If You Only Watch One Money Video, Make It This

Most financial advice is designed to keep you trapped in the middle class forever. Where are you going to spend your time? Your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life. I went to school and what they pounded in me was the poor person. You got to get a job. You got to get a job. You got to work for money. You got to save money and you got to invest in the stock market and all this stuff. That's why people are poor. 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. The wealthy don't follow standard budgeting rules. They focus entirely on buying assets that print cash even while they sleep. The poorest people on Earth always are going after this stuff versus cash flow. When you learn as an investor over multiple decades is the only thing that matters is free cash flow. That's it. If I earn $10,000 or $3,000 or whatever extra money, whatever the number is, $1 billion. I would take the entire amount of money. I'd go buy an asset that pays me cash flow, and I would always live off the cash flow, not the cash. If you don't unlearn those old money rules today, you'll guarantee a future full of constant financial stress and zero control over your own time. You have to prioritize your time really carefully. I have been a Warren Buffett fan in the business realm. I've been a Warren Buffett fan since my early 20s. I read the things he writes. Momentum requires you always do the next thing to keep the momentum going. And the reason you get yourself in a passionate place is so that you change your life. And the only thing that changes your life is making a decision. Think about the famous parable of the pipeline. So two men are hired to carry water from a river to the village. The first man works harder, carries more buckets, and makes a decent daily wage. But the second man spends his nights building a pipeline. It takes time and he makes less money at first, But once the pipeline is finished, water flows automatically. He gets paid while he sleeps and the bucket carrier loses his job. You have to stop carrying buckets and start building your pipeline. Now you might be thinking right now, I don't have the time to build a pipeline because you're too busy carrying buckets just to pay the rent. But the truth is that the longer you use that excuse, the heavier those buckets will get until they finally break your back. You don't need thousands of dollars to start building your asset. You just need a plan and a little bit of belief. Here's the exact step-by-step system to stop trading your time for money and finally build your pipeline. 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. Shift your focus from consuming to creating. So when you sit on the couch and watch television, You are putting money directly into someone else's pipeline. The entire financial system is built to make you a consumer. Corporations hire the smartest marketers in the world to keep your eyes glued to their screens so you will spend your money. Banks hire brilliant people to create programs that entice you to borrow their money. You are acting as a consumer, and the consumer is always the person who pays the bill. If you wanna change your financial destiny, you must become a creator. You have to create an asset that other people want to consume. So you need to decide what kind of asset to build. And I believe it starts with your own life. I think your purpose comes from your pain. So if you think about the hardest moments in your life, think about the struggles that you fought through, the moments that you wanted to give up on everything and the problems you eventually solved, you survived them. That's awesome. Now you have the exact blueprint to help someone else who is currently going through that exact same pain. If you struggled with debt and you found the way out, your purpose is to teach others how to escape debt. The blueprint is your first asset. You do not need to be a certified guru. You just need to be one step ahead of the person that you are trying to help. When you package your knowledge into a service or a product, you stop consuming and you start creating. You move from the side of the equation that spends money to the side of the equation that makes money. And the data proves that this shift dictates your wealth. Tom Corley spent 5 years studying the daily habits of the wealthy and the poor. He found that 67% of self-made millionaires watch less than 1 hour of TV per day. By contrast, 77% of poor individuals watch more than 1 hour of TV every single day. The wealthy use their free time to build their pipelines. They create assets and package their knowledge. The poor use their free time to escape from their bucket-carrying jobs. You have to stop escaping your life and start building a life you do not want to escape from. The average person spends over 6 hours every day staring at a digital screen. That is over 40 hours a week of mindless consumption. That is an entire full-time job dedicated to watching other people win. You have to protect your free time. You must shift your core identity from someone who just buys things to someone who builds things. And when you make that shift, you stop waiting for that weekly paycheck and you start building your automatic cash machine. Stop trading your time for dollars. So you've been taught your entire life from school to work to work hard for a steady paycheck. You trade 40 hours of your life and receive a fixed amount of cash in return, right? The massive problem with this traditional model is that your time is limited. You only have 24 hours in a single day. If you always just strictly trade your time for money, you immediately hit a financial ceiling that you cannot ever break through, no matter how hard you work. The wealthy do not trade their time for money. They trade value for money. They focus their energy on building systems, digital products, or investments that operate independently of their physical time. So you need to detach your income from the hours on the clock. You can look at the story of friend of the channel, Ali Abdaal. He