entirely. Many of these startups fail simply because they build a product that absolutely nobody actually actually wants. Another massive group fails because they just completely run out of cash. You end up spending years of your life draining all of your savings and maxing out your credit cards just trying to prove that your idea works. You stay awake late into the night worrying about how to pay your bills. You pitch to hundreds of investors who just tell you no. You spend your weekends tweaking a pitch deck instead of living your life. You sacrifice your health and your relationships for a dream that has a 90% chance of failing. Now, if that's what you want to do, awesome, go for it. But you do not have to do that. You can skip the hardest part of business. You can skip the long years of making zero profit. You can just buy a business that already works and already prints cash. When you buy an existing business, you start making money on the very first day. You do not need to guess if your customers will buy what you sell. You do not have to build a brand from scratch. The customers are already there waiting for you. So right now is a massive shift happening in the global economy. About 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every single day. They control about 2.34 million small businesses in the United States alone. These retiring owners hold an estimated $10 trillion in business assets. That is trillions of dollars of wealth that is expected to transfer over the next 10 years. This is the biggest financial opportunity of our lifetime. They run the local hardware store, the neighborhood bakery, and the regional trucking company. These are businesses that have deep roots in your community. They have real customers who pay real money every single week. And when these owners retire, their knowledge leaves with them unless someone steps in to take over. But here's the crazy part that you need to pay attention to right now: more than 58% of these owners have no documented transition plan. Their kids do not want take over the family plumbing company. The kids want to work in tech or do something completely different. They do not want to fix pipes or manage employees or drive trucks. The owners are tired and burnt out. They just want to sell the company, retire comfortably, and play golf. They are literally waiting for a hungry entrepreneur exactly like you to walk in and take over their life's work. They want to see their legacy continue in good hands. So your first action step is to look around your town and notice how many older owners run the local shops. Make a list of 5 businesses you drive past every day that look like they've been there forever. Skip the struggle with an SOS business. Now, you do not want to buy a complicated tech company or a trendy restaurant. Trendy restaurants fail fast when the hype dies down. Tech companies, they require constant updates and massive teams of expensive engineers. Building a brand new software company like I'm doing with Brandlytics, man, it takes a massive amount of intense daily focus. Side note, if you want to split test your thumbnails and grow your YouTube channel, Brandlytics is awesome. Might just be for you. You have to manage developers, fix bugs, and run endless marketing campaigns. But you can buy boring business instead. There's a framework for this called SOWS. It stands for stale, old, weak, and simple. You want a business that is stale, meaning it does not need crazy disruptive technology or viral marketing to survive. People just need the service no matter what year it is. A plumbing business or a roofing company will never go out of style. People will always have leaky pipes and broken shingles. You want it to be old, meaning it has survived for at least 5 years and has a proven track record of making good money. An old business has loyal customers who keep coming back every single month. It has survived bad Economies and recessions. You want it to be weak, meaning the current owner has terrible customer service or bad marketing. You can easily step in and beat the local competition just by answering the phone on time and having a clean website. Most of these older owners do not even use email properly. They miss phone calls and lose money every day because they refuse to use any kind of modern tools. And finally, you want it to be simple. You need a business model that is incredibly easy to understand on day one. If it takes you months to figure out how the product works, you should walk away unless again, you really love it. You want a business where you can explain exactly how it makes money in one single sentence. Sometimes the simplest strategy is the most effective. A vending machine route is the perfect SOWS business. It is completely simple and totally weak in competition. You pull up, you restock the snacks, and you collect the cash. You do not need to hire a massive marketing team to convince people to buy a bag of chips. You just place the machine in a busy building. You just buy the route, implement some basic inventory software to track your sales, and you instantly increase your profit margins without inventing anything new. You could run special promotions or put card readers on old machines to double your revenue. If the old owner only accepted coins, you'll see a massive spike in sales by accepting a credit card swiper. So your next action step is to write down 3 unsexy businesses in your neighborhood that fit this exact SOWS model. Go talk to the owners and ask them how long they've been in business. The secret to buying with almost $0 down. Now, you're probably sitting there thinking you need a massive bank account or rich parents to buy one of these companies. You might think you need millions of dollars in cash just sitting in a vault, right? You do not. You can literally buy a profitable business using the cash flow of the business itself. The most powerful way to do this is called seller financing. Because these older owners are desperate to retire and nobody else wants to buy their unsexy business, they will actually act as a bank for you. So they will hand over the keys to the business and you pay them a monthly payment out of the profits that the business is already making. You do not need to go to a traditional bank For this part, you avoid all the crazy bank fees and the months of waiting for your loan approvals. You just negotiate the terms directly with the seller, so you can ask for a low interest rate or a longer time to pay them back. You can even structure the deal so you only pay them more if the business grows. It creates a win-win for everybody involved. The seller gets a steady stream of retirement income, and you get a business with almost no money out of your own pocket. Now, if the seller will not finance the whole thing, you've got Government-backed bank loans. The SBA 7 loans typically require only a 10% down payment. You can easily raise that small amount from private investors, friends, family. You can use the money you save from your day job. When Nina and I walk around Toronto, we see dozens of small shops that are ripe for this kind of buyout. We see dry cleaners and corner stores and local gyms. You could take over a million-dollar company with almost none of your own money. The business pays the bank loan back for you every single month from. its own revenue. You just sit at the top and manage the system. The bank takes on most of the risk because they know the business has a history of making profit instead of just some startup that doesn't have track record yet. So your action step here is to start practicing how to talk to owners about seller financing options. You can search online for local businesses for sale and call one broker today just to see how many sellers are open to financing. You'll be surprised by how many say yes. The best boring businesses to target right now. You need to target businesses that provide essential services that people need no matter what the economy is doing. You want recession-proof companies that print money in good times and bad times. So take a look at laundromats. 16% of American households do their laundry at a laundromat. People will always need clean clothes even when the economy crashes. People still have to wash their shirts. Laundromats bring in a median annual revenue of $219,878. They are essentially self-service. The customers do all the work by loading and unloading their own clothes while you collect the coins and credit card payments. You do not need a huge staff to run them. You can hire one person to clean the floors and wipe down the machines. You can upgrade the machines to take mobile payments and make even more money. You can add vending machines for soap and snacks to boost your profits. You can even add a wash and fold service where people pay you extra to do the laundry for them. Another incredible option is self-storage facilities. So storage facilities are extremely low maintenance, because you do not have to deal with broken toilets or crazy tenant complaints like you do with apartment buildings that you're renting out. People just leave their stuff in a metal box and they pay you every month. If they stop paying you, you just auction off the box. The self-storage industry has an average profit margin of 36%. You can add automated locks and online booking to make it a completely passive income stream. You do not even need an employee to sit at the front desk. Customers can rent a unit on their phone and get an access code instantly. It's hard to focus on your health and your family if you're working 100 hours a week for a boss, but when you buy a boring storage facility that practically runs itself, you get your time back. You get your time back to focus on your health, to go salsa dancing, to be with your family, to build your next big thing. You can also look into commercial cleaning services or property management. A property management business can easily bring in between $50,000 and $1 million in average annual revenue. You just oversee the rent collection and handle leases for other property owners who do not have the time to do it themselves. It's a steady, predictable recurring revenue that hits your bank account every single month. You can a few contractors to handle the repairs and maintenance. Also, HVAC companies, plumbing services, landscaping routes are all printing cash right now because they are services that a robot or app simply cannot replace. You cannot download an app to fix a broken air conditioner. A real person has to show up and do the work. So your action step here is to pick one boring industry and learn everything you can about how it works. Read books, listen to podcasts, watch interviews of people who already own that type of business. Also explore local service niches you might not have considered yet, like mobile pet grooming or specialized medical transport, which can also yield high returns. Overcome the fear of buying. Many people freeze when they think about buying a business. They think they do not have the skills to run a company. They worry that the employees will quit or the customers will leave. That fear is completely normal. Every successful business owner felt the exact same fear before they signed their first deal. The key is to rely on the systems that the old owner has already built. You do not have to reinvent the wheel from scratch. You just have to keep the wheel turning. So you'll spend the first few months just learning how the machine they built works. You'll talk to the employees, ask them what needs to be fixed. You can listen to the customers and find out what they love about the service. You slowly introduce small changes to make things run smoother. You do not have to make massive changes on day one. You can take your time and learn the ropes. The old owner will usually stay on for a few months as well to train and introduce you to the best clients and the team. They want you to succeed because their name is still attached to the legacy of the shop. Now, if you're worried about making a mistake, you can hire an advisor to look over the financial records before you buy. You can bring in an accountant to verify the revenue and the profit margins. You can talk to a lawyer to make sure the contracts a business had, that they're solid. You do not have to do it all alone. You can build a team of experts