How to Get Ahead of 99% of People Starting Today

You are one boring habit away from being ahead of almost everyone that you know. You can have any habits, any patterns of behavior that you wish. It's simply a question of which you decide. Gallup found that only 20% of employees worldwide were actually engaged in their work in 2025, the lowest level they've measured since 2020. Concerning trend we're seeing across the US and some parts of the global workforce where employees' overall satisfaction with their employer has dropped to record lows. It's through repetition that you program your subjective mind. And it's your subjective mind that controls your behavior. Right now, you're probably in the 80% that isn't engaged. And which side you end up on changes what you earn this year and what your kids watch you do with the rest of your life. All problems or dreams are figureoutable. The secret of this whole thing is stay engaged. Learn from people who've already been there. In June 1966, a guy with a fresh Harvard MBA took a job counting securities by hand in the bank vault. The room was called the cage. The pay was $9,000 a year. His name was Michael Bloomberg. Both of them made me an offer. One offered $14,000 a year, the other $9,000 a year. I liked the people at the $9,000 one better, just who I happened to meet that day. Counting securities by hand. That was the job. A Harvard MBA in a basement moving paper around at the bottom of the building for 15 straight years while the people around him went home. He went from the cage to general partner. Then in 1981, Salomon Brothers merged and Michael Bloomberg got let go. 15 years and they handed him $10 million severance and showed him the door at 39 years old. Oh, I got fired. I was fired after 15 years. I'll let him say that. People always are afraid to say that. I was going to. I was going to get fired. I can just tell you, it should happen to every one of you. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. And I did have my share of the value of the company, which we were selling at the time. And that was the nest egg that I used to start my company. He started his own company almost immediately. It was called Innovative Market Systems. You know it today as Bloomberg LP. And the terminal it makes sits on the desks of nearly every So here's the lesson in that. The job that made him was the one in the vault, the one he'd left off of his resume. I was at, uh, Salomon Brothers for 15, 16 years. It was a phenomenal experience. I looked forward to going in every day. I've always looked forward to going in every day, even the day there I knew I was going to get fired. Everything he'd learned, how the money actually moves, he learned in the room nobody wanted, doing the tasks nobody respected, showing up on time. While everyone else was already home. They could take away his title, they could take away his desk. They couldn't take back 15 years of showing up every day. Now you might be thinking, okay, 12 hours a day, 6 days a week for 15 years. I've got a job, I've got kids, I'm running on 5 hours sleep. I'm already exhausted. That's just not available to me. And you're right, that version isn't available to you. And I'm not gonna tell you to go, you know, wreck your health just to try to catch up. But let's look at the actual mechanism again, because the hours are the least important part of the story. What you can copy isn't the hours. It's that he pointed 15 straight years at same thing without stopping. And duration is something that you can have starting today, no matter how tired you are, because duration doesn't require a giant chunk of free time. It just requires that you don't quit in month 4. That's the whole game. You are surrounded by talented people who start and stop constantly, start and stop, start and stop. New idea in January, dead by March. Different new idea in June. If you keep going in one direction for 3 years while that happens around you, you will pass almost every one of them without having a single dramatic day. And 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 it's time to trust yourself more. And let me give you exactly what to do starting today. 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. When you're the worst in the room, win on volume. When you're the least skilled person in the building, you have exactly one weapon and it's volume. It's not about clever positioning, just volume. That was me at an agency years ago, bottom of the list skill-wise. Everybody else was out there making one video a week, so I made 3 a day, morning, lunch, dinner. Then I applied every note I got to the very next one instead of saying, I'll do another one next month. If you do the math on that, one video a week is 52 a year. 3 a day is over 1,000. So in 12 months, I had more reps than somebody with 15 years of one a week experience. I got better for one reason. I got 20 more chances to be wrong and I took every single one of them. So that's the move you make when you're green, right? Talent, taste, connections, they take years to build and you haven't had those years yet. Reps, you can start collecting right now and nobody can stop you from doing it. But this is the part that makes reps feel like work. Anders Ericsson's research on deliberate practice found that elite performers can only hold truly focused practice for about an hour at a time and top out around 4 to 5 hours a day. So if you're new, you'll get 15 to 20 minutes of full concentration before your brain is just done. So stop trying to find a 4-hour block that doesn't exist in your life. Find 20 focused minutes and make it a real rep with a real output that a real person could see and critique. 