The AI Gold Rush Is Here... Here’s How to Profit From It

You could miss the greatest wealth-building opportunity of your life because you're waiting for certainty instead of taking action. The stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over. Strategy is not words. Strategy is action. Every generation gets a technology that makes new entrepreneurs rich, and for this generation, it's AI. The companies that will succeed in this transition period will be the ones that most effectively use AI. If you're doing something and making maximum use of AI and you're competing against someone who is not, you will win. There's never been a better time to be an inventor and a pioneer than right now because the world is on fire with, with new ideas and with AI and space opportunities and all. We're in the middle of multiple golden ages right now. Using the latest large language models, whether it's ChatGPT, Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, whatever it may be, is like having every professor in every university available to you as a mentor. If you wait until the opportunity feels completely safe, someone else who had more courage will profit instead of you. So in the next 3 hours, you'll discover the wealth-building principles used by the world's most successful entrepreneurs and how AI is creating new ways for ordinary people to get rich today. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. 3 22-year-olds became billionaires by paying doctors and lawyers to grade AI answers for OpenAI and Anthropic. The money is going to whoever spots what AI still gets wrong and sells the fix to the people building it. The Federal Reserve reported that AI adoption still at only 18% of American firms at the end of 2025. So more than 8 out of every 10 companies around you still haven't really implemented it, and their customers are sitting there waiting for someone who has. So here's how the young billionaires get rich off AI actually did it, and none of them invented a chatbot. Brendan Foody runs a company called Mercore with 2 friends he met on his high school debate team, and all 3 of them are worth about $2.2 billion each. It started with something they heard in a meeting with OpenAI. Foodie Adarsh Harmath and Surya Midda grew up in the Bay Area and competed together on the speech and debate team at Bellarmine College Preparatory. In 2023, they started a company and dropped out of college to run it. The first version was nothing to do with artificial intelligence. At a hackathon in São Paulo, they built a way to match skilled engineers overseas with American companies that needed them. They handled all the paperwork and the payments, and they took a small cut off every deal they made. It was a recruiting business. It was boring on purpose. They took meetings with OpenAI and xAI, and they heard the same problem twice. The labs had all the computing power money could buy and all the internet text there was to read. What they didn't have was people who could tell them whether an answer that AI gave was actually any good. If a model, an LLM, writes a contract, you need a lawyer to say where it's wrong. If it writes code, you need an engineer to catch if there's a security hole. If it gives medical advice, you need a doctor to make sure that it was correct. So they pointed their recruiting business at that. Merckor hires real doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, and engineers to grade what the LLMs produce. The expert they hire marks the output and then writes the scoring guide that the lab uses to grade the next 10,000 answers. Merckor finds those people, runs the workflow, handles all the payments in dozens of countries, and charges their fee on top of that. There's no breakthrough algorithm in any of this. They found out that a lab with billions of dollars of computers was short on cardiologists, and then they went and they hired them for that. The experts get paid $75 to $150 an hour, which is real money for a few hours a week on top of an existing day job. A radiologist reads scans all day long, then spends 3 evenings a month telling an LLM where it got a scan wrong. And by October 2025, Merkur was managing about 30,000 contractors and paying out roughly $2 million a day. Its customers included OpenAI and Anthropic. That same month, investors valued the company at $10 billion. Each of the 3 founders owns about 22% of it, which puts each of them at around $2. $1.2 billion. They were all 22 years old. Forbes says they're the youngest self-made billionaires ever to make the list, younger than Mark Zuckerberg, who got there at 23. 2 years from a hackathon project all the way to that. No degree. They didn't have a patent. They didn't create an algorithm that nobody else could write. Now you might be thinking, okay, those 22-year-olds, they're geniuses, they're from Silicon Valley, they have Peter Thiel in their contacts, and you might be 45 with a business that sells something a lot more physical than them. What they actually did wasn't a technical breakthrough. And that's what I'm trying to model here for you guys. They sat in a room with a buyer. They listened to what the buyer couldn't get anywhere else, and they went and they solved the problem for them. A $10 billion company. And that's all it does. You can do that inside your industry right now, this week, with the phone that— the phone that you're holding right now. Let's go back to that Federal Reserve number. Only about 18% of American companies are implementing AI effectively. That means the race is wide open in your town, in your industry, and the 82% who haven't really touched any of it yet this year. So here are the 6 young billionaires getting rich off AI, where each of them came from, and the one move that made them rich that you can learn from as well. Edwin Chen never took a dollar. Edwin Chen is 37 years old. His parents came over from Taiwan and ran a restaurant, and he worked in the family kitchen as a teenager before the boarding school and before MIT. At MIT, he studied math, computer science, and linguistics. Then he spent about 10 years as a research scientist inside the biggest names in the industry. So Google, Facebook, Twitter. He also did a stretch at Clarium, the hedge fund Peter Thiel ran, but he walked away from all of it and moved out of the Bay Area. He had always hated the Silicon Valley status game. In 2020, he started Surge AI on his own out of an apartment with the money that he had saved from those 10 years of working. He didn't have a co-founder, he had no pitch deck, he had no outside investors. Surge finds the doctors, lawyers, and engineers who can tell an AI lab where its model went wrong and grades the output. By 2024, it was doing $1.2 billion in revenue with around 110 people and Google and Anthropic were both paying customers. No company in history has reached $1 billion of revenue faster without raising outside money. Chen owns about 75% of it now. Forbes puts him on the list of the 400 richest Americans as the youngest person on that list, and you'd probably never even heard his name until watching this video here. So what you can do is copy the order that he did everything in— revenue first from a customer for work that you can already do. So think about 3 things that you can sell right now to somebody who has paid you before, then message those 3 people tonight and ask what they're working on and see if you can help them. Alexander Wang took the job nobody wanted. Alexander Wang grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the town where America built the atomic bomb. Both of his parents were weapons physicists at the laboratory there, and they had come from China. He entered his first math contest in 6th grade. For one reason, the prize was a trip to Disney. He won it. Then he made the Math Olympiad program, the United States physics team, and the finals of the National Computing Olympiad twice. As a teenager, he was always trying to automate restocking his own fridge when he worked out the thing that later made him rich. What was holding AI back wasn't the algorithms. Nobody had labeled any of the data. So he went to MIT to study machine learning, and that lasted about a year. At 19, he dropped out. His first company wasn't the one that actually made him rich. In 2015, He and a designer he knew from Quora, Lucy Guo, built an app for booking doctor's appointments, and it went nowhere. Guo said, we couldn't focus on product dev because we were just calling doctors all day. Then a roommate joked that what they really needed was an API for humans, and that joke became Scale AI. Scale labels data. Real people sit down and draw a box around every car, every stop sign, every pedestrian in a picture so that a model An LLM AI can learn what it's looking at. Millions of boxes, one at a time. Every lab needed that work done, and none of them wanted to be the company that did it. In June 2025, Meta paid $14.3 billion for 49% of Scale and made Wang its chief AI officer. He's 29 now, worth about $3.6 billion. So find the job in your industry that everybody needs and nobody wants to do. Think about the last time a client apologized before asking you for something. Sorry, I know this is a pain, but could you, you know, whatever comes after that, that's the job. Call the client this week and offer to take it off their hands every month. Lucy Guo left in 2018 and got rich in 2025. So Lucy Guo was studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon when Peter Thiel's foundation offered her $100,000 to quit. That's what the Thiel Fellowship does, if you didn't know. It pays people under 20 to leave school and go build something. She took it. She designed that Snapchat where she was the first woman in that job, and then Quora where she met Alexander Wang. She was in the doctor's appointment app with him too, the one that failed. Guo said, we wish there were an API that could call the doctors for us every time somebody was sick. That's a good idea. Made an appointment in the app. So in 2016, the two of them went and built that instead and called it Scale AI. She was 21. 2 years later, she was gone. They had some disagreements about how the company should be run. And in 2018, she left the company that she had co-founded. Meta's $14.3 billion was still 7 years away at that point, but she kept her shares. For the next 7 years, she had no job there. She didn't have a title. She didn't have a say in any of the decisions that Scale made. But in April 2025, Forbes named her the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire at 30 on a stake worth about $1.25 billion. In December 2022, she launched Passes, where creators sell directly to the people who follow them, and she raised around $50 million for it. Olivia Dunne and Bella Thorne are both in on it. So start your next thing before you know how the last one goes, right? Guo had no idea in 2018 what those shares would be worth, and she didn't wait to find out. And you can write down the one thing you'd build in business if your current company went away, and then give yourself 2 hours on the weekend to start making progress on it. Michael Troll sold his company to SpaceX. So Michael Troll is 25. He wrote his first code at 11 so he could build his own mobile games, and at 14 he built a programming game. He was a National Computing Olympiad finalist, and at MIT he co-created Highlight, an AI programming competition that pulled in more than 10,000 entrants. In 2022, he and 3 MIT classmates started a company called AnySphere. One of them, Aman Sanger, had sat in his high school classes in New York. Troll was 21 when he raised their Series A. Then he spent almost a year building the wrong product. They went after mechanical engineering software, tools for designing actual physical parts in an industry that none of them knew anything about. Troll has called that year wandering in the desert. So they went back to the one job they understood completely, which was writing code all day with tools that were too slow, and they built Cursor. Now, it nearly didn't work as a business. They charged $20 to $40 a month while paying out more than that to OpenAI and Anthropic to run it, which left them with a gross margin of around 30%. In April 2025, their AI support agent invented a login rule that didn't exist, and a wave of customers canceled before a human could even step in. But in November 2025, Cursor passed $1 billion in annual revenue faster than any business software company had ever done it at a $29.3 billion valuation. Then on the 14th of August of 2026, SpaceX bought the whole company for $60 billion in stock. The largest startup acquisition anybody has ever recorded. Each of the 4 co-founders walked away with about $2.4 billion of Elon Musk's rocket company. So build for the job that you already do all day long. They lost a year on an industry that they didn't understand, then built a tool for the one thing they really knew completely. So write down the 3 parts of your own work that waste most of the time this week and pick the one that you could easily describe to AI to start building. Arvind Trinivas quit OpenAI right before ChatGPT. Arvind Trinivas grew up in the middle-class part of Chennai. His father worked at a bank and his mother stayed home. She used to point at the IIT Madras campus near their house and tell him, this is where you're going to study. He got in, then he missed a computer science seat by a fraction of a grade point and he fell into a depression. He taught himself Python at night, competed on Kaggle, and graduated in 2017 as the top student in his dual degree. Berkeley came next, a PhD under Pieter Abbeel. His internship at DeepMind in London came with housing so bad that he slept at the office, and it was there he picked up a book about how Google was founded. At OpenAI in 2018, he stopped believing that he was good enough. He said, I went to OpenAI and I felt like really bad because people were so much better than me. It was a big reality check. He finished the PhD in 2021 and went back to OpenAI full-time. He was 27 on the research staff at OpenAI doing the exact work he had trained his whole life to do, but he quit in August 2022 weeks before ChatGPT came out, when nobody outside the labs knew it was coming. That same month, he and 2 other engineers, Denis Yarats and Andy Konwinski, started Perplexity. He had wanted to build a better way to search since he read that book in the DeepMind office. It didn't start as a search engine. The first product was a tool for searching Twitter in English. The answer engine came after that, and Jeff Bezos put money in. By 2025, Perplexity was valued at $20 billion, with 100 million people using it every single month. Srinivas is 32 and worth about $2.5 billion. Google made $63 billion from search in the last 3 months of 2025. Every dollar of that is advertising. A search that answers your questions and sends you on your way earns Google nothing. So Google will always give you a page to try to stay on. Perplexity answers the questions and shows you where the answers came from. And Google can't copy that without giving up how it gets paid. So for you, you can write down the biggest company in your market at the top of a page tonight. And underneath it lists 5 things that it can't do for a customer without costing itself money. One of those 5 things is the business that you could start. Brendan Fouty skipped his finals. So Brendan Fouty, one of the 3 that I talked about at the top who we opened this video with, grew up in the Bay Area, and both of his parents are software engineers. His mother works on Meta's real estate team, and his father started a graphics company in the 1990s. At 16, Fouty ran his first business, charging his friends $500 each to get them Amazon Web Services credits. He met Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Mehta in rhetoric class at an all-boys high school in San Jose. And the 3 of them ended up on the debate team together. Hiremath and Mehta had known each other since they were 10 from elementary school debate tournaments, and Hiremath was only put into debate because his parents worried that he was too quiet. Those 2 became the first team ever to win all 3 national policy championships. Foodie is dyslexic. Competitive debate runs on enormous volumes of reading. He got good at the other side of it instead, listening to a person and answering exactly what they said. Years later, that's what he did when he was in the room with OpenAI. In August 2023, as college sophomores, they started Merkur out of their dorm rooms. Foodie skipped his finals. HireMath left the Harvard program where he was taking a bachelor's and a master's at the same time. And the next year, the Thiel Foundation handed all 3 of them $100,000 each to stay out of university. Merkur didn't start as an AI company either. It matched software engineers in India with American companies and interviewed them with an automated video avatar. Then OpenAI and xAI told them what they were actually short of, and they pointed that same business at finding doctors, lawyers, and PhDs to grade what the LLM models were producing. 2 years later, Mercur was valued at $10 billion and each of them was worth $2.2 billion. At 22 years old, Foodie said, it's definitely crazy. It feels very surreal. So think about 3 conversations this week with people who already sell to your customers and ask what their clients keep asking that nobody else is supplying. The door is open right now. Foodie and his friends, they didn't have money, they didn't have a degree, they didn't have a product that anybody wanted yet. What they had was a hackathon project And the nerve to ask a customer what they felt was missing. Again, only 18% of companies are really using AI effectively. You're early even though it doesn't feel early and it will never feel early. The best time to start is right now. Pick the one thing that you're already best at and have a deep passion for. Mix it up with what you already know about AI and then go ask 10 customers who need help and go work with them. This is the first moment in history where one person with a laptop can outearn an entire company. AI is real, and it is going to change every industry. Generative AI is on track to add up to $4.4 trillion a year to the global economy, according to McKinsey. And that number is a window into the biggest wealth shift of your lifetime. The ability to use these tools is both fun and empowering. And the people who step through it in the next 12 months are going to look back on this year as the year that everything changed for them. Let me tell you about a guy named Tony Dinh. He was a software engineer with a safe 6-figure job at a big tech company. Good money, good title, the kind of job you're supposed to feel lucky to have. But he wanted to build his own thing, and so he walked away from it and started shipping Tiny products that he built on his own, building in public where the whole internet could watch him either win or fall on his face. Then the AI wave hit, and he built a tool called Typing Mind. It's a faster, cleaner, more powerful way to use AI chat with a better interface and extra features that the heavy users really love. One specific problem with one clean solution. And here's the best part: he runs the entire business completely alone. No employees, no office, no team. Just Just him and a laptop, often working while he travels the world. And that one tool pulls in over $130,000 a month. He posts his exact numbers in public, so it's not just a rumor. You can go and check for yourself. He didn't raise millions from different investors. He didn't hire 50 people. He found one expensive problem, pointed AI at it, and let the technology do most of the heavy lifting that he used to then build his whole company. That is the AI business model that is making millionaires right now. One person, one specific problem, AI doing the work of an entire team. Now here's where your brain often goes and tries to fight. You're thinking, that's great, but Tony, he's a coder. I'm not technical. I can't build a tool like that. I wouldn't even know where to start. And this is where we gotta relax because we need to shift the thinking. The model's not about coding. Tony built a product, but the exact same model works as a service, and the service version doesn't need you to write a single line of code. You bring the relationships and you bring your judgment. AI does the work. You can deliver the work that used to take a whole agency for a handful of clients and keep the money because you don't have the team to pay. The tools have gotten so good that the only thing standing between you and this is a decision just to start. So let me show you exactly how it works step by step. Step 1, pick one specific expensive problem. The biggest mistake people make is trying to help everybody with everything. They want to be a general AI consultant who does a little of this and a little of that. That never works. The money is in being laser specific. So Tony Dinh didn't build a tool that does 100 different things. He built one tool that solves one problem really well, making AI chat faster and easier for the people who live in it all day long. That's it. One specific painful problem that people pay real money already to solve. So your job is to find your version of that. Pick one type of person and one expensive headache that they might have right now. Maybe it's a small law firm when they need their client intake handled. Maybe it's a real estate agent who need their listings written up and their follow-up emails sent off. Maybe it's local restaurants that need their social media run, right? The keyword is expensive. You want a problem where people are already spending money because that means demand is already proven. You're not creating a brand new market. You're entering one that already exists and doing it faster and cheaper with AI. So here's a quick test to find your problem. Look at what businesses around you are already hiring people to do that is boring, that is repetitive, and that is time-consuming. Writing product descriptions, answering the same customer questions over and over, editing videos, building simple reports, following up with leads. Every one of those is a task that AI can now do in a fraction of the time. And every one of those is something a business is already paying real money for. That is the opening for you. The line between what you do and who you serve has to be completely straight. When you try to serve everyone, you connect with no one. When you go all in on one specific person with one specific problem, then you become the obvious choice to work with. So before you go do anything else, Get super clear on this. Who do you help and what's one expensive problem you do solve for them? Write it down in one sentence. If you can't say in one sentence, you're still too broad. Keep narrowing down until it's sharp. Step 2, start high, not cheap. This is where so many entrepreneurs sabotage themselves. They think the way to start is to sell something cheap, a $20 ebook, a $50 mini course, a small digital download. And I'm telling you, that's the slow road to go to nowhere, right? When you sell cheap stuff, you need You need thousands and thousands of customers just to make a living. And finding thousands of customers takes a massive, expensive marketing machine that you don't have yet. So just switch the math, go high ticket from day one. So let's look at how easy the numbers can get. So imagine you charge $2,000 a month to deliver an AI-powered service. You only need 4 clients to hit $96,000 a year. 4 clients. You can manage 4 clients from your kitchen table. Now picture 8 clients, and now you're nearly at $200,000 a year. Still working alone. That's the power of starting high. A small number of clients who pay real money is 100 times easier to manage than a huge crowd of people who are paying you pennies. And high ticket does something else for you. People actually take it more seriously. When someone pays you $2,000 a month, they show up, they do the work, they get results, and they refer their friends. So don't be scared to charge what the work is worth. The AI does a lot of the heavy lifting on delivery, which means your margins are huge. You're not paying a team. You keep almost everything. But there's also one more reason why high ticket wins. With a small number of clients, you can give each one an incredible experience. You know their names, their businesses, their goals. You answer quickly. You overdeliver. That kind of care is impossible when you're just drowning in thousands of low-paying customers. And it's exactly what turns a client into somebody who stays for years and sends you everyone they know. So start high, serve a few people incredibly well, and let that fund everything you build next. Step number 3, let AI do the work a team used to do. So this is the engine that makes the whole thing run. The reason one person can now do what used to take 20 people is that AI handles most of the actual labor. So your job is to build a simple system where the machine does the repetitive work and you do the thinking. Run everything through 3 filters. First, eliminate. Look at your day and cut anything that actually doesn't move the needle forward. I used to write detailed notes for a group of mine that I later found out nobody ever read, so I cut it out completely. Be honest about what's just busywork. Second, automate anything repetitive. Give it to AI. Turning a single long-form video into 20 short clips, transcribing every call so that you never lose an idea, drafting your outreach messages, writing your first drafts of your client work, organizing your research— AI can do all of that in minutes. Third, Third, delegate. For a few things AI can't do and shouldn't do, you get help. You can hire a part-time assistant for 5 to 10 hours a week to start so you learn to lead without the weight of having a full-time salary. When you stack these 3 things together, something pretty wild happens. You start delivering professional-level work at a speed that looks impossible for your clients. They think you have a whole team behind you and it's just you and your AI. Now let's look at a simple client. So say you land a client who needs 30 social media posts A weekly newsletter and all of their customer emails answered. A few years ago, that's 3 completely different hires. Today you sit down with AI, you feed it their brain and their voice, and you generate first drafts of it all in an afternoon. You spend the rest of your time editing, adding a human touch, your taste, and making sure that it's excellent and you're proud of. The client sees agency-level output. Your actual cost is a few dollars in AI and a couple hours of your undivided attention. And the gap here between what you can deliver and