Psychology of People Who Get Rich From Zero | Most People Never Notice This

Your financial situation has absolutely nothing to do with how smart you are. Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. The big secret behind disruption is not having any idea how it's supposed to be done. I had no idea how it was supposed to be done. There's literally one thing, one trait that you want that's gonna allow you to accumulate wealth. It's the lack of FOMO. Research shows that poorer households that believe they control their own choices build 40 to 60% more wealth than those who blame their situation on outside forces. Watch and read high-performance people, and you will see that they always take responsibility. When their life goes to garbage, it's when they quit taking responsibility. The best thing we can do for ourselves is to focus on what we can control. We can't rewrite the past. We can't predict the future, but we can take ownership of our actions today so we create a culture of progress of just moving forward at your pace. Mastering this mindset is not just about buying a nicer house, it's about finally getting the freedom to spend your time exactly how you want. When you actually realize everything's your fault, it gets really good out here. Because when you think your boss's boss controls your shit, when you think somebody down the street in a building controls your shit, then you get real sad because you feel helpless. When you realize you control your shit, Things go. Delaying gratification is an absolute superpower. You have to put yourself in a state of perpetual discomfort in order to manifest your greatness. You've got to reach outside of your comfort zone. When I was 19, I had a massive choice to make. I had a 6-figure investment banking job offer on the table. That was the smart choice to take that. It was the safe choice. But instead, I chose to own 30% of a startup company and made $300 a month. My friends thought I was crazy and And logically, it didn't make sense. But I knew that true wealth and freedom, they don't come from playing it safe in some cubicle. I had to rewire my brain to take the risk, and it led me to building and selling a biotech software company. The psychology of taking that leap is exactly what gets you from $0 to living on your own terms. Look at Sara Blakely. She was selling fax machines door to door and kept getting the door slammed in her face. She had absolutely $0 in business funding and no background in fashion. But growing up, her dad used to ask her at the dinner table, what did you fail at today? He completely rewired her psychology. Instead of fearing failure, she feared not trying. She used $5,000 in savings and that unstoppable mindset to build Spanx into a billion-dollar brand. She didn't have more knowledge than the competition. She just had that bulletproof psychology that you can build too. Then there's Ronald Reed. He spent his life fixing cars and sweeping floors at JCPenney. He wasn't a Wall Street genius, but when he died, he left behind an $8 million fortune. On the flip side, Richard Fusconi was a Harvard-educated executive at Merrill Lynch. He had all the smarts and connections in the world, but he went completely bankrupt. Why? Because Reed mastered the psychology of money, patience, and delayed gratification, while Fusconi let his ego destroy his bank account. Wealth is a behavior. You just have to learn the right behavior. Behavior. Now you might be shaking your head saying, Evan, this is just motivational talk. My problem isn't my mindset. My problem is my empty bank account and the terrible economy. You can blame the economy or your boss all you want, but that won't put any more money in your pocket. People are getting rich right now in the exact same economy, starting with the exact same $0 that you might have. The only difference is what's happening here inside their heads. So here are the exact mindset strategies you need to stop playing small and start building real lasting wealth from nothing. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #believe in the comments below and 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. Take control of your results. Getting rich from $0 starts with a psychological concept called your locus of control. This is the exact belief system that dictates how you view your own power in the world. People with an external locus of control believe that outside forces determine their success. They blame the economy, their boss, the algorithm, their bad luck. They think wealth is something that happens to lucky people. But self-made millionaires have a fiercely internal locus of control. They believe their actions and only their actions dictate their financial reality. So if you want to make millions, you have to adopt this exact same mindset today. You have to take 100% responsibility for your empty bank account right now. It isn't your parents' fault. It isn't the government's fault. It's your responsibility to change it. When you take full ownership, your brain stops looking for excuses and starts looking for solutions. A major study found that people with a strong internal locus of control save significantly more money and accumulate more wealth over time because they actually believe that their actions matter. So I want to hit 40 million subscribers on YouTube. I can't reach that massive number by hoping the algorithm magically favors my videos. I have the power to control the process. I have to make better content. I have to test new ideas. I can take extreme ownership of the results. You need to do the same thing with your finances. If you want to get rich, stop giving your power away to outside circumstances. Decide right now that your future is in your own hands entirely. You are the director of your life. When you face a setback, don't ask why the world is being unfair to you. Ask yourself what you can do differently next time to get a better outcome. It's a psychological shift that changes everything. It turns you from a victim into a creator. It forces you to look at your daily habits and realize that every single choice you make is either building your empire or taking you down. You have to look in the mirror and accept that nobody is coming to help you, right? Nobody is going to hand you a check for $1 million. You have to go out into the marketplace and you earn it through your own value and your hard work. Start small today. Take ownership of your morning routine. Take ownership of your spending habits. Prove to yourself that you control your destiny. This internal belief is the absolute foundation of all self-made wealth. Until you believe that you are in control, you'll always find a reason to quit when things get hard. Embrace total control and watch how quickly your financial world begins to transform. Master the art of waiting. The next psychological trait that you must develop is delayed gratification. This is your hidden financial superpower. When you start with $0, the urge to spend your first bit of profit is incredibly strong, right? You finally make $1,000 and you want to buy