20 minutes a day, 6 days a week is 100 hours a year of deliberate work on one skill. That is not nothing. Find the one book and stop reading the other 99. So I used to read a lot of books a year, and I'll be honest with you that it got to me. 99 out of every 100 of those books did nothing for my business. They felt productive. I finished one, I feel smart, I highlight some passages, I'd tell people what I was reading and my business would be exactly the same as it was the week before. I was reading because it was easier than picking up the phone and selling. So here's what's actually moved my life. Every so often I'd hit one book that landed directly on the bottleneck that I was stuck on at the moment. And when that happened, I stopped hunting for the next book and just did what that one book said to do. So if we flip that around, don't ask, what should I read this year? Ask, what is the single thing blocking me right now? Try to write that down in one sentence, then go find the one book, the one YouTube channel, the video, Or the person that's solved exactly that. Then go through the one thing 3 times and execute it before you allow yourself to go open anything else that's new. And skip the courses that you sign up for so you can feel busy instead of actually just starting. Formal training is usually a year or 2 behind what's actually working, and it feels like you're making progress because somebody hands you a certificate at the end. But the people who get ahead, they teach themselves. They go find the answers on YouTube, in a book, in a forum from somebody who did it last month, and they run it that same night. Being leads to doing. Decide you're the kind of person who figures things out, and then the figuring out starts happening on its own. Give the new thing 20% of your week and nothing more. Now let me solve the problem that you actually have, which is that you actually already have a life. So there are 2 ways that people handle this, and both of them usually fail. The first is do nothing new, right? You keep exactly everything as it is. You tell yourself you'll start when things calm down, and guess what? Things never calm down. So 4 years go by and you're still in the same chair. The second is 0 to 100. You get fired up on on a Tuesday, quit the job, burn the savings, give yourself 90 days to make things work. And 90 days is nowhere near enough runway for anything real. So you end up back in a job with less money and just more fear than when you started. Here's a version that works: 80/20 until you're 20/80. So right now, 80% of your working time goes to whatever pays your bills today. Protect that. It's what's buying you your future runway. The other 20% goes to the new thing. So if you work 50 hours a week, great, that's 10 hours a week. If you got a job and 2 kids and 6 hours is all you got, then use all 6. 6 hours a week is enough to build something real. Put those 6 hours in the calendar as an actual block with time. Time you have in book goes to then whoever asks for it first. And then you run that split until the new thing starts producing actual money, not just attention, not just compliments, money from a stranger more than once. Then you move the ratio, right? The new thing gets 40%, then 60%, and eventually it's carrying 80% of your time because it's carrying your bills. So you never have to take a giant leap. You had a slow, boring handover and you never once had to put your family at risk. So one more thing about time, and this one is free. The last 3 weeks of December, everybody in your industry takes the foot off the gas. Inboxes go quiet. Senior people are suddenly answering their own emails. That's the cheapest access to important people you'll get all year. While everyone else is coasting, you send the thoughtful note, you record the video, you get the meeting that would have taken 6 weeks in March. Now, I don't like decisions that make me feel weak. Quitting with no plan makes me feel weak. Waiting forever makes me feel weak. 20% a week protected every week makes me feel strong. And it adds up to whether you feel it or not. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it, and I'll see you there. Eliminate, automate, delegate in that exact order. So here's where the hours you say you don't have are hiding. Take everything that you did last week and run it through 3 filters in this order. Eliminate first. So look at every recurring task and ask a genuinely uncomfortable question: do I actually Do I even need to do this at all? Not how do I do this faster, but does this even need to exist? Because a big chunk of what fills your week is there because you did it once and then never questioned it again. The report that nobody reads, the meeting that could have been 3 sentences, the 40 minutes a day you spend reorganizing things instead of shipping things, right? Kill it and see if anybody notices. Usually nobody does. Automate second and only second. So software, AI can take an enormous amount of repetitive work off your plate right now and it costs almost nothing, but never automate a process you haven't proven by hand first, because all you'll do is make a broken process run faster and have more breaks in more places. Delegate third. This is where you'll resist because you tell yourself you can't afford it to hire somebody, but you can start at 5 to 10 hours a week of help. That's it. Somebody to handle your scheduling, the editing, the inbox, invoicing. What you're really buying back is your best thinking hours so they land on the one thing that only you can do. Most of what's crushing you right now, you assign to yourself. And so now you get to unassign it. Being the best doesn't matter if you're a secret. So you can be generally the most skilled person in your field and still lose to someone worse than you who happens to be more well-known. That's not fair, but it isn't going to change. Better known beats best every time, and complaining about it doesn't move you forward at all. So the work is to become known on purpose. Educate your market at scale. Take the questions that you answer one at a time on the phone for free all week and answer them publicly instead. One video, one post, One post, one talk that reaches 500 people is 500 conversations that you didn't have to schedule. And show that you care more than the person next to you. When someone watches you explain something for real, for free, in depth, holding nothing back, they conclude 2 things without you having to say either one. This person knows what they're doing. This person isn't trying to squeeze me. That's the whole sale made before you even meet. The paper airplane on my logo means entrepreneurship because a paper airplane, which breaks the sound barrier in videos, is impossible. And doing the impossible is the entire job description, right? Nobody's going to go and hand you a jet. You