what you have to pay is where the millionaires are being made right now. Step 4, build relationships, not an audience. So a lot of people think that you need to go viral first, right? You think you need a million followers before you can make money. So you spend a year chasing views and end up broke and burned out. You don't need a giant audience for this model to work. You just need the right relationship. So Let me give you a model that I teach my Movement Maker clients. Make a list of 50 people who could each be worth 6 or 7 figures to your business. Not customers, connectors, people who already have the audience or the network that you really want to reach. I call it the Money 50 list. Then instead of asking them for anything, you give first. Invite them to be a guest on a simple show or podcast that you run. You record the conversation, you make them look great, and you build a real relationship. I've had clients build 7-figure businesses off of a channel with fewer than 50 targeted subscribers. Because they owned the relationships that mattered instead of chasing strangers and just views. And the give-first move works because it changes your whole relationship dynamic. Everyone else is sliding into people's DMs and inboxes asking for their time, their money, their attention, a favor. You show up offering to make them look good and put a light on their story. You're the only one giving instead of taking at the start, and that makes it different and unforgettable for them. I had a client who did a version of this by simply offering free coaching on Instagram. Live just to show off what he knew. And in 2 weeks, he went from signing up 2 people to 55 in his high-ticket program and scaled past $1 million in just a few months. He didn't have a huge following. He led with value and just let the right people come to him. So stop obsessing about your follower count. Pick a handful of people who can change your business, serve them, connect with them, and watch what happens. Quality relationships beats a giant audience every single time. Step number 5, stay lean on purpose. Here's something that nobody actually talks about. The goal is not to build the biggest company. The goal is to keep the most money and the most freedom. So when you grow a giant team, you create a giant set of problems as well, right? Payroll management, drama, overhead. The whole magic of this AI model is that you can make a fortune while staying small. That's the freedom of this model. You get to design a business around the life you actually want. You don't need a fancy office. You don't need a perfect website. You don't need a finished logo or a big brand to begin. Multimillion-dollar businesses have been launched with none of that. What you need is one clear offer, AI doing a ton of the work, and a few great clients. Keep your costs near zero, keep your team tiny or nonexistent, and let the technology be your leverage. Lean is not the limitation here. Lean is your entire advantage. Think about what that actually buys you. No 2 investors to answer to, no staff meetings, No rent, no payroll deadline hanging over your head every 2 weeks. When your costs are nearly nothing, you can survive a slow month. You can take a real risk. You can survive a client who says no or is not a fit for you anymore because you're not desperate to cover this giant overhead. That freedom is its own special kind of wealth, and it's only possible because AI lets one person carry the load that used to need an entire team of employees. The smaller the machine is that you build, the more money you get to keep at the end of the day. Step six: Start before you're ready. Now this is the one that actually decides who wins. You can know all of these five steps above and still do nothing because you're waiting, waiting to learn more, waiting for the perfect idea, waiting until you feel qualified. And while you wait, someone less talented than you is starting messy and figuring it out as they go. Tony Din didn't wait until everything was perfect. He left a safe, high-paying job and started shipping small products. Products in public one after another, learning from each one as he went. He didn't get it right on the first try. He kept going, and getting it going is what eventually got it right. So here's, here's your assignment this week, not someday, this week. Pick your one problem, write down your one offer, and have one real conversation with one person who might pay you for it. That's the whole start. Not a website, not a logo, not a business plan, not more research. One offer, And one conversation. The AI tools are sitting there right now, more powerful than anything a billion-dollar company had even just a few years ago, and they're free or nearly free, free to use today. The only thing missing is deciding to move. The window where this is wide open and uncrowded is right now. A year from now, a lot more people will have figured all of this out. The advantage belongs to the person who starts before it's obvious, and that person can be you. So the door's open right now. And it will not stay open forever. The people who win this won't be the ones with the most money or the best degree. They'll be the ones who actually started while everyone else was sitting around wondering if it was real. Pick one expensive problem, charge real money to solve it, let AI do the work of the team, build a few key relationships, and stay lean. You do not need permission and you do not need to feel ready because ready isn't real. You just need to start today, right where you are and with what you have. One person with a laptop can now build what used to take an entire company I think it is probably possible now to start a company that is a one-person company that will go on to be worth like more than $1 billion, and more importantly than that, deliver an amazing product and service to the world. For the first time in over 50 years, more than 1 in 3 new startups are being built by a single founder with no co-founder at all, up from fewer than 1 in 4 back in 2019. And the startup data firm Carta credits the jump to AI tools. That let one person do the work of a whole team. So the question for you isn't whether a one-person business is possible anymore— that's proven— it's whether you're going to be one of the people who finally builds a thing that you've been putting off, or whether you'll sit and watch other regular people do it first. Let me tell you about a guy named Mark Liu. Back in 2021, Mark hit rock bottom. He was broke, he was depressed, and he was living in his parents' house with no income and no clear way out. He didn't have a co-founder, he didn't have a team, he didn't have investors lining up to rescue him. What he decided to do instead was teach himself to build small software products and then ship them over and over again on a single laptop. Now, most of them flopped pretty hard, and that's the part that people love to skip over. He built more than 20 projects that went absolutely nowhere before one of them, a simple tool that helps other builders builders launch their products faster finally caught fire. Now today, Mark runs about 15 little products entirely by himself, and together they bring in roughly $85,000 every single month with almost no expenses because the whole team is just him. He never hired a single employee, he never raised a dollar from anyone, and he built the entire thing out in the open, posting his real revenue and his ugly failures for the whole world to watch. He went from his parents' spare room to millions of dollars in sales, one small product at a time. And he never once asked anyone for permission to start. Now, the common objection that I often hear that stops almost everyone before they take that first step is, that's great for Mark, but he's a developer who can write code and you can't. I get it. And listen, this is— I want to be honest because all progress begins with telling the truth. For most of history, that objection was actually completely fair. Building software meant you either spent years learning to code or you raised a giant lot of money to hire engineers. And if you couldn't do either one, your idea just kind of died in your head. That wall though now is completely gone. It came down recently. It's come down quietly, and a lot of people haven't realized it yet. With Claude, you can describe what you want in plain normal English and have it write the actual working code right alongside you, step by step, explaining as it goes. The skill that matters now isn't typing code. It's knowing which problem is worth solving and being willing to start before you feel ready. So think Think about what that actually means for you. The thing that used to cost $50,000 or team of engineers or 6 months of waiting, you can now sit down and build yourself in an afternoon for the price of a subscription. That barrier that kept regular people kind of locked out of building software for the past 30 years, it disappeared. And the people who move on it early are going to look back at this exact window the way people wish that they had bought into the early internet. You're not too late. You're almost too early, which is the best place in the world to be. So So let me walk you through exactly how you'd build your own one-person business with Claude starting from absolutely nothing. Pick a problem you already know. So let's start with this. You pick one painful, specific problem that you already understand better than almost anyone. This is where you have an unfair advantage and you probably don't even realize that you're sitting on a goldmine. Every job you've ever worked, every industry you've ever been around, every hobby you've ever gone deep on. Has handed you a private list of annoying problems that people inside those worlds would gladly pay to make disappear. So the builders that are winning right now, you're not— they're not just chasing some giant trendy idea that they read about. They're taking one small pain that they personally know inside out, and they're solving just that one thing. So take Danny Postma. He'd already built and sold one company in the AI space, so he knew that world cold. And when he noticed people were paying hundreds of dollars for a professional headshot, he built an AI tool called Headshot Pro that does it for a few bucks. He solved the problem he understood deeply for people he understood deeply. So get killer at one thing. Don't try to build the everything app that does 50 things badly. Build the single thing that you would happily have paid for back when you were stuck doing it the slow, painful way. Your purpose here usually comes from your own pain, from the precise frustration that you lived through and never want to touch again. And the range of what you can build is wider than most people think. So people are building small software tools that businesses pay a monthly fee for, simple apps that solve one annoying task, systems that watch a company's online reviews and draft the replies, dashboards that track numbers about a specific industry cares about, and automated services that run a piece of someone's business for them every day. Every one of those started as one person noticing one specific pain. So right now you can write down 5 problems that you personally understand, the ones that usually make you sigh at your old job, and circle the ones that make you the angriest, that's your business. Let Claude build it with you. So now you start the conversation with Claude and let it carry all of the technical details and weight that you don't have. So here's how it actually feels when you sit down to do it. You open Claude and you describe your idea in regular words the way you would explain it to a friend over coffee. You say, I want a simple tool that does this specific thing for these specific people. Claude asks you smart questions that you hadn't thought of. It helps you lay out a clear plan, and then it starts writing the real code while explaining what each piece does and why. When something breaks— and it's absolutely gonna break— you copy the error message, you paste it back in, and Claude fixes it with you and tells you what went wrong. So you're never expected to know any of this in advance. Claude Code can live right on your computer and build the whole thing right beside you, file by file, Like a patient senior software engineer who doesn't get tired, who doesn't roll their eyes at you, doesn't make you feel stupid for asking those basic questions. Being leads to doing here, I think in the most literal way. The moment you start acting like a builder, even a slow and clumsy one, you actually start becoming one, and the speed comes shockingly fast after the first week. Ship the ugly first version. So now we want the smallest possible version live and in front of real. People fast before you feel ready. This is where you separate yourself from the 99% who tinker forever in private and never ship a single thing. You are not trying to build the perfect product. You are trying to build the slightly embarrassing first version that does one useful thing well, and then put it in front of a handful of people who actually have the problem. So builders are doing this in days now, not years. Go back to Danny Postma. He built the very first version of the headshot tool in about 30 hours, put it straight out into the world, and it made $100,000 in its first 2 weeks. He didn't sit around polishing it in private for a year. He shipped the rough version and let real customers tell him what to fix. So ready isn't real. So stop waiting to feel it. Ship the rough version. Watch closely how real people use it. Listen to what they complain about and let their reactions tell you exactly what to build next. A scrappy thing that exists and earns beats a beautiful thing that is still trapped in your imagination. So getting it live is a good start. And from there you make it 10 times better. Using real feedback instead of your guesses. The market will teach you more in one week of being live than one year of planning ever could. Charge real money, aim high. So now we want to charge real money from day one and aim higher instead of low. This is a mistake I watch kill one-person businesses before they even get a chance to breathe. People build something decent, then price it at a couple of dollars, which means they suddenly need thousands and thousands of customers just to put food on the table. And that That requires a giant marketing machine that they don't have and can't afford yet. So we want to flip the whole thing around. As a solo builder, your sweet spot is usually a smaller number of people paying you a meaningful amount each. So we can look at some simple math. If you find just 4 clients paying you $2,000 a month, that's $96,000 a year. And that is a one-person, almost 6-figure business that you can run from your kitchen table with no office and no staff. If you want to. The same logic works for software. Some solo builders charge businesses around $1,000 a month for a single tool, and just a handful of clients like that changes your entire life. The whole point is to charge enough that a few good customers carry you instead of chasing 1,000 cheap ones. And look at how big this can get with just one person. Danny Postman's AI headshot tool brings in around $300,000 a month, run entirely by him and his whole solo portfolio. portfolio of products, clears roughly $3.6 million a year with no co-founder and no investors. Tony Dinh left his big tech job, built his own software tool on his own, and crossed more than $1 million a year all by himself. You don't need a million customers. You need a real product, a fair and confident price, and the courage to charge what it's genuinely worth. Let Claude run the business. Next, we can use Claude to run the parts of the business that building. So you can stay a team of one without drowning in all the busywork. The real reason one person can pull this off now is that AI doesn't just write your code, it can handle the work that used to force you to hire people. So you can have it draft your sales emails, write articles, answer the common questions, sort and prioritize your inbox, and turn one long video into 10 short clips to promote what you built. So this is how I like to use eliminate, automate, delegate, except now you get to delegate to AI instead of people. You can eliminate the busywork that keeps you broke and keeps you tired. You automate the repeatable stuff that drains your hours, and you let Claude handle a huge chunk of the rest—not everything, but a huge chunk—so that the only thing left on your plate is the high-value work that actually grows the business and makes the money. That is precisely how a single person runs an operation that looks from the outside like it must have a whole team and an office behind it. So guard your hours. Every task you hand to AI is an hour that you get back to build the next thing. Build it out in the open. So a very cool idea is to build the whole thing out in the open because for a one-person business, attention becomes oxygen for you. The biggest fear solo builders carry is that they'll pour months into something great and nobody will ever find it. So how we fix that, and it costs you nothing, just a little bit of courage, you share the journey publicly. While you build it. Mark Liu became known to a huge audience not by running expensive ads that he couldn't afford, but by posting his progress, his real revenue numbers, his wins, and his embarrassing— in quotes— embarrassing failures out loud for anyone to follow along. People don't just buy a product, they buy the story and the person behind it, and they root for someone that they've watched struggle and keep shipping anyway. So pick one place online, post what you're building this week, show the ugly first version with no shame, ask people what they'd actually want, and let a small audience grow around your work before the product is even finished. By the time you launch for real, you're not just yelling, you know, to an empty room. You've got a group of people already waiting, already trusting you, already half sold. Your distribution and your product end up getting built at the very same time by the same one person for free. That's a form of leverage almost nobody uses, and it's sitting right there waiting for you to Then stack another one. So then you keep stacking because once you build one product, the second one is far easier. And this is the part that turns a side project into real wealth. The first product is always the hard one. It's the one where you learn how to talk to Claude, how to ship before you're ready, how to charge with more confidence, how to find and keep your clients. But every single skill you build on that first one carries straight into the next product and the next and the next one after that. That's exactly how Mark Liu did it. He didn't build one giant company and bet everything on it. He built a long series of small products, one after another, most of them failing, each new one a little easier and faster than the last one until the winners stacked up into something most funded startups with big teams never reach. You can run the same play, build one, get it earning real money, then use the exact same playbook to build the next one and let them compound on each other, right? Brick by brick, product by product. A single determined person, you builds a portfolio that becomes lasting life-changing wealth. If you have the ability to build this, then you have the responsibility to do it. If you can, then you must. The tools finally caught up. So here's where all of this lands. You are alive at the exact moment where the tools finally caught up to the dream that you have been carrying here. The paper airplane here that should never be able to break the sound barrier is doing it right now because impossible has always just meant nobody's done it yet. You have a problem you understand deeply. You have Claude sitting there ready to build it with you and you have the whole world reachable from the same laptop already open right in front of you. You don't need permission, you don't need a team, and you don't need to be technical. You only need to start. And the best time to start is now. How about right now? Open Claude tonight, type out that one problem you can't stop thinking about, and let it build the first rough piece with you before you go to bed. That's it. That's the whole beginning. Most of the people who'll be running real one-person businesses a year from now are going to start with exactly that small a step this week. So go build the thing only you can build and let the world see what one determined person is truly capable of. This is the first moment in history where one person and a laptop can out-earn an entire company. We might have AI that is smarter than any human by the end of this year. This could be very significant productivity in the economy. AI is the biggest technical thing Ever in my lifetime. I mean, it is so profound. You've got the smartest business partner ever built, ready to work all day for about $20 a month, and you haven't even opened it yet. People who actually use Claude are finishing complex college-level work around 12 times faster than the ones grinding through it all by themselves. And the people winning right now are starting with less than what you have today. The only thing that's in your way is the decision to begin. Let me tell you about a guy named Peter Levels. Back in 2014, he was in his late 20s, bouncing around the world with barely any money coming in, watching his savings shrink every single month. He didn't have a degree, he didn't have a rich uncle, he didn't have a safety net. He was just a scared guy who was running out of cash. So he made a wild promise to himself. I love this: 12 startups in 12 months, one brand new product every month, whether he's ready or not. And most of them flopped completely. Then one hit. It was called Nomad List. It was a site, uh, for people who travel and work online. It grew to millions of visitors. Then he created Remote OK, and that became one of the biggest remote job boards on the planet. And then in February 2023, he built a little tool that was called Photo AI. And here you upload a few of your selfies and it creates professional photos of you using AI. Its first week, it made about $5,000. 18 months later, it was pulling in more than $130,000 every single month. And the best part is this: Peter had no employees, he had no office, he had no investors, he had no team. It was him, a laptop, and AI doing most of the heavy lifting. One person, more than 40 products, over $200,000 a month. He started before he felt ready. He was broke and scared, and the work turned him into the guy who could win. Okay, now you might be thinking, okay, Evan, that's great for him, but he's a coder. I'm not technical. I don't even know where to start. And honestly, I'm worried that AI is going to replace me in my job or my business before I even make a dollar from it. And I understand. This year, Claude is the coder. The skill that matters most is actually spotting the problem and just pointing Claude at it. You find someone that is hurting enough to pay to make that problem go away, and Claude helps you handle the build. What leaves people behind is just waiting to feel ready, and ready is not real. So you don't need to wait for permission. You don't need to wait to feel ready. We just need to start one tiny step. The opportunity in front of you is bigger than any skill gap you think you have, and I'm going to show you exactly how to grab it. Nobody wants AI. They want their problem gone. Okay, so here's the first thing that we're— we want to burn into our brain. People do not pay for AI. They pay to make a painful, expensive problem disappear. A business owner that's bleeding customers at 11 PM when nobody's there A realtor who's stuck writing listings for 3 hours wants those 3 hours back. So your job is to find that kind of problem and then kill it with Claude. The best place to look is your own pain. I think your purpose comes from your pain. So the stuff that frustrated you in your old job, the headaches in your own life, those are the exact problems that other people will pay you to take away for them. So you already know where it hurts. So that's where you start. And you know, I think that's a great point. And let's talk about just giving yourself permission. It's okay to want the money. Your mission comes first. But if money is sitting at number 100 on your list, you'll always be doing part-time things nights and weekends forever. So keep money in your top 5 and then get specific. So we're not helping small businesses, pick dentists, pick plumbers, pick real estate agents in one city, find the single task they hate, the one that eats their week up, and then point Claude straight at it. So I teach my team a simple filter. Eliminate, automate, delegate. The job a busy owner would kill to get off their plate is the one that you get paid to take out. And when you reach out, never lead with the word AI. Say, I'll handle your follow-up emails so you stop losing leads, or say, I'll give you back 10 hours of your week. That's what a busy person, a busy entrepreneur, they pull out their credit card for. So get this right, and 5 people with the same problem and a credit card is enough to start a real business. If you can solve a real problem, then you must go offer Offer it. Somebody out there is stuck tonight on the exact thing that you could fix tomorrow with Claude sitting right next to you. Sell a service before you build a startup. Now for the fastest way to put money in your pocket this week, sell a service where Claude does the heavy lifting and you keep the money. The biggest, most boring goldmine right now is automating the busywork that drowns every small business. Think about what an owner does over and over again, chasing down leads, answering the same customer questions, writing their weekly reports and emails, newsletters, onboarding every new client by hand. It eats the hours they should be spending actually running the business. So you build a cloud-powered system that takes one of those jobs off their plate completely, then charge them to set it up plus a monthly fee to keep it running. And the demand is exploding. According to Fiverr's business trends data, searches from companies looking for freelancers who can build AI agents and automation jumped more than 18,000% in a single year. Businesses are hunting for someone to do exactly this, and most have no idea where to start. That someone can be you. And here's the beautiful part: you never touch the code. You sit with the owner for an hour, you find the one task that wastes their week the most, and you map out exactly how it gets done step by step, understand their process. You