Tai Lopez: NEVER Ignore The Power of Mentors When Building Your Empire!

He's an investor, partner, or advisor to a multitude of businesses. Through his book club and podcast, he shares advice on how to achieve health, wealth, love, and happiness. He says that finding mentors is one of the biggest predictors of your success. He's Tai Lopez, and here are his top 10 rules for success.

Life is very short. I see people going, oh, I'm 22, I only have, you know, I have all the world in front of me. You don't. First of all, tomorrow's not guaranteed, but more importantly, the age with which people are starting to become entrepreneurs. I read there's a kid, he made a nuclear power plant in San Francisco, he's 17 years old. That's your new competitor. So increase your sense of urgency as an intangible. I need to practice. Remember, before the day comes, you gotta practice. You cannot be standing at the free throw line playing professional basketball in the 7th game of the NBA championship and hope right then you're gonna be practiced. Practice is too late. Larry Bird used to, the great basketball player, he used to shoot whatever, 1,000 free throws, 8 in the morning. My friend Adon Ravine trains a lot of the pro basketball players, LeBron James he trains, he trains Durant, Kobe, Chris Paul, and he says these guys are up when everybody else is sleeping, they're practicing. So everything you want is going to entail a good bit of practice. So the second thing you have to do is people have to understand insurance, and I'm not just talking about life insurance or health insurance. I'm saying you have to protect what you already have. So some people, like Warren Buffett says, you only have to get rich once. So when you do well and you make money Have insurance by saving some of it for a rainy day. That's insurance. I did a video on that, like, that was the most important, because there was a few times in my life where I got like really— I would say really high up your pyramid, you know, right? And then fell back. Yep. And I feel back— I did a video of it, maybe I'll put a link in it in the description. 3 times I went like up, way up the pyramid and fell back. Yeah, I didn't Insurance. Well, now you, now you can tell people, don't— and Mark Cuban, who became a billionaire, he owns the Dallas Mavericks and different stuff. He sold a company, like a sports radio program, and he was brought in as shares of Yahoo. And at the— when he got— so they paid him all these shares, which were worth a lot of money at the time. But, you know, shares can go up and down. So he had one mentor, a financial advisor, who said, no, listen, You should buy insurance on this. So there's a way to do that with stock options. And sure enough, those shares of Yahoo he had been paid in dropped to almost worthless, but he had locked in the value with insurance. So he's still the billionaire we know now. So lock in what you have. Increase your courage. Harden up a little bit. Take a cold shower. Don't always take a warm shower. Acclimate your mind and your body to doing things that are harder. You know, one of my friends who's one of the most successful people in a young startup but made a billion-dollar valuation on a company in 5 years, whenever we're talking about new ideas we're going to do next, if I say, "Oh, that's going to be easy. Why don't we do that?" He says, "Ty, there's no money in what's easy. Focus on these intangibles." You know, the ability to have a ton of courage. He said the secret to advice I mean, the secret to success is get hold of something and hang on. Just hang on. If somebody wants it, hang on to it. It's worth as much to you as it is to anybody who wants it. I have to think in the world now where everybody's idea of a business is make a business, I'm gonna buy a piece of real estate, I'm gonna flip it, I'm gonna do it one week later, I'm gonna buy a stock and short sell. This guy had a completely different approach. Get a hold of something and hang on to it. And if you look at some of the most successful people in the world, They follow that strategy. Bill Gates gave up very little shares in Microsoft. He owned, I think, 60% of it even at its peak. He may have sold since then, but he got a hold of something and didn't, didn't let go. And he says, and again, that's the opposite of mentality most people have. Warren Buffett has the same thing. He buys businesses that he would want to hold on to forever. You got to get good. We talked about this, getting good at one thing. But this guy was saying— I've heard this. This is a new member. I said you got to create voices in your head. This is a voice. This Jack Simplot— I want— they even put on the back of the book, grab a hold to something and hang on. If you don't have something to grab a hold of, you better freak out and find something to grab hold on. It could be an occupation, it could be a movement, it could be a charity, it could be a business, it can be an invention, it could be a piece of art. But grab hold of something and do not let go. Now, make sure you grab on to the right thing, because if you grab on to the wrong thing, uh, you're in for some trouble. But have some investment. Don't spend all your cash so that when a good deal comes up, you have the money to buy it. If you're an artist, if you're a farmer, if you're an actor, whatever, you're going to need some cash. Don't spend it all and get a hold of something. People who are successful have extraordinary imaginative vision. And Elon Musk calls it a more complicated term, which is arguing from first cause is not analogy. So here's what arguing from analogy, or not having extraordinary imaginative vision— let's say you're in a horrible place, you were sleeping in your car, I was sleeping on a couch, someone born in ghetto, someone born in poor part of India. If you argue from, um, uh, sorry, arguing from analogy means, well, everybody around me is doing bad. I'm doing bad, therefore I'm gonna always do bad. That's arguing from analogy, and that's not having imaginative vision. The people who make it are the people who do the opposite. They go, I'm gonna argue from first causes. I'm gonna say, has anybody ever risen up from the ashes out of the ghetto, or from the couch, or from the car? The answer is we all know that story. So