some nice clothes, or you want to upgrade something on your car to show people that you're succeeding. This is exactly how people stay broke forever. People who get rich from zero master the ability to delay their rewards. They choose their future self over their present desires. They take that first $1,000 and invest it right back into their skills or their business. They understand that waiting is part of the price that you pay for massive abundance later. Right now I'm developing a software, it's called Brainlytics, and we'll link it up below. Requires a massive amount of time, energy, resources upfront. I could easily take that money and spend it on immediate comforts, but I'm delaying my gratification because I know building a real asset will create infinitely more value in the long run. You have to approach your wealth the exact same way. If you can't resist the urge to buy things that you don't need right now, you'll never have the capital required to build real wealth. Experts point out that financial success rarely comes from a single dramatic decision. It comes from hundreds of small decisions made consistently, like a ship that's guiding you, the rudder, right? It's guiding your ultimate direction, making improvements all the time. Mastering this requires completely changing how you view money so you stop seeing money as a tool to buy status and start using money as a tool to buy freedom. Every day you delay a purchase, you're buying a piece of your future independence. You're giving yourself options. You're building a fortress around your life so you never have to take a job that you hate just to pay the bills. It's deeply psychological. It requires you to sit with the discomfort of wanting something and actively choosing to say later. You have to fall in love with the process of building, not just the rewards of spending. When you train your brain to wait, you develop an incredible level of discipline that bleeds into every other area of your business. You'll have the patience to stick with a marketing strategy when it doesn't work on day one. You'll have the patience to build a loyal audience over 5 years instead of just chasing a viral trend. Now, we're not trying to deprive ourselves of any joy. We're just trying to have strategic patience. The people who make millions from zero, they don't have magical willpower. They just have a clear vision of their future so that it's exciting, that it makes ignoring the short-term distractions easier. So build your vision, make it so powerful that skipping that expensive dinner today feels like a step in you building your big financial empire. Break your familiar patterns. Your brain is literally wired to keep you poor. This is because of a psychological concept called status quo bias. Human beings vastly prefer to stay exactly where they are, even if their current situation is terrible. The known struggle is always more comfortable to your brain than the unknown possibility. So you might hate being broke, but you know exactly how to survive being broke. It's familiar. Building wealth from zero requires stepping into the complete unknown, and that terrifies your nervous system. So you have to violently break your familiar patterns if you ever want to reach the next level of success. Wharton Executive Education explains that people resist change because they fear losing what they have more than they value gaining something new. So you have to fight this natural instinct every single day. You have to become comfortable with the deeply uncomfortable. If your daily routine, it feels safe and easy, then you're not growing. You aren't pushing the boundaries of what your potential actually is. I'm currently working on a project to dub my 8,000 videos into 75 languages. Like, it's a massive leap into the unknown. It breaks every pattern of how I usually run my channel, but I know that sticking to my comfortable English-only strategy will eventually cap my growth, and I want to serve the world. I have to shatter the status quo to reach a global audience. So look at your life and identify where you're playing it safe. Are you staying in a dead-end job because it provides a predictable paycheck? Are you avoiding launching your business because you're afraid of looking stupid to somebody? Realize that playing it safe is the most dangerous thing that you can do, right? The world is moving too fast. If you stay still, you will get completely left behind. You have to train yourself to aggressively seek out change. Make it a habit to disrupt your own life before the market completely comes after you. So it means trying new marketing channels. It means pitching bigger deals and bigger clients. It means investing in new skills, even if you feel completely unqualified for it. Rich people don't wait for the perfect safe moment to make a move. They act despite uncertainty. They know that the only way to transform their financial reality is to break the mold of their current existence. So you need to stop defending your limitations. Stop protecting your comfortable little box that you built for yourself. Break down the walls, expose yourself to the risk of failure, because that's the exact same place where massive financial success lives. Your future millions are hiding right behind the changes you're most afraid to make today. Heal your hidden money wounds. This is a big one. Sometimes the reason you can't get rich has nothing to do with your business strategy, has everything to do with your deep hidden money wounds. Many aspiring entrepreneurs carry financial trauma from their childhood without even realizing it. If you grew up in a house where money was always a source of stress and arguments or fear, your nervous system learned to view money as a massive threat. You might subconsciously sabotage your own success because getting rich feels fundamentally unsafe to your brain. So we have to heal these hidden psychological wounds before you can ever hold on to any kind of real wealth. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. Covers the top lessons from today, gives you space for your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it. I'll see you there. Therapists explain that financial anxiety is often a nervous system response, not just a budgeting problem. When you view money through the lens of trauma, you either hoard every single penny in absolute terror or you blow it all immediately because your brain wants to get rid of the stress. Neither of these behaviors will make you a millionaire. So you have to rewire your psychological response to money. You got to move from a mindset of deep scarcity to mindset of abundance. With money. Scarcity tells you there's never enough, so you have to fight everyone for a tiny piece of the pie. While abundance will tell you that money is simply a— it's an infinite resource that flows to people who give immense value. So you have to start telling yourself a new story about what you deserve. You aren't destined to struggle because you saw your parents struggle. You don't have to carry their financial anxiety into your own