POV You Started Living Like Old Money - Everything Changed

Old money means families who've been rich for many generations. The wealth is passed down from generation to generation, and the people in these families today didn't earn the money themselves, they inherited it. It might have been their great-great-grandfather who made the money, and the kids today are still rich because of him. And according to Oxfam, the global top 1% have more than twice as much wealth as the bottom 6.9 billion people combined. Now, I don't have some rich great-great-grandfather. My grandparents had a grocery store in Italy and sold it to move to Canada so their daughter my aunt could get treatment for her polio. Then my parents sacrificed almost everything they had so my 2 sisters and I could get the best education that they could afford for us. I wanted to make this video because I don't know what it's like growing up with old money, but I want to learn the lessons that they pass on. In my first business, I was making $300 a month and I ate the same bean salad for lunch every day. But beyond the actual bank accounts, old money also have habits and rituals and rules for living that were also passed down from generation to generation and are never taught in schools. So if you learn to think like old money does, you can apply the lessons to your life as well as future generations of your family. Your grandkids will know you as the one that finally made your entire family financially free. There are 10 lessons that old money teach their kids that are never taught in school, and I'm going to cover them today through the stories of old money families. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in the 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.

Rule number 1, buy things to last a lifetime. So people with old money buy one very good item instead of 10 cheap ones. So for example, they'll buy a pair of well-made leather boots and repair them for 20 years instead of buying new shoes every winter. King Charles III of the British royal family is a famous example of this exact habit. Even though he is The king of the United Kingdom, he does not constantly buy new clothes. He follows a personal rule he calls buy once, buy well. So for example, he wears a pair of handmade leather shoes that he bought in 1971. Rather than throwing them away when the bottoms wore out, he has the exact same pair repaired and resoled for over 50 years. He also regularly wears suits and winter coats made for him in the 1980s. When a suit gets torn, he pays a tailor to sew some patches onto the fabric so he can keep wearing it. People with old money They know that high-quality items look better as they age. They see repairing their belongings as a mark of respect for good craftsmanship. So buy fewer things but higher quality. Appreciate them and look after them. Rule number 2, keep your wealth a secret. Old money doesn't brag. You will rarely see them driving a bright green sports car. They prefer safe, reliable cars because they don't need attention from strangers. The Mars family owns a company that makes M&M's and Snickers and Pedigree Pet Food. They're in their 4th generation of wealth and are worth over $100 billion. They are known in the business world as the stealth billionaires because they keep their wealth a strict secret. They do not want attention from strangers. For many years, the Mars Company headquarters was a plain brick building in Virginia. It didn't even have a company sign on the outside. The family members never brag or go to famous Hollywood parties. John Mars and his brother Forrest Mars Jr. always drove themselves to work in normal everyday cars. They never bought bright sports cars or hired private drivers. They drove regular cars because they wanted to be able to go to the grocery store just like normal people without anybody staring at them. So focus on trying to get rich instead of trying to impress people and look rich. Number three, invest in education, not just toys. So old money spend their money on learning. They will happily pay for a great math tutor or piano teacher, but they will say no to buying the newest video game console for their kids. The Rockefeller family is one of the most famous old money families in American history. They built their massive a fortune, uh, in the oil business over 100 years ago. John D. Rockefeller Jr. inherited this huge wealth, but he refused to spoil his children with toys.

He actually made his 5 sons share a single tricycle.

