The Happiest People Do These 9 Small Habits Every Day

Happiness is a skill, and the happiest people practice it every single day. Gallup found that only 48.9% of American adults are thriving in their lives right now, which means the other half are just getting through the week. The people in that first half get the same 24 hours that you do. They just spend their first 30 minutes differently. In April 2007, Arianna Huffington was 2 years into building the Huffington Post. She was working 18-hour days. She was on every list of the most successful people in media, and she was proud of how little she slept. Because that's what winning was supposed to look like, right? Then one morning she was sitting at her desk and she passed out from exhaustion. She hit her head on the way down. She broke her cheekbone and cut open the skin above her eye and woke up in a pool of her own blood on her home office floor. She went to doctor after doctor, heart tests, brain scans, blood work, the whole thing. And every single test came back clean. There was nothing medically wrong with her. She was just exhausted. And she'd been calling that exhaustion ambition fatigue. For years. She didn't fix it with a new company or a new city or a new job. She fixed it by fixing her sleep. She started guarding her sleep like it was a meeting on her calendar that she couldn't move. She started walking. She started putting her phone in another room at night. Small stuff, boring stuff, stuff you could start doing tonight without asking anyone else for permission. And 4 years after she collapsed on that floor, AOL bought the Huffington Post for $315 million. And in 2016, she walked away from it to Thrive Global, a company built around the small daily habits that fixed her. She already had the success and the title when she hit that floor, and none of it touched on how she felt. The habits are what changed that. Now you might be thinking, okay, a glass of water in the morning? Your problem is money or the job or the person you live with or the city that you're in. And like, those are real. A morning walk does not pay your rent. But Arianna had the money and the title, and it never touched how she felt. See, the brain imaging on meditation shows measurable change in 2 to 3 weeks at 10 to 20 minutes a day, not 2 years, 3 weeks. That's less time than you'll spend deciding whether to start or not. I think all progress begins with telling the truth. So here it is. You're too worn down to fix the big thing, and these habits are how you stop being worn down. Being leads to doing. So here are the 9. They are small because small is what you'll actually do. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. Believe. They move their body before they check their phone. So the first thing I do every morning is what I call the believe walk. I get outside and I walk. That's it. You don't have to worry about an app or gear or 5:00 AM cold plunge. When you wake up and reach for your phone, you spend your first 20 minutes on everybody else's problems, right? Emails, headlines, doom scrolling. Else's opinion of you. You're reacting before you've even had a thought of your own for the morning. When you walk first, you get those 20 minutes back and you get them with your heart rate up. A study out of Yale and Oxford looked at over 1.2 million adults in the United States and found that people who exercise had 43% fewer days of poor mental health than the people who didn't. And the biggest gains came from 30 to 60 minutes of activity, 3 to 5 times a week. Not 2 hours, not every day, 30 minutes a few times a week. And walking outside beats walking on a treadmill for how you feel afterwards. Researchers kept finding the same thing— same distance, same effort— but doing it in a park or on a street with trees lifts your mood more than doing it indoors. Now, I'm not telling you to build a 2-hour-long morning routine with 15 steps and a whiteboard, right? Those get abandoned the first time that you miss one day. The best morning routine is the one that you don't have to talk yourself into. So mine is I put my shoes on, I open the door, and I start walking. There's nothing in there that I can fail at. And the reason why the Believe Walk works isn't that it's the perfect workout, it's that it's the one they'll do every single morning. They drink water before they drink coffee. So you just went 7 or 8 hours without a drop of water, you're mildly dehydrated, then you drink coffee on an empty stomach and you wonder why you're jittery and brain foggy by 10:00 AM. Coffee's fine, it's just The order that's wrong. So this is the smallest habit on the list that costs you nothing, right? No money, no time, not real willpower. You fill an empty glass at night with water, you put it next to your bed. In the morning, you drink it before you've done anything else. I stack a few other things right there so you don't have to think about them. So put 6,000 IU vitamin D in the morning with the water, never at night because it keeps me up. And I take some omega-3s. Now, of course, you could talk to your doctor before you take any of these. The point is, this is my list. It doesn't have to be yours. The point is that you take the decisions out of your morning so your energy goes up of your actual life instead of you're piling all of these choices on your day before 9:00 AM. They spend 2 minutes on what's already working. So next is you can take a few minutes and just focus on what's going right. You don't necessarily have to schedule this because gratitude comes pretty easily for me. But if it's hard for you, then, then put that in. What's hard for me is belief. So that's what I schedule. But if gratitude is a hard part for you, put it on your calendar and Treat it like it's a client meeting. Write down 3 things, not 10. 