How the Biggest Mistake in History Created A Trillion-Dollar Empire | Sergey Brin

Talking about the Soviet Union, where he was born, Sergey Brin once said, "I know the hard times that my parents went through there, and I am very thankful that I was brought to the States."

And I know the hard times that my parents went through there, and I'm very thankful that I was brought to the States.

I love that line because the man who built the search engine most of the world uses started out as a six-year-old immigrant who barely spoke English. Sergey co-founded Google with Larry Page when they were both students at Stanford. Google says people now search in it more than five trillion times. Now, my mom was born in Italy in a small region called Molise. When she was a kid, her younger sister got polio, and back then polio could kill a child. The best hospital in the world for kids with polio was SickKids in Toronto. So my grandparents sold their grocery business in Italy and moved the whole family to Canada. They didn't speak English. My mom was 10. My aunt lived a full life because they made that move, and my mom grew up here, met my dad, and the rest is history. So I wanted to make this video because Sergey's family made the same kind of move that my mom's family made. His parents gave up their jobs in Moscow so their son could have a better life. My grandparents, my nonna, gave up their business so their daughter could live in Toronto where I live. Almost everybody's family is from somewhere else. So if you have ever been the outsider, the kid with the accent, or the one starting from nothing, Sergey's story shows you where that can lead. I'm going to walk you through the whole story of Sergey Brin today, from a tiny apartment in Moscow to a garage in Menlo Park, to walking away from Google and coming back to build its AI. 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. 5 flights of stairs in Moscow. So Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, August 21st, 1973. The Soviet Union was a communist country and Jewish families like his faced open discrimination. He lived with his parents and his grandmother in one small apartment, and he described it to Stanford students in 2025 like this: I lived in a tiny 400-square-foot apartment with my parents and my grandmother and had to walk up 5 flights of stairs. His father, Michael, loved astronomy. Moscow State University kept Jewish students out of physics, and astronomy counted as physics. Jewish applicants took their entrance exams in separate rooms that people nicknamed gas chambers, and they were graded more harshly than the other students. Michael studied math instead and graduated with honors in 1970. Then he was refused a place in graduate school. He ended up working at Gosplan, the government office that planned the Soviet economy. His mother, Eugenia, had studied math and mechanics at Moscow State and worked at the Soviet Oil and Gas Institute. Now, Sergey saw what that did to his dad. He said, I've known for a long time that my father wasn't able to pursue the career he wanted, he told Moment magazine. We cannot stay here anymore. So in the summer of 1977, Michael went to a math conference in Warsaw, Poland. He came home and told his wife, We cannot stay here anymore. Eugenia didn't want to go at first. For her, she later said, the decision was 80/20 about Sergei. But in September 1978, they applied for exit visas, the permission the government required before you could leave. Michael was fired right away, and Eugenia quit her job. Sergei was only 5 and still remembers that after we had applied for exit visas, we had the police visit our house. My father lost his job. There was always a feeling of fear. The visas came in May 1979. The family first went to Vienna, where Jewish A Jewish refugee group called HIAS helped them. Then they went to the suburbs of Paris where a mathematician named Anatoly Katuk had arranged a short research job for Michael. And October 25th, 1979, they landed at JFK Airport in New York. Sergey was 6. The new kid with the accent. The Bryns rented a simple cinder block house in a lower middle class neighborhood near the University of Maryland. They bought a 1973 Ford Maverick with a $2,000 loan from the local Jewish community. Michael became a math professor at university, and Eugenia went on to work as a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Sergey arrived knowing only basic English. He said, I will say, as a child I had an accent. I came to the US at the age of 6, and so I was teased and stuff in elementary school. His mother remembers it the same way. She said it was a difficult year for him the first year. His parents also sent him to Hebrew school, where he was teased again. After almost 3 years, he begged them to let him stop. Now, looking back on those years, he told Stanford students that his family got to the US and were still, you know, very poor and had make our way out of having nothing. The Montessori kid who thanked his dad. At Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, Sergey was allowed to move as fast as he wanted. He said, I really enjoyed the Montessori method. I could grow at my own pace. The school's director, Patty Barshaw, became a mentor to the entire family. In the summer of 1990, Sergey went back to the Soviet Union with his father on a 2-week student exchange trip. He was a few weeks away from turning 17. On the second day, he to his dad and said, thank you for taking us out of Russia. On that same trip, he threw pebbles at a police car. The 2 officers got inside, got out quite upset, as he tells it. And he finished Eleanor Roosevelt High School in 3 years. At the University of Maryland, he earned a degree in math and computer science in 1993 with high honors in math. He won a National Science Foundation fellowship to pay for graduate school, and after MIT turned him down, he chose Stanford. He earned his master's degree there in August 1995 and stayed on to work towards a PhD. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It has the top lessons from today, gives you space to write biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it, and I'll see you there. Two students who found each other obnoxious. This is funny. So in 1995, a student named Larry Page was thinking about coming to Stanford, and Sergey was assigned to show him around. By some accounts, they disagreed about nearly everything. He said, "We both found each other obnoxious, but we say it a little bit jokingly." Obviously, we spent a lot. Of time talking to each other, so there was something there. Larry started a project to download the web and study which pages linked to which. Sergey said Larry joined Stanford in '95 and he started downloading the web, which it turns out to be the most interesting data you can possibly mine. So Sergey joined them. He explained why. He said this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry. They called their search engine BackRub because it looked at the links pointing back to each page. A page that lots of important pages linked to ranked higher. That idea became PageRank. The first version went up on Stanford's website in August 1996. Their crawler, the program that visits the web pages and copies them, at one point used almost half of Stanford's whole network. They renamed the project Google from a misspelling of googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The $100,000 check they couldn't cash. In August 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, watched a quick demo and wrote them a check for $100,000. Bechtolsheim was a Jewish immigrant from Germany himself. He made the check out to Google Inc. That company didn't exist yet. For 2 weeks while they did the paperwork to set up, they had nowhere to deposit the money. And on September 4th, 1998, they incorporated Google in a garage in Menlo Park. It belonged to their friend Susan Wojcicki, who later became the CEO of YouTube. Sergey took leave from his PhD and his parents weren't happy about it. His mother put it this way: We thought everybody in their right mind ought to get a PhD. Sergey still jokes about it today. He says, so I'm still on leave of absence technically. Might still come back. Now, they almost sold it anyway. Excite was one of the big search sites of the time, and in 1999, the investor Vinod Khosla got Larry and Sergey to agree to sell Google to Excite for $1 million. Excite CEO George Bell turned it down. Khosla talked him down to $750,000, and Bell still said no. It's funny how we all have these deciding moments in our life that kind of make or break what we end up doing for the rest of our lives. For me, I graduated University of Toronto and I thought I wanted to be an investment banker, and I had this opportunity to go be an investment banker and travel the world and do these huge deals and make a ton of money outta university, or become a 30% shareholder in a business and make $300 a month. And it was that decision that really changed the trajectory of my life. If I didn't go and be an entrepreneur in that moment and turn down the dream jobs, I probably wouldn't be here chatting with you guys. Okay, let's get back to Sergey's story. Adult supervision. Google grew quickly. When we were at Stanford, we had about 10,000 searches per day. Now we serve over 50 million searches per day, he said in a 2000 interview when the company had about 170 employees. In 2001, they hired Eric Schmidt, an experienced tech executive, as CEO, and the press called him Google's adult supervision. Their principles got tested pretty early. A hateful anti-Semitic website called JewWatch showed up high in Google search results when people searched the word Jew, and Jewish groups asked Google to remove it. Sergey's own family had fled that kind of hatred, and he still refused to change the rankings by hand. He said, I certainly am very offended by the site, but the objectivity of our rankings is one of our very important principles. On August 19, 2004, Google went public at $85 a share. The founder's letter to the investors said Google is not a conventional company, and one section of it was titled Don't Don't be evil. Standing up to China. In January 2006, Google launched google.cn in China, and to operate there, it censored its search results the way Chinese governments demanded. Sergey defended that at first, and then he started to doubt it. In June 2006, he said, perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense. So in mid-December 2009, Google caught a sophisticated attack on its systems that came from China. One of the attackers' main goals was to get into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. So on January 12th, 2010, Google told the world what happened and said it was no longer willing to censor its results in China. Sergey explained his side of it, saying, having come from a totalitarian country, the Soviet Union, and having seen the hardships that my family endured both while there and trying to leave, I certainly am particularly sensitive to the stifling of individual liberties. So on March 22nd, 2010, Google started sending searches from mainland China to a its uncensored site in Hong Kong. He said, at some point you have to stand back and challenge this and say this goes beyond the line of what we're comfortable with and adopt that for moral reasons. Decades to prepare. In 1998, the same year Google was founded, Sergey's mother was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. She was 50. 