hand that to Claude, and it builds a system that runs it. You You fix what doesn't quite work, and you hand them back hours of their life. To them, you're the person who gave them their time back, and that is worth real money to you. Being leads to doing. The moment you start showing up as the person who solved this, you start becoming that person too. Okay, so how much can you make? A setup like this runs anywhere from a couple thousand dollars plus a monthly retainer to keep it humming, and one client can replace a whole paycheck. So pick one painful, repetitive task that businesses in your niche all hate. Write one simple message and send it to 20 local businesses this week. Say, I'll answer your customers the second they reach out, day or night, so you never lose another sale. That's a message a busy owner actually pays for. The tools are free or they're close to it, $20 a month. The only thing between you and your first client is a message that you have not sent yet. Build the thing in a weekend, not a year. So once you got a little cash and you know what people need, then you start to really build. And this is where like this year gets unfair in your favor. Building software used to take a team of engineers 6 months, to 6 years to create. Now you describe what you want in plain English and Claude writes the code with you. They call it vibe coding, and it's how a lot of new software is getting built right now. Here's how you can do it without a computer science degree. So you open Claude, you describe the thing you want in plain English, plain words, like you're explaining it to, you know, a smart friend of yours. Claude writes the actual code and hands you back a working version that you can click through and try around in a couple minutes, long before you put any real time or money into this And when you're ready for the real thing, the version that runs a business, you can point Claude Code at your project and it builds, tests, and fixes the files for you. You test it, you tell it what's broken, and it keeps patching it and improving it. You keep going until it works. Then you connect simple services for signups and payments. So you don't need an engineering team. You don't need a 6-month to 6-year timeline, just you and Claude. And it does not have to be the next big app. Most of the money is in the small, boring tools. Booking system for local gym, a dashboard that pulls contractors' numbers onto one screen, a little automation that saves a busy office an hour a day. Unglamorous problems that people will gladly pay to make disappear. Okay, now this is really important because this is where a lot of people are tempted to quit because your first version is going to be, it's going to be pretty rough. It's going to be pretty bad, right? Expect to suck at the beginning. It's supposed to. Ship it anyway. Remember Peter, he shipped Photo AI rough and started charging in week 1 then made it better while people were already paying. A boring tool making a little money beats your perfect app that lives in your head forever and never gets out into the world. The person who ships something ugly this weekend ends up miles ahead of the genius still planning their next step next year. A paper airplane isn't supposed to break the sound barrier either, right? But doing the impossible is exactly what you are here to do. So give yourself one weekend, pick the smallest version of your idea, the one thing it absolutely has to do, and build only that with Claude. Charge for it before it's pretty. You can always make it better once real people are paying you. Turn what you know into something that sells while you sleep. Okay, so not everybody wants to run a service or build an app, and that's fine because there's a third door, and it might be the simplest one. You package what you know into small digital products and them over and over. So don't worry about the 200-page book that takes 40 hours and barely sells. What we're here to do is make tight, useful tools people can buy and apply in 5 minutes. So a big one right now is called prompt packs. These are collections of proven instructions that get Claude to do a specific job really well, like writing sales emails for a dentist or planning a month of content for a coach. Makers sell these for around $17 And because it costs you nothing to make another copy, you keep 95% of every sale. You can go bigger too. A focused mini course that solves one specific problem sells for $47, and you can record it in an afternoon. Claude can even translate your product into other languages in minutes so you can sell the same thing to people all over the world without learning a single new word. So you can put it up in a simple online store and you're open for business. And prompt packs are just a start. You can sell templates that do someone's boring setup for them. Them, a planning system that runs their whole week, a swipe file of messages that actually get replies, a checklist that turns a 3-hour job into 20 minutes. Anything you had to figure out you the hard way, you can hand to someone else for a small price. And the magic is you build it once and then you sell it thousands of times. It keeps selling while you sleep, on a Saturday, on vacation, at 3 in the morning. You do the work one time and Claude helps you make it in an afternoon instead of a month. So think about what you already know that other people are struggling with right now. The things that your friends always ask you for your help with, the skill that you might take for granted. That knowledge is worth real money. And now you finally have the tools to package it and sell it while you are sleeping. You're not too late and you're not too small. You know what the best time to start was years ago? Okay. The second best time right now. Your first 10 customers are closer than you think. Now the next worry creeps in. Okay, this sounds good, but how do I get customers when nobody knows who I am? The answer is smaller than you think. You need 10 people. Remember Peter? He had no audience when he started. He built in public, shared what he was making out loud, and every win and every flop, and people followed along and bought from him because they trusted the journey. You can do the same thing for free starting today. Pick one place where your people are already hanging out— a Facebook group for local business owners, LinkedIn, a about your topic, show up, be useful, answer questions, share what you learned building your thing. Post a before and after of a problem that you solved once a day. Find someone asking about the exact problem you solve and give them a genuinely useful answer without a pitch, uh, connected to it. Spend 2 weeks doing that and stop being a stranger to this community. You start becoming the person that they think has all the answers. And here's a framework that I teach our Movement Makers clients. Make a Money 50 list. That's the 50 people who, if they knew you, liked you, trust you, could send you real businesses. year. Don't ask them for coffee or pick their brain. Bring them real value first. Feature them, share their story, solve one small problem for them for free. You can open a simple spreadsheet, write down 50 names, and every week pick a few and actually do it. By the time they need what you sell, you're the obvious person that they want to call. You're building real relationships with 50 people who can change your whole year. So go direct. Email 20 local businesses this week. Message 10 people you already know who run companies. One yes out of 20 and you You've made more than a week at a job that you can't stand. So stop waiting to be discovered. Discovery is not going to come banging on your door. You are going to go where the people are and you help them first. You let the relationship turn that into a customer. Your first 10 customers are in the room you're already standing in. You just haven't started the conversation yet. So when are we going to start it? Today. The work that you put out is what gives people a reason to find you. So put something out. Stack small wins into something nobody can ignore. Okay, so here's the last piece, and I think it's the one that separates the people who make a little money from the people who completely change their whole life and their whole family's life. Don't stop at one, one service, one product, one app. That's a great start, but it's just the first brick in your, in your empire, in your building. The people winning with AI right now are doing a lot of small things that each make a little, and it all adds up. Remember, Peter, more than 40 products. Most made nothing. A few changed everything. He didn't know in advance which were going to hit, so he kept shipping. He kept trying. That's your real advantage. AI makes the cost of trying almost nothing, so you can take more swings than anyone in history has ever been able to take. You turn the system that you used into a product. You turn what you learned into a course. Each one just feeds the next one. So you take the money and you make it better. You put it Back in better tools, more time, the next idea, and the most important thing that you're building isn't just the money; it's who you become. The first time you make $100 from something that you created with your own hands and little AI, I don't know something changes in you forever. You stop seeing yourself as someone waiting for a break and start seeing yourself as someone who makes their own, and that belief is worth more than any paycheck because once you have it, nobody can ever take it from you. The whole reason I do this is simple: I want to solve the world's biggest problem. Um, I think people do not believe in themselves enough. AI doesn't fix that. You do, by starting, by shipping, by proving to yourself that you're capable of so much more than you ever gave yourself credit for. Your first dollar is waiting on you. Okay, so here's where you are right now. You've got the most powerful tool in history ready to work for you for almost nothing, and real proof that one Starting from scratch and scared can build a life that they're proud of. The only missing piece is you saying yes and starting today. So take the first small step, send the first message, build the first thing, and let the work turn you into the person you already have it in you to be. AI is a bubble, and that's good news for you as an entrepreneur. Sounds backwards, right? Everybody's either hyping AI as the second coming or dismissing it. It as a passing fad. But my take is the so-called AI bubble is the biggest opportunity you're about to miss if you're not paying attention. And I don't want that to happen for you. In fact, I'd rather you fail by riding this wave than play it safe and watch it pass by. Because one of my core beliefs is I'd rather no one fail than not know at all. Right now you're caught between 2 extremes. On the one side, people are screaming that AI will change everything overnight, every app, every business, maybe even replace entrepreneurs and Entirely. On the other side, you've got folks whispering, "It's all a hype. It'll crash and burn. Save yourself." It's like standing in the middle of a gold rush. Some are either racing to stake their claim; others are too afraid of a bust to even dip their toe. And you? You're just trying to figure out what's true and what's noise. Here's the deal: if you freeze, if you do nothing out of fear, you risk getting left behind when AI reshapes your industry. But if you chase the hype blindly without a strategy, you could waste time and money on something that collapses. Neither of these outcomes are ideal. You have worked too hard to let a wave like this either leave you in the dust or wipe you out. The consequence of getting this wrong isn't just missing a trend, it could mean missing the future of your business. So imagine looking back in 5 or 10 years and saying, I had the chance to jump on the AI revolution, but I was too scared or too stubborn to do it. Regret like that stings, and I know because I've I felt it, and I don't want you to feel it too. Lessons from the dot-com bubble. To understand why I'm excited about the AI bubble, let's take a quick trip to another bubble, the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Now, back then, everyone was throwing money at anything that had a dot-com at the end. Pets.com, a company that sold pet supplies online, raised over $80 million and became a poster child of the dot-com hype. Within 9 months of its IPO, it went bust. Why? It had tons of hype but no solid business model, no real value for customers. Contrast that with Amazon. Amazon stock got hammered when the dot-com bubble burst. It lost over 90% of its value at one point. People called it Amazon.bomb. But Jeff Bezos wasn't chasing hype. He was building real value, a strong e-commerce foundation obsessed with customer experience. Amazon survived the crash and eventually thrived, becoming one of the biggest companies in the The bubble bursting wiped out the pretenders and cleared the field for the players with real substance. That's the key. In every bubble, whether dot-com or AI, the ones who focus on real value and long-term vision come out on top after the hype settles. So the lesson for you, don't be Pets.com, be Amazon. Use this AI wave to build something that lasts, not just to ride a short-term buzz. When I lost a $40 million opportunity, I want to share one of the biggest lessons I ever learned in my own entrepreneurial journey—a painful lesson about hesitating too long. When I was 22, running my first startup, I nearly lost everything because I was too cautious. I spent an entire summer perfecting our business plan, pages on pages, planning every detail on paper, and not actually doing enough in reality. I was stuck in planning, afraid to launch anything until it was just right. Right? Sound familiar? Well, guess what? While I was polishing paragraphs in the business plan, a giant company entered our industry looking to buy up small startups. It came down to us and one competitor, but when opportunity knocked, we weren't ready. I just had a binder full of plans, and that competitor who had launched and taken action got acquired for $40 million. $40 million! And my company, we missed that deal, and that really stung. I remember thinking that could have been Yes. I could have sold my business for $40 million. It was a brutal wake-up call for me, but it taught me something that I need you to embrace. We've got to get out there and test your assumptions. Most of your plan is going to be wrong anyway. I learned that the hard way. From that day, I started calling myself a recovering perfectionist. I realized a half-assed plan you actually execute is better than a perfect plan that you never act on. So when I talk about AI and the opportunities and the hype around I'm coming from that lesson. I don't want you to miss your $40 million opportunity or whatever that looks like for your business because you are waiting for perfect or paralyzed by uncertainty. I want you to take action while others are still writing their business plan for the future. Now, maybe you're thinking, okay, that sounds great, Evan, but I'm not a tech person. I don't really get AI. What if I jump in and it all crashes? I can't afford a big mistake. And fair enough, I hear you. A lot of entrepreneurs feel this way right now. Maybe you feel Completely out of your depth with new technology, or you're worried that you're going to waste your resources. Maybe you're even thinking, "I'll just wait until the hype dies down and the path is clear." But think about this: you don't need to be a tech genius, and you don't need to bet the farm on AI to get started. Waiting for clarity sounds safe, but in a fast-moving wave like this, waiting is the riskiest move of all. Every big shift in business, whether it was internet, social media, now AI, looked confusing and risky at the start. Start. But the entrepreneurs who said, I'll figure it out as I go, are the ones who came out ahead. And guess what? You can figure it out. You figured out everything else up to this point— how to run a business, how to solve problems, how to adapt when things got tough. You don't have to know everything about AI. You just have to be willing to learn something about it. I'm going to show you how to approach this in a practical way. So park those doubts at the door for now, and let's talk about how you can not only survive this so-called AI bubble, but absolutely thrive because of it. You ready? Let's jump into the real strategies that will take you from feeling doubt to taking action and ultimately to transforming who you are as an entrepreneur in this new era. Step number 1, shift from fear to curiosity. The first shift is all about mindset. Instead of fearing the AI bubble, get curious about it. Why? Because fear and curiosity can't coexist. When you're in fear, your brain shuts down possibilities. When you're curious, you start finding opportunities. Think about it. Our brains are wired to resist change. It's a survival instinct. New technologies can trigger that fight-or-flight response. This is unknown. It might be dangerous. Avoid, avoid, right? That's your lizard brain talking. But as an entrepreneur, you can't afford to let the lizard brain drive. So flip it. Ask questions instead of making assumptions. Instead of AI will replace everything, I'm doomed, or AI is just a scam, ask how could this actually help me? Where could this open a door in my business? When you trade your fear for curiosity, you turn paralysis into exploration. Curiosity is that childlike wonder that makes you lean in instead of back away. And here's a little science for you. There's a principle called Amara's Law that says we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. So yes, the hype right now is probably overblown. AI isn't going to magically fix every problem in your business this quarter, but long-term, it's likely going to have more impact than we can even imagine today. Knowing this should fire you up to learn and observe, not panic. Curiosity lets you capitalize on the long run while everyone else is freaking out or getting cynical. So action item for you: approach AI like a student, not a critic. Spend an evening playing with a free AI tool just to see what it does. Watch what your competitors or industry leaders are doing with AI. AI, not to copy them, but to spark some ideas for you. Replace the thought, this is scary, with, this is interesting. When you do that, you'll find your fear turning into excitement, and excitement is momentum. It's the momentum you need for the next steps. Step number 2, focus on real value, not hype. In a bubble environment, it's easy to get caught up chasing all the shiny objects. Don't fall for it. The entrepreneurs who win are the ones who stick to fundamentals: serving customers, solving real problems, delivering genuine value. AI is a powerful tool, but it's just that— a tool. It's not a magical money machine or a substitute for understanding your customers. So ask yourself, where can AI actually create real value in my business or for my clients? Maybe it's automating a tedious task so you can serve customers faster. Maybe it's analyzing data to uncover a trend that helps your clients save money. Whatever it is, tie it to a real pain point or desire. If you use AI to do something meaningful, something people already care about, you're building on solid ground. But if you're doing it to sound trendy in a press release, you're building it on quicksand. Remember the story of Pets.com versus Amazon? Pets.com poured millions into flashy ads. Who remembers the sock puppet dog? They had hype, they had attention, but they didn't have a viable way to deliver value profitably. Amazon, on the other hand, kept refining how to deliver books, and then everything to customers better than anyone else. The same is true right now. 90% of AI startups that are just hype will flame out, but the ones who use AI to actually solve a real problem will endure. So be intentional. Don't add AI to your business just so you can say you have AI. Add it because it makes something faster, cheaper, or better for your customer. That's it. Do that and you won't be one of the hype casualties when things shake out. You'll be too busy serving your customers something they truly value. And trust me, bubble or bubble. That never goes out of style. Step number 3, start small but start now. Opportunities in a bubble is all about timing and action. You've got to take action before the bubble bursts, but you don't have to bet your whole business on it on day one. The key is to start small and iterate quickly. So think big picture but act tiny steps. If you've been watching this AI trend from the sidelines, I want you to get on the field in a manageable way. Pick one little experiment. For example, can you use an AI tool to handle some customer service emails this week and see how it goes? Can you train an AI on your FAQs and have it help customers 24/7? Or maybe use an AI image generator to mock up marketing materials. Choose something low risk but potentially high reward and just try it. Not next year, not someday when I have time— right now. Why is this so important? Because action is the antidote to anxiety. When you start doing, you stop doubting as much. You'll learn more from one day of trial and error than a year of thinking and planning. I learned this the hard way with that $40 million miss. I planned for months and got nothing. When I finally started taking action, even small ones, things began to move. Momentum built. You don't need a perfect plan. In fact, remember what I said earlier: a half-assed plan started now is better than a perfect plan never acted on. That lesson cost me $40 million, and I hope you You got it for free just now. So sketch a quick plan for your little AI experiment and go. Maybe it fails. Fine. You'll learn and tweak and try again. Maybe it works and you just unlocked a new level for your business. Either way, you win because you're moving forward while others are still standing still. Step number 4, adapt and keep learning. This is your identity shift. Taking action once isn't enough. You need to commit to continuous learning and adaptation. This is where where the identity shift comes in. It's time to stop seeing yourself as not a tech person or too late to the game or just a traditional entrepreneur. Your new identity is, I am an adaptable, always learning entrepreneur. Embrace the idea that part of your job is to keep evolving. Think of companies that failed to adapt. Blockbuster thought they were just in the video rental business. They didn't evolve their identity to being into the entertainment delivery business, and Netflix ate their launch. Kodak thought they were just a film company. They actually invented the digital camera, but they shelved it because it didn't fit their identity, and they got left behind. Don't be like that. Don't cling to what you've always been when the world is changing. Here's the beautiful thing: as an entrepreneur, you are not fixed. You can learn new skills, adopt new tools, and reinvent yourself at any time. In fact, the most successful entrepreneurs constantly reinvent themselves. They're not afraid to say, I don't know how this works yet. They get their hands dirty. They take courses. They ask questions. They watch videos. They stay humble and hungry. So ask yourself, what does the next level version of me look like in the age of AI? Maybe you become the entrepreneur who combines your deep industry knowledge with AI superpowers. Make that a potent combo. Maybe you become a leader in your circle, teaching others what you've learned about tech. You solidify your knowledge by teaching. The point is you evolve your identity from someone wary of change to someone who thrives on change. And this isn't about learning a tech trick here or there. It's about changing how you see yourself. When you see yourself as an adaptable innovator, you'll find it easier to tackle whatever comes next, AI or otherwise. You won't say, I can't do that. You say, I haven't done that yet, but I can learn. And that mindset shift becomes everything. It moves you from being at the mercy of trends to being the one who leverages them. Step number 5, don't do it alone. Get support. Finally, remember this, you're not alone on this journey, nor should you try to be. One of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make, and I made this early on too, is trying to figure everything out solo. When I started my first business, I was too embarrassed to ask for help when I was struggling. I thought I had to put on a brave face and do it all myself, and that nearly broke me and my business. My company. I've said it before and I'll say it again, don't do it alone because you'll probably fail. You'll quit along the way because it's too devastatingly lonely. So, as you venture into AI or any new domain, build your support system. Find a community of entrepreneurs learning about AI. Trust me, there are groups out there. There are online forums, there's local meetups, there's masterminds where people share what's working and what's not. Seek out a mentor or an advisor who has more experience in technology or AI. This could be as simple as asking a tech-savvy friend to coffee and picking their brain, or hiring a consultant for a short session to get you started in the right direction. Surrounding yourself with people on the same path turns this whole experience from scary into exciting. You get to share wins, swap failures, and bounce ideas around. And more importantly, when you hit a wall— and you will, it is part of learning— you'll have someone to help you climb that wall instead of giving up. Entrepreneurs are tough breed. But we're not invincible solo warriors. Every great entrepreneur you know had mentors, peers, and a team. So don't isolate yourself. Make this a team effort. Celebrate your AI experiment wins with your friends. If you have business partners or a team, bring them into the learning process too. Let them contribute ideas. The more minds working on this, the faster you'll adapt and the more confidence you'll build. And confidence is key. When you know you've got backup, you approach challenges with a different level of energy. You'll take on bigger challenges because you know that it's not just you against the world. It's you and your allies, your fellow believers pushing forward together. That's how you make sure you don't just ride the AI wave, but you make your own wave too. From doubt to identity shift. So look at the journey that we've taken here. You started with doubt, you know, is this AI bubble going to burst in my face? Should I do anything? And now you have a roadmap to move into action and actually change who you are in the process. This was never just about AI; it's about you becoming the kind of entrepreneur who can handle any wave. Today is AI; tomorrow it'll be something else, another technology, another shift in the market. The specifics will change, but the core principle won't: bet on yourself to learn and adapt rather than sitting on the. the sidelines. You are not the person who watches opportunities pass by anymore. You are the person who grabs them, shapes them, and uses them to serve your mission. You're building the skill of belief in yourself and your vision, even when the path forward is uncertain. And that is huge. Most people won't do that, but you are not most people. This is how you future-proof yourself. This is how you win consistently. Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and I make these videos because running a business It's hard. And waking up every day and getting to work when you're all by yourself is hard. And the thing that saved me, that continues to inspire me, motivate me, give me hope, inspiration, ideas, is looking at the stories of people who've done a lot more than me. And I learn strategies, I get motivation, and it gets me to believe in myself to go off and attack the day. And so I hope this video inspires you to do the same as well. So today let's some AI tools to grow your business. Enjoy. The tool is incredibly good. There's 4 things that the Generative Fill is really good at: removing objects, adding objects, creating backgrounds, and expanding images. I'm going to use the rectangular marquee tool, but with any selection, you can just click and drag over an image. You get this little hovering window here. If you don't see it, you can go into Window and then go all the way down to where it says Contextual Taskbar to enable it. Also, side note, if you wanted to, you can go into Edit and choose Generative Fill and then use this window here, or right-click on the selection and choose Generative Fill. You can click on the 3-dot icon here and select Pin Bar Position so the bar will always stay there. And you can move it around at this point too. Right, exactly. So I can move it here and then pin it to, say, the top. I have a selection active, I can input a prompt and I can literally put anything. Wouldn't it be cute if we had maybe like a sleeping fluffy cat? And I can click on generate and we're gonna hopefully get a cat sleeping. Make it cute kitties. A cute kitty. It's a giant cat. It is a giant cat. The cool thing about the generative AI is that it matched the lighting, the perspective, the shadows, even a little bit of that reflection there under the cat, which is just incredible. And also in the prompt, Properties panel, you have 3 variations right here, and you can click on the one— oh my God, that's a big cat, but it's a cute looking cat. It's just amazing how realistic this looks. I didn't really do much work. When you do the Generative Fill, it fills in all the pixels inside of that selection. So it actually generated the floor as well. You don't get transparency at this point. If you wanted to, like you mentioned, the cat was a little too big, so we want to make it smaller, press Ctrl+T to transform. But when we do that, we get the same issue that I was talking about earlier with the background. You can see that the background is there, but if you ever transform and move the cat to another location, when you click on these generative fill layers, they open up this section here in the properties panel that shows you the prompt that you used, and you can just click on the generate button again. Unfortunately, it will not generate the same cat again. It'll generate a whole new set of cats, but in the right perspective, in the right scale, the right size. You still have the other variations, but they're using the previous background, which will not work. But then you have a whole new set of cats. Tool number 2 is Adobe Firefly. How to use Adobe Firefly. It is our new tool for enabling you to use everyday language to generate extraordinary new content. Text to image. This is where you describe in natural language or in prompts how to generate an image. You could try any one of these prompts. This one is really fun. What did it take to make that? We'll click on that. 5 words, fairy house in the woods. Let's go ahead and make a steampunk version of this. Adds it right down here, and then I'll click generate. It will generate sort of steampunk version of this. We could add more to this. Inside a tree in the dark woods. Let's just try that. Here it is in a tree at this point. Oh, much better. From there, I can take this and I can download this image. It adds content credentials, just FYI. This was AI generated. I didn't make this in Photoshop. I didn't paint it. I don't claim to do any of that stuff. I just claim to write the prompt. That's all this is essentially saying. Applies it. It downloads the credentials. If you're interested, we can go to contentauthenticity.com/inspect. When we drag this into this URL, this is all the metadata. This was created in Firefly 1.0. I'm going to turn on content credentials. It's going to attach all my information. Take this and I'll drag it in here. Now it's in Photoshop. Let's go to preview. We could see my information, but if you scroll down, this shows this asset has attribution and history data. I want to do gold and black flower pattern. Check this out. Generate. It actually made this repeating pattern. Let's convert this to define this as a pattern. There's our pattern. Let's just see how it worked out. Let's go into our patterns right down here. Let's click on that. It made a pattern. We do have some ridges in there, which I'm not crazy about. Right here, it looks like we're off a little bit. Let's turn this one on. Almost makes a perfect pattern. Some little spots right there, but overall pretty good. Let's adjust the scale of this beautiful woman. So let's talk about people. Here's what it generates for people. It actually does a pretty good job so far. Golden black wings, highly detailed full body. This is what I'm going for, like this, just gorgeousness. I'm gonna download it. Face gets a little funky. Or just using these as a way to kind of storyboard. My subject matter will sometimes determine the aspect ratio ratio, but that's 1024 by 1024. If we go to widescreen, widescreen is going to give me more resolution. This is just a good, like, concept that I want to use for my design. Tool number 3, one of my personal favorites, is Midjourney. I recently began exploring the world of AI art with Midjourney. It's an online tool that can bring anything from your imagination to life, no matter how surreal or abstract. If you're new to AI art, Midjourney is Perhaps the best rated for creating visual art. You enter a series of prompts and the AI will do its best to depict your written command. It can generate a wide range of art styles, from painterly effects to hyper-realistic renders. Midjourney is a bot that runs on the chat platform Discord, so you first need to set up an account there, then join the Midjourney server via the Midjourney website. Here's where you can see all kinds of weird and wonderful To create your own piece, enter one of the newbies groups. Add your own job to the constant stream of activity by typing /imagine followed by a brief description of your idea, such as cute panda wearing a baseball cap. The Midjourney bot will get to work generating your images, but you'll soon discover that this public group is way too hectic. So, how do you get started? You'll quickly lose your place in the conveyor belt of thousands of requests and results. If you scroll up again, you can look out for your own entry being highlighted with a yellow background, but it'll still disappear again within seconds. Instead, click the little inbox icon in the top right, and you'll find an option to jump to your most recent result. You can now adore your randomly generated images of cute pandas wearing baseball caps in a grid of 4 squares. Each result is unique. Some may be exactly what you had in mind, others might be nothing like you wanted. This guy is pretty cute. Tool number 4 is ElevenLabs. To start turning text into speech, head to the ElevenLabs homepage. You can click on the card in the top right-hand corner, or you can also click on the link down below in the description. Right here on the homepage, you don't even have to set up an account. You can just type in some text, and right here you can select a voice to narrate that text. Here you have all of these different pre-made voices. Once you finish setting up your account, here we drop into speech synthesis, and this is where we can type in some text and it'll generate speech based on that text. The benefit of going through an account is you get a much larger quota to convert text into speech. Right up above, just like we saw on the homepage, here you could select one of these voices, and here you could even preview what these voices sound like by clicking on the preview icon. It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. You could go through and listen to all the different options. Below that, you also have voice settings, and here you could adjust things like the stability. If you go down to the left where it's more variable, this will cause the voice to sound more expressive. Here you could also modify the clarity and similarity enhancement. You could try adjusting these different values to see how that affects the voice. Down below, here's where you can type in your text, and the more text you type in, the better the model will work, and the reason why is it adjusts the delivery based on the context of the text. Here, for instance, I'll type in text. Unfortunately, I have some bad news to report. So it's bad news, so the voice will probably be a little bit more downbeat, and it'll factor that into the way it delivers the voice. It's pretty incredible. Right down below, all I need to do is click on generate, and then we can listen to the voice. Unfortunately, I have some bad news to report. Mrs. Fields won best cookie of the year and not the Kevin Cookie Company. That sounded really human-like. I am still just blown away by how good this technology has Along with the premade voices, if you scroll up the page, you also have the option to add your very own voice. You can click on this or up on top, you can click into the voice lab. Within the voice lab, you have 2 different options for making a new synthetic voice from scratch. Over here, you could design a voice or you can also clone a voice. Thanks for being here, Steve. Let's start with this. I think the world's biggest problem is that people don't believe in themselves. What do you think, and how do we solve this problem? I agree, Evan, that a lack of self-belief is a significant issue. Tool number five is Resemble AI. Over the last two years, Resemble has been used by more than 250,000 people to create AI-generated voices from bots. To ads, fashion shows, and even an Emmy-nominated Netflix documentary called The Andy Warhol Diaries. Our users have crafted beautiful voiceovers in seconds, and we've come up with new ways to create content that sounds even more real. That's why we're proud to introduce arguably the most impactful feature We call it speech-to-speech. Let me show you what I mean. At the moment, you might be familiar with typing in a sentence and hitting the play button. Hope that worked out. If not, you have a few options. That sounds good, but my friend Liz wanted to say it slightly differently. Let's upload how she wanted to say it. Hope that worked out. If not, you have a few options. Hope that worked out. If not, you have a few options. And let's generate this in Robert's voice. Hope that worked out. If not, I have a few options. We can use this to create AI voiceovers that truly match human-like performances, including all of the, um, imperfections of human speech. You can apply any voice skin to your voice. Like an angry, aggressive voice. voice that means business. Or super friendly, like my colleague Tanya. Or a whispering voice for when you want to be secretive. Speech-to-speech works in real time, which means I can replace my voice with another while talking. This is great for immersive applications that require fast speech generation. This works across all of Resemble AI's voices with stunning results. In any voice imaginable. This opens up all sorts of possibilities for gaming, film, advertisement, and narrations. Tool number 6 is Soundraw. So you just finished making the dopest YouTube video ever. You edit it, you throw your favorite song with that sick beat drop in the background of your video, and you upload. Everything's good, right? No, YouTube just threw you a copyright notice for using Drake's Susie Slide without permission. You don't want it to turn into a copyright strike because 3 strikes and, uh, yes, if you get 3 strikes in 3 months, YouTube can permanently disable your account or stop you from monetizing your account. But good thing you won't ever have to deal with that because SoundRaw is bringing you high-quality, royalty-free, AI-produced, customizable music that you can put in the background of your YouTube or your commercial videos. No need to download any software or have any experience with a beatmaker. Soundraw makes it easy for you by allowing you to find a genre that matches your video, choose how fast or slow you want the track, choose how long you want your music to play, and then customize it to your liking. Tool number 7 is Descript. The thing I love about surfing is it never stops challenging you. It's a journey through the waves, but also through your very These nuggets are made from chicken. Manatees are the Cadillac of marine mammals. Just wanted to welcome you to the team with this little video. You need to capture your screen while recording yourself. The script does that. Um um um um emulate the taste of like like non-chicken nuggets. Yeah, I went too far. Okay. So these nuggets are made from chicken, but they're made to emulate the taste. Taste of non-chicken nuggets. Dope. Oh, that's much better. Then edit all the blather out of your videos because my time is very precious. Oh, that's fire. It's been said that manatees are the Cadillac of marine mammals. Perfecto. Can you fix the color while you're there? Make it less teal and more— Cerulean? Sure. It needs more style. It needs more clips, more GIFs, more, more. Replace your background with something more fun. I prefer the cold void of outer space. Let's boost that sound quality. Emulate the taste of non-chicken nuggets. Emulate the taste of non-chicken nuggets. Dope. The thing I love about surfing is it's a journey through the waves. It never stops challenging you. Well, I might have made it too gnarly. Sounds tasty. It's a real movie, Rhonda. Yeah. Tool number 8 is Pictory AI. I'm going to show you a quick demo of Pictory. We'll walk through a couple of different use cases. The first use case is where we have a video that we want to start with, and we want to create highlights of the video. So you drag and drop a video here, and you would upload it to Pictory. And what Pictory does when you upload the video is it actually runs the video through a transcription step, and you can see the transcript of the video right here that is automatically created, and you'll see the video right here, and you can browse through the video by searching for the transcript, parts of the transcript And one of the simple things that you might want to do before you create the highlights is you may want to remove sections of the video that you don't want to include in the highlights at all. So here I searched for Canada and I'm going to select this whole sentence and remove it from the video. So this deletion not just deletes it from the transcript, it actually deletes it from the video. So you can delete sentences from the video, You can also delete words. You can say, hey, I don't want to say Americans here. I can delete Americans. So again, that word is gone from the video. Then I can remove these filler words like uh's and um's, and I can just press this button to remove the filler words. So all the filler words are gone from the video. You see the video already is down several seconds from our original length. Now I say I want to further select the highlights. So you can use AI to select the highlights of the video. You can say, hey, I want 10% of the original video selected as my highlight. And so I run the highlighting algorithm through it and it picks out from the transcript key sentences that our AI thinks are the best representation of this video. So it's picked out about 5 sentences I can say, hey, I don't want to include this. This is talking about hockey and I don't want to include that, but I want to include this because this provides context to what he's talking about. And now I have about a 56-second version of that 4-minute press conference and I can move on to the next step. Now we can choose whether we want to include the subtitles on the video, whether we want to burn them in or not. We can also add brand settings. So we can say on every scene include a logo. Also, I can include an outro scene, which is the final call to action to my video. And I can have an intro included as a standard, or I can create an intro custom to my specific video. And then finally, we would generate a video and it would generate this one highlight video, which is, as I showed, 56 seconds long with about 6 independent sentences. It would also be able to generate 6 individual 15 to 20-second videos, each with these sentences that we, that we selected. Tool number 9 is Jasper. Hey, Chan, how's that blog post coming? Great, really great, almost too great. Great, can't wait to see it. Can't wait to write it. You need a little inspiration? Jasper is here to help. It's an app that uses AI to help you create any kind of content you need. It's like having your very own robot sidekick with an infinite supply of ideas. And that's why the perfect A perfect pair of socks is like a hug for your feet. Hot damn, that's good. Headlines, articles, images, anything, everything. Jasper, I need some caption ideas for Instagram. Like, a lot of them. You got it. These are so good, I could kiss you, but I won't. Dear customer, it looks like your account Problem is user error. It's a little confrontational. What if we lighten it up a little bit? Jasper can fine-tune the voice and tone of your writing. Sorry to hear about the problems with your account. I'll make sure everything goes smoothly. Smiley face. Nice. Jasper, can I get that in Italian? Naturalmente. Sweet. Blog post is done in record time. Now I just need some images for it. Jasper can even even generate custom art based on your prompts. Get images of literally anything you can think of in seconds. You finished all those articles already? Just felt inspired. Jasper learns how humans create by consuming the internet. It gives Jasper endless options, and that means it can create original content without plagiarizing anything. Now you'll always have the content you This post is incredible, and so are you. Would you like a ridiculously huge promotion? I would be okay with that. Who's your little friend? I'm Jasper. Nobody. And tool number 10, the last one before some very special bonus clips, is D-ID. Welcome to D-ID Studio. I was created today to give you a quick walkthrough of this groundbreaking tool. Tool. Once you've logged in, you'll see some pre-made avatars you can instantly use. All of them have been created perfectly to allow the eyes to blink and the lips to move correctly. Let's give it a try! To make one of the avatars talk, just type something into the little text box over here, then use the Voices menu to Choose a voice that sounds good to you. Hi, I'm Cora. Robots fascinate. Hi, I'm Cora. Robots fascinate me. I bet a robot's favorite music is heavy metal. Ha ha ha! Cora made a human joke. Okay, so then to make Cora talk, just push this generate video button and wait a few seconds. Hi, I'm Cora. Robots fascinate me. I bet a robot's favorite music is heavy metal. It's that fast and that easy. You don't need a huge team or fancy office to make money. In starting the company, I had nothing. I had no income source. You can do it with one of 9 simple machines. Right now, the U.S. Census Bureau counts 30.4 million one-person and businesses in America with zero employees, and together they pull in over $1.8 trillion a year. So while everyone is fighting for the same crowded online hustles, a small group of people are quietly buying simple machines nobody is talking about and turning them into a paycheck that never calls in sick. Let me tell you about a college kid named Zach Downey. So while he was studying at James Madison University, he got fed up that there was nowhere to grab a late-night snack, so he decided to fix it himself. His very first idea was a pizza vending machine, and honestly, it flopped. He ran into regulatory roadblocks and dead ends, and most people would have quit right there. But Zach, he didn't quit. He just changed his machine. He noticed that people lose their minds over cotton candy at amusement parks and fairs and resorts, the kind of places packed with families already in a spending mood. So he bought automated cotton candy machines, the exact kind of robotic kiosk that lands number 1 on this list, and he parked them right where the crowds already were. Here is what makes it work. It costs him about 30 cents in sugar to spin a cotton candy that sells for $5 to $10, and the little robot making it becomes a show that pulls people in all by itself. He didn't need a storefront or staff or a fancy business degree. He needed one machine in the right spot. Today, Zach is just 22 years old. He runs around 10 of these machines under his company, Distinctive Vending, and he's on track to pull in over half a million dollars in revenue. A college experiment that started as a complete flop turned into a half a million dollar a year business, all because he was willing to buy one simple machine and let it do the work for him. This is the entire promise of this video, and it's a lot less rare than you think. Now here's what you might be thinking. You're thinking these sound like weird little gimmicks, or that you need a fortune and some kind of degree or engineering just to understand and run one of them. You don't. Most of the machines that I'm going to show you cost less than a used car. Several are under $5,000, and they're built to run with almost no staff and almost no skill. The whole game here is owning an asset that keeps working whether you show up or not, and I want you to run your business as if you were to get hit by a bus tomorrow. The machine keeps making money without you even being there. Don't get hit by a bus though. That's the difference between a real job and real wealth. So let me show you 9 machines that are quietly making regular people rich this year, counting down to my personal number one favorite. Business number 9, the Fleet Saver. First up is the biggest one, a mobile tire Retreading unit. This is a self-contained little factory that lives inside a commercial van or a shipping container. It cleans up old commercial truck tire casings, lays on fresh layers of rubber, and heat cures a brand new tread right there on site. So instead of a trucking company hauling worn-out tires across the state to some central plant and losing days of expensive downtime, you drive the machine straight to them and fix it in their own yard. Now, yes, this This one has the highest barrier on the list, starting around $25,000 to get started. So it's not the first thing you go and buy on day one, probably. But here's why it's worth knowing about anyway, and why nobody's talking about it. It runs on high-ticket business-to-business contracts with trucking fleets and city transit agencies, the kind of clients who pay on time and stick around for years because you are saving them serious money and serious headaches. One machine, a handful of fleet contracts, and you've built a recession-proof Proofed income that has absolutely nothing to do with chasing strangers on the internet, right? There are millions of commercial trucks on the road and barely anyone serving them this way. So the demand is enormous and the field is wide open. Being leads to doing here. So even if this machine isn't for you, let it stretch what you believe a business is even allowed to look like. Business number 8, the micro packager. Next up is the vertical form fill seal machine, what I call the micro packager. So for about $4,500, this machine takes a roll of film, forms it into a tube, fills it with a precise amount of liquid or powder, and heat seals it shut all on its own. It basically brings real industrial contract packaging into your garage. Now think about every small brand out there selling coffee samples, single serve protein, soy sauce packets, or supplement powders. They cannot afford a giant factory with massive minimum orders. So So they get stuck and stay small. You can become their answer. You charge them a simple fee per unit to package their product. And because brands need this done over and over again every single month, you build a predictable high-volume income stream that just keeps repeating like clockwork. One single supplement brand can keep your machine running for weeks. And once you have 5 of those brands, you have a real factory income from a corner of your garage. Nobody is dreaming about a sachet machine. And that is exactly why there is so much room inside of it. Remember this pattern because it shows up on every machine in this video: the boring ones nobody brags about having, and almost no competition. And that is where the quiet money lives. Number seven: the nut butter mill. This next one is part machine and part show. So commercial fresh nut butter grinder takes cheap peanuts or cashews. And turns them into premium made-to-order nut butter right in front of the customer. The raw nuts don't cost that much, but the second people watch it and smell it being ground fresh, you can sell specialty flavors like honey cinnamon or spicy chili at a massive multiple of what those nuts cost you. The live grinding is the marketing. You don't need to pay for ads. The machine itself is the ad, pulling a crowd everywhere you set it up. You can run it at farmers markets and weekend pop-ups for fast cash Cash flow now, and then you take those exact same flavors and turn them into an online brand that you can ship nationwide later if you want to. The big jarred brands on the grocery shelves can't compete with fresh, and they can't compete with a story. And now you have both. This is how a simple $5 jar of fresh butter quietly grows into a real food company with a real following, all starting from one grinder on a folding table. So don't overthink the fancy version. Get