to guide you through this process. So your action step now is read one book or watch one video about buying a small business this month. You'll see that the process is pretty straightforward once you understand the basic steps. You realize that ordinary people buy businesses every single day. Adopt the CEO mindset. Now, to pull this off, you have to completely change the way you view entrepreneurship. You have to shift from just being a startup founder mindset to a CEO mindset. Startup founders are obsessed with creating something new totally from zero, and if that's you, awesome. They spend years guessing what the market wants and burning through their cash. They constantly worry about running out of money before they make their first sale. They wear every single hat in the company, and they often burn themselves out. But a CEO focuses on running, improving, and scaling a company that already exists and already has customers. A CEO looks at the big picture and finds ways to make this machine run faster. In my Movement Makers program, I teach successful entrepreneurs how to scale their impact by stepping into this exact leadership role. You have to delegate the small tasks so you can focus focus on the massive growth you have ahead of you. You have to stop acting like the hardest worker in the room, and you have to start acting like the smartest leader in the room. You have to trust your team to do most of the heavy lifting. You have to give them the tools that they need to succeed and then get out of the way and trust them to do their job. You will never scale a business if you insist on making every single decision yourself. You have to build systems that run without you. So when you acquire a business, you get instant infrastructure on day one. You inherit an established customer base, a proven business process, a trained team, and existing cash flow. Your job is not to do all of the daily grunt work. Your job is to lead. Your job is to look at the boring business. You find the bottlenecks and you fix them. Maybe the old owner did everything on paper and kept receipts in a shoebox. You just bring in an iPad and some basic scheduling software, and suddenly the business is 20% more profitable. You sell up a simple digital marketing campaign that the old owner was too afraid to try. You can also hire a great manager to run the day-to-day operations for you so you do not have to be there every single day. You are buying the past performance, but you are building the future. This is how you engineer real generational wealth. You build wealth through ownership, not by grinding away 100 hours a week for a boss who does not care about you. So now you have the exact roadmap to buy your first Freedom instead of suffering through the startup struggle. So your action step is to stop acting like an employee and start making decisions like an owner. Audit your own life and find three areas where you can start acting more like a CEO today. The ultimate shift: You are fully capable of running an empire, so stop waiting for permission to become a true leader. It's time to step up, take the reins, and trust your ability to learn on the go. No one is coming to hand. you your success on a silver platter. You have to go out and be willing to take it. You have to be willing to do the things that other people are too afraid to do. And the only thing standing between you and your freedom is your willingness to take the leap. So take that first step today. Start looking for a business or sale in your area. Contact a broker and start a conversation. 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? No matter what, no matter how little it is, if it's— whether it's a big house or a little house, that space right there, you're the boss. That's what your business is. That's what your life is. You create the space so you can control it. You control your environment, but you have to architect that. The space you choose to work in can seriously impact your productivity and your mood. Structuring your surroundings To make good choices automatic is the real secret behind every millionaire that you admire. You don't have to be the victim of your environment; you can also be the architect of it. Your brain is a record of your environment. Who you surround yourself matters. What content you consume matters. If you keep fighting against a broken routine, you stay stuck exactly where you are for the next ten years. Growth requires deliberate habits. If you don't know your routine. How are you supposed to ever feel your best? No one can live without a routine. You just forget that. If you guys don't have a routine, I would recommend like you get one going. In 2006, doctors at the Massachusetts General Hospital wanted to improve the eating habits of thousands of staff members and visitors. They did not talk to anyone about willpower or motivation. They simply changed the physical environment. They added bottled water to every single refrigerator right next to the soda. Within 6 months, soda sales dropped and water sales skyrocketed. They proved that you often choose things not because of what they are, but simply because of where they are in your environment. Now, I can hear your doubts right now. You might be telling yourself that you've tried routines, you've bought the planners, and you always fall off track after a couple days. But your systems have not failed because you are weak. They failed because you designed them for the perfect version of yourself, not the tired and stressed-out version of yourself. When you build a system based on your actual reality, it does the heavy lifting for you. Let me show you how to structure your day so that success becomes completely automatic. Stop chasing goals and start building a daily machine. Goals are completely useless for changing your daily behavior. You have probably set massive goals for your business before. You wrote them down, you felt a huge rush of motivation, and you pictured how amazing your life was going to be. But a goal only tells you where you want to go. It does absolutely nothing to help you take the physical steps to get there. When you only focus on the goal, you put yourself in a constant state of failure. You wake up every single day realizing that you are still not a millionaire. There. You still do not have a massive audience and you are still struggling. And that gap between where you are and where you want to be creates massive anxiety for people. The most successful entrepreneurs in the world do not focus just on their goals. They focus on their systems. A system is just a repeatable process that guarantees you take action regardless of how you feel. There's a fascinating study from the British Journal of Health Psychology that showed how people build new habits. The researchers divided people into different groups to see who would stick to a workout routine. One group was just told to track their workouts. Another group was given motivational speeches to boost their desire to exercise. The final group was told to create a specific system. They had to write down the exact day, time, and location that they would work out. The results are pretty shocking. The motivation group only had a 35% success rate, but the group that built a simple system a 91% success rate. You do not need more motivation to build your business. You just need to decide exactly when and where you are going to do the work. So when I started my YouTube channel, I didn't have a goal to reach 4 million subscribers. If I'd focused on that massive number, I would have quit in, in the first month. Instead, I built a system. My system was simply to create and upload a new video every single week. At the beginning, beginning. Now we do every day. My first videos were terrible. I was awkward and shy and completely embarrassed to watch myself on camera. But my purpose comes from my pain. I struggled so much when I was starting my first software company. I wanted to quit. I felt totally isolated and alone. And I knew there were other entrepreneurs out there feeling the exact same pain. I wanted to help them. I wanted to help you. So I stuck to my system. I made 350 videos before I was finally not embarrassed by my own content. I made 700 videos before I actually inspired myself. I did not win because I had better goals than anyone else. I won because my system forced me to put in the reps when nobody else was watching. If you want to finally break free from the cycle of starting and stopping, you must build a system that tells you exactly what to do every single morning. Your system will build your momentum. Once you have momentum, becoming successful is just a matter of time. That leads me directly Design your environment for the lazy version of you. You always try to design your life for the perfect version of yourself. You assume you will wake up full of energy, ready to crush your tasks and completely immune to distractions. But that perfect version of you is not real. You need to design your systems for the tired, stressed, and lazy version of yourself. When you are exhausted, you need to be able to take a break. Your brain will always choose the path of least resistance. If your guitar is in a closet, you will never practice. If your camera is packed away in a bag, you will never record a video. If you have to search for your client list, you will never make your sales call. You have to remove all the friction between you and the work. I want to share a powerful concept from an IT developer named Oswald Knuckles. He created a daily system called reset. Setting the room. Whenever he finished watching television, he does not just turn it off. He puts the remote back on the stand, fixes the pillows, and folds the blanket. Whenever he takes a shower, he wipes down the toilet while the water is warming up. He does not view this as cleaning. He views this as preparing the room for his next action. He intentionally designs his environment so that his future choices are as easy as possible. You must apply this exact same system to your business. When you finish working for the day, clear your desk, open the exact software you need for the next morning, leave your notes right next to your keyboard. When you sit down the next day, you will not have to think about what to do. The work will already be waiting for you. This is also how you protect your mindset. Lack of belief is the biggest problem in the world right now. It's what I believe. Your current environment is perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are. If you want to change your life, you have to radically change what you feed into your Set up your environment so that success and belief are impossible to ignore. So every single morning I have a system where the very first thing I do is play a video of someone who inspires me. I call it my believe walk. Get up, go outside for at least 15 minutes, put on something that inspires you. I listen to Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Les Brown. I do not leave my inspiration up to chance. I manufacture my belief by designing an environment that forces me to think bigger. Your environment will always beat your willpower in the long run. So fix your surroundings today and your habits will automatically fix themselves tomorrow. But fixing your physical environment is only the first step. Now you have to clear out the mental clutter. The 10-minute mental cleanse system. You are probably carrying hundreds of uncompleted tasks in your head right now. You are thinking about the emails you need to send, the videos you need to film, the clients that you need to get on and call call, the bills you need to pay. This creates a massive amount of mental static and stress. When your brain is overloaded with things that are not finished, you literally cannot focus on the task that's right in front of you. This is a psychological phenomenon called the Zeigarnik effect. In the 1920s, a psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik noticed that waiters in a restaurant could remember complex unpaid orders with perfect accuracy, but the exact moment the bill was The waiters completely forgot the order. Your brain is programmed to constantly remind you of unfinished tasks until you either complete them or put them into a trusted system. To stop this mental drain, you need to build a mental cleanse system. Take 10 minutes