future. So start paying attention to the words that you use when you talk about finances. Do you constantly say that you can't afford things? Do you feel intense guilt when you spend money on yourself? These are symptoms of a broken money mindset. And so it's actively challenging these thoughts. Replace them with the belief that you're highly capable of generating more income. When you finally heal these wounds, making money stops feeling like a battle for survival and becomes more fun. It becomes a creative game. You stop making decisions because you're afraid and you start making decisions because of opportunity. You'll easily pitch to high-ticket clients because you actually believe your service is worth it. You'll invest in your business because you trust in your ability to generate a return. Healing your psychology becomes a key to unlocking the potential of your finances. Follow your curiosity instead of a plan. There's a massive myth in the business world that you need a flawless 10-year master plan to get rich. Most people stay at zero because they overthink every single detail before they even take the first step. They want guarantees. They want the perfect map. But the truth is, self-made millionaires rarely start with a perfect plan. They just follow what makes them intensely curious. They lean into their interests. They take messy action. They figure out the rest along the way. You have to stop planning and start actually exploring. Experts highlight that greatness can't be rigidly planned, and the best opportunities come from meandering, curiosity-driven steps. When you follow your genuine curiosity, you naturally work harder and longer than anyone else. You don't need some artificial motivation when you're deeply obsessed with the problem that you're trying to solve. This obsession is what pushes you past the early rough stages of entrepreneurship when you're making absolutely no money. If you just chase a trend because you think it's going to make you quick cash, then what happens is you, you burn out and you quit as soon as things are difficult. But if you follow your genuine interests, you create unique expertise that nobody else can easily replicate. You spot connections and opportunities that the purely profit-driven people are going to completely miss. Your weird passions are actually your biggest competitive advantage. So you have to give yourself permission to experiment, to try, to taste, try new projects that might fail, launch the weird service you've been dreaming about. You don't need to see the whole staircase, as they say. You just have to take the first step. You just need to follow the immediate spark of excitement. One small, curious action naturally leads you to the next. Before you know it, you have a completely unique business model that fits your complete unique strengths. So stop letting the pressure of this perfect plan paralyze you, right? People are, are just procrastinating 'cause they're afraid. The market changes too fast for a 10-year plan to be accurate anyway. So speed and curiosity are infinitely more valuable than perfect preparation. Start pursuing those interesting ideas in your head right now. Embrace that it's gonna be messy and that you're gonna fail. The path from zero to millions is never this straight line. This is wild, crazy, unpredictable journey that is fueled entirely by your willingness to explore the unknown. Build your margin of safety. When you're trying to escape $0, a single bad decision can completely wipe you out. This is why mastering the psychology of risk is so important. People who build lasting wealth understand that they are not perfect. They know they're going to make bad investments. They're going to hire the wrong people. They're going to launch products that completely fail because they expect to fail. They build a massive margin of safety into their lives. You have to plan for disaster if you want to survive long enough to experience your future incredible success. In the book The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel explains that leaving room for error is the most underappreciated part of wealth building. If your entire financial strategy relies on everything going exactly right, you are guaranteed to fail. You have to assume that projects will take twice as long and cost twice as much as you initially expect, or triple or 10x. You need to build a buffer. This isn't about being negative. It's not pessimism. It's about extreme psychological resilience. When you have a margin of safety, a business failure just becomes an expensive lesson, right? It's not the end of your entire company. You don't panic when a client drops you or a marketing campaign doesn't do well. You've already built in the cushion to potentially absorb it. This creates emotional calmness and allows you to think clearly and make rational decisions while your competitors are freaking out and making desperate mistakes. So you build a margin of error. How do you do it? By living below your means, by keeping some cash reserves and not risking everything on one single unproven idea. So you have to protect your downside. It's not just about making money. It's about making sure that you never get forced to close down your business. Survival is the foundation of compounding wealth. You have to be around long enough for the money to be coming in. When you know that you have room for error, you actually have a lot more freedom to take risks. You can swing for the fences because you know that one strikeout, right, it's not going to destroy your entire business. It switches you from not playing to lose and now you're actually trying to play to win. So embrace that reality that you're going to mess up, you're going to screw up. It's not going to be perfect. Build the financial and emotional shock absorbers that you need. And that's a psychological shift that gives you a lot more power to outlast the hard times and ride the waves to massive wealth. Master the art of consistency. The final psychological key to getting rich from zero is the most boring, but also the most powerful. It is relentless, unbreakable consistency. You can't build a multimillion-dollar empire in one just big, giant, dramatic leap. Wealth is built through tiny, unsexy, daily repeated actions over years. Most people fail because they want the overnight success. They put in intense effort for 3 weeks, see no results, and then quit. Self-made millionaires understand that intensity is useless without consistency. Experts confirm that wealth isn't built through perfection, but through consistency and how you respond when things don't go as planned. So you fall in love with showing up every single day, especially when you don't feel like it. You don't need to be the smartest person in your industry. You just need to be the person who absolutely refuses to go away. You separate your daily actions from the immediate emotional feedback You can't judge the success of your day by the money that immediately hits your bank account today. You judge your success by whether or not you executed the daily