get paper and you throw it every single day and it goes further than anyone expected because you kept throwing it. Score the day, not the year. Now, the 2 habits that hold all this together. The first one takes 15 minutes a day. Wake up and get outside within 15 minutes. Go for a 15-minute walk. Don't look at your phone. Listen to something that fills you with belief instead of something that just fills you with other people's panic. And that's it. That's the whole thing. And it's the single most important daily habit that I have because whatever goes into your head first is what you think about for the rest of the day. Then you can build a scorecard. So write down the 5 things that would make today a win. Publish something, talk to a buyer, 20 focused minutes on a skill, the walk, 10 pages of the book. Give yourself a point for each. At the end of the day, you get a score out of 5 and that score is the only performance review that matters. So keep it on paper, not in an app. An app turns into a project you maintain instead of a habit that you actually go off and keep. And why does this work? Yeah, love, research at University College London found it takes an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic. And depending on the behavior, it can take anywhere from 18 days to 254 days. So when day 12 feels like it's not sticking, that's not a sign that you're failing. That's just day 12. So many people quit at week 3 while the process was working exactly as designed. Benjamin Franklin did a version of this every single day of his adult life with 2 key questions. So in the morning he asked, what shall I do this day? And at night he said, what good have I done today? That's 300 years old and it's still better than every productivity app on your phone. So don't wait to feel ready before you start scoring. Ready isn't real and it never arrives when you want it to. Do more than you were asked on purpose. And last one, it's the cheapest competitive advantage on this entire list. Do more than what you were asked for, not vaguely, but specifically. So before meeting with someone who matters, spend 30 minutes actually studying them. Watch their talk, read what they wrote when they launched their company. Find something that they actually built that isn't in their bio And bring that up instead of their most famous project. Nobody does this. Nobody. And when you show up having genuinely done a little bit of homework, the person across from you feels something they almost never feel in business, which is that somebody paid attention to them. Then in the conversation, talk 30% of the time and let them talk 70%. Ask better questions than they were braced for. Repeat their exact words back to them when you respond, because that's how a person knows for certain that you were listening instead of just waiting for your turn to interrupt them and talk. That's it. That's the whole technique. And it works on clients, on partners, on bosses, on anybody. Almost nobody listens. If you do, they'll remember you. You're closer than you think. You don't need a dramatic year. You need 20 focused minutes, 1 book, 5 points on a scorecard, and the willingness to be doing it in month 4 when it stops being exciting. That's a good start. Now go make it 10 times bigger than you were planning to. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn the billionaire success formula that anyone can follow. Most people think becoming a billionaire is just luck, but the truth is they just think differently than most people. First principles analysis, I think, is something that can be applied to really any walk of life, anything really. It's just, it's really just saying, you know, let's boil something down to the most fundamental principles. The things that we are most confident are true at a foundational level. When I'm 80, now 90, I want to have minimized the number of regrets that I have in my life. Being an entrepreneur is about taking risks, but it's about taking very calculated risks and being, you know, protecting the downsides. Forbes reports 70% of the world's billionaires built it all themselves, starting from absolutely The list is mostly a list of self-made billionaires. Um, like 70% of the Forbes 400 made their fortune. Here I come. I had a 1977 Fiat X1/9 that literally had a hole in the floorboard. I got a job working at night as a bartender at a place called Alon's, and then I got a job selling software at a company called Your Business Software. Mark Zuckerberg was a Harvard freshman with a gift for computer programming. He transformed a dorm room project into the internet's biggest global village. The site now has over 900 million users. If you don't change how you look at problems right now, you're going to spend the rest of your life building someone else's dream instead of your own. But everyone has a perspective, and that's in fact all vision means, that you see the world in a way that is either different or otherwise, okay, than, than somebody else. And you see opportunities that I think are— that you believe are particularly important to go in and address. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. When Jeff Bezos was working a safe, high-paying Wall Street job, he had an idea to sell books on the internet. His boss told him it was a good idea for someone who didn't already have a great job. He had to change how he looked at the problem, so he used what he calls the regret minimization framework. He pictured himself at 80 years old and Asked if he'd regret trying and failing, the answer was no. But he knew he'd regret not trying at all. I went to my boss and said to him, "You know, I'm gonna go do this crazy thing, and I'm gonna start this this company selling books online." He said, "You know, this actually sounds like a really good idea to me, but it sounds like it would be a better idea for somebody who didn't." already have a good job. And the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy, what I called, which only a nerd would call, a regret minimization framework. So I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, okay, now I'm looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have. That shift in thinking built a $3 trillion empire. Look at Elon Musk when he started SpaceX. SpaceX. He