10 things turns into homework, right? And then you stop doing it. 3 things is easy. A meta-analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pulled together gratitude studies from around the world and found a consistent, statistically significant lift in wellbeing. Another review of 64 randomized clinical trials found people doing gratitude practices scored about 6.9% higher on life satisfaction, with roughly a 7.8% drop in anxiety symptoms and a 6. 9% drop in depressive symptoms. Those aren't miracle numbers. Nobody's life gets just rebuilt by a journal, but feeling 7% better every day for a whole year, that adds up to a much better year. That's a good start. Now imagine what that does over 10 years. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it, and I'll see you there. They sit still on purpose. So next we could talk about meditation. Now you don't to meditate on a cushion for an hour. It could be a few minutes of just paying attention to your body and what's around you. Your brain has a network that runs when you're not focused on anything, the default mode network. It's what replays that conversation from 3 days ago and rehearses an argument, right, that you're never going to have. And when it's overactive, you call it overachieving. Brain imaging work coming out of Harvard Medical School showed experienced mediators dropping activity in those regions by around 30% when they practiced. Beginners still got a 10 to 15% drop, and you don't need years. Studies point to 10 to 20 minutes of meditation a day, 5 days a week, shows measurable change in 2 to 3 weeks. 2 to 3 weeks at 20 minutes a day is about 5 hours of your life total. You know when the best time to start is? Right now. How about right now? So put the video on pause, sit up, take 10 slow breaths where you actually feel the air. 10 breaths is the whole practice. If sitting makes you too restless, you could do it moving. You could put on a walking meditation and walk slowly outside while it plays. Same benefit, and your body has something to do with itself. The goal isn't just to empty your head. It's to notice you've drifted and come back over and over again. That's the whole exercise. They bring their heart rate down before bed. I spent 90 days testing sleep hacks with my Oura Ring here, trying to improve my readiness score up from a baseline of 67.5, which is just fair. It's actually really bad. I tried everything people suggested. The single most effective thing I found was getting my resting heart rate into the 60s before I got to bed. So whether it's meditating or breathing exercises or slow walk outside, every time I got my heart rate down first, my readiness scores came back in the 80s. Every time. Your resting heart rate is on your phone or your watch already, so check it out tonight so you know the number you're trying to get under. The second most effective thing was strange and it worked. Hugging a pillow or my robe in bed. It settles your nervous system down. Try it before you decide it sounds silly. You can't go straight from answering emails into bed and expect to sleep really well. Your body needs time to slow down first. So Pick one of these: breathe for five minutes, walk around the block, squeeze each muscle group tight for five seconds and let go. Toes up to your head. You're not trying to fall asleep. The point isn't to try to fall asleep; it's getting your heart rate low enough so that you can fall asleep. They go to bed at the same time every night, same bedtime every night, and start winding down an hour before it. So when I tested a fixed bedtime, it tied for the second best results of everything that I tried—not because there's magic at 11 p.m., but because your body will start getting ready on its own. Once it can predict what's coming. The wind-down hour is the part that you're gonna wanna skip, right? Don't do that. That's where you dim the lights and you stop doom scrolling on your phone. Food stops even earlier, right? 3 to 4 hours before bed. So around 7 or 7:30 for, uh, 11:00 PM bedtime. If your brain spins the second your head hits the pillow, this is my actual hack. I put on something that I care about slightly but won't mind missing, and I set a 60-minute timer to shut it off. Something interesting enough to pull my mind off of my thoughts and problems, but I'm bored enough that I don't fight to stay awake for it. So think of some kind of interesting podcast you can listen to. And then naps, 15 to 30 minutes, always before 2:00 PM. Go past 30 minutes and you'll wake up groggy and worse off than when you started. They talked to one real human. So Harvard has been running a study on adult development for over 80 years, following the same people through their whole lives, tracking their health and their happiness. It's one of the longest studies of its kind that's ever been done. The defining isn't money, and it isn't achievement, and it isn't fame. It's relationships. The people who stayed closely connected to other people were happier and physically healthier, and the relationships told you more about how they'd age than their cholesterol did. You can't run an 80-year study on yourself, but here's what you can do today. Talk to one real human in an actual back-and-forth conversation every day. A call, not a text. Coffee, not just some comment on their social media. 10 minutes where somebody knows how you're actually doing. If you can't think of who to call, call the person you'd call if something went Badly wrong. That's the relationship the study is measuring. You work so many hours in the business that you stop calling your friends, and you promise yourself you'll call them after the launch. There's always another launch. Call somebody today, right now, before you forget. That's the habit. They protect the part that's fun. Fun is ROI. I say that all the time, and I mean it as a business number, not just something that you're feeling. If you hate the daily work that you're building, you'll find a really smart sounding reason to quit on it. It'll look like you got a strategy. It'll sound like you're pivoting.