was a doctor in the UK. Doctors make good money, but they're still carrying buckets. They only get paid when they physically show up to the hospital to treat a patient. Ali realized that as a doctor, he could only help hundreds of patients, but he wanted to reach millions and detach his time from his income. So he started creating YouTube videos about productivity and studying. He built digital courses and systems, and today he's a multimillionaire entrepreneur. He's helped millions of people optimize their lives, and his videos print money for him while he sleeps. He moved from carrying buckets as a doctor to building a pipeline as a creator. This is how the financial system actually works for the rich. A comprehensive study by the IRS showed that over 70% of millionaires have at least 3 streams of income, and most of those streams are passive or portfolio income, not earned wages from a regular job. So you must start building your streams of income that do not rely on you physically punching in a clock, right? If you only have one stream of income and requires your physical presence, you are constantly just one bad day away from being flat broke. If you get sick or you lose your job, the money completely stops. You have to insulate your life against financial disaster by building digital assets that duplicate your human effort. So if you film a great video teaching your best strategy, that single video can be watched by a million people. You did the work one time, but you get paid for it repeatedly for years. Model the success of people who are already winning. So you do not need to figure out how to build a wealth pipeline all by yourself. The biggest mistake you can make right now is trying to invent a new way to make money entirely from scratch. You do not need to be a completely original genius to become rich. The proven path to immense wealth has already been safely carved out by thousands of people, millions of people before you. Success leaves clues. You just need to find the wealthy people who have the exact results you want and study every single thing that they did. But you must copy their rise, not just the result that they're at today. People look at what successful people are doing right now and try to copy that exact same thing. That is dangerous financial advice. You have to look at what their actions and daily habits were like before they made it. So when I was 19, uh, had a biotech software company, I did not have any clue what I was doing. I was making $300 a month. I was eating canned beans for lunch every day just to survive. I desperately wanted to quit and I did quit for one day on my partner. I had zero momentum. Like it was just nothing was working. Working. Then I decided to stop guessing and start modeling proven success. I looked at Bill Gates because he had a software company, Microsoft. I said exactly how he built Microsoft in his early struggling days. He did not build his empire by doing everything himself. He built it by forming strategic partnerships with hardware companies like IBM. So I took the exact same proven strategy and applied it directly to my little tiny software company, and we made a partnership with an established company that already had paying customers that I needed to survive. And my first deal was $13,500. That single shift, it saved my business. It eventually allowed me to safely sell that business for life-changing profit. And 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, go grab it. I'll see you there. You do not have to be born genius to get rich. You just have to be a highly dedicated student of success. According to detailed data from SCORE, entrepreneurs who actively work with a trusted mentor are exactly 5 times more likely to successfully start a profitable business. In addition, exactly 70% of those mentored businesses successfully survived past 5 difficult years. You don't need a physical human mentor sitting next to you in your living room, although that's awesome. You can find amazing mentors in business books, in audios, in YouTube videos like this. That's why I do these videos every day. Find someone who's built the exact cash pipeline you want. Study how they struggled at the start. Study how they overcame their biggest fears. When you carefully model the proven success of the greats, you safely shortcut your own steep learning curve. Build momentum because perfection is a financial trap. The number one excuse you will use to avoid building your asset is that your idea is not completely ready yet, right? You tell yourself that you need to do far more research. You will complain that your website is not flawless, or your digital product, it needs one more special feature before you launch it. This is the danger that tells your brain to keep you safe and keep you in your comfortable bubble. Perfectionism is just fear, your fear of being seen. And if you wait for your new asset to be perfect, you will painfully carry those buckets for the rest of your life. You are secretly afraid of what your old high school friends will think. You are afraid of what your parents will say. It's time to let go of that paralyzing fear right now. You have to expect to suck at the very beginning. Expecting to suck, especially at the start, does not mean that you actually suck as a human being. It just means that you do not have yet the necessary skills develop. Yet is the key word. When I started making my early YouTube videos, they were terrible. I was awkward, I was shy. My first one, I have a suit on. It was deeply uncomfortable for me staring at the camera lens. It took me 350 videos, public videos, before I could watch myself back and not be completely embarrassed, right? 