He wanted to teach them patience and the value of taking care of what they had. However, he spent as much money as possible on their minds. He hired top private tutors to teach his children foreign languages and music and science. Because the family encouraged learning over playing with expensive toys, his son David Rockefeller developed a lifelong passion for studying beetles and nature. They believed in the power of education so much that they even used their wealth to build entire schools like the University of Chicago. They knew that toys break and you throw them away, but a good education, it lasts a lifetime. So spend money on learning the skills that can make you better forever instead of something fun that disappears next week. It's hard, but this is a discipline that makes old money stay wealthy And you can do it too. Number four, make your money make more money. So old money doesn't just let cash sit in the bank account; they buy things that pay them back, like apartment buildings that collect rent every month or stocks that pay dividends. Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. made millions of dollars in the stock market and movie business in the 1920s. He didn't leave his cash in the bank though. In 1945, he used his money to buy the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. At the time, it was the largest commercial building in the world. He rented the office space to hundreds of different businesses by collecting rent every single month. He turned his cash into a massive real estate machine that gave him more cash. This building made the family hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 50 years. That rent money from the building is what paid for the political campaigns of President John F. Kennedy and his brothers. So when you make money, instead of spending it or just holding on to it, look for ways to have it go out there and make you even more money. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It has the top lessons from this video, space to write your own takeaways, and a simple action plan that you can start on today. Click the link in the description below to go grab it. And I'll see you there. Number 5, protect the family name. So a good reputation is worth more than cash. Old money teach their kids to be polite, to stay out of internet drama, and never get into public arguments online. Queen Elizabeth II and the British royal family followed a strict motto for over 70 years to protect their name. The motto was never complain, never explain. She knew that the reputation of the royal family was the most valuable thing that they had. So when newspapers printed bad rumors, she refused to argue with them in public. She taught her family to stay quiet, Smile and be polite. She understood that getting into a public fight would make the family look bad. By refusing to get into the drama, she protected the royal name. She proved that keeping a good reputation and acting with dignity is worth much more than winning a public argument. So think about what your family name means to you and how you can give your grandkids a reputation to live up to. Number 6, value your time above everything else. Time is the only thing you cannot buy more of. So old money will pay someone to mow the lawn or clean the house so they can spend their hour reading a book or playing with the kids. George Washington Vanderbilt II is a great example of this. He inherited a massive fortune from his famous grandfather, Cornelius Vanderbilt. In 1889, he built a giant house in North Carolina called the Biltmore Estate. And instead of trying to manage the daily chores himself, he hired hundreds of workers. He paid a large staff to cook the meals and clean the rooms and wash the clothes and take care of the gardens. He didn't do this because he was lazy. He did it to buy back his time because he had a staff. handling all the daily work, he was free to spend his hours learning. He used his time to study 8 different foreign languages, to explore the woods around him, and to read a personal library of over 20,000 books. Old money families understand that you can always make more cash, but you can never get back a lost hour. So think about what an hour of your time is worth to you and who you can hire to do some of the tasks that you shouldn't be focused on anymore. Number 7, focus on keeping money, not just earning it. So earning money is only half The battle. Old money puts their wealth into safe trust funds so one person cannot accidentally spend it all on a bad business idea. Let's go back and look at John D. Rockefeller again, who made a massive fortune in the oil business. His son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., wanted to make sure the money lasted for generations. He knew that keeping the money was just as important as making it in the first place.

So in 1934, he set up strict trust funds for his children and grandchildren.

He locked a huge amount of the family's cash inside these trusts. He put a group of smart bankers and lawyers in charge of managing the investments, and the family members receive a safe payout from the trust every year to live on. However, they are not allowed to just go to the bank and take out all the cash because the money is locked up. No single family member can accidentally spend the main fortune on a bad business idea. This smart plan has kept the family wealthy for over 100 years. So as tempting as it can be to go spend your money as soon as it comes in, think about how you can keep it first.

Number 8.

8, build a private network. They do not need millions of followers on social media. Old money prefers having dinner with 3 trusted friends who can give them honest advice about business and life. JP Morgan of the Morgan family built one of the most powerful banks in the world. He hated talking to reporters and didn't want to be famous in the newspapers. He focused his energy entirely on building a very small private network of trusted friends. When the United States faced a massive bank crisis in 1907, Morgan didn't ask the public for ideas. He invited a small group of trusted bank presidents to his private library in New York City. He locked the heavy doors so nobody could leave. They sat together in private and gave each other honest advice until they solved the crisis for the country. One habit that I'm building is keeping a list of the top 500 people in my network and finding a way to stay in touch with them at least every 90 days. I'm naturally an introvert and I hate small talk, so it's easy for me to lose touch with people. So building a structure that forces me to stay in contact every 90 days with those top 500 people in my network has been an incredible resource for me.

Number 9, give back quietly.

When they donate money to a hospital or school, old money often does it anonymously. They do not need their name painted in huge letters on the side of a building. Andrew Mellon came from a very wealthy banking family. In the 1930s, he decided to build a massive art museum in Washington, DC for the American people. He gave his own huge, expensive art collection to start the museum. He also paid $10 million of his own cash to build the giant building. However, he completely refused to let the government put his name on the outside of the building. He insisted that it must be called the National Gallery of Art. He didn't want a giant sign showing off his family name. He wanted the museum to belong to the country. He also knew that other rich families would be more likely to donate their own art if the building was not named after the Mellons.

His son Paul Mellon continued this habit.

