Inside the Billionaire Mind: What They Really Focus On

People stay broke because they focus on the wrong things. Focus has always been a strong part of my personality. You have to be good at saying no and picking the things that really make a difference. Billionaires protect their time, build ownership, create leverage, and put their energy into work that keeps producing results. I just flip through it and, you know, there's practically nothing in it. You've got to keep control of your time and you won't You can't keep control of your time unless you can say no. It's all a matter of leverage. If you know how to leverage yourself well, then you're going to be able to get more life out of life. The rich don't work for money. So we learn to use debt to create assets, and assets keep putting money in our pocket. If you keep giving your best hours to small thinking and small tasks, Your biggest goals will never get the attention they deserve. So in the next three hours, you will learn how billionaires protect their focus, multiply their results, and build lasting wealth. 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. There are six decisions that turn work you get paid for into something that you own, and every founder in this video started where you are, choosing between getting paid for the work. and owning part of the business. The Federal Reserve found that in 2022, 20% of American families owned a privately held business, but in the top 10% of highest earning families, nearly half of them had a business. So making the right choice on these 6 decisions will control how much you make, how much freedom you have, and what you can leave to your kids. Ray Kroc was 52 years old and selling milkshake machines when he drove out to San Bernardino to find out why one hamburger stand had ordered 8 of his machines. What he found was the McDonald brothers and a kitchen that ran like an assembly line. So they didn't have carhops, they didn't have plates, they had a short menu and food that came out in 30 seconds instead of taking 30 minutes. He talked to the brothers into letting him franchise the McDonald's brand across the country. And for the next 6 years, he did exactly that. He signed up operators, he set the standards, he drove the growth of the business. And for all 6 of those years, the name on the business wasn't his. He was the agent. They owned the business. The arrangement made him almost no money, and he now saw why. Because the brothers had capped what he was allowed to charge a franchisee, so his upside was fixed no matter how well he did. Every improvement he made was an improvement that he was building for the McDonald's brothers' assets. He was 58 years old and building the most valuable name in food for 2 men who were happy with one good restaurant. So in 1961, he raised the money and bought the whole thing for $2.7 million— the McDonald's name, the system, the golden arches, All of it. And then he did the part that actually made him rich. His finance man, Harry Sonnenborn, worked out that McDonald's shouldn't only sell franchises, it should also own the land underneath them and lease it back to the operator. So the rent got paid to McDonald's regardless of how many burgers sold that month in each franchise location, and it came from every single location. The restaurant company was really a property company with very reliable tenants. The second big decision was owning the real estate. Buying the name got him the restaurants, but owning the ground under it made his fortune. So You might be thinking that you don't have $2.7 million and you're not buying a big business this year. But what I want you to pay attention to in this whole video, but especially with Ray Kroc, was the real move. It was noticing that he was spending 6 years making somebody else's asset more valuable and then deciding it was his turn to take ownership and build his freedom. So here are 6 people who took that leap and exactly what you can learn from each of them. Michael Dell, pay to get it back. So Michael Dell started his company in a University of Texas dorm room in 1984, building custom PCs to order instead of guessing what people wanted to buy. It worked so well that he dropped out of medical school. Dell went public in 1988, and for the next 25 years, he ran a business that was named after him, but he didn't fully control it because he had shareholders to report to. By 2012, that turned into a problem. He wanted to move Dell away from cheap PCs for consumers and into enterprise software servers services. That kind of change usually takes years of heavy spending, and conservative investors don't like massive change. So the public markets, they punish those kinds of CEOs. Every quarter, he'd have to explain why growth was going down while he was investing in something new that they didn't believe in. So in 2013, he did something that almost no founder does, but often I think they want to. He bought his own company back. The buyout was worth about $25 billion, and he partnered with investment firm Silver Lake to do it with him. And it was one one of the largest deals of its kind ever done. Dell said, I couldn't be more thrilled to have control over my own destiny in a way that is not possible as a public company. So he spent $25 billion so he could make a decision that looked wrong in 3 years, but was right for 5 years plus afterwards. That's what ownership actually buys you. It's not just about money, but about permission, permission to do the unpopular thing and not have to defend yourself every 90 days to people who don't see the vision that you've got for your business. And it worked for him. The company that he took private is a very different business now than what he started with. It's built around enterprise and that's what he wanted and he still runs it now. So you've got a version of this in your business at your size right now. There's some decision that you keep not making because somebody would have to sign off on it or because it would make you look bad to somebody else who's watching you. So think about what that is, who that person is. Is it your boss, your biggest client, a partner, an investor, a parent? That person's judgment is what you are actually fighting with right now. And until you identify it, you'll keep calling it something else like timing or the market, or you're just not ready yet. Phil Knight, take the money but keep control. So Phil Knight started Nike, started selling Japanese running shoes from the trunk of his car at track meets in Oregon. And he'd been a middle-distance runner, and his old coach Bill Bowerman became his business partner, pouring rubber into a waffle iron to make a better sole for their running shoes. Now, growing into a global company took a lot of money, far more money they needed than what the shoe sales were throwing off for them. So Knight did what a lot of founders do— he raised money. And in December 1980, he He took Nike public, but what's cool is how he did it. Nike didn't go public with one kind of share; he went public with two. The Class A shares carry the real voting power, and they stayed overwhelmingly with Phil Knight and his family. The Class B shares are what everybody else was allowed to buy and trade on the public market. That structure does one really important thing: the Class A shareholders get to nominate three-quarters of Nike's board of directors. So Phil Knight's percentage of the company came down a lot over the years, but his control of the company barely moved at all. at all. Knight has been pretty open with why he did this. He said he watched other founders raise money and then get removed from their own companies by the people who bought in. He wanted the money without losing control. So you might not be taking a company public, but you do have a business and you do have shares. So who owns a share? Who gets a vote? Who has the final say? Those are separate things, and you don't have to hand out all 3 and lose control of your business. So before you take money from anyone, including a friend or a family member, write down the list of decisions that they are not allowed to change and do it before you have conversation with them so you have a plan going in. Dietrich Mateschitz: Own it, don't distribute it. So Dietrich Mateschitz was a marketing executive selling toothpaste, and he was in his late 30s before anything really interesting happened to him. But he was on a business trip in Thailand and he was badly jet-lagged, and somebody gave him a local tonic called Krating Daeng. His jet lag disappeared. Now, for most entrepreneurs who see a great idea, you go home, you get the rights to distribute this new idea in your country, you take a margin on every case You sell and you do well. You'd also be a very well-paid distributor of a drink that belongs to somebody else, and the day that they end that arrangement, you're left with nothing, no ownership. He didn't do that. In 1984, he and Shalil Yuvidia each put in $500,000 and started a brand new company together, each holding 49% of it. Yuvidia's eldest son owned the remaining 2% of the company, and the clause Matichitz insisted on was that he would be the one who ran the business. Then he spent 3 years on a product before selling a single can. He carbonated it, he cut the sweetness for European taste, and he put it in a tall, narrow can that looked nothing like a typical soft drink. Red Bull launched in Austria in 1987. Now let's look at the 2 different versions of his life. One version pays him a commission on the cases that he sells. The other version gives him half of one of the most valuable private companies on earth. The work was pretty much the same. The structure was completely different, and that's what made him a billionaire. So the next time somebody offers you a percentage of the sale, ask what would it take to own a percentage of the business instead? The worst answer you get is no, and you can still have the commission. Whitney Wolfe Heard: They can take your title, not your shares. So Whitney Wolfe Heard was on the early team at Tinder and was a co-founder of the business. She was the one who came up with the name Tinder. Then that co-founder title was taken away from her, and after a series of events, she left the company and sued it. She was 24 years old, and she had a pretty important choice to make. Take the settlement offer, sign the paperwork, go quietly, and just let that be her story. But instead, she built a competitor. Bumble launched in 2014 with one clear rule, which was that women send the first message. And that single change fixed the thing that made the whole category unpleasant for half of its users. And it grew really quickly. On February 11th, 2021, Bumble went public at a valuation of around $8.6 billion. And Whitney stood on the floor of the Nasdaq holding her baby son while it all happened. Now, her revenge is not the thing I want to focus on here. It's the control. At Tinder, she had a title: co-founder. When she left, her co-founder title had been stripped from her, and her internal shares and options had not been formalized or granted. So she had nothing. At Bumble, she owned the company, and it made her a billionaire. She later also sued Tinder and got awarded ownership in a settlement agreement afterwards. So look at what you're building over the next 12 months and ask one question about it: What are you actually going to own from the work you're putting in? Ingvar Kamprad decide. Who owns it after you? So Ingvar Kamprad was 17 years old when he started IKEA, selling pens and wallets and picture frames out of a shed on his family farm in Sweden. Furniture came later. Flat packaging came after that when an employee took the legs off a table to fit it in his car more easily. And by 1982, he had the kind of problem that a lot of founders would love to have. The company was enormous. He was getting older, and the Swedish inheritance tax on a fortune his size was brutal. What usually happens in this case is a family sells a piece of the company to pay for the tax. Bill, then another piece to pay for the tax on top of the sale. And a generation later, the company belongs to whoever bought those pieces and the family loses control. So he did something unusual. He moved the Ingka Group, which owns and runs most IKEA stores, into a Dutch foundation he set up called Stichting Ingka. And by transferring his equity and ownership of IKEA into an independent self-owning foundation with no traditional private shareholders, Kamprad ensured that no inheritance estate was left for his family to pay massive inheritance taxes on. Corporate continuity was locked in, which basically made it impossible for heirs to cash out or break up the IKEA empire. And tax efficiency was optimized because the Netherlands had different foundation laws and way more favorable tax regulations. And that's still how it's set up today. IKEA isn't listed on any stock exchange that you can buy into. It has no shareholders who could vote to sell it. And in legal terms, the foundation essentially owns itself. So Kamprad arranged it so that after he was gone, Nobody could take the company apart. Now, you don't need a Dutch foundation, and you're probably not avoiding massive Swedish inheritance taxes. But almost every business owner has no answer at all to a very simple question, which is: What happens to your business if something happens to you? So it's worth thinking about it this week. Who takes over? Who gets paid and how much? Who has the final say if two people disagree? And what structure can you set up today to minimize the taxes that your family will need to pay once you're gone? Rihanna asked for half the company. So you probably know Rihanna for all of her music, but she became a billionaire through her fashion and beauty business ventures, not her album sales. Every famous person gets the same offer over and over and over again. Put your name on our product, we'll pay you a licensing fee, and we'll keep the company. And it's usually pretty easy money, but the money also stops when the contract stops, and they end up owning nothing at the end of it. So in 2016, she signed a completely different deal with the beauty arm of LVMH. LVMH. Fenty Beauty would be owned 50/50 between her and them. Not a fee to use her name, half of the actual business. And that ownership changed what she did with the company. Fenty launched in 2017 with 40 foundation shades that filled a major gap for people with darker skin tones that other brands ignored. The deeper shades sold out instantly, proving there was a massive hidden demand that the traditional beauty companies were obviously ignoring. Forbes reports that the majority of her $1.4 billion fortune comes from that company, not from the music that you might know her for. She's a billionaire because of the half of the businesses she owns. The songs made her famous, but the business ownership is what made her rich. So this is the thing I say to creators all the time who are getting offers right now. Ownership is infinitely more important than a commission or licensing fee. So when somebody wants your name, they want your face, they want your audience attached to their product, the question to ask is, what does this look like if I own part of it instead? Pick the one decision you're avoiding. So Ray Kroc bought the business he spent 6 years building for other people. Michael Dell bought his own company back so he could make the decisions that nobody else believed in. Phil Knight, he took the money and kept the Class A voting shares to stay in control of his business. Matuszak built a company instead of taking a distributor fee. Wolf Herd made it so she couldn't get kicked out of her new venture. Comprod decided who runs his business after he's gone, and Rihanna asked for half of the company instead of getting the fee. Not one of them did something that you can't do a smaller version of. I can't do a smaller version of in our businesses. And my advice is almost always the same, which is to own your company and finance it out of your own sales and your your own profitability for as long as you possibly can. Not because outside money is bad, but because the moment that you go looking for investors, you end up spending your time raising money instead of growing the business. And those are 2 completely different full-time jobs. There's also a second thing that happens far too often. If you give away too much of your own company, you stop being motivated by it. I've seen people end up with 2% of a business they started and they quit because at 2%, it isn't theirs anymore and they just want out. So fight for your control, Fight for freedom and fight for ownership. The wealthiest people I know buy back their own time before they buy anything else. But most people use extra money to buy things instead of buying freedom. Time is the ultimate currency. No matter what resources you have, you can't wind back the clock. There are a lot of things that are a waste of time. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, working adults were asked how they'd spend a $40. windfall, and only 2% thought to spend it on saving themselves time. I have the same number of hours as anybody else. What am I going to spend them on? And getting that right is more important than exactly like being perfectly productive with those hours. Being willing to delegate is such an important thing in life, and being a good, good delegator, finding people who are better than you to do the things you're not good at, and then, then that frees you up to do the things you are good at. The hours you buy The hours you buy back are the difference between seeing your kids on a Tuesday and still doing your own invoices at 60. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. One of the most important things you have in your life is time. It's one of your greatest assets, or it's your liability. So here's how the rich actually buy back time. Andrew Carnegie built the largest steel operation in America and could not make steel himself. The whole company work. Carnegie needed somebody to run the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, and he found a man named Bill Jones. Now, Jones wasn't an executive. He was a millman who understood furnaces and understood the people standing in front of them. Carnegie valued him so much that he offered Jones a partnership in the company. Ownership, the thing every ambitious person says that they want. And Jones turned it down. He didn't want business worries. He told Carnegie to keep the partnership and pay him a big salary instead. Instead. So Carnegie paid him $25,000 a year. That was the same salary the President of the United States was paid, and Carnegie gladly paid. Jones took the cash, Carnegie kept the ownership, and got the best operator in the country running his mill every single day. And that left Carnegie free to be in New York, in Britain, selling steel, raising money, and buying up the companies around him. Only he could do that part. Meanwhile, Jones ran the plant and created inventions that changed how the whole industry moved molten iron. Carnegie said he wanted one line on his gravestone, here lies a man who hired people better than himself. He never actually put it there, but he said it as a summary of how he built everything he built and became the richest man in the world. Now, you probably don't have Carnegie money. What he paid Jones was presidential money, and I'm guessing you just don't have that lying around. But you can also start small. One of my first companies, we had almost no money coming in, and I was doing some tedious work that I was bad at and I hated. And I told myself maybe what you're telling yourself right now. I can't afford to hire a full-time person to I'd love their help. I need their help, but I just don't have the money. So I hired somebody for an hour a day. And because that person was faster and more focused than me, that hour gave me back 2 hours of my day. You think you can't afford help. You can. You just haven't done the math on it. And in this video, I'm breaking down the 6 ways to buy back your time like the rich so you can focus on the work and the people that you love. Number 1, work out what an hour of you is worth. You can't buy back time until you know what your time costs, and almost nobody has ever done the calculation. So take the revenue you want your business to make this year and divide it by 2,000, which is roughly the working hours in a year. If you want to build a $140,000 business, your time is worth $70 an hour. If you're going for $1 million, your time is worth $500 an hour. Use the number that you're aiming at, not the one that you actually hit last year, Act like you're already worth $500 an hour. If you spend your days on $20 jobs, you'll never get there. So personally, I don't like decisions that make me feel weak, and working for $20 instead of $500 an hour is one of them. So write your number down and put it somewhere that you'll see because it changes how a normal Tuesday looks like. At $500 an hour, spending 40 minutes rearranging your calendar costs you $333. Booking your own travel costs you $250. Chasing an unpaid invoice by email costs you about $80 in your own time, and you'll have to do it 3 times before they pay. Then take 25% of that number, and that's what you should be willing to pay someone else to do it. So at $70 an hour, you can pay $17.50 an hour for help. At $500 an hour, you can pay $125 an hour, and that's a bargain. That 4-to-1 ratio is why rich people make so much progress. Pay somebody $125 and you get back an hour you value at $500. Do it 20 times a month and you freed 20 hours. It turns into even more money if you spend them selling and building higher value things. So go through last week's calendar right now and put a dollar figure next to each block. It might make you feel a little sick to see how much you're wasting on low-value activities, but all progress begins with telling the truth. Number 2, kill the work before you hand it off. So most owners skip straight to hiring. They find something that's super annoying and immediately look for a person just to take it over. That's how you end up paying somebody to do work that never needed doing. So write this down. The order is eliminate Eliminate, then automate, then delegate in that order every time. Eliminate first. So go down your calendar and your task list and ask one question about each item. What actually happens if this never gets done again? I used to spend hours writing up and sending out the minutes from my mastermind groups. One month I didn't send them. Nobody noticed. Nobody asked. So I stopped doing it forever and I got my time back. A lot of your week is stuff you only still do because you did it last week. Reports that nobody reads, meetings that exist because they existed last quarter, a weekly email to a list that never replies. Dashboard you built in 2023 and just check out of habit. If you're not sure something matters, just stop doing it for 30 days and see whether one single person mentions it. If nobody cares, then eliminate it from your schedule for good. Automate second. So whatever survived the cut, look for software or AI that can handle it before you hand it to a human. A scheduling link kills the back and forth on calendar bookings. A saved template can kill 20 minutes of writing. Automatic invoice reminder kills the most uncomfortable email that you have to send all month. Automation doesn't get sick. It doesn't quit. If you have to do something more than once, look for how it can be automated next time. And then delegate third and only third. By the time you get here, the pile of work is a fraction of what it was when you started, and everything left is genuinely worth paying for. Eliminate, automate, then delegate so you can focus on what you're genuinely called to do. Number 3, start with 1 hour a day. You don't need a full-time hire. Full-time is how this goes wrong, because if you've never managed anyone before, you try to fill their day with busy work. You lose a ton of your time managing and training them, and then you resent the cost and just want to go back to doing everything yourself. So start with one person part-time on the tasks that you hate the most and are the worst at. One hour a day is enough to prove the whole idea to yourself. And the person you hire should be be faster at it than you, which is a part that people keep underestimating. My first hire gave me back 2 hours for every 1 hour that I paid for. So let's say you're an entrepreneur and you want to make YouTube videos to spread your message and promote your business. So you spend 20 minutes recording the video and then 5 hours editing it. You're spending 5 hours on the skill editing that you probably don't care about getting great at and spending 20 minutes on the skill speaking that could serve you for life. Hiring a part-time editor allows you to make more videos, get better at the skills you actually want to improve, and buy time back so you can grow your business. And handing the work over takes less effort than you might be imagining. If you have written instructions or SOPs, that's great. But what I love to do is just screen share videos. So the next time you do the task, hit record on your screen and narrate what you're doing. That's the training. And it costs you 5 extra minutes because you had to do the task anyway. They can rewatch it as many times as they need instead of asking you the same questions twice. Number 4, test people instead of interviewing them. Interviews tell you who is good at interviews. You need to know who is good at the work you're actually hiring for. And there are 2 ways to get there fast. First, write the job posting as one big unbroken paragraph and then bury a specific instruction in the middle of it. So for mine, I'll ask people in the first sentence of their application to tell me how many YouTube subscribers I have, and in the second sentence, share who their favorite entrepreneur of all time is and why. Most people use AI to submit, which makes things even worse. Because they spend 8 seconds applying to your job and you need to spend 5 to 30 minutes reviewing it. If 200 people apply for the job, you're spending hours to sift through work that took them seconds to create. So the first sentence of how many YouTube subscribers that I have works through AI because the number is constantly moving and AI will default to an older answer. The second sentence of their favorite entrepreneur also weeds out AI applications because AI will default to the same 5 people and give the most generic responses as to why. Anybody who doesn't follow the instructions or is using AI to copy and paste answers goes straight to the reject pile, and that instantly weeds out over 80% of the applications and makes the hiring process suck a lot less. Second, give the survivors a paid trial project capped at 5 hours that should take them 2 hours. Pay them properly for it. Hiring a video editor based on how well they interview makes no sense. They might be the most shy, introverted person of all time. That's fine. You're not hiring them as a salesperson, so don't interview them like one. You hire a video editor based on how well they edit your video. So in that trial project, you learn their speed, you learn how well they communicate, you learn what did they get stuck on, whether they ask smart questions, whether they hit the deadline, and how much you like actually working with them. I'm not a micromanager, so you also see if they use the full 5 hours to do a 2-hour job, which means they're either exceptionally slow or just taking advantage of you. And it's great to know that upfront instead of years in. My lead video editor, Christina, came to me through the same paid trial system. I sent her raw footage of a content shoot I did and asked her to cut it in my style. She sent it back, did what I asked, and also told me my style wasn't very good, so she improved it. And she was right. I hired her. She's edited my videos for over a decade now. We even hired her awesome husband Sam to join us too. And right now they're probably editing this video on their boat off the coast of Italy. So first, weed out the people who did not actually bother to read your job post or lazily left it to AI to apply for them. And then second, and give people a trial job to actually work with them on a sample project and see how well they do, as well as how well you enjoyed working with them. It completely changes the traditional hiring process and brings so many more right-fit people to you. Most entrepreneurs complain that hiring sucks. It doesn't have to if you have a better system. Number 5, buy time in your personal life too. Buying your time back isn't only a business move. The same math works in your personal life as well. In that same study out of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 28% of people said they spend money buying back time in a typical month, and the ones who did reported meaningfully higher life satisfaction. It just isn't the first thing that comes to mind. And that's the mindset difference that rich people have. They prioritize buying back their time over entertainment, fancy toys, and almost everything else. Now, researchers also gave people $40 twice. One weekend they had to spend it buying time, the next weekend on something physical. physical. People were happier on the weekend they bought the time. Ashley Whillans at Harvard Business School has spent years on this, and she found taking the same money and spending it on getting rid of the chores you hate most does more for how you feel about your life than spending it on things does. The reason you don't do it already is guilt. Offer someone a new shiny gadget or a service that saves them 4 hours, and the new shiny gadget wins nearly every time because the shiny gadget feels like it's a And paying someone to clean your house feels like you're admitting that you couldn't handle it yourself. So price out your own week honestly. If your time is worth $40 an hour, 3 hours of yard work costs you 3 hours you just said were worth $40, right? Paying somebody $60 buys all 3 of them back. Same with driving across town for 90 minutes to save $30 on groceries. That drive spent $60 of your life to save $30. So start with the single chore you hate the most, get a number on it, and pay someone for it. somebody. Researchers looked at more than 35,000 Americans and found the happiest ones had 2 to 5 free hours a day. Under 2 hours and you're stressed, over 5 and it starts working against you because you lose the feeling of being useful. So look at your own week. The average person spends 2 hours every single day on household chores. Let's break down exactly what you can outsource for under $40 an hour. First, cleaning. You spend about 6.5 hours a week cleaning your house on average. You can hire an independent cleaner for $25 to $40 an hour. Second, grocery shopping. You spend an hour every time you go to the store. You can get your groceries delivered for a small delivery fee instead. Third, yard work. You spend 2 hours a week on your lawn. You can pay a local service $30 to mow it for you. Fourth, laundry. You spend over an hour a week doing laundry. You can drop off your clothes at a wash and fold service for $1 a pound. Add that up. That is over 10 hours of your life back every single week for less than $40 an hour. So for $1,500 per month, you've bought back 40 hours of your time to focus on things that bring in more than $1,500 a month or spend that time with the people that you love. That's how the rich buy back their time everywhere. Number 6, guard what you just bought. You buy back 5 hours a week and a month later they're all gone again, right? New stuff just seems to fill them up. Has that ever happened to you? Those hours you bought back only count if you spend them on the work that only you can do. So for me, that's being on camera and building relationships. Every month I ask myself, what can I uniquely And the honest answer is there's always more that I should be handing off to more people on my team. Ask it every month, not once a year, because the answer keeps changing as you grow. So when your business was doing $100 grand, you had to do certain jobs yourself. At half a million, somebody else should be doing it, but you'll keep doing it out of habit unless something makes you stop and look. So decide in advance where the hours go. Write it down. If the plan is 3 hours of selling, 2 hours with your kids. Put it on a calendar before the small tasks take over, because an hour that isn't claimed by something specific gets claimed by your inbox, by your DMs, by social media, by other busywork that mostly doesn't make you money. You can start this week. Andrew Carnegie became the richest person in the world by knowing he wasn't the best person to do most of the work and being willing to pay for someone who was. You can start smaller than you think. 1 hour a day, 1 task you hate. Don't wait for permission and don't wait to feel ready. You know when the best time to hand the first task off is? Now. How about right now? Your business, your mission, and your family deserve the you that spends time on the things that only you can do. Getting rich comes down to what you own and almost nothing else. The rich don't work for money. So we We learn to use debt to create assets, and assets keep putting money in our pocket. If I earned $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. The Federal Reserve tracks it. The richest 1% of American households own about half of all stock held by American households. And the bottom half of the country owns 1.1% of it. I own half of Sony's publishing and I'm leaving them and they, they're very angry at me because I just did good business, you know. Content on the internet, it's an opportunity to provide value to the audience. It's a way to provide affinity towards you and your company by showing the humanity. And that gap decides whether you work until 70, whether you can turn down a bad client, and whether your kids get a head start or begin with nothing the way you did. In terms of content, there's never too much content. It is just because what we want and who we are and how we consume content changes every day through our experiences. You have to own assets that make you money while you sleep, that grow while you sleep. In July of 1973, a 29-year-old director signed a deal He got a deal memo with 20th Century Fox. It paid him $150,000 to write and direct a science fiction movie the studio was not excited about. His name was George Lucas. Then his last film came out and changed everything. American Graffiti hit that August and made a fortune on a tiny budget. Suddenly Lucas was the director studios wanted, and he could go back to Fox and ask for more. He didn't ask for more money. He asked to keep 2 things the studio saw as leftovers. What were they? The sequel rights and the merchandising rights. I was very careful to say, I don't want more money, I don't want more points, I don't want anything financial, but I do want the right to make these sequels. Fox handed them over without much of a fight. Studios had lost money on movie merchandise before, and nobody in that building believed toys from a space movie were worth holding on to. They kept what looked valuable. They kept the box office. Up until that time, Merchandising had been relatively unknown. When I took over the licensing, I simply said, I'm going to be able to make t-shirts, I'm going to be able to make posters, and I'm going to be able to sell this movie even though the studio won't. So I managed to get control of pretty much everything that was left over that the studio didn't really care about. Here's what each side actually bought. So Fox, they bought a movie. Star Wars cost $11 million to make and grossed $410 million in its first run, and Fox did pretty well on it. Lucas bought the toys and the sequels, and they paid him for the next 35 years. So let's see how this started. Christmas 1977, the toys weren't even manufactured yet, so they sold an empty box with a certificate in it promising to mail the figures later. Parents bought about 500,000 empty boxes. The actual toys shipped in February. That's how badly Fox misread what it gave away. People were paying full price for a piece of cardboard and an IOU. Lucas kept those rights for the rest of his working life. Every toy, every lunchbox, every t-shirt in the mail for 35 years paid Lucas, not the studio. That's what let him build his own company instead of working inside somebody else's. And in 2012, he sold that company, Lucasfilm, to Disney for $4.05 billion. He didn't ask for a bigger check in 1973. He walked away with $4.05 billion in 2012. Same movie, different man. The difference is that he asked to own the pieces that nobody else wanted, and those pieces built the company that he sold. Now, here's an objection that people have when I tell this story. You're thinking, that's fine for a Hollywood director with leverage, and you don't have any leverage, you have bills. And I hear you, I understand. I've had the months where the whole plan is just to get to Friday. But the reason to care about ownership is that it's the only thing that ever ends those bad months. A raise makes this year better and It makes every year better after it. It pays you when you're sick. It pays you when you're on vacation. It pays you when you've stopped working altogether. And you don't need Star Wars. You need to own one thing that other people want, and you need to stop handing it away for a slightly bigger check. Here's exactly how the people who get this do it right. Move the income into the asset before it becomes a lifestyle. So the rule I give people is actually pretty easy. If you have high income, take that income and put it into the asset. Income by itself doesn't make What you do with it does. You can earn $400,000 a year, spend $400,000 a year, and own nothing at 55. And I've watched people do that while looking extremely successful the entire time. Here's what makes it hard, and it's not about discipline, it's about timing. Move it the same week that it lands before you get used to seeing that money in your bank account. After 3 weeks, that money feels like it's yours, and moving it into an asset feels like you're giving something up. Curtis Jackson did the extreme version of this, so he didn't take the cash and buy an asset with it. He turned down the cash and took the asset. When buying a business, Vitaminwater came to him. The reported cash offer for putting his name on it was around $5 million. He pushed for a piece of the company, and in June of 2007, Coca-Cola bought Vitaminwater's parent company for approximately $4.1 billion. And his piece of that has been reported to be around $100 million before taxes. It was the same endorsement, it was his same face on the bottle, but he made a lot more money. So set your number tonight. Pick a percentage of every payment that comes in and make it automatic and send it to something you own before you even look at it. If 20% is impossible, start with 5%. That's a good start. And 5%. 