wanted to buy rockets to send to Mars, but they cost up to $65 million each. That price would have stopped anyone else, but he refused to think like an average person. He used first principles thinking. He broke a rocket down to its basic parts and asked what the raw materials actually cost. It turns out the materials were super cheap, so he decided to build the rockets himself. That shift in thinking changed the world. Sara Blakely sold fax machines door-to-door for 7 years. She had $5,000 in savings and an idea for footless pantyhose. Every factory told her no, but growing up, her dad used to ask her at the dinner table what she failed at this week. If she didn't have a failure, he'd be disappointed. She learned to look at failure as just a step in the process, not the end of the road. And because she thought differently about rejection, she kept pushing until she built Spanx and became a self-made billionaire. Now, right now you're probably thinking, I don't have billions of dollars or a genius brain of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos to do any of this. You think they had some massive advantage that you don't have, but every single one of them started with zero, just like you. The only difference is they trained their brains to see opportunities where average people see dead ends. You can learn this exact same skill right now. I'm going to show you exactly how to rewire your brain to think like a billionaire. Break down your biggest problems. When you face a massive challenge, you probably look around to see how other people solve it. You copy their methods. You hope for the best. That's called reasoning by analogy, and it keeps people completely stuck in average results. Billionaires don't think this way at all. They use a powerful mental model called first principles. The ancient philosopher Aristotle defined a first principle as the basic foundation from which a thing is known. It means you strip away all the assumptions, all the old traditions, and all the outside noise until you find the absolute facts. When you look at the raw facts of a problem, you see solutions that everyone else misses. So let's say you want to start a business, but you think it costs $50,000 to launch. Average thinking says, well, you've got to go get a bank loan or save up for 10 years. First principles thinking asks, what do I actually need to get my first customer? You just need a phone and internet connection. Those cost almost nothing. When you stop accepting the rules that other people hand to you, you can unlock your ability to start creating wealth. So we need to start breaking down the obstacles into the smallest possible truth. You'll realize that most of your limits, they're just completely made up. Billionaires don't accept the world exactly as is. They break it down and rebuild it to serve their own vision. Once you start doing this, you'll never look at a roadblock the same way again. But breaking down problems is only the first step, because once you see the opportunity You've got to know how to place the right bets. Take bets where you can't lose. Most people are terrified of taking risks because they think risk means losing everything. And you probably think that billionaires are just wild gamblers who got super lucky, and that is not true. Wealthy people actually hate risk. They actively avoid risk. Instead, they look for asymmetric risk. Asymmetric risk means the potential upside of a decision is massive, But the potential downside is incredibly small. When Richard Branson started Virgin Atlantic Airlines, he didn't risk his entire music empire to buy planes. He made a smart deal with Boeing that let him return the plane after 1 year if the business completely failed. His downside was just a few months of leasing costs, but his upside was a multi-billion dollar airline. So you need to start looking at your own life through this exact same lens. Stop risking everything on ideas that have a tiny payoff. Stop staying in a safe job where your downside is wasting 40 years of your life. When your upside is a 2% raise and start looking for bets where you can lose a little bit of time or a little bit of money, but you could potentially change your entire financial future. If you make 10 asymmetric bets and 9 of them fail, that one win will completely wipe out all of your losses and make you incredibly wealthy. You've got to train yourself to spot these opportunities. If you don't take these smart bets, you'll spend your entire life working for someone who actually does. Taking the smart bet requires serious courage, which leads directly to how you handle your biggest fears. Look at your life from the end. Your brain is wired to keep you comfortable right now. When you face a tough choice, your mind instantly thinks about the immediate stress, the fear of looking stupid, the potential for short-term pain. This is exactly why you put off your dreams. To think like a billionaire, though, you've got to force your brain out of the present moment. You must use the regret minimization framework from Jeff Bezos. So you project yourself forward to age 80. You picture yourself sitting in a rocking chair, looking back on your entire life, and you ask yourself, will I regret not taking this chance? The daily fears you have right now usually completely vanish when you look at them from the end of your life back to today. When you're 80, you won't care if you lost a little money at age You won't care if your friends thought your idea was crazy. You'll only care about the chances you didn't take. You'll be haunted by the dreams that you let die inside you. When you view your decisions from the perspective of your 80-year-old self, the right choice becomes incredibly obvious. You stop playing small. You stop worrying about rejection. You realize that the pain of regret is infinitely worse than the pain of failure. Build systems instead of chasing goals. So you've been taught your entire life to set big goals, but if goals were the secret to extreme wealth, everyone who set a goal would be a millionaire. The truth is winners and losers often have the exact same goals. Every athlete wants to win the championship. Every entrepreneur wants to build a big company that has a huge impact. The goal isn't what