He gave hundreds of millions of dollars to schools and to museums, often asking them to keep his name completely off the projects. So you may not have millions of dollars to give away, but even helping one person each week can start to build this old money habit for you. And number 10, plan for your grandchildren. Old money often thinks 50 years ahead. They'll plant a small oak tree in their yard knowing they will never see it grow fully, but knowing their grandchildren will get to sit in the shade of the giant tree. Arthur Guinness started the famous Guinness Beer Company in Ireland in 1759. He found a small old brewery in Dublin that wasn't being used. He didn't just rent the building for 1 or 2 years. He signed a lease for 9,000 years. He knew he would only live to see a tiny fraction of that lease. And so he wasn't just thinking about his own life. He wanted to guarantee that his children, his grandchildren, and great-grandchildren would always have a cheap place to run the family business. Because he planned hundreds of years into the future, the Guinness family built a massive fortune. Over 250 years later, the company is still brewing beer on that exact same piece of land. Start living like old money today. It's easy to look at all the old money families and just think the rich get richer, and I'll never be able to.

Yeah.

And I know it's hard to have that kind of money, but behind the money are the habits. And you can absolutely start building those habits yourself right now with what you have. Buy fewer things but higher quality. Stop showing off to impress people you don't even know. Invest in your own education. Make your money make you more money. Protect your family name. Value your time more. Focus on keeping instead of spending money. Build your network. Give back and plan for your grandkids. All of those habits aren't taught in school. They're what rich families teach their kids. And now you know it too. Habit and start today. Your future grandkids will thank you for it. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be.

Believe.

Now let's learn how the rich see the world differently.

The rich look at the problems in the world and they see a business in it.

The thing that annoyed them 3 times this week is already their next business idea. Gallup found that Americans who own a business and employ people have a median net worth of $3 million. There's something that will annoy you this week too, and it will keep annoying you until somebody fixes it. So why don't you build a $3 million company and solve it? So here's how the rich see the world differently. James Dyson is worth about $17 billion, and the whole thing started with something that annoyed him while he was vacuuming his own house. In 1978, he was cleaning his carpet with a Hoover Jr., and the machine kept losing suction. The fuller the bag got, the worse it cleaned. Now, everybody who owned a vacuum, they knew that. It was just what vacuums did. You bought new bags. Banged it against an outside step to knock the dust out of the bag and just put up with it. Dyson was 31 and he didn't let it go. Why does a vacuum get worse at cleaning the more that it cleans? Not long after, he was standing in a sawmill watching a 30-foot cyclone on the roof pull sawdust out of the air with nothing but spin. No bag, nothing to clog. So he went home, ripped off the bag on, on his Hoover, taped a cardboard cone where it had been, and ran it over the carpet. The suction held. Then it took 5 years. He worked in a shed behind his house and built 5,127 prototypes, changing one thing at a time. He was close to $1 million in debt by the end of it. He'd remortgaged the house and his wife's teaching salary was paying the bills.

Then he took it to the people who made the vacuums.

Hoover said no. Electrolux said no. Miele said no. They all sold the bags and a vacuum that never needed bags was the last thing that they wanted. So he launched it himself, the DC01. Came out in Britain in 1993, costs more than anything else on the shelf, and within 2 years it was the best-selling vacuum in the whole country. Now you might be thinking, okay, that's a story about an engineer and you're not going to go invent some vacuum in your shed. And fair enough, the engineering here isn't the thing that we're copying. Everybody in Britain owned a vacuum that lost suction and everybody just accepted it. Dyson didn't let it go, and the answer for his business turned up on the roof of a sawmill that he happened to be standing in. The habit is noticing what annoys you and then going and fixing it.

The rich build this habit before they had the money, not after it.

Dyson had it while he was a million dollars in debt. So here are the six ways to build that same habit, starting with whatever already annoys you. Write down what annoyed you this week. So here's how we start: open the Notes app on your phone right now and start a list and call it annoyances.

Give it.

7 days, 7 days. Every time something irritates you this week, put one line in it. The invoice that you had to chase down 3 times, a form that you filled out that asked for your address twice, the 40 minutes you spent on hold, the thing at work that everybody complains about and nobody fixes. One line each, 10 seconds. Don't think about whether this is a business yet or not. And by the end of the week, you will have a page of all of these things that annoy you. Almost all of them are nothing, and that's fine. You're looking for the one that shows up more than once in your week.

If you hit the same thing 3 3 times in 1 week, you're almost certainly not the only one struggling with that, and that's worth looking into.