habits that you set for yourself. Did you make the sales calls? Did you create the content in the videos? Did you improve your product? If you did the work, it was a good day. The financial results eventually follow, but they're— it's always a lagging indicator. They fall behind the effort. Effort comes first, then the money. It requires an immense amount of mental toughness. It means pushing through boredom. It means ignoring shiny object syndrome that distracts you from your core mission. I want to do all these things. You have to put your head down and do the repetitive work that actually moves the needle forward. So build a routine that is so simple and powerful that you can execute it even on your worst days. Designed for your worst day, not your best. So look at your life right now. What's the one daily habit that if repeated for 5 years would completely guarantee your financial success? Identify it, protect it, do it. Every day. Your future millions won't come, uh, from a magical lottery ticket, right? You build them brick by brick, habit by habit, every day. So let your consistency become your competitive advantage in a world full of people who quit too soon. Step into your greatness. You have everything it takes to build an incredible life from absolutely nothing. It all starts with a simple choice to change your mindset. Today. So stop waiting for permission and start proving to yourself that you're truly capable of achieving. I believe in you. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn the secret strategy rich people use that most people don't talk about. You do not need a million-dollar tech idea to build massive wealth and finally quit your day job. The fastest shortcut to hitting your financial goals is buying an unsexy business like a laundromat or plumbing company that already makes real money. Ironically, the businesses that don't crash are the ones built on trash. They solve real problems, they get paid, and they last. Something that most people overlook. The less exciting the business, the less competition there is, and the more reliable the dividend. Right, so it's, it's a foolproof business. Biggest factor into going into boring businesses is the fact that it's recession-proof. It is not seasonal, and it's something with recurring revenue. If you keep telling yourself you are not ready to be an owner until you invent the next big app, you will completely miss the greatest wealth transfer in history and stay broke. Sometimes you don't need to upgrade the business idea. The boring version already works. You're not just running the boring businesses, you are building a modern empire. Warren Buffett is the greatest investor of all time, but he does not build tech startups. He buys boring companies. He bought a candy company, a furniture store, and a paint business. Look at them.

If somebody came in and offered us the entire business, and then we try to think, what is this place going to look like in 5 or 10 years, and how sure are we of it?

He realized early on that buying a business with a proven track record is the easiest way to guarantee a massive return on your money. You skip the risky startup phase and go straight to collecting The practice.

And we go and somebody comes to us with a business that's done phenomenally for 10 or 15 or 20 years, or maybe for 50 years, and we've seen how, what their batting average is. We've actually seen they bat at.350 or whatever it may be, and we just make the assumption that we won't screw it up by hiring them, and we buy the business. That's far easier to tell great baseball batters after you've seen a couple seasons of their batting than it is to go to even college baseball teams or high school school baseball teams and pick out the superstars.

Now, right now you're probably thinking you need millions of dollars to buy a company. That's exactly what the startup world wants you to believe so you stay stuck working your day job. The truth is retiring owners are desperate to sell, and you can buy their profitable business using seller financing or small business loans with almost zero down. I'm going to show you the exact types of boring businesses you can look for right now. The $10 trillion generational wealth transfer. A massive 90% of all startups fail entirely. Many of these startups fail simply because they build a product that absolutely nobody actually wants. Another massive group fails because they just completely run out of cash. You end up spending years of your life draining all of your savings and maxing out your credit cards just trying to prove that your idea works. You stay awake late into the night worrying about how to pay your bills. You pitch to hundreds of investors who just tell you no. You spend your weekends tweaking a pitch deck instead of living your life. You sacrifice your health and your relationships for a dream that has a 90% chance of failing. Now, if that's what you want to do, awesome, go for it. But you do not have to do that. You can skip the hardest part of business. You can skip the long years of making zero profit. You can just buy a business that already works and already prints cash. When you buy an existing business, you start making money on the very first day. You do not need to guess if your customers will buy what you sell. You do not have to build a brand from scratch. The customers are already there waiting for you. So right now is a massive shift happening in the global economy. About, uh, 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every single day. They control about 2.34 million small businesses in the United States alone. These retiring owners hold an estimated $10 trillion in business assets. That is trillions of dollars of wealth that is expected to transfer over the next 10 years. This is the biggest financial opportunity of our lifetime. They run the local hardware store, the neighborhood bakery, and the regional trucking company. These are businesses that have deep roots in your community. They have real customers who pay real money. Every single week. And when these owners retire, their knowledge leaves with them unless someone steps in to take over. But here's the crazy part that you need to pay attention to right now. More than 58% of these owners have no documented transition plan. Their kids do not want to take over the family plumbing company. The kids want to work in tech or do something completely different. They do not want to fix pipes or manage employees or drive trucks. The owners are tired and burnt out. They just want to sell the company, retire comfortably, and play golf. They are literally waiting for a hungry entrepreneur exactly like you to walk in and take over their life's work. They want to see their legacy continue in good hands. So your first action step is to look around your town and notice how many older owners run the local shops. Make a list of 5 businesses you drive past every day that look like they've been there forever. Skip the struggle with an S.O.W.S. business. Now, you do not want to buy a complicated tech company or a trendy restaurant. Trendy