if somebody else did it, then if you use extraordinary creative imagination, then why can't you do it too? And that's arguing from first causes. That's what allowed Elon Musk to make Tesla, spaceships, SolarCity. So for all of us, we get stuck when we argue from analogy. Well, you know, last time I started a business, it failed. Last time I trusted somebody, they betrayed me. Well, that's good. That's arguing from analogy. That's just saying because it happened before, it's gonna happen. It doesn't always work that way. Sometimes you do it better. You double down on your brain. You learn from the mistakes of others and your mistakes, and the next thing, you create something new. And that's where wealth comes from. Not just wealth in your bank account— wealth of happiness, love, health, everything you want. Remember, change your mind, change your life. Everybody wants to change life, but you have to change your mind. Humans are different because we have powerful minds, and sometimes that gets us in trouble, but if you pull it off right, it can bring you those things that you need in life, those things that you're missing, you know. Everybody wants the good life. Like I say in my TEDx talk, everybody wants the good life, but not everybody gets the good life because most people aren't willing to do this stuff that am I willing to put in the time, put in the grind? Do not be a 450-pound person making fun of other people for being overweight. Just focus on yourself and learn from the world. Don't take that attitude of, "Ugh, oh really?" Nobody great is going to prove their point to you for the most part. They're going to say what they have to say. This guy's dead. He does not care what you think about his book. If you're able to go through this and glean 3 things that change your life forever, then that's great for you. So have that attitude of, ah, look for aha moments at every moment in your day. I started keeping a billboard with my staff, and I'm like, guys, it's getting lopsided. Look at all the— and I put a little mark every time I had a good idea for the business. And I'm like, I want your side to have more than mine. There's no rule that I have to have all the good ideas. Be innovative, be innovative. Read books like this. Find little innovations for your own life. Most people are patiently impatient, which I'm pretty sure is a recipe for a horrible life. What you have to be is the opposite. It sounds identical to be impatiently patient versus patiently impatient, but it makes all the difference in the world. So what I wish someone had told me, said, look, Ty, like John Wooden said, be quick but not in a hurry. 99% of people do is they act as if they have all the time in the world. So people are like patient. You see people, you're like, well, when are you gonna make your move on life? They're like, well, you know, I've got to wait for a few things together. So they're patient. But then when real opportunities arise that they can identify, instead of patiently waiting and building them step by step like sculpting a sculpture, they hastily jump into them. They They don't put the hard work in. They don't build the foundation and the structure. So that's when they are impatient. What I suggest you try instead is the exact opposite. Freak out if you're not getting the dreams that you wish you had, right? So freak out like, so today, don't even be, don't even say, oh, tomorrow I'm gonna get good at this. Freak out now, but then patiently build. So I can just go through a million things in my life where I fell prey to that. One of them is setting far-off goals. When you set a 10-year goal, you're just basically giving yourself an excuse to 8 years into it be like, well, I'm still on track because I got, you know, 2 years more. No, look, people who do big things make almost always immediate an immediate action towards the goal. Once you immediately freak out, you immediately take action, then step number 2, you impatiently move through each cycle. And I recommend you can go through a full cycle. Peter Drucker says a good timeframe is 18 months. It's enough time that things can kick in, but it's not so long that you lose the predictive power of goals. Goals are trying to get predictive power. So therein, I think, lies the happy medium. You're setting your 67-day goals, which are really fast. If you're watching this at midnight, start at midnight. What are you waiting for? Make hay slowly. Be quick but not in a hurry. There's this myth of the solo entrepreneur. I'm gonna have one good idea, I'm gonna go out, or I'm gonna come up with this one invention. I was just reading a book, I think it was by Craig Venter, or one of these big biotech guys and he said, you know, there's this huge myth that their great breakthroughs happen from one person having an individual moment of genius. Steven Johnson talks about this a lot in his book Where Good Ideas Come From. Almost all great ideas come from some collaborative effect. And so the best way to create a collaborative effect is for you to take what you know and clone it out to 3 or 4 people or 5 people or at least one person, even if you, let's say for example hypothetically, you could get 2 people to know 50% of what you know, to be 50% as effective as you. Well, guess what? 2 people at 50% is another one of you. And you look out at the world and you go, man, all the things that could be accomplished if I just could didn't have to sleep and I could work 24 hours a day, or I could go out there. Joel Salatin told me that when he was here. He said, "Ty, I don't know how people sleep with all the opportunities." And so Joel, my first mentor, he created his protégé, was his son Daniel, who now runs the operations and frees Joel up to be in the big picture. And the company, their farm is more successful, Polyface Farm, and Joel's able to do other things. You have to be able to do that.

Thank you so much for watching. I made this video because Terrell Coleman asked me to, so if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of Tai Lopez's top 10 rules meant the most to you, going to make you think about your life and your business. Leave it in the comments below and I'm going to join in the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Continue to believe, and we'll see you soon.