10 years later, Sergey had his DNA tested, and on September 18, 2008, he wrote on his personal blog, I carry the G2019S mutation, and when When my mother checked her account, she saw she carries it too. The mutation is a gene called LRRK2, and it gave him somewhere between a 20% and 80% chance of getting Parkinson's in his lifetime. Then he wrote, I have a better guess than almost anyone else for what ills may be mine, and I have decades to prepare for it. He had the money to act on that. Forbes said he had given more than $2 billion to Parkinson's research. He says his parents shaped how he treats money. He said, from my parents, I certainly learned to be frugal and to be happy without very many things. And in August 2015, Google reorganized under a new parent company called Alphabet, with Larry as CEO and Sergey as president. The worst decision. Not every bet they made worked out. In June 2012, Sergey took the stage at Google's developer conference and showed off Google Glass, a pair of glasses with a tiny computer screen built in, with a live skydiving demo. Developers could pre-order them for $1,500. The glasses never caught on with regular people, and Google ended its Explorer program in January 2015, he said, everybody thinks they're the next Steve Jobs. I've definitely made that mistake. At Google I/O in 2025, he said he made a lot of mistakes with Google Glass. And on December 3rd, 2019, Larry and Sergey stepped back from running Alphabet, and Sundar Pichai became CEO of both Google and Alphabet. Sergey had a plan. He said, I had this vision that I was going to sit in cafes and study physics, which was my passion at the time. Then COVID closed the cafes, and he said, "I actually retired like a month before COVID hit, and it was the worst decision." He said he felt himself spiraling, kind of not being sharp. Back in the office every day. By 2023, Sergey was back in Google's offices several days a week, working with a team building Gemini, Google's AI. By 2025, he was in the office in Mountain View nearly every day, helping on projects like VO3, which is Google's video-making AI. In March 2024, after Gemini's image tool produced inaccurate and offensive pictures, he said Google definitely messed up. And in February 2025, he sent a memo to the Gemini team. Competition has accelerated immensely, and the final race to AGI is afoot, he said. AGI means artificial general intelligence, an AI as smart as a person or smarter. He told the team to be in the office at least every weekday, and he said 60 hours a week is a sweet spot of productivity. In May 2025, he walked onto the stage at Google I/O and said, we fully intend that Gemini will be the very first AGI. That's when he told the crowd that anybody who's a computer scientist should be working on AI right now. Looking back on his time away, he said that staying retired would have been a big mistake. Challenging transitions can pay off. On October 25th, 2009, exactly 30 years after his family landed at JFK, Sergey gave $1 million to HIAS, the refugee group that helped them in Vienna. He said, I would have never had the kinds of opportunities I've had here in the Soviet Union or even in Russia today. I would like to see anyone be able to achieve their dreams, and that's what this organization does. His mother Eugenia died on December 3rd, 2024, at 76. A year later, on December 7th, 2025, Sergey went back to Stanford for the closing event of Stanford Engineering's 100th year. He talked about the apartment in Moscow, the move to America, and walking away from his PhD. Then he summed up his life and said, I guess I had had the experience of expanding my world in ways that seemed very painful at the times, but later paid off just because of my personal history. And I guess, you know, those challenging transitions can pay off. I love it because we learn the most in the most challenging situations and opportunities. When I had my first business, I struggled. I made no money. I was too embarrassed to tell my friends that I was struggling. And it was because of all of those hardships that I had to go through, and I made it harder on myself by not asking for help, that I wanted to create My website, and then eventually this YouTube channel. I think your purpose comes from your pain. Whatever you struggle the most with is what you want to help other people not struggle through as much. The hard changes can pay off. It's easy to look at Sergey today on stage at Google as one of the richest people in the world and think his life was just always easy. He started as a six-year-old in a cinder block house in Maryland who barely spoke English. The kids at school teased him for his accent. So Sergey was born in a tiny apartment in Moscow. His father was blocked from the career. that he wanted because the family was Jewish. His parents risked everything to leave, and he arrived in America at 6 with almost nothing. At Stanford, he met Larry Page. They built Google in a garage with a $100,000 check, and Excite turned down the chance to buy it for $750,000. He stood up to China, prepared for Parkinson's, retired, and then came back to build Google's AI. So that's Sergey Brin's story, and now you know it too. Maybe you're in the middle of a hard change right Like a new country or a new job or a new business. It can feel painful while it's happening. Sergey's family gave up everything to leave Moscow, and that move is what put him at Stanford in a room with Larry Page. So your hard change can pay off too. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn a simple habit that turned Warren Buffett into one of the world's richest men. Did you know Warren Buffett orders a $3.17 meal every morning if the market doing well and a cheaper option if it's not.