Yeah.

You wanted to move it into something else, but you quit because it stopped being fun and you didn't want to admit that. So the daily habit is to look at your day and find the piece you're genuinely looking forward to. And if it isn't there, then your day is built wrong. Somebody hates their job, so the highlight of their day is going to lunch at Wendy's. That's the thing they look forward to for 8 hours. And when that's the best part of your day, you'll start drowning the rest of it in fast food and Oreos and pizza, and then you'll be unhappy about that too. The food was never the problem. The food showed up because there was nothing else in the day that was worth you wanting for. You need something in your day worth looking forward to that just isn't food, something you're making or somebody that you're helping. Remember, we're built to serve. I built my whole week around this. So Mondays are for mentoring my team. Tuesdays are for making YouTube videos. Entire day is for one thing, because switching between 6 different tasks in a day is how you end up tired and proud of nothing you create. If there's no fun in your day because of the people in it, then you've been avoiding decision about these people for a long time. Real happiness means being willing to end relationship, the partnership, or the contract that's making you miserable every morning. They know exactly who they're helping today. Your purpose comes from your pain. It's what I wrote about in Built to Serve. Whatever you struggled with the most in your life is exactly what you're built to help other people through right now. That's your big why that I call it. It's big. And on an ordinary Tuesday morning, it can feel too big sometimes to live up to. So you connect it to the little why. One specific person that you're helping today. Sometimes that's a younger version of you. Having somebody to help does more for you than any gratitude exercise because it gives you a reason to get up. So every morning, think of one person, not the audience, not some number, not the market. One person you're gonna make a little bit better today. Then do the thing that actually helps them. And here's one more thing to try. Put yourself back in your lowest moment, that night in the car, the bathroom floor, wherever yours was. Then record a video talking straight to that version of you. And tell them what you know now that you didn't know then. You lived through it, so you're the world's leading expert on getting that specific person out. People spend years scared of the camera, and that exercise takes a fear away in about 4 minutes because you stop trying to just perform and worry about the numbers, and you start helping somebody that you love. You have the ability, so you have the responsibility. If you can, then you must. Start with one. Don't try to do all 9 tomorrow. You'll last 4 days and then decide that, you know, you're the kind of person who just can't stick to anything. And that story keeps you stuck in a lot more ways than just some of these habits. So pick one, do it for a week, and another when it stops feeling like work or you're— it's on default now. Remember, the bird sitting on a tree isn't afraid of branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, it's in her wings. Your happiness isn't in the job or in the money or the timing either. It's in what you do every day. And that part has always been yours to control. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn the lessons it took me 45 years to learn. Being realistic about your goals is the absolute worst advice anyone can give you.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Everything you want as a YouTube creator, every freaking Any goal you want to hit, whether it be subscribers, you want to hit 1 million or 10 million or whatever, will come if you just make the best videos possible. So my goal, and this is what it will be till the day I die, is to make the best YouTube videos possible. When we were putting together this tour, I had some really lofty goals I wanted to reach conceptually. When you lower your expectations to match what is normal, you kill the exact vision that makes your ideas special. My family was still mad at me for not I was not going to medical school, and now my wife was divorcing me because I lacked ambition. Once again, I was unable to live up to the expectations of others. Their dreams and my dreams were different. I'm always going to expect myself to do certain things or surpass certain things. As long as I believe that, then, you know, my road to success is going to continue to expand. Everybody told me I couldn't have what I was dreaming of. Everybody told me it's not possible, give it up, don't have high expectations. Well, the truth is, my entire life I've had monster, monster expectations. And if you keep playing small to make other people comfortable, you'll lose your passion and end up working for someone else's 10-year plan. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. I wrote this over and over and over again. I talked to myself in the mirror. I'd sit on the toilet and say, one day, one day, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a million dollars. One day, one day. And people used to tell me, that's crazy, dude. Like, why do you think so big? This is when people were telling me not to. What do you believe holds people back from just taking action? Other people's opinions. And how do you overcome that? By telling your mom I'm 45 years old right now, but when I was 19, I joined a biotech software company. I worked 15 hours a day, but I only made $300 a month. I owned 30% of the startup, but I was eating beans every single day because that's what I could afford. I almost lost the business multiple times. I was so close to giving up and taking a realistic, safe $100K+ banking job, and my own brain was giving me incredibly smart reasons why I should quit. But I asked myself one question. What if I quit now? Question. When I'm an old man at 40 or 45 years old, will I regret not chasing this unrealistic dream? And the answer was yes. So I decided to stop playing small. I modeled success from Bill Gates and finally saved the business. If I had listened to the people telling me to be realistic, you wouldn't be watching this video right now. But I have bills to pay. You're sitting there thinking it's easy for a 19-year-old to eat beans. You have rent, you have kids, you need a steady paycheck right now. You're absolutely right about your responsibilities, but playing it safe doesn't actually protect your family. It just guarantees that you stay stuck. The risk of failing at a normal job is just as high as in a business, but the upside is zero. You can protect your family and chase a massive dream at the same time. Let me show you the exact steps to build your empire without risking your rent money. Redefine your risk. So most people think of starting a business means risking everything. You think you need to empty your bank account, quit your job and go completely broke. That is the absolute wrong way to do it. You can start testing your idea right now for exactly $0. A major study shows that 60% of new businesses fail within the first 3 years, and it is almost always because they just run out of cash. Don't be part of that statistic. Keep your day job to pay your rent. Use your evenings to build your real dream. Spend just 1 hour every single night working on your idea. You don't need to be reckless to be successful. You just need to be incredibly consistent. Start small and test what actually works with real customers. If you want to start a marketing agency, don't rent an expensive office. Send 50 emails to local dentists offering to run their ads. When your side income finally matches your job income, then you can quit. Until then, use your job to fund your empire. This keeps the pressure off your creativity. You make terrible decisions when you're stressed out about paying for groceries. So keep the steady paycheck and build your legacy in the dark. You can start reaching out to 10 potential clients today on social media without spending a single dollar on ads. The internet right here gives you free access to the entire world. Use it. Your lack of a budget is an actual advantage because it forces you to be creative. But what is the exact thing you should be building? I'll show you how to figure that out right now. Discover your core value. So you need to figure out your most important core value. I call this your one word. My word is belief. Every single decision I run through this exact filter: does this project spread belief? If yes, I try to do it. If no, then I skip it. Research from the Harvard Business Review shows that companies with a clear purpose have 400% more growth than companies without one. This applies to you too. I recently analyzed data from 50 different billionaires to find their common success frameworks. Every single one of them had a massive, undeniable core value that drove their decisions. So think about the hardest moments of your life. How did you pull yourself out of the darkness? The specific lesson you learned in that pain is your core value. You want to teach other people how to avoid the exact pain that you went through. Once you know your word, your entire business plan becomes incredibly easy. You stop copying other people and you start building something that only you can build. So look at your favorite movies, your favorite songs, your favorite teachers. They all share a common theme. That theme is your core value. When you align your business with your deepest value, you stop feeling exhausted and burnt out. You wake up with energy because you feel like your work actually matters to you, because it does. You aren't just selling a product or service anymore. You're leading a movement, even if it's a small one. But what happens when you wake up feeling completely crushed by doubt? I have a specific system to fix that immediately. Borrow belief from giants. So you'll have days where you completely doubt yourself. Your environment will try to drag you down. The people around you might tell you to just be normal and play it safe, man. You need to change exactly who is in your ear. When I started my channel, nobody in my real life really understood what I was doing, so I borrowed belief from people who are already massively successful. I listened to Steve Jobs and Les Brown in my ear every morning. It's called my believe walk. Get outside, put something in your ear that helps you believe in yourself more. A study by the American Society of Training and Development found that having a mentor increases your chance of success by 65%. If you don't have a mentor in real life, find one online. Listen to their interviews while you brush your teeth. Watch their speeches when you commute to work. Fill your brain with the voices of people who absolutely refuse to play small, and their extreme confidence will slowly become your confidence. You'll start thinking bigger because you're surrounded by giant thinkers. You have to aggressively guard Your mind. Turn off the negative news. Turn on the people who make you want to win. Your daily habits dictate your future. So if you spend two hours a day watching mindless entertainment, you'll stay exactly where you are. If you spend two hours a day, though, listening to successful leaders, your entire mindset shifts. But watching videos isn't enough. You actually have to put in the reps. I'll tell you exactly how many reps you need to do next. Commit to 350 reps. Now you're probably judging your first attempt against