every single evening to write down every single thought, idea, and obligation floating around in your head. Do not organize them yet, just get them out of your brain and onto a piece of paper. Paper. This simple act tells your brain that the information is safe. Your brain will finally stop reminding you about these tasks and your anxiety will disappear. Once everything is written down, pick the one most important task that will actually move your business forward. Circle it. That becomes your only focus for the next morning. Everything else can wait. Now you're probably an overthinker. You get these bold, powerful, and courageous ideas, But instead of acting on them, you sit and think. You analyze the risks, you worry about what people will say, and you let the idea die. You have to trust that great ideas flow through you for a reason. When you get a great idea, you must take one small physical step towards it within 5 minutes. Buy the domain name, record a rough voice memo, send an email to a potential partner. Lock the idea into reality before your mind can talk you out of it. When you stop storing your ideas in your head, and start putting them into the physical world, your entire business will transform. But even the best productivity system will fail if you do not have the right foundation. This brings me to the most important system of all: build a system that forces you to serve others. If your only goal is to make money, you will quit as soon as the process gets painful. Entrepreneurship is incredibly hard. You will face rejection, you will lose money, and you will have days days where you want to shut everything down. In those dark moments, wanting a bigger bank account will not give you the strength to keep going. You are built to serve. You want to wake up every single day and feel like your life actually matters to somebody else. When you make your business about helping other people, you tap into this unlimited source of energy. Researchers at the Wharton School of Business conducted a fascinating study on university call center These employees were tasked with calling alumni to ask for donations. The job was highly stressful and had a huge turnover rate. The researchers brought in a student who had received a scholarship funded by those exact donations. The student simply talked to the employees for 5 minutes about how the scholarship had changed his life. Over the next month, the employees who met the student increased their total revenue by 171%. They did not get better scripts. They did not get better training. They simply realized that their work was actually changing a human life. Money is incredibly important. You need money to hire a team, scale your impact, and take care of your family. Money can absolutely be in your top 5 priorities. I think it actually has to be. It just can't be number one. Your number one priority must be the mission. You must have a cause that you would fight for even if you were not getting paid. You need to systemize your service. Make it a mandatory part of your daily system to help one person with zero expectation of getting anything in return. Answer a question in a forum, leave a detailed comment on a small creator's video, or send an encouraging message to a client or a friend. When you focus intensely on who you are serving, your fear of failure goes away. You stop worrying about looking perfect on camera because you realize the message is more important than your ego. Your business will explode the moment you realize that your true job is just to pull other people out of the same dark hole you used to be in. But even the best mindset will fail if you give up too early. Track your actions and ignore your results. Your obsession with immediate results is destroying your long-term potential. So you start a new routine, you work incredibly hard for 2 weeks, and then you turn around and realize nothing has changed. You still do not have the sales, you still do not have the audience, and your bank account looks exactly the same. So you decide the system is broken and you quit. But the system is not broken. You were just expecting to see the harvest while you are still planting the seeds. So in the science of continuous improvement, there is a concept known as the plateau of latent potential. When you first build a new system, your results will flatline for a long period of time. You will put in massive amounts of effort and see absolutely zero external reward. This is where 99% of people give up. But your effort is not being wasted. Your effort is being stored. When I first started my journey, I tracked my year-over-year growth. After 5 years of making content consistently, I only had a few thousand subscribers. Most people would look at those numbers and call me a complete failure. If I had judged my Success purely by those results, I would have quit like a thousand times over. But I did not track my results; I tracked my actions. I focused entirely on the fact that I showed up and I did the work I promised myself that I would do. You have to love the process of building your business. If you only love the reward, you will never survive the years of grinding in the dark. You must be completely stubborn about why you were doing this, but incredibly flexible about how you get there. Build a system. Where your only definition of a successful day is whether or not you executed your daily habits. When you stop obsessing over the outcome and start obsessing over the daily inputs, your success becomes absolutely inevitable. Your ultimate engine. You already have everything inside you to do something truly legendary. You just have to stop waiting for permission and start building the routines that guarantee Trust that your ideas matter and take immediate action on them today. I believe in you and know you can build the life you dream about. Motivation is overrated. It's a fake friend that shows up when things are exciting and then disappears the minute work gets tough. We've been taught to chase that fired-up feeling, but those who win aren't motivated all the time. They're consistent. So if you keep waiting until you feel inspired, Until you feel inspired, you will watch opportunities pass you by while someone else with half your talent but twice your consistency blows past you. Think I'm wrong? Look at one of the most successful comedians ever, Jerry Seinfeld. When a young comic asked Seinfeld for his secret, Jerry didn't say get motivated. He said write every day. Don't break the chain. He hung a huge calendar on his wall and put a red X on it for every day that he wrote jokes. After a few days, he He had a chain and his only job was to never break it. It didn't matter if the jokes were great or if he felt funny that day. It didn't matter if he was motivated or not. All that mattered was showing up and writing. That unsexy daily habit helped fuel years of consistent, high-level performance. Seinfeld's consistency beat motivation, and that's a big reason he became one of the greats. Now you might say, sure, Evan, but I'm no Jerry Seinfeld. So let me share something personal from myself. I don't wake up motivated either, not even close. People think I leap out of bed on fire. I don't. And that surprised me too at first. I mean, I love what I do. Why aren't I pumped every single morning? And eventually I realized that what matters is that I do something about it. So I engineered a morning habit to kick my butt into gear. So before I check email or Instagram or even think about the day, I feed my mind something Inspiring. It might be a clip of Steve Jobs or Howard Schultz or Elon Musk as I go outside on what I call my believe walk. But every single day, I watch something that makes me believe. I've also unfollowed any accounts that make me feel negative. Why? Because I know motivation won't magically be there when I need it. I have to cultivate it with habits, with boring routines that guarantee I start my day feeling bold and confident. And you know what? It works. Even on the days when I wake up in a funk, those habits snap me out of it and get me moving. So maybe you're thinking, okay, but aren't entrepreneurs supposed to be free spirits? I became my own boss to avoid boring routines. I hear you. A lot of entrepreneurs, they like to rebel against structure, and the idea of doing the same thing every day sounds suffocating when you love and crave creativity and freedom. But discipline equals freedom. Having a few steady habits doesn't make you a robot. It frees up your brainpower so you can actually be creative where it counts. Without basic routines, you waste energy deciding when or whether to work, fighting distractions, riding emotional highs and lows. It becomes exhausting. Meanwhile, your competitor has already banged out their boring morning tasks and moved on to innovating, right? Consistency becomes your equalizer. Just remember, the genius who works only when they're inspired will always lose to the persistent entrepreneur who grinds. out the basics daily. The boring stuff is the foundation on which exciting success is built. So let's dive in. Let's get practical and look at the 11 boring habits that will skyrocket your entrepreneurial progress. These are the habits that make motivation almost irrelevant because you'll be making progress regardless of how you feel on any given day. You ready? Let's dive in. Number 1, show up every day. Consistency beats inspiration. Successful entrepreneurs have one thing in common: they show up, especially on days they don't want to. It sounds simple, but it's everything. Top performers in every field— athletics, CEOs, artists— are more consistent than their peers. They deliver day after day while everyone else battles procrastination and waits to feel ready. If you want results, make showing up a non-negotiable. Rain or shine, in the mood or not, you do something that moves your business forward daily. It could be as small as one sales call or one page of writing, but do it without fail. Consistency creates your momentum and momentum beats motivation. Remember the Seinfeld story? He didn't wait on inspiration to strike. He built a habit so he couldn't flake out. And then with my own story, when I started on YouTube, I was nobody. Year one, I had 25 subscribers. Year 2,000 subscribers, 5 years on YouTube, and practically no one cared. I was putting up videos every week and still hearing crickets. Any motivated person would've quit. I definitely felt like quitting. I was embarrassed. And fun fact, I couldn't even watch my first 350 videos back because I cringed at how bad I thought they were. But I kept showing up. And honestly, the only thing I had going for me was that I just didn't stop. I just kept going. And slowly those small numbers grew. After 5 years, I hit 2,000 subscribers. Then things finally started to pop, and now it's over four million. That didn't come from a lightning bolt of inspiration; it came from consistent action long after that initial excitement of making videos wore off. So build the habit of showing up. Make your calls, create your content, improve your product daily. Even if progress is slow, you're laying bricks, and brick by brick, if you don't quit, you can build your cathedral. Number two. Number 2, plan your day. Don't wing it. Never start your day without a plan. This is a boring habit that prevents a ton of stress and wasted time. If you wake up and dive into work with no clear priorities, you'll gravitate to whatever is easiest— your emails, social media— and convince yourself that you are busy while the real important tasks sit untouched. Sound familiar? Instead, plan your day in advance, either the night before or first thing in the morning. List out the key tasks that will make the day a Pick your top 1 or 3 priorities, the things that drive your business forward, and block time for them on your schedule. This simple habit ensures that you work intentionally rather than reacting to whatever pops up. And here's some science. Research shows that you are 2 to 3 times more likely to follow through on a new habit or goal if you plan out when and where you'll do it. Psychologists call it an implementation intention, basically a fancy term For decide exactly what you'll do, when and where. So for example, don't just say, I'll make some sales calls tomorrow. Say tomorrow at 10 AM, I will make 5 sales calls from my desk. Lock