I think all progress begins with telling the truth. And so this list is you telling the truth about where your week actually goes and the things that frustrate you. Right now you're solving these problems for free over and over again and then forgetting that you solved them. And the reason why this list idea works is that you already have the information. Dyson didn't go looking for a vacuum problem. He was cleaning his own carpet. You walk past your issues every single day at your job, in your industry, and whatever you're already good at. You know things about your own work that outsiders would pay real money to learn. You just stop noticing them because you just do them every day. So write the list for 1 week before you decide that you don't have any ideas. Almost nobody has actually checked into those ideas. They just decided that they had no ideas and moved on. And then try to put a dollar figure next to the ones that continue to repeat. So if chasing an invoice is worth 90 minutes and your time is worth $50 an hour, that annoyance costs you $75 this week. Now it's a number, and numbers are the things that you can actually act on. Then at the end of the week, you can go back Look at the repeats and rewrite every single one in a specific single sentence. Be specific about what the annoying thing actually is.

So invoicing is a pain isn't a business.

I have to reenter the same client details into 3 different systems every time I send a bill. That is, that's a real specific problem. The second version here tells you exactly what to build, which is something that takes those client details once.

Vague annoyances stay annoyances forever.

Specific annoyances are ones that you can turn into something that you build, you can sell or hand to somebody else.

Specific annoyances.

Specific annoyances are ones you can turn into a business.

Ask who decided it.

Almost nothing that you deal with every day is an actual fact. It's a decision that somebody made, usually years ago, usually for a reason that stopped being true. The way your industry bills, the reason a service takes six weeks, the form that asks you for your address twice—somebody chose all of that, and often that somebody left the company in 2011. Let's look back at Dyson's vacuum. Every vacuum lost suction as the bag filled, and everybody treated that as just that's how vacuums work. It wasn't. It was a design choice, and the companies making them had a reason to keep it because they sold the bags. That's the difference in how the rich look at things. You see the way it is; they see the person who decided it in the first place. So pick one thing in your industry that everybody just accepts and nobody likes. Then ask two questions: Who decided this?

And what actually happens if I do it slightly differently?

Deliver in three days when everybody else takes three weeks. Publish your prices when the whole industry makes you book a call. Answer the phone. How about that? That That one might sound like a joke, but in a lot of industries, answering the phone is the entire advantage because everybody else decided that that's just not how it's done. So this week, write down 3 things that your industry does that makes no sense to you as somebody who works in it. Then pick the one that you could change right now without asking for anybody's permission and start changing it. Say yes before you feel qualified. Now, when an opportunity shows For most people, the automatic answer is just no, and you have a reason ready to justify it. You don't have enough time, not enough money, not the right moment. You don't have enough experience yet. Just try this for 30 days. When an opportunity shows up that scares you a little bit but wouldn't ruin you if it went wrong, say yes first and set a limit on the way in. So the limit is how much money and how many weeks that you'll give it before you stop. Not everything. The ones that scare you specifically, those ideas, because you might not be good enough at it yet. And those are usually the bigger ideas that you can actually build into something. Ready, feeling ready isn't real. Nobody will hand you a certificate that says you're ready. Dyson launched a vacuum that cost more than anything else on the shelf after every manufacturer in the industry had told him no. He became qualified by doing it, right? Being leads to doing. You don't wait to feel like the kind of person who runs a business and then start acting like one. You start behaving like a business owner before you feel like one, and the feeling arrives much later after you've already started doing the work. So if we make it practical, pick the thing that you've been circling around for months. Give yourself 48 hours and do the smallest real version of it. Not a plan, the actual thing. So send the message, post the offer, put up the one page, call the person you've been meaning to call since March. I call it the 2% difference. Don't worry about getting to 100% of the plan. Just do the first 2%. Watch what your head does in those first 48 hours because it'll produce so many different excellent reasons why you should wait. And all of them sound like good, good reasons, good ideas why you should wait. Write them down and say, Because seeing them on paper, one, it takes their power away. And 2, seeing them on paper helps you see when the same excuse is showing up over and over again. Listen for other people's problems. Your own list has a limit, right? You live one life, you only do one job, you only hit so many problems in a given week. But everybody around you is describing their problems all day long. People love to complain, right? Your friend complaining about her manager, the woman at the counter explaining why the system is down again, your brother-in-law saying that they still have to deal with the staff Schedule on paper every Sunday night. You hear all of these things just as conversations. The rich hear them as business opportunities. You both hear the exact same thing, but only one of you is writing it down. So this week, in every conversation that you have, listen for one specific sentence. It usually starts with "I hate it when," or "The worst part of my job is," or "We still have to do it by hand." Those are the ones people hand them to you for free, and nobody ever picks up on them because people complain by default. So when you hear one, ask a single follow. What are you doing about it now? And that answer is worth more than just a complaint because it tells you what they've already tried. It tells you what they're paying for. It tells you how much that problem is costing them. Then write it down in that same list that you started in the first section next to your own problem. A problem that you heard 3 times from 3 different people is worth more than one that you've had 3 times yourself. So you could take the staff schedule one. You hear it from your brother-in-law, then you hear from somebody at a party who manages a pub, then you hear it from your own cousin. That's 3 people Paying somebody to do a job on paper every Sunday night. You haven't built anything yourself yet, and you already know who has the problem, how often it happens, and what it's ruining for them. That's a real market. It didn't cost you anything to find out, just some conversations. Listen to people complain. And the best ones come from industries that you know nothing about. You have no idea what's supposed to be hard in somebody else's job, so you'll ask the obvious questions everybody inside the industry stopped asking years ago. Dyson wasn't a vacuum engine He was a man cleaning his own carpet who wanted to know why it was getting worse. So have 5 real conversations at the week and come back with 5 sentences, not your ideas about their problems, the exact words that they used when they were complaining.