everyone else's 10th year, right? That's the big mistake. When I started making YouTube videos, I was terrible. I hated watching myself on camera. It took me 350 public videos before I stopped feeling just completely embarrassed by my own work, and it took me 700 videos until I actually inspired myself for once. A study from the University College London showed that it takes an average of 66 6 days to form a new habit, but mastering a complex skill takes thousands of repetitions. So you can't expect to be great on day 1. You have to be willing to completely suck at the beginning. If you want to grow a massive audience, you have to constantly test what works. You need to spend time completely optimizing your titles, maximizing your click-through rates. You test cinematic, you test text-free thumbnails. Your first product is going to be ugly. Your first video will get zero views. Put it out anyway. The only way to get the skills you need is to actually do the work. If you refuse to release anything until it's 100% perfect, you'll stay stuck forever. So stop overthinking and start producing. Buy cash flow instead of building it. You don't always have to start a brand new company from scratch. Sometimes the absolute smartest move is to buy an existing business that already works. You look for completely boring business models that print money every single day. So think about buying a local laundromat or a waste management company The current owners are getting ready to retire and their kids don't want to run a boring company. According to the Exit Planning Institute, 75% of business owners plan to transition their business over the next 10 years. That is a massive opportunity for you to step in and acquire wealth. You can buy a highly profitable asset instead of spending 5 years trying to build one. You step into a company that already has high-paying customers trained staff, and consistent revenue. You just apply your maybe modern marketing skills to a very traditional business and the profits could explode. You don't need to invent a brand new tech software to be incredibly rich. You just need to find a solid, boring business and run it much better than the previous owner. Buying an existing business gives you immediate momentum from day one. It completely removes the high risk of a brand new startup failing. But once you own the business, You need to tightly manage your time. If you do every single daily task yourself, you'll burn out fast. Here's exactly how to fix your schedule today. Eliminate what does not matter. The obsession with being extremely busy destroys people's potential. Working 15 hours a day on the absolute wrong tasks will keep you broke forever. You need to look at your daily schedule and instantly cut out the garbage. Apply a 3-step process to your life. Eliminate, automate, and delegate. First, eliminate everything that doesn't directly bring in revenue or build your brand. Second, aggressively automate your repetitive tasks. Use advanced AI tools, custom prompts, and integrations to handle most of the boring work for you. And then third, delegate the remaining tasks that you aren't an expert at to other people. A study by Stanford University found that knowledge workers spend up to 41% of their time on discretionary activities that could easily be handled by others. You should only be doing the specific tasks that only you can do. If you hate editing audio for your videos, hire someone else to do it. If you need a cheap, scalable solution, use open-source alternatives to get some of the heavy lifting off your plate. Protect your daily energy at all costs. You need your brain to be totally fresh for the bigger strategic decisions. You can't be a visionary leader if you're completely exhausted from doing basic data entry. So taking control of your time and becomes the ultimate business flex. Now you have the perfect strategy, but you still need one final push. Create massive momentum today. The only thing you're truly missing right now is momentum. You have the great ideas, you have the burning desire, but you keep waiting for the perfect moment to start. The perfect moment simply doesn't exist. You just need to take the very first messy step today. According to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, making visible progress on a goal drastically increases your motivation to keep going. It's called the progress principle. Don't worry about step 100 right now. Just focus entirely on step 1. Build a system to track your daily progress. Use a simple spreadsheet to monitor your daily habits or your nutrition goals. High protein foods, Greek yogurt, salmon, eggs. It gives your brain the energy to focus, but your tracking sheet gives you the discipline to execute. So register your domain name tonight. Film your first rough video today. Send that one terrifying email that you've been avoiding. Do something physical that makes your dreams slightly more real. When you look back at your life as an old person, you won't regret the times you failed. You'll only regret the times that you never even tried. So don't let fear control your entire future. You're fully capable of achieving incredibly impossible things if you just refuse to stop stopping. Every single massive empire started with one single uncomfortable decision. So make that decision right now. You are absolutely ready. Your next step to greatness— you have everything you need right inside of you right now. So stop listening to the people telling you to play it safe, to be realistic. Step up and claim the life you actually want. Now let's learn the psychology of men who succeed later in life. The most dangerous idea living in your head right now is that it's too It's too late. I'm too old. What do you want to say to that person? I'm not— it's never too late.