it in your calendar. One study had people fill in the sentence, during the next week, I will exercise on day, at time, in place. Those who did this were up to 3 times more likely to actually exercise. Planning works. I do this myself every day. I know exactly when I'm filming videos or when I'm mentoring my team. team because it's on my calendar. If it's scheduled, it happens. If you leave it to when I feel like it, it won't. So make planning a habit every day. Know your priorities and your time slots in advance. The ROI on this 10-minute habit is huge. You'll get the important stuff done whether or not you're in the mood because you've made a commitment to yourself on paper. Number 3, win your morning. No snooze How you start your morning sets the tone for the entire day. Hit the snooze 5 times and scroll aimlessly. You're telling yourself it's okay to procrastinate and coast. I like to say the first thing you do each day is tell yourself it's okay not to hit your goals. If you smack that snooze button, think about it. You set a goal, your alarm, and the very first action of the day is breaking that promise. That chips away at your confidence. So here's the habit. No more snooze. When the alarm goes off, get up, even if it sucks, especially if it sucks, because starting with a small win, getting up on time creates a domino effect of wins. Now, once you're up, do something positive and proactive with the first 15 to 30 minutes of your day. This is your win the morning routine. It doesn't need to be a 2-hour elaborate ritual with green smoothies and sunrise, unless you want that. It could be as simple as making your bed or doing 10 pushups. Or going on a believe walk like I do, something to build a quick sense of accomplishment. Admiral McRaven famously said, if you make your bed, you've accomplished the first task of the day and the rest comes easier. In my case, I watch an inspiring video and then I try to create something. Often I'll post a quick message on Instagram or share some positivity because I want to create before I consume the world's noise. And that routine sets me up for the day, as I've shared already before. Yeah. But maybe for you it's a short meditation, a quick walk, writing in your journal. The key is that you control the start of your day. You feed your mind and body something good instead of reacting to emails or news and other people's agenda. By doing so, you leave the house or you start work feeling energized and in charge, not constantly behind the curve. Consistently winning your morning makes you far less dependent on feeling motivated later because you've already built momentum from the start. Number four, eat the frog first. Tackle the hardest task every day. Do the hardest, most important thing first. Right after your morning routine, dive into the task you're most likely to procrastinate on. Maybe it's making that sales call to a client who might say no. Maybe it's working on your business plan or coding a complex feature or writing a chapter of your book, making your next video. This is known as eating the frog. It's a term from Mark Twain that was popularized in business by Brian Tracy, friend of the channel. The idea is simple. If you have to eat a live frog every day, wouldn't you rather just get it over with? If you eat that frog first thing in the morning, you can go through the rest of your day knowing the worst is behind you. Why is this habit so powerful? Well, for one, your willpower and decision-making energy are highest in the morning. So as the day goes on, your mental resources drain and tasks feel harder. We've all felt that 4 PM brain fog, right? So by tackling the tough stuff first, you leverage your freshest energy on what matters most. Also, when you finish a tough task, you get a rush of accomplishment that makes you feel like a winner. It boosts your mood and confidence for everything else. On the other hand, if you avoid the hard thing and you middle around on the easy trivial tasks, you'll carry this weight of I still haven't done X all day long, and that creates stress and guilt, which kills your motivation. I'm not going to lie, eating the frog is never fun in the moment. Picking up the phone to call that angry customer or sitting down to crunch last quarter's financials is not thrilling for most people. But this habit builds your discipline muscle like crazy. And once the frog is done, you feel lighter and free. The rest of the day is gravy by comparison. So personally, I try to film my hardest videos or handle my most critical messages early when I'm fresh. If there's a tough conversation I need to have with a team member, I schedule it first thing. By doing the hardest thing first, you prove to yourself that you run the day; the day doesn't run you. So do this consistently, and you'll notice something: you'll stop dreading difficult tasks so much because you've conditioned yourself to attack them. And that's progress you simply can't achieve if you only work when a surge of motivation conveniently makes it feel easy for you. So tomorrow morning, identify your frog. Number 5, move your body daily. Exercise for energy. This one might sound unrelated to business, but trust me, daily exercise is the entrepreneur's secret weapon. Building a company is not just a mental game, it's a physical endurance game too. You need energy and stamina and stress resilience, and nothing gives you that like moving your body. I don't care if it's a 20-minute walk, a gym workout, yoga, or even just a walk with your dog. Jumping on a mini trampoline in your office. Yes, I do this. I try not to jump too much while I'm making videos. The habit of getting your body active each day will boost your productivity and mood more than a cup of coffee. And you don't have to take my word for it. Take billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson. When asked how to be more productive, Branson's answer was this: work out. He swears that exercising daily gives him 4 extra hours of productivity every week. 4 hours. Think about how huge that is over time. And Branson's not alone here. CEOs like Tim Cook, Mark Cuban, Oprah, many of the busiest, most successful people in the world make time to exercise every single day. It's not because they're fitness buffs by nature, it's because they know it sharpens their performance. And science backs this up too. Exercise improves focus for 2 to 3 hours post-workout, releases endorphins that crushes stress, and even grows new brain cells for improved memory and learning. A healthy body makes a more effective entrepreneur. So here's how you can implement it as a habit. Schedule it. Treat your exercise like an important meeting with yourself that you cannot cancel. Even if it's just a quick walk around the block at lunch or 10 minutes of stretching between Zoom calls, put it on the calendar. I like to keep things simple. So I have a 5:00 PM workout routine and I'm also on a trampoline all day long. So I'm feeling low energy or between tasks, I'll just jump out on the trampoline for a few minutes. I literally bounce on this trampoline 20,000+ times a day while I'm working. Crazy? Maybe, but it keeps my energy high, my blood flowing. The point is movement needs to become a non-negotiable. Some days you won't feel like it, you do it anyway. Those are the days you need it the most. Even a slow, boring workout counts. Consistency is what counts. Over time, you'll notice you're more alert, you're less stressed, and more motivated naturally because your body and your mind are firing on all cylinders. So get moving daily. Your business will thank you for it. Number 6, curate your input. Feed your mind, not your doubts. Entrepreneurship is hard enough. Don't make it harder by flooding your brain with garbage or negativity. Curate what you allow into your mind each day. This is a habit most people ignore. They passively scroll whatever the algorithm throws at them, watch news, that freaks them out and hang around negative people. And then they wonder why they feel discouraged or distracted, right? As an entrepreneur, you need to protect your mindset fiercely. That means deliberately choosing inspirational, educational, or uplifting inputs and cutting out the rest. I talked earlier about how I watch an inspiring video every morning to kickstart my belief on my believe walk outside. That's one way I curate my input. I'm basically brainwashing myself for success. On purpose. I highly recommend you create a daily inspiration playlist for yourself. It could be videos, podcasts, audiobooks, this YouTube channel, whatever lights a fire inside you. Listen or watch even 10 minutes a day. It's a mental vitamin. And at the same time, unfollow or mute sources that constantly make you feel like crap. Doom scrolling through Instagram can leave you feeling worse about yourself. So I went through and unfollowed accounts that weren't lifting me up. Now my feed is 90% positive. people and ideas that inspire me. And that didn't happen by accident. It was a habitual practice of curating my environment. Consider your physical environment too. Surround yourself with books or quotes or objects that remind you of your goals and your values. Some entrepreneurs put their vision board or goals list where they can see it every day. Others like me have little weird reminders. So I might have a believe sign or memorabilia all over my office. Office or the damn the Doritos, Doritos bag behind me. They're not a sponsor. The idea is to create an environment that naturally triggers motivation and focus. Research shows that much of our behavior runs on autopilot triggered by environmental cues. Roughly 2/3 of what people do each day is habit, not conscious choice. So design your environmental cues. If you want to read more, leave a book on your pillow so you read at If you want to stop wasting evenings on TV, maybe unplug the TV and put it in the closet on weekends. Make the good behaviors easier and the bad behaviors harder. So for me, curating the inputs also means I seek out mentors and expanders. I consume biographies of entrepreneurs that I admire to soak in their mindset. It's a habit, a little dose of greatness each day feeding my mind. And over time, what happens is those inputs, they compound. You'll find yourself naturally More optimistic, more resourceful, and yes, more consistently motivated because you've conditioned your mind to focus on possibilities and solutions. Curating your input is about feeding your mind the good and starving it of the bad. It's a boring habit in that it's just consistently choosing the better media, the better conversations, the better thoughts, the better people. But wow, does it pay off in your attitude and your actions. Number 7, do one hard thing daily. Build your discipline. So make it a habit to intentionally do one uncomfortable thing each day, something that challenges you or that you'd rather avoid. Why? Because doing hard things consistently is the weightlifting for your discipline and your self-confidence. If you only ever do what's comfortable, the minute you face a real challenge in business, you will quit. But if you've built the habit of flexing your grit muscle daily, you become almost antifragile, right? Difficulties become easier to handle and you won't get derailed so quickly. This hard thing could be directly in your business, like that tough phone call, asking a question you're afraid to ask, working an extra hour on your craft when others would call it a day. Or it could be something in your personal routine too that just sucks a bit. The cold shower in the morning. Doing the early morning workout. Out, resisting that dessert after dinner. The specific action matters less than the message that you're telling yourself. I do what is hard when I don't feel like it. I am stronger than my feelings or my temptations. One of my weird personal habits for this is the damn Doritos strategy. I kind of quickly alluded to it behind me here. So if you've seen my videos, you might have noticed that giant unopened bag of Doritos sitting behind me. Yes, it's real and it's probably years old by now and definitely stale, but it still probably tastes And I keep it there as a deliberate test of my willpower. So conventional wisdom says, if you're avoiding junk food, remove the temptation. But I do the opposite. I leave the temptation right there and practice not giving