Watch where money already moves. You don't have to guess what people want.

You can see it by looking at what they're already paying for. So you can go and read 1 and 2-star reviews of products in the area that you're interested in, not the 5-star ones, the angry ones.

ones. Somebody who paid full price was disappointed, then they wrote you several paragraphs explaining exactly what was missing.

That's gold. That's the cheapest real market research that there is. It takes you one afternoon and doesn't cost you any dollars to do your market research.

Look for the same complaint appearing across different companies.

So one angry customer is just one angry customer.

The same complaint under 6 different products tells you that it isn't just one bad company, it's the whole industry. Then go and check whether anybody has actually solved it, because that's the part that you just can't assume.

Then look for So find a service where the normal experience is slow, where it's confusing, where people are rude, and people keep paying anyway.

That's a market that's already spending money and already unhappy. Somebody already paying for a service they dislike is easier to sell to than somebody who has never paid for anything like it. They're already spending the money every month.

You just want them spending it with you instead.

And notice the jobs that people keep hiring out over and over and over again. Problems that come back every month tend to get paid for. Repeat spending is a signal. Selling something once is good. Getting paid every month, that's a business. Then go and talk to 5 people who actually have the problem before you go and build anything at all. Not your friends, and not to pitch people. Just ask them what they currently do about it, what it costs them, what they've already tried before, what they gave up on. You can spend 20 minutes with each. That's under 2 hours of your life in total. Those conversations will help kill your bad ideas fast and help get you to the one that will win. The people who build something that will actually work, works tend to be the ones who talk to real customers early. So this week, pick one product in your area and read its 1-star reviews for an hour. Write down every complaint that you see more than twice and check whether anybody has fixed it yet.

Decide who you are before the proof shows up.

So this last one is what makes the other 5 actually happen. Start the list today anyway, but if you never decide that you're the kind of person who builds things, the list just sits there and you do nothing with it while you Privately believe that you're not the kind of person none of the other five will stick. You'll write the list of annoyances and then never open it up again. You'll say yes and then apologize for saying yes. So decide first. Being leads to doing. Decide you're somebody who builds things. Then start booking the time like it's already true. That might sound like nonsense, but you've already done the negative version, the opposite version of that. You've decided I'm not a numbers person. I'm not technical. I'm not a salesperson. And then organize years of your life protecting that identity. There's a reason why my logo here, it's a paper airplane, a paper airplane in the videos that breaks the sound barrier. That's impossible. And doing the impossible is exactly what all of this is for. Dyson spent 5 years in a shed on a machine every manufacturer had rejected.

And now he's one of the richest people in Britain.

If you have the ability, then you have the responsibility. If you can, then you must. You've got something you already know how to do that somebody out there is struggling with tonight. And sitting on it helps nobody. You need one week and a list. Start the list today. Write down the first thing that annoyed you this week because every business you use today was somebody noticing something and refusing to leave it alone.

And now it's your turn. Now let's learn from Warren Buffett and the 3 things that rich people do differently every day. Your busy calendar might be a massive warning sign that you're failing as an entrepreneur.

I just flipped through it and you know, there's, there's practically nothing in it. You, You've got to keep control of your time, and, and you won't keep control of your time unless you can say no.

I think it's the secret to all of my success. I have calendar anorexia. I want as little in my calendar as possible. I'm meticulous about it.

You got to be very careful if you're somebody who feels like you're busy all the time to understand that busyness can become a habit, and busyness can become your biggest excuse.

Warren Buffett creates massive wealth because he uses He has 3 completely different daily habits to protect his focus and reject 99% of requests.