makes you successful. Billionaires focus entirely on systems. A goal is a singular outcome you want to achieve in the future. A system is the daily process that you follow right now. If you focus only on the goal, you'll feel miserable until you finally achieve it. And once you hit it, you lose all your motivation. When you focus on building a world-class system, you win every single day that you show up and run that system. If your goal is to make $1 million, your system is making 50 sales calls every morning before 10:00 AM. You can't control if a client buys from you, but you can control your system of making the calls. Wealthy people fall in love with the daily actions. They optimize their habits. They obsess over the small, boring details of their daily routine because they know that extraordinary outcomes are just the result of ordinary habits repeated over decades. So stop obsessing over what the finish line goal is going to look like and put all your energy into your daily work. If your systems are excellent, The money will naturally follow. And to build a great system, you've got to stop blindly following the herd. Stop copying what everyone else does. One of the biggest mistakes you make is looking at highly successful people and trying to copy exactly what they did. Now, I love modeling success, but this is also a massive mental flaw called survivorship bias. During World War II, the military wanted to add armor to their bomber planes. They looked at the planes coming back from battle and saw that they were covered in bullet holes on the wings and the tail. The military wanted to put armor on those damaged spots, but a brilliant mathematician named Abraham Wald realized they were looking at the wrong thing. The planes that took hits to the engine never made it back at all. The military needed to armor the engines, not the wings. In business, you only see the people who survived. You see the college dropout who built a massive tech company. You don't see the 10,000 other college dropouts who went completely bankrupt doing the exact same thing. You can't just copy the visible actions of a billionaire. You've got to understand the unseen principles behind their actions. So don't just look at their current morning routine. Look at how they made the decisions where they were broke. Understand their risk tolerance. Understand how they manage their failure. When you overcome the survivorship bias, you stop falling for all of these empty success formulas. You start thinking critically about what actually drives success for your business. And that critical thinking is exactly the skill you need to master the hardest skill in business: cut your losses faster than anyone else. When you put time, money, energy in a project, you desperately want it to succeed, right? When it starts failing, your brain tricks you into holding on. You think, if I just work harder, I can turn this thing around. This is sunk cost fallacy, and billionaires violently reject it. Billionaire quant trader Igor Turchinsky says that cutting losses is the hardest and most crucial skill in business. Wealthy people know that the resources you spent yesterday are gone forever. You cannot get them back. The only thing that matters is the future potential of the project. If a strategy isn't working, billionaires cut it immediately. They don't care how much money they spent already. They don't care if it hurts their pride. They ruthlessly kill bad ideas so they can free up their capital and their energy for the massive opportunities ahead. So you've got to train yourself to detach your emotions from your business decisions. Look at your current projects, look at your current investments, look at your current team, look at your current habits, and ask yourself, if I wasn't already invested in this, would I start this today? And if the answer is no, then you cut immediately. And this level of extreme discipline is incredibly painful. Painful in the moment, but holding on to a losing hand guarantees that you stay broke for the rest of your life. And once you clear the losing ideas, you have to have the right motivation to push your winning ideas forward. Make your work about more than you. If your only motivation is to have a nice car or buy a nice house or escape your job you hate, you're never going to make it. Building a massive business requires an insane amount of effort and stress and rejection. And when things get incredibly dark and you want to quit, a selfish desire for money will not keep the energy there to allow you to keep going. You must be driven by a mission to serve other people. You're built to serve. I think that, I think your biggest purpose in life comes from your deepest pain. The things that you struggle with the most are the exact things that you are uniquely qualified to help other people overcome. Billionaires build massive wealth because they solve massive problems for a lot of people. They don't wake up thinking about how to just extract dollars from the economy. They wake up obsessing over how to deliver insane amounts of value. When you can shift your focus from what you can get to what you can give, then your entire business transforms. People can feel your intention. Customers don't buy from people who are just trying to make a quick buck. They buy from people who genuinely want to improve their lives. So when you dedicate your life to serving others, it unlocks more motivation. You push through the obstacles that would break an average person Because you know that other people are depending on you to win. Step into your greatness. You've got everything you need right now inside of you, so stop waiting for someone else to give you permission to be amazing. Your dreams aren't crazy, they're just waiting for you to show up and do the work. Now here's why you don't need a job to make money. Security in a corporate job doesn't exist anymore. The safe job is about to be So far this year, companies have cut more than 800,000 jobs. That's the highest number we have seen since the pandemic. A major West Michigan company plans to cut hundreds of jobs tonight. Grand Rapids-based AccraSure is telling us that artificial intelligence is replacing actual employees. Over 80% of students feel they learn nothing about entrepreneurship