in. I'm stronger than this Doritos, I tell myself. My mouth is watering even just thinking right now. If I can resist that craving every day, what else can I conquer? It's a daily reminder that I'm in control, not my impulses. And the high that you get from knowing that you did the difficult thing is incredible. It builds self-love and belief in a way that nothing else can. My friends have even started their own Dan the Doritos challenges. One keeps a bowl of candy on his desk without touching it. Another keeps sugar packs by his coffee maker and never uses them. It's a strange little habit, but it's powerful. Now, you don't need a Doritos bag, but find your edge and stand on it daily. Maybe you're shy, so your hard thing is initiating a conversation with a stranger each day. Maybe you hate numbers, so your hard thing is reviewing one financial metric of your business each day just to get over the fear. By doing what's hard, you prove to yourself that you can, and that discipline spills over everywhere in your life. When the inevitable big challenges in entrepreneurship come for you— your deal falls through, a product fails, a pandemic hits— you won't collapse. You'll think, I've done tough things every day, I can handle this too. And that resilience comes from the daily reps of discomfort. It's not sexy. It's definitely not fun in the moment. It's boring and often painful, but it forges you into a stronger person every single day. So ask yourself each morning, what's my hard thing today? And then do it. And over time, you'll start to crave the challenge because you'll love who you become by conquering it. Number 8, ask for help and accountability. Don't go it alone. Entrepreneurship can be a lonely road if you let it, but going it alone is a habit you don't want to start to form. In fact, make the opposite a habit. Regularly seek help, feedback, accountability from other people. Pride or fear keeps a lot of founders struggling in silence. And I know because I did this too in my journey. Early on, I was making no money, everything was falling apart, and I was too embarrassed to tell anyone. I didn't want my friends or family to know how badly I was struggling. So I suffered alone, which only made everything harder. And I nearly broke down during that phase. In hindsight, I realized that if I had simply asked for help or even just shared what I was going through, I could have saved myself a ton of stress and maybe gotten solutions sooner. The lesson for me and for you, don't build your dream in isolation. Make it a habit to reach out. This could mean having a weekly check-in with a fellow entrepreneur to swap challenges and try to hold each other accountable. It could mean asking a mentor or advisor for feedback on your plan. It could even mean openly sharing your goals with your team or your spouse or online. So that you feel accountable to follow through on what you said you're going to do. When you voice your struggles or your plans, you create external pressure, the good kind, to take action, and you gain perspectives you wouldn't have on your own. And studies have shown that having an accountability partner can dramatically increase your odds of hitting a goal. One famous stat from the American Society of Training and Development suggests you have a 65% chance of success with a specific accountability partner. Appointment and up to 95% if you have ongoing check-ins. The exact numbers aside, the point is accountability works. If you're more introverted like me and the idea of regularly involving others makes you cringe a bit, you start small. Maybe send a Monday email to your mentor outlining your focus for the week and a Friday email updating them on the progress, or even join an online community like we've got here in Believe Nation and put some comments below. You can share your wins in your life, The habit isn't about huge networking. It's about not letting your pride or your fear keep you stuck. When I finally opened up about my struggles, I discovered something pretty amazing. People wanted to help. My audience, my friends. When I started saying, hey, I'm having a hard time with X, what would you do? Tons of advice and support started pouring in, and just knowing I wasn't alone made me push through instead of quit. So I try to remind others 2, don't do it alone because you'll probably fail. You'll quit along the way because it's so devastatingly lonely, and that's from my own experience. So break the habit of lone wolfing it and build the habit of asking for help. Being accountable to someone, even in small ways, keeps you consistent when your motivation falls because you know someone cares if you show up or not, and sometimes that makes all the difference. Number 9, single task with focus. Cut out multitasking. In a world of constant pings and dings and notifications, focus has become a superpower, so master it. The habit here is to give your full attention to one task at a time every day for a solid block of time and ruthlessly eliminating distractions during that block. It might feel boring compared to juggling 5 browser tabs, checking your phone, and doing email every 2 minutes. But multitasking is a lie. It doesn't make you more productive. It makes you scattered and less effective. Researchers have found that task switching can cost as much as 40% of your productive time. You could be losing nearly half your workday just in the mental gaps created by bouncing between tasks. So here's the new habit: carve out at least one chunk of time, even 30 minutes to start, where you work on only One thing with zero interruptions. It could be first thing in the morning, great for those important tasks. You're eating the frog that we talked about, or maybe late at night if you're a night owl. Whatever time you can concentrate best during this time, close your email, put your phone on do not disturb or in another room, and shut down any apps or any tabs that are unrelated to the task at hand. If you're writing, just write. If you're coding, just code. If you're brainstorming strategies. Just do that. You might feel twitchy at first, itching to check notifications. That's normal, but stick with it. You're training your brain to focus again, like a muscle that's been allowed to completely atrophy. I schedule deep work sessions for myself where my team knows that I am unavailable. Sometimes I'll even put on noise-canceling headphones or earbuds with no music. The silence sends a signal that I'm in the zone. And guess what? An hour of truly focused work work often produces more real progress than an entire day of fragmented effort. When I batch film YouTube videos like I'm doing right now, I devote the whole day, Tuesday, just to filming. I'm not focused on emails or meetings, just turn on the camera and go. And by the time I'm making multiple videos, I hit a flow and get far more done than if I tried to squeeze in filming in between other tasks. Now you might try a version of this, maybe dedicate mornings to creative work and afternoons to call so you're not constantly context switching. The main point is to focus on one thing at a time. It's a habit to build just like you're going to the gym. And at first, 15 minutes of concentration might feel hard, but over time you'll stretch that to an hour and then 2, and you'll start to love it because you'll see the quality of your work and the speed of your progress skyrocket up. Plus, it's mentally freeing to not be a slave to every notification. You'll realize most urgent things can actually wait. By eliminating the noise for a while each day, you get the truly important work done. No motivation needed, just pure habit and structure carrying you through. Remember, multitasking is the enemy of excellence. Commit to your focus habit and watch your productivity soar. Number 10, prioritize sleep and recovery. Recharge yourself. Hustle culture might glamorize the all-nighters and the 4 a.m. wake-up grind, but let me tell you this: chronic sleep deprivation is a silent killer of success. One of the most boring habits you can adopt, yet one of the highest ROI is getting enough quality sleep and rest. It's not flashy; it feels lazy, but it's anything but. It's strategic. Your body and your brain are the engine of your business, right? If you don't maintain that engine, it'll break down. The science says without adequate sleep, your Your brain literally struggles to function. Neurons can't fire optimally, your cognitive performance tanks, and your mood and decision-making go downhill. You ever notice how problems seem 10 times more overwhelming when you're exhausted, or how you make silly mistakes or snap at people when you're running on 4 hours of sleep? That's the sleep loss taking effect. On the other side, good sleep improves almost every aspect of your brain function— your memory, your problem-solving, your creativity, your focus. You name it. One study even found that people who improved their sleep saw increases in cognitive performance and a reduction in age-related cognitive decline. So if you sleep well, you think better and you perform better. It's that simple. So what does this mean as a habit? It means setting a consistent sleep schedule as much as possible. If it means you need 7 or 8 hours, most adults do, you prioritize that like you would any important meeting. You wouldn't skip a meeting with your biggest client to binge Netflix till 3:00 AM, Right? So treat bedtime with that same respect. Maybe it means shutting down screens an hour before bed or doing a wind-down routine like reading or stretching so you actually fall asleep on time. This might feel dull. Going to bed at a decent hour is not a sexy life hack, but it will supercharge the hours when you are awake. Even Jeff Bezos, who runs one of the world's biggest companies, Amazon, says he insists on getting 8 hours of sleep because it gives him better energy and clear thinking for high-quality decisions. He's not stupid. He knows a tired brain running Amazon is bad for business. So I had to learn this myself. I'm honestly still working on it. There are periods I tried to get by on 4 to 5 hours grinding early and late. I tell myself I was working harder than everyone else, but I hit diminishing returns pretty quickly. My creativity dried up. I became irritable. And ironically, I had to redo work because of mistakes. So now I try to guard my sleep and I also take breaks and days off to recharge. Another thing hustlers often neglect: you are not a machine. Even machines need maintenance. So schedule that day off, that time off, unplug for an afternoon, take a walk outside, get out in nature more to reset your mind. These rest habits keep you consistent longer term. Burnout is the enemy of consistency. If you burn out, you'll be forced to stop, and there goes all that momentum that you have been building up. So the boring habit here is take care of your biological needs. Get sleep, stay hydrated, give yourself downtime. It's not laziness, it's how the actual elite performers sustain their success. Think of it this way: every night you get quality sleep, you're earning back tomorrow's motivation and willpower in spades. So if you want to be a machine in your work hours, respect the human need to recharge. Long term, this habit separates the entrepreneurs who flame out after a And number 11, celebrate small wins daily. This is your fuel for your momentum. So let's talk about the habit that keeps your inner fire burning— celebrating your small wins. Entrepreneurs, we're ambitious people. We're always looking at the next goal, the next mountain to climb, and that drive is great. But the downside is we often beat ourselves up for not being where we want to be. Yeah, and I think that's a huge mistake. be while completely ignoring the progress that we actually are making. So this can be demotivating and unsustainable. So to stay consistent without relying on big spikes of motivation, you need to cultivate a sense of progress and gratitude every day, even for the little wins and the little steps. And psychology proves this out. Harvard researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer found that the number one driver of positive emotions and motivation during the workday is progress. day was making progress in meaningful work, even if the progress was small. In their study of thousands of daily diary entries, they discovered that those