Focus has always been a strong part of my personality.

When he came to Columbia and spoke to the business school, the very last question that was posed to him was what his secret was. And he had this— never forget it— he had this giant pile of paper and he pulled it out. It was a complete hodgepodge and said that he reads 500 pages a week. And anyone can do it. And, you know, it's like compound knowledge. If you start today, it would just build over time.

I just read and read and read. I probably read 5 to 6 hours a day. I like things quiet. I shut the door actually at the office because I don't want to hear anybody talking outside. I still probably spend 5 or 6 hours a day reading and, and, and, or thinking while I read.

If you don't aggressively take control of your time right now, you'll become a prisoner to other people's priorities and never build the empire that you deserve.

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.

It— I better be careful with it, man. There's no way I will be able to buy more time.

You have to prioritize your time really carefully. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Years ago, Bill Gates thought being productive meant packing his schedule. He booked his calendar down to the minute. Then he looked at Warren Buffett's personal pocket calendar and was shocked.

I also remember Warren showing me his calendar and— Oh, I love this. You know, I had every minute packed and I thought that was the only way you could do things. And, you know, the fact that he is so careful about his time— Can I show this to the audience?

Yeah.

There are days that there's nothing on. This is the week of April, of which there are only 3 entries for a week.

Warren explained that you control your time, and sitting down just to read and think is far more valuable than rushing to another meeting. He built a $130 billion fortune mostly by sitting in a quiet room, completely ignoring the busy culture everyone else falls for. Now, right now you might be saying, hey, well, that's easy for Warren Buffett to have a blank calendar. You think you gotta hustle 15 hours a day to keep your head just above the water. You feel like if you stop grinding, you'll lose everything. But constantly grinding is exactly what keeps you stuck. Buffett didn't buy his freedom after he got rich. He acted like his time was priceless long before he made his first million. I'm going to show you the 3 exact things he does every single day that you can start doing right now to take back your time. The 25/5 Focus Method. Okay, you want to be successful. You've got massive goals for your life. You have a huge list of projects that you are trying to complete. You're trying to build a business. You're trying to grow your YouTube channel. You're trying to get in shape. You're trying to invest your money. You think that working on 25 different things at once makes you a hard worker. You think juggling all these priorities proves that you're dedicated. Warren Buffett completely disagrees with you. He believes that chasing too many things is exactly why you're failing. He uses a strategy called the 25/5 rule. The story goes that Buffett was talking to his personal. He told the pilot to write down his top 25 career goals. The pilot made his list. Then Buffett told him to circle his top 5 most important goals. The pilot circled his top 5. He told Buffett that he would focus his main energy on the top 5. He said he would work on the other 20 goals when he had some spare time. Buffett looked at him and said, no. He said, those 20 goals are now your avoid-at-all-costs list. If you don't completely ignore those 20 goals, they'll destroy your chances of success. They'll steal your time. They'll drain your energy. You'll never achieve the 5 things that actually matter. You're probably doing this right now. You're spreading your energy so thin that nothing gets your full attention. You have a massive vision for your life, but you're getting zero results because you refuse to focus. So you have to realize that good is the enemy of great. You might have 20 good ideas, but pursuing those good ideas is exactly what stops you from executing your 5 great ideas. So you have to cut away the distractions. You have to be willing to ignore things that you do care about just so you can win the things you care about the most. Your brain, it's going to tell you that you're missing out. Your brain will give you really smart reasons why you need to keep all your options open. But all that happens is you stay stuck. You have to learn how to say no. If you don't ruthlessly cut your goals down, you'll always be average. You'll never reach your full potential. You'll watch other people pass you by because they had discipline to focus. So you have to stop treating your focus like it's inevitable, like it's a cheap commodity. It's the most valuable asset that you own. If you want to know exactly how to do this, you need to build your Avoid at all costs list. Building your avoid at all costs list. Okay, so how do you actually do this? You have to write down your list today. Write down every single project that you're working on. Write down every goal that you have for the next five years. Look at that list; it's probably huge. Now force yourself to pick just five. This is gonna hurt. You want to pick ten. You're gonna try to negotiate with yourself. Don't do it. Warren Buffett says don't do. Do it. Pick exactly 5. Take the rest of your list and put it in a drawer. You aren't allowed to look at it or touch it until you succeed at the top 5. You have to protect your attention like it's your most valuable asset. The wealthiest people in the world are extremely aggressive about what they ignore. If you wanna make millions of dollars, you must ignore almost everything. You have to cancel projects. You have to say no to people. Every time you say yes to a distraction, you're delaying your ultimate success. Your 6th most important goal is your biggest enemy. You like it just enough to spend You can spend a lot of time on it, but it won't ever give you the massive success of the top 5. When I joined my first software company at 19 years old, I was struggling. I didn't know what to do. I had to focus entirely on modeling success. I studied how Bill Gates started Microsoft. I applied his exact strategy to my business. It landed me my first deal for $13,500. It only worked because I ignored everything else. I focused on one specific model and put all my energy into it. You have to do the same thing. Find your top priority. Commit to it completely. People will invite you out. They'll pitch you new business ideas.