I'll have a sausage McMuffin with egg and cheese. $3.17 is a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit. The market's down this morning, so I think I'll pass up the $3.17 and go with the $2.95.

For decades, Buffett has kept his breakfast simple. He gets a McDonald's bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit with a Coke when the market is strong. But when the market isn't doing well, he picks a cheaper breakfast like a small meal or just coffee.

This is the McDonald's I go to

So what do you have at McDonald's?

Probably 3 times out of 4, I get a sausage McMuffin. Then at lunchtime, I get a Quarter Pounder and fries.

Even though he's one of the richest men in the world, he stays focused on being frugal and consistent. In fact, McDonald's gave him a lifetime card, which means he can eat for free, but he still chooses to pay. For him, paying for his meals is about maintaining his frugal mindset regardless of his wealth.

Here we have my McDonald's card, which lets me eat free at any McDonald's in Omaha for the So that's why the Buffett family has Christmas dinner at McDonald's. That explains a lot of things.

He also said, chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken, which shows us that small habits can build up over time and lead to big changes in our lives.

Somebody once said that the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they're too heavy to be broken.

So stay consistent, and your small actions will add up to something great. Warren Buffett has more than $100 billion. He's one of the richest people to ever live on planet Earth. He could have a private chef cook him meals made of gold. He could eat a 5-course breakfast in a mansion. He could buy the finest restaurants in the world and have them closed down just for him. But he doesn't do any of these things. Every single morning, this billionaire gets in his car, drives himself to work, and goes through the McDonald's drive-through. This is not a joke. This is a daily routine that has made him a legend. But there's a special twist to the story that most people miss. The specific meal he orders depends entirely on how the stock market is doing that morning. He doesn't just order whatever he feels like eating. He uses the market to decide his order. If he feels poor because the market is down, he spends $2.61. If the market is doing okay, he spends $2.95. If the market is up and he feels prosperous, he splurges and spends $3.17. You need to understand the extreme depth of this choice. It's not just some quirky habit of an old man. It's actually lessons in psychology, wealth preservation, and human behavior. So today we're gonna look closely at this one simple routine from Warren Buffett. We're gonna zoom in on the exact change in his cup, the science of his decisions, and the absolute secret to his massive success. You're gonna learn how a $3 breakfast can teach you everything you need to know about building an empire. The 5-minute drive and the exact change. So let's look closely at Warren Buffett's routine here. He lives in the same house in Omaha, Nebraska, that he bought in 1958. It takes him exactly 5 minutes to drive from his driveway to his office at Berkshire Hathaway. On the way, there's a McDonald's. Before he leaves the house, his wife puts a specific amount of exact change into a little cup inside his car. The amount of money in that cup is directly tied to the stock market. When Warren gets up, he checks the market. This determines his exact breakfast choice. So here are his 3 choices. Option 1 is 2 sausage patties. This costs $2.61. He chooses this on days when the market is down. He literally tells his wife that he is feeling less prosperous, so he's going to pass on the bacon and the egg. Option 2 is sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit. This costs $2.95. He chooses this on average days. Option 3 is a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit. This costs $3.17. He only gets this on days when the market is up and he's feeling rich. He takes the exact change from the cup, hands it to the person at the drive-thru window, gets his paper bag, pours himself a Coca-Cola, and goes to his desk. So think about the extreme level of discipline that this takes. He has enough money to buy the entire McDonald's corporation, but he refuses to spend an extra 56 cents on bacon if the stock market is having a bad day. He ties his daily consumption to the reality of his business. He doesn't let his massive overall wealth Detach him from the daily reality of money. 56 cents means nothing to his bank account, but the habit of respecting 56 cents means absolutely everything to his mindset. When you're an entrepreneur, it's very easy to start making money and immediately change your lifestyle. You get a big client, so you buy a nicer car. You have a good launch, so you start eating at expensive restaurants. You let your expenses rise to match your income. Warren Buffett does the exact He keeps his expenses flat and completely predictable. He anchors his physical reality to his business reality, but he does it on a microscopic scale. He feels the pain of a bad market by denying himself a slice of bacon. It keeps him sharp. It keeps him hungry. This keeps him completely grounded in the reality of the numbers. The Lifetime Gold Card. The story actually gets a bit wilder. And Warren Buffett loves McDonald's so much that the company actually gave him a special card. It's a Gold McDonald's card. This card gives him free food for life at any McDonald's in his hometown of Omaha. Bill Gates has one of those rare cards, but Bill Gates's card works anywhere in the world.

Bill, is it true you have the McDonald's Gold Card?

I do.

Can I see it?

Sure. What? That is so shiny.