in school, even though most want to start their own business. The only non-gamble in life is going on offense. And you've been taught that going on offense is the gamble because the school system was literally created to create factory workers. Our school systems teach us nothing about money. Nothing. It's pathetic. So at 25, I recommitted to my education, but this time I started studying not things that were in books, but people that had actually created wealth. Going into a traditional career path limits your impact, keeps you miserable, and stops you from sharing your unique genius with the world. My sense is that even for the, the kids that get into the, um, the elite colleges at this point, it's like you've passed some Mandarin examination in China, but you're just so exhausted you're never going to do anything more with the rest of your life. You're burned out at 18. You take a calculated risk to start a company realizing you may forego a couple of of steady income in another job and whatever else. That's a great risk to take. And if you don't take that risk, I think you have a very high chance that you end up regretting that. Where are you going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life. When I was 19, I had the hardest choice to make. I was in university and I had a job offer for a safe 6-figure investment banking job. It was a job everybody wanted, but I also had a chance to own 30% of a biotech software making only $300 a month. And I picked a startup. I chose to struggle, eat beans for lunch, because the thought of sitting in a cubicle doing work I hated scared me more than being broke. I knew I had to take control of my own income. Think about Colonel Sanders. At 65 years old, he had a tiny $105 Social Security check. He didn't go looking for a greeter job at a local store. He took his chicken recipe, hit the road, and slept in his car He faced 1,009 rejections before finally someone said yes to his franchise idea. He proved that you can create massive wealth at any age just by owning your own ideas instead of working for someone else. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia couldn't pay their rent in San Francisco. They didn't rush out to get safe, normal jobs. Instead, they put 3 air mattresses on their floor and charged people to sleep there during a local design conference. That simple idea turned into Airbnb. They created a $100 million company because they look for a creative way to solve a problem instead of looking for a safe corporate salary. And right now you might be thinking that you need thousands of dollars in the bank to start making your own money. You think you need rich parents or some giant loan to succeed, and that's not true. Colonel Sanders was broke at 65. Airbnb started with 3 cheap air mattresses. You don't need money To make money, you just need a problem to solve and the courage to take the first step. I'm going to show you exactly how to start generating your own income from scratch right now. Solve your own biggest problem. To make money without a job, you've got to realize where value actually comes from. You get paid for bringing value to other people. The absolute easiest way to bring value is to look directly at your own life. Your purpose comes from your pain. Whatever you struggle with the most is exactly what you want to help other people overcome. So think about your If you had a hard time getting fit and you figured out a system that works, that system is your new business. If you struggled with anxiety and found a way to manage it, that method—that's your business. You don't need a fancy business degree to make this happen. You just need to be one step ahead of the person that you're trying to help. Over 62% of billionaires are totally self-made, meaning they've created their wealth by solving real problems, not by inheriting cash. People pay you to solve their problems because they desperately want to. Skip the pain that you have already went through. You're selling speed and convenience. If you can help someone skip 5 years of painful trial and error, they pay you for that shortcut. So don't think you need to invent the next big tech platform to be successful. Look at the local business in your town. They need help with their marketing, their accounting, their daily operations. They've got massive problems right now. You can step in and help fix those problems. When you focus entirely on serving others and solving their actual pain points, you stop acting like an employee begging for a simple paycheck, and you start acting like a true entrepreneur commanding a premium price. You stop handing out weak resumes and start handing out powerful solutions for problems. This simple shift in your mindset changes everything. You go from hoping that a boss picks you to knowing that the market desperately needs you. So you've got to stop looking for a company to hire you and start looking for a person to help. The money will always follow the value you provide. So if you fix a $100 problem, If you fix a $1,000 problem, you make a little bit of money. If you fix a $1,000 problem, you make a lot more money. It's simple. Your job right now is to identify the most expensive problem you know how to solve and then go find the exact people who are crying out for that exact solution. But finding a problem is only the first step because your surroundings might be secretly destroying your chances of success. Change your environment to change your mind. Your current environment is perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are right now. So if your friends all have traditional jobs, they'll constantly tell you to get a safe job. They aren't trying to hurt you. They just don't understand your big vision. Research shows that you're up to 61% more likely to adopt the exact habits and mindsets of the people closest to you. So if you want to make your own money, you must change your daily environment. You've got to completely shut out the negativity, limit your access to people who doubt you, and fill that empty space with extreme positivity and the specific messages you actually want to hear. So if you can't find supportive friends in your own town yet, go find them online. Read powerful books, listen to great podcasts, watch amazing YouTube