They'll ask you to join their exciting new startup.

Right.

You have to tell them no. It's going to feel uncomfortable.

People might even get mad at you.

Let them be mad. You can't let other people dictate where your time goes. If you don't take control of your schedule, somebody else will happily take it from you. You're built to serve a specific purpose, and you can't do that if you're constantly distracted. So you have to stay laser-focused on your top 5. But focus alone won't make you rich. You need to know exactly how to compound your value, which brings us directly to Warren Buffett's second The 500-page knowledge habit. Once you have your focus, you need to execute. Warren Buffett spends up to 80% of his day reading. When a student asked him how to prepare for an investing career, Buffett held up a stack of paper. He said to read 500 pages like this every day. He said knowledge builds up like compound interest. Everyone can do it, but he guaranteed very few actually will. Now you might think you don't have time to read 500 pages a day. I don't either. That's not the point. The point is that you must aggressively consume knowledge about your specific focus. Most people consume garbage. You wake up, you immediately scroll through negative news. You look at social media and compare yourself to people who are faking their success. You load your brain with all sorts of distractions. You have to change your environment. If you want to be great, you have to put greatness into your mind every single day. So start your morning by listening to someone who inspires you. Put on a video of a successful entrepreneur. Listen to the greats. When you surround yourself with massive thinkers, your own problems start to look small. You begin to believe that you can overcome your current struggles. You borrow the belief from them. If you aren't learning every day, you're falling behind. Your competitors—they're studying, they're getting ready, they're getting better. You have to make learning a non-negotiable part of your daily routine, and ideally first thing in the morning. So I go for a walk every morning. I call it my believe walk. It's my dedicated. Time to clear my head and find my focus. And while I walk, I listen to videos and interviews of successful entrepreneurs. I want the greatest minds in history speaking into my ear. I want their belief to transfer into me. You can do the same. Find the authors, the speakers, the leaders who've already accomplished your goals. Consume their content relentlessly, right? Let their knowledge compound inside of your brain. It's the highest return on investment you will yet. But consuming information is only half the battle. If you don't know how to translate that knowledge into real-world action, you're just wasting your time, which is exactly what we're going to fix right now. Turning knowledge into action. Reading and learning are completely useless if you don't take action. Watching this video is useless if you don't take action. You can read 100 books a year. If you don't change your behavior, you just wasted your time. You're just trying to feel productive without actually doing the work. So you need to implement what you learn. And when? Immediately. You have to start taking risks. Your fear of failure is the number one thing holding you back. You want everything to be perfect before you launch. I get it. You want the perfect website, the perfect camera, the perfect plan. Perfectionism is really just fear. It's a mask for fear. You have to expect to suck at the beginning. When I started my YouTube channel, I was terrible. You can go back and watch the videos. I hated my first 350 Videos. I couldn't even watch them because I was so embarrassed by myself, and it took me 700 videos before I actually felt a little bit proud of my work. But I kept posting. I kept learning. I took the knowledge I had and I put it into action. And you can get there faster. You can do the same. Make the messy video. Send the awkward email. Launch the ugly product. Just get it out there. The market will tell you what works. You will learn far more from 10 days of taking action than you will from 10 months of just reading books. Books. Every time you test a new idea, you're gathering new data. You're figuring out what works and what doesn't work. So stop overthinking your next move. Stop waiting for the perfect moment. The perfect moment, it doesn't exist. You just have to start where you are with what you have. Action builds confidence. When you combine massive knowledge with massive action, you become incredibly dangerous to your competition. But to make sure that you're taking the right actions, you have to master the 3rd habit of the ultra-rich. It's a habit that almost every entrepreneur completely ignores. Scheduled thinking time. The third habit is the most difficult for entrepreneurs to master. It's the habit of sitting in a quiet room and simply thinking. Warren Buffett doesn't just read; he schedules large blocks of time to just think. Bill Gates used to schedule every minute of his day. Then he saw Buffett's calendar and realized it was mostly blank. You think that being busy means you're being productive. Productive. You fill your calendar with meetings and calls and emails. You pride yourself on working 15 hours a day, but you're running on a treadmill a lot of times. You're moving fast but going nowhere. If you don't schedule time to think, you'll never solve your biggest problems. You'll just keep reacting to fires. You have to pull yourself out of the daily grind. You need time to step back and look at the whole board, the bigger picture. I call it CEO time. You have to ask yourself the questions. Are you actually moving closer to your ultimate goal or not? Are you spending your time on those top 5 priorities that we identified earlier, or are you slipping back into your old habits? You have to protect your thinking time. Treat it like the most important meeting of your week. Turn off your phone, close your laptop, sit with a blank piece of paper and a pen. Let your mind wander. The best ideas come when you give your brain the space to breathe. Most people are terrified of silence. You constantly need a podcast, a song, a video playing in the background. You're afraid to be alone with your own thoughts, but your thoughts are where the million-dollar ideas live. You have to practice being bored. You have to force yourself to sit and strategize. This isn't wasted time. It's the most profitable time of your entire week. But to make this actually work, you have to ruthlessly engineer your physical and mental space, which is what we're going to cover next. Designing your daily environment. To make thinking time work, you have to ruthlessly control your environment. Your environment right now—it's perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are. If you want to change your life, you have to change what surrounds you. You have to limit access to negativity. You have to shut down the voices that tell you that your ideas are crazy. Sometimes those voices are your friends and family. Sometimes the loudest negative voice is in your own. You have to fight back by engineering your surroundings. When you sit down to think, you can't be in a place full of distractions. You need a dedicated space. You need a place where your brain knows it's time to work. So you need to find your version of that. Maybe it's a quiet corner in your house. Maybe it's a park bench. It doesn't matter where it is. It only matters that you guard it fiercely. If you let other people interrupt your thinking time, you're telling them that their priorities are more important than your future. So stop doing that. You have to value your own mind enough to protect it. enough to give it the silence it needs. So when I'm creating something new, that's when I feel the most free. You need to give yourself permission to explore your ideas without judgment. So don't worry if the idea sounds stupid at first. Let it develop. Write it down. Look at the different angles. You'll have these moments where you doubt yourself. You'll wonder if you're sitting there wasting your time. You'll want to go back to checking emails because it feels easier. You get that dopamine I mean, hey, don't give in to that urge. Push through the discomfort of deep thinking. When you create an environment that supports deep focus, your productivity will absolutely skyrocket. You'll start seeing opportunities that were totally blind to you before. You'll finally have the clarity you need to push forward. But there's one final piece of the puzzle that ties all of this together. Building unstoppable momentum. Okay, you now know the 3 habits. You need to ruthlessly focus on your top 5 goals. You need to aggressively consume knowledge about those goals. You need to schedule quiet time to think and strategize. Knowing this is not enough. The only thing you're missing right now is momentum. You don't need a massive breakthrough. You don't need a viral moment. You just need to take one small step today and then another small step tomorrow. Momentum is created by doing the boring repetitive tasks every single day, even when you don't feel like it.