20% moving every week beats 20% that you never actually do anything with. And be clear with yourself about what counts. An asset is something that either pays you money or grows in value that you can actually get at while you're not touching it. So shares in a company, a property that you can rent out, equity in a business, yours or someone else's, a piece of work that you made once that keeps selling. That's the core list. That's what an asset is. A car isn't on it. Neither is equipment that you bought for a business that you haven't started yet. The home you live in is different. It might go up in value, but you can't get at that money while you're still living in it. And you still have to live somewhere. It doesn't pay you and you can't get at the growth without selling the roof over your head. So it's not on this list. So this week, write down which of those 4 you'd actually put money into and rank them. And every time you get money from now on goes into the top one. Know which one of the 3 models you're running. If you sell your skill, you're running one of 3 businesses. And almost all of the frustration I see comes running the wrong one for the money that you're Charging. So the first is the craftsman. So clients are buying from you specifically, and every piece is just one of a kind. The only thing you can do is raise your prices in this model. So you go from $500 apiece to $1,000 to $10,000 to $50,000 apiece. But there are only so many hours in a week. Once your price is as high as it goes and your week is full, that's it. You can't earn more. So it's a great living and it usually just stops there. The second is the agency. So you stop doing every job and become the head craftsman who trains other people to do the work. They'll be about 80% as good as you, And that's fine because you charge less than your one-of-a-kind price and you can serve 10 clients instead of just 2. And the third is mass market. So you take the thing that you already made and you sell a copy of it many times. A painter who sold one canvas for $1 million sells prints of that same painting forever. The work is done, the selling never stops. A lot of the pain I see comes from someone stuck in one model, charging Model 3 prices, working themselves into the ground. So pick model, choose it this week, and then price it like it is. So if you're a craftsman, then your rate has to go up. If you're the agency, then you hire more people. If you're mass market, then you stop taking custom jobs. Every one-off pulls you back into making things by hand. Build a content asset once and let it work forever. So here's an asset that you can build this month with no money at all. Write down the top 20 to 40 questions that your buyers ask you before they say yes to working with you. Not the questions you wish they asked, the real ones, the actual ones. How much does it cost? How long does it take? What What if it doesn't work? Why are you more expensive than the other guy? Then answer every single one on camera, one video per question, and put them on your YouTube channel and on your website. Now count what that does. Every one of those conversations used to cost you 20 minutes on a phone call. You had the same conversation over and over and over for years. Now the video has it there for you at 2:00 AM while you're asleep with 40 people at once who are watching. And the person who books a call has already watched your videos. They show up ready to buy instead of just asking the basic questions. And that's library of videos doesn't expire. So you build it in an afternoon and it's still selling for you in 10 years. You do the work one time and it keeps selling whether you show up on that day or not. Own the ground you're standing on. So this isn't only about money, it's also about whose ground that you are actually building on. So you can build something excellent on land that you don't own, a great store in a leased building, a great business inside somebody else's platform, a great following on an app that you don't control. It works right up until the day that the person who does own it changes the terms and conditions. And they usually change the terms once you're doing well, right? They're not being mean. They just see how much you're making now. So you can ask yourself one question about every part of your business. If the owner of this changed the rules tomorrow, what happens to me? What happens to you? An app decides that your videos goes to fewer people. A marketplace raises its cut from 15% to 30%. A landlord sees you're lining up the door at 8:00 AM and doesn't renew your lease. And every one of those, you did the work and someone Somebody else own the thing that you are standing on. So the fix for this is build an email list, names and addresses of people who want to hear from you sitting in a file that you can export and take with you. That list is the only audience you actually own. Everything else is rented and the rent will keep going up. So same logic on the physical side, sign a 5-year lease and your landlord watches you get really busy. When it's time to renew, he raises the rent because he can see that you can afford it. So lock in your renewal price on the day that you sign while he doesn't think that you're worth that much yet. That clause costs you nothing today, and in year 6, It's the difference between you staying open and maybe closing down your business. So take 10 minutes tonight and list every platform, landlord, supplier who could end your business with one decision. Then start reducing that list one by one. Build your money 50. So your relationships aren't a risk like that. They're how you got every one of those deals in the first place. And I would protect them before protecting anything else. So here's how I make it helpful for me. Write a list of 50 people, not 500 contacts, not a follower account, 50 named human beings who each move real money into your business, either because they buy from you or because they send you people who can or who do. And getting that list right takes some thought, effort, takes an afternoon. Put those people whose introductions changes your year. Like if those people knew you, like you, trust you, what would it do for your entire year? And then those 50 people get something from you every month that has nothing to do with selling them anything. You send them a client, you send them the article that answers the exact problem that they they mentioned. You introduce 2 of them to each other. You text them the week their mother's having surgery because they told you about it. Like, do that for a year and you have something a competitor cannot buy with an ad budget. They can outspend you on advertising tomorrow morning if they wanted to. They cannot spend their way into 50 people who pick up the phone when your name shows up. Give them a license, never the ownership. This is the one that costs people usually the most money, and it happens in single sentence in a contract that almost nobody ever actually reads. So you build something for a client, a system, a course, a piece of software, a process, a set of designs, and in the paperwork it says that the client owns it. Change that. Make the rule that you give them a perpetual license to use that thing and you keep owning it. They get to use it forever. They're happy because using it is all they ever wanted and you still own the asset, which means you can build the next version, sell it again to somebody else, and turn one project into a product. It's the same work. It's the same one-off invoice. It's the same happy client. Sign it their way and the project ends with you owning nothing. Sign it your way and you still own something that you can sell for 10 more years to other people. So go read the last contract that you signed and find that clause. It's in there. And if you are the one writing the contracts, then write the licensed version starting now. Profit won't save you, cash will. This is another part that kills a lot of great businesses, and it's not the part that most people worry about. Profit won't Running out of cash is what usually closes the doors. You can be a profitable company and still go bankrupt because you just aren't getting the money showing up in time. So what happens here is expenses come in fast and payments come in slow. So you start the work in March, your team gets paid in March and April and May. The client then pays you in June. On paper, March looks like a great month. In the bank, March, April, and May are all empty bank accounts. So ask about the money before you take the job, not after. When does it get paid? Get paid? What's the deposit? What happens when they're 30 days late? A client who won't answer those questions is probably going to pay you late. And when you own real assets, ask the same questions of them. A rental making $300 a month is $3,600 a year. And that's the whole margin. One furnace costs more than that. Now if you take out a couple of vacant months, because the mortgage and the taxes kept running even though the rent stopped, so run that math before you buy. Otherwise, you're not actually being an owner. You're just on call to fix toilets for a margin that one furnace completely wipes out. The way I want you to think about it is this: buy it for less than it's worth. If it's worth $400,000 and you pay $340,000, you're up $60,000 before you do anything. Overpay instead, and you spend years just earning that amount back. That holds outside of real estate too. If a business makes $100,000 a year, don't pay $1 million for it. Buy the equipment used. Take the equity while the company is still small. Stop paying to look rich. A lot of smart people never start because they're scared of looking broke. So the car payment, the watch, the dinner you grab the bill for, the wedding built for an audience of people who you don't even know— every one of those decisions is trying to buy the appearance of wealth with the exact money that you could have bought the real thing. So every dollar you spend looking rich is a dollar you can't use to actually get rich. So next time you're about to buy something to impress people, ask what you could do for that same money. The $60,000 car is a down payment on a property. That $40,000 wedding upgrade is most of a second down payment. I'm not telling you to go live like a monk. I'm telling you to pay attention to like, what are you actually buying? The look of it or the real thing? Your money buys one or the other, but not both. All progress, I think, begins with telling the truth. So you can open your statements from the last month and put every line into 2 columns: things I own now and things I just showed people. You'll know what to do before you finish that sheet. What you own is what you keep. So nobody's coming to hand you an asset. You build one or you buy one and you do it with money that's currently going somewhere else. Start with one, the video library, the license clause, the 5% that moves automatically into investments. Even just one asset that pays you on a day that you didn't work is the whole game. If you have the ability, then you have the responsibility. If you can, then you The richest people say no far more often than you do. I just flipped through it and, you know, there's practically nothing in it. You've got to keep control of your time, and you won't keep control of your time unless you can say no. My inability as an adult female to say no, my— I call it my disease to please as a female, is the same thing that caused me to be victimized as a child. Every time you say yes to something When you focus on something small, it takes your focus off the big work that actually matters. I buy anything I want, basically, but I can't buy time. And so to have time is the most precious thing you can have. I better be careful with it. There's no way I will be able to buy more time. You have to be good at saying no and picking the things that really make a difference. Gallup published Gloria Marks' research at the University of California, Irvine And it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to what you were doing. So 6 interruptions in a day cost you more than 2 hours of the work you actually get paid for. There are a lot of things that are a waste of time. You have to prioritize your time really carefully. So here's how the rich focus on saying no. In 1997, Steve Jobs walked back into an Apple that had lost over $1 billion that year and was, in his own words, 90 days from being insolvent, going Instead, he spent his first months finding out what Apple was actually selling, and the answer was about 350 products. We started, um, with the product line. We looked at the product roadmap going out for a few years, and we said a lot of this doesn't make sense, and it's way too much stuff, and there's not enough focus. And so we actually got rid of 70% of the stuff on the product roadmap. There were printers, there were 12 versions of the Macintosh with model numbers that nobody could tell apart. Good products, most of them built by people who cared, but just too many, too many products. Apple had lost its focus. There were a lot of products. These were the product platforms, 15 product platforms and a zillion variants of each one. So he got a whiteboard out and he drew a square with 4 boxes in it. Across the top, consumer and pro. Down the side, desktop and portable. The new goal would be to have only one product per box. We went back to Business School 101 and we said, what do people want? Well, they want 2 kinds of products. They want consumer products, and we need pro products because our design and publishing market wants pro products, and some consumers do, and some education do as well. And in each of those 2 categories, we need desktop and portable models. That was his whole plan. Anything that didn't fit into one of those 4 boxes was canceled, and about 350 products became roughly 10. He had already explained what he meant by focus months earlier at Apple's development conference in May. A developer asked him about it from the floor, and here's exactly what he said. When you think about focusing, right, you think, well, focusing is, is saying yes. No, focusing is about saying no. Focus is about saying no. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts. Apple lost over $1 billion the year he came back. The next year it made $309 million. So right now you might be thinking, okay, he could do that because he's Steve Jobs and you're not. So this doesn't apply to you yet. Being Steve Jobs is not what made those nos expensive. He was canceling products his own engineers had spent years on, and he had to love at those people in the hallway afterwards. He said no anyway, and the company made money 12 months later. It worked because he knew exactly which 4 boxes he was building for, and 340 products weren't in them. You can name your own 4 boxes this week, whatever your business size is. So how do the rich actually do it? They decide what they'll say no to before anyone asks. Here are the 6 filters that they run. Make it such a yes that you'd break your own rule. So Derek Sivers built CD Baby into the biggest seller of independent music online and sold it for $22 million. Then came the speaking invitations, the consulting requests, the investment pitches, and he said yes to most of them just out of politeness. So he made one rule for himself. If it's not a hell yeah, it's a no. Here's how he puts it. Spend time doing, working, being things you love and are passionate about. If it doesn't excite you and you don't have to do it, say no. So So here's why he says it matters. Being busy means being out of control. You're too busy to react when the great opportunities come because you're busy with the mediocre ideas. So he turned down speaking gigs that paid well because they meant traveling somewhere that he didn't want to go to. The money was fine, it just wasn't a hell yeah for him, so he said no. He doesn't even let the yes be an option, and he says it like this: no yes. Either hell yeah or no. Anything in the middle is still a no. And he found the opposite of what he was Saying no more often didn't cost him relationships and made the yeses mean something greater because people could tell the difference between him being polite and him being all in. So try it on the next idea that comes in. If your first honest reaction isn't hell yeah, say no to it today instead of sitting on it for 2 weeks. Now, one warning, because this filter can be turned against you sometimes. There is a difference between doubt and fear. If the hesitation is that it doesn't fit with what you're building, that's doubt, and then it's a no. If the hesitation is that you might not be good enough, that's fear, and fear isn't a reason to say no. Don't sell anything you don't already use. Yvon Chouinard built Chouinard Equipment into the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the United States. His bestseller was the piton. It was a metal spike you hammer into a crack in the rocks that your rope has something solid to hold on to. Pitons paid for Everything. Then he went back to a climb in Yosemite that he'd done years earlier, and the rock was wrecked. Every