Obviously, you know that. I know that.

You cannot allow yourself to say that I'm too old ever again. I don't care if you're 98 and you know that you have 15 seconds left to live. Don't buy into the myth that you're too old because that is going to slow you down. The founders behind the most successful startups in America aren't 25 years old. They're 45 on average, according to this study. According to a study from MIT and the U.S. Census Bureau that tracked 2.7 million company founders.

The moral to my life, don't quit at age 65. Maybe your boat hasn't come in yet. Mine hasn't.

There are absolutely a ton of entrepreneurs that started their companies in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s when it was difficult to do such a thing. Sidney Frank, who created Grey Goose, didn't invent his big thing until his 70s. So this was never really about business or about your age. It's about whether you quit on yourself in the exact chapter where your whole life was about to turn around. The most powerful decision we make— most of us don't make it consciously— is what are we going to focus on? Don't have a quitting mind. Repetition every day. Stay hard. Let me tell you about a man named Harlan Sanders. At 65 years old, he was broke. A new highway had rerouted the traffic away from the little roadside restaurant That he'd spent years building. And just like that, the thing that he poured his life into was gone.

Now they come along, should have made this interstate system that went 7 miles back of me, left me sitting high and dry.

He was living on a Social Security check of $105 a month. So picture that for a second, right? 65 years old, a failed business behind him, $105 to his name. He was carrying around all of this doubt. He had every reason in the world to sink into a chair and decide that that was it, his shot is gone. But what he had instead was a chicken recipe and a decision to make.

I was 66 years old. I couldn't afford to quit.

He climbed into his old car and he started driving. He'd pull up to a restaurant, walk into the back, and offered to cook his chicken right there for the owner and the staff. If they liked it, they could use his recipe and his name, and he'd take a few cents of royalty on every piece of chicken they sold.

I only got a nickel on every chicken that they sold. They got 3 dinners out of it, but I got 1 nickel for the whole meal. But you'd be surprised how fast those nickels add up.

Door after door, kitchen after kitchen, he got no more times than any person should ever have to hear it. He slept in his car and he kept going at 66, at 67, at 68. Then one day, a single restaurant said yes. Then another said yes. When you started with this franchise, how long before the real break came and it began to take off across the country?

It began to do pretty good after about 2 years.

By the time he was 73, Colonel Harland Sanders had franchised more than 600 Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, and he sold that company for $2 million, which is worth more than $20 million in today's money.

After 7 and a half years of this franchise business, I sold out for $2 million. Not a lot of money. I see in the paper yesterday, the same company that I sold for $2 million sold for $240 million yesterday.