You're going to wake up tomorrow And you won't want to execute.

You're going to feel tired. You might feel overwhelmed. That's the exact moment that defines your entire life. Are you going to give in to the comfort, or are you going to push through and do the work? You have to believe that the work you're doing today will eventually pay off. The results will not show up immediately. You'll put in massive effort and see zero results for a long time. That's the test. That's the filter that removes the weak. You have to keep pushing until the momentum takes over. And when it does, you'll become unstoppable. You'll look back at your life and realize that mastering these 3 daily habits changed absolutely everything. Lack of belief is the biggest problem in the world today. That's what I think. You have to believe in your own potential before anyone else will. You have to trust that if you put in the daily reps, the compound interest of your effort will eventually explode. So stop waiting for someone to come and rescue Stop waiting for permission from anybody else. Give yourself the green light right now. Protect your focus, expand your knowledge, and guard your thinking time. Everything you want is on the other side of that consistency. Your next step. Your dreams aren't impossible. They're just waiting for you to actually commit to them. You have everything you need right now to start making a massive impact. So trust your vision and take the very next step. Next step today. If you want to get ahead of 99% of people starting today, check the video right there next to me.

I think you'll love it. Continue to believe and I'll see you there.

You are one boring habit away from being ahead of almost everyone that you know. You can have any habits, any patterns of behavior that you wish.

It's simply a question of which you decide.

Gallup found that only 20% of employees worldwide