climber coming through was hammering spikes into the same cracks and then hammering them back out to take them back home, and thousands of trips had chewed the stone apart. The spikes were his. He created this problem. So in 1972, he and Tom Frost put out their first catalog. It opened with an editorial called A Word about what pitons were doing to the rock. Behind it ran a 14-page essay by the climber Doug Robinson on the alternative, which was aluminum wedges that you slot into the crack with your hand and then lift straight back out. There was no hammer and there was no damage done to the environment. Then they stopped selling pitons. His bestseller was now gone. Within a few months, the piton business had completely dried up and the wedges were selling faster than they could make them. So he killed the product that was funding the entire company before the replacement had even proved itself. And he trusted that the customer who cared about the environment, about the rock, would follow him. They did. And the company that came out on the other side Right. Is now called Patagonia. So look at your own bestseller and ask whether you'd still put your name on it in public today. Only do deals for a product that you actually use. When I signed a 3-year deal with Sage, the accounting software, I moved my own accounting onto Sage to do it. Because if you're going to promote it, you want to be on it. So that goes for everything that you put your name on, the products that you resell, the partner that you send your clients to, the tool that you tell people to buy. If you wouldn't spend your own money on it, don't ask anybody else to either. Put a real number on who gets your time. Mark Cuban gets asked for his time constantly, and he answers nearly all of them the same way. No meetings or phone calls unless I'm picking up a check. Everything is email. Saves me hours and hours every day. He says the same about his lunch. I'm not big on let's go eat lunch. Meetings, same with phone calls. They're a waste of time. He told Inc. The rule for the ones that you can't get out of any meeting you actually sit for should have a duration and set outcome before you agree to go. A start, a finish, and what's it for agreed before you ever say yes. His reason is time. Your most valuable asset is your time, and it's perishable. Once it's gone, it's gone. You can't get it back. So he calls meetings the single biggest time. waster that there is. And he's not hiding from doing the work. He gets a lot of work done. He gets around 700 emails a day and he reads and answers them himself. I read and respond to emails. I work out. I read and respond to emails. I do a couple Zooms, then I read and respond to emails, then I eat dinner, then I read and respond to emails, he said. He'd rather get 700 to 1,000 emails, he says, than sit in long, boring meetings. Email is also searchable, which matters to him more than the speed does. He has so many businesses and investments that he wants it all in writing so he can go back and look it up months later. So he removed the entire category instead of just trying to manage it, and then told everybody what his rule was around meetings so they stopped asking. So decide what has to be on the table before you'll ever give somebody an hour of your time. For Cuban, it's money, and everything else gets an email. Say no to the client who guards their money instead of their time. Jason Fried has run the software company Basecamp for more than 20 years, and he has spent that time turning down the customers who would have paid him the most. He wrote a piece for Inc., the business magazine, called Why I Say No to Big Money Customers. So his rule is this, in his words, you get a great product by saying no to almost everything almost all the time. And that takes a certain degree of discipline that it's very hard to stick with, especially as you grow. He learned that selling shoes as a kid in Illinois, the big brands would send reps to arm the salespeople with facts about the fancy technology in the sole and the customers, they never really cared about it. They cared whether the shoe felt right. So he built a company that ships the smallest thing that works instead of the longest list of features and ideas. He puts it the other way around too. If you like saying yes, get better at saying no. No gives you more opportunities to say yes to the things you really want to do. And he's honest about why it's hard. It feels so easy to It's easy to say yes when that thing is 3 months out, right? But then it's hard when it's just around the corner. And he's clear about how to deliver it. Just be clear and set realistic expectations. Telling someone yes when you really mean no is a recipe for a bad experience down the road. His reason goes past just the product. He would rather have tens of thousands of small companies paying a little each month than a handful of big accounts paying the same amount, because losing one of those big accounts— Every bounce takes a fifth of the business with it, and a big customer drags the product towards what a big company wants and away from everybody else who is paying for it. There's a client who values their money more than their time. You can spot them in the first conversation. They negotiate before they understand what it even is that they're buying. They ask nitpicky questions about every step. Later, they try to go around you to save a fee somewhere, and when it gets hard, they ask for a refund. Don't take those clients. And be honest about who pays when you say yes. person on your team who has to manage that account for the next 6 months. And it's every good client who gets a little less of your attention because a difficult one is taking all of it. Give the no without the reasons. This one is hard for me. Charlie Munger was Warren Buffett's business partner at Berkshire Hathaway. He sat on a stage at their annual meeting for nearly 40 years in front of tens of thousands of people, and the line he became famous for was 5 words long. I have Nothing to add. The format put him on the spot every time, right? There's a shareholder meeting. They would come and they ask a question. Buffett would give answers at length, and then the microphone would go to Munger with the whole room turned towards him. What's he gonna say? That happened question after question all day, every year. His rule was, it's good to know when you think you can add value and when you can't. When it's the former, say something, and when it's the latter, remain quiet. Because he stayed quiet through most of it, the moments he did speak carried more weight than anything he could have added by just Filling in time. He applied the same rule to money too. He and Buffett sorted everything that came to them in 3 different boxes, and he named 'em like this. We have 3 baskets: in, out, and too tough. So most of what crossed the desk went into the third one, too tough. He said why that third box was so full. We have to have a special insight or we'll put it into the too tough basket. So nobody got a counteroffer or meeting to talk it through, or a letter explaining what was wrong with the business. It went into the pile and they just moved on to the next one. You could do the same with your own no. Give the answer and stop. It works like ending a relationship. The moment you give your reasons, you've handed over a list of things to argue with, and they'll never take every one, and none of it changes what you've decided anyway. Put your calendar next to what you say you want. Reed Hastings ran Netflix and took 6 weeks of vacation every year. Now, Netflix, they have no vacation policy at all. They're famous for this. So no allowance, no forms, No tracking. The policy is take vacation. His reason is the interesting part. Here's how he says it: You often do your best thinking when you're off hiking in some mountain or something. You get a different perspective on things. So to him, the time off was where the work happened, and he made sure that people saw him taking it. Time asked him how much vacation he took last year and how openly he talked about it, and he answered both of those things at once. He said five to six weeks. I'm definitely European in my habits now, and you know, send a picture. I'll make it clear that I'm in this great place on. Vacation. If the CEO never leaves, nobody below him believes the policy of taking unlimited vacation and getting people to actually use it was the whole point. The principle underneath is the one that he always repeats: lead with context, not control. He gave people enough context to decide for themselves and then removed the rules that would have decided it for him. So his 6 weeks off had no business reason on them, nothing to show for at the end of it, no deals closed, and he booked them every year anyway. The vacation policy isn't the only thing that he took away. Netflix's whole expense policy— this is awesome, it's 5 words long— act in Netflix's best interest. So there's no forms, no approval tiers, no receipt desk, nobody signing off on a flight, and no way to hide behind a rule when you spend money badly. So open your calendar and look at the next week day by day. What is the thing you need to be working on most right now? And find how much space you're actually given in your calendar. If it isn't in there, put it in now and give it real hours on a real day, not whatever gap is left over between between other things. And imagine yourself at 80 looking back at your life right now. If you don't take action, will you regret it? If yes, then start today. If no, then you have your answer and you can stop thinking about it and move on. You already know which one. Every no on this list is really a yes to something else. You have the same hours today that you had yesterday. What changes your year is what you take off the calendar. And you already know which things you need to say no to. You knew that before you even started of this video. So go say no today. Being leads to doing, and the person you're becoming doesn't keep that on the calendar. Getting rich comes down to what you own and almost nothing else. The rich don't work for money. So we learn to use debt to create assets, and assets keep putting money in our pocket. If I earned $10,000 or $3,000 or whatever extra money, whatever the number is, $1 billion, I would take the entire amount I'd go buy an asset that pays me cash flow, and I would always live off the cash flow, not the cash. The Federal Reserve tracks it. The richest 1% of American households own about half of all stock held by American households, and the bottom half of the country owns 1.1% of it. I own half of Sony's publishing, and I'm leaving them, and they, they're very angry at me because I just did good business. Content on the internet, it's an opportunity to provide value to the audience. It's a way to provide affinity towards you and your company by showing the humanity. And that gap decides whether you work until 70, whether you can turn down a bad client, and whether your kids get a head start or begin with nothing the way you did. In terms of content, there's never too much content. There's just— because what we want and And who we are and how we consume content changes every day through our experiences. You have to own assets that make you money while you sleep, that grow while you sleep. In July of 1973, a 29-year-old director signed a deal memo with 20th Century Fox. It paid him $150,000 to write and direct a science fiction movie the studio was not excited about. His name was George Lucas. Then his last film came out and changed everything. American Graffiti hit that August and made a fortune on a tiny budget. Suddenly Lucas was the director studios wanted, and he could go back to Fox and ask for more. He didn't ask for more money, he asked to keep 2 things the studio saw as leftovers: the sequel rights and the merchandising rights. I was very careful to say, I don't want more money, I don't want more points, I don't want anything financial, but I do want the right to make these sequels. Fox handed them over without much of a fight. Studios had lost money on movie merchandise before, and nobody in that building believed toys from a space movie were worth holding on to. They kept what looked valuable. They kept the box office. Up until that time, merchandising had been relatively unknown. When I took over the licensing, I simply said, I'm going to be able to make t-shirts, I'm going to be able to make posters, and I'm going to be able to sell this movie Even though the studio won't. So I managed to get control of pretty much everything that was left over that the studio didn't really care about. Here's what each side actually bought. So Fox, they bought a movie. Star Wars cost $11 million to make and grossed $410 million in its first run, and Fox did pretty well on it. Lucas bought the toys and the sequels, and they paid him for the next 35 years. So let's see how this started. 1977, the toys weren't even manufactured yet. So they sold an empty box with a certificate in it, promising to mail the figures later. Parents bought about 500,000 empty boxes. The actual toys shipped in February. That's how badly Fox misread what it gave away. People were paying full price for a piece of cardboard and an IOU. Lucas kept those rights for the rest of his working life. Every toy, every lunchbox, every t-shirt in for 35 years paid Lucas, not the studio. That's what let him build his own company instead of working inside somebody else's. And in 2012, he sold that company, Lucasfilm, to Disney for $4.05 billion. He didn't ask for a bigger check in 1973. He walked away with $4.05 billion in 2012. Same movie, different man. The difference is that he asked to own the pieces that nobody else wanted, and those pieces built the company that he sold. Now, here's an objection that people have when I tell them You're this. thinking that's fine for a Hollywood director with leverage, and you don't have any leverage, you have bills. And I hear you, I understand. I've had the months where the whole plan is just to get to Friday. But the reason to care about ownership is that it's the only thing that ever ends those bad months. A raise makes this year better, an asset makes every year better after it. It pays you when you're sick, it pays you when you're on vacation, it pays you when you've stopped working altogether. And you don't need Star Wars to tell you this. You need to own one thing that other people want, and you need to stop handing it away for a slightly bigger check. Here's exactly how the people who get this do it right. Move the income into the asset before it becomes a lifestyle. So the rule I give people is actually pretty easy. If you have high income, take that income and put it into the asset. Income by itself doesn't make you rich. What you do with it does. You can earn $400,000 a year, spend $400,000 a year, and own nothing at 55. And I've watched people do that while looking extremely successful the entire time. Here's what makes it hard, and it's not about discipline, it's about timing. Move it the same week that it lands before you get used to seeing that money in your bank account. After 3 weeks, that money feels like it's yours, and moving it into an asset feels like you're giving something up. Curtis Jackson did the extreme version of this, so he didn't take the cash and buy an asset with it. He turned down the cash And took the asset. When Vitaminwater came to him, the reported cash offer for putting his name on it was around $5 million. He pushed for a piece of the company, and in June of 2007, Coca-Cola bought Vitaminwater's parent company for approximately $4.1 billion. And his piece of that has been reported to be around $100 million before taxes. It was the same endorsement, it was his same face on the bottle, but he made a lot more money. So set your number tonight, pick a percentage of every payment that comes in and make it automatic and send it to something you own before you even look at it. If 20% is impossible, start with with 5%. That's a good start. And 5% moving every week beats 20% that you never actually do anything with. And be clear with yourself about what counts. An asset is something that either pays you money or grows in value that you can actually get at while you're not touching it. So shares in a company, a property that you can rent out, equity in a business, yours or someone else's, a piece of work that you made once that keeps selling. That's the core list. That's what an asset is. A car isn't on it. Neither is equipment that you bought for business that you haven't started yet. The home you live in is different. It might go up in value, but you can't get at that money while you're still living in it. And you still have to live somewhere. It doesn't pay you and you can't get at the growth without selling the roof over your head. So it's not on this list. So this week, write down which of those 4 you'd actually put money into and rank them. And every time you get money from now on goes into the top one. Know which one of the 3 models you're running. If you sell your skill, you're running one of 3 businesses. And almost all of the frustration I see comes running the wrong one for the money that you're charging. So the first is the craftsman. So clients are buying from you specifically, and every piece is just one of a kind. The only thing you can do is raise your prices in this model. So you go from $500 apiece to $1,000 to $10,000 to $50,000 apiece. But there are only so many hours in a week. Once your price is as high as it goes and your week is full, that's it. You can't earn more. So it's a great living, and it usually just stops there. The second is the agency. So you stop doing every job and become the head craftsman who trains other people to do the work. They'll be about 80% as good as And that's fine because you charge less than your one-of-a-kind price and you can serve 10 clients instead of just 2. And the third is mass market. So you take the thing that you already made and you sell a copy of it many times. A painter who sold one canvas for $1 million sells prints of that same painting forever. The work is done, the selling never stops. A lot of the pain I see comes from someone stuck in one model, charging Model 3 prices, working themselves into the ground. So pick Pick your model, choose it this week, and then price it like it is. So if you're a craftsman, then your rate has to go up. If you're the agency, then you hire more people. If you're mass market, then you stop taking custom jobs. Every one-off pulls you back into making things by hand. Build a content asset once and let it work forever. So here's an asset that you can build this month with no money at all. Write down the top 20 to 40 