the machine, set up one at a market this weekend, and let the people line up tell you what to make more of. Number 6, the On Demand Branding Box. Number 6 is a compact flatbed printer that prints full-color logos directly onto kraft paper bags, fabric totes, and shipping boxes. It runs between $4,000 and $6,000. Here's a painful problem that it quietly solves. Every local bakery, boutique, online shop desperately wants their own branded packaging, but the big print factor So you step in with no minimum order at all. A blank bag costs around 5 cents and you sell it printed for 20 to 50 cents each. That tiny little gap multiplied across thousands of bags a month quietly turns into a $2,000 to $4,000 profit. And the best part is you're not really selling bags. You're selling small business owners the ability to finally look professional and proud when they hand their product to a customer. And that's the beauty of Customer, this business. and people will pay for that feeling all day long. Better still, a bakery doesn't order packaging once, they order it again and again forever. So a handful of local shops become steady, repeatable income that you can count on. You become the quiet brand behind all the brands in your town. Number 5, the Lot Stripper. Right in the middle of the list is one of the simplest machines here, a high-precision line striping machine machine for parking lots. It's a wheeled battery or gas-powered sprayer that lays down crisp, clean parking stalls, fire lanes, and the accessibility markings that businesses are legally required to keep fresh and visible. The equipment starts around $3,000, and a single striping job can pay $300 or more. So you knock out a few contracts a week, and now you're looking at $2,000 to $4,000 a month. Now look around your own city for a second. Every shopping center, church, school, apartment complex has a parking lot that slowly fades and legally has to be repainted on a schedule. The work never dries up, the competition is pretty sleepy and aging out, and you can start this part-time on weekends while you keep your day job to protect your runway until the machine clearly pays for itself. Even better, lines fade on a schedule, so one parking lot you stripe this year becomes a repeat customer next year without you doing anything new. Land 10 of those and you've build a route of recurring income that practically reorders itself. Number 4, the Smart Swag Station. Now it gets a little fun. This is a small 3D printer setup that fabricates custom keychains and accessories with a programmable NFC chip baked right inside, the same tap-to-share tech that's already in your smartphones. Someone taps the keychain on a phone and it instantly pulls up a social profile, a digital business card, or a ChipLink. The setup ranges from $500 on the low end all the way up to $10,000 as you scale it up. The raw plastic and the chip costs under 25 cents per unit, and you sell each one to realtors, content creators, service workers for $5 to $10. That spread is exactly why operators are quietly netting $1,000 to $6,000 a month from a machine sitting in a spare bedroom. You're selling people a tiny piece of the future, something they have never seen before, and most of your competition does not even know this product exists yet. So a realtor can hand one to every client and their home pops up with a tap. A creator sells it to their fans who can tap to follow. A restaurant pulls one up on every table that leads to a tip page or their menu. One machine, a dozen different markets, and you're the only person in town offering it. When you're early to something like this, you do not have to be the best, you just have to be there first. Oasis. Number 3 is a 24/7 ice and water vending kiosk, and it might be the most boring genius idea on this entire list. The machine filters the water, makes the ice, bags it, and dispenses it completely on its own with no staff to manage and nothing that ever spoils. You can place it at a marina, campground, busy gas station, anywhere where people need ice and there is nobody around to sell it to them. A single bag costs around 20 to 40 cents to produce and sells for $2 to $3.50. Which is an 84 to 90% profit margin on something people grab without thinking twice. A high-capacity unit runs $15,000 to $25,000 upfront, and then it quietly throws off $1,200 to $2,400 in profit every month while you're having dinner with your family at home. Stack 2 or 3 of these at different high-traffic spots, and you have replaced a full-time salary with something that doesn't need you to clock in. This is what owning a real asset actually feels like. The machine does the work, the location brings the And you collect the money. Nobody posts about an ice machine online, which is exactly why the people who own them are quietly winning. Number 2, the custom case printer. Almost at the top now. This is an automated phone case vending machine that you drop into a mall, an airport, college campus. The customer designs their very own case right on a touchscreen, and the machine prints it for them in minutes with no employees standing there A machine like this runs around $6,500. A blank case plus the ink costs around you $1.35, and that finished custom case sells for $15 to $20. A good high-traffic location pulls 30 to 50 sales a day. And I want you to actually do the math because it is staggering for a box that runs itself. Think about it. So almost everyone walking past that machine has a phone. Almost anyone wants it to feel like it's theirs, and almost nobody is offering it to them. Right where they're standing. People will always pay a premium to make something truly theirs, to feel like they have something that nobody else has. And this machine sells them that exact feeling 24 hours a day while costing you almost nothing to deliver it. You find one busy spot, you set it, and it quietly works the crowds for you all day and all night. And number 1, the Automated Sugar Artist. Now, my number 1 The one almost nobody is talking about is the robotic cotton candy kiosk. Behind a pane of glass, a little robot spins detailed geometric cotton candy designs in about 60 to 90 seconds, and people stop dead and film the entire thing because it's honestly pretty mesmerizing to watch. The entertainment is what sells it. The show is the product. A unit runs between $5,000 to $12,000. Now here's the number that should make you sit up straight or stand up straight like me on the trampoline. It costs about 31 cents in sugar and a paper stick to make one, and it sells for $5 to $10. That's a profit margin of over 93%, and operators are netting $2,500 to $3,500 every month from a single machine that needs no staff and literally creates its own crowd everywhere it goes. And here's the hidden bonus: every customer who films that little robot spinning their candy is posting free advertising for you to their followers too. So the machine markets itself while it sells. Drop it at a mall, a fair, theme park, dark, busy boardwalk, and the line forms on its own. It is fun, it's automated, it's almost pure profit, and hardly anyone is doing it yet. That right there is the definition of a machine making people rich this year while the rest of the world is looking the other way. The real machine is the decision to start. So there they are, 9 machines quietly building real wealth while everyone else is fighting over the same loud, crowded ideas. Notice a pattern running through all of them. No one needs a big team, a degree, or a ton of You just need to pick one, buy the asset, and let it go to work for you. There's a saying: the best time to start was years ago. Then the second best time to start is when? Right now, today. So if you see the opportunity sitting there right in front of you, then you have the responsibility to go act on it. If you can, then you must. 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've got to keep control of your time, and and you won't keep control. 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 3 completely different Evan has 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— I'll 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. 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. I better be careful with it. 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? He has days that there's nothing on. This is the week of, uh, 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 got to hustle 15 hours a day to keep your head just above the 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 pilot. 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 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 is 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 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 it. Pick exactly five. 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 five. 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 want to 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 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 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, 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 value, which brings us directly to Warren Buffett's second daily habit. 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 it guaranteed very few actually Now you might think you don't have time to read 500 pages. 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 goal. Consume their content relentlessly, right? Let their knowledge compound inside of your brain. It's the highest return on investment you will get. 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. 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. 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, 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 3rd 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. 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 like 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 hard 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 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 head. 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 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 hit. 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 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 you. 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 today. Most of what you learn in school is completely useless for many. What does school teach you about money? And the answer is nothing. They know nothing about money, and they teach our kids. The highest earners in the world ignore traditional career paths and focus on stacking a handful of high-impact skills. And if you keep following the old rules of climbing the corporate ladder, you will stay stuck struggling to pay your bills while watching other people live your dream life. A salary is a drug they give you when they want you to forget about your dreams. Let's look at Warren Buffett. He is one of the richest investors alive, but if you walk into his office, you will not see his university degrees on the wall. The only thing he hangs up is a certificate for a public speaking course that he took. I actually have the diploma in the office, and I don't have my diploma from college. I don't have my diploma from graduate school, but I've got my Dale Carnegie diploma there because it changed my life. He realized that learning the skill of communication would instantly double his value. He ignored traditional rules and focused on a skill that actually prints money. By far the best investment you can make is in yourself. If they just learn to communicate better, both in writing and in person, they increase their value at least 50%. Now you might be thinking, okay, that's easy for Warren Buffett, but I'm just too busy trying to survive to learn something new. The actual truth is you do not need to quit your job or spend years back in a classroom. You just need to focus your limited of time on the exact abilities that the market actually pays for. And so today I'm going to show you the 7 high-return skills you can start learning today that will completely transform your earning power. Master artificial intelligence and prompt engineering. So you might think that artificial intelligence is gonna steal your job, but the truth is a person who knows how to use artificial intelligence is going to take your job. It's projected that 75% of global businesses will use AI in their daily operations. If you ignore this trend, you'll be completely left behind. A massive report shows that artificial intelligence could add $4.4 trillion to the global economy, so you need to claim your piece of that pie. The most important high-return skill right now is prompt engineering. This just means knowing exactly how to talk to artificial intelligence to get the best results. You cannot just type in a lazy question and expect magic. You have to use a specific 4-part framework. First, define the role. So tell the program to act like an expert copywriter or a brilliant lawyer. Second, provide the data. Give it examples of what you want. Third, make the specific ask. Do not be vague. And fourth, request the exact format, like a bulleted list or a table. When you master this communication skill, you can do 10 hours of work in just 1 hour. You instantly become 10 times more valuable to any client or Do not wait for the perfect moment to learn this. Action cures fear. Just open a free program today and start testing it. Build your momentum right now. But artificial intelligence is just a tool. To truly multiply your income, you need to know how to sell the value you just created, which leads perfectly into the second skill: close high-ticket sales. Selling cheap products will keep you exhausted and broke. If you sell a $20 item, you need thousands of customers just to pay your rent. But if you master the skill of high-ticket sales, you only need a handful of clients to completely change your financial life. High-ticket offers are not about tricking people into paying more for the same service. They're about solving problems that are so painful, urgent, or expensive that premium pricing becomes totally obvious to the buyer. So you have to change your entire mindset around selling. Most people feel slimy when they ask for money, but you are built to serve. If If you have a product or a service that can genuinely fix someone's problem, you have a moral obligation to offer it to them. If you do not offer it to them, you are hurting them. You are being selfish. Selling is just serving at the highest possible level. You also need to understand that sales is a learned skill, not a genetic gift. Companies that spend money on sales training are 57% more effective than companies that ignore it. You can learn the scripts, you can learn how to handle objections, Do not take the yes away from the customer before you even ask for the sale. So pick up the phone, make your premium offer, and let them decide. Selling one-on-one is incredibly powerful, but what if you want to reach millions of people at the exact same time? That is where the third skill comes in: public speaking and video communication. You have to get on camera. It does not matter if you are shy or introverted. I was. Video communication is the single fastest way to build deep trust with a massive audience. When people can see your face, they can hear your voice, they connect with your story on a highly emotional level. You do not need a fancy studio or an expensive microphone. You just need your smartphone and the courage to share your truth. When I started making videos, I was completely terrified. I was an introverted guy who just wanted to hide. It took me 350 videos before I was not completely embarrassed to watch my own content back, and it took me 700 public videos until I actually started to think I was getting good. I expected to suck at the beginning, and I did, but I just kept going. I focused entirely on the one person I could help instead of worrying about the millions of people who were not watching me yet. So if you want to stand out in your industry, start making videos about your foundation story. Tell people why you started your business. Tell them about your struggles. Tell them what to believe. Do not wait for validation from the internet. Just put in the reps and build your back The market always rewards the people who show up consistently and speak with passion. The art of skill stacking. So schools taught you that you need to pick one major and do one specific job for the rest of your life, right? That is terrible advice for making real money. Our economy does not reward specialists who only know one narrow thing. The highest earners in the world use a strategy called skill stacking. You do not need to be the absolute best in the world at one skill. You just need to be in the top 20% for 3 or 4 different skills and then combine them. So instead of just being a normal graphic designer, you become a designer who also understands user psychology and direct response copywriting. That specific combination makes you incredibly rare. Research from the World Economic Forum proves that cross-functional skills are the most heavily demanded Abilities in the entire global job market. So look at your own life. Take your boring corporate experience, add a little bit of marketing knowledge, and mix in your weird weekend hobby. Suddenly, you have a totally unique profile that nobody else can compete with. You stop being a commodity, and you start being a category of one. When you are the only person who can do what you do, you get to dictate your own price. But what happens when you have these rare skills? Skills and people still refuse to pay you what you're worth, you have to master the next skill to force the market to respect your value. Data-driven negotiations. Most people walk into a salary review or a client pitch completely driven by their emotions. They complain about how hard they work. They talk about how long that they've been at their company. They say that they need more money because their rent went up. That strategy will keep you broke forever. Businesses do not care about your personal financial stress. They only care about the value that you bring to their bottom line. So if you want to double your income, you have to separate your self-worth from the negotiation process. You can use hard data. An analysis of 500 different salary negotiations revealed that using emotional arguments only work 8% of the time. But when people presented a business case backed by actual market data, the success jumped to 67%. You have to do your research, find out exactly what your specific skill stack is worth in the open market right now. Present those numbers confidently. Show the client exactly how much money your work is going to make them. When you frame your request as a smart business investment instead of a personal favor, the money will flow to you. Negotiation gets you paid the right amount, but to build massive wealth that lasts decades, you need to understand the underlying pulse of your entire industry. And that brings us to skill number Number 6, data analysis and market research. You cannot build a million-dollar business based just off of your gut feelings alone. You have to know your actual numbers. Most people are terrified of looking at their analytics because they are afraid of seeing the ugly truth. They would rather live in denial. But if you do not know exactly where your leads are coming from or exactly where your customers are dropping you are just flying blind. Data science and analysis roles offer massive salaries because the ability to read data allows companies to maximize their purchasing power and predict future trends. You do not need a fancy degree to do this. You just need to log into your dashboard and face reality, right? When I'm trying to grow a YouTube channel, I do not just guess what people want to watch. I look at the exact click-through rates on every single thumbnail. I studied the audience retention curves for the first 60 seconds of the video. You have to do the exact same thing for your business. Track your conversion rates, track your email open rates, double down immediately on the things that are working, and ruthlessly cut out the things that are failing. Let the data show you a clearer path forward. Now you can have the best data, the best sales pitch, and the best technical skills, but you will still hit a massive income ceiling if you try to do everything yourself. This final skill is the ultimate wealth multiplier: leadership and team building. You are the biggest bottleneck in your own life right now. You are trying to control every single tiny detail of your work because you are a perfectionist. You think nobody else can do the job as well as you can. That belief is keeping you stuck playing a very small game. The fastest way to scale your income to the moon is to stop asking how you can do a task and start asking who can do this task for you. When you transition into true leadership, your job is no longer doing the daily grind. Your job is to empower other people to do the work. Self-confidence and the ability to delegate are the absolute foundations of success for any high-level executive or business owner. You must learn the framework of eliminate, automate, delegate. First, eliminate the useless tasks that you do every day that do not actually move Second, automate everything you can using software and AI. And finally, delegate the rest of the work to talented people who actually love the things that you hate doing. You have to let go of your ego. Let your team make mistakes so they can learn and grow. Build a culture where your people feel like the work they do actually matters. And when you focus on serving your team and lifting them up, they will build your empire with you. You now have the exact seven skills you need to completely double your income this year. But all of these strategies. All of these strategies are completely useless if you do not fix the one massive problem happening inside your head right now. Your true potential. The only thing truly holding you back from doubling your income is your own self-doubt. You have to decide today that your biggest goals are actually possible for you. Stop listening to the people who tell you to play it safe and stay small. Step into your greatness and do the work that you were put on this earth to do. It has never been easier to get rich from $0 than it is right now. I know that sounds bold. In fact, most people will tell you the opposite, that it's harder than ever, that without money you can't make money. But the truth is, the opportunity this year is unprecedented. We have more tools, more access, more knowledge at our fingertips than any generation before us. And if you refuse to take advantage of that, you'll stay stuck where you are. Do nothing and nothing changes. Worse, you'll look back years from now full of regret, wondering what could have been. And research shows we regret the things we don't do far more than the things that we try and fail. Let me prove it to you with a quick story. Colonel Harland Sanders was 65 years old, broke, living on a tiny $100 Social Security check. Instead of giving up, he decided to sell his fried chicken recipe to restaurants. He drove around America sleeping in his car, knocking on doors, and got rejected 1,009 times. Over 1,000 people told him no. Can you imagine that? Most people would have quit after a dozen rejections, let alone hundreds. But not Colonel Sanders. He refused to give up. And finally, one restaurant said yes. His recipe caught on. Kentucky Fried Chicken was born. And by his late 70s, Colonel Sanders became a millionaire and and a global icon, all because he kept going when anyone else would have quit. That is the power of relentless persistence. Now you might be thinking, okay, great for Colonel Sanders, but what about you, Evan? How about me? Have you ever started from nothing? And absolutely. I wanna share a quick personal story. When I was 19, I was a co-founder of a startup that was failing. We were only making $300 a month and I felt worthless as a human. I was too embarrassed embarrassed to tell my friends how bad it was, so I just pretended everything was fine while secretly drowning. The pressure built, and at a family Thanksgiving dinner, I hit my breaking point. I told my business partner that I quit. In my mind, I was done. I broke down, was crying at the table, totally devastated. That night was one of the worst nights of my life. But the very next morning, as soon as I woke up, I felt that pit in my stomach. That quitting didn't feel right, and I realized that I could live with failure, but I couldn't live with regret. And I remember telling myself, I can deal with the failure, but I can't deal with not knowing. So I decided to give it one more shot. And I thought, how can I save this business? And I turned to someone who'd already built something huge, Bill Gates. I didn't know him, but I studied how Bill Gates built Microsoft from zero. I learned that in Microsoft's early days, partnerships were the key to their first big growth. So I tried modeling that. I reached out to a potential partners and eventually made a deal with a company in the UK to distribute our software. And that one partnership went from making me $300 a month to $13,500. In an instant, I had proof that our business could work. I felt like a millionaire in my head at 19 years old, and we gained momentum and confidence. And a couple years later, my startup was acquired. I went from near rock bottom to a win, all because I didn't give up and I found the model that worked. Now you might still have doubts. Maybe you're thinking, okay, sure, Evan, you had a business and you had some knowledge. I'm just a person with $0, no advantages. Is getting rich really possible for me? Or this year is a tough time. The economy, the competition, AI is taking over. Isn't it too late for me to start? I get it. The doubt is natural, but look at it from this perspective. Starting from $0 can actually be your greatest advantage. When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose. You can take risks. You can be creative. You can hustle in a way that people with big cushy jobs or big savings, they won't. And remember, nearly 80% of millionaires are self-made. They didn't inherit their wealth. They built it. They started with nothing and they built it from the ground up. And so if the majority of millionaires began with no money, then why not you? The American dream or whichever country you're from is alive for those who are hungry enough to chase it. So kill the doubt. You can do it. I'm going to show you exactly how. So if I woke up tomorrow with $0 in my bank account and had to start over this year, this is what I do to get rich step by step. Let's break it down. Here we go. Step number 