little wins— fixing a small bug in code, closing a minor sale, getting a positive comment from a customer— kept people incredibly joyful and motivated. The best way to keep an employee engaged day after day wasn't massive bonuses or huge achievements. It was facilitating Celebrating daily progress. The same applies when you're your own boss. If all you focus on is the gap between where you are and where you want to be, then you'll feel constantly behind and discouraged. But if you make it a habit to acknowledge what went right each day, you'll generate a steady flow of motivation from within. So how do you celebrate small wins as they happen? One simple way is to keep a daily progress journal. At the end of each day, you can write down 2 to 3 things that you've accomplished or wins from that day. They can be tiny. You published your blog post, you made a video that you were procrastinating on, you got a kind email from a customer, you figured out how to fix a problem in your app. By writing it down, you're telling your brain this mattered. Good job. Another method I love doing this with my wife is you share your wins. So you share your wins with your friend, the spouse, your team. For example, the win of the week or shoutouts on Fridays. Every day I try to make a video for my team. Team too inside of our Slack where I'm sharing a win, something that I want to recognize somebody on the team for doing because they did a great job. Because everybody, including me, we love shares. It just makes you feel better, and culturally it reinforces progress. So if you're a solo entrepreneur, you could share your daily win or tell your accountability buddy. It might feel awkward at first, but it builds positive momentum. So during the years when my YouTube audience was really tiny, I survived by celebrating small wins. I remember getting 50 views on a video and I was so happy. It sounds crazy, right? I reframed it. 50 people watched my advice today. Imagine a room of 50 people listening to me speak. Wow. And that little mindset trick kept me pumped. It made me realize that no matter how small, I was making an impact. And that feeling motivated me to do the next video and the next one. If I had said, oh, only 50 people, this sucks, I would've quit and never reached the 5,000 or 50,000 or 5 million views later. By celebrating the little micro wins, I kept myself in the game. So you could do the same thing for yourself. Every day, take a moment, acknowledge something that you did well, you made some progress on, even on the tough days, especially on the tough days. Find one thing. Maybe it's, hey, I got out of bed and I sent 3 emails even though I was depressed. Awesome. Maybe it's sales are down, but I learned a lot from those customer complaints today, right? There's always something. This habit, it keeps your mindset positive. And forward-looking. It gives you a hit of dopamine and pride that reinforces your other habits. So instead of waiting for the big win a year from now to finally feel good, you're creating little wins today. And success is really just the accumulation of lots of small wins. So celebrate them. This isn't about giving yourself a trophy for nothing. You're putting in work and you deserve to recognize it. So by doing this, you stay motivated internally. You'll end each day thinking, Okay, I'm closer than I was yesterday. Let's go again tomorrow. And that, my friend, is a recipe for unstoppable momentum. So look at you, you made it here learning, getting better by watching this video. You're proving that you're not just interested in success, but you're actually committing yourself to it. These habits may be boring, but they are the unglamorous backbone of every great entrepreneur's journey. So keep at it. One day at a time, one habit at a time, you're building something extraordinary yourself. Habits make or break you as an entrepreneur. Too many brilliant people never reach their potential because they never build the habits to match their ambition. If you ignore this, you'll keep struggling and start to wonder if you were ever meant to be an entrepreneur at all. Steve Jobs was 30 when Apple, the company he co-founded, fired him. He said it was devastating. The focus of his entire life was gone, and he felt like a public failure. He could have given up for good, but he didn't. Instead, he started a new company called Next and helped launch Pixar, turning that humiliating defeat into an epic comeback. A decade later, Apple begged him to return, and Steve led one of the greatest business turnarounds ever. Yet in that dark moment, Jobs felt the same crushing doubt that you feel when everything falls apart. He felt betrayed, humiliated, like maybe he had never had it after all. But here's the difference: he didn't accept that feeling as the end of his story. I remember hitting my own breaking point as a young entrepreneur. I spent 9 months on my first business plan, making only $300 a month and eating cheap bean salad every day. Frustration started to pile up until I finally snapped. I called my business partner and I said, I quit. Then I hung up the phone and I cried harder than I ever had. I felt like a worthless failure. For the first time in my life, I saw myself as a quitter, and it broke me. But the next morning, I woke up with a new kind of pain— regret. I realized that the pain of giving up would be worse than the pain of pushing forward. So I swallowed my pride, and I told my partner I wanted back in. I knew I had to change something, so I studied how Bill Gates built Microsoft and borrowed one of his strategies. And a few weeks later, we closed a $13,500 deal, which was the first real victory of my business life. With that momentum, we grew the company and eventually sold it. But none of that would've happened if I had stayed down and never gotten back up. Now you might be thinking, okay, great, but I'm not Steve Jobs. I'm not a genius or celebrity CEO. Or maybe you're thinking, Evan, hey, good for you, but you had a partner and the lucky break. I'm still struggling here. I hear you. And here's what you need to know. Steve Jobs wasn't a born He started out as a college dropout with no money, sleeping on friends' floors and scrounging for meals. And I was a kid with no experience, just trying to figure it out. Steve wasn't born unstoppable, and neither was I. It was built step by step through habits, the same ones that you can start building today. If we could do it, so can you. So let's get into the 6 habits that made Steve Jobs an unstoppable entrepreneur and how you can make them yours. Habit number one: Do what you love. Steve Jobs was obsessed with doing work he loved. He once said, "The only way to do great work is to love what you do." Why? Because passion fuels perseverance. When life hit him with failure, getting fired, products flopping, his love for the mission kept him going. Jobs admitted, "The only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did." If you don't truly love your work. Work, you'll quit when it gets hard. It's that simple. Passion isn't just a feeling, it's a practical tool. When you care about the outcome, you'll work longer, you'll fight harder, you'll refuse to quit because it matters more to you. And passion is contagious. Steve's excitement ignited his team at Apple with a deep passion for creating groundbreaking products. So ask yourself, are you doing work that makes you come alive? And if not, find a way to get closer to it, even if means taking on a job on the side until you figure out what you truly love. Because when you love what you do, nothing can stop you from doing it. Habit number 2, have a bold vision. Unstoppable entrepreneurs have a vision so big it keeps them moving forward. Steve Jobs wasn't just making computers, he wanted to change the world. He believed in dreaming big, or as he put it, put a dent in the universe. When he recruited Pepsi executive John Jobs challenged him with a single question: Do you want to spend your life selling sugar water, or do you want a chance to change the world? That vision became magnetic. It attracted employees, attracted partners, and rallied customers. A bold vision gives your work more meaning. It turns your business into a mission. So when you have a massive why, the how can bend to your will. Setbacks become lessons. Roadblocks become hurdles that you figure out how to jump over. And as the saying goes, he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. Your vision should be so clear and powerful that it pulls you through the tough days. Now, maybe you want to empower a million people with your product. Maybe you aim to redefine an industry. Whatever it is, make it specific and make it clear. it matter to you. Steve Jobs had the audacity to say he would change the world, and then he did. What is your dent in the universe? Get clear on it and you'll find a more powerful drive to make it happen. Habit number 3, stay curious and keep learning. Steve Jobs made a habit of exploring beyond his comfort zone. After he dropped out of college, he dropped in on classes that intrigued him, like calligraphy, for no other reason than it fascinated him. Now, at the time, it had no practical use in his career— none. But 10 years later, those calligraphy lessons helped Apple build the Macintosh with beautiful fonts and typography that no other computer had. Jobs later said that creativity is just connecting things, and you can only connect more things if you learn more things. By traveling, studying art and design, experimenting with new ideas, he kept his mind sharp and his So unstoppable entrepreneurs never think they know it all. They're students of life. They read, they ask questions, they tinker with new skills, always gathering new dots to connect down the road. And science backs this up. Research shows that people with a broad range of experiences and knowledge are more innovative because they can see patterns and solutions that others miss. So take that course that interests you, even if it's outside your field. Meet people with completely different backgrounds. Try hobbies that make you a beginner again. Again. Every time you stretch yourself to learn something new, you're investing in future innovation for yourself. Steve Jobs's curiosity led to ideas that changed technology and entertainment. Yours can do the same for whatever you're working on if you stay curious and keep learning. Habit number 4, focus on what matters. Say no to a thousand things. Being unstoppable isn't about doing everything, it's about doing the right things and ignoring the rest. Steve Jobs was ruthless about focus. When he returned to Apple in 1997, the company was spread too thin with around 350 products in development. Jobs cut it down to 10 core products so his best teams could pour their energy into each one. He was as proud of what Apple didn't do as what it did. In fact, he once gave Google's Larry Page this advice. Decide on the five products that matter most and get rid of the rest. They're dragging you down. Focus requires saying no a lot. As an entrepreneur, every day brings new ideas, opportunities, and distractions. If you try to chase them all, you'll catch none. Stanford researchers found that people who multitask heavily and split their attention end up less effective at everything. When you spread your Thin, you make shallow progress. When you concentrate on a few priorities, you make deep progress. So figure out what moves the needle for your business or your goal and commit to that. Cut everything else. Cancel the project that's going nowhere. Say no to the clients who aren't the right fit. Protect your time and focus like your life depends on it because your dream does. Steve Jobs focused Apple's efforts on a handful of projects. Products that revolutionized the company. What could you revolutionize if you stopped dividing your attention? Habit number 5, embrace failure and persist. Every entrepreneur gets knocked down. The great ones keep getting back up. Steve Jobs understood that failure is not the opposite of success, it is part of success. When Apple kicked him out, it was the worst moment of his life, and And it set the stage for his greatest achievement ever. He later admitted, getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to me, because it freed him to think creatively again. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it, he said about that failure. In other words, sometimes life kicks you hard to move you forward. Steve didn't lose faith when life hit him. With a brick. He kept going. The only way you lose for good is if you give up. Jobs put it bluntly, if you're afraid of failing, you won't get very far. So don't be afraid to fail. Be afraid of not learning from it. According to Harvard research, successful entrepreneurs see failure as an opportunity to learn and grow. Each setback teaches you what not to do the next time. Each mistake brings you one step closer to the solution if you're willing to adapt and try So think of failure like a test. It shows you what doesn't work so you can focus on what might. When things go wrong, and they will, take a breath, extract the lesson, and get back in the game. Persistence is a habit. Every time you choose not to quit, you strengthen that persistence muscle. Steve Jobs persevered through failure and it made him stronger. It can do the same for you. And habit number 6, ask for help. Ask for help and build a great team. The myth of the lone genius is just that— it's a myth. Even Steve Jobs didn't build Apple by himself, and you don't have to go it alone either. One of Jobs's most powerful habits was his willingness to ask for help and surround himself with brilliant people. At 12 years old, he boldly called up Bill Hewlett, who was the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, just to ask for some spare parts for an electronics project he was working on. Hewlett was so impressed by the kid's initiative that he gave Steve the As Jobs later recalled, most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask. And that's what separates the people who do things from the people who just dream about them. The habit of asking continued throughout his career. When Apple was developing the iPhone, Steve realized the screen was scratching way too easily. He didn't have the solution, so he reached out and asked. He called Wendell Weeks, the CEO of Corning Glass, and described the problem, asking if he could help. asking for the toughest glass they had. Corning had something called Gorilla Glass sitting on the shelf, a technology from the 1960s that had never been used in consumer products. Because Steve asked, Corning brought it to life, and that ultra-strong glass became the iPhone screen. So the lesson here is don't let pride or fear stop you from getting help. Steve also knew that a great team beats a great individual. He hired people who are insanely talented and let them shine. It doesn't make sense to hire smart people And then tell them what to do, he said. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do. Your job is not to have all the answers. It's to recognize and recruit others who have pieces of the puzzle that you need. So find mentors who've walked your path and ask them questions. Partner with people who complement your strengths. Hire team members who are better than you at specific tasks. If you try to do it all alone, you will hit a ceiling. Maybe you're there right now, but if you build a network of support, you will explode. Explode through your limits. Being unstoppable doesn't mean never needing anyone. It means having the confidence to admit when you do need help and the wisdom to seek it out. Keep moving forward. Okay, you've just learned the habits that made Steve Jobs unstoppable. Now ask yourself, what will you do with them? It won't be easy. You'll face resistance, doubt, and days when nothing seems to work, but you're still here learning and working on your dream, and that already sets you apart. All successful people have the exact same 7 traits. Most people will ignore this and stay average. If you ignore it, chances are 5 years from now you'll still feel stuck, or worse, you'll be looking back with regret wondering what went wrong. I don't want that for you, and I know you don't either. Look at Walt Disney, the man who created Mickey Mouse. He was fired from his first newspaper job because They said he lacked imagination. Then his first animation company went bankrupt. He was told over and over that his ideas were too risky, too expensive, or just plain silly. At one point, he couldn't even afford food and survived by eating beans from a can. But he refused to quit. He kept creating. He kept believing. When he pitched Disneyland, more than 300 investors turned him down. Yet he kept going until one finally said yes. It's amazing. Today, Disney is one of the biggest brands on Earth. He succeeded because he never gave up. So ask yourself: If a man who got fired for no imagination could build a world of imagination, what could you build if you refused to stop? I almost gave up on my dream too. At 19, I quit on my first business. I had left a high-paying job opportunity to own a part of a startup and ended up making 300 bucks a month. Nothing was working. I was grinding every day. And feeling like a total failure. I was so embarrassed by how broke I was that I stopped hanging out with my friends, and I couldn't even afford pizza. One night, I hit rock bottom and told my business partner, I'm done, I quit. And then a new kind of pain hit me. I pictured myself years later, haunted by the fact that I gave up on my dream. That vision of regret was worse than the failure, and I couldn't accept that. So the very next day, I crawled back into the office, which was my my, my business partner's condo. I had no idea how I was going to fix things, but I made a decision. I would find someone who did know and learn from them. And I picked the best model I could think of, Bill Gates, since I had a software company, he had the largest software company in the world, and study how he built Microsoft and made his first million. And guess what? Within a few weeks, we closed our first major deal for $13,500. I went from making $300 a month to bringing in a $13,500 check in a single day. That blew my mind, and it changed who I was. I realized I could have stayed a quitter and missed out on everything, but instead I proved to myself that if you push one more day, if you're resourceful and you model success, you can turn things around. I learned a lot about the value of resilience and belief and finding mentors in your darkest moment. Now you might be thinking, okay, great story, Evan, but I'm not Walt Disney. I don't have a ton of imagination. I'm just a normal person with normal problems. Listen to me. Every successful person you admire started as a normal person with normal problems. None of them began with special powers. The difference is, when things got hard, they didn't settle for normal. They made different choices, choices that built those 7 traits into them. You can make those choices too. This isn't about born talent or luck or money. It's about what you decide to believe and how you act when the pressure is on. And the fact that you're watching this tells me something, that there's a fire in you. Maybe it's small right now, but it's in there. And my job in this video is to pour gasoline on that fire. So here's the good news. These 7 traits can be learned. They can be practiced. They can become your traits at an identity level. Starting today, you can decide to develop each one and completely change the trajectory of your life. So let's break them down one by one and get specific on how you can build them. Trait number 1, self-belief. All successful people believe in themselves unapologetically. They believe in their vision even when it's just a crazy idea and everyone else doubts them. There's a famous saying, whether you believe you can or you can't, you are right. And it's true. If you don't believe in your ability, you won't even try, or you'll quit as soon as it gets tough. On the other hand, when you do believe in yourself, you'll move mountains to prove yourself right. In psychology, this is called a growth mindset— the belief that you can improve and adapt. Stanford research has shown that the view you adopt of yourself literally shapes your life. If you believe you're capable of growth, you will grow. Successful people act like they're capable of amazing things long before it's evident, and that belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Think of Oprah Winfrey early in her career. She was fired and told she wasn't fit for television. She could have said maybe they're right, and she faded away. But she didn't. She held on to her belief that she was meant for more, and now she's Oprah, one of the most influential media figures of all time. She believed in herself when no one else did. Do you? Ask yourself honestly: Do you believe you can do great things? If your immediate answer is no, then let's change that right now. You might say, but I've never done anything great before. So what? Every success story starts with someone believing before they have evidence. I learned this from my mom. She used to tell me, if you have the ability, you have the responsibility. If you can, then you must. Whenever I failed or felt down, she'd look me in the eyes and say, you're Evan Castrilli Carmichael. You can do anything you believe you can. And I didn't buy it at first. I was a B and C student while my sisters got straight A's. But after hearing it enough times, I finally thought, Huh, what if she's right? And that little seed of belief—what if it's true?—changed my life. I started behaving like I could achieve something, and eventually I did. Trait number two: passion. Successful people love what they do; they are obsessed with it. They would do it for free just for the joy because it's part of who they are. I spent over twenty years studying entrepreneurs, artists, innovators, leaders, and one of the most consistent pieces of advice. advice is follow your passion. You have to find the thing that makes you feel alive, the thing that you would do even if you never got paid. Why? Because doing anything great is hard. It takes years of hard work. If you don't love the process, you'll quit. If it's just a paycheck or a casual interest, you'll give up when it stops being fun. But if you're truly passionate, you'll keep going even when it sucks, even when everyone calls you crazy, even when it doesn't make logical sense anymore. You keep going because you It's who you are. You don't get to be the best by doing what you hate or what you think you should do. You become the best by loving what you do more than anyone else loves what they do. Think about the greats. Kobe Bryant shooting baskets at 4 AM because he loved the game, not just because someone forced him. Or Steve Jobs, who famously said, the only way to do great work is to love what you do. He was right. If you haven't found something you can pour your heart into, you need to keep looking. Looking. Don't settle for a life of lukewarm interest. It's a recipe for mediocrity. So what do you love so much that you do it no matter what? What would you regret not doing? It might be a career, a project, uh, an art, a cause— anything. Identify it and give yourself permission to pursue it. Yes, you might have responsibilities and bills, and I'm not saying be reckless, but you owe it to yourself to incorporate your passion into your life and ultimately into your Because when you operate from passion, work doesn't feel like work. It feels like honor, like service, like play. And that's where the magic happens. You'll put in more effort, you'll put in more hours, you'll be a lot more creative and happy because it feeds you. That's how winners pull ahead of the pack. They're not straining themselves to compete. They're playing their own game that they love. So they naturally practice more. They learn more. They persist more. If you haven't found that thing yet, keep exploring. Follow your curiosity. Think about what pain you've overcome in your life. Often your purpose lies in helping others with the struggle that you went through. I always say your purpose comes from your pain. In my case, I struggled so much as an entrepreneur that I became passionate about making entrepreneurship easier for other people. Find your why. Trait number 3, action. Successful people do something. They They have a bias for action. They execute fast, even before they feel ready. This is where so many people fail. They get paralyzed trying to plan the perfect approach or waiting for the right time, and they never actually start. Newsflash, there is no perfect plan