700 videos until I finally watched a video that I genuinely felt a little bit of inspiration by what I was making. When I posted that first video I left it up for a year, and in that year I got 3 comments, right? From my mom, my older sister, and then some random person saw my video, right? In, in a full year, one new comment. But that random comment, I was thrilled when I saw it. I realized I actually reached a human, like one person. If I had stubbornly waited until I was perfectly polished from my post, my first video, I would be absolutely nothing today. I would not have the subscribers. I wouldn't be talking with you guys right now. I wouldn't have a business that helps me build and grow and make a real impact. The science clearly shows that waiting for perfection actively harms your personal financial progress. The American Psychological Association published research showing that perfectionism is strongly directly linked to severe daily procrastination, crippling anxiety, and total mental burnout, which means the longer you obsess over making your pipeline flawless, the longer you stay paralyzed in fear. You just need to bravely lay your first pipe today. It might leak, it might be crooked, but you can fix it tomorrow. The only way to win the money game is to start rapidly building momentum before you actually feel ready. You will easily learn far more from your first 10 messy public failures than you will ever learning and reading 100 books on business strategy to be safe. Make service your ultimate financial strategy. There's a massive lie in the modern corporate world that says you have to be greedy and selfish to get rich. The real truth, I think, is the exact opposite. If you blindly chase money, you will eventually run out of energy completely. You're going to burn out. If the only reason you're doing this for money, you will burn out. The free market will instantly see right through your selfish money intentions. Money is simply a natural byproduct of massive value that you deliver to the world. You are fundamentally built to serve. It's what I believe. If you're not happy with your current financial situation, it is simply because you are not actively serving enough people at a high enough level. When you shift your mental focus from asking, how can I make $1 million, to asking, how can you deeply help 1 million people, your entire financial trajectory changes. So money can't be number 1 on your priority list, but it also can't be number 1,000 on your priority list either. Money is absolutely essential Good luck getting your car to drive without having any money to buy fuel for it, right? Money needs to be in your top 5 priorities. It just can't be number 1. Number 1 has to be the specific mission that you are on. Your brand new pipeline has to be perfectly designed to strictly solve really painful problems for real people who are suffering and struggling. Think about the biggest companies in the world and what they sell. They all got incredibly wealthy by making daily life easier, faster, or better for their customers. When you actively serve at a massive scale, normal people begin to completely trust you. When they trust you, they gladly hand their money over to you. You without hesitation. And the business data strongly backs this concept up. A massive detailed study by Deloitte found that purpose-driven companies consistently witness much higher market share gains and grow 3 times faster on average than their direct competitors who only focus strictly on the cold hard profits. When you just make your pipeline about serving others and solving their deeply painful problems, the free market consistently rewards you with massive financial returns. If you feel totally stuck right now, you need to go out of your way to just help one single person today. Confidently teach them the one specific valuable skill you already know. Build your global financial empire on the solid foundation of actively making other people successful. When you make other people rich, healthy, or happy, you automatically become incredibly wealthy in the process. Protect your belief system at all costs. You can easily have the absolute best financial strategy in the world. You can have the perfect pipeline blueprint all mapped out on your wall. But if you do not have the core internal belief to execute the daily plan, you will stay broke. Forever. The single biggest problem in the world, I think, right now is people do not believe in themselves enough to take a massive personal risk. When you start bravely building your asset, people will immediately tell you that your idea is crazy. Your closest friends will loudly tell you to play it safe. Your family will tell you to just keep happily carrying your wooden buckets like a normal, reasonable, responsible person. And if you listen to their doubts, you will instantly adopt their limiting beliefs and you will permanently only quit on your dream. So you have to fiercely protect what goes into your ears and into your eyes every single day. Your daily mental environment completely dictates your financial outcome and destiny. I actively make my daily YouTube videos strictly for myself first. I put my own videos on trying to inspire me in the morning. I call it my believe walk. I get outside, go for a walk, and, and listen to a video. I want Warren Buffett in my ear. I want Steve Jobs in my ear. I aggressively listen to powerful voices every day because I need to borrow their belief until my own belief internally is strong enough to take massive action. You must consciously design a specific protective environment that forces you to constantly level up in your life. Research from the National Science Foundation shows that the typical average person has up to 60,000 separate thoughts per day, and 80% of those thoughts are entirely negative. That's crazy. Your own brain is already heavily fighting against your own future financial success. You can't afford to ever let those negative, small-minded people aggressively pull you down even further. You need to actively choose to consume inspiring content that makes you feel powerful, capable, and ready to completely attack your financial goals. When you can fortify your own mind with that belief, nothing can stop you from finishing your cash pipeline. So we need to heavily guard your internal belief exactly like it's your most valuable financial asset. Asset because it is. The truth about who you are. The only thing keeping you broke is the story you keep telling yourself. And so after this video, now it's time to stop playing small and start demanding the life you deserve. Your wealth pipeline is waiting for you to lay the very first pipe today. So get to work right now and go build your asset. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. I analyzed 50 billionaires. Now let's learn what they have in Evan Carmichael. You will never become a billionaire or even a millionaire by following the advice of the middle class. Most people think that extreme wealth comes from luck or inheritance or being in the right place at the right time, but the truth is it comes from having the guts to concentrate your bets when everyone else is diversifying to protect their ignorance. If you keep spreading your focus, your energy, and your money across a dozen different safe options because you are afraid of losing you will guarantee that you end up with a life of mediocrity and never reach the massive potential that you were built for. In 2008, Elon Musk was facing the worst year of his life. He had made $180 million from selling PayPal, a fortune that would set most people up for life on a private island. But Musk isn't most people. He had poured almost all of that money into two companies that looked like they were about to die— Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX had 3 failed rocket launches in a row. Tesla was running out of cash and couldn't make payroll. Musk had about $40 million left. He had a choice. He could put all the money into one company to save it, but that would mean the other would definitely die. Or he could split the money between them to try to keep both alive, but risk running out of cash for both and losing absolutely everything. Most people would have walked away. They would have kept the $40 million and lived like King. Musk chose the hardest path. He split the money. He went all in on both. He literally had to borrow money from friends to pay his rent because he had zero liquid cash left. On Christmas Eve 2008, at the very last hour, a financing round came through for Tesla. Days later, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract. He risked $180 million to get to zero just to have a shot at changing the world. Today, he's the richest man on the planet. So right now you're probably telling yourself, But Evan, I don't have $180 million like Elon Musk. And that's not the point. It's not about the amount of money. It's about the habit of your mind. You're playing small with the $1,000 the same way you'd play small with $10 million. If you cannot bet on yourself when you have nothing to lose, you will never bet on yourself when you have everything to lose. So today we're going to break down the actual blueprint. I analyzed 50 billionaires to find out what what they actually have in common, and it's not what you think. The trap of diversification. The first thing you need to understand is that billionaires do not get rich by diversifying. You have been told your whole life, don't put all your eggs in one basket. That is great advice if your goal is to preserve wealth. It's terrible advice if your goal is to create wealth and build an empire. Warren Buffett, one of the greatest investors of all time, calls diversification protection against against ignorance. He says it makes very little sense for anyone who knows what they are doing. If you know how to analyze a business, if you know your market, if you know your value, why would you put your money into your 20th best idea instead of your top idea? When you look at the portfolios of the ultra-wealthy, you see extreme concentration. They find one thing they believe in, usually a company they built themselves or an investment they know inside and out, and they push all their chips into the middle of the Bill Gates didn't diversify into real estate and gold when he was starting Microsoft. He was 100% Microsoft. Jeff Bezos wasn't buying stocks in other retailers in 1999. He was 100% Amazon. And the data backs this up. There's a study by Acadia Asset Management that looked at concentrated portfolio managers versus diversified ones. They found that the managers who had the courage to bet big on their best ideas, their top 5 to 10 stocks, significantly outperformed the ones who spread their bets thin. The managers who concentrated their portfolios generated higher returns because they were betting on their convictions not their fear. You are hurting your own growth by trying to do too many things at once. You have a side hustle and a main job, and you're thinking about crypto, and you're trying to start a YouTube channel, and you're learning Spanish. You are diversifying your energy because you are afraid that if you pick just one thing, it might fail. But by doing 5 things at 20% effort, you are guaranteeing that all 5 of them fail. You need to find your wonderful business. Buffett says if you can find just 3 wonderful businesses in your life, you will get very rich. You don't need 50. You need one. You need to become an expert in one area. You need to know more about your specific niche than anyone else in the room. When you have that level of knowledge, you don't need to diversify to protect yourself. Your knowledge is your protection. So stop trying to be okay at everything and give yourself permission to be a genius at one thing. Put your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket very closely. Like Andrew Carnegie used to say. The power of disagreeableness. If you want to be a billionaire, you have to stop caring what other people think. I don't mean you should be a jerk. I mean, you must possess a psychological trait known as low agreeableness. Researchers from the Socioeconomic Panel in Germany analyzed the personality traits of millionaires and billionaires. They used the Big Five personality model. They found a consistent pattern. Wealthy people score very high on conscientiousness. They are disciplined and they're organized. They score high in openness. They like new ideas, but they score significantly lower than the average person on agreeableness. This means they are not