videos from the exact people who are already doing what you want to do. I started my YouTube channel because I wanted to surround myself with some of the greatest minds in history. I wanted Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett in my ear every single morning. I wanted their their intense ambition to rub off on me. You've got to be incredibly intentional with your daily morning routine. Don't wake up and immediately scroll through toxic social media or the depressing news. Start your day with content that makes you believe in yourself. When you consume greatness daily, it starts to feel completely normal. Soon the idea of settling for a boring cubicle will feel totally insane to you. You'll begin to think bigger, act faster, expect so much more of You can literally rewire your entire brain for massive success just by changing what you look at and who you listen to every single day. So treat it like a garden, right? Your mind is a garden. If you plant negative seeds, you'll grow a massive negative life. If you plant seeds of belief, you'll grow a massive, awesome empire. You've got to ruthlessly protect your focus. So stop giving your attention to things that make you feel small and start obsessing over the ideas that make you feel powerful. The moment you change your input, inputs, the outputs will transform forever. But once you fix your surroundings, you need a system to actually get you moving, which brings us to the simple 2% trick. Use the 2% rule to build massive momentum. The biggest thing you're missing right now is just momentum. You're sitting on a truly great idea, but you haven't taken any real action. You're constantly overthinking it. You want everything to be 100% perfect before you finally launch. You want the perfect logo, the perfect website, The perfect business plan. Stop doing that. Perfectionism is just you being afraid. Studies reveal that perfectionism actually decreases your productivity and increases severe mental burnout. You don't need a perfect plan; you just need to execute the first two percent. If your goal is to write a book, a selling book, the first two percent's writing just one single page. If your goal is to start a massive YouTube channel, awesome. The first two percent is pulling out your. Phone and recording your first really messy video. Don't worry about step 100, just focus completely on step number 1. Take the absolute smallest, easiest action right now. Once you take that first step, your brain, it gets a— it's a quick win, and that quick win builds confidence, and that confidence creates momentum. So when I wrote my book about momentum, I didn't plan it out for long months. I just started typing furiously. The physical Action itself creates the energy you need to keep going. So waiting around for the perfect moment, what does it do? It guarantees that you'll wait forever. Action cures fear every single time. When you're moving forward, you simply don't have the time to sit there and doubt yourself. So don't let your greatest ideas die just silently here in your head. Put them out into the real world. Start messy. Start small. But you've absolutely got to start. When? Today. It doesn't matter if your first attempt looks crazy, ridiculous. The only thing that matters is that you aren't just standing still anymore. You're finally in the game. Every massive company started as some tiny, flawed little experiment. You are no different. So push through the hesitation, click publish, make the call, and watch how quickly your life begins to change. Now that you're moving though, you've got to prepare yourself for the hardest phase of all. And this is where almost everyone quits. Expect to be terrible at first. So now you've got to accept a really harsh reality. Your first attempt at anything new is going to be absolutely terrible. Your first product will have tons of flaws. Your first video will be incredibly embarrassing. Your first major sales call will feel completely awkward. And that is completely normal. Everyone starts out at the bottom. You just don't see the messy hidden starts. Data shows that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice To truly master any complex skill. You just can't skip the struggle. When I first started on YouTube, I was completely terrified. I was shy, quiet, introverted. I did not like being on camera. It took me 350 videos before I wasn't completely embarrassed to watch myself back, and 700 public videos before I actually felt inspired by one piece of content that I made. And I made absolutely hundreds of terrible videos. You can go back and watch them, but I kept going Anyway, most people just quit because they tried five times and they expected to be world class immediately. They let the ego stop you from making actual progress. So the fact that you're willing to try and be terrible becomes an actual secret advantage. So embrace the highly awkward phase. Look at your early failures as data, and that's going to be part of your story as you climb. Every single time you fail, you learn exactly what not to do the next time. Will be an inspiration to others if you can handle looking foolish for a little while. You'll eventually become completely unstoppable. The only real failure in life's quitting before you get good. So you've got to give yourself permission to be a total beginner. Stop comparing your chapter 1 to somebody else's chapter 20, right? Your journey is your journey, and that is okay. So put in the boring reps, do the unglamorous work. The mastery that you want is waiting on the other side of 1,000 terrible attempts. And once you survive that awkward phase, you can speed up your results by borrowing the exact blueprints of people who've already won. Model the massive success of others. You don't need to figure out all of this on your own. That's one of the biggest mistakes that I made early on. You don't have to reinvent the wheel to make a massive fortune. The smartest entrepreneurs study the exact people who've already won and simply model their success. So if you want to build a $100,000 consulting business, find someone who already did exactly that. Study their public websites, Look at their specific pricing. See exactly how they talk to their premium clients. Then thoughtfully apply those