restaurants fail fast when the hype dies down. Tech companies, they require constant updates and massive teams of expensive engineers. Building a brand new software company like I'm doing with Brandlytics, man, it takes a massive amount of intense daily focus. Side note, if you want to split test your thumbnails and grow your YouTube channel, Brandlytics Awesome might just be for you. You have to manage developers, fix bugs, and run endless marketing campaigns, but you can buy boring business instead. There's a framework for this called SOWS. It stands for stale, old, weak, and simple. You want a business that is stale, meaning it does not need crazy disruptive technology or viral marketing to survive. People just need the service no matter what year it is. A plumbing business or a roofing company will never go out of style. People will always have leaky pipes and broken shingles. You want it to be old, meaning it has survived for at least 5 years and has a proven track record of making good money. An old business has loyal customers who keep coming back every single month. It has survived bad economies and recessions. You want it to be weak, meaning the current owner has terrible customer service or bad marketing. You can easily step in and beat the local competition just by answering the phone on time and having clean website. Most of these older owners do not even use email properly. They miss phone calls and lose money every day because they refuse to use any kind of modern tools. And finally, you want it to be simple. You need a business model that is incredibly easy to understand on day one. If it takes you months to figure out how the product works, you should walk away, unless again you really love it. You want a business where you can explain exactly how it makes money in one single sentence. Sometimes the simplest strategy is the most effective. A vending machine route is the perfect SOWS business. It is completely simple and totally weak in competition. You pull up, you restock the snacks, and you collect the cash. You do not need to hire a massive marketing team to convince people to buy a bag of chips. You just place the machine in a busy building. You just buy the route, implement some basic inventory software to track your sales, and you instantly increase your profit margins without inventing anything new. You could run special promotions or put card readers on old machines to double your revenue. If the old owner only accepted coins, you'll see a massive spike in sales just by accepting a credit card swiper. So your next action step is to write down 3 unsexy businesses in your neighborhood that fit this exact SOS model. Go talk to the owners and ask them how long they've been in business. The secret to buying with almost $0 down. Now you're probably sitting there thinking you need a massive bank account or rich parents to buy one of these companies. You might think you need millions of dollars in cash just sitting in a vault, right? You do not. You can literally buy a profitable business using the cash flow of the business itself. The most powerful way to do this is called seller financing, because these older owners are desperate to retire and nobody else wants to buy their unsexy business. They will actually act as a bank. For you. So they will hand over the keys to the business, and you pay them a monthly payment out of the profits that the business is already making. You do not need to go to a traditional bank for this part. You avoid all the crazy bank fees and the months of waiting for your loan approvals. You just negotiate the terms directly with the seller. So you can ask for a low interest rate or a longer time to pay them back. You can even structure the deal so you only pay them more if the business grows. It creates a win-win for everybody involved. The seller gets a steady stream of retirement income, and you get a business with almost no money out of your own pocket. Now, if the seller will not finance the whole thing, you can use government-backed bank loans. The SBA 7 loans typically require only a 10% down payment. You can easily raise that small amount from private investors, friends, family. You can use the money you save from your day job. When Nina and I walk around Toronto, we see dozens of small shops that are ripe for this kind of buyout. We see dry cleaners and corner stores and local gyms. You could take over a million-dollar company with almost none of your own money. The business pays the bank loan back for you every single month from its own revenue. You just sit at the top and manage the system. The bank takes on most of the risk because they know the business has a history of making profit instead of just some startup that doesn't have track record yet. So your action step here is to start practicing how to talk to owners about seller financing options. You can search online for local businesses for sale and Call one broker today just to see how many sellers are open to financing. You will be surprised by how many say yes. The best boring businesses to target right now. You need to target businesses that provide essential services that people need no matter what the economy is doing. You want recession-proof companies that print money in good times and bad times. So take a look at laundromats. 16% of American households do their laundry at a laundromat. People will always need clean clothes. Even when the economy crashes, people still have to wash their shirts. Laundromats bring in a median annual revenue of $219,878,000. They are essentially self-service. The customers do all the work by loading and unloading their own clothes while you collect the coins and credit card payments. You do not need a huge staff to run them. You can hire one person to clean floors and wipe down the machines. You can upgrade the machines to take mobile payments and make even more money. You can add vending machines for soap and snacks to boost your profits. You can even add a wash and fold service where people pay you extra to do the laundry for them. Another incredible option is self-storage facilities. So storage facilities are extremely low maintenance because you do not have to deal with broken toilets or crazy tenant complaints like you do with apartment buildings that you're out. People just leave their stuff in a metal box and they pay you every month. If they stop paying you, you just auction off the box. The self-storage industry has an average profit margin of 36%. You can add automated locks and online booking to make it a completely passive income stream. You do not even need an employee to sit at the front desk. Customers can rent a unit on their phone and get an access code instantly. It's hard to focus on your health and your family if you're working 100 hours a week for a boss. But when you buy a boring storage facility that practically runs itself, you get your time back. You get your time back to focus on your health, to go salsa dancing, to be with your family, to build your next big thing. You can also look into commercial cleaning services or property management. A