Warren Buffett has talked about this card publicly in interviews. He has a card that gives him free food. He never has to pay for his breakfast again, but he still pays. He still uses the exact change from the little cup in his car. Why would a man who is famous for saving money refuse to take free food? He continues to pay for his meals because for him, the act of paying is the actual point. It's not about getting a cheap breakfast; it's about maintaining a frugal mindset. If he uses the card, the game is over. The connection to the stock market is broken. If the food is free, then a down market feels exactly the same as an up market. He needs to physically hand over the $2.61 to feel the reality of the. So this can be a lesson for anyone building a business. Sometimes you do things not for the direct financial reward, but for the mental reward. Paying for that cheap meal keeps him connected to the value of a dollar. It reminds him that every cent matters. When he sits down at his desk to make decisions about billions of dollars, he's still the guy who just carefully counted out exact change for a sausage patty. You cannot buy that level of mental grounding. You have to practice it every single day. If he used a free card, he'd lose his daily anchor. The lifetime card becomes his trap. It's a luxury that would make him soft. The true entrepreneurs know that comfort is the enemy of greatness. Warren Buffett intentionally keeps a small amount of discomfort in his life, like denying himself a better breakfast with bacon, to make sure his business edge stays perfectly sharp. The science of the breakfast choice. There's also a deep scientific reason why Warren Buffett eats the exact same type of meal every single morning. It's a concept called decision fatigue. Your brain uses energy every time it makes a choice. It does not matter if the choice is massive, like buying a company, or tiny, like choosing what to wear or what to eat. Every choice burns a little bit of your mental fuel. Psychologists have proven that the human brain can only make a certain number of good decisions in a single day. And as the day goes on, your brain gets tired, your decisions get worse. You start to take the easier way out. You become impulsive. You make mistakes. Warren Buffett knows that his primary job is to make a few very good decisions every year. He needs his brain to be at maximum power. He cannot afford to waste his mental fuel on figuring out what to eat for breakfast. By going through the same drive-thru, looking at the market and picking from 3 preset options, He entirely removes breakfast from his mental workload. The decision is made automatically by the rules he set up years ago. This is exactly why you see other highly successful people wearing the exact same clothes every day. They are protecting their brain energy. They are saving the decision-making power for the things that actually matter. So when you build a business, you're going to be hit with hundreds of questions every single day. Your team will need answers. Your customers will need help. If you exhaust your brain by making 50 random choices before you even get to your desk, You are going to fail. So look at your morning routine. Are you wasting energy deciding what to wear, what to eat, what podcast to listen to? You are leaking power daily. You need to systemize the small things so you can dominate the big things. Warren Buffett uses a paper bag from a drive-thru as a shield to protect his billionaire brain. You need to build your own shields. The heavy chains of habit. This entire morning routine. Perfectly illustrates one of Warren Buffett's most famous beliefs. He frequently says, chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. Let's play that back again. Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. This is the absolute core of his success. The $3 breakfast is a tiny, light habit. On day 1, it means nothing. On day 10, it means nothing. But over 50 years, that specific habit has forged a mental chain of discipline that is completely unbreakable for him. People think that success is about making one giant risky leap. They think it's about the one big trade or the viral video or the massive product launch. They're wrong. Success is actually about doing the boring, simple, disciplined things over and over again until it becomes a permanent part of who you are. When you start a new habit, it feels incredibly If you decide to wake up 30 minutes earlier to read a business book, that first morning is pretty easy. The habit feels light. But if you do it for 5 years, it becomes an unbreakable chain that physically changes the structure of your brain and of your life. The dangerous part is that this rule also applies to bad habits. If you have a habit of checking your phone the second you wake up, that feels very light. It doesn't seem like a big deal. But year after year, that habit becomes a heavy chain of distraction That destroys your focus and kills your dreams. Before you know it, you're trapped. Warren Buffett engineered his life so that his chains of habit pull him forward towards success, frugality, and clear thinking. His morning McDonald's run is a deliberate chain. He built it on purpose. He wears it every day. So ask yourself what chains you are building right now. Every single action you take today is forging a link in a chain. Are you building chains that will lift you up or chains that will drag you