questions that your buyers ask you before they say yes to working with you. Not the questions you wish they asked, the real ones. The actual ones. How much does it cost? How long does it take? What if it doesn't work? Why are you more expensive than the other guy? Then answer every single one on camera, one video per question, and put them on your YouTube channel and on your website. Now count what that does. Every one of those conversations used to cost you 20 minutes on a phone call. You had the same conversation over and over and over for years. Now the video has it there for you at 2:00 AM while you're asleep with 40 people at once who are watching. And the person who books a call has already watched your videos. They show up ready to buy. Instead of just asking the basic questions. And that library of videos doesn't expire. So you build it in an afternoon and it's still selling for you in 10 years. You do the work one time and it keeps selling whether you show up on that day or not. Own the ground you're standing on. So this isn't only about money, it's also about whose ground that you are actually building on. So you can build something excellent on land that you don't own, a great store in a leased building, a great business inside somebody else's platform, a great following on an app that you don't control. It works right up until the day that the person who does own it changes the terms and conditions. And they usually change the terms once you're doing well, right? They're not being mean. They just see how much you're making now. So you can ask yourself one question about every part of your business. If the owner of this changed the rules tomorrow, what happens to me? What happens to you? An app decides that your videos go to fewer people. A marketplace raises its cut from 15% to 30%. A landlord sees your line at the door at 8:00 AM and doesn't And every one of those, you did the work and somebody else owned the thing that you were standing on. So the fix for this is build an email list, names and addresses of people who want to hear from you sitting in a file that you can export and take with you. That list is the only audience you actually own. Everything else is rented and the rent will keep going up. So same logic on the physical side, sign a 5-year lease and your landlord watches you get really busy. When it's time to renew, he raises the rent because he can see that you've been making money. Yeah. can afford it. So lock in your renewal price on the day that you sign while he doesn't think that you're worth that much yet. That clause costs you nothing today, and in year 6, it's the difference between you staying open and maybe closing down your business. So take 10 minutes tonight and list every platform, landlord, supplier who could end your business with one decision. Then start reducing that list one by one. Build your money 50. So your relationships aren't a risk like that. They're how you got every one of those deals in the first place, and I would protect them before protecting anything else. So here's how I make it helpful for me. Write a list of 50 people, not 500 contacts, not a follower count, 50 named human beings who each move real money into your business, either because they buy from you or because they send you people who can or who do. And getting that list right takes some thought, effort, takes an afternoon. Put those people whose introductions changes your year. Like if those people knew you, like you, trust you, what would it do for your entire year? And then those 50 people get something from you. every month that has nothing to do with selling them anything. You send them a client, you send them the article that answers the exact problem that they mentioned. You introduce 2 of them to each other. You text them the week their mother's having surgery because they told you about it. Like, do that for a year and you have something a competitor cannot buy with an ad budget. They can't outspend you on advertising tomorrow morning if they wanted to. They cannot spend their way into 50 people who pick up the phone when your name Give them a license, never the ownership. This is the one that costs people usually the most money, and it happens in a single sentence in a contract that almost nobody ever actually reads. So you build something for a client, a system, a course, a piece of software, a process, a set of designs, and in the paperwork it says that the client owns it. Change that. Make the rule that you give them a perpetual license to use that thing and you keep owning it. They get to use it, but you keep owning it. That's a good one. They're happy because using it is all they ever wanted. And you still own the asset, which means you can build the next version, sell it again to somebody else, and turn one project into a product. It's the same work. It's the same one-off invoice. It's the same happy client. Sign it their way and the project ends with you owning nothing. Sign it your way and you still own something that you can sell for 10 more years to other people. So go read the last contract that you signed and find that clause. It's in there. And if you're the one writing the contracts, then write the licensed version starting now. Profit won't save you, cash will. This is another part that kills a lot of great businesses, and it's not the part that most people worry about. Profit won't save you. Running out of cash is what usually closes the doors. You can be a profitable company and still go bankrupt because you just aren't getting the money showing up in time. So what happens here is expenses come in fast and payments come in slow. So you start the work in March, your team gets paid in March, in April, April and May. The client then pays you in June. On paper, March looks like a great month. In the bank, March, April, and May are all empty bank accounts. So ask about the money before you take the job, not after. When does it get paid? What's the deposit? What happens when they're 30 days late? A client who won't answer those questions is probably going to pay you late. And when you own real assets, ask the same questions of them. A rental making $300 a month is $3,600 $400,000 a year. And that's the whole margin. One furnace costs more than that. Now, if you take out a couple of vacant months, because the mortgage and the taxes kept running even though the rent stopped— so run that math before you buy. Otherwise, you're not actually being an owner. You're just on call to fix toilets for a margin that one furnace completely wipes out. The way I want you to think about it is this: buy it for less than it's worth. If it's worth $400,000 and you pay $340,000, you're up $60,000 before you do anything. Overpay instead, and you spend years just earning that amount back. That holds outside of real estate too. If a business makes $100 grand a year, don't pay $1 million for it. Buy the equipment used, take the equity while the company is still small. Stop paying to look rich. A lot of smart people never start because they're scared of looking broke. So the car payment, the watch, the dinner you grab the bill for, the wedding built for an audience of people who you don't even know— every one of those decisions is trying to buy the appearance of wealth with the exact money that you could have bought the real thing. So every dollar Every dollar you spend looking rich is a dollar you can't use to actually get rich. So next time you're about to buy something to impress people, ask what you could do for that same money. The $60,000 car is a down payment on a property. That $40,000 wedding upgrade is most of a second down payment. I'm not telling you to go live like a monk. I'm telling you to pay attention to like, what are you actually buying? The look of it or the real thing? Your money buys one or the other, but not both. All progress, I think, begins with So you can open your statements from the last month and put every line into 2 columns: things I own now and things I just showed people. You'll know what to do before you finish that sheet. What you own is what you keep. So nobody's coming to hand you an asset. You build one or you buy one, and you do it with money that's currently going somewhere else. Start with one: the video library, the license clause, the 5% that moves automatically into investments. Even just one asset that pays you on a day that you're not working. That you didn't work is the whole game. If you have the ability, then you have the responsibility. If you can, then you must. Outworking the people around you still works, and it's never been easier to do. Need to work super hard. And I mean, if you do simple math, say like, okay, if somebody else is working 50 hours and you're working 100, you'll get twice as done as much done in the course of a year as the other company. If you don't work hard every single day, you will perish. Gallup found that Full-time American employees worked 42.9 hours a week in 2024, down from 44.1 in 2019. I begin each morning by doing my highest priority work first. I have a very clear priority list, and I start from the highest priority work first. Before I even get to work, my day is already a success. If it's not in the calendar, it won't get done. It's not really a priority, right? You have to make sure That gap is 62 hours a year, and that's a new skill, a finished project, or the side business that you keep saying that you're going to start one day. You have to prioritize your time really carefully. The way that I've found to stay focused, be productive, and not get distracted is, one, by auditing my time so that I know, one, what I'm supposed to be working on, and then two, that at the end of any task, I'm going to reflect on what I got done and what I didn't get done. Back on how long it took me, how much time did I spend on task. So here's how a true workaholic actually works. Jensen Huang runs Nvidia, and he works seven days a week. The reason goes back to 1996 when the company came one chip away from dying. You're getting ready to ship the Riva 128, and you guys have got six months of cash left. In 1993, three engineers sat in a Denny's in San Jose and started a company. company with $40,000. Jensen Huang was one of them, Chris Malachowski and Curtis Priem were the other 2. They made graphic chips, and for the first 3 years, they made them badly. At the time that we started the company in 1993, we were the only consumer 3D graphics company ever created. By the time that we realized we had gone down the wrong road, Microsoft had already rolled out DirectX. It was fundamentally incompatible with Nvidia's architecture. 30 competitors have already shown up, uh, even though We were the first company at the time that we were founded, so the world was a completely different place. By 1996, the company was nearly dead. Huang laid off about half the company. Everyone left had one chip to bet on and not enough money to build it the normal way. Our backs were up against the wall. We were running out of time, we're running out of money, and for a lot of employees, running out of hope. So here's how building a chip normally goes. You design it, you pay a factory to make a small batch, physical samples come back, You test them, you find the mistakes, you fix the design, and you pay for another batch. The plan that companies normally go through, which is, you know, build the chip, write the software, fix the bugs, tape out the new chip, so on and so forth. Every round costs months and money. Nvidia could afford one production run and nothing after that. So Huang made a bet that should have killed the company. He spent a big piece of the money he had left on an He used an emulator, tested the entire chip on that machine, and never held a real sample in his hand. We also made the decision to use this technology called emulation. Then he ordered the full production run on a chip that nobody on Earth had even touched. If the emulator was wrong about one detail, there was no second batch and there was no company. You decide to do the entire testing in simulation rather than ever receiving a physical prototype. You commission the production run sight unseen with the rest of the company's money. So you're betting it all right here on the RIVA 128. Yeah, the chip was the RIVA 128, and by the time it shipped, there was enough cash left to cover one more month of salaries. It sold a million units in 4 months. NVIDIA lived. Was everybody telling you you were crazy? No, everybody was clear we had no shot. Not doing it would be crazy because otherwise you might as well go home. You're going to be out of business anyways. Well, it worked. Yeah. And for years afterward, Huang opened his presentations by telling the room that the company was 30 days from going out of business. He still works like a man who believes that. He has around 60 people reporting directly to him, and he holds no scheduled one-on-ones with any of them. Nvidia's leadership team is 60 plus, 60 people. Yeah. And they all report to you? They— yeah, they all report to me. 60 direct reports? 60 direct reports. Yeah. I don't do one-on-ones. I give you feedback right there in front of everybody. Here's how he describes his week. I work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, and I work 7 days a week. Now that's a true workaholic. But he isn't just putting in more hours. He set his whole company up so that those hours count. And right about now, You might be thinking, okay, that sounds like the fastest way to burn yourself out. And I hear you. I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to be how you run your company, but when somebody joins me, I ask them a question. How many hours do you want to be working and how many are you working right now? Then I write a contract to match it. Some of the people on my team work 25 hours a week. Some are at 70. Both work fine because the hours aren't what usually breaks people. The wrong work is. Hours on work that matters make you good. Hours on work that doesn't matter will wreck you whether you're 25 or 70 hours a week. And Jensen Huang isn't spending his week on boring paperwork. He built a company with no managers between him and the information, so he spends his hours deciding, making important choices. You can set up your week the same way. So here's how a real workaholic spends a day. Split your week into building days and meeting days. So my week splits into building days, maker days, and manager days, which are meeting days. So Wednesday and Fridays, those are my maker days. Wednesday is my creator day and Friday is my CEO day. And on both days, I don't have anything booked. Monday and Thursday, those are my manager days. I stack them with calls. Tuesday is a maker day on paper as well. It's my YouTube day, so nothing gets booked on it either. Here's why I'm strict about it. One 60-minute call dropped in the middle of a building day does not cost you 60 minutes. It costs you almost a whole day. in the morning knowing that it's coming so you don't start any deep work. Then you spend the hour on the call doing the thing. Then you spend the afternoon getting your head back. And by the time you're thinking clearly again, it's already 4:00 PM. I mean, you've built nothing. A meeting day and a building day are 2 different jobs. On a meeting day, you're reacting, you're answering, you're trying to make decisions quickly with people. On a building day, you go down into one thing and stay there for 4 hours. Try to do both in the same morning and you'll be wiped out by Friday with nothing finished. So pick one day this week and close it. Start with whatever you can book off and then grow it to a whole day. Move every call off it, even the good ones. Then take everything you moved and jam it into one other day. So I use 2 meeting days for meetings because of the size of my team and what I'm working on. But start with one, and on that day you might get through 6, 7 conversations in a row, and you'll still have the next whole day free to actually go build something. Even half a day is a good start, then you grow it. Give every day one job. So inside those days, I give each one a single theme. So Monday is my team day, and I spend the whole day mentoring and talking to the people on my team. Tuesday is my YouTube day. I'm filming this video on a Tuesday. Wednesday is my creator day, my project day. Thursday mornings, I do my group trainings, and Thursday afternoons, I save for friends and friends of friends and podcasts. Friday is my CEO day. The reason why I have different days for different things is switching. Every time you jump from a sales call to editing a video to a hiring decision to support emails. It takes a while to get your head into the new thing every single time. So you feel busy all day and you finish your week with like 4 and a half things finished. A theme day means you never have to catch up. So on Tuesday, I'm not taking calls, I'm not taking meetings. I'm just locked in on my YouTube. My tools are open, my camera's ready to go, my head is already there, and I'll film a stack of videos one Tuesday that keeps my channel fed for at least a week. I can only do that because I'm not bouncing between things, and the bouncing is what creates most of the chaos and mental fatigue. So look at last week and count how many different kinds of work you touched on your worst day. If it's more than 3, that's your problem. You're not lazy. The problem is you're just switching too much between different kinds of tasks. Then name your own day. So for me, Monday's people, Tuesday is making YouTube videos, like whatever fits your business, write it somewhere where you will see it. And when somebody asks for a Tuesday sales call, tell them Thursday works better. They will almost never be offended. That's the part that most people worry about and it Hardly ever happens. So they book on the Thursday and they start treating your calendar like it's worth something because you treated it that way to begin with. The people who take your protected days almost always are not doing it on purpose. They take it because it's available. So stop making it available. You made it available. And listen, you're going to have real emergencies. So you can decide right now what the rule is going to be for emergencies. For me, I'm training my team so they know if you are calling me on a Tuesday, if you are interrupting me, you're sending me something, I'm in the middle of making videos, so it better be important. And people respect that boundary. And there are almost no emergencies that ever pop up. So the first few weeks, that's going to be a little bit harder. People are used to your old calendar, they might test a new one a handful of times. The more you hold steady, this is my calendar, the more they respect it. Shrink the block