property management business can easily bring in between $50,000 and $1 million in average annual revenue. You just oversee the rent collection and handle leases for other property owners who do not have the time to do it themselves. It's a steady, predictable recurring revenue that hits your bank account every single month. You can hire a few contractors to handle the repairs and maintenance. Also, HVAC companies, plumbing services, landscaping routes are all printing cash right now because they are services that a robot or app simply cannot replace. You cannot download an app to fix a broken air conditioner. A real person has to show up and do the work. So your action step here is to pick one boring industry and learn everything you can about how it works. Read books, listen to podcasts, watch interviews of people who already own that type of business. Also explore local service niches you might not have considered yet, like mobile pet grooming or specialized medical transport, which can also yield high returns. Overcome the fear of buying. Many people freeze when they think about buying a business. They think they do not have the skills to run a company. They worry that they the employees will quit, or the customers will leave. That fear is completely normal. Every successful business owner felt the exact same fear before they signed their first deal. The key is to rely on the systems that the old owner has already built. You do not have to reinvent the wheel from scratch. You just have to keep the wheel turning. So you'll spend the first few months just learning how the machine they built works. You'll talk to the employees, ask them what needs to be fixed. You You can listen to the customers and find out what they love about the service. You slowly introduce small changes to make things run smoother. You do not have to make massive changes on day one. You can take your time and learn the ropes. The old owner will usually stay on for a few months as well to train and introduce you to the best clients and the team. They want you to succeed because their name is still attached to the legacy of the shop. Now, if you're worried about making a mistake, you can hire an advisor to look over the financial records before you buy. You can bring in an accountant to verify the revenue and the profit margins. You can talk to a lawyer to make sure the contracts a business had, that they're solid. You do not have to do it all alone. You can build a team of experts to guide you through this process. So your action step now is read one book or watch one video about buying a small business this month. You'll see that the process is pretty straightforward once you understand the basic steps. You realize that ordinary people buy businesses every single day. Adopt the CEO mindset. Now, to pull this off, you have to completely change the way you view entrepreneurship. You have to shift from just being a startup founder mindset to a CEO mindset. Startup founders are obsessed with creating something new totally from zero, and if that's you, awesome. They spend years guessing what the market wants and burning through their cash. They constantly worry about running out of money before they make their first sale. They wear every single hat in the company, and they often burn themselves out. But a CEO focuses on running, improving, and scaling a company that already exists and already has customers. A CEO looks at the big picture and finds ways to make this machine run faster. In my Movement Makers program, I teach successful entrepreneurs how to scale their impact by stepping into this exact leadership role. You have to delegate the small tasks so you can focus on the massive growth you have ahead of you. You have to stop acting like the hardest worker in the room, and you have to start acting like the smartest leader in the room. You have to trust your team to do most of the heavy lifting. You have to give them the tools that they need to succeed and then get out of their way and trust them to do their job. You will never scale a business if you insist on making every single decision yourself. You have to build systems that run without you. So when you acquire a business You get instant infrastructure on day one. You inherit an established customer base, a proven business process, a trained team, and existing cash flow. Your job is not to do all of the daily grunt work. Your job is to lead. Your job is to look at the boring business. You find the bottlenecks and you fix them. Maybe the old owner did everything on paper and kept receipts in a shoebox. You just bring in an iPad and some basic scheduling software and suddenly the business is 20% more profitable. You set up a simple digital marketing campaign that old owner was too afraid to try. You can also hire a great manager to run the day-to-day operations for you so you do not have to be there every single day. You are buying the past performance, but you are building the future. This is how you engineer real generational wealth. You build wealth through ownership, not by grinding away 100 hours a week for a boss who does not care about you. So now you have the exact roadmap to buy your freedom instead of suffering through the startup struggle. So you're Action step is to stop acting like an employee and start making decisions like an owner. Audit your own life and find 3 areas where you can start acting more like a CEO today. The ultimate shift. You are fully capable of running an empire, so stop waiting for permission to become a true leader. It's time to step up, take the reins, and trust your ability to learn on the go. No one is coming to hand you your success on a silver platter. You have to go out and be willing to take it. You have to be willing to do the things that other people are too afraid to do. And the only thing standing between you and your freedom is your willingness to take the leap. So take that first step today. Start looking for a business or sale in your area. Contact a broker and start a conversation. Now let's learn why success is hard until you build systems like this. You do not lack discipline. You just have a terrible daily environment. They say we're creatures of our environment. You believe that, Post? Yes, I am a creature of my environment. You're the boss in your apartment, right? No matter what, no matter how little it is, if it's— whether it's a big house or a little house, that space right there, you're the boss. That's what your business is. That's what your life is. You create the space so you can control it. You control your environment, but you have to architect that. The space you choose to work in can seriously impact your productivity and your mood. Structuring your surroundings. To make good choices automatic is the real secret behind every millionaire that you admire. You don't have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it. Your brain is a record of your environment. Who you surround yourself matters. What content you consume matters. If you keep fighting against a broken routine, you stay stuck exactly where you