afraid of conflict. They are not afraid to swim against the tide. They do not need social harmony to feel good about themselves. When you are building something massive, people are going to tell you that you are crazy. They are going to tell you that it cannot be done. They are going to tell you that you are wrong. If you have high agreeableness, you will listen to them. You will try to fit in. You will compromise your vision to make everyone feel comfortable. Billionaires don't do that. They are non-conformists. Look at Steve Jobs. He was famous for his reality distortion field. He would demand things that his engineers said were impossible. He wasn't trying to be their friend. He wasn't trying to be agreeable. He was trying to change the world. He didn't care if people thought that he was difficult. He cared about the vision. You have to be willing to be misunderstood. You have to fight for your idea when no one else sees it. You have to be the one who says yes when the whole world says no. This is why so many billionaires are entrepreneurs. You cannot climb the corporate ladder if you are highly disagreeable. The corporate world rewards people who follow the rules and play nice. The entrepreneurial world rewards people who break the rules and create new realities. So you can ask yourself today, Where are you compromising your dream just to avoid an awkward conversation? Where are you saying okay when you want to scream no? Stop trying to please everyone. You are not pizza. You are a leader. Lead. The obsession with speed. Speed is the ultimate weapon. If you look at the daily habits of billionaires, they do not waste time. They understand that time is the only asset that they can never buy back. There is a concept called return on time investment, or ROI. R-O-T-I. Billionaires are obsessed with this. They aggressively use leverage— other people's money, other people's time, systems, and technology— to make sure that their personal time is spent only on the highest value tasks. When I analyze successful people on my channel, I see this pattern over and over. They don't just work hard, they work fast. Tom Bilyeu, friend of the channel, has a strict routine. He gets up, he works out to build discipline, he meditates to clear his mind, and then he attacks his most important task immediately. He doesn't check email first. He doesn't scroll social media. He calls it thinkitating, using his brainpower to solve complex problems before the world can distract him. Most people are moving too slow. You have an idea for a business, you spend 6 months researching a logo, you want to start a podcast and you spend 3 weeks looking for the perfect microphone to buy, right? You're using preparation as an excuse to hide. If you wait until you feel ready, you will be waiting for the rest of your life. Billionaires act on information immediately. When Elon Musk faced that crisis in 2008, he didn't take a month off to think about it. He was on the phone, flying around the world, negotiating deals, moving money, literally working 20 hours a day to save his companies. The speed of his decisions saved him. You need to shorten the gap between the idea and the execution. If you have an idea right now, do something about it in the next 10 minutes. Send the email. Buy the domain, post a video, call the client. Stop overthinking. Your brain is designed to keep you safe, not to make you rich. Safety is slow. Wealth is fast. The billionaire mindset is about shrinking timelines. If you think a goal will take you 10 years, ask yourself, how can I achieve this in 6 months? Even if you fail, you will be further ahead than if you stuck to the 10-year plan. So a lot of you are waiting for permission. You're waiting for someone to tell you that you are good enough. You're waiting for the perfect time. There is no perfect time. The perfect time was yesterday. The second best time is right now. The ability to handle crisis. You will never reach the top without facing a moment that threatens to destroy everything that you have built. This is the existential crisis phase. Every single billionaire that I've studied has gone through a moment where it looked like it was all over. We talk about Elon Musk in 2008, but look at Jeff Bezos in the dot-com crash of 2001. Amazon lost 90% of its value. 90%. Imagine looking at your net worth and seeing it drop by 90%. Most CEOs panicked. They folded. They went bankrupt. Bezos didn't panic. He focused on the math. He focused on one single metric, the cash conversion cycle. He realized that if he could get cash from customers before he had to pay his suppliers, he could fund his own growth without needing banks or investors. He turned Amazon into a cash-generating machine during the worst crash in the history of the internet. He didn't just survive the crisis. He used the crisis to become stronger. This is what Nassim Taleb calls being anti-fragile. Fragile. It's not just about resilience, which is bouncing back to where you were. It's about getting better because of the stress. When you are building your business, you are going to get hit. You are going to lose a big client. Uh, your star employee is going to quit on you. The economy is going to tank. Uh, pandemic is going to shut down the world. If you crumble when things get hard, you are not ready for this level of success. Yet billionaires look at crisis as a puzzle to be solved, not a sign that they need to stop. They maintain an internal locus of control. They believe that no matter how no matter how bad the external situation is, they have the power to fix it. They don't blame the economy. They don't blame the government. They don't blame their team. They take extreme ownership. So when bad things happen to you, do you play the victim or do you become the architect of your own rescue? Your pain is your training ground. The struggles that you are facing right now are not there to stop you. They are there to prepare you for the weight of the success you are asking for. For. If you can't handle the pressure of a $10,000 problem, life will never trust you with a $10 million problem. So