and move it off your morning. Every meeting I run is scheduled to end 5 minutes early. So a 25-minute call instead of 30, a 55-minute instead of an hour. That gives me 5 minutes to go to the bathroom, to get some water, to get my head straight before the next thing starts. So you never know when you're gonna have to go pee. And a day with no gaps is also where you can feel frazzled at the end. That's the smaller version. And here's the bigger one. I used to check a whole list of websites every morning and it would take me a while to get through all of them. It felt very productive. It also was the first thing I did every day, which my best hours went to reading other other people's work. So I ran an experiment. I condensed it into half an hour at 1 o'clock every day. And in that half hour, I have to get it done. And look at that, I get it done in half an hour instead of 90 minutes in the morning. If you give a task 2 hours, it usually takes 2 hours. So you could start doing this today. You could take the task that is eating your mornings. You can cut the time by 2/3, move it to the afternoon, set a timer. When the timer goes off, you're done, whether you are finished or not. The first 2 days, it'll a little bit rushed. By day 3, you'll notice the work was never actually filling that whole block anyway. Your mornings are your best hours, so don't spend them on small stuff. Kill the work before you speed it up. So I have a formula I use for this, and the order is the whole thing. It's eliminate, automate, delegate. That is the order. It's a particular order. Eliminate comes first, and almost nobody starts there. You'll buy software to speed up a task that you should have just deleted. Now you're paying And you'll end up paying every month to do something that doesn't actually matter, or you'll hand it to a person, which is worse because now somebody's week is filled with work that was never worth doing in the first place. So eliminate first, then automate what's left. A tool can automate whether it's a software, whether it's AI, et cetera. This isn't only a business framework, it's a framework for anything in life. Anytime you're feeling stressed out or overwhelmed, that feeling is a signal that you need to go eliminate a few things from your life, not to worry about them. work faster, to have and do less. All progress begins, I think, with telling the truth. And the truth is usually that a third of your calendar is there because it was just there last month. So here is the assignment. Open last week's calendar and find the recurring thing that you'd be a little embarrassed to defend, right? The report, the check-in, the updates that people are not replying to. Skip it on purpose. Say nothing. If a week goes by and nobody notices, skip it again. Do that for a month and it's gone for good. One number, 3 drivers, and nothing else. So I have a brain that wants to chase everything, right? Left alone, I'll start 6 projects on a Sunday. So I keep one Google Sheet and I have what I call my wildly important number. At the top, there's one number. It's not a feeling, it's not a theme, it's a number. And under it, there are exactly 3 drivers and each one is also a number, something I can count at the end of the week to see my progress. That's the whole document. 3 is the limit and it matters. 2, when you're not really running a business, you're running a project. 4 or more and you just have no Priorities at all. You just have a list of to-dos that almost never get done. So to put it in a rhythm that makes it work, every time I'm checking in with my team, that number gets updated before the check-in. So you can see in a glance whether it's moving, but the number itself and the 3 drivers underneath it, they don't get swapped out because some shiny idea showed up on a Tuesday afternoon. The numbers hold for months. So if a driver turns out to be wrong, you change it deliberately, not because you're just in a mood to change things. That saved me months. More time than any app I've ever bought. The new project isn't the problem. The problem is the old one sitting half-finished for 6 weeks while you play with this new idea. So write your number down tonight, write your 3 drivers underneath it, then look at tomorrow and find the block that doesn't move your number or any of your 3 drivers. There's always one. That's the block that goes away. Do 3 a day while they do one a week. So here's where your extra hours now should go. When I was young and part of an agency, I was the least skilled person on the team. That's not me being humble. I was measurably the worst. So I did homework. Everyone else was putting out a video a week. I made 3 a day, every day, including weekends. One in the morning, one at lunch, one at dinner. And my agent was looking at them, giving me feedback. So if we count what that does, in a single week, I got 21 reps and a piece of feedback on each video I made. The person next to me got Only one rep over a month. That's 84 corrections against their four. I didn't catch up to them because I was smarter. I wasn't. I was not naturally more gifted. I caught up because I'd been wrong 84 more times than they had, and every one of those got fixed. So that's what the extra hours are for: more attempts at the thing that you're trying to get better at. And after every attempt, somebody tells you what you did wrong. So find your rep. If it's a salesperson, then you're taking calls. If you're making videos, then it's videos. If you write, then it's pages. Count how many you. did last week, then do that many in a day and let the quality drop a little while you do it. You'll be embarrassed by attempt number 7 and you'll get better by attempt number 15. And find out how it went as fast as you can. If nobody tells you what you got wrong, then you're not getting better. You're just practicing the wrong things. You're just staying busy. Start your day before the work starts. So every workaholic I admire protects the first stretch of the day and spends it with intention on purpose. So back to Jensen Huang from NVIDIA, he gives his time to his I give mine to a walk, so I call it the Believe Walk. It's one word hashtag and it's 3 steps. Step 1, wake up and get outside fast. Put a stopwatch on. I'm out the door within 15 minutes. That part matters more than the walking because the alternative is picking up your phone and the second you do that, you're starting to hand your life, your day to whoever happens to be overwhelming you with email or Instagram. Step 2 is the walk, right? Fresh air, move for 20 to 30 minutes. Some mornings I'll throw a rucksack on, extra weight, but that's an extra point. You don't have to do that. You just have to get outside. And then step 3? And step 3, listen to somebody who's already done what you're trying to do. So I'll put on Steve Jobs or Howard Schultz. You're borrowing their belief until yours show up. So this is not about trying to have some productivity hack. It's about who you are when you sit down. I think being leads to doing. So do your believe walk. Get outside, walk, put something in your ears. It helps you believe in yourself more. And if you're tight on time, 10 to 15 minutes is enough. That's the baseline. And it's more than enough to change your life. You have 15 minutes. Make the information come to you. So working hard only pays off if you hear about problems quickly. Huang has about 60 people reporting straight to him. Like I said, no scheduled one-on-ones, nobody filtering what reaches him. When he gives feedback, he does it in front of the group so everyone hears the same reasoning at the same time, and he never has to say it 60 times. And every morning, he reads a stack of short emails from people all over the company, each one listing the 5 things that matter So look at what that design does. A normal CEO waits 2 weeks and sits through 4 meetings to hear the same thing. He reads it first thing in the morning in 5 lines. So he spends his day deciding and not just chasing people all day for updates. You can build that at any size. If you have a team, you can cancel your next status meeting and ask for 5 lines instead. If you work alone, you're still losing time just hunting for information. Yeah, I Information. mean, I think that's a really good point. It's spread across all of your different apps. Every extra app you have to open is another place to go looking and lose time. One inbox, one task list, one document where the plan lives. If you have to check 4 apps to find out what you're supposed to do today, you'll spend your best hour just finding it out and get nothing done. A bird sitting on a branch isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, but it's in her wings. So build the system so the information reaches you and then trust Trust yourself to decide. You have more room than you think. So nobody gets more hours in a day than you do, right? The people who beat you work the hours everyone else gave up and they spend them on fewer things. So close one day, name your days, cut a block by 2/3, delete the reports nobody reads. Pick your number. If you can do that, then you must. Where you are next year comes down to what you do with this. The rich get paid over and over for work they did once. And right now, every hour you work only pays you once. My biggest moneymaker is called IP, intellectual property. And all of you as entrepreneurs have that intellectual property in your head. So the best business, I believe, is one that doesn't have to put up— invest capital, but earns a passive income. Perpetuity growth annuity. The Congressional Budget Office found that only a third of the top 1%'s income comes from actually working. It's all a matter of leverage. If you know how to leverage yourself well, then you're going to be able to get more life out of life. You know why I'm a nice guy? It's leverage. When you're giving more than you're asking for, you've got the leverage. I like leverage. That other two-thirds is what pays them on the weeks that they don't work, and you can build a small version of it this year. The companies that will succeed in this transition period will be the ones that most effectively use AI. If you're doing something and making maximum use of AI and you're competing against someone who is not, you will win. It doesn't matter what field of science I'm going to go into or what profession I am. I'm going to ask myself, how can I use AI to do my job? So here's how the rich focus on leverage. J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book in Edinburgh's cafes, and the series has now sold more than 600 million copies. In the early 1990s, she was a single mother writing in cafes because she couldn't afford much else, working on the story of a boy who finds out he's a wizard. My circumstances then were that I was a single parent, recently divorced, not working. Very, very broke. A lot of the book, in fact the whole of chapter 10, was written in here. The single idea was, um, was Harry, this boy who didn't know he was a wizard. She finished it, then 12 publishers turned it down. The 13th was a small house called Bloomsbury. The chairman there, Nigel Newton, did something no other publisher had done. He took the first chapter home and gave it to his 8-year-old daughter Alice. Alice read it and and came back asking for the next chapter. Then she kept asking. That's the entire reason the book got published. I gave the manuscript to my daughter Alice, um, the night I got it, and she couldn't stop reading, so I had to tear it off her the next morning. So, well, I think I'm gonna buy this. What do you think? She said, that's a good idea. Bloomsbury printed it in June of 1997. The first hardback run was 500 copies. Not 500,000. 500. Rowland wrote that book once. Writing it took her years, and that got her the first 500 copies. The 501st copy took her no extra time at all. Not an extra hour, not an extra word she had to write. The work was already finished. She didn't write it again for the 2nd printing, or for the 100th, or for the edition that comes out in a language that she doesn't even speak. Every copy after the first was the same pages doing the job again in countries she never visited while she was sleeping. That series is now sold Over 600 million copies in more than 80 languages. It's the best-selling book series in history. The book that got a 500-copy print run and the book they translated into 80 languages, it's the same book. Nothing about the writing changed. What changed is how many people wanted a copy. I don't think we realized, I don't think Jo realized, probably for a year after that, that this phenomenon was growing as fast as it did. And that's when she got Huge number of offers from the United States, and they paid very large amount of money, um, for the American rights. That's leverage. You do the work one time and it keeps paying you. So here's how the rich focus on leverage and how you can do it yourself. There are 6 ways to get paid more than once for the same hour, and you can start the first one this week. Stop selling your hours So start with how you actually get paid right now. And if the answer is that you sell blocks of your time, then you have a ceiling and you already know where that ceiling is. So you multiply your rate by the hours that you work in a week. That is your ceiling. You can raise the rate, how much you charge, but we all get the same 24 hours in a single day. So the move now is to sell the same thing more than once. Take the thing that you do for one client at a time and build the version of it that can serve 30 or 35 or 50 clients. $3,000, a group instead of one-on-one, a course instead of a call, a template instead of a custom build, a subscription instead of a project. Start with what you already deliver most often. So look at what you've already built for 5 different clients where it was basically the same work each time, just the names of the clients changed. That's the one that you start to package and you don't need it to be perfect. Run it once with 5 people at a lower price and tell them that it's the first version and they're getting a real deal here. They'll tell you what's missing. You fix it and now you have a thing that sells without you having to do more work. That's leverage. That's the whole point. You can price a group version at somewhere between a quarter and a third of whatever your one-on-one rate is. And then you tell them why they're getting less of you and more of each other. And for a lot of people, that's actually a better deal because the person that is 2 steps away from them can think of and answer questions that you never even thought to cover and run it live the first few times instead of prerecording the whole thing at the start, because a couple weeks in, you'll notice exactly where people are getting stuck, and those are the parts that you record and turn into a repeatable process, right? So build it out of what the first group actually needs, not out of what you guessed that they would need. One-on-one work is good work, it pays well, and it's how you can actually learn what people need. But if it's the only thing you sell, then you can only earn as many hours as you can work. So when you stop, the money stops. The rich focus on leverage. Record the answer once and stop repeating yourself. So every week you answer the same questions over and over again, right? What's your pricing? How long does it take? Do I need any experience? What happens if it doesn't work out? And you answer them in person, live, on emails, on calls, and then you do it again, the same thing next week, next week, next week. You're being the dancing monkey. You do the same routine for every new person who comes to you, and they only pay you one time each. So the The homework is write down every question that you have genuinely answered more than twice this month, and you'll land between 20 and 40 different questions. Then record the answer to each one. In Movement Makers, we call these buyer breakthrough videos. It's you on camera answering the exact questions that stop somebody from buying. You can do it on your phone. It's fine. You don't need a script. You don't need to worry about editing. Just say the thing that you are already saying to clients when they ask you the question. Now that answer goes to work without you having to do extra work. It goes on YouTube channel first, so it has a home. Link to it, then it goes in your onboarding email, it goes on the pricing page where people stall before they buy. You send them the link when someone asks instead of having to type out the same 6 paragraphs for the 30th time this week. And then we can run the numbers on one question that you get asked the most. So let's say you answer the question 5 times, right? And it takes 6 minutes. That's 30 minutes every week, which is 26 hours every year. One video recording buys back most of those 26 hours every year for as long as you're in business. It also works overnight. You're sleeping and the video is still answering. Somebody watches your video at 11 PM on a Sunday and then books you. You didn't do anything new there. That's the whole idea— leverage. And make those videos findable, not just ones that they'll sit in some folder and rot. So put every recording in one document with the question written above it in the customer's own words. So don't call it onboarding FAQ number 4. Use their actual words instead. So, do I need to have Any experience, then anybody on your team can find the right link in 10 seconds without having to ask you for it, right? We're trying to reduce the amount of time you have to spend. Now, you might think this feels impersonal, but it's actually the other way around. A video of you with your face beats a typed paragraph every single time. It builds more connection. It answers the exact thing that they were nervous about, and they can watch it at midnight at their own convenience, which is where their questions actually show up. Make one thing do 5 jobs. So here's where this often goes wrong. You make one video, you put it on YouTube, you You wait for views, nothing happens, and you decide that making content doesn't work for your business. The video is fine, but you only gave it one job. Take one good piece of content and give it 5 jobs before you make another one. So you could put it on the page where people are deciding to buy. You can send it in your welcome email so new people meet you properly on day one. You can give it to whoever handles your sales so that when somebody goes quiet, they have something real to send instead of just, uh, hey, I'm checking in. You can put it at the bottom of your next newsletter. You can answer a question with the video in a group or a forum where your Buyers already are. It's the same recording, but it's five different