are for the next 10 years. Growth requires deliberate habits. If you don't know your routines, How are you supposed to ever feel your best? No one can live without a routine. You just forget that. If you guys don't have a routine, I would recommend like you get one going. In 2006, doctors at the Massachusetts General Hospital wanted to improve the eating habits of thousands of staff members and visitors. They did not talk to anyone about willpower or motivation. They simply changed the physical environment. They added bottled water to every single refrigerator right next to the soda. Within 6 months, soda sales dropped and water sales skyrocketed. They proved that you often choose things not because of what they are, but simply because of where they are in your environment. Now, I can hear your doubts right now. You might be telling yourself that you've tried routines, you've bought the planners, and you always fall off track after a couple days. But your systems did not fail because you are weak. They failed because you designed them for the perfect version of yourself, not the tired and stressed out version of yourself. When you build a system based on your actual reality, it does the heavy lifting for you. Let me show you how to structure your day so that success becomes completely automatic. Stop chasing goals and start building a daily machine. Goals are completely useless for changing your daily behavior. You have probably set massive goals for your business before, you wrote them down, you felt a huge rush of motivation, and you pictured how amazing your life was gonna be. But a goal only tells you where you want to go. It does absolutely nothing to help you take the physical steps to get there. When you only focus on the goal, you put yourself in a constant state of failure. You wake up every single day realizing that you are still not a millionaire, you still do not have a massive audience, and you are still struggling. And that gap between where you are and where you want to be creates massive anxiety for people. The most successful entrepreneurs in the world do not focus just on their goals. They focus on their systems. A system is just a repeatable process that guarantees you take action regardless of how you feel. There's a fascinating study, uh, from the British Journal of Health Psychology that showed how people build new habits. The researchers divided people into different groups to see who would stick to a workout routine. One group was just told to track their workouts. Another group was given motivational speeches to boost their desire to exercise. The final group was told to create a specific system. They had to write down the exact day, time, and location that they would work out. The results are pretty shocking. The motivation group only had a 35% success rate, but the group that built a simple system had a 91% success rate. You do not need more motivation to build your business. You just need to decide exactly when and where you are going to do the work. So when I started my YouTube channel, I didn't have a goal to reach 4 million subscribers. If I'd focused on that massive number, I would have quit in the first month. Instead, I built a system. My system was simply to create and upload a new video every single week at the beginning. Now we do every day. My first videos were terrible. I was awkward and shy and completely embarrassed to watch myself on camera. But my purpose comes from my pain. I struggled so much when I was starting my first software company. I wanted to quit. I felt totally isolated and alone, and I knew there are other entrepreneurs out there feeling the exact same pain. I wanted to help them. I wanted to help you. So I stuck to my system. I made 350 videos before I was finally not embarrassed by my own content. I made 700 videos before I actually inspired myself. I did not win because I had better goals than anyone else. I won because my system forced me to put in the reps when nobody else was watching. If you want to finally break free from the cycle of starting and stopping, you must build a system that tells you exactly what to do every single morning. Your system will build your momentum. Once you have momentum, becoming successful is just a matter of time. That leads me directly into the next system you need to build. Design your environment for the lazy version of you. You always try to design your life for the perfect version of yourself. You assume you will wake up full of energy, ready to crush your tasks and completely immune to distractions. But that perfect version of you is not real. You need to design your systems for the tired, stressed, and lazy version of yourself. When you are exhausted, your brain will always choose the path of least resistance. If your guitar is in a closet, you will never practice. If your camera is packed away in a bag, you will never record a video. If you have to search for your client list, you will never make your sales call. You have to remove all the friction between you and the work. I want to share a powerful concept from an IT developer named Oswald Knuckles. He created a daily system called resetting the room. Whenever he finished watching television, he does not just turn it off. He puts the remote back on the stand. Fixes the pillows and folds the blanket. Whenever he takes a shower, he wipes down the toilet while the water is warming up. He does not view this as cleaning. He views this as preparing the room for his next action. He intentionally designs his environment so that his future choices are as easy as possible. You must apply this exact same system to your business. When you finish working for the day, clear your desk, open the exact software you need for the next morning. Leave your notes right next to your keyboard. When you sit down the next day, you will not have to think about what to do. The work will already be waiting for you. This is also how you protect your mindset. Lack of belief is the biggest problem in the world right now. It's what I believe. Your current environment is perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are. If you want to change your life, you have to radically change what you feed into your mind. Set up your environment so that success and belief are impossible to ignore. So every single morning I have a system where the very first thing I do is play a video of someone who inspires me. I call it my believe walk. Get up, go outside for at least 15 minutes, put on something that inspires you. I listen to Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Les Brown. I do not leave my inspiration up to chance. I manufacture my belief by designing an environment that forces me to think bigger. Your environment will always beat your willpower in the long run. So fix your surroundings today and your habits will automatically fix themselves tomorrow. But fixing your physical environment is only the first step. Now you have to clear out the mental clutter. The 10 Minute Mental Cleanse System. You are probably carrying hundreds of uncompleted tasks in your head right now. You are