down? down to the bottom. Lessons for entrepreneurs: you do not need to be a billionaire to use the McDonald's strategy. You don't even need to like fast food. The specific food doesn't matter at all. The underlying framework of the story is what you need to copy. So here are the exact lessons that you can pull from Warren Buffett's morning routine and how to apply them to your own entrepreneurial journey. Lesson number 1 is complete emotional detachment. The stock market goes up and down every single day. Most investors panic when it drops and celebrate when it They let the market control their emotions. Warren Buffett does not panic; he simply changes his breakfast order. He takes a massive global financial event and shrinks it down to a missing piece of bacon. He processes the data, accepts the reality, and moves on with his day. When you are running a business, you are going to lose clients. You are going to face bad months. Your sales are going to drop. You cannot let those daily swings destroy your mental health. health. You have to find a way to acknowledge the loss without letting it ruin you. You need to build a system where a bad day just means you skip the metaphorical bacon, but you still show up to the office and do the work. You stay consistent regardless of the weather outside. Lesson number 2 is the true definition of wealth. Most people think wealth is about showing off. They want the expensive watch, the luxury car, designer clothes, so that other people will know that they have money. That's fake wealth. Fake wealth is loud. Real wealth is incredibly quiet. Warren Buffett driving a normal car to a fast food window is the ultimate flex. He does not need anyone to know he is rich. He knows he is rich. He is completely secure in his own value. He does not need to spend money to impress strangers. He only spends money on things that actually bring him a return on his investment. So as an entrepreneur, you must fight the urge to look successful. Looking successful is incredibly expensive and it drains the capital you need to actually become successful. So stop buying things to impress people on the internet. Keep your overhead low. When your business has a great month, do not go and buy a boat. Take that money and invest it back into the company or put it into investments for yourself. Act like Warren on a good market day. Treat yourself to something tiny like a $3 breakfast and get back to work. Lesson number 3 is the power of micro You cannot control everything in your business. The market will do what it wants. Your competitors will launch unexpected products. The economy will shift. You have to accept that chaos is part of this game. Because you cannot control the macro environment, you must have total control over your micro environment. Your morning routine is your micro environment. Warren Buffett cannot control the stock market, but he can absolutely control exactly what happens in his car at eight o'clock in the morning. morning. That 5-minute drive is a completely controlled system. It gives him a feeling of order and stability before he walks into a world of financial chaos. So you can build your own controlled micro routine. Maybe it's drinking a glass of water and reading for 10 minutes before you check your email and react to the world. Maybe it's writing down your 3 biggest goals for the day while you make your coffee. My favorite is the believe walk. Get outside, spend 15 minutes for a walk outside and listen to something that makes you believe in yourself. More. It doesn't need to be a complete 3-hour routine. It just needs to be a specific predictable action that you can execute perfectly every single day. This simple routine gives us the psychological armor you need to handle the chaos of being a business owner. Building your own drive-through. So take a hard look at your current life and your current business. I want you to find your own version of the exact change cup. What is the one small daily habit that you can tie to your business performance? So maybe if you hit your daily sales calls, you allow an hour at night to watch TV. If you miss your calls, you spend that hour reading a sales book instead. You are building a direct physical connection between your daily actions and your daily rewards. You are making the invisible effort visible. Do not rely on willpower. Willpower completely vanishes when you are tired. Rely on systems. Rely on the chains of habit. Make the good choice the absolute easiest choice. Put the exact change in the cup the night before. Set up your environment so that success is the path of least resistance. You have the power to change your life today. It doesn't start with a million-dollar investment. It starts with the very first decision you make tomorrow morning. It starts with choosing discipline over comfort. It starts with choosing the cheap breakfast when you need to stay hungry. You are capable of building immense wealth and leaving a massive legacy. But you have to start small. You have to start with the 56 cents. Respect the small things and the big things will follow. Build the heavy chains of good habits and nothing in this world will be able to break you. Now let's learn how Steve Jobs trained his mind. Do you know Steve Jobs practiced Zen Buddhism to improve his creativity? In 1974, Steve Jobs traveled to India with his college friend Daniel Kaki to find spiritual answers and a deeper understanding of life.