He became the white-suited face of one of the most recognizable brands on the entire planet, KFC. And remember, he started all of this at 65. Now you might be thinking, okay, that's a nice story, Evan, but that was a different time. Sanders got lucky. It's harder now, and I've already burned too many years. And that thinking and that objection is the one thing that that's standing between you and everything that I'm about to give you here in this video. You feel behind because you're measuring the years that you've lived against some imaginary schedule that somebody else handed to you, right? That schedule is not real. The pressure that you have to have your life figured out by a certain age is just a myth, and it creates unnecessary weight on your shoulders that has nothing to do with what you're actually capable of building. The years you think that you wasted weren't wasted at all. They were reps. They were used stacking up the exact Experience that, that research we talked about says makes a 50-year-old nearly twice as likely to build a runaway success as a 30-year-old. So we're not too late. You are loaded with experience, and what you choose to do in the next few minutes decides whether all of that experience becomes your actual next breakthrough or you let it stay your excuse to stay stuck. Your timeline belongs to you and nobody else. So the first thing you have to understand about people who win late is they just stop racing against somebody else's clock. So there's no deadline for finding your purses. Zero. Life isn't a straight line where you're just supposed to arrive at some fixed point by some certain birthday of yours, right? It's this winding path full of tons of detours and setbacks. And the detours are exactly where you need to pick up everything that eventually makes you dangerous. So Henry Ford's first company, it completely fell apart. And then the second one did too. He didn't found Ford Motor Company until he was 39 years old. And the Model T that changed the world didn't arrive until he was 44. 2 failures years behind him and his real work hadn't even started yet. If he had accepted that, that was it. His shot was gone. He'd have never known the name Henry Ford. And he's not some rare exception. Takeichiro Mori was an economics professor who didn't start building his real estate business until he was 55 years old. By the time he was in his 80s, he was the richest man in the entire world. Ray Kroc was 52 years old. He was a milk machine salesman. He was sick and tired of driving from town to town selling milkshake machines when he walked into a little burger stand and turned McDonald's into this global empire. These are not lucky freaks of nature. These are men who refuse to believe that their birthday, their age was gonna decide how far they can go. And so it's a shift that happens in your psychology, and it's the whole reason why 45 keeps showing up in the data. Carl Jung talked about how a 16-year-old's mind is aimed at conquering the world out there, the money, the status, the proving to everyone that you matter. But somewhere around 45, you wake up to a deeper truth. The only thing you actually needed to conquer this whole time wasn't the world, it's yourself. And that's actually the most powerful upgrade that a human being, I think, can go through. The man who spent 45 years learning how his own mind works, learning where he panics, learning where he's willing to sacrifice, what he refuses to do, where his values at, that person is holding a weapon that a 25-year-old can't even picture yet. So you have that weapon right now. You've been sharpening it for years without even noticing. So the goal is to stop asking, hey, am I too old for this? And start asking, What have these years actually taught me that I can finally put to work? Every hard job that you hated taught you something. Every relationship that ended, it taught you something. Every business that didn't make it taught you something that you can't put in a textbook. The bird sitting on a branch isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust was never in the branch. It's in her wings. So your circumstances, they're the branch. They'll shake, they'll break, they'll get rerouted by some new highway like Colonel Sanders that you never saw coming. Your wings are everything that you've learned about yourself over all of these years. Trust those. That's a psychology that wins late, and you already own it. Turn your insecurity into ambition. So here's something that almost nobody says out loud about high achievers, and it's especially true for the ones who break through later in life. A lot of them are running on a dangerous cocktail of massive insecurity mixed with massive ambition, right? You feel deep down like you're not enough, so you work harder and reach higher and chase more. All to cover up that hollow feeling of not being good enough. And when you're older, that insecurity gets bigger because now there's a second voice on top of it that's also saying, hey, and you, you should have done this already. You should be further ahead than where you are right now. So this is really important. That insecurity doesn't mean that you are a broken human. It is just energy sitting in your chest waiting for you at some point to feel something worthy. The way you point that is at service. So when you get nervous, when the doubt floods in, when you feel like an imposter for Or trying something at your age. Shift the focus to the person that you're here to try to help. Service. The second you stop asking, do I look stupid for doing this? And start asking, who is not getting health because I'm sitting on the projects protecting my pride? The fear starts to go away. It has to, because you physically cannot be self-conscious and of service at the same moment. Your brain has only room for one of those. So choose service and watch the nerves quiet down. And this is the part that I believe with everything in me. Your purpose comes from your pain. Whatever you struggled with the most in your life, Whatever cost you all of those years that you kept grieving, that is the exact thing that you're meant to help other people through. The struggle wasn't your punishment. The struggle was your preparation. The messy divorce, the bankruptcy, the addiction that you beat, the years of feeling invisible, all of it handed you a map that people who haven't walked that road, they simply don't have. And now you have it. Colonel Sanders spent decades cooking in a roadside kitchen before that recipe was worth anything. The pain came first. The purpose grew out of it. And if you have the ability to help somebody through the thing that you survived, Then you have the responsibility to do so. If you can, then you must. That's how you take the insecurity that might have been eaten at you for years and turn it into a mission that finally pulls you forward every morning to do something. Hit the same spot until the wall breaks. Okay, so now let's talk about why late bloomers actually break through, because it often comes down to a very specific and repeatable way of working that you can start copying today. So just imagine this giant brick wall in front of you and a, and a sledgehammer in your hand. If you swing that hammer at 15 different spots in the wall, you're going to exhaust yourself and the wall is still just going to be standing there. But if you hit the exact same spot for 15 or 20 times in a row, that