placements. You did the work once, and now it sits in five different places doing five different jobs, and almost none of them rely on a platform or an algorithm to show it to anyone. So let's do an example. Let's say you're a bookkeeper, and you record the answer to like, "What do I need to have ready before our first session?" Right? That answer goes on your pricing page. It kills the fear that signing up with you means losing a weekend to admin. It goes in the welcome email as the first thing. A new client sees. It gets sent to the person who went cold on you in March. It sits at the bottom of your next newsletter. It goes under a post in a local business group where somebody asks that question. One recording, 5 jobs, and 4 of them land in front of somebody whether or not a platform or an algorithm decides to show it. This is what we call the edge of the puzzle. So figure out the border first, which is what a piece of content is for, before you get lost in the thumbnails and the titles and the posting schedules. Those are the middle Pieces of the puzzle. They only make sense once the border is built. So before you record anything, write down where it's going to live. And if the honest answer is YouTube, and then I hope, you haven't built leverage. You've just uploaded something and hoped. And then go back through what you've already made. You almost certainly have something from last year that's still good and is still just doing one job or sitting in a folder doing nothing. Get it to 5 places this week without having to make any new content. Have one conversation a week for a year. So you've been told that you need to have a big audience before any of this works, and you don't. Building millions of views takes years, and waiting for it is why so many people quit inside the first year. Let's do some math here. So commit to one conversation a week. Start a biz dev show, which is what we call it inside our Movie Makers program. It looks like a podcast, and its job is to build a relationship with the person that you're interviewing. So interview people who have a real client list, but nobody in your space has ever thought to ask for an interview, the high-end lawyer, the CPA who specializes in your industry, the person who runs a $20 million company who's never been interviewed in their life. Never interviewed is what you want. Pick the ones who could be worth 6 or 7 figures a year to your business if they just knew you, liked you, and trusted you. That's 52 conversations a year, and it costs you 1 to 2 hours a week. You're giving first. You're not asking them for anything. You're putting them on camera, making them look good. Then you send them some edited clips of them themselves, and they can share those clips with their own audience, their clients, which are also your potential clients, because everybody shares the thing that makes them look good. Now let's run some pessimistic numbers on this. So say most of it goes badly. Out of 52, uh, only 10 of them ever send you anything. And of those 10, they send you 1 referral a quarter once you've actually met them. Since you're still doing the interviews all year, that's roughly 20 referrals in year 1 and 40 a year after that. Close a quarter of those at whatever your average deal size is. If your average deal is $5,000, year 1 is $25K for 1 to 2 hours a week, and year 2 was $50K without you having to add anything new. That's the pessimistic version, and it's money that isn't in your business right now. Some of those 52 people, they have a list, they have a team, they have a room full of clients for you. You didn't have to build anything new and you don't have to pay for it. And the ask is one short email because you're the one giving. So I'm starting a new podcast on whatever the industry is that you're talking to where I interview people who are experts Excellent at what they do. Thirty minutes, I send you the video and you can use the clips however you want. I'd love to feature your story. That's the message. The people who you want have almost never been asked, and the ones that say no, it only costs you the time to send the email. So pick ten names today and email the first one before you close your laptop. Let the software make the copy. So treat AI like a power tool. So it goes to all the repetitive parts of your work, of the business, and it stays out of the parts that need an important decision. So one long video can go into a tool that cuts them into 10 short clips. One recorded message can come back as a transcript, as a summary. It could be a list of what needs to be done by when. One long answer to a customer question could come back as an email that you send, a post that you can publish, a page that can live on your website. You're not creating 10 new things each time. You made one thing and the machine reshaped it into 10. It's the same 1 hour of work with 10 different shapes. But there's an order to this, and getting it backwards is what wastes tons of time, effort, money, energy. Do it Manually first, badly with real customers until you know that it works. Then you automate it. Automating something you don't even know works yet means you're building a machine, creating things that nobody wanted. That's AI slop. Nail it, then scale it in that order every time, and keep your hands on the part that is actually you. So AI writing your whole video makes something that sounds like everybody else. Generic is not what's going to help you sell your business. The machine is brilliant at copying and reformatting and summarizing, but it's bad at. Actually being you. So let it copy the work and reformat it, but it can't copy you. So start with whatever you do every single week and don't have a ton of judgment that needs to go into it. You're moving files, you're sending the same reminders, you're copying a name from one system to another, you're chasing the invoices always late. Hand those things over first because when the machine gets one small thing wrong, it's easy to fix. Spot check it for the first couple of weeks anyway. Leave anything with a decision in it A loan for now, pricing an unusual job, telling a client some bad news, deciding who you're going to hire next. Hand those over to AI at the beginning and you'll be apologizing to people for something that a machine decided. So use it for the copies and you stay on the parts that need an actual person. Leverage only compounds if you stop starting over. So none of this works or adds up if you start starting over every 2 years. So leverage stacks. This is what the rich understand. The FAQ videos you record this month are mostly still working for you in 3 years, rerecording the pricing ones with your pricing change, and the rest just kind of sit there and grow for you. The 10 relationships out of those 52 that actually stuck are still sending you referrals in year 4. Every piece is added to a pile that keeps growing, and it grows faster because each new piece has more places to live. Then you rebrand, new niche, new name, new website, new everything, new direction. And most of that pile just stops working for you. The recordings are now about the old thing, and the audience knows you by the old name, and you carry almost none of it forward. Into the new thing. I've watched the same person rebrand 4 times in 10 years, and every single time it feels like you're doing something. And starting over is exciting, but maintaining is boring. Every restart throws away years of compounding. So the task is simple. Ask yourself what you were building 2 years ago. If what you're building today can't use any of it, that's why nothing has stacked up for you yet. So pick a direction that you can live with for 5 years and let the boring version go and keep improving on the boring version. Improve what you've already got instead of trying to replace it. And whatever the number is that you have in your head of what this could become, that's a good start. Now go bigger, because a small number makes you stop building the moment that you reach it. And the first wins here show up in weeks and keep compounding from there. Do the work once. You don't need more hours. You have the same 7 days as everyone else, and you're already tired. You need work you did once to keep paying you after So pick the one thing you've already built for 5 different clients and start there this week. Security in a corporate job doesn't exist anymore. The safe job is about to be unsafe. 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 its employees 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 businesses. 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 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. Sticking to 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 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 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 years 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? 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 the startup. I chose the 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 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 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 past. 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 travel, 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. 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, 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 So 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 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 yourself. You can literally rewire your entire brain from 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 inputs, the outputs will transform forever. But once you've 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 2%. If your goal is to write a book, bestselling book, the first 2% is writing just one single page. If your goal is to start a massive YouTube channel, awesome. The first 2% 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. What 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 5 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 gonna 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 Model the massive success of others. You don't need to figure out all of this on your own. That was 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. Yeah, and I think Study that's a really important point. their public website, 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 2 times more likely to survive their first 5 difficult years. When my first business was struggling, I felt completely hopeless. 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 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 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've 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 just. Really 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 action. So you wake up every morning with a clear intention: make today truly count. Before you hit head, your tired head on the pillow 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 is 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. If you're broke right now, it's not because you're lazy or because you're not smart enough. It's because the game was designed for you to lose, and nobody ever handed you the real playbook. The Federal Reserve's own data shows the bottom 50% of Americans own just 2.5% of the wealth in the entire country, which means half the people in the richest nation on Earth are fighting over crumbs. But 500 years ago, a ruthless Italian named Machiavelli wrote down the cold, brutal strategies that the powerful were using to win and keep winning and Today I'm handing you 10 of them because the day you stop playing fair with a system that was never fair to you is the day everything starts to change. Let me tell you about a man named Ronald Read. He grew up dirt poor on a farm in Vermont, so poor that he hitchhiked and walked miles just to get to school. He came home from the war and spent about 25 years pumping gas at a gas station, and then he worked as a janitor at JCPenney sweeping floors for another 17 years. He never made much money in his life. He wore the same same old flannel coat held together with safety pins and drove a beat-up secondhand car. So when Ronald Reed died in 2014 at 92 years old, the people in his small town got the shock of their lives. This quiet janitor had left behind an estate worth almost $8 million. He gave $4.8 million to his local hospital and $1.2 million to the library. How does a gas station attendant and a janitor die richer than most doctors? He spent less than he earned He bought shares of boring, solid companies, and then he did the hardest thing of all— he waited for decades. He let his money quietly multiply while everyone around them spent theirs on stuff that fell apart. He wasn't lucky, he wasn't a genius. He was patient, he was disciplined, and that combination beats a giant paycheck every single time. Now you might be thinking, okay, that's great for Ronald, but I'm living paycheck to paycheck. I can barely cover my rent. So how am I supposed to build wealth from nothing left over at the end of the month? Here's what's important to understand. Building wealth on a low income was never about how much you make. It's about strategy. And strategy is the one weapon that doesn't cost you a single dollar. A high income with no strategy goes away. You've watched broke celebrities and bankrupt lottery winners prove that 100 times over. But a low income with brutal discipline strategy compounds into actual real freedom. The amount you start with With matters far less than the rules that you're playing by. And most people never learn the rules because the people who profit from you being broke don't want you to. So let me give you the 10 moves Machiavelli would hand you if he were sitting here with you today. And fair warning, they're going to feel uncomfortable because comfort is the exact thing that's been keeping people broke. Number 1, bet on your skill, never on your luck. So Machiavelli split the whole world into 2 forces. There's Fortuna, which is luck, the random chaos that you don't control. And he said it rules maybe half of your life. And then there's Virtue, your skill, your foresight, your decisive action. And that's the half that you do control. Broke people spend their whole lives praying to Fortuna. They wait for the lottery ticket, the inheritance, the lucky break that's gonna save them. The strategist does the opposite. You pour everything into Virtue and take command of what actually is in your hands. And the very first thing in your hands is information. So start tracking every single dollar that comes in and every single dollar that goes out starting today. Most people who are broke generally have no idea where their money disappears to, and you cannot command an army that you cannot even see. So when you log every transaction for 30 days, you'll find the leaks, the subscriptions you forgot about, the little daily spends that quietly are bleeding you dry. Plugging those leaks is the easiest money that you'll ever make, and it costs you nothing but a little bit of honesty. All progress begins with telling the truth, and that includes telling the truth about your money. And foresight is the part of virtue too. The strategist doesn't just react to the month, he plays the long game. He sees the moves 3 years out and acts on it today while everyone else is only thinking about Friday night. You don't control whether you got dealt a bad hand, but you absolutely do control how you play it. Number 2, see the game exactly as it is. Machiavelli's most powerful rule was to deal with the world as it actually is, not as you wish it were. So here is a cold reality: the financial system is not on your side. It is engineered to keep you spending and borrowing because your debt is somebody else's income. Buy now, pay later, 0% financing, credit card minimum payments— these things are all designed to look harmless while they quietly drain you for years. So you fight back with what I call rich math. Never ever judge a purchase by its monthly payment. Judge it by its full total real cost. The system trains you to ask, well, what's the monthly payment? Because that little number, it hides the damage. The wealthy ask, what does this actually cost me in total And what could that same money become if I invested it instead? And then you hunt down your high-interest debt and you destroy it like your future depends on it. Every dollar you pay in interest is a soldier that is fighting for the other side. Take those soldiers back. Number 3, build walls of discipline, not willpower. So a brutal truth about human beings that Machiavelli understood 500 years ago is that people are weak. Under pressure. Your willpower will absolutely collapse the moment when something gets hard, and life always gets hard. That's why he never trusted good intentions. He trusted strong walls. So stop relying on motivation to save money because motivation is the most unreliable thing that you can do on your own. Build the wall instead. The very moment that money hits your account, automate a transfer that pulls a set amount into a separate savings account before you can even think about it. Then make that account painful to reach. No debit card, attached to it. Delete the app off your phone. The goal is to make saving completely automatic and make spending that money a genuine hassle. You pay yourself first before a single bill, before a night out. When the structure does the work, your weak moments can't sabotage you anymore. Number 4, move in complete silence. Machiavelli knew that the moment that you reveal your strength, you paint a target Target on your own back. The same thing is true with money. The second the people around you they sense that you've got some, they all want a piece of it. Family starts asking for loans. Friends expect you to grab every check, and worst of all, you feel this pressure to prove it with a new car or flashy wardrobe. So you do the opposite of what your ego wants. You build your wealth in total silence. You let your money be present but completely invisible. Drive the modest car for a few more years. Keep the quiet apartment, wear the regular clothes, let your bank account grow while your lifestyle barely changes. The broke person spends to look rich. The strategist looks ordinary on purpose and gets rich for real. Think about Ronald Read again. The whole town thought he was just a poor old janitor right up until the day he died. And that invisibility, that was a superpower because nobody ever came asking for a handout and nobody ever pressured him to keep up. Every dollar you don't spend impressing strangers Every dollar you save from strangers is a dollar that stands guard growing your army. Let them underestimate you. The