Steve and I became friends in 1972 as freshmen in college. We went to India in 1974.

While in India, Jobs explored different spiritual teachings, including Zen Buddhism, which emphasizes clearing the mind.

A clear mind, that's what I believe in.

Focusing on what truly matters.

Your job is to pick the one thing that actually matters.

We are delivering today the iPad, the new iMac, the iPod, iPhoto, MacBook Air, iTunes.

When he returned to the United States, Jobs used what he learned in India to guide his work. He embraced simplicity and mindfulness, which became the foundation of Apple's product designs like the iPhone and MacBook.

It's turning out to be the way we're running the company, the advertising, The product design, we're just trying to get simple again.

These products became known for being simple and easy to use. Jobs once said, that's been one of my mantras, focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end, because once you get there, you can move mountains. Today, Apple's products are still known for their clean, elegant designs. Don't complicate things. Keep it simple. Many people think Steve Jobs built Apple just by being a genius with computers. That's a completely false idea. The real secret to the massive success of Apple started in a dusty, incredibly hot village in India. It was the year 1974. Steve Jobs was only 19 years old. He was broke. He was barefoot. He was covered in lice. He did not care about circuit boards or writing computer code. He only cared about finding the true meaning of life. He traveled all the way across the world to find a famous spiritual guru. When he finally got to the village, he learned the guru was already dead. He felt completely lost and devastated, but that massive disappointment forced him to look inside his own mind instead of looking for outside help. That specific failure created the exact foundation for the iPhone, the MacBook, and a company worth trillions of dollars. This is the deep story of how Steve Jobs used ancient Zen Buddhism to build the future and how you can use his exact mindset to grow your own business. The Great Escape to India. Steve Jobs was not a normal teenager. He dropped out of Reed College because it cost his parents too much money. He felt very guilty spending their life savings on classes that he didn't even care about. He did not have a dorm room of his own. He slept on the hard floor in the rooms of his friends. He was so poor that he returned empty glass Coke bottles for 5 cents just to buy food for the week. He walked across town to eat free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple every single Sunday. During this time, he read a famous book called Be Here Now by Ram Dass. This book completely changed his brain. He decided he wanted to experience deep spiritual enlightenment. He wanted to actually feel it in his bones, not just read about it in a college library. So he got a low-level job at a video game company called Atari. He worked the night shift because he rarely showered and walked around the office without any shoes on. He saved every single penny he made. He convinced his good college friend Daniel Kotke to travel to India with him. They wanted to find a specific spiritual teacher named Neem Karoli Baba. They truly believed this holy man would give them all the secret answers to life and fix their confused minds. The harsh reality of the search. India was absolutely nothing like Steve Jobs expected. It was not a quiet, peaceful, easy place. It was extremely loud, highly crowded, and incredibly hot. The very moment he stepped off the airplane in New Delhi, the intense heat hit him like a solid brick wall. There were poor beggars everywhere he looked. People were starving in the dirty streets. He and Daniel wore very cheap local clothes to blend in. They traveled across the massive country on terribly crowded, filthy trains. They walked for miles and miles in the burning hot sun. The journey was physically brutal. Steve actually got very sick along the way. He caught a terrible disease called dysentery from drinking the local water. He was stuck in a tiny bed with a dangerously high fever for days. He lost a massive amount of weight. He even asked a local barber to shave his head completely Just to deal with the intense heat and the bugs, he was physically weak and exhausted. But the absolute biggest blow of the trip was still waiting for him. After many long weeks of hard travel, they finally reached the specific ashram of Neem Karoli Baba. They walked right up to the front gates with hope in their hearts. The people standing there told them the great guru had actually died several months earlier. Steve was completely crushed. He had traveled halfway across the planet. For absolutely nothing. There was no magic man waiting to give him the answers to the universe. The massive shift to Zen. Steve Jobs had a giant realization in that quiet, dusty village. He realized that famous inventors like Thomas Edison did not find their great ideas by asking a guru on a mountain. He realized you cannot just pay a holy man to give you a clear mind. You have to build a clear, strong mind all by yourself. So he stopped looking for the magic tricks and started looking closely at his own passing thoughts. He spent the next seven months wandering all around India. He watched very closely how the local village people lived their daily lives. He noticed that these poor people did not use cold logic in the way Americans did back home. They used deep intuition. They trusted their gut feelings above everything else. Steve decided right then that human intuition was much more powerful than pure. Pure cold intellect. When he finally returned to the United States, he was a completely different person. He wore traditional Indian robes around town. He still walked around without shoes. Normal people thought he was totally crazy, but his young mind was sharper and clearer than it had ever been. He started heavily studying Zen Buddhism back in California. He went to a special center and met a real Zen monk named Kobun Chino Otogawa. They spent many long hours together in silence, Steve learned exactly how to sit perfectly still. He learned how to watch his thoughts pass like clouds without judging them. He learned how to deeply focus his brain on one single thing and completely ignore all the distracting noise around him. Bringing ancient Zen to the circuit board. Steve Jobs took this deep, quiet spiritual training and brought it straight into the loud, messy business world. Most personal computers in the late 1970s were extremely ugly. They were giant, heavy metal boxes with messy wires hanging Now everywhere, they looked highly complicated. They made normal everyday people feel stupid and afraid. The smart engineers who built them only cared about raw computer power. They didn't care at all about how the machine actually felt to the user. Steve cared deeply about the feeling. Zen Buddhism taught him the