1, commit 100% and master your mindset. The very first thing I do is make an unbreakable decision that I am going to become wealthy. You have to commit 100%. No half measures. No, maybe it'll work out. You burn the boats. There is no plan B. Why? Because when you're all in, you find the way. Back when I was in university, I had a choice: take a high-paying job or start a business. Everyone thought I was crazy to turn down the sure thing, but I knew in my gut I'd regret not betting on myself, or at least trying. I remember thinking, when I'm 40 and I'm an old man, I don't want to look back and wonder what if. I'd rather fail chasing my dream than play it safe and live with the regret. And so that mindset is non-negotiable if you want to go from $0 to rich. And science backs this up. Studies show that people regret the actions they didn't take far more than the ones that they did. So decide right now that you'd rather try and fail than not try at all. And part of this mindset shift is believing that it's possible for you. If you don't truly believe that it can happen, you've already lost. So feed your belief. I call my community here Belief Nation for a reason. Belief is the engine. Every great thing that will happen in your life is on the other side of you believing in yourself even a little bit more. So guard your mind from negativity and surround it with inspiration, with videos, with books, with people who've done it. If I were starting at zero today, I would flood my brain with success stories and positive influences daily. I'd make it impossible for the self-doubt to take root. You have to develop an unshakable conviction that you will win. The other part of mastering your mindset is setting a clear vision and aligning it with what you love to do. So don't just chase money, chase a dream or a business that actually excites you and serves others. Why? Because you'll never win doing work that you hate. Someone else will love it and they will beat you. That's a lesson I've had to live. At one point, years after my first business, I was running a successful website for entrepreneurs. It was making money, it was working on paper, but I didn't love it anymore. My passion had shifted to video and I knew it. So you know what I did? I shut the entire thing down overnight, a website with hundreds of thousands of pages of content, and I moved my whole team to focus on YouTube. People thought that I was nuts to abandon a sure thing, but I knew the real risk was sticking with something I didn't have my heart in anymore. As I like to say, doing something you don't like is the risky thing. The safe choice is to move to what you love. So if I'm starting from zero, I'm first getting my head and my heart in the right place. I commit to the journey. I believe that it's possible, and I focus on a vision that fires me up. With that foundation, you start to lay the groundwork to become unstoppable. Step number 2, find your purpose and solve a real problem. So once my mindset is set, the next thing I do is figure out what I'm going to build or do to create wealth. This isn't about picking a random money-making scheme. It's about finding a mission that is meaningful and valuable To others. You get paid for solving problems. So one of my core beliefs is that your purpose comes from your pain. Look at the toughest challenges or pains that you've overcome in your life, and you'll often find a clue to how you can serve others. In my case, I struggled as a 19-year-old entrepreneur. I felt alone and scared, clueless, lost. That pain became my purpose. Today, everything I do is about helping 19-year-old Evans out there who are struggling. I know what that pain feels like, and I wake up every day driven to try to make it easier for others. You have something like that too. Maybe you grew up poor and learned how to budget and save. Maybe you battled a health issue. Maybe you learned how to get healthy as a result. Maybe you just know a lot about a field or have a skill that you can teach others. Take something you've been through and care deeply about and build around that. When your mission is personal, not just strategy, you'll have the passion to keep going and people will feel that authenticity. But passion alone isn't enough. It has to solve a real problem. For people. Money flows to value. So if I'm starting from zero, I'm asking, what problem can I solve that people are willing to pay for? It could be a service, it could be a product, content that addresses a need. Since I have no money, I'd lean towards businesses that require hustle, not capital. So for example, maybe you can offer consulting or freelance using a service that you have— marketing, coding, design, writing, anything— or you can create content on the topic and monetize it with coaching or ad revenue. The key is to focus on helping others in a concrete way. So the more people you help, the more money you can make. It's that simple. That's entrepreneurship. When I started this YouTube channel, it wasn't to get rich. It was to solve a problem I knew existed. Entrepreneurs needed guidance and inspiration. I provided free value consistently, and eventually the money followed through ads, through our programs, through our coaching opportunities, speaking, book deals. If I had to start over, I'd identify one specific niche or problem to pour myself into. Don't try to do 20 things, you dilute your efforts. Focus. So maybe it's launching a simple service business at first to get cash flow and learning while keeping a bigger vision in mind. The idea is to start doing something that helps people even on a small scale. So think big, but we're acting small to get momentum going. You can always pivot or expand later, but you need to get in the game now. So think about what group of people do you want to serve? Who do you want to be your hero? For me, it was entrepreneurs. For you, it might be single parents or gamers or local businesses or people who want to get fit. Whatever you have a connection to, find that intersection of what you love, what you're good at or can learn, and what people need. That's your sweet spot. That's where you'll find purpose and profit. And once you have it, you are ready to execute. Step number 3, model the masters. Learn from successful people. People. Here is a huge shortcut. Whatever goal you have, someone out there has already achieved it. If I'm at $0 and I want to get rich, I'm going to school on people who started from nothing and made it big. I did this with my first business, uh, intuitively or out of desperation. I looked at Bill Gates and Microsoft as my model. I literally asked, how did he go from 0 to 1? The answer I found was partnerships. Microsoft's big break came from partnering with IBM. But even before Before that, Bill Gates was making smaller partnership deals that took Microsoft from a tiny company to a few million in revenue. That insight changed my strategy. I stopped trying to do everything alone, and we'll talk about that later, and started making partnership calls. And as I shared, that led to our first major deal and saved my company. Model success. It leaves clues. This year, this is easier than ever. I would devour biographies, interviews, podcasts, podcasts, YouTube videos, any content where successful entrepreneurs or investors are sharing how they did it. I'm looking for patterns and strategies. How did they make their first $10,000, their first $100,000? What did they do when they had no money and no credibility? So for example, many entrepreneurs started by offering their services for free or cheap to build a track record, then leverage that into bigger opportunities. Many built personal brands that then attracted an audience before launching their product. There's no one-size-fits-all, but you will start seeing common themes. So take notes. If you learn that a strategy worked for 5 different self-made millionaires, odds are it can work for you too. And don't just copy the outcome, copy the process. Copy the rise, not the result. Don't get mesmerized by someone else's end success— their mansion, their millions. Study how they rose from the beginning. When I researched Bill Gates, I wasn't looking at how Microsoft dominates now. I was laser-focused on how He hustled deals when he was a no-name startup founder. That's the part that applies to me starting at zero. So if I wanted to build a huge YouTube channel now, I'd study how people in my space were making videos now, but also what were they doing when they had 100 subscribers, not when they have 10 million subscribers. If I want to start a clothing line with no money, I'd study someone like Daymond John sewing hats in his garage in the early FUBU days. There are blueprints that are out there, so use them. And one more thing, you can turn your heroes into mentors. Consuming their content is great, but if there's any way to get direct access or advice, go for it. That might mean joining a free online community that they run or engaging in their livestream Q&As or even offering to work for them for free just to learn. Be bold. The worst they can say is no. The best that can happen is you get a mentor who's already walked the path. Even if you can't speak directly to them, you can immerse yourself in their mindset. So I attribute a lot of my success and confidence confidence to the fact that I spent years surrounding myself virtually with great minds. I would watch videos, and still do, of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and Oprah and whoever inspired me every morning. It feels like I'm hanging around them, and it builds my belief. My dad once asked me how I had the confidence to stand next to a multi-billion dollar CEO in a meeting. It's because I had been living in the minds of great people through videos and books, and their mentality rubbed off on me. You become what you consume. So if I'm starting from zero, I'm consuming greatness and modeling every strategy I can find from people who turn nothing into something. Step number 4, don't do it alone. Get support and ask for help. This one is critical. If I'm starting over, I'm not going to be a lone wolf. Trying to do everything by yourself is a recipe for burnout and failure. And I learned this the hard way in the early days of my startup. I I was working nonstop every single day from dark to dusk, and I was getting nowhere. Why? Because I was too proud and embarrassed to ask for help. I thought I had to put on a brave face and figure it all out on my own, and I didn't want my friends to know that I was struggling. So I suffered in silence, and that isolation nearly broke me. I eventually quit for a day because I felt so alone and defeated. And I'll tell you right now, just don't do that. Don't make it harder by trying to be a hero all by If I'm at $0 from day one, I tap into every source of support that I can find. Find a community of like-minded people. That could be an online forum, a school group, a Discord community, a local meetup of entrepreneurs, anywhere you can talk to others on the same journey. Share your struggles and wins. Ask questions. You'll be amazed how many people actually want to help if you just ask. I'd also look for a mentor, a coach who's willing to guide me. It could even be a peer who's just a few steps ahead of you. Swallow your pride. And ask. Don't do it alone because you'll probably fail. You'll quit along the way because it's too devastatingly lonely, and that's an honest truth. Humans are not meant to endure hardship alone, and building wealth from zero is definitely a challenge with ups and downs. So surround yourself with people who uplift you, even if it's just one friend who checks in and believes in you. It makes all the difference. Also, consider partnerships. If you lack certain skills or resources, partner with. Someone who complements you. My first business probably wouldn't have gone anywhere if I didn't have business partners. I had two co-founders who were technical, and I was more on the business side. And that partnership was key. I couldn't code bio software, and they didn't hustle the deals that I was doing. If you find the right person to team up with, you can ten x your progress. Just make sure you share the same values and the same vision. Don't partner just for the sake of partner. Partnering. Choose wisely, but don't be afraid to do it. And don't forget your friends and family. They might not understand your business, but they can provide emotional support. Tell the people close to you what you're trying to do and why it matters so much to you. I know it can be scary to admit you're struggling or say, hey, I need help, but it's so important. In my case, once I finally opened up about how hard things were, it removed a huge weight off my shoulders. I realized I wasn't going to be In fact, people wanted to encourage me. If I could go back to my 19-year-old self, I'd shake him and say, tell your friends you're having a tough time. It's okay. There's no shame in being at the beginning. Everybody starts somewhere. So build your support system. Find believers who will cheer you on. Seek out advisors who have the knowledge that you lack. Leverage other people's strength and their networks through partnerships. When you have a team, whether it's it's a formal team or just your informal circle, you will go farther and handle this setback so much better. We rise faster together. Step number 5, take action. Start small and improve quickly. When you're starting from zero, speed of implementation is everything. You can't afford to sit around perfecting your plan for months. You need to do things and learn on the fly. One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was over- planning. Early in my startup, I spent an entire summer writing a detailed business plan, refining every little detail, and making it look perfect on paper. I was so caught up in planning, I wasn't actually doing the sales or iterating on the product. And guess what? We missed a huge opportunity because of that. A big company came looking to buy businesses like ours, but we hadn't made enough real progress. And we lost that deal to a competitor who had been executing while I was just writing my business plan. And that competitor got bought for $40 million, and we got nothing. That stung. I learned my lesson. Ideas are worth nothing without action. So I vowed to never let perfection slow me down again. So version 1 is better than version none. You don't need to have everything figured out just to start. You just need to start. So if I'm at $0, I'm launching quick and dirty. Have an idea for a product? Awesome. Create a minimum version of it this week and get it in Offering a service? Awesome. Start pitching clients today, even if you're not 100% ready. Make a basic free website or even just a social media page and put yourself out there. It might not be pretty. That's okay. You'll refine as you go. Action produces information. You'll learn more in one month of doing than in a year of thinking about it. My YouTube channel is a great example. My first videos, they were terrible. I was awkward on camera. I had really bad editing skills. I had tiny views. But by making videos, I learned how to make better videos. We've now done 10,000 videos, but I have to make the first 350 bad ones to start getting good. Imagine if I had waited until I knew what I was doing. I'd still be waiting right now. So don't be afraid to fail in small ways. Think of it as testing, not failing. Try different approaches and see what sticks. Most of your ideas will not work, and that's fine. As I remind myself, you've got to get out there and test yourself. Most of your plan is going to fail or go wrong anyway. And that's not pessimism. That's reality. The sooner you find out what does not work, the sooner you can double down on what does work. So treat it like an experiment. You launch, you learn, you adjust, you repeat. Each cycle, you're getting closer and smarter to that jackpot. One more tip: prioritize actions that get you revenue or users quickly. When you have $0, you want to validate that someone will actually pay for what you do as soon as possible. Don't spend 6 months building something in a vacuum only to find out that nobody needs it. Do the simplest version and see if you can get one customer, one sale, or even just one user giving you feedback. That early validation not only teaches you, it also gives you a psychological boost. Hey, someone wants this. So example, if I was starting a consulting business, I'd rather land one small paying client Next week than spend weeks polishing a fancy website with no clients. If I'm creating a product, I might pre-sell it, offer it, and see if people buy, then build it later, rather than build the whole thing hoping people come. This way, cash starts flowing sooner, which you can reinvest, and you avoid wasting time. The bottom line is take action imperfectly. You're going to make mistakes. That is inevitable. But you can't steer a parked You've got to get moving to gain any momentum. Every successful entrepreneur has a trail of errors and failures behind them, but they learned and kept going. So will you. Launch now, improve later. Done is better than perfect. Step number six: Build your brand and attract opportunities. Your personal brand and online presence are incredibly powerful, and they're basically free to build. So if I have to get rich from zero dollars. I am going to leverage the heck out of internet and social media to create opportunities. And when I say build your brand, I don't mean you need a fancy logo or a perfect Instagram profile. I mean share your journey and provide value publicly so that people know who you are and what you stand for. This does a few things. So first, it builds trust and reputation. So if you consistently put out helpful, authentic content that's in your field, people will start to see you as an authority or at least someone worth paying attention to. What that does is it leads to customers, it leads to partnerships, it leads to investors. Second, it creates a community of people around you, which is also incredibly valuable. Remember step 4 about not doing it alone? A loyal audience is a kind of support network and brain trust. Third, it attracts opportunities that you could never predict. So my YouTube channel, for example, has brought speaking gigs and book deals and consulting offers and friendships with people that I admired, all because I just started sharing So if I'm starting from zero, I'd start creating content immediately, likely on the platform where my target audiences hangs out. So if I'm targeting professionals, maybe that's LinkedIn. If it's a younger or broad audience, maybe it's TikTok or YouTube. For me personally, I love YouTube because I am a visual learner and I believe video is the most powerful way to connect with people. So that's why I started a YouTube channel in the first place. I thought if I can make videos, to help other entrepreneurs not struggle like I did, it would be more impactful than writing blogs. And when you make content, focus on serving your audience, not just selling. Share lessons, document your journey, teach what you know, even interviews with other experts. Become a value machine. Now you might wonder, so how does this make me money directly? At first it doesn't, and that's okay. Think of building your brand as you're planting seeds, and over time those seeds grow Into a farm, you know, to think an orchard that bears fruit for years. And the more people who know you in a positive light, the more people you can ultimately do business with. As one of my mentors told me, the more people know you, the more people you can serve, and the more people you serve, the more success you're going to have. It's a pretty simple equation. I had to get over my initial shyness about putting myself out there. I used to be afraid of being on camera or being the face of anything. I didn't want the spotlight. I'm an introvert, but I had a great agent who. Who reframed it for me. He said sharing my story wasn't about ego, it was about service. Reaching more people meant helping more people, and that clicked for me. So remember, promoting yourself is really promoting the mission and value that you offer. If you're coming from a place of wanting to help, then you should be eager to be known because you can make a bigger impact and income if you are known. So practically, I would set a schedule for content just like I would for any work task. Maybe I commit to posting 2 YouTube videos or 3 TikToks a week or writing a blog post every week, whatever format plays to my strengths. Consistency is key, which we'll talk about in the next step. And don't worry about being perfect here either. Your content will improve as you do it. My first videos were awful and we've talked about that, but by video 100, I was a lot better. And by video 1,000, I had a real community. Give yourself permission to be messy at the start. And one more thing, engage with your audience. When you're small, you have the advantage of being able to respond to every comment, talk to followers one-on-one, build real relationships. Those early community members can turn into your biggest advocates, your first paying clients, or just a source of great feedback and encouragement. I can't tell you how many times a random comment or message from a viewer gave me a breakthrough idea or just the motivation to keep going. And even now, I consider my audience part of my team. You guys, I listen to your needs and questions and your comments. I still look at all of them and it helps guide what we do next. So build your brand. It doesn't have to cost money, just time and courage. Show the world who you are and what you stand for. Become the go-to person in your space, even if that space is tiny at first. And over time, this becomes a massive asset. Your brand will start to open doors doors for you while you sleep. Opportunities will start coming to you instead of you always chasing them. That's when momentum really kicks in. Step number 7, be consistent. Hustle with patience and persistence. This might be the most important of all. Never give up. Consistency and persistence are the superpowers that turn small efforts into massive results. If I'm starting from zero, I know I'm not going to become a millionaire overnight. It's going to take time, probably years of showing up every single day, and I'm prepared for that. You have to be in love with the process, not just the end goal of being rich, because it's the daily grind, the repeated actions that actually create wealth. So first, some perspective. It took me 7 years of making videos on YouTube to get to 38,000 subscribers. 7 years! Most people would have quit way before that. And today the channel has over 4 million subscribers. But those first 40K, it was the hardest grind because the growth was so slow. Low. Why didn't I quit? Because I wasn't focused on the numbers. I was focused on helping one person at a time. I always say focus on who you're serving, not who you're not. If 50 people watched a video, I was grateful for those 50, and I gave them my all. I even imagined those 50 people in a room. That's a pretty decent crowd. It just kept me motivated because I knew if I could impact 50 people, I could grow it to 500, then 5,000, and so on. So I just reframed what others see as only a few You as an opportunity to connect more deeply with a few. And over time, consistency plus patience equals exponential growth. Those small numbers multiply if you keep going. So whatever path you choose to be wealthy, be it a business, a YouTube channel, investing, anything, treat it like you're watering a tree. You don't see much happening at first, right? Maybe just a tiny little sprout. But if you get frustrated and you stop watering, the sprout dies. But if you keep at it day after day, eventually that tree will grow roots and then shoots, and then it's towering above you, right? There's a great parable about the Chinese bamboo. It spends 5 years underground with no visible growth, and then in a few weeks it shoots up to 90 feet. All that time it was building a root system. Your work is building the root system even when you can't see much of the surface. So don't quit before the miracle happens. That means you need persistence and adaptability. Persistence doesn't mean doing the same thing that's clearly not working over and over. It means not giving up on the goal, but being willing to try new tactics instead. If something isn't working, tweak it and stick with the overall mission. So in my case, I was persistent about making content to help entrepreneurs, but I constantly experimented with formats and titles and styles until things started to click. Click. You keep the mission constant and the methods flexible. Also, and this is sometimes hard, celebrate small wins to keep yourself motivated. When you're starting from zero, $100 sale, 100 views on a video, it's a win. Recognize that and use it as extra motivation. I used to literally dance around my room when I got a new client or when a video did better than the last one. So let yourself feel proud of progress, even if it's tiny. What it does is it keeps a positive mindset And it helps build your resilience. Too many people only celebrate the end goal and ignore the journey, but the journey is all we have for a long time. So you have to enjoy it. And let's be real, there will be days, there will be tough days, days when nothing is working, days when you question why you're even doing this in the first place. And I've been there more times than I can count. And on those days, remember your why. Remember that bold commitment you made in the beginning, the vision that fired you up. The people that you want to help, the life that you want to create for yourself and your family. Remember that every setback is just temporary; it's part of your story. Sometimes, when I would feel like quitting or giving up, I'd literally rewatch my favorite motivational videos or revisit the success stories that I mentioned earlier, just to reset my mindset. I call a friend who understands entrepreneurship and talk it out. Do whatever you need to do to keep yourself in the game. As long as you don't stop, you haven't. You haven't failed. You're just not there yet. Consistency also applies to your habits and your routine. So getting rich from zero might require a lifestyle change. You may need to cut back on leisure and double down on work for a while. And I'm not a fan of 24/7 grind with no rest. You know, I believe in sleep and family time and taking care of your health, but you will need to put a lot of hours and probably sacrifice some comfort. The good news is if you picked a mission that you actually enjoy, right back to step 1 and 2, the work can be fun and fulfilling, not drudgery that drains you. So I love