embrace the crisis. It is the fire that forges the steel. They solve the biggest problems. Perhaps the most important thing billionaires have in common is the scale of the problems that they solve. So you are paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems that you solve. If you solve a small problem for a few people, you make a little bit of money. If you solve a massive problem problem for millions of people, you become a billionaire. So look at the billionaires that we've talked about. Elon Musk is trying to solve the problem of fossil fuels with Tesla and the problem of human extinction with SpaceX. Pretty big problems. Bill Gates solved the problem of putting a computer on every desk in every home. Jeff Bezos solved the problem of getting anything that you want delivered to your door in 2 days. These are not small problems. Most entrepreneurs aim too low. They start a business just to make money. They want to just pay their bills. They want a nice car. And there's nothing wrong that, but it won't make you a billionaire. You have to fall in love with the problem. And to go to the next level, you have to expand your vision. You have to ask, how can I help more people? How can I serve deeper? You need to find your one word. You need to find the core value that drives you, because when things get hard, and they will get hard, money will not be enough motivation to keep you going. You need a mission. If you're just chasing paper, you will burn out. If you are chasing a purpose, you will be unstoppable. So the billionaires I know, the ones I studied, they're not sitting around counting their money. They are working harder than you and me. Why? Because they're obsessed with the problem they are solving. They are built to serve. So if you want to join their ranks, stop asking, how can I make a billion dollars? And start asking, how can I help a billion people? The money is just a byproduct of the value that you create. Focus on the value. Focus on the service. Focus on the impact. You have Michael Jordan-level talent at something. You have a genius inside of you that is waiting to be unlocked. Unlocked, but you are keeping it small because you don't believe in yourself enough to tackle the big problems. The world is waiting for you to step up. The world has huge problems that need your specific genius to solve. So don't deprive us of your contribution because you're afraid to fail. Go bigger. Now let's learn how to stop sabotaging your success. You are sabotaging your own business without even realizing it. Do you feel like you're working hard but not getting results, it's time to find out if you're making one of the 5 huge mistakes that self-taught entrepreneurs often make. Stick around because fixing even just one of these could change your business forever. Mistake number 1: trying to do it all yourself and not asking for help. You might be thinking self-taught means you have to figure out everything on your own, and this is a huge mistake. No one can do everything alone. When you try to be the lone wolf, you miss out on other other people's experience and insight. It's hard to see the forest among the trees, as they say. A mentor advisor can often spot the solution to a problem that has you stumped. Even the greatest entrepreneurs have coaches, mentors, support networks. Here's some proof. A survey from the UPS Store found 70% of small businesses that receive mentoring survive more than 5 years, which is double the survival rate of businesses with no mentors. In the same survey, 88% of business owners with a mentor said that having one invaluable. Another study found that one-third of successful entrepreneurs had a mentor or support group versus only 14% of entrepreneurs who failed. So the evidence and all the data, it's clear going it alone is actually hurting you. So what should you do instead? Ask for help. Find someone who's been where you are and learn from them. This could be a mentor, a business coach, or even a peer group of fellow entrepreneurs. You'll make decisions with more confidence and avoid pitfalls others have already learned from. Remember, being self-taught Thought doesn't mean refusing guidance. It means you take charge of your own learning. The smartest entrepreneurs are always learning from others. As the saying goes, if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. So drop the ego, reach out, and build your dream with others. You'll get further faster with a little help. Mistake number 2: winging it without a clear plan. Running a business without a plan is like going on a road trip without a map. You might be busy driving, but you have no idea if you're headed in the right direction. Many self-taught entrepreneurs make the mistake of just winging it. They dive into work each day just reacting to whatever happens without a clear strategy or goals. Figure it out as you go can only take you so far. The result is you waste time and money, you chase shiny objects, or you stall out because you don't know what your next step should be. Here is why a plan matters. Entrepreneurs who plan are far more likely to succeed. Research shows that writing a business plan significantly increases your chances of success. One review found that entrepreneurs with a formal plan were twice as likely to successfully grow their business and secure funding. Another study found that entrepreneurs with business plans are 260% more likely to actually launch their company and 30% more likely to grow it. But despite these benefits, only about a third of business owners ever actually finish a business plan. So don't let that be you. Even writing down your goals makes you 42% more likely to achieve them. That's a simple step that pays off in a big way. It doesn't have to be a giant plan. Having a plan doesn't mean you can't adapt or be lean. It means you set clear goals and a basic roadmap for how to reach them. You can always update the plan as you learn, but start with something. Define your target customer, uh, figure out your product or service, your pricing, and how you're going to actually market your thing and