extreme value of empty space and pure simplicity. He fully believed the computer should feel just like a clean, quiet, empty room. It should calm your mind down, not stress you out. When he and his friend Steve Wozniak built the Apple II computer, Steve Jobs obsessed over the plastic outside case. He wanted it to look friendly and inviting to a normal family. He wanted the color to be a perfect calm beige. He even cared deeply about the hidden inside parts of the computer. He aggressively forced the Apple engineers to make the tiny circuit board lines perfectly straight and beautiful. The engineers pushed back. They told him no customer would ever open the box and see the inside. Steve told them that a truly great carpenter does not use rotten, ugly wood on the back of a nice cabinet, even if no one ever sees it. He demanded total purity all the way through the machine. The incredible power of saying no. The absolute core idea of Zen is stripping away all the unnecessary things. It's about actively removing everything until only the absolute truth remains. Because of his time in India. Steve Jobs became the ultimate editor in the business world. When he returned to run Apple in 1997, the company was heavily dying. They were losing millions of dollars. They had dozens and dozens of different confusing products. They sold many different versions of the Macintosh computer. They sold printers. They sold scanners. It was a massive confusing mess. There was zero focus. Steve walked right into a big meeting and drew a very simple grid on the whiteboard. It only had 4 empty squares. He told the room that Apple would only make 4 computers from now on. They would make 1 desktop for normal people, 1 desktop for smart professionals, 1 laptop for normal people, and 1 laptop for smart professionals. He completely killed hundreds of different projects in a single afternoon. People, they were shocked. Many people lost their jobs that day. But Steve knew from his Zen training that you cannot be great if you are doing too many things at once. You have to clear the clutter from your room before you can think clearly. The ultimate daily mantra. This specific clear mindset created the biggest consumer electronics revolution in human history. Think deeply about the very first Apple iPod. Other digital music players on the market back then had 20 different small buttons. They were very hard and frustrating to use. Steve Jobs looked at those old designs and he them. He ordered his Apple team to remove all the buttons. He wanted people to be able to get any specific song in just 3 easy clicks. This strict demand seemed totally impossible to the smart engineers, but it forced them to invent the famous round click wheel. The iPod had no on/off switch at all. It just smoothly woke up when you touched it. It quietly went to sleep when you left it alone. It was pure Zen philosophy placed right into your pocket. Steve Jobs perfectly explained this exact mindset in a very famous business interview. He said, that has been one of my mantras: focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple, but it is worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. Lesson 1: Go outside your bubble. So now let's break down how you can use the Steve Jobs Zen method in your business. The very first lesson is to stop looking for answers inside your own specific industry. If Steve Jobs only studied other computers, Apple would have looked exactly like old IBM computers. He would have built boring, heavy gray boxes. Instead, he studied Eastern philosophy in India. He studied the art of calligraphy. He walked through quiet apple orchards. You need to feed your own brain with totally different inputs. If you own a local landscaping business, don't just read boring landscaping magazines. Read books about luxury 5-star hotels to learn about amazing customer service. Read old books about human psychology to clearly understand human behavior. The absolute best business ideas happen when you connect 2 completely different worlds together. When you bring strange outside knowledge into your specific field, you become a category of one. Nobody can ever copy you because nobody has your unique mix of life experience. So don't just study your rivals, study art, history, nature. You will build a deep well of unique inspiration for your business. Lesson number 2, make it painfully simple. The second deep lesson here is that you must be the strict editor for your customers. Your customers are very tired. They are highly overwhelmed by modern life. They have way too many choices hitting them every single day. If your company website is even slightly confusing, They will leave immediately. If your physical product requires a long instruction manual, they will get angry and return it. If your sales pitch has 20 different confusing points, they will completely tune you out. You must do the very hard work of making things incredibly simple. This takes massive, painful effort behind the scenes. It's very easy to add more features to a product. It's incredibly difficult to take features away. So look at your current business right now. Figure out what you can remove today. Think about what confusing steps you can cut out of your checkout process. Find the extra words you can delete from your website homepage. Make your product or service so incredibly simple that a very tired person can use it without thinking at all. When you remove all the friction, your sales will explode. Remember that true simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Lesson 3, trust. Trust your inner gut. The third and final lesson here is to fully trust your intuition. We live in a modern world that is completely obsessed with cold data. People want massive spreadsheets for every single decision. They want to run endless focus groups. They want to ask 100 different people for their opinion before they ever launch a new product. Steve Jobs hated focus groups. He firmly believed it is not the job of the customer to know what they want. Data can only tell you what already happened in the past. It absolutely cannot tell you what to build for the future. You have to spend real time in pure silence. You have to learn meditation or go for long quiet walks without looking at your phone. You need to let your busy mind settle down. When the muddy water of your mind finally gets calm, you can see all the way to the clear bottom. That is exactly where your absolute best ideas live. You actually already know what the right move is for your business right now. You just have way too much noise in your head to hear the answer. So block out the loud noise, trust your inner voice. It is the most powerful business tool you will ever have. If you want to learn why Steve Wozniak gave away over $10 million of his stock, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak quietly gave away $10 million of his own stock to reward early Apple employees who had been left out of the company's riches.