what I do. So working a 16-hour day sometimes doesn't even feel like work. I've also structured my life to maintain balance. So I schedule a day for family, a day for being the CEO, a day for content. So I'm fully present in that area. And what it does is keeps me disciplined, right? That kind of discipline keeps me going long-term without burning out. When you're consistent, you also learn how to be efficient and organized. You find ways to do more less time because you have to if you're repeating tasks every day. So embrace the process of optimization. The difference between the person who gets rich from nothing and the one who doesn't is often just that one kept going when the other stopped. So be the one that keeps going. Remember Colonel Sanders getting rejected 1,009 times? What if he stopped at 1,008? Remember me making 350 videos that went nowhere? What if I stopped at 349? The world would have never seen what we had to to offer, and I don't want that for you. So persist, keep showing up, hustle with faith and patience. If you do that, your success becomes inevitable. It's just a matter of when, not if. So there you have it. That's exactly what I do to go from $0 to rich this year. It starts in your head and your heart with total commitment and belief. It moves through finding a purposeful path, learning from the best, surrounding yourself with support, taking fast Action, building your reputation, and never ever giving up. This isn't a get-rich scheme, it's a get-rich-for-sure plan if you work it and give it time. The fact that you're here showing up learning means you're already ahead of most people. You're hungry and you're willing to do the work, and I respect that so much. Your journey from $0 starts now, and I promise you that if you stay consistent and you keep believing, you're going to amaze yourself with where you end. Marketing is the lifeblood of your business. It doesn't matter how great your product or service is. If nobody knows about it, you're not in business. When you avoid marketing, you're essentially writing a death sentence for your dream. And if you keep neglecting it, your ideal customers will never find you and your competition will eat your lunch while you watch your vision wither away. Back in 1984, Steve Jobs bet everything on a single bold marketing move. Apple was about to launch the Macintosh, and Jobs commissioned an outrageous Super Bowl commercial that looked nothing like anyone had seen before: a woman smashing Big Brother on a huge screen to announce the birth of the Mac. Apple's board of directors hated it. One board member even wanted to fire the ad agency that made it. The CEO told the team to sell off the Super Bowl ad slot and cancel the whole thing, but the marketers on Apple's team quietly refused to back down. They ran that ad anyway in the Super Bowl, and it became legendary. The commercial shocked the world, generating massive buzz, and reinvented Apple's image. A week later, Apple's once skeptical board gave a standing ovation, admitting they were wrong about the power of that marketing. Here's the thing: the pressure Steve Jobs felt to prove his vision is the same pressure you feel right now. He bet his company on one gutsy marketing an idea when everyone around him doubted him. Now, you might not be launching a Super Bowl ad, but every time you put your message out there, it can feel like your reputation and business are on the line. I know how that pressure feels because I lived it. When I was 19, I became a co-owner of a tiny startup. We had a great piece of biotech software, but we had zero clue how to market or sell it. Month after month, very limited sales. Crickets. I felt like a total failure. I was isolated, overwhelmed, and all almost gave up entirely, wondering if I was cut out for entrepreneurship or not. But in that dark moment, I decided to dig deeper instead of quitting. I told myself, I'm not the first guy to struggle with marketing, so how did others figure it out? I started studying how the great entrepreneurs got known. I learned that Bill Gates built Microsoft by partnering with bigger players. So heart pounding, I started reaching out to companies that had the customers we needed, and I proposed a partnership. I was a nobody I was 20 years old. I was terrified they'd laugh me off. But you know what? One company said yes, and that one partnership helped expand our business. We went from slowly moving along to landing over 300 customers in 30 countries. We built a global brand because I swallowed my fear and marketed through partnership when it counted. I learned that marketing isn't about slick ads or having a huge budget. It's about courageously putting yourself out there and finding smart ways to reach If a shy, non-technical teenager like me could do it, trust me, you can too. Now maybe you're thinking, okay, sure Evan, but I'm not Steve Jobs and I'm not a born marketer. You might even feel a knot in your stomach when you even hear the word marketing. And maybe you're saying to yourself, I'm an introvert, or I don't have any money for ads, or I just don't know where to start. I get it. One of our subscribers, Safari's Companies, asked me point blank in a comment, hello Evan, can you help with marketing? And maybe you're asking the same thing. Here's what I need you to understand: marketing is not some mystical talent reserved for extroverts and madmen. Marketing is a skill. It can be learned like any skill. It can be mastered. And it starts with a decision to stop making excuses and start taking action. You don't need millions of dollars or a fancy ad firm. What you need is the belief that your message matters and the willingness to fight for it. Now, if you've watched this far, you have that spark inside you. And now I'm going to show you how to turn that spark into a fire. Make marketing non-negotiable. Your business depends on it. If you only take one thing from this video, take this: treat marketing as a must, not a maybe. Too many entrepreneurs build a product and just hope people will magically find it. They won't. Without promotion, something terrible happens— nothing, as master showman P.T. Barnum famously said. And he was right. Look at the stats: 52% of Small businesses admit they routinely put off marketing tasks. Why? They feel they're too busy, or it's uncomfortable, or they think it's not their job. But avoiding marketing is a fatal mistake. I want you to flip a switch in your head starting today. Marketing is your number one job as an entrepreneur, not an afterthought, not a when I have time activity. It is the activity. You could have the cure for cancer or the next iPhone in your hands, but if you don't actively market it, nobody will care. So. Schedule it, prioritize it, put it on your daily to-do list. Even if you only have an hour a day, use that hour consistently. More than half of business owners say they have an hour or less per day to spend on marketing. Fine, make that hour count every single day. Consistency beats intensity. I'd rather you spend one focused hour every day promoting your business than a sporadic blitz once in a while. When you make marketing non-negotiable, you send yourself a clear message: I'm here to play in the big leagues. That mindset shift alone will start producing opportunities for you. And remember, your business's survival depends on people knowing and caring about what you do. So add fuel to that fire. No more hiding. No more saying, I'll get to it later. Later is already too late. Start today. Post that video, send that email, make that phone call. Fanatically promote your value, the The world needs to know about you, and it won't happen by accident. Obsess over understanding your customer. Great marketing isn't about slick tactics; it starts with empathy. If you don't deeply understand who you're serving and what they desperately need, all of your marketing efforts are just a shot in the dark. This is where so many entrepreneurs go wrong. They talk about features and facts that they think are cool instead of speaking to the. The customer's heart and pain. The result is crickets. In fact, 42% of startups fail because they didn't solve a real market need. They created something that nobody truly wanted. I nearly fell into this trap myself in my software startup. We once spent months coding a cool feature, and guess what? Not a single customer cared about it. We wasted time because we didn't bother to ask what our customers actually needed. Never again. From then on, I made it my mission to build around what customers really wanted. You need to do the same with your marketing. Get out of your own head and into your customer's head. Who are they? What keeps them up at 2 AM? What problem would they pay almost anything to solve? What language do they use to describe that problem? Do the research. Talk to them. Literally call a few customers or prospects and listen. Really listen to their frustrations and their desires. Read the reviews in your industry. Look over forums and social media comments. Look for the complaints. Find the exact words your target audiences use and then mirror those words in your marketing. When your customer feels like, wow, they get me, trust is formed in an instant. Also, focus your message on the outcome that you deliver, not just the product. Remember the old marketing truth? People don't buy a quarter-inch drill, they buy a quarter-inch hole, and really they're buying what that hole will do for them. Speak to the result and relief your solution provides. And please ditch the jargon. If you can't explain your value in plain language a 10-year-old would understand, go back to the drawing board and reword it. Research shows investors and customers prefer simple, clear language. The grandmother test, as I like to call it. So boil your message down to the core. Who do you help? What problem do you solve? And why do you do it better? When you truly know your customer and speak their language, marketing stops feeling like selling and it starts feeling like helping. And that is a game changer mentality shift. Suddenly your emails get open, your ads get clicked, your phone starts ringing with referrals because your audience hears their own story in your marketing. That's the foundation everything else rests on. Obsess over your customer and you'll never worry about marketing tricks. You'll be delivering exactly what they're already searching for. Tell your story and share your values. People don't want to be sold a product. They want to buy into a mission and a story. Especially today, people are craving connection and authenticity. So the question then becomes, what is your story? Why did you start this business? What do you stand for? And if you haven't shared that, you're leaving your most powerful marketing weapon on the table. Facts tell, stories sell. It's cliché, but it's true. Research from Stanford shows a story is up to 22 times more memorable than facts alone. Now think about that. You could fire off a bunch of data in your marketing and people will forget almost all of it. But wrap a single fact in a relatable story and it sticks. Why? Stories create emotion, and emotion drives action. So start telling your story. Maybe you created your product because you experienced a problem firsthand and decided enough is enough. Tell us about that turning point when you became the hero of your own story. Or maybe your company exists because you believe in a world that operates differently, right? Share that vision. Bring us in. When I started my business, it wasn't to make a quick buck. It was because I struggled so much as a young entrepreneur, and I never wanted other people to feel the same way. I wear the word believe on my hoodies and t-shirts and hats not just because it's a slogan. It's my core value, and I share that in my content openly because those who resonate with believe become my most loyal followers. Likewise, whatever your core values are— integrity, Innovation, freedom, family—wear them on your sleeve. 64% of consumers say shared values are the main reason they have a relationship with a brand. Far and away the largest driver, according to Harvard Business Review. People want to support businesses that align with their beliefs. So weave your values into your marketing. Don't be afraid to take a stand for what you care about. It could be as simple as saying we believe in sustainability, so our packaging is 100% recycled, or family. Family is at the heart of our business. Here's the story of how my grandfather inspired this company. These aren't digressions, they're emotional glue that makes customers stick with you. A customer might find you for your product, but they stay because of your purpose. And here's the beautiful part: when you share your story, you not only attract the right people, you also repel the wrong ones. And that's okay. If someone doesn't vibe with your values or your story, they were never your customer anyway. Focus on the ones who do. Build your tribe by being you. In a world full of very generic brands, your personal story and your values are marketing gold. So start infusing them into your website. Put it on your about page. Create YouTube videos, your social media posts, your sales calls, everywhere. Be the entrepreneur who isn't just selling a widget, a tool, but sharing a piece of their soul. That's how you move your marketing from a transactional relationship Relationship to a transformational one. That's how you get customers not just buying, but believing. Dare to be different. Stand out or fade out. So let's be honest, we are all drowning in marketing messages every day. If you play it safe and bland, you'll get lost in the noise. The worst fate in marketing isn't that some people dislike you; it's that no one even notices you. And the data backs this up. The number one challenge most small businesses report is simply standing out in a saturated. Market. 62% of consumers say they struggle to even tell the difference between products from different small businesses. Think about that. If you don't boldly differentiate yourself, customers literally can't see why they should choose you at all. So you must dare to be different. Embrace what makes you unique— your niche, your style, your story, your approach— and amplify it. Businesses that truly consider themselves one of a kind actually find it easier to reach customers. Why? Because when you stand out, you cut through the confusion. So ask yourself, what's something that you can say or do that your competitors are too afraid to? It might be your branding, your tone, or bold guarantee. Maybe it's taking a controversial stance on an industry issue or using humor where others are really stuffy and boring. One of my favorite examples is the Dollar Shave Club. Here was this unknown startup selling razors, right? Not exactly a new invention, but the founder launched a hilariously bold 90-second YouTube video full of attitude and jokes. It cost about $4,500 to make— peanuts— but it didn't look or sound like any other razor ad. That video went mega viral, pulled in 12,000 orders in the first 48 hours, and essentially put Dollar Shave Club on the map against giant competitors. 4 years later, Unilever bought that company for $1 billion. Why? Because one gutsy piece of marketing cut through decades of He didn't have a big budget, but he had the courage to be different. He even said, great storytelling is why we've been able to grow so fast. So what does that mean for you? It means stop looking at what everyone else is doing in your field and copying it. If their marketing all looks beige, make yours bright red. If they're all formulaic, inject your personality. Now you might worry, but what if some people don't like it? Let them go. Your goal is not to appeal to everyone. Everyone. Your goal is to strongly attract your ideal customers and repel the ones who aren't a fit. Polarize a little. Create fans, not just casual buyers. When you do something noteworthy, run an offbeat campaign, you create a unique niche, you speak in your fresh voice, you're going to start to generate buzz. People talk about what's different. Think of marketing like a spotlight. You have to shine it on the quirkiest, most remarkable parts of you and your business. That's what gets people to step out of their routine and check you out. As Seth Godin would say, be a purple cow in a field of brown cows. So you can brainstorm right now. What's your purple cow? It could be an unusual origin story, a weird brand mascot, an over-the-top customer service promise, or just your crazy enthusiasm for what you do. Whatever it is, lean into it. In marketing, boring is broke. Different means dollars. Overdeliver value and build trust. At the end of the day, trust is the currency of any successful marketing campaign. You can get attention with hype or creativity, but if you don't back it up with real value and integrity, you'll never earn loyalty. Great marketing isn't about tricking people into a one-time sale. It's about building a relationship so they come back again and again and they bring their friends. So how do you build that trust? Start by overdelivering. Make your product or service so good that it markets itself through word of mouth. Think about it. 73% of consumers say product quality is the number one reason they become repeat customers. Your marketing promise must be met and exceeded by the experience that you then deliver. If it's not, no fancy ad campaign will save you. So ensure you're really proud about what you offer. Then actively leverage your social proof. Humans are social creatures. We look to others when making decisions. In fact, the vast majority of people now trust online reviews almost as much as personal recommendations, and over 90% of consumers read reviews before buying anything. That means one of your marketing priorities should be encouraging and showcasing your testimonials, your reviews, any evidence that real people love your business. Don't be shy here. If a customer sends you a thank you email saying that your service completely changed their life, ask for permission to turn that into a public review. Video testimonies are gold because they're hard to fake and highly relatable. Think about featuring some on your website and your landing page. Next, position yourself as an authority in your space. This isn't about your ego, it's about reassurance. People trust businesses that demonstrate expertise. So share useful tips, publish how-to guides, speak at local events, get featured in the media, go on shows. I started sending out a press release every 2 weeks when I launched my website, sharing advice and stories, and it eventually landed me in major media like the New York Times as an expert. That third-party credibility boosted my brand tremendously at the time. You can do similar things on a smaller scale. Write a guest article for an industry blog, collaborate with a respected influencer in your niche, host a free workshop. Show that you're not just selling something, that you're on a mission to help. That builds trust before a potential customer even makes contact. Also, be transparent. If something goes wrong, own own it and communicate proactively. If you're new or small, don't pretend to be a giant corporation. Play to your strengths like personal service and speed. Trust is also reinforced by consistency, so show up reliably with your content and messaging. As we've already discussed, every touchpoint— your website, your emails, your videos, your store, your office— they can consistently reflect your values and keep your promises. And over time, what this does is this consistency, it imprints brand in people's mind as dependable. And one more thing: invite your customers into your community, whether it's a Facebook group, a Discord server, school community, or just an ongoing email conversation. Make your customers feel like they're a part of something. When people feel connected, their trust in you multiplies. They're no longer just buying a product from you, they're joining a tribe— your tribe. And members of a tribe stick around and advocate for the brand that they love. So deliver exceptional value. Proof it social proof. Be the expert who genuinely cares and treat your customers like lifelong partners, not one-off transactions. If you do this, you won't just have customers, you'll have raving fans who do a large part of your marketing for you. Collaborate and partner for exponential growth. You've heard the saying, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. This absolutely applies to marketing. One of the biggest force multipliers in getting your business known is partnering up As entrepreneurs, we often think we have to do everything ourselves, but smart partnerships can really excel you years ahead. In fact, studies show that high-growth brands are 3 times more likely to use marketing partnerships as part of their strategy compared to low-growth companies. So the evidence here is clear: collaboration creates leverage. I learned this firsthand in my own startup. We partnered with a larger competitor to co-promote our software, and it opened doors to Tons of customers we could have never reached alone. So how can you leverage partnerships? Start by looking at who already has the attention of your target audience. Is there a business with a complementary product or service—not a competitor, but something related—that serves the people you want to reach? Team up with them. It could be as simple as a co-hosted webinar where you each introduce your brand to each other's audiences, or a cross-promotion deal: you email your list about their offer and they email theirs about yours. It could be creating a bundle or a special pack. Package where you offer your things together. One classic example is a partnership between GoPro cameras and Red Bull. Both target adrenaline-loving audiences, so they often collaborate on content and events, effectively sharing their fan bases and marketing muscle. Now, you don't have to be Red Bull to do this. Even 2 local businesses can join forces. Maybe a local gym partners with a healthy meal prep service. They promote each other with flyers, referral discounts, combined social media challenges. Both win new customers at very low cost. Also look at influencer partnerships. Are there individuals— YouTubers, Instagram personalities, bloggers, authors— that your target audiences follow and trust? If you can build a relationship with those influencers, you tap into a well of credibility and exposure. That might mean offering your product for them to review, or even doing an affiliate deal where they earn a commission for referrals. People are more likely to try something new when someone they trust says it's great. And don't overlook channel partnerships. If you have a product, can you get a big retailer or platform to carry it? If you have a software, can you integrate within a larger software ecosystem so users can see you? Microsoft built its empire in part by partnering, like having thousands of independent software vendors develop for Windows. Those partners made Windows more valuable, and Microsoft in turn gained a massive distribution network. Again, scale it down to your level. Think about aligning with the players in your space who already reach ideal clients. Approach partnership conversations with a win-win mindset. It's not about begging for favors, it's about creating mutual value. When you pitch a collaboration, lead with how it helps the other side. Maybe it gives their customers extra value or positions them as offering something new and cool. Be reliable and easy to work with, and you'll find partners opening doors for you too. Remember that business is not a zero-sum game. By combining forces, 1+ 1 can equal 3 Or 30. So brainstorm a list of potential partners and start reaching out. Even one good alliance can completely change the path of your marketing reach overnight. So don't try to do everything solo. Find your allies and conquer together. Provide value first through content. So we've talked about mindset, understanding storytelling, boldness, trust, and partnerships. Now let's talk strategy. One of the most practical marketing tools at your disposal is content. Not ads, not cold calls, content that educates, inspires, and entertains your target audience. Why? Because in today's world, people have filters up for traditional advertising, but they actively seek out helpful or interesting content. If you become the source of that valuable content, you earn attention and trust before you ever ask for the sale. It's basically marketing on easy mode. Consider this: content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62%. Less. That's backed by data. Educational videos, informative blog posts, insightful podcasts— these draw people in without expensive ad spend by offering real value up front. And it makes sense. When you freely help someone solve a problem or learn something new, you establish yourself as an authority and an ally. You're not chasing them down, they're coming to you. So what content should you create? Think about the questions that your customers keep asking. Think about the problems that they struggle with. Then start answering those questions through content. If you are a fitness coach, maybe you write a quick 5 Quick Home Workouts for Busy Professionals, or you do a video demonstrating them. If you run an accounting firm, maybe you publish a simple checklist, the Top 10 Tax Deductions Small Businesses Overlook. This isn't giving away your secret sauce, it's showcasing your expertise and generosity. And here's the kicker, it It attracts more qualified leads. The people consuming your content self-select as interested in what you offer. By the time they reach out to you, they're pre-sold on your knowledge and value. It massively shortens your sales cycles. Content is also the engine of the online ecosystem. Good content gets shared on social media, found on Google, forwarded to friends. One blog post can keep pulling in leads for years. Talk about marketing that works for you 24/7. But no, consistency is crucial. A single blog post or one video is not going to move the needle. So create a schedule that you can maintain, maybe one piece of content a week to start. Over time, you'll build a library of value that becomes an asset in its own right. And don't forget to repurpose your content. Turn that webinar into a series of short videos or a blog post into an infographic. Different people prefer different formats, so spread your knowledge across mediums. Also remember, storytelling applies here too. Don't just dump dump information. Wrap it in stories or examples so it sticks. Remember the 22 times more memorable stat? Let your personality shine in your content. Tell your story. That's how viewers feel a personal connection with you. There's