wall cracks and starts to come crashing down. Same amount of effort, just completely different results. Difference is focus and repetition landing on one single point. That's what the years of struggle are really for when you put them to use. People never break through because every few months they get discouraged and they swing at a brand new spot. New business idea, new business plan, New spot over and over and over. They spread their swings across the entire wall and then wonder why nothing ever cracks. The person who wins late is usually just the one who kept pounding on the same spot after everyone else kind of wandered off to swing somewhere else. Focus is a competitive advantage because it's rare. If your idea is genuinely ahead of its time, you might have to hit the same spot 40 times instead of 20. So what? You built the arm for it. You've got the patience that 25-year-old version of you never had. There's this picture that I'd love for you to. You know, burn it here into your mind, especially when it all feels pointless. Think of a combination lock with 6 numbers on it. You have 5 of the 6 numbers already dialed in correctly and the lock still won't open from the outside. Even from the inside, it looks completely stuck. It feels like nothing you're doing is working, but you are one single click on that final wheel away from the whole thing springing wide open. This is exactly where a huge number of people are standing at the exact moment that they quit. They're 5 clicks in, one click away. Sanders was one restaurant away from KFC for years, and it looked like total failure the entire time, right up until the second that it didn't. So on a day it feels hopeless, don't read that feeling as a stop sign. It's a, it's an idea that you need to keep going, to keep turning the wheel until you get that last click. Get rich slow, then get rich fast. One of the most freeing things that you can accept is how the timeline of real success actually works. So there's a saying that I love that you get rich really slow and then you get rich really fast. The slow part is what scares people away because for a long time it looks like nothing is actually happening. But that slow part is where you're pouring the foundation of your empire. You're making your product genuinely great. You're taking care of the people you serve so well that they can't stop telling their friends about you. You're building your launchpad so solid that when it's finally time to scale, you go up like a rocket ship instead of something that explodes in the sky. Building anything real. That lasts is usually a five to seven year haul before it looks like an overnight success to everybody else watching from the outside, and that length of time is the exact reason people burn out and walk away around year two or three. They just don't see the money show up fast enough. They get discouraged, and they decide, "Hey, this isn't working," and so they quit right before the fast part was about to begin. But if you know going in that it's a multi-year climb, you stop panicking and freaking out when month six doesn't make you rich. You expected month six to be quiet. You're playing a longer, calmer game than most people who are trying to sprint past you and be gone by next spring. So this is a way to look at the slow years without going broke or also losing your mind and confidence. Split your focus 80/20. Put 80% of your energy on the work that brings in real revenue right now, the stuff that keeps the lights on and pays the bills so you're not operating just from pure desperation. And then put the other 20% on the bigger creative vision, the long-term thing that you're truly building towards. That 20% is your future. The 80% is what buys you enough time to actually reach it. So many people go all in on the dream with zero income, and they flame out inside of a year. And plenty of others play it so safe on the income side that they never once touch the actual dream. The 80/20 split lets you do both at the same time, and it's how you stay standing in the game long enough for slow to finally turn into fast. Or with a belief until you build your own. Okay, so the hardest part about winning late: some days you will not. believe in yourself. There will be this giant doubt that'll be louder than your faith, and everything I've said will feel like it was written for somebody else, somebody younger, somebody stronger, somebody who didn't make all the mistakes that you made. I've been there more times than I can count. So here's what you do on those days. You borrow belief. When you do not have the belief in yourself, you lean on someone else's belief in you until you can rebuild your own. You borrow it from the stories of people who walk through the same fires before you. You read about Colonel Sanders or watch this video again In that car, and you let his stubbornness pour into your morning. You study how Steve Jobs got kicked out of the very company that he founded, wandered for years, and came back to build it into the most valuable company in the world. You surround yourself with a community that believes in the mission on the exact mornings where you can't find the belief anywhere in yourself. That is strategy. It's not just some weakness. Every strong person that you admire has borrowed belief from someone at their lowest point. This whole game is simply refusing to quit. it during the stretch of time when you're still building up your belief in yourself to do the thing that you don't think you're capable of doing yet. But you don't rebuild belief by sitting around just trying to think positive thoughts. You rebuild it through action. So confidence is not something that you just think your way into. It's something that you earn one scary small action at a time. You take the step, you survive it, and your brain updates its files here on who you are and what you're capable of doing. Being leads to doing. You decide to be the kind of person who shows up. You act like that person today, Even before you feel ready, and the actions slowly make it real, makes it the truth. So don't sit and get ready to feel ready. Ready is not real. Nobody who ever did anything great felt ready the moment before they started. You know when the best time to start is? Now. How about right now? The best years are the ones you haven't lived yet. Here's what I would love for you to walk away with. You are not behind. You're right on time. You're carrying an arsenal Of experience your younger self could only have dreamed about. Sanders started at 65. Crocs started at 52. The best founders in the country are 45 plus. Your timeline becomes your own. So keep hitting the same spot, keep serving people through your pain, and keep turning that final wheel even when it looks stuck, because you are so much closer than it feels right now. The chapter you're most proud of hasn't even been written yet. The man you're becoming is standing just on the other side of the discomfort that you are feeling right now. So trust in your wings, not the branch. The impossible is exactly what you were here on this earth to do. If you want to know what the rich teach their kids about cash flow, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. Wealthy parents raise their kids to run money like a business owner long before they ever hand them a single dollar.

Your children are learning about the world through you, and more through your actions than through your words.