thinking about the emails you need to send, the videos you need to film, the clients that you need to get on and call, the bills you need to pay. This creates a massive amount of mental static and stress. When your brain is overloaded with things that are not finished, you literally cannot focus on the task that's right in front of you. This is a psychological phenomenon called the Zeigarnik effect. In the 1920s, a psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik noticed that waiters in a restaurant could remember complex unpaid orders with perfect accuracy. But the exact moment the bill was paid, the waiters completely forgot the order. Your brain is programmed to constantly remind you of unfinished tasks until you either complete them or put them into a trusted system. To stop this mental drain, you need to build a mental cleanse system. Take 10 minutes every single evening to write down every single thought, idea, and obligation floating around in your head. Do not organize them yet. Just get them out of your brain and onto a piece of paper. This simple act tells your brain that the information is safe. Your brain will finally stop reminding you about these tasks and your anxiety will disappear. Once everything is written down, pick the one most important task that will actually move your business forward. Circle it. That becomes your only focus for the next morning. Everything else can wait. Now, you're probably an overthinker. You get these bold, powerful, and courageous ideas, but instead of acting on them, you sit and think. You analyze the risks. You worry about what people will say, and you let the idea die. You have to trust that great ideas flow through you for a reason. When you get a great idea, you must take one small physical step towards it within 5 minutes. Buy the domain name, record a rough voice memo, send an email to a potential partner. Lock the idea into reality before your mind can talk you out of it. When you stop storing your ideas in your head and start putting them into the physical world, your entire business will transform. But even the best productivity system will fail if you do not have the right foundation. This brings me to the most important system of all. Build a system that forces you to serve others. If your only goal is to make money, you will quit as soon as the process gets painful. Entrepreneurship is incredibly hard. You will face rejection, you will lose money, and you will have days where you want to shut everything down. In those dark moments, wanting a bigger bank account will not give you the strength to keep going. You are built to serve. You want to wake up every single day and feel like your life actually matters to somebody else. When you make your business about helping other people, you tap into this unlimited source of energy. Researchers at the Wharton School of Business conducted a fascinating study on university call center employees. These employees were tasked with calling alumni to ask for donations. The job was highly stressful, had a huge turnover rate. The researchers brought in a student who had received a scholarship funded by those exact donations. The student simply talked to the employees for 5 minutes about how the scholarship had changed his life. Over the next month, the employees who met the student increased their total revenue by 171%. They did not get better scripts. They did not get better training. They simply realized that their work was actually changing a human life. Money is incredibly important. You need money to hire a team, scale your impact, and take care of your family. Money can absolutely be in your top 5 priorities. I think it actually has to be. It just can't be number 1. Your number 1 priority must be the mission. You must have a cause that you would fight for even if you were not getting paid. You need to systemize your service, make it a mandatory part of your daily system to help one person with zero expectation of getting anything in return. Answer a question in a form. Leave a detailed comment on a small creator's video or send an encouraging message to a client or a friend. When you focus intensely on who you are serving, your fear of failure goes away. You stop worrying about looking perfect on camera because you realize the message is more important than your ego. Your business will explode the moment you realize that your true job is just to pull other people out of the same dark hole you used to be in. But even the best mindset will fail if you give up too early. Track your actions and ignore your results. Your obsession with immediate results is destroying your long-term potential. So you start a new routine, you work incredibly hard for 2 weeks, and then you turn around and realize nothing has changed. You still do not have the sales, you still do not have the audience, and your bank account looks exactly the same. So you decide the system is broken. And you quit. But the system is not broken. You are just expecting to see the harvest while you are still planting the seeds. So in the science of continuous improvement, there is a concept known as the plateau of latent potential. When you first build a new system, your results will flatline for a long period of time. You will put in massive amounts of effort and see absolutely zero external reward. This is where 99% of people give up. but your effort is not being wasted. Your effort is being stored. When I first started my journey, I tracked my year-over-year growth. After 5 years of making content consistently, I only had a few thousand subscribers. Most people would look at those numbers and call me a complete failure. If I had judged my success purely by those results, I would've quit like a thousand times over, but I did not track my results. I tracked my actions. I focused entirely on the fact that I showed up and I did the work I promised myself that I would do. You have to love the process of building your business. If you only love the reward, you will never survive the years of grinding in the dark. You must be completely stubborn about why you were doing this, but incredibly flexible about how you get there. Build a system where your only definition of a successful day is whether or not you executed your daily habits. When you stop obsessing over the outcome and start obsessing over the daily inputs, your success becomes absolutely inevitable. Your ultimate engine. You already have everything inside you to do something truly legendary. You just have to stop waiting for permission and start building the routines that guarantee your victory. Trust that your ideas matter and take immediate action on them today. I believe in you. I know you can build the life you dream about. If you only watch one video about money, make it this one. I think you'll enjoy. Continue to believe. And I'll see you there. Most financial advice is designed to keep you trapped in the middle class forever. Where are you going to spend your time? Your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life. I went to school and what they pounded in me was the poor person.