and there is no perfect time. At some point, you have to pull the trigger and go. And I learned this the hard way. In my first business, I was a perfectionist. I'm, I'm still a recovering perfectionist. I spent an entire summer drafting the ultimate business plan. Dozens of pages of research projections. It looked beautiful. And while I was planning, a competitor in my industry was acting. They got out there. They got customers. They got attention. A large competitor came along looking to acquire a business like ours, and guess who was already ready and who wasn't? Not us. Our competitor got bought for $40 million, and we got nothing. I missed out on a $40 million deal because I was stuck in planning mode, and that one hurt. But it taught me a pretty valuable lesson. Listen, a half-assed plan you start now is better than a perfect plan that you never execute. Most of your precious plan is going to be wrong anyway once it meets reality. You can't think your way to success. You have to do your way to success. So ask yourself, what's one important thing that you've been putting off because you don't feel ready and decide to take one small step today? Make that call, publish the post, start the channel, make the video, reach out to that person, whatever it is, just start. You won't have all the answers, and that's okay. You figure it out by doing. Start before you feel ready. Trust that you'll learn along the way. The simple trait, being an action taker, already puts you miles ahead of most people. Remember, you can't steer a parked car, so get moving and you'll find your direction. Trait number 4, embrace failure. Every successful person has a healthy relationship with failure. In fact, they fail more than the average person. The difference is they're not afraid of it. Most people are so terrified of failure that they don't even try, and that's the biggest failure of all. Successful people understand that failure isn't the end of the road. It's just a data point on the path to success. It's feedback. It's education. It's a necessary stepping stone. They don't take failure personally. They don't make it mean I'm a failure. They just say, okay, that didn't work. Good to know. What can I learn from it? from this. Let's try again. They failed their way to success. In fact, they failed at more things than most people have ever attempted. Think about that. The average person might try a dozen things in their life and give up when something doesn't immediately work out. Successful people might try 100 things, fail at 90 of them, but the 10 that hit more than make up for it. Failure is the price of admission for success. Michael Jordan, one of the greatest basketball players of all I put up as number one. He put it this way: I missed over 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I was trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I failed over and over and over in my life, and that is why I succeed. Failure is not the opposite of success; it's part of success. Thomas Edison made a thousand unsuccessful light bulb prototypes. When a reporter asked him how it felt to fail a thousand times, he said, "I didn't fail a thousand times." The light bulb was an invention with a thousand steps, and that's the mindset you need to adopt. Treat number five: perseverance. Never giving up. If one trait separates the winners from the losers, it's the sheer grit to keep going no matter what. Life will test you. Business will test you. Do you get back up one more time, or do you stay down? Successful people always get back up long after other people. Have thrown in the towel. Remember Walt Disney with his 300+ rejections? That's perseverance. Or look at J.K. Rowling. She was rejected by 12 publishers. 12 publishers said Harry Potter wasn't worth publishing. She could have stopped at rejection number 12 and we'd never have known Hogwarts, right? But she persisted until a small publisher took a chance on her. Now she's one of the best-selling authors in history. Stories like that aren't the exception, they're the rule. Virtually every success is built on a mountain of persistence. They say it takes 10 years to become an overnight success, and it's true. The problem is most people never make it to year 10 at whatever they're doing. They quit at year 2 or 3 because they're not seeing results yet. Don't let that be you. Perseverance is a choice. It's a quiet daily choice that I will not quit. Decide that for yourself. Decide that no matter how long it takes, you're going to see your vision through. There are no expiry dates on your dream. I don't care if it takes you until you're 30 or 40 or 65. Time is going to pass anyway, so you might as well keep pushing towards something that you care about. Keep going. Trait number 6, positive environment. All successful people raise their standards for their environment. They purposefully shape who and what they surround themselves with. So you've probably heard the saying, you are the average of the 5 people that you spend the most time with. It's true. Environment is everything. If you hang around 5 pessimistic, lazy, excuse-making people, you will become the 6th. If you hang around 5 ambitious, optimistic, high-performing people, you'll also become the 6th. We as human beings are contagious to each other. So winners curate their environment ruthlessly. So this means 2 things: cutting out the negative influences and adding in positive influences. First, the negative You must distance yourself from chronic negativity, naysayers, people who hold you back. Sometimes that's friends, even family. Sometimes it's the content that you consume. Pay attention to how the people around you make you feel. Do they make you feel energized, inspired, capable, or do they make you feel drained, discouraged, and small? If it's the latter, you need to start spending less time with them. This can be hard, but it's necessary. Successful people from tough backgrounds often had to be the ones who said, enough. I love you, but I can't have you around my dreams if you're going to tear them down. They raised their standards and refused to tolerate constant negativity around them. They stopped blaming their circumstances and they started demanding more of themselves. That's how you break free from a limiting environment. You declare to yourself, I will not accept this anymore, and you change it. Now, cutting negativity alone isn't enough. You have to add in positivity If you don't have supportive, inspiring people in your life immediately around you, seek them out. Find a community of people who are also pushing for more and believing more. That might mean joining groups or clubs or online forums. Even here in the comment section here in Believe Nation on this video, put it down below. Fill your ears with the words of great mentors from videos and books and podcasts. I still do this constantly as a shy introvert starting my business. I didn't have any entrepreneurial friends to turn to, so I turned to my heroes. I called them aspirational mentors. Through their biographies and their talks, their mindset became my mindset. You can do the same. There's no excuse to not have positive influences. You have YouTube, you have audiobooks, you have virtual mentors at your fingertips 24/7. Make use of it every day. Consume something that elevates you, ideally earlier in the morning. It's like healthy food for your brain. Trait number seven: a strong purpose. The final trait that all successful people share is that they're driven by a deep. Sense of purpose. They know why they do what they do, and that why is everything. It gives meaning to their work and fuel to their fire. Purpose is what turns a job into a mission. It's the difference between someone who is just making a living and someone who is making a difference. Now, if you study the greats, you'll see this over and over again. They weren't just chasing money. They're usually chasing a mission to change something in the world or to reach a personal vision. When you have a purpose, setbacks don't defeat you as easily because you know what you're fighting for. Like Viktor Frankl said, he who has a why to live can bear almost any how. Successful people have a powerful why. I like to say your purpose comes from your pain. Whatever you struggled with in life is what you want to help other people through. Now here's another thing. Having a purpose also attracts other people to you. People want to be a part of something meaningful. Your team, your customers, your audience, they will rally around you if you have a genuine It's inspiring. It's also a compass for your decisions. When you're lost or you're facing a tough call, you can ask, does this align with my mission or not? That clarity becomes gold. The world needs what you have. Successful people internalize this. They carry a sense of duty about their purpose. It's not just about personal gains. It's about using your gifts to make an impact. When you approach your life like that, as a mission, you become someone a lot more powerful. You won't give up easily. Easily because it's not just your own comfort that's on the line, it's your calling. And that is identity-level motivation. That's what creates your legacy. So those are the 7 traits, and I'll list them out one more time. And as I do it, I want you to imagine who you could become if you committed to all 7. So self-belief, trusting that you can figure things out and win even when no one else believes in you. Passion, doing work that lights you up so you have endless fuel to devote to it. Action— moving quickly and decisively rather than overthinking and hesitating. Embracing failure— learning from every misstep rather than never trying because you're afraid. Perseverance— getting back up every time, outlasting everyone who gave up. Environment— surrounding yourself with inspiration and cutting out the negativity. And purpose— knowing exactly why you're doing all of this and letting that why drive you forward. Notice something important here. None of these traits are None are privileges given only to the lucky. They are all choices. They are habits of mind and behavior that anyone can cultivate, including you, especially you. Success is not this mystical thing that is handed out to a select few. It's the result of building these traits day by day until they become who you are. Don't be intimidated by the entire list. You don't have to master all 7 overnight. Just start with one. Which one of these do you need the most right now? Pick that one trait and focus on it this week. Write a sticky note reminder. Do one small action each day and practice it. Keep it simple. If you chose action, for example, then every day this week, identify one important step and do it before your head hits the pillow. If you chose self-belief, start each morning with a video, an affirmation, a visualization of you accomplishing your goal. Bit by bit, you'll feel that trait growing stronger inside. you. And here's the secret: these traits reinforce each other. When you act, you gain confidence, your self-belief grows. When you persist through failure, you discover new passion and purpose. When you surround yourself with positive people around you, you'll find it easier to keep going and your belief gets stronger. It's all interconnected. You're basically upgrading your identity piece by piece, and momentum will build. Now it's your turn. No more waiting, no more excuses. You have the blueprint. You have the same 24 hours in a day as everyone else. You have gifts inside you that the world needs. Yes, needs. It's time to unleash them. So the moment this video ends, I want you to take one concrete step toward your dream using one of these traits, even if it's tiny, especially if it's tiny. Just do it now and then do it again tomorrow and then again the next day and let those little steps compound. Remember, the only thing that can stop you You is you, and you're done standing in your own way, aren't you? And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. For everything you need to become mentally strong, focused, and free, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. Distractions are stealing your life one decision at a time. Trying to pursue too many goals at once can definitely be counterproductive. Now, I realize that life is complicated. We all have multiple goals that we're trying to pursue, but if