a reason I've made thousands of YouTube videos highlighting lessons from successful people. It's valuable content that also aligns with my mission to spread belief. That content has brought me an audience of millions of people, many of whom go on to become customers of my other businesses. You can start small. But the principle stands: lead with value. Give, give, give before you ask. It might feel slow at first, but you are planting seeds that will yield a harvest for years to come. Content builds an audience, not just a customer list. And an audience is one of the most powerful assets that you can have because they'll follow you, rally for you, and buy from you repeatedly. So whether it's writing tips on LinkedIn, sharing how-to videos on YouTube, or posting insightful infographics graphics on Instagram. Start sharing what you know. Be the teacher, the guide, the entertainer in your niche. It's marketing that doesn't feel like marketing, and that's why it works so well. Keep believing and keep moving forward. So look at you, you made it here. You're absorbing all these strategies and stories. That already sets you apart. Most people won't invest this kind of time in leveling up, but you did. So take moment and just acknowledge that you're not just sitting back wishing your business will grow. You're actively doing the work, and that's huge. Now, knowledge without action means nothing. So I've given you a roadmap, but you have to drive the car. The doubt that you had about marketing— is it a little quieter now? I hope so. So hold on to that belief because you can do this. You can. Every marketing master was once a beginner who just decided to try. The difference is they didn't quit when things got tough. They tweaked the They learned from the nos, and they kept going. You're gonna do the same. Remember, you're not just an entrepreneur or an inventor or a service provider. You are a marketer. This is part of your identity now. Embrace it. Wear it proudly. It's the identity of someone who refuses to let their dream die in obscurity. It's the identity of someone who will find a way to connect, to serve, to shine a light so bright that. Customers can't help but notice. So you have the tools, you have the heart, you have the vision. Combine those and you become unstoppable. So step into the arena and start implementing. Tweak your mindset to make marketing a must. Go call a customer to update your message. Share that personal story in your next video. Reach out to that potential partner you've been too nervous to approach. Create one piece of content this week that provides incredible value to your audience. Do it now while the idea ideas are fresh and your motivation is high. Marketing is a journey, not a one-time thing. You'll get better with each experiment. Some things will flop, that's fine. Each failure is just data that's guiding you to something that does work. But as long as you keep moving forward, you keep testing, you keep believing in your mission, you will make progress that once felt impossible. If a teenage kid who started off making $300 a month— me— can build a global business by learning marketing, then you, with your experiences and passion can absolutely blow past anything that's holding you back right now. Now go out there and put this into practice. Your business needs you to be its champion, its voice, and you are ready to step into that role. People think a college degree is the only ticket to success, but why do so many billionaires ignore traditional education? This question might shock your teachers, but it's a reality we see with icons like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson. These moguls broke away from the conventional path, and some even dropped out and still built empires. Are they just lucky geniuses, or do they know something about learning that schools don't teach you? In this video, we'll explore why billionaires often buck the traditional education system and, more importantly, what they do instead. By the end, you'll see how you can apply their approaches to your life. Let's dive in. Breaking the school equals success myth. So we're all taught that good grades and diplomas lead to success. And yes, education is valuable. In fact, 84% of the richest people did graduate college. But here's the twist. Many of the most famous billionaires succeeded without finishing school. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison all left college early and still landed on world's wealthiest lists. These cases are exceptions, not the rule, but they prove that a traditional degree isn't the only path to extraordinary success. Why is this dropout billionaire story so enticing? It's because it challenges the norm. It makes you wonder if going against the grain might actually work. Now, I'm not telling you to drop out of school. Most people who do that don't become billionaires. What matters is why these outliers felt they could ignore the usual route. They weren't anti-education; they were just pro-learning in their own way. They believed in a different approach to education—one built on passion, vision, and continuous self-improvement. Passion over diplomas—the billionaire mindset—one key. The difference? It's mindset. Billionaires often prioritize passion and purpose over following a preset curriculum. They ask, is this teaching me what I need to fulfill my vision? And if the answer is no, they aren't afraid to chart their own course. Steve Jobs famously dropped out of college because he couldn't see the value in it for his goals. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. So I decided to drop out. It was one of the best decisions I ever made, Steve Jobs said. Free from required classes, he then followed his curiosity, like taking a calligraphy class just because it fascinated him. That seemingly useless interest later helped him build the Macintosh's beautiful typography. In other words, by pursuing what intrigued him instead of a standard syllabus, Jobs learned things that helped revolutionize personal computers. This pattern, it shows up again and again. These innovators have a burning interest or vision that traditional schooling can't always accommodate. They are hungry to learn, but on their own terms. Psychology calls this a growth mindset, the belief that you can develop your abilities through learning and efforts. People with this mindset thrive on challenges and see failure as a chance to grow. Billionaires like Jobs, Branson, or Musk, they exemplify this. They don't see a grade as a limit of their intelligence. They constantly ask questions, seek new skills, and believe that they can figure things out. As Stanford professor Carol Dweck notes, having a growth mindset is essential for success. And these entrepreneurs, they live that mindset every day. Passion matters more to them than diplomas. Instead of studying something because it's required, they zero in on learning what fuels their mission. This doesn't mean school is bad. It means education is not confined to a classroom. If you have a dream that doesn't fit neatly into a degree program, are you willing to learn in other ways? That's the question these billionaires answered with a resounding yes. Self-education— learning never stops. Just because they ignored formal education doesn't mean billionaires stop learning. Far from it. In fact, they are often obsessive self-educators. They simply trade classrooms and exams for books, mentors, and real-world practice. Learning becomes a lifelong habit, not a phase of life. Elon Musk is a perfect example. He earned degrees in physics and economics, but he's the first to say that college wasn't where he learned the most. You don't need college to learn stuff. You can learn anything. You can learn anything you want for free. I think colleges are basically for fun, Musk bluntly remarked. This isn't a knock on knowledge. Musk arguably knows more than most graduates. It's a knock on the traditional format of knowledge. When Musk wanted to build rockets, he didn't go back to school for aerospace engineering. He taught himself by reading textbooks and seeking out experts. One early SpaceX mentor said Musk literally taught himself rocket science by reading textbooks and talking to industry heavyweights. All that information, it was out there, and Musk had the self-drive to absorb it. This self-education habit is common among top billionaires. They read voraciously. Warren Buffett, for example, spends about 5 to 6 hours a day reading and has done so throughout his entire career. He says the key to success is simple: read 500 pages every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up like compound interest. The average person could do it, Buffett insists, but most won't, which is why he gains a competitive advantage. Bill Gates also shared that reading is still the main way that I both learn new things and test my understanding. So these billionaires essentially create their own curriculum continuously. They treat learning as a daily ritual, not something that stops at graduation. Now, you might not have 5 hours a day to read, but the lesson here is that information is freely available as never before. Ever before. Books, online courses, videos like this one. Billionaires take advantage of this. They turn their curiosity into knowledge, no permission needed. So ask yourself, when was the last time you learned a new skill on your own just because you wanted to? The tools are out there, and the most successful people use them relentlessly. The school of experience— learning by doing. Beyond books, billionaires learn by doing. This is a huge factor in why some of them cut short their formal education. They felt they could learn more on the job or by starting a venture than sitting in a lecture hall. There's a saying, experience is the best teacher. These entrepreneurs take that view to heart. They see the real world as their classroom. Let's look at Sir Richard Branson. He struggled in school because of dyslexia and dropped out at age 15 to start a youth-run magazine. Pretty bold Right? Branson says it was the hands-on experience that taught him what he needed. I left school at 15, and I was struggling to survive in the jungle, and that was a great education. Just getting out there hands-on teaches you a lot. His magazine venture became his first success, and he kept building from there—from music to airlines to telecom. Branson believes if you want to be an entrepreneur, then don't waste your time going to university or business. School. Just get on and do it. It's not that he sees no value in knowledge. He simply learned by jumping in and figuring things out on the fly. In Branson's own words, my career has been my education. He wrote about how tackling real business problems taught him more than any textbook. In the end, solutions to big problems won't come from doing school reports, but by getting out there, asking questions, seeing differently, and finding the answers That quote is awesome because it's so empowering. You can learn by trying, by creating, by failing, and then by trying again. And schools often fear failure. You get a bad grade and it hurts your GPA. But in the entrepreneurial world, failure—it's feedback. Every failed product, every mistake teaches a lesson that brings you closer to your goal. Take the example of software billionaires. Many of them started coding and launching projects as teenagers. Bill Gates was programming computers in high school and even got early business experience. Through a deal to analyze traffic data. By the time he dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft, he'd already been doing tech and business for years. The doing gave him the confidence that he was on the right track. Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg built the first version of Facebook in his dorm room. It grew so fast that he left Harvard to devote himself to it full-time because the experience of running a real company was teaching him more than any class in that moment. Here's the practical insight: don't wait until you graduate to start pursuing your dream or testing your ideas. Start your projects now. Get that experience. Maybe it's a side hustle, a YouTube channel, a nonprofit initiative— whatever drives you, treat it as your personal hands-on MBA. Classroom learning is valuable, but it complements experience. It can't replace experience. Even if you stay in school, which can be great, seek out internships, build prototypes, join competitions. Get your hands dirty. That's how you internalize skills and stand out. Billionaires often have a head start on mastery because they began their 10,000 hours of practice long before others did. Mentors and networks versus professors and grades. Another thing billionaires do differently is seek mentors and learning from people, not just from institutions. So instead of only listening to professors or chasing A's, they actively find teachers in real life— experts, fellow entrepreneurs, even competitors— to learn from them. They treat networking as learning. Elon Musk, as we already talked about, he cold-called rocket experts when he was starting SpaceX. He wasn't shy about asking questions and getting guidance outside of formal class. That aerospace consultant, Jim Cantrell, became Musk's mentor in the early days, and Musk soaked up knowledge from him and others Essentially, Musk created his own advisory board of experts to educate him. This kind of mentorship and advice-seeking is something you can do at any stage. If you're curious about a field, reach out to people who know more. Many successful people are surprisingly willing to share advice if you're genuinely interested and respectful of their time. Billionaires also learn from peers. For example, Mark Zuckerberg has often cited how important his network at Harvard was— not the classes, but the peers he met. People. He met co-founders of Facebook there and even met his wife in college. Zuckerberg valued college as a great social experience to meet talented people, but he's not sure that college is preparing people for the jobs that they need today. In a podcast interview, he pointed out that huge student debt and lack of practical training are big issues with the current system. He even suggested that maybe not everyone needs to go to college, especially as more alternative paths emerge. This is coming from a Harvard out who clearly learned a lot from other people and from actually launching a company. What billionaires do is surround themselves with smart, driven individuals and learn from them. It's often said that you are the average of the 5 people that you spend the most time with. If you spend your time only in structured classes, you're limited to that environment. These entrepreneurs went out and found communities where they could exchange ideas, get feedback, and be inspired. Think of the PayPal Mafia. That's Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others who built PayPal in the early 2000s. They learned from each other, and after PayPal, that network spun out into multiple billion-dollar companies: Tesla, LinkedIn, Palantir, YouTube, etc. They didn't learn that in a lecture. They learned it by collaborating and mentoring each other. So the actionable insight for you: find your mentors and your tribe. If you're in school, those could be a professor whose outlook you admire, or club with like-minded innovators. If you're already in the working world, seek mentors in your industry or even online. We live in an age where you can follow CEOs on X, you could join startup meetups, or watch interviews. This channel right here is full of advice from legends, effectively giving you access to virtual mentors. So take advantage of that. Don't learn in isolation. Successful people often credit mentors for their breakthroughs, so why not proactively look for those teachers outside of the classroom. Skills over degrees— value creation is the real test. Traditional education is big on credentials— grades, degrees, titles. Billionaires, however, focus on skills and value creation. They ask, what can you actually do? What problems can you solve? Paper qualifications alone don't impress them as much as real capability. Elon Musk shows this attitude in his companies. When hiring, he famously says a college degree means little to him compared to someone's ability to get things done. We don't care where you went to school or even if you went to school, just show us your code, Musk wrote when recruiting engineers for X. He has hired people without degrees who demonstrated talent through coding projects or practical work. Musk even noted that he'd value a candidate who built useful software on their own over someone with a PhD but no tangible output. This mindset Mindset permeates many innovative companies today. Google, Apple, and others have relaxed degree requirements because they realize what billionaires knew all along: skills are more valuable than credentials. Billionaires ignore traditional education in the sense that they don't blindly trust a system to prepare them. Instead, they take responsibility for mastering the skills they need. If school provides it, great. If not, they'll get those skills elsewhere. It's no coincidence that many self-made tycoons are essentially self-taught in key areas of their business. Another example is how these leaders often encourage unconventional problem solving. They're not looking for how well you can memorize textbook answers. They care how you think. The conventional education model sometimes trains us to avoid mistakes and just follow instructions. But in business, the big wins come from thinking differently and sometimes breaking the rules— legally and ethically, of of course. Billionaires often credit their success to understanding the limitations that traditional thinking imposed. They keep an open mind and adapt quickly, which is a skill in itself. So ask yourself, what skill do you need to reach your goals, and how can you start developing it today? It might be coding, marketing, design, public speaking, anything. You can learn so much through practice, online tutorials, mentors, etc. Don't wait for a syllabus to tell you that it's time to learn a skill. Seek out the knowledge and practice on your own. Your ability to create value is what will ultimately determine your success, not just the name of a school on a diploma. Education in your traditional sense is one way to gain skills, but it's not the only way. And billionaires prove that by hiring and succeeding based on real-world abilities. What you can do: design your education. By now you might be thinking, okay, I get it, billionaires learn differently. But what The great news is you can apply these principles in your own life starting now. You don't have to be a billionaire or ignore your classes to benefit from this approach. This segment is all about you taking these insights and turning them into action steps for your personal growth. Step number 1, take charge of your learning. Even if you're in school, don't be a passive student. Identify what skills or knowledge you need for your goals and actively pursue them. This could mean reading books outside of your coursework, signing up for an online class, or building something on your own. on your own. Be the CEO of your own education. So for example, if you dream of starting a business, start learning about entrepreneurship right now, not just theoretically but by running a small venture or side hustle. Remember, all the knowledge you need is accessible if you're resourceful. As Elon Musk said, you can learn anything you want for free in today's world. So make a list of topics you're curious about and commit to learning a bit each day. That habit is like compounding interest on your personal value. Number 2, follow your curiosity and passion. So if there's a project or a subject that lights you up, dive into it, even if it's not part of a formal program. Steve Jobs learned calligraphy with no idea how it would help him. It seemed useless at the time, but it became incredibly useful later. Trust that your interests have value. Your passion can become your superpower because you'll naturally put in the hours to excel at it. So if you're coding late at night or you're tinkering in a workshop, or you're writing stories, or you're designing games, know that you're building real expertise. It might even turn into a career or a company. Billionaires often started with a personal fascination that grew. Think of Zuckerberg with social networking, or Musk with space and electric cars. Give yourself permission to explore outside of the lines. Number 3, embrace failure as learning. So don't be afraid to make mistakes, just treat them as lessons. In school, Failing a test feels like the end of the world, but in life, failing a test just means learn and try again. The road to success is paved with trials and errors. Instead of chasing perfect grades, chase improvement. Did your idea or prototype flop? Great, you just found one way that doesn't work. As Thomas Edison would say, analyze it, adjust, and try again. Each iteration makes you smarter and more resilient. This is how entrepreneurs eventually hit on billion-dollar ideas. Ideas, not usually on the first try, but through persistence and learning from each attempt. So start reframing failures as feedback. The faster you learn to do this, the faster you'll grow. Number 4, seek mentors and peers who inspire you. You don't have to figure everything out alone. Reach out to people who are doing what you want to do or who have the skills that you want to develop. That could mean emailing a professional in your field for advice. It could be finding a teacher or coach who believes in you. Or joining a community of like-minded learners. Build your own personal board of advisors. As they say, success leaves clues, and by surrounding yourself with successful, positive people, you'll pick up on their habits and their mindset. Many successful entrepreneurs say they got a crucial boost from mentors. So look around. Who in your life or your extended network could be a mentor for you? And how can you contribute value to that relationship as well? It can start as simply as asking a question or seeking feedback on your work. Don't be shy. The worst that can happen is you get no reply, but the best is you gain a lifelong coach or friend. Number 5, focus on skills and impact. So starting today, pay attention to what you can do, not just what grades or certificates you have. Make a list of skills you want to acquire in the next year and start working on them one by one. Treat it like a game or like a challenge. You can't code? Cool, try a beginner project on GitHub. Club or a coding boot camp online. Want to improve public speaking? Awesome, join a local Toastmasters club or practice by making short videos, post it on YouTube. Each skill you build is like adding a tool to your toolbox that can open new opportunities for you. And when you do pursue formal education or apply for jobs, you'll stand out because you can demonstrate real abilities. You will have a portfolio of projects, not just a resume of classes. And that's the kind of thing that impresses visionary leaders. They see a bit of themselves in someone who goes beyond the syllabus. Believe in your own path. At the end of the day, the reason billionaires ignore traditional education is because they believe in their own path. They have an unshakable faith in their vision and in their ability to learn what's necessary along the journey. And this is perhaps the biggest takeaway of all: self-belief. When Steve Jobs dropped out, or when Elon Musk started a rocket company with no aerospace background, there was an immense level of self-belief at work. They bet on themselves. They believed that they could figure it out even if they took an unconventional route. And guess what? You have that same potential for self-belief. It doesn't require billions of dollars or a genius IQ. It requires giving yourself permission to trust your intuition and abilities. Believe that you can learn whatever skill or knowledge you need. Believe that you can contribute to the world in a meaningful way, degree or no degree. Education is everywhere if you have the mindset to seek it. This isn't about saying college is worthless. College can be an amazing resource and experience for many people. It's about realizing that your education is ultimately in your hands. You don't have to be limited by what's taught in a classroom. You can learn from books, from people, from trials, from YouTube From every experience life throws at you, billionaires become billionaires in part because they never stop learning and never stop growing. They cultivate themselves relentlessly. And as a lot of the stories on this channel highlight, each of these leaders had moments of doubt and obstacles, but they pushed through by focusing on growth and keeping their vision front and center. They model success, they learn from others, and then they turn around and innovate in their own way. Now it's your turn. Believe that you can craft your own. Path. And maybe that means excelling in school and doing extra on the side. Maybe it means taking a non-traditional route in your career. Whatever it is, know that the same principles apply: stay curious, be courageous in action, seek wisdom from everywhere, and trust yourself. You have the ability to achieve great success and fulfillment by learning and adapting continually, just like the billionaires we talked about. In the words of one of those billionaires, stay hungry, stay foolish. Foolish. That was Steve Jobs. And be hungry to learn and unafraid to do what others might call foolish when you pursue an unconventional dream. That's how you break new ground. That's how you end up changing the world. So why do billionaires ignore traditional education? Because learning on their own terms empowers them to achieve the extraordinary. And you can do the same in your life. It all starts with a choice to take ownership of your growth. Remember, you have takes to succeed, with or without a fancy diploma. Use every resource available, never stop improving, and believe in yourself even when the road is different. Forge your path, keep learning, and keep going. Ultimately, the most important school is life itself, and class is in session every day if you're willing to learn. So go out there and make your own education, your own destiny. You've got this. Congratulations, you're one video closer To who you're meant to be. To learn how successful people turn daily habits into extraordinary results, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. I get eight hours of sleep. I prioritize it unless I'm traveling in different time zones. Sometimes it's impossible, but I am very focused on it. You can have any any any habits, any any patterns.