same proven principles to your own unique style. According to the Small Business Administration, businesses that receive direct mentoring and strictly model-proven strategies are two times more likely to survive their first five difficult years. When my first business was struggling, I felt completely lost. I had no real idea how to turn things. Around. Then I decided to intensely study a highly successful software company, Microsoft, because I had a software company. I looked at how they operated, looked at how they got their first clients, not how they make an extra million now. I didn't steal or copy them, but I learned directly from Bill Gates's powerful framework. That single focused decision saved my entire company. Success always leaves clues. There is a roadmap out there for you to do whatever you want and achieve whatever you want. You just have to be humble and curious enough to actively go and follow it. So read the biographies of great leaders, watch the long-form interviews of the performers that you look up to and respect, find the hidden patterns in their daily behaviors, and then creatively adapt them to your situation. Why would you spend 10 years making deeply painful mistakes when you can learn from someone else's expensive experience in just 10 days or 10 hours? So be an aggressive student of greatness and your path to financial independence will be so much faster. You don't lack the ability, you just lack the right model. So find your ideal model, study them relentlessly, build your own blueprint for your special flavor. And then when you've got the right model, you need the right people. And there's a specific way to get the most powerful CEOs to take your call. Build real relationships instead of fake followers. So most people think that making money online means you definitely need millions of random followers, right? You think that you need to go incredibly viral to succeed, and that's a massive and actually dangerous distraction. You don't need a million casual subscribers to make a million dollars. You just need deep, highly meaningful relationships. Don't worry about the vanity metrics. They will constantly waste your time. Instead, focus on direct business development through high-value connections. One of my favorite strategies, what we teach inside our Movement Makers program, is a business development show. It's a dedicated interview show. Don't constantly cold call potential clients. Warmly invite them onto your show to share their story. People love talking about themselves. When you feature them prominently, they feel valued and you built a relationship. Statistics clearly show that 84% of B2B sales start exactly with a warm referral or strong existing relationship. When you interview someone, you spend real focused time with them. You build authentic trust with them. That genuine Trust turns into lucrative partnerships, massive referrals, highly paying clients. It literally doesn't matter if your new channel only has 200 total subscribers. We're going after people who have high demand but low media demand. You're coming in as media right now, and you can get top industry leaders who built multimillion dollar networks. So don't worry about the random clicks and start aggressively chasing real conversations. Add massive value to the exact people that you desperately want to work. With. Feature their deep expertise. Ask them incredibly great questions. Do your research before you have them on. Give them a beautiful platform to share their story. When you actively become a super connector and a supporter, the big money naturally follows you everywhere you go. Your network is truly your actual net worth, so start building it deliberately and strategically today. Stop worrying about the algorithm and start obsessing over the actual human beings you want to serve. And building that network takes extreme focus, which means you've got to completely change how you manage your 24 hours. Make every single day truly count. Your limited time is your absolute most precious asset. If you want to permanently escape the endless job cycle and build your own incredible life, you've got to maximize your specific daily actions. So you wake up every morning with a clear intention. Make today truly count. Before you hit your head, your tired head on the pillow tonight, tonight, do one specific thing that moves you significantly closer to your dream. Make one beautiful piece of art. Send one highly important email. Record one incredibly helpful video. Create something today that you desperately want your future grandkids to see. Research strongly indicates that completing just one highly meaningful task a day significantly boosts your overall life satisfaction and guarantees long-term success. To make real time for that meaningful work, you've got to ruthlessly manage your busy schedule. You must eliminate, automate, or delegate absolutely everything else. If a specific task doesn't directly serve your core mission, stop doing it. If a basic computer program or AI can do it, awesome, automate it immediately. If someone else can do something significantly cheaper, hire them right away. Don't waste your unique genius on boring busywork. Focus only on the high-level tasks that actually move the big needle forward. When you finally take control of your daily time, you instantly take total control of your personal income. You stop hopelessly trading hours for a flat, boring salary and start aggressively trading massive value for huge financial returns. You already have absolutely everything it takes to build a beautiful life of total freedom. You just have to firmly decide that you're ready to step up and claim it. And this brings us to the absolute most important truth of all, and it's something that I hope that you Remember every single morning when you wake up, your belief is your ultimate superpower. You are entirely capable of building a massive life on your own terms. So trust your vision, take the messy action, and never let fear make your decisions for you. To learn the 7 behaviors to get rich faster, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. Your financial situation has absolutely nothing to do Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. The big secret behind disruption is