deliver value. Set milestones for the next 6 months and year. This gives you a sense of direction each day. You'll know what success looks like and how to measure it. Without a without a plan, anything can distract you. With a plan, you can wake up each morning knowing the top 1 to 2 things you need to focus on today. You become proactive instead of reactive. So take some time to map out your business. It doesn't have to be a 50-page document. Don't stress out, don't overanalyze. Even a 1-page plan or bullet point list of goals is better than nothing. You'll be amazed at how much clarity you get by writing things down. So stop winging it and start planning it. Your future self will thank you when your business stays on track and starts hitting its targets. Mistake number 3: lacking discipline and consistency in your habits. Freedom is one reason you became an entrepreneur, right? No boss, no time clock. But here's the trap: without discipline, that freedom can destroy your business. Self-taught entrepreneurs often treat their business like a hobby instead of a job. They work on it when they feel motivated and slack off when they don't, or they get caught in procrastination and busywork instead of the hard tasks that actually matter. Matter. Inconsistent effort leads to inconsistent results. The reality is successful entrepreneurship takes a lot of hard work and consistent habits. It's not a 4-hour workweek fantasy. In fact, most business owners work longer hours than employees. One study found 33% of small business owners work over 50 hours per week, and 25% work more than 60 hours. Many even put in the time on weekends and vacations. Why? Because when you're building something of your you get out what you put in. If you only put in half-hearted effort, don't be surprised when you get half-hearted results. But it's not just about the raw hours. It's about habits and consistency. Research from Duke University found that over 40% of our daily actions are governed by habit, not conscious decision. That means nearly half of what you do each day is just on autopilot. If you develop good habits like dedicating 2 hours every morning to high-priority work work or making those sales calls daily. It will carry you through even when your motivation is low. On the flip side, if you fall into bad habits— sleeping in, scrolling social media, reacting to emails all day— your business will suffer. You won't even realize how much time is slipping away because habits run silently in the background. So to avoid this mistake, treat your business like a serious commitment. Set a schedule for yourself. You don't need a 60-hour grind if that's not realistic for but do decide on consistent work times and stick to them. For example, you might commit to working on your business from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. every weekday before any other activities. Create a routine. Maybe you review your goals each morning. You tackle the hardest task first, right? Eat that frog. You dedicate certain days to specific needs. Mondays are for marketing, Tuesdays for your product development, etc. Also eliminate the distractions when you're working. Turn off your notifications. Let your friends and family know that those hours are sacred. Secret. Being your own boss means you must boss yourself around. No one else will do it. Consistency beats intensity. It's better to move the ball forward every single day with solid habits than to work in erratic bursts of inspiration. Those small daily actions will compound over time, and that consistency builds trust with your customers and momentum in your growth. So set up habits that make you productive by default. Make success your daily routine. When discipline becomes a habit, your business will start to run like a well-oiled machine, and you will start to reap the rewards. Mistake number 4: ignoring your market and customers, building something no one wants. This mistake is a silent killer— pouring your heart into a product or service without checking if anyone actually needs it. Self-taught entrepreneurs can fall in love with their idea and assume, if I build it, people will come, right? They spend months or years developing a business in bubble. No market research, no customer feedback, only to launch to the sound of crickets. It's devastating and it's common. Building something nobody wants is one of the top reasons that new businesses fail. So don't just take my word for it. Research by CB Insights found that no market need is the number one reason startups fail. In fact, one report showed that 8 of the top 12 reasons startups fail are related credit to poor product-market fit. Basically, making something that nobody wants. Think about that. The majority of failures happen not because the founders weren't smart or they didn't work hard, but because they didn't solve a real problem for customers. Another analysis found that 34% of startup failures were due to a poor product-market fit, and 22% failed from not having the right marketing plan. If no one wants your product, even the best marketing won't you. The market is the ultimate judge. If you ignore it, you're running on hope, you're not running on reality. So to avoid this mistake, put your customer at the center from day one. Don't be afraid to get out there and talk to people who might have the problem you're trying to solve. It could be as simple as having conversations with your target audience or doing quick surveys. Ask them about their biggest problems and needs in the area that you want to help them serve. Listen more than you talk. Don't lead the witness by pitching your idea too soon. Just learn what they truly care about. And as you gather these insights, be ready to pivot or to tweak your idea to better solve the real pain points that you discover. This is not meant to be a blow to your ego. It's how you craft something people actually want to buy. Also, try to test your idea early and cheaply. If you have a product concept, creating a rough prototype or even a sketch and get feedback on it. If it's a service, try a small pilot program. Or