quiet ones are the ones who win. Number 5, seize assets, don't rent out your hours. The 99% trade their time for money, and that's exactly why 99% of people don't get rich. There are only 24 hours in a day. Everybody has the same 24 hours. So when you sell your hours, your income has a hard ceiling no matter how hard you're Machiavelli respected those who seized territory and held it. And in the money game, your territory is assets, the things you own that make money whether you show up or not. So shares of solid companies like Ronald Read bought, a small piece of real estate down the road, a digital product you build once and sell 1,000 times. This is where the pay yourself first money goes, not into savings account to rot, but into ownership. So stop thinking like a worker who rents out your hours and start thinking like an owner who buys things that pay you. Every dollar you put into an asset is another soldier you send out to work 24 hours a day, and unlike you, that soldier never sleeps and never quits. Number 6, be ruthless about your generosity. This one might sting, but you might need it. Machiavelli warned that generosity given carelessly will bankrupt the giver and breed entitlement in everyone around them. So when When you're building wealth or on a low income, you simply can't be the personal bank account for your entire circle. Giving money out of guilt drains your reserves and also trains people to depend on you instead of building things for themselves. So you give with strategy, not with guilt. Give when it actually builds something, when it lifts someone towards standing up on their own, not when you're being pressured into doing it. Protect your capital the way that the general guards the treasury that funds the entire war. Because the thing that people don't say is staying broke so that you can rescue everybody else doesn't actually help anybody. Get strong first. A wealthy you can help 100 people for the rest of your life. A broke you can't even help yourself, and it definitely can't help them. So it's the put your own oxygen mask on first before trying to save the whole plane. Number 7, build the machine Then master one thing first. So the wise don't chase money around all day. They build a machine that commands money to come to them. Ronald Read built a quiet machine out of dividend stocks that paid him whether he was awake or asleep. So the goal becomes to build an automated income that doesn't depend on your sweat. But listen to this carefully because a lot of people get this wrong. So don't try to build 5 machines at once when you're starting out. The path to wealth is almost never multiple streams of It's not. Look at people's stories. It's not. It's becoming absolutely killer at one single thing. The people who chase 5 side hustles all at the same time usually do 5 of them really badly and burn out with nothing to show for themselves. So pick one skill, one asset, one stream, and you master it until it actually pays you. Then and only then you can take that money and start building the next machine. Like the expression goes, one blade sharpened to a razor's edge beats 10 dull blades every single time. Number 8, pay for speed. Here's a strategy that feels completely backwards when money is tight, but it's actually how achievers win. Achievers pay for speed. So when you're broke, your instinct is to figure everything out for yourself for free. But figuring out alone can cost you years and a mountain of actually expensive mistakes. The single smartest investment a low-income person can ever make on their own is into skills and knowledge, is into yourself, because your ability to earn is the one asset that no stock market crash can wipe you out and no thief can ever steal from you. A $30 book or an online course that teaches you a skill which raises your income for the rest of your life is the highest return you can make on earth. It's not even close. Look at it this way. If you spend 3 years struggling alone to learn something an expert could have taught you in 3 months, that lost time isn't free. It's the most expensive thing that you'll ever buy, and you paid for it with time out of your life. So before you try to invest in anything else, invest in your own earning power first. Sharpen the one tool that produces all the others, which is you. Number 9, speak like someone who selects, not someone who begs. Machiavelli understood that power is established by how you carry yourself. So show weakness and dependency and the world will exploit you every time. So watch how you speak about money. Broke people Speak like applicants, hoping, asking, begging for a shot. Wealthy people speak like they select, like they're the prize choosing who gets access to them. You have to retrain your own thinking and language. When you sit down to negotiate a salary, a rate, a price, a deal, you communicate from a place of authority and calm value, even if you don't have a ton of money in your bank account. So stop saying, I was hoping for, and start saying, well, my rate is. Stop apologizing. So when you're negotiating, stop apologizing for your prices. Learn to say a number and then go completely silent and let it sit there, because the person who speaks first in a negotiation usually loses. People will always pay more to someone who carries themselves like they're worth more. And remember, raising your income is the single fastest accelerant on this entire list, and it very often starts with nothing more than how you talk about your own worth. Number 10, strike now while everyone else is still asleep. Is hesitating. Machiavelli said fortune favors the bold and that wealth grows in the exact spot where hesitation dies. The number one reason people stay broke for their whole life isn't a lack of money. It's waiting, waiting for more money to start, waiting for more time to start, waiting for the perfect moment that is never ever coming. So let me be as clear as I can on this. Don't wait for permission. Don't wait to feel ready because ready is fake. You start with whatever you have. In your hands right now, invest $20 this week. Open the account today. Track your first dollar tonight. Here's how it works: you get rich slowly, and then you get rich suddenly because the slow part only ever begins the moment you decide to start. The best time they say right to plant the seed was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. How about right now? The story they'll tell about you. The fact that you're starting with less isn't the thing that disqualifies you. It's actually the thing that's going to make your story pretty remarkable. Ronald Read proved that a quiet janitor can outbuild a millionaire. And if a man with a safety pin that holds his coat together can do it, so can you. You have the ability. So now you have the responsibility to actually use it. Most financial advice is designed to keep you trapped in the middle class forever. Where are you going to spend your time and 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 at print The poorest people on earth always are going after this stuff versus cash flow. What you learn as an investor over multiple decades is the only thing that matters is free cash flow. That's it. If I earned $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 principal. 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 2 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 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. 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. 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 want to 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 you are trying to help. When you package your knowledge into a service or 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 five. 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. In 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 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 a 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 multi-millionaire entrepreneur. He's helped millions of 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 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 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, I 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. 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. 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 developed. 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 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 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 you— 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 one 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 one. Number one 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 without hesitation. And the business data strongly backs this concept up. A 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 You can have the perfect outline 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 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 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 listen to a video. I want Warren Buffett in my ear. I want Steve Jobs in my ear. I aggressively listen to their 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, 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. 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 and PayPal, a fortune that would set most people up for life on a private island. But Musk isn't most people. He had poured almost all of that money into 2 companies that looked like they were about to die: Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX had 3 failed rocket launches in a row. Tesla was running out of cash and couldn't make payroll. Musk had about $40 million left. He had a choice. He could put all the money into one company to save it, but that would mean the other would definitely Or he could split the money between them to try to keep both alive, but risk running out of cash for both and losing absolutely everything. Most people would have walked away. They would have kept the $40 million and lived like a king. Musk chose the hardest path. He split the money. He went all in on both. He literally had to borrow money from friends to pay his rent because he had zero liquid cash left. On Christmas Eve 2008, at the very last minute, 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 ones $10,000 the same way you'd play small with $10 million. If you cannot bet on yourself when you have nothing to lose, you will never bet on yourself when you have everything to lose. So today we're going to break down the actual blueprint. I analyzed 50 billionaires to find out what they actually have in common, and it's not what you think. The trap of diversification. The first thing you need to understand is that billionaires do not get rich by diversifying. You have been told your whole life, don't put all your eggs in one basket. That is great advice if your goal is to preserve wealth. It's terrible advice if your goal is to create wealth and build an empire. Warren Buffett, one of the greatest investors of all time, calls diversification protection against ignorance. He says it makes very little sense for anyone who knows what they 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 table. Bill Gates didn't diversify into real estate and gold when he was starting Microsoft. He was 100% Microsoft. Jeff Bezos Bezos wasn't buying stocks in other retailers in 1999. He was 100% Amazon. And the data backs this up. There's a study by Acadian Asset Management that looked at concentrated portfolio managers versus diversified ones. They found that the managers who had the courage to bet big on their best ideas, their top 5 to 10 stocks, significantly outperformed the ones who spread their bets thin. The managers who concentrated their portfolios generated higher returns because they were betting on their conviction, 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 five things at 20% effort, you are guaranteeing that all five 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 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 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 ROTI. Billionaires are obsessed with this. They aggressively use leverage— other people's money, other people's time, systems, and technology— to make sure that their personal time is spent only on the highest value tasks. When I analyze successful people on my channel, I see this pattern over and over. They don't just work hard, they work fast. Tom Bilyeu, friend of the channel, has a strict routine. He gets up, he works out to build discipline, he meditates to clear his mind, and then he attacks his most important task. 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 wanna 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're thinking about starting a business, 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 six months? Even if you fail, you will be further ahead than if you stop. 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 talked 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 from customers before he had to pay his suppliers, he could fund his own growth without needing banks or investors. He turned Amazon into a cash-generating machine during the worst crash in the history of the internet. He didn't just survive the crisis, he used the crisis to become stronger. This is what Nassim Taleb calls being antifragile. It's not just about resilience, which is bouncing back to where you were. It's about getting better because of the stress. When you are building your business, you 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 bad the external situation is, They have the power to fix it. They don't blame the economy. They don't blame the government. They don't blame their team. They take extreme ownership. So when bad things happen to you, do you play the victim or do you become the architect of your own rescue? Your pain is your training ground. The struggles that you are facing right now are not there to stop you. They are there to prepare you for the weight of the success you are asking for. If you can't handle the pressure of a $10,000 problem, life will never trust you with a $10 million problem. So embrace the crisis. It is the fire that forges the steel. They solve the biggest problems. Perhaps the most important thing billionaires have in common is the scale of the problems that they solve. So you are paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems that you solve. If you solve a small problem for a few people, you make a little bit of money. If you solve a massive problem for millions of people, you become a billionaire. So look at the billionaires that we've talked about. Elon Musk is trying to solve the problem of fossil fuels with Tesla and the problem of human extinction with SpaceX. Pretty big problems. Bill Gates solved the problem of putting a computer on every desk in every home. Jeff Bezos solved the problem of getting anything that you want delivered to your door in 2 days. These are not small problems. Most entrepreneurs Most entrepreneurs aim too low. They start a business just to make money. They want to just pay their bills. They want a nice car. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it won't make you a billionaire. You have to fall in love with the problem. And to go to the next level, you have to expand your vision. You have to ask, how can I help more people? How can I serve deeper? You need to find your one word. You need to find the core value that drives you because when things get hard, and they will get hard, money will not be enough motivation to keep you going. You need a mission. If you're just chasing paper, you will burn out. If you are chasing a purpose, you will be unstoppable. So the billionaires I know, the ones I study, 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. Product of the value that you create. Focus on the value. Focus on the service. Focus on the impact. You have Michael Jordan level talent at something. You have a genius inside of you that is waiting to be unlocked, but you are keeping it small because you don't believe in yourself enough to tackle the big problems. The world is waiting for you to step up. The world has huge problems that need your specific genius to solve. So don't deprive us of your your contribution because you're afraid to fail. Go bigger. 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- Hot 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 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 was 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. 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 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, 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 plan, anything can distract you. With a plan, you can wake up each morning knowing the top 1 or 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. 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 own, 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 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 you, but do decide on consistent work times and stick to them. For For example, you might commit to working on your business from 8 AM to 1 PM 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, Tuesday is 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. Being your own boss means you must boss yourself. 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 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 a 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 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 save 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 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 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 A project 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 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 flaws. 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 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 teacher, 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 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 that 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 get back up. 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 define 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 to 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 The only way you truly fail is if you stop trying. Congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. To learn the secret systems millionaires and billionaires use to build wealth, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe and I'll see you there. The biggest financial advantage you can ever have is a system that keeps working while you sleep. When you learn as an investor over multiple decades is the only thing that matters is free cash flow.