consult with a few potential clients. The goal is to validate that your solution resonates with people. Are people saying, "I need this," or, "When can I have it?" Or are they lukewarm? Early feedback is gold. It's far better to learn and adjust in the beginning than to spend all your money on a full launch that then flops. Remember, feedback isn't criticism, it's direction. It guides you to shape your business into something that will work. At the end of the day, your business exists is to serve customers, to solve a problem, to bring value. When you align what you offer with what people genuinely need and value, you create that win-win relationship. Customers get something they love, and you get a growing, profitable business. So fall in love with the customer, not just your product. Do your homework on your market. Stay curious, ask questions, and never assume that you know it all. The more that you listen and adapt, the less likely you are to build something useless. Solve a real problem come, and you'll never have to worry about finding customers. They will come to you. Mistake number 5: being afraid of failure and giving up too soon. Entrepreneurship is tough, and not every attempt will succeed. But the biggest mistake self-taught entrepreneurs make here is taking failure too personally and giving up when things go wrong. You might hit a roadblock— a product launch fails, a client backs out, the revenue isn't coming in as fast as you hope— and you think, I'm just not cut out for this. So you quit. That is the only guaranteed way to fail permanently. The truth is, failure is not the end unless you stop trying. Every successful entrepreneur has faced setbacks. The difference is they learn from them and they keep going. I love the mindset that failure is feedback. In fact, every failure teaches you something valuable. It does. It shows what not to do or how to do it better the next time. Failure is only failure if you don't learn from it. If you treat each failure as a lesson, you actually haven't failed at all. You have grown. It's like getting feedback from the market or from life on how to improve. And guess what? Everybody fails on their path to success. This isn't just a nice saying, it's reality. The road to success is paved with trial and error. The most legendary business leaders, inventors, creators, they all had flops and outright disasters before figuring it out. They succeeded because they didn't quit after those failures. There's a famous quote: I have not failed, I've just found 10,000 ways that won't doesn't work. That's Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, humorously reminding us that every no gets us closer to a yes. Success usually takes longer than we want to believe. Too many people just give up in year 1 or 2, just when things might have started to click if they had persisted a bit more. So how do you embrace failure in a healthy way? First, expect it. This doesn't mean you're aiming to fail, but don't be shocked when something doesn't work. It's just part of the process. Adjust your mindset to see failure as a pressure, not as a verdict on your ability and that you suck. When something goes wrong, take a step back and ask, why did this happen? What can I learn from this? How can I adjust and come back better? Maybe your marketing message was off. Maybe you targeted the wrong audience. Maybe you simply need more patience for your strategy to actually play out. Use that insight to pivot and refine your approach, and then you try again. And keep in mind that resilience, it's like a muscle. Every time you get over some setback, you start to build that muscle. You get a little bit tougher and smarter, and over time you become more and more unstoppable because no failure can break you. You always find a way to adapt. This is crucial for self-taught entrepreneurs because you're learning as you go. Not everything will be perfect on your first try. Give yourself permission to fail and learn in public. It's better to launch imperfectly and then iterate and improve than to hold back because you are afraid. And most importantly, don't quit on your dream just because it's harder than you thought. If you truly believe in what you're doing, then keep pushing. You might be closer to a breakthrough than you think. Remember that every overnight success story has a hidden chapter of years of effort and setback. So keep going even when it's tough. Perseverance is going to be your superpower as an entrepreneur. Use it. The beautiful thing about mistakes is that they don't They find you, they educate you. Now we've covered the 5 huge mistakes to avoid. You have the power to course correct. Ask for help when you need it. Plan your path so you're not drifting aimlessly. Build rock-solid habits that drive you forward every day. Obsess over your customers and make sure you're giving them real value. And above all, don't let fear of failure stop you. Every entrepreneur's journey is a work in progress. You're gonna have ups and downs, victories and defeats. That is normal. What matters is that you stay in the game and keep going. Learn from every misstep and keep moving. Success is not reserved for only the geniuses or the lucky ones. It's for the ones who keep improving and keep going. So you've chosen a challenging path being an entrepreneur, but it's also a rewarding one. You have a vision inside you and the world needs to see it. So take this video as your wake-up call and hopefully your pep talk. It's time to double down on your growth. Correct the mistakes if you've been making them, and you'll see the difference in your business and in yourself. You already have everything it takes to win. Now go out there and make it happen. And remember, the only way you truly fail is if you stop trying. To learn 96 ways to improve your life from billionaires, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. You keep telling yourself you